The Best American Poetry

In Other Words -- Jeffrey Levine

 [Poetry is] a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them. – Howard Nemerov

 

I want to write this week about the flesh, about loss, and about my father’s passing at 4 am on October 3, 2010, about Freud and about the coming, vast celebratory party for my 70^th birthday, to be thrown next Saturday of this very week by my sweet wife, with my own child in attendance, about my mother, now 95, who has lived a full and heroic life and cannot recognize me but smiles broadly when I read Mary Oliver to her.

About having a catch with my dad when I was a teenager and he in his early forties, about a book he gave me after my reading at a Madison, Wisconsin bookstore on February 29^th 2009—the very day Canterbury Books went out of business (coincidence?). He’d asked me what book I wanted. Was it a biography of Velásquez, or possibly Goya, I can’t remember, which he had the clerk wrap, and that lies atop my desk, still in its wrapping paper, these 10 years later, that paper the sacristan of this mortal relic, a too, too solid metaphor.

From the ubiquitous floating epigraph to the ibids and op cits of scholarly writing, I am tempted, as always, to quote the famous, even though doing so feels self-indulgent, ingratiating, self-glorifying, pompous, pedantic, egoistic, boastful, and ultimately, too far to the side of original thinking and feeling to be worthy of full credit. But there’s also salve, if not salvation, in that quoting, and so I want both to poke fun at the practice of leveraging the words of others, and then to practice it. I would like, for example, to invite Oedipus and Kreon to repeat their ironic exchange in the Prologue to Oedipus Rex, an exchange that prompts any self-respecting psychoanalyst to reach for pad and pencil:

Oedipus. Tell me: Was Laios murdered in his house,

Or in the fields, or in some foreign country?

 Kreon. He said he planned to make a pilgrimage.

He did not come home again.

Oedipus.                                    And was there no one,

No witness, no companion, to tell what happened?

Kreon. They were all killed but one, and he got away

So frightened that he could remember one thing only.

Which one of us lives without the sense of a guilty secret? Although, what the secret is about we do not know. (Cf. Jung on dreams, the dream world, a world of permissible psychosis, which we enter and re-enter, night after night.) Silence and the unsaid: the unsayable, really. That’s what I want to get at as this week goes on.

All in good time. For now, as an unnamed New Yorker staff writer (unnamed by Roger Angell in his memoir, This Old Man, All in Pieces) (Penguin Random House, NY 2016) says about Donald Barthelme: “When he was writing a lot, you had this sense that there was someone else sort of like you, living in your city, and saying things that meant something about your life. It was like having a companion in the world.” As if that vicarious companionship weren’t cold comfort enough, Angell continues: “And an older man, also a writer and contributor, said . . . ‘He always seemed to be writing about my trashiest thoughts and my night fears and my darkest secrets, but he understood them better than I did, and he seemed to find them sweeter and classier than I ever could. For a long time, I felt I was going to be all right as long as he was around and writing. Having him for a friend was the greatest compliment of my life’.”

Companions in this world, then. At 70, I am comforted by my own surrender to the words of the great others, and the words that somewhat lesser others have written about the great. Even if, at the end of the day, little of it is about us. The effort of conveying the uniqueness of our experiences (as I have often said to poets, “What’s so special about your fatal disease—make me experience it”) is an effort of exactness. To pit experience against the frailties of language, the frailties of language against experience. As Jeanette Winterson says somewhere, the poet has the poem, made of words, and the reader has the poem, made of words. But already you can sense the inadequacy of Winterson’s reduction, yes? You can already sense what’s carried within the silences, and what silence might say, and what it might not.

 

 

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Freelance Fashion [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Dear Poetess Vinny,

Here's a challenge for you: I'm a freelancer and I just sold my first book (a memoir with poems). Hooray for me. Now I'm on a tight deadline so I'm basically working at home, all day, every day. I can stay in my bathrobe 24/7 but I find that when I do, I end up sitting on the couch, watching Law & Order reruns and eating last night's pizza. I do believe that "clothes make the man (woman or person)" so I want to figure out what to wear so that I feel like I'm "at work" but comfortable and I want to look pulled together in case I get a visitor (or so that the Seamless person doesn't call 911 on me). What should my work-at-home uniform be? And do you have tips to keeping myself focused during these long stretches of keyboard time? 

Thank you! 

Marissa 

Hey Marissa!

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I, too, was writing a book in my bathrobe, praying for more focus, or more time, all the while wondering, how can I make myself look (and therefor feel) more productive? 

This is what I came up with.

 

Step One: Hanging Up Your Robe

Leave the bathrobe on a hook in the bathroom, the pajamas in a drawer or under your pillow, and save the sweatpants for after work. I find that giving my more comfortable clothes a place to live that is out of sight forces me to put on “real” clothes, and allows me to focus on what I’m working on rather than thinking about all the interesting shapes I can make with my robe.

 

Step Two: Getting Dressed

I’m not saying we get into freelance work because we hate white button-downs and slacks, but I will say that if it’s not required, it probably won’t be your first choice. Luckily, we have options.

1. Put on some pants.

I know it sounds silly, but let’s be real: how many days have you worn your “comfy pants” just to avoid real ones? Putting on a clean pair of pants can help you feel like you’re zipping up your lazy urges and stepping in to a new day. But, let’s not forget that most pants (especially jeans and work pants) are unbearable after a few hours. The answer? Yoga pants.

Now, we all knew yoga pants were “in,” but I bet that most of you didn’t know they had worked their way out of the athletic section and into the workplace. These are perfect for working at home because they are stretchy and wrinkle-resistant, which means you can move seamlessly between typing at your desk and eating lunch cross-legged on the couch, and if you need to jet for a meeting with an agent, you’re already dressed. My favorite place to shop for these is Betabrand (above), with options starting at $58 (with 20% off your first purchase). Cheaper options include pants from Rekucci, which can be found starting at $30 on Amazon, or jeggings or work pants with 4-way-stretch from places like American Eagle and Express starting at $25. 

And the best part? Pair these with a cotton v-neck and you’ve got a comfortable, professional look that you can even throw a blazer on top of if you need to.

2. Grab a shirt. Not a t-shirt. 

Like I said earlier, button-downs are not everyone’s cup of coffee, and for that reason we have things like loose blouses and cashmere sweaters, articles that look as good as they feel; because honestly, who can bear to wear something tight and scratchy when they’re home all day with all of their comfortable clothes just a few steps away?

Try a flowy shirt with ruffled sleeves like this one from Zara:

Or this loose v-neck tank top from Express:

The first place I go to look for nice clothes that I can’t afford is the local thrift shop. I can’t tell you how many people buy nice clothes, even designer clothes, wear them twice (or never at all), and then sell them to Buffalo Exchange for a fraction of what it cost them. The result? Low-end designers with high-end quality for around $20. It may take a little time to leaf through the stacks, but I promise that you will find some lovely and unique pieces like this blazer from Banana Republic (left) or this spring sweater from Rebecca Taylor (right):

                                 

3. Lastly, let’s talk shoes. 

I know, I know. Shoes are the worst—because most of them hurt like hell—but the fact of the matter is that you will have to leave the house sometime, and as a freelance professional, sneakers just won’t cut it. 

Or will they? 

I don’t know about you, but I’m a shoes-off kind of gal when it comes to working from home, and even I can’t resist this new trend of dress shoes that are actually sneakers, like this pair of shoes from Cole Haan. Coming in at $140, these are a little pricey even for me, so check out your local DSW for similar styles in lots of colors, and for more at-home fancy shoe choices, try some loafers or flats that you can easily slip in and out of.

 

Step Three: Tips for Keeping On-Task and On-Target

For most people, the hardest part about working from home is the world of comfort and the list of chores that make up they environment. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cleaned my entire apartment instead of writing an article, or how many times I’ve put Sex and the City on for “background noise” only to find myself eating chips and yelling at Charlotte. So here are some tips for getting back to work in the place you call home.

1. Figure out which environment makes you feel the most productive.

I know we all think that we can sit on our beds with our laptops open, but  really, we’re just asking for the writerly slouch to turn totally horizontal, meaning your Word document will soon be eclipsed by your web browser. Does your kitchen table offer you a place to work? A desk by an open window? The coffee table in your living room? Try them out and see which one makes you lose track of time (in the good way).

2. Take breaks when you need them, but set a limit.

Say to yourself, I will watch one episode, make myself a cup of coffee or a snack, and go back to work. My advise here is to stay away from shows like Law and Order or Game of Thrones, shows that are made for binging, because really, we just can’t resist. Watch a thirty-minute comedy or an episode of a show you’ve seen before so that when the break is over, you don’t have to tear yourself away from the tv, you can just get up and walk.

3. Try working in a nearby cafe or at the local library once in a while.

Getting out of the house and into a setting where other people are also working, reading, and writing, can be really helpful to your psyche, especially when you’re working on a long-term project. Better yet, invite one of your writer friends who is probably struggling just as much as you are to stay on target.

4. Keep a blazer or cardigan hanging on the back of your chair while you work.

This little trick not only reminds you that you are in work mode, but it allows you to be ready to go at a moment's notice, like when your agent inevitably stops by without alerting you beforehand.

5. A touch of makeup never hurts.

This isn't a beauty thing, but a war-face thing. Putting even just a little bit of moisturizer, skin-colored eye shadow, and mascara on at the beginning of your work day can help alert your body to shift gears, which comes in handy when you are feeling sleepy or lacking motivation.

Even if you find yourself in your bathrobe on a Thursday afternoon, don’t fret! The beauty of freelancing is that you can work at the time you are most productive, which doesn’t have to be 9 to 5. The important part is checking things off your to-do list and finishing your project so you can move on to the next one.

***

I hope these notes have been helpful! Got a question? Comment below! And I'll see you all next month for another installment of fashion and beauty tips. For more work from Poetess Vinny, check out her weekly write-up of Next Line, Please, Tuesdays on Best American Poetry or follow her blog, Vinny the Snail.

In Celebration of Airplanes [by Dolores Hayden]

Alamy Stock Photo, Orville Wright flying in Berlin, 1909.

One hundred years ago, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made a non-stop transatlantic flight for the first time, taking off on June 14, 1919 from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing near Clifden, Ireland, the following day. These pilots won money and fame at a time when flight was a dangerous undertaking: they froze in an open cockpit and their biplane had no directional instruments for steering through fog. Today, passengers look bored while standing in line at airports waiting for flights that will cross similar distances in a third of the time. Most of us have never known about the excitement generated by early aviation because our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were encouraged to forget the time before airplanes became safe transportation.

In the fall of 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to the dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to try out their first glider. Lying prone between wood and cloth wings, one brother at a time took off for a very short glide. Years of experiments brought greater control. By December 1903, the Wright Flyer I, a biplane powered by a lightweight motor and two propellers, marked the official start of aviation. The Wrights kept their invention quiet while they applied for patents, so quiet that one skeptical newspaper editor queried, “Fliers, or liars?” By 1905, Orville was able to keep the Wright Flyer III in the air for thirty-eight minutes. In 1908 Wilbur demonstrated the excellence of the Wright Model A in Europe where aviators Henri Farman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and Louis Blériot were making strides. With his Golden Flyer of 1909, Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, New York, became a major American contender in the race to manufacture successful airplanes, and his fierce competition with the Wrights has often been recounted.

Less familiar is the story of the young exhibition pilots who demonstrated the earliest aircraft at a time when very few Americans had ever seen a plane and the designers were still debating how many sets of wings one should carry. The first of many international air meets in the United States was held at Dominguez Hills field south of Los Angeles in January 1910. “WE FLY!” exulted the local paper. During a ten-day run, the gate totaled two hundred fifty thousand. Heavier-than-air flying machines dominated the meet. The women and men who flew in 1910 risked their lives for exhilaration as much as remuneration, viewing landscape from surprising angles: looking down on places from above, looking out or up at wind and weather. The aircraft generated awe, or what historian Joseph Corn has called the “winged gospel,” the belief in “mechanical flight as portending a wondrous era of peace and harmony.” At the same time, pilots began to do “Death Dives” for rowdy audiences, and promoters smiled at headlines like “Monster Crowds Thrilled by Air Devils.”

The 1910 Census listed pilots as carnival entertainers, and in the exhibition years, they often performed for tens of thousands at racetracks and state fairs. One promoter boasted of his “flock” of bird men and bird women. Drawn from cities like Rochester and San Francisco, as well as from small towns like Greenville, Texas; Mountain Home, Alabama; Arcadia, Michigan; Oxford, North Carolina; and Orofino, Idaho, stunt fliers were the sons and daughters of bankers and manufacturers as well as farmers, miners, saloon keepers, salesmen, and carpenters. Until the mid-1920s, when Bessie Coleman appeared, all were white. Some had made or raced bicycles, motorcycles, or automobiles. A few had experience in the air steering hot air balloons or dirigibles. Grade-school dropouts met college graduates in flight school, and on the exhibition circuit, they all had to master new skills. Around 1910, accounts of the exhibition fliers’ achievements began to appear in newspapers and magazines where their events often made the front page, accompanied by photographs. Interviews and profiles of pilots created aerial celebrities. Trade journals such as Aero and Hydro reported air meets in detail, but there were society page accounts as well. Wealthy individuals purchased some of the first planes, just as they had bought some of the first automobiles a decade earlier. Town and Country covered aviation.

Rich or poor, male or female, early pilots who performed at carnival altitudes needed exceptional stamina. Accidents were common. Pilots had no control tower, little advanced weather information, and few established landing places. Early aircraft were open to the weather, with cloth wings, wooden struts, bracing wires, and front or rear elevators or rudders. Powered by a small motor and a propeller, an early airplane’s landing gear might be rigged with bicycle wheels. The best flyers were skilled in both intuition and calculation. Basic equipment usually included a fuel gauge and an altimeter. Some pilots carried a personal compass. For a long-distance flight, a pilot who was “contact flying” spotted landmarks on the ground and checked them against a paper map strapped on a knee board. Exhibition pilots usually traveled from one venue to another by train or ship, sending disassembled aircraft as freight because it was safer than flying.

When the United States entered World War I, private aviation slowed in favor of military activity. Air combat in Europe was deadly, but the United States was late in entering the war, so relatively few American pilots saw combat. Extensive flight training and rapid airplane production resulted in postwar surpluses of both pilots and machines, especially the Curtiss JN-4D, the Jenny, a biplane with two cockpits designed as a trainer. After the war, cheap military surplus airplanes allowed dozens of pilots to make a living giving rides in pastures outside small towns. The earliest barnstormers in the United States were traveling actors who performed in barns and open fields, and the young pilots took up this name. Soon the barnstormers created small groups called flying circuses to increase attendance. Antics grew wilder. Parachute jumps, night stunts with fireworks, and finally, wing walking and transfers from plane to plane were added. A wing walker did acrobatics on the wings, tail, or landing gear of a two-cockpit plane while a partner handled the controls. Barnstorming pilots also began to earn money in outdoor advertising, dropping leaflets, forming smoke letters, trailing banners. Some drew customers to land sales by performing stunts in the sky above the tracts.

By the late twenties, the postwar Jennies were aging machines and the barnstormers made flying seem very dangerous. Entrepreneurs who aimed to exploit the commercial potential of moving passengers, mail, and freight by air called for more rules on safety. When John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the Atlantic nonstop, Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, they demonstrated both the civilian and military potential of flight. After Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew the Pacific nonstop in 1931, global connections were understood. U.S. Department of Commerce regulations went into effect near the end of the 1920s, and within a short time, most of the barnstormers were out of business, as aviation become safe transportation.

Dolores Hayden is a landscape historian and poet. Exuberance, her collection of poems based on characters from the early years of aviation, is just out from Red Hen Press.

The Mushroom Chronicles Part II: Prugnoli Frittata [by Barbara Hamby]

(Ed note: This is Part II of Barbara Hamby's mushroom chronicles. Find Part I here. sdl)

All human history attests                                     
That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! -
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99

We were out past midnight on Friday and arrived at the Sant'Ambrogio market too late the next morning for the ovoli mushrooms with their gorgeous red caps, but I noticed the box of little brown mushrooms with the label "Prugnoli." They were expensive--30 euros a kilo as opposed to 8 euros a kilo for the porcini--which led me to wonder if they were a seasonal specialty. I bought "due etti." An "etto" is an eighth of a kilogram, which is about a quarter of a pound. I asked the mushroom man, who my friend Sue says is called Cecco, what I should make with my little bag of prugnoli. His answer was "risotto o frittata." My husband, who loves rice, said, "No more rice," so I decided on a frittata. I remembered a small stand with fresh pecorino and eggs, so I bought six eggs that had a little handwritten sign: Uova di nostra gallina, eggs from our hen. I also bought some chives, because they would give the frittata some visual zip and not be as overpowering as onion.

Fresh prugnoli at the Sant'Ambrogio market

When I returned to the apartment, I looked up prugnoli to see what I had found. Little did I know that there was a Prugnolo Cult in Italy. It has been chilly and rainy in Florence this year, and perhaps that's the reason why I was lucky enough to find prugnoli in the market. Late May and April are their time in the world. In Southern Italy they are sometimes called fungo marzolino or marzulolo, because March is marzo, and they mature a little sooner in the warmer parts of Italy. In central Italy they are also called il fungo di San Giorgio, because they start popping up close to the feast day of St. George (April 23). I had always dreamed of being a member of a mushroom cult, and finally it had happened. Italy--the land where dreams come true.

I had due etti di prugnoli, and I set about making a frittata for lunch. First I washed them with great care, now that I knew they were at the center of a cult, and then sliced the larger ones.

Whole Prugnoli, washed.

Prugnoli sliced, ready for cooking

I'm winging it here. I don't have a recipe, but I've made omelets and frittatas before. When I was first married and traveling in Italy, I was a devoted slave of Marcella Hazan, who wasn't afraid of butter. And as I've said before, butter and mushrooms go together like Sinatra and The Sands, so I put a little of that glorious green extra-virgin olive oil in my skillet and a tablespoon or more (probably more ) of butter. When they had warmed up, I put in the prugnoli.

Olive oil + butter = magic

market-fresh chives

While the prugnoli were cooking, I chopped the chives. How much did I use? Half the bunch I'd bought at the market.

Here I will take a minute to rant about color in cooking. A dish has to be beautiful as well as delicious. When I'm making a salad, I want a range of colors. It's almost like painting. Three different greens--maybe the pale green of frisee, the dark green of arugula, and the medium green of escarole or butter lettuce--make a canvas, and then you add the purples of red onion and radicchio, the orange and crunch of carrots, and the crimson of tomatoes. In Italy right now, Piccadilly tomatoes are all the rage. They are smaller than Romas and larger than cherry tomatoes and are very sweet. A salad would be very compatible with this frittata.

How many eggs to use? I broke four into the dish, but it didn't seem to be enough, so I broke the other two and stirred them with a fork until I had a lovely golden bowl. Then I added salt and freshly ground pepper.

How are the prugnoli doing?

They've cooked down a bit with their lovely juices mixing with the oil and butter. I taste one and it's perfect, still firm but softening. Time to add the egg mixture:

Now that's a lovely brown and gold canvas, but it needs something:

Chives! However, I have an kitchen equipment emergency. This skillet has no lid, so I place a white ceramic dinner plate on top of the skillet and try not to check it for five minutes. I'm aiming for the consistency of a just baked custard: set enough to hold its shape but still trembling in the center.

The result makes a satisfying lunch for me and breakfast the next morning for two. One of my favorite Italian cookbooks, Antipasti by Julia della Croce, says that room temperature frittata makes a welcome addition to an antipasti selection. I'm convinced! Now I'm dreaming of an antipasti party with at least ten dishes and prosecco and Negronis. Everyone's invited!

Barbara Hamby is the author of six books of poems, most recently Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009).She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.

Next Line, Please: Impromptu [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Three cheers for David, a man who not only celebrates his birthday today, but who doesn't use his birthday as an excuse to not do any work. We're happy to celebrate with you by writing and sharing our poems! Here is his prompt, introduced by a sonnet promised to us two weeks ago. Perhaps you regulars will recognize the hook:

Impromptu (on His Birthday)

On this June day I was born and I’m glad
I get to post a new prompt, but first must
Pause to say how much I like to write
Lines like lines one, two, four, six, eight, and nine
Of the impromptu poem this is, since
Each of these lines has just ten words, no more,
Like the first line of one of Frost’s great poems,
And then to catch up I must share the piece
I vowed to share last week, and here it is:

Sonnet

If history has taught us anything it’s that
Anyone can be bought, anyone can be sold,
Anyone can be called, anyone can be killed.
For every angry minute you lose
sixty seconds of happiness. Ceaseless
as the cricket, all night till dawn flow her tears.
You can’t think well unless you’ve dined well.
You can’t keep a secret unless you hide it from yourself.
You can bray all night before you shake down the stars.
Nevertheless there is pleasure in the pathless woods.
Love, built of beauty, dies when beauty dies.
There are two tragedies in life,
And whatever they are, you will endure them,
Like a heart that breaks but continues to live.

If you can tell that some of the lines of David's sonnet are stolen, you’re right, and David's defense is T. S. Eliot’s: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal." 

But for this week's prompt, we will focus less on borrowed (or stolen) lines and more on the “impromptu,” which David defines as a nine-line stanza that can serve as the prologue to something else—ideally, something that has not yet been written. Your stanza should have the feel or tone of an improvisation, and a unifying formal element such as the pointed use of one-syllable words, rhymes, anagrams, or acrostic patterns. Who knows, maybe we will have created a new form when the results are in.

Extra credit if you can guess which of “Frost’s great poems” begins with 10 monosyllables to great effect, and what’s so great about it.

Deadline: Saturday, June 15, midnight any time zone. Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Next Line, Please: A Sonnet Is Ample Space [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week’s prompt was to begin a poem directly quoting or with a variant of a sentence spoken by Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “If history can teach us anything …” and over 150 poems poured in, telling us exactly what we've learned over time. Here are some of the week’s highlights.

Emily Winakur starts us of with “Cross-Discipline”:

If history can teach us anything,
it’s that a sonnet is ample space for
the creation of a planet. Already,
line four, atoms are spinning dizzily,
like toddlers hyped up on birthday cake.
By line six, the dinosaurs have marched,
leaving giant footprints in riverbeds.
Line eight, the earth is cooling down—
wait, it’s heating up again. Enter man-
kind, or at least our rodent forebears.
Of course we cause the turn of the earth,
the turn of everything: we invented
wheels. A star goes dark in Cassiopeia.
Did I say creation? I meant the opposite.

I absolutely love the way the poem references its structure, the way it takes us from prehistoric times to the present, reminding us that we are all, in some ways, obsessed with creation and destruction.

Millicent Caliban summarizes some unpleasant historical truths that we tend to overlook when romanticizing past eras. David wisely turns our attention to the turn after line eight, "a textbook example of using the logic of a sonnet to advance a double argument":

If history has taught us anything,
it is that life was dirty, cold and dark.
Diseases raged unchecked and danger lurked.
To travel far was risky, without comfort.
To be a woman meant a narrow scope—
a self-determined life was scarce a dream.
Hierarchies were strict and unrelenting;
your gender, race or tribe determined all.
Yet people put more trust in simple faith;
believed that God had so ordained their lot.
Some strove to conquer ignorance with learning
and, when they could, indulged in acts of love.
They understood the sacredness of Nature
and did not waste her bounty in their rage.

This one takes us back to nature (or rather a Dickinsonian 'Nature'), which is both the worst place to be (dirty, cold, and dark) and the best place to be (the sacredness of her bounty). Very cool.

Randall Brett’s “Student Debt” juxtaposes memories of train rides in boyhood to events in South Africa, and dazzles us with its painfully relatable last lines. 

If history can teach us anything,
if the djinn of memory riding beside me
on the Regional from New York to Providence
is roused angrily from its nap
by the calling out of place names:
Saybrook, Old Lyme, New London, Westerly

What pass for the colonies of your childhood—
while you text me from LA about the First and Second
Boer Wars, the Voortrekkers, the Battle of Blood
River, the map marked “all dead,”
your studies from the spellbook of time—

How you are happy in every past,
but ours.

I'll admit to having personal motives for loving this idea of people being thoughtful and understanding with the history of everything except for their relationship to you, but even so, the journey is objectively lovely.

“Intercourse” is the eye-catching title of Josie Cannella’s passionately earnest poem:

If history has taught us anything
perhaps it’s that we need to talk things out.
Some diplomatic negotiating
mends rips in social fabric, sans a doubt.
Whether a border has been wrongly crossed
or toes have accident’ly been stepped on,
without a conversation, all is lost
and hope for peaceful resolutions, gone.

Some suffer rips and wrinkles. They don’t care
to grapple with the ugly likelihood
that those who’ve wronged them simply do not share
their moral obligation to make good.
Disquieted, they quiet down their pain,
let anger gall, and plan revenge to gain.

Always relevant given the mode of political and social discourse going on today, I love the double meanings behind phrases like borders "wrongly crossed" and toes "accidentally stepped on."

And Eric Fretz wins the brevity award for his two-stanza poem:

If history can teach us anything
It’s that we never know what’s coming next.

Sometimes decades pass and nothing happens
And sometimes ages are transformed in weeks.

Which I love because this can be applied to life, career, romance, and yes, the movements of the world.

If you're still hungry for some wonderful poems and interesting conversation, visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

Much Depends on Dinner: The Mushroom Chronicles [by Barbara Hamby]

“All human history attests                                     
That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! -
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99

Porcini Risotto

In Tallahassee, where I live most of the time, we have a hot sultry summer that is often very wet, and while everyone is running from air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned rooms, chanterelle mushrooms pop up all over the city. A friend has secret chanterelle spots, and I am often the beneficiary of her largesse. This was how I started making mushroom risotto. When the chanterelles weren't in season, I turned to making risottos with portobellos and oyster mushrooms from my local food coop, but nothing prepared me for the Italian world of mushrooms.

To cook from the market in Italy is like entering a terrestrial paradise. Florida State University has a study abroad program in Florence, and it has made living in Italy accessible for two academics. The first time we lived in Florence, I'd go to the Sant'Ambrogio market near our apartment to practice my Italian and learn about food. I spent a lot of time furious, because I had been a vegetarian for eleven years and didn't know about the glorious world of antipasti and how vegetables could be prepared so they weren't a greasy mess or edible cardboard. I learned that there was a world beyond salads and stir fries.

That first fall of 1992, a young woman at the market taught me about arugula and other wild greens I'd never heard of and came to love, crave, and grow in my own garden. Last year I became obsessed with wild mushrooms from the Sant'Ambrogio market. I made a mushroom risotto with porcini, and this year when we returned, the mushroom man at the Sant'Ambrogio market was one of my first stops.

This guy is all business until he sees how much you love his mushrooms. He usually wears a plaid shirt over his substantial belly, and his hands look as if he has dug some of his product out of the loamy soil. They are big hands with thick fingers. Often there's a cigarette pasted to his lower lip. I told him I wanted to make a "un bell risotto" with porcini, and he chose three medieval specimens for me. Here they are before I washed them, glorious and earthy.
And here they are washed and sliced:

I think the white mushrooms are fresher, and I discarded some of the yellow stems with holes, because they looked a little tough.

Making risotto is a very meditative activity. There's a lot of standing and stirring involved, so put on some music. My husband likes to cook to rhythm 'n' blues, but I prefer Mozart or Bach. The Goldberg Variations are my current crush with Glenn Gould humming away. This is also a great time to memorize poetry or recite the poems you've memorized. The rice won't care. I've memorized Hamlet's six soliloquies. Hamlet and Beethoven are a great combination. Or you can just surf along on your own internal waves. You're on your feet, so wear comfortable shoes. I've made risotto wearing flip-flops and lived to regret it.

I started making risotto with a recipe I found on line, but I simplified it immediately when cooking with chanterelles, because they are so delicate.

Click through for recipe and illustrated instructions

Next Line, Please: "If history can teach us anything..." [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's prompt on Next Line, Please is inspired by that rare gem, the delivery of a great line.

In The Godfather: Part II, when you hear Michael Corleone tell Tom Hagen, “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone,” it makes such an impression that a fragment of the line tends to survive in widely different contexts.

The part of the line that really endures is “If history can teach us anything,” and Rhymester Lehman thought it an excellent opening line for a poem. Two stanzas, 14 lines or less, with a break between stanzas.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate and to read more! Deadline: Saturday, June 1, midnight any time zone.

The Politics of the Erotic [by Denise Duhamel]

    When my poetry book The Woman with Two Vaginas was published by Salmon Run Press in 1995, I was horrified that it carried a subtitle (not of my choosing) “erotic poetry.” While there were poems celebrating sexuality in The Woman with Two Vaginas, there were also poems about rape, incest, and child abuse.  So when the publisher labeled it “erotic,” I felt a sense of shame.   For me—and I think for many poets—writing about sex causes uneasiness.  The unabashedly “fun” sex poems, the odes to sex are clear in their intent, joyous—naughty, yes, but intentionally so.  But when sex goes wrong—becomes violent and horrible—how do poets portray those experiences without the fear of being labeled erotic?   
     What first drew me to the Inuit tales that the poems in The Woman with Two Vaginas were the celebratory ways in which female genitalia become part of a story plot.  Sermerssuaq, a strong legendary Inuit woman, has a purple clitoris that grows so big when she is excited that a "hare's pelt can barely cover it."  Blubber Girl brings her dead love back to life by rubbing a blubber facsimile of him against her magical vulva.  Women also bond together in various ways to overcome obstacles, including vicious husbands who are not tolerated.  "Two Woman Who Found Their Freedom" are wives of the same abusive husband who run away to live together, happily, in the belly of a whale.
    In the tales, male and female powers are often exchanged by gender.  In "A Different Kind of Birth," a man has a baby after swallowing a fertile fish.  In "My Grandmother is My Husband" and "My Mother Stole My Wife," women turn their vaginas into sleds so they can hunt when there are shortages of men.
    In a later book, Kinky, I was able to explore eroticism through Barbie dolls, but also explore gender roles.  In the title poem, Barbie and Ken even “exchange heads,” to see what it is like to be a different gender.  I was interested in the way Barbie’s curvaceous body is actually quite phallic.  (Barbie's creator, the late Jack Ryan, was also a missile designer.)  In Lucinda Ebersole's and Richard Peabody's anthology Mondo Barbie, the writer Sparrow's "Barbie: A Memoir" describes Barbie has having "that attenuated airline  look--Barbie resembled a stewardess and an airplane."   Erica Rand opens her book Barbie's Queer Accessories with a graphic description of a lesbian pornography spread from a 1989 issue of On our Backs in which Barbie is used as a dildo. In a short Barbie memoir called "überdoll,"  Heidi Glenn describes her pre-teen friend's unorthodox use of Barbie--"Barbie didn't belong in there and at the same time I marveled at how her leg seemed to fit so perfectly in Elizabeth's pee-pee place."
    In Kinky, Barbie is mauled, suffers many indignities, sexual and otherwise—but through humor I was able to skirt issues of eroticism when describing violent scenes.  I’m not sure if I have an answer as to how to portray the ugly parts of sex in poetry and be sure the poems will always be read in the tone the poet intends.  Poets can’t very well attach warning labels to their poems—don’t you dare find this degrading escapade a turn on to dictate a proper reaction.  All we can do is put ourselves out there—the celebrations, the indignities, all of it.
    The woman in the title poem of my book The Woman with Two Vaginas, is a mythical woman, a ghost whose vaginas are in the palms of her hands.  I didn't learn until after my book was published that there was also a real woman, Myrtle Corbin the "Four-legged Woman from Texas," who, according to Leslie Fiedler's book Freaks, had two vaginas and allegedly bore five children—three out of one vagina, two out of the other.  In a publicity photo, courtesy  of Wisconsin's Circus World Museum, Myrtle Corbin lifts up her long dark late-nineteenth-century skirt to reveal the two of her four legs that would otherwise be hidden.  Short, seemingly boneless, legs dangle between her normally-developed ones, her secret eliciting both a sense of shock and tenderness in those who view her.  I agree with the late Kenneth Koch who wrote that a poet should not “reveal something” that she would “never want anyone to know”—but, still, most writers like to keep their options open, to at least have the choice to be one of those fools.  To use a "dirty" word now and then.  To show their secret legs.

-- from the archives; originally published February 8, 2008

The Publisher's Publisher: Mark Saunders 1967-2019 [poem and tribute by Dean J. Smith]

The Beam
for M.H.S

Dome of white gold
between indigo
clouds

sabered shafts
on blue ridge
mark new directions

stanchions above
the diamond--
his field illumined

precision lasers
roam over texts
in his study

flares of love
for his wife
and children

light of pure joy
In his smile.
Never a mask.

        -- by Dean John Smith

On the morning after the University of Virginia basketball team won the national championship, I was on the phone with Mark Saunders, the director of UVA Press about a book that would celebrate the incomprehensible journey the Cavaliers had just completed.

We had previously agreed to table all discussions until the game was over.

“Let’s talk tomorrow so we don’t jinx anything,”  Mark said.

After the victory, Mark celebrated by leading the school’s Auld Lang Syne inspired mantra, “The Good Ole Song.”  It’s preserved here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXjTmSXL6Ik

He and I shared texts over the last two seasons wherever we happened to be watching. He might be in John Paul Jones arena when I was at a hockey tournament in Buffalo.  Weeks of silence went by and then possession by possession critiques of the team would cascade down the screen.

Mark passed away suddenly last weekend, at the age of 52. His death is a devastating loss for the scholarly publishing community.

Continue reading . . . 

 Dean J. Smith is the Director at Cornell University Press.

Next Line, Please: A Letter is a Joy of the Earth [by Virginia Valenzuela]

There are a number of poems that were considered by their authors be unfinished, even fragmented, including Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and some of Emily Dickinson’s mysterious two-liners. For this week we considered Dickinson's poem #1639, using it as our first two lines in a poem of our own creation:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—

Of course it is almost impossible to beat Dickinson at her own game, but what can we say? A poet's gotta try.

It may be Angela Ball who comes closest to imitating Dickinson’s characteristic aesthetic, two stanzas, eight lines, slanted rhymes, and lots of em dashes:

A letter is a joy of earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Its script sails slotted—
Dimly in its berth—

Its sovereign words purse—
Tightly—all the while—
Till appointed hands unfurl—
And deliverance—arrive—

Emily Winakur’s staccato rhythms and cascading thoughts mirror humankind's struggle to make sense of it all: life, death, the world, the gods:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
it is denied the Gods—
Singing stories—Death or Mirth—
announcing—like a Fraud—

that Thing you did. Was it so Great—
if no one knew but for
those Gods hushed and hovering—late—
round heaven’s hearth—Voyeurs

of deeds and sins. To have to Pause—
unknowing—to hold paper
up to Sun—and wonder at the Flaws
and Flights that will appear—

as soon as paper splits and tears
by taper’s candlelight.
Anticipation mixed with fear—
“Madame,” it says, “I write—”

Charise Hoge’s “Mollusk and Mail” completes Emily’s fragment "as Marianne Moore might have done," David says, "with the celebration of a lowly creature," one that is extremely close to my heart, the snail:

A Letter is a joy of Earth––
It is denied the Gods––
Though Godspeed may prevail
––when it is deemed a snail.

Admire then the Snail––
A coiled envelope that seals
the softness of a living thing
––discerned in words––arriving.

Beth Dufford “cheated and used two of Emily’s mysterious couplets to bookend my meager whimperings in between,” and to great effect:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Like warmth before a shadow’s Birth
Eludes the sheltering frog—

Let me use this Day, let it not slip—
Let me imprison it in a locket—
Let me not thirst with this Hock at my lip
Nor beg, with domains in my pocket.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, with more mysterious lines and couplets and scholarly commentary from the master of poetry, David Lehman. And tune in next week for a new prompt!

Forsooth -- I have no idea what forsooth means -- [by Janice Erlbaum]

Well, now I do, because I looked it up, and it's an archaic term for "in truth." Another handy fact I learned during this very poetic week, during which I've been blogging here at BAP, or BAmPo, or whatever you want to call it, as well as judging a poetry contest for public high school seniors, one of whom used the fucking word "forsooth" in her poem (entrant's names have been blacked out, but I'm going out on a limb to guess that this poet is female, or a transgendered person, because the narrator of the poem is a girl – or, rather, "a maiden").

I took a point off for "forsooth." I’m sorry. I know it's just me exercising my own poetic prejudice, but "forsooth" can not possibly have any personal meaning to this young poet, unless that personal meaning is "if I use this word, I will sound poetic." It stinks of shortcutting, to me; it stinks of fancypants bullshittery, and that is one thing this judge will not tolerate. I say: Write from the goddamn heart, or go home.

I am also taking points off for poems where the speakers kill themselves at the end, and there are a bunch of those. It's never too early to teach kids that poetry doesn’t have to end in suicide.

The poets who get the best scores from me are the ones who obviously love language, the ones whose rhythms have me nodding my head from the first line, the ones whose rhymes beat the shit out of Eminem's, or any of the other rappers who have the gall to rhyme "me" with "me." The kids you can just see, slumped against their locker in the hallway, scribbling something down on a notebook balanced on their knee between classes. They didn't write a poem because their teacher told them about this contest; they heard about the contest, and they ran home and sifted through pages of their best work, their hearts beating so hard their tongues throbbed in their mouths. These are the ones I want to call on the phone and say, Hey, you made me gasp, you made me well up with tears, you made me well up with pride. Hey, teach me what you know; I'm afraid I've forgotten it.

Of course, the top score goes to the kid with the sestina.

I told you I was prejudiced.

-- JE
                from the archive; first posted Aprli 4, 2008

Is Your Roof Next? [by Katie Peyton]

 

This is a shark on a house.

 

It follows the time honored tradition of shark art, and art on top of houses.

 

It’s a statement against dropping shit from the sky.

 

What else do we need to know? 

 

According to the Oxford City Council: a lot. Should it be removed? Maintained? Landmarked forever? More importantly, if we allow one person to have shark on their house, does that mean we have to let everyone have a shark on their house? What about a dolphin? A turtle? A giant Pokémon? In other words, is the Headington Shark a gateway drug?

 

I've thought about it, and I’m pretty sure I personally don’t have much cause for concern. My building (a 1928 walkup at the edge of Greenpoint BK) is an unlikely target for guerrilla shark action. First, the shark would have to access the roof, which is not going to happen. The super is definitely not going to answer the phone. The shark can send an email to the management company, which will be received never. Someone’s cousin may come and look at the shark’s apartment and say it’s an old building, and also, no to the roof.

 

In fact, I have seen no sharks on any roofs in my neighborhood, in the time since this shark was installed in 1986. The only thing I’ve seen on top of buildings are other buildings: new construction condominiums, which literally snake over, in an L fashion, to hover on top of prewar walkups.

 

So, even if a shark does land on the roof, a condominium will probably land on top of it in three years. 

 

+++

 

I cannot believe The New Yorker was also working on a piece about this, but if you want actual reporting, you can read the whole thing here.

paul eluard does his best to honor fem sexuality [by Paul Eluard]

For a New Night

Woman I live with
have lived with will live with
will always live with

Red coat
Red gloves
Red mask
Black boots

As evidence as proof
I have seen you nude while lavishly adorned.

Tits, O my heart

(translated from the French by Burt Lancaster)

Meet the Press: PANK Books—A Conversation with Jessica Fischoff

Dante Di Stefano: You have an exquisite poem called “My Body is a Library” published in Diode, that ends with the following stanza:

 

        I’ve renamed every flower
        For the women who came before me
        I’ve rewired the plane, redrawn the key
        And untied the ribbon from my neck
        Without dropping my head at my feet.
        If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that
        Brought me here, then hand me the match.
        A story beginning with self-immolation
        Doesn’t always end in ashes.

Reading these lines, I was struck by how they parallel the PANK mission to publish poetry from “a place inhabited by contradiction, quirk and startling anomaly, where the known is made and unmade, and where unimagined futures are born.” Could you begin the interview by riffing on that mission and your own words?

Jessica Fischoff: I think PANK’s mission statement really encapsulates itself. I’m not sure I could phrase it any better, but I can say the raw spaces writers allow themselves to access when creating is the place I aim to put myself in with my own work.

DD: How did PANK Books come into being?

JF: In 2016 John Gosslee started PANK Books to publish diverse and important full and short length books that deserved attention. In conceptualizing the press aspect of PANK it was important to him that all books the press published had the full support of all of the editors regardless of which editor brought the book to the press. As of 2019, Chris Campanioni, Maya Marshal, and Ashley M. Jones have all chosen books for publication alongside John Gosslee.

DD: Tell us about the books in the PANK catalog.

JF: PANK Books has a very strong eight title catalog of little and big books that range in orientation, voice, craft, and genre. The main thread of our books is that they are inclusive in their support of all marginalized voices. We’ve published new writers, veteran writers, and in 2019 we published a book by a writer who had never published a creative work. We’re always reading, we’re always interested in publishing work we know is important to read.

DD: What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges for women-run presses?

JF: I’d like to answer with questions I ask myself, and that any editor and writer should ask themselves at least once.

How does the curation of a publication change amongst editors of different genders and backgrounds?

Do women editors read differently than editors who are not women?

Do different topics and styles of writing resonate with me differently than non-female editor counterparts, or does it come down to my personal taste?

How do I know whether what I’m publishing and how I’m managing as an editor is because I am a woman, or because I’m drawn to certain writing styles and management techniques?

How much of the writing I’m drawn to is because I am a woman and how much is because I am myself?

At the end of it, I think the personal inclination towards any kind of specific work is likely based on who we are as individuals first.

DD: Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from PANK Books.

JF: We’ve slated a number of publications as 2020 releases. The titles include short essays, choreo-poems, and a book that plays with the incorporation of music as text. Our book contest runs through September 1st, and we’re selecting potential full-length manuscripts in poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and little books for publication alongside the contest winners. Our judges are press authors and our Reviews Editor. The winning authors will judge next year’s contest, which keeps the thread of our mission in the PANK family.

DD: How has being a cellist influenced your work as a writer and editor?

JF: I’ve played in a number of indie bands over many years, and collaborated with other musicians, practiced, recorded, scheduled tours, promoted, and designed albums. The processes mirror managing a publication and press. I work with people to produce something beautiful and creative, something I am excited to share with the world, something I love. 

As a writer, I think musically. I read everything out loud and listen to the rhythm. I admit I tap my foot to some lines to hear the beat. Music influenced the way I write, where the line breaks, where the rhythm rests, and the arc, and turn.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a PANK poet?

JF: I’ve picked two poems I love.

        Regala un huevo con una mano y con la otra, mata la gallina

                 By Steve Castro

        Some people are encyclopedias.
        I’m more like the ashes after a book
        is burned. Every burned tome dissap-
        pears. The Apples will also vanish.
        If the sun that devours books
        got caught in a gargantuan
        Library of Congress mousetrap
        and died with a broken neck as a result,
        then I would bury the sun in the cemetery
        reserved for vanishing apples and book ashes.
        My father once stole the spotlight
        and ended up doing two months in jail.
        My papá is malo. He’s the type
        to give you an egg with one hand
        and kill the chicken with the other.

        YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN WHEN SOMEONE IS LOOKING
                By Joanna C. Valente

        Some of the women in town
        thought Mary ought to be punished.
        Her belly grew to a hearse.
        She prayed for a sailboat
        to carry her uterus on a milk sea.
        Dragonflies swarmed her flamingo-pink
        plumage. She watched
        boys shred guitars. May
        the distortion mince all
        the tired women
        inside her. A doctor suggested
        lime in tea—an exorcise. May she
        shoot wind to hear grass buzz,
        to know which she is sprouting
        inside her.

---

Jessica Fischoff is the Editor of [PANK] and author of the upcoming little book of poems, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (Across the Margin, 2019). She has a degree in English and Journalism from University of Iowa, where she studied the lyric essay under the mentorship of John D’Agata and went onto the Creative Nonfiction MFA program at The University of Pittsburgh where she served as an Editorial Assistant at Creative Nonfiction and began to write poetry under Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ben Lerner. Her writing appears in Diode Poetry Journal, Fjords Review and The Southampton Review.

Jessica's little book, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (ATM 2019) is available for preorder.

[PANK]

Next Line, Please: Questions and Echoes [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Have you ever written or read a poem that started and ended with a question, and found yourself so totally enthralled, so mystified, and included? Well, for this week's installment of Next Line, Please, our contributors were tasked with that very idea, with works by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats that end with a question, and works by Goethe, Rilke, Auden, and Shakespeare that begin with one, as inspiration. Shall we dive in?

Angela Ball refers to “Ode to a Nightingale” in the title and first line of her poem, “Viewless Wings”:

Are there still “wings of poesy”? Yes. They’ve been shelved,
like a beaver top hat collapsed when not in use, whose hatter
survives in a madhouse, where he deplores the lake
for its surly, copulating swans. Stylish poets reject
metaphorical levitation, as evoked by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
in his sonnet, “High Flight,” where he “slips the surly bonds of earth”
in a Spitfire MK1, aided by wings from Cuthbert Hicks,
author of “The Blind Man Flies” and source of the line,
“And touched the face of God.” What are these straw-man
“bonds of earth”? Why “surly”? Can plagiarism
fly?

I'm a sucker for things like poesy and mad hatters, and copulating swans, for sure! What a powerhouse.

Michael C. Rush dazzled many of us with the questions raised by “Eleutheromania” and with the magnificence of sound in the poem’s sixth stanza:

Who holier than the disbeliever?
Even the thirstiest visits the cistern of drool.

Choose your delusion? Choosing your delusion
is just one of the delusions that chooses you.

I smell burning books, millions of them, unseen, unread,
hijinks of accusing kachinas and kinkshamers drinking the soul-ution,

instantiating confusion, a quasi-tsunami of ludonarrative dissonance,
a knucklefruit parley between the chronic ironic and the cure of the curve

as was kisses will be with the lips of is.
What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

The shock of a duck
jerked up in the jaws of a dog.

Which is more powerful, narrative or verisimilitude?
Is power determined by the ability to deceive?

David Lehman is with Stephanie Cohen, who said her favorite lines of the week were “The shock of a duck / jerked up in the jaws of a dog.” For my part, I'm pretty enthused by "drinking the solution."

In “Requiem,” Pamela Joyce S. beautifully weaves echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “full of sorrow,” “half in love,” “full-throated ease,” “tender” night.

What are you thinking?
To think is to be
full of sorrow and
I am full of thought.

Only half in love,
you said half joking,
the quiet breath escaping
like a death rattle.

I called you soft names
with full-throated ease
In the forlorn landscape
of tomorrow’s separate dreams.

What thoughts will please you,
Love, on this last tender night?

So much yes! 

Diana Ferraro’s “Clockwork” begins and ends with timeless questions:

What time is it?

The sorry round face, two bones as hands
The mock banner of a forbidden ship
Poison, pirate, prowess, no lighthouse warns.

The past, a sacking bag laid on the bare land
Jewels and coals shifting and clanking
A peaceful cow with a bell hails the future.

Bright stamps on lost letters, used gloves, missed calls,
Stocked sunrays heaped within a tall fire
Written papers burn on the trail of autumn leaves.

Weightless witnesses stolen by the wind
Zephyr, sirocco or gale, so many skies!
Present melts in the sigh of a lived life.

Is it time?

As always, there are many more poems and interesting conversations on poesy to read up, so head on over to the American Scholar's page for the whole post! 

On Writing "On Not Using the Word Cunt . . ." [by Lisa Williams]

<<<
I enjoyed Jim Cummins' and Denise Duhamel's comments, as I've enjoyed their poetry over the years. It's a pleasure to be in their company. I want to approach this subject from a different angle.

What is erotic in poems? For some readers, graphic language and a bawdy directness, indicating sexual experience and lack of inhibition are appealing. If a woman writer is intrepid enough to place "cock" and "cunt" in her poems, you might think approvingly, no shrinking violet, this one! She is tough, she is brazen, she is "now." She doesn't cater to the old dream of beauty, and she's titillating besides. Maybe this is even a mandate: Pity the postmodern woman writer who doesn't put 'cunt' in her poems!

My poem "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' in a Poem" emerged from considerations along these lines. A writer I know read a poem of mine in a magazine and wrote to me about it. She said that it was a little stately, that I might want to rough it up, sex it up a bit. The poem was not about the body, or sex, or love: it was about an idea, an idea which had to be (painfully) relinquished. It was an abstract and meditative poem, and—I'll admit it—a little stately. But the idea of "sexing it up" nagged at, then galvanized, me, especially since I am grumpy about the contemporary convention that women use graphic language to prove they are free from convention. In a torrent of language and attitudinizing, I wrote the poem, "On Not Using the Word 'Cunt' . . . almost as it appears. Though tonally close to anger in parts, the poem was a riot to compose: one of those experiences in which you, the writer, are intoxicated by the flood of language, mind sparking, tongue racing . . .

I wanted to explain that, in some cases, to rough it up/sex it up might be the equivalent of showing 't and a'—the same ole same ole, catering to new gender mandates, like "a burlesque romp/by someone who would rather keep her dress." Is a contemporary reader so distractable/skeptical that she/he needs to be flashed at every few lines? Must women writers continue to be subjected to the old polarities of prim and proper (old-fashioned) versus naughty and bawdy (postmodern)? Can't a woman writer be abstract and meditative by choice without losing authority? (Isn't that, in fact, a little more taboo these days?)

There is erotic engagement between writer and reader of another kind, as the body of words, so to speak, tempts and fascinates by drawing the reader into cerebration, excitements of the mind. I think of the language play and tonal revelations Emily Dickinson gives her readers that make each of us feel as if she speaks to us alone. Her poems are eternally charged. And what about the seductive possibilities of sound? A writer can seduce if she/he means to give pleasure, as Wallace Stevens can (to me), no matter how abstract he seems at times. We can submit as that music—whether discordant, harmonious, or composed of scales in between—guides the imagination to more "jocular procreations."

I think of that smarmy marvel of a tongue, the serpent in Paradise Lost, so flattering and seductive to Eve. If we are not so innocent, we can engage in conversations that are more than merely graphic or flattering. Consider the linguistic possibilities of a longer discourse between Eve and her tempter—not resulting in teeth ripping skin—yet; both speakers rising in words of excitement, wit, and suggestiveness; both voices rippling with inflection.

Lisa Williams

*The above is not a response to the blog before mine that I've just read, and which I think is remarkable.
>>>
Pictured  above: from "Beauty and the Beast" (Cocteau)

I Will Wear My Wounds in Chapters: Six Chapbooks

To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018

Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:

                        …Oh, forgive me, Lord,
    how human I’ve become, busy clicking
    what I like, busy pushing
    my cuticles back and back to expose
    all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me
    tell your creatures how sorry
    I am, let them know exactly
    what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
    too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
    Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
    horns, braid back those long-
    frayed endings of every nerve tingling
    with all I thought I had to do today.

To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.

Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018

Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:

    As if Shakespeare
    could turn in
    his grave after
    Giampiero
    our guide
    tells of Juliet’s
    balcony and her
    statue removed
    from the courtyard
    because thousands
    of tourist hands
    cracked
                    its bronze
    breasts
    by rubbing them
    “for luck in love”
    and I wonder
    does anybody
    care who
    now visits
    her perch and
    house walls
    fucked
    by graffiti.

Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.

The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019

Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:

    A bird in the kitchen
    this morning.
    It was enough.
    A song among tangerine bowls.
    Near the open window
    atop the butcher-block table—
    grapefruit, 
                     a spoon.
                                    Unequivocal.
    Peering out into darkness.
    For Sunrise. 
    Knowing 
    it will blind.

    Too much.
                         Hallelujah. 
    Even the seeds.

Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.

[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:  

 

    The one that belonged to her
    The one where the light hit for the first time
    The one between our houses
    The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
    The one the dog squeezed through
    The one at three over the candle and cake
    The one at three at the checkpoint
    The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
    The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
    The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
    The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
    The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
    The one he went through, hairs shooting out
    The one she went through, blood turning up
    The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
    The ones we put up when she was born
    The ones we passed to leave for good
    The ones we paid quarters to get through
    The one they learned the names of Presidents for
    The ones they needed social security numbers for
    The one I touched in the dark of my room
    The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
    The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
    The one we tried to jump and failed
    The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
    The ones in the books that made animals of us
    The ones that told us who we weren’t
    The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
    The ones that kept flowers
    The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
    The one she went through too tired to find her way
    The one they have chosen to give them purpose
    The different one I have chosen
    The one I haven’t yet found
    The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen                                                                               

Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”

Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:

    The corn in aisle nine pops
    when you pay
    with your NRA Visa.
    In the gun-shaped produce section
    there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
    pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
    To enter, all you have to do
    is show up and say, I hate gays.

Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.

And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018

In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.”  Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering it.

---

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

An Erotic Soundtrack for The Best American Erotic Poetry: The Movie [by Catherine Bowman]

A highly subjective list after looking over my CDs and albums. 

1. All six tracks on the self-titled Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane album

2. “The Very Thought of You” as sung by Billie Holiday or Albert Collins

3. The Canadian Nick Gilder’s pop hit “Hot Child in the City” on The City Nights album

4. “Salt Marie Celeste” from Nurse with Wound. A lost ghost ship at sea. 

5. Portishead’s Dummy

6. Arto Lindsay’s cover of “Simply Beautiful” on Mundo Cililizado

7. Neil Young’s song “Harvest Moon”

8. Gal Costa singing “Dindi." Lyrics by Tom Jobim

9. Tony Joe White’s “Rainy Night in Georgia" as covered by Shelby Lynn.

10. Black Angels. Passover 

11. “Too Marvelous for Words,” lyrics by Johnny Mercer

  as recorded by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra

12. Stevie Wonder’s song “As (Wonder)” from Songs in the Key of Life

13. Prince’s “If I was your Girlfriend”

14. All of the Sarah Vaughn in Hi-Fi album

*

Ok. Better stop now, though I did leave out my recordings of cheetahs purring.

Any additions?  Favorite make-out music or erotic soundtracks? 

Or what songs would you bring to a dirty song/dirty martini/clean underwear

 party? 

from the archives; originally published February 11, 2008

Playing the Lines [by Terese Svoboda]

One of the first tasks I've given neophyte writers is to free associate for ten minutes and then lineate the last ten lines of their writing so it “looks” like poetry. I'm trusting that the mind automatically writes poetry versus prose, and that the unconscious seeks heightened language to make sense of emotion. Because the writer has by the ten minute mark usually run out of things to conceal and is onto more subconscious material, the lines are always looser and more interesting than if he had just begun to arduously write “a poem” in iambic pentameter, line by line. Chopping up the prose after the fact is easier for beginners than envisioning how those lines should look while composing them. The lesson for them is that the line breaks are decisions of the eye and the ear that aren't so difficult after the material has arrived, and the poet can more easily determine what to emphasize.

What about the reverse? Taking the line breaks out of a poem and turning it into prose? I'm reading The Book of Asa (Eyewear) by C.P. Mangel, a very smoothly done 635 page narrative poem about a black intellectual family transplanted to the South. Compelling characters, fabulous food-and-place descriptions, the Klu Klux Klan waiting to pounce, and coming-of-age momentum – but in rough blank verse. Why the but? The formal constraint strengthens the piece and nowhere does it feel forced – rather, it's a tour de force. But I think in this instance, the formal limits the audience, and an important work needs its audience. Okay, so not everybody will like the bacon kidney pie, pumpkin parsnip soup, liver custard, dove dumplings. I'm not sure being published in England (Eyewear's headquarters is London), gives the book the exposure it deserves, given its timeliness, but I do know getting such a big book published would be very difficult, perhaps even as fiction. Still, I keep imagining it without line breaks. Mangel, a lawyer with an MFA from the University of British Columbia, lives, according to google, in North Carolina. Her chapbook Laundry concerns hate crimes within the prison system.