The Best American Poetry

Pacific Northwest Poets: Plentiful & Powerful [by Heidi Seaborn]

Next week, writers from all over will trek to Portland for the Associated Writers & Writer’s Programs (AWP) Annual Conference and Book Fair. Those of us in the Northwest are delighted to invite the writerly world to our rivers, mountains, ocean shores and urban landscapes. Attendees will find themselves surrounded by the natural beauty and a zillion poets who call the Pacific Northwest home.

There may be more poets writing and publishing in the Pacific Northwest than anywhere besides New York City. Working together with Lewis & Clark College, Oregon Poetic Voices  has archived digital recordings of over 450 poets reading their poetry. In Washington State, Kathleen Flenniken’s The Far Field blog, captured the work over 350 poets a few years ago. These are poets that are widely published, often professional poets. In Seattle, which carries the UNESCO City of Literature designation, there’s a joke that there are so many poets in the area that you need to swerve to avoid hitting one.
   
“There is such a tremendous range of poetic voices and styles in the Pacific Northwest, “says Billie Swift, owner of the poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, Open Books. “At Open Books, we don’t have a Pacific Northwest Poets section because where would one begin? We have people come into the store seeking PNW poets. Their eyes widen as we pull book after book after book off the shelf. And then there are hundreds of literary journals and presses thriving in the region.”   

One of which is the renowned Poetry Northwest that is celebrating its 60^thyear at AWP. Editor Erin Malone agrees with Swift: “Poetry is ubiquitous in Seattle and the whole Northwest— from the UW to organizations like Hugo House, to our indie bookstores, to reading series like Margin Shift, to our Writers in the Schools teaching our K-12 kids how to write poems. And because it’s such a large community, I feel like our writing scene goes against that dreaded Seattle Freeze. Writers here are very supportive and welcoming.”

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State’s Poet Laureate credits a rich ecosystem that surrounds and supports writers in the Northwest: "I have been pleasantly surprised at finding writerly/poetry communities in every corner of the state.  This is heartening. I have also seen nascent communities in High Schools, but much more work remains to be done. There is vibrancy and yet there remain many untapped possibilities to involve immigrant communities as well as Native communities to share their songs and their stories."

Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna and Oregon State Poet Laureate Kim Stafford at the Hugo House 

The poets working today have several legendary tall trees of Pacific Northwest poetry to thank, including Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, David Waggoner, Carolyn Kizer and Tess Gallagher.  As Billie Swift says, “The Pacific Northwest poetry community has an exceptionally strong adherence to the poetic word."

That word is both heritage and expectation. Oregon State Poet Laureate, Kim Stafford reminds: “How many stories, songs, chants, spells, and other native utterances disappeared with the wave of settlers to the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century? Along with still-vibrant tribal presence here, I see writers in this region at work to restore words that fit the place--the land, rivers, weathers, and quirky customs we carry forward. We have a vibrant book and poetry scene in Seattle, Portland, and Boise, and as Oregon Poet Laureate I've encountered writing communities scattered all over. The land speaks through us to one another.”

 

Next Line, Please: Red Eyes and Blue Moons [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's post shows off poems that made clever use of phrases with multiple meanings, phrases such as "red eye" or "blue moon" or "working stiff" or "grass widow." As always, there were droves of impressive responses to the prompt, and much else to be admired. Shall we jump in?

Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Red Eye” won deserved praise from discerning readers:

Bright crimson smear in the sclera. Over-
flow of a miniature river’s cataracts into the ovoid pool
of black pupil, blue iris, and lens. I almost never look
at my face in a mirror: so someone asks, what
happened to your eye? What hasn’t. Violent sneeze,
burst vessels. Once I abraded the cornea when by mistake
I rubbed sand into it. Maybe I was trying to make
glass. On the all-night flight from Vancouver to Baltimore
where you lay dying, I took a window seat so I
could both see and not see, hologram of the reading light
fixed above the jet wing. In Polaroids of us at the beach
as kids, our eyes burn red as coal embers, as unchecked fever

Diana Ferraro said it best when she wrote, “I like very much the almost medical, precise descriptions that create a cold distance, then slowly build into all the meanings of red eyes until we fall into the painful abyss of the unexpected.”

Christine Rhein shares first place with “Working Stiff,” the soliloquy of a man wearing a “man bun” (gross) and “Armani suits” (very nice if you can get it):

I’m serious. Fourteen hours a day. My neck, shoulders hurting.
My laptop heating up. Like business. I own a mall, a dance club,
three coffee shops. And on paydays, we all chat—my employees
happy,
able to buy the hippest clothes, great bodies, expensive hair—the
kind
that bounces when they walk. For myself—it’s a man bun, six-pack
abs,
Armani suits—in Second Life, Kona Karl raking in the lindens, and
me
designing logos for the coffee cups, bikinis for the dancers. To top all
that—
I’m getting married soon. But hey—don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’m
just playing “some stupid game.” She’d never understand Kona Karl
needing a tuxedo, a honeymoon. Or the 55,000 lindens—260 bucks
I’ve spent on special animation, making sure that, yeah, I’ll be
working
magic on my wedding night. And on any night when my bride,
Cloudberry,
shows up, logged-in, to shake cocktails, fill the hot tub in the beach
house
she picked out for us—the mortgage, like in real life, costing me
plenty.

"Blue Moon" proved to be a very popular jumping off point for NLP contenders.

Patricia Wallace earns high marks with her poem of that title:

I like the moon, the way she hangs around
when everyone else has split, sick of my caterwauling,
my complaints, my sorry love life. Sometimes she’ll slip in
an extra appearance at the bar and shine her full attention
on our conversation. We talk about dark sides and tattoos,
joke about the gossip: the black-out nights, how secretly
she’s a man, the dog-eared rumors people spin out drunk
with daylight, wanting to be hip and clever by claiming
we’re looney. She says she gets the blues from wildfires
and volcanos. Been there. I know the feeling,
Once in a blue moon, if she’s had a few too many,
I’ll walk her to the corner, lift her to a lamppost and watch her drift
into a dawn sky. There’s that little tidal tug as she disappears.

Taking advantage of the unusual terms used to keep score in tennis (where “love” equals zero) Allen King contributes the clever and economical poem, “Love-Love”:

Watching tennis
on t.v.
she turned
and asked,
“What’s love?”
Boy did
that make
me think.

There's plenty more to see, so visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

The Poetry of Bonnie & Clyde [by Heidi Seaborn]

On May 4^th, the poems of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow will be auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in Dallas. The notorious gangster couple wrote poems during their two-year crime spree from 1932-1934 that included robbing banks, gas stations and shops and killing people along the way. They were eventually ambushed by the police in Louisiana and died in the shootout. The poems were written in a 1933 daily planner notebook that has been in the possession of Clyde Barrows’ family all these decades. Bonnie Parker was particularly prolific. Her poems are long sequences of rhyming stanzas that pull from the Wild West ballad tradition.

You've read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died;
If you're still in need
Of something to read,
Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

She likens their fugitive life to that of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Long before Michael Ondaatje wrote The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Bonnie Parker imagined him in poetry, in a chance encounter with Clyde in her poem, “Outlaws—Billy the Kid and Clyde Barrow”:

Billy rode on a pinto horse
Billy the Kid I mean
And he met Clyde Barrow riding
In a little gray machine

Billy drew his bridle rein
And Barrow stopped his car
And the dead man talked to the living man
Under the morning star

Billy said to the Barrow boy
Is this the way you ride
In a car that does its ninety per
Machine guns at each side?

I only had my pinto horse
And my six-gun tried and true
I could shoot but they got me
And someday they will get you!

Bonnie also used her poems at times to set the record straight when they were falsely accused:

If a policeman is killed in Dallas,
And they have no clue or guide;
If they can't find a fiend,
They just wipe their slate clean
And hand it on Bonnie and Clyde.

There's two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow mob;
They had no hand
In the kidnap demand,
Nor the Kansas City depot job.

While Bonnie and Clyde were glamorized in life and since through film and literature, their poetry reveals that life on the run was far from easy. Clyde (with misspellings) describes:

As we travel down the highway
never knowing where it will end.
Never very much money 
and not even a friend

We donte want to hurt annyone
but we have to steal to eat
and if its a shootout to live
then thats the way it will have to bee.

The outlaw couple knows that they are doomed and use their poems to express their fatalism. Their impending death is presented in their poems without bravado or fear, but an understanding that this will ultimately be their end:

Some day they'll go down together;
And they'll bury them side by side;
To few it'll be grief
To the law a relief
But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde. 

~From “Outlaws: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” by Bonnie Parker.

For Bonnie, poetry was a hobby. She had written poetry previously and even had a couple poems published. However, one wonders if the poems written in the 1933 notebook were written for posterity. If so, Bonnie and Clyde would be pleased and surprised that 84 years later, their verse would be auctioned off and read around the world on something called the Internet!  

A Delicious Deciduous Debut [by Heidi Seaborn]

Crowns off to Matty Layne Glasgow for his debut poetry collection, Deciduous Qween being chosen by Richard Blanco for Red Hen Press’ Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award in 2018.  This debut collection is a forest of wonders, bejeweled with language that stings, flings, hisses and kisses all at once. This is a writer who pulls the teeth of childhood and holds them up to the light for the reader to see “like words that only shine/when they are free”, a writer who unearths the Texan landscape and sexuality in poems that burn hot and vivid.

Glasgow revises the floral blooming coming of age story into “a bed of wildflowers” with the “lust & rust of a Texas spring.” There is lust and rust and love and shame, and loss threaded throughout this collection, as a mother dies and a boy claims his sexuality and life goes on like a drag queen on stage.

The poem “how you go” includes erasures from Peter Wohlleben (author, The Secret Life of Trees) as it grapples with a mother erased from a son's life. In Deciduous Qween, people and trees are entwined as Glasgow reimagines human nature from our soiled roots to our lofty leafy limbs.  Deciduous Qween will be available in June. In the meantime, here’s a taste:

 

Ash Mama

I never called you Mother Tree.                             
May I now        that  your body     
felled you—bark      sallow  &
unfurling     from your   hollow
bones?   I saw      an emerald
ash borer   in   your pancreas,
watched   it loosen  your skin,
swallow you   whole     in one
month.     They   said it would
take years.      I never  called
you         Great Ash,       until
that’s what   you were— dust
through     my fingers,    filling
your own     mother’s     grave.
You never called me seedling,
your       weak-limbed    boy—
frail-leaved        &  thin-veined
in shadow.  Every  tree needs
light,       every  crown   wants
to rise.     We each wore  ours
differently.     You died  before
your     mother.           No sun
for you   no     head in    star-
soaked canopy.  You kept me
alive      all   the same,   until
they took you    away,     left
your roots      in the ground,
bound to mine,   as if to say
Grow,baby.   Reach, qween            
 boy. Let your crown   shine.

A Modern Take on “Marriage” [by Heidi Seaborn]

Are you or have you been in an MFA Poetry program?  Are you over 50? Ok, then you’ve read Marianne Moore's “Marriage” and know it is considered one of the most important works not just from Moore, but of Modernism. [Ed: Marianne Moore's "Marriage" may be found in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.]

Published in 1923, “Marriage” is a long, complicated collage of statements and quotations on marriage, gender and male/female relations that evolve into a dialogue between Adam and Eve and it still holds up today. The institution of marriage has fundamentally not evolved drastically, despite women’s rights, legalization of gay and interracial marriage. And Moore’s use of collage to create the overlapping conversation of husband and wife, Adam and Eve is perhaps more relevant today than ever.

We can envision Eve and Adam, sitting by the glow of the television, iPhones in hand, scrolling.Without looking up from his iPhone or to see if he is disturbing Eve, Adam blurts out: “Treading chasms/on the uncertain foot of the spear” and continues on “Past states, present state,” his voice rising.

Eve shifts a bit as Adam has interrupted her own social media scroll. But he doesn’t notice, busy blabbing on about nightingales, apples, before admitting he “stumbles over marriage,/a trivial object indeed.” Does Eve bother to look up at this admission from Adam? She does for a moment, wondering if someone had posted wedding photos on Instagram that she’d missed, glances over at iPhone. Seeing nothing, she returns to study her own iPhone. They continue on for a while like this, maybe a “hmmm” or a grunt of acknowledgement that the other has spoken.

Then Eve lights up, reads a snippet from her Facebook feed “for love that will gaze an eagle blind” quoting her friend Tony Trollope, and then a jibe from Shakespeare’s Twitter feed. Now Adam is paying attention. He hates that she follows Shakespeare, some girl crush he thinks.

Two can play at this. They both start going back and forth, throwing out insults gleaned from social media pals and (possibly fake) news sites. Adam cites John Cournos’ retweeting Ezra Pound—“a wife is a coffin” is met with “well, maybe she ‘leaves her peaceful husband’ that Eve snagged from a Simon A Puget’s fashion blog.

Side by side on the sofa in the dim light of the television, they continue on, heads bent over their weapons. When the television volume turns up to air an ad from Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union”, Adam and Eve briefly look up before returning their gaze to the little screens in their hands. Marianne Moore would not be surprised.

Over the Moon and Back Again [by Heidi Seaborn]

In an MFA workshop last summer, an acclaimed poet declared that the moon was over, that it had been over used and needed to be relegated to the poetry graveyard with ravens and heart. Just like that. Done. The MFAs took note. No more moons.

But I’m not yet ready to yield the moon. Instead I find myself now obsessed with it, guarding it from extinction. Like Diana, I hunt for moon references. Pounce on moon sightings. I keep an eye on the moon when it rises at night, as it lingers in the sky by day. I wane as it wanes, I am filled by its fullness. When a Super Moon blasts a hole in the night sky, I can’t look away, letting its spotlight hold me, entranced. I’m not alone. Google the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon and you’ll find over 55 million results. For one moon, on one night.

When the moon eclipsed the sun a couple of years ago, the world looked up in wonder. The poets wrote. It’s cultural. Remember moon pies and Michael Jackson performing The Moonwalk? It’s historical. Remember Neil Armstrong’s real walk on the moon? Or just watch First Man and pretend you were alive then.

In fact, the moon stars in nearly 1,000 movies according to IMDb. We croon to the moon, whether we are music fans of Oscar Peterson, Neil Young or Pink Floyd. Amazon lists over 20,000 albums and 60,000 books with moon in their titles. On poets.org, there are 107 pages of moon references. The poet Lillo Way has a prize-winning chapbook Dubious Moon [Slapering Hol Press] that is nothing but moon poems. Here’s one from Way’s book that captures the sensuality of the moon, its powerful draw:

Frame the Moon

Furred out, cased, paned and trimmed,
the opening of a window.

From my position here on the floor
in supine half-spinal twist,

my quarter-revolving eye catches
a perfectly sliced-in-half moon centered

in the upper right corner of the upper
left pane of a window blued by a sky

somewhere between baby-boy daytime
and electric-transvestite midnight –

the perfect globe cleavered by
a celestial butcher-boy –

the first half of hope, not the last,
depending, I suppose, on your viewing point,

mine being spine suppliant to floor,
floor kissing earth and holding the kiss,

earth sucking me hard, the half-moon
mullioned and muntined,

one four-millionth of a light-year away,
beaming me up and off from here –

half an inkling that, when the bones wave
their white phalanges of surrender

to whatever pulls us down – some unthing,
some weightless, scentless, tasteless,

wan thing, draws me up into a moon’s
glowy, showy, half-assed bliss.

 

The moon rules the tides of our oceans, of women’s bodies. It may orbit our earth, but we are in its powerful cosmic sway. Even Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” [Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press] where the moon is dismissed as: “A kind of ancient/date-rape drug” and “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band./Better off alone” acknowledges it is the lover we can’t ever truly leave. Maybe we are destined to howl at the moon in our poems, to shoot past cliché to discover the ancient and constant inspiration of our one and only moon.

Next Line, Please: Two-Word Titles [by Virginia Valenzuela]

John Ashbery once said that he liked to begin with a title, rather than end with one, when he sat down to write a poem.

Here on Next Line, Please, we are partial to two-word titles that can yield multiple meanings. For example, “Spring Break” might refer not only to college kids painting the town red in Fort Lauderdale but also to the damage that a winter storm may cause to a pristine spring of water.

Here are some potential two-word titles:

Working Stiff
House Arrest (or House Organ)
Twin Killing
Strip Steak
Food Court
Hot Corner
Blue Moon
Red Eye
Hung Jury
Grass Widow
Spring Break

Each of these phrases has a primary meaning, and in some cases a slang meaning—for example, “twin killing” is baseball shorthand for a double play. Your job is to choose a title from this list—or come up with a two-word title of your own—and write a poem that features two meanings of the chosen phrase. Extra credit if you start with one meaning and end with the other. Fourteen lines or less.

It’s not the same thing, but many years ago David wrote a poem that secretly capitalized on two possible meanings of “ERA” (“earned run average” in baseball and the proposed constitutional amendment). You can do the same with other acronyms, and maybe we’ll do that one fine week.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Eleven Years Ago Today: Difficulty Part 2: reading Susan Howe [by Mark Doty]

Thinking about what's difficult in poetry makes me want to talk about a book I've been reading with great pleasure, Susan Howe's SOULS OF THE LABADIE TRACT, which New Directions published in 2007.
The contexts of these poems are complex ones, but Howe's book artfully establishes the grounds of her inquiry. She begins with two bits of prose, the first describing the Puritan preacher and writer Jonathan Edwards, and how he'd ride through the wild country of Western Massachusetts thinking through his essays and sermons, and scribbling on scraps of paper which he'd pin to his clothes, using their location as a mnemonic device. It's a beautiful figure of the poet, wearing words in the wilderness, clothing the body in fragments of text. Then Howe offers a riveting ars poetica, a description of her research time in the library at Yale, the crumbling books of American language, fragments of history. Such dislocated bits of speech float up even through her prose.

"Often walking alone in the stacks,' she writes, "surrounded by the raw material paper afterlife, my spirits were shaken by the great ingathering of titles and languages. This may suggest vampirism because while I like to think I write for the dead, I also take my life as a poet from their lips, their vocalisms, their breath."

The vocalisms and breath of the dead are indeed present in the short poems that follow, each a small rectangle of text in the center of the page composed of six to eight lines. There's a strange and exhilarating feeling of space between words and phrases, as if these fragments had sifted out of those library stacks, out of the gathered words and yellowed books our ancestors have become. Howe's 
especially interested in the Labadists, a group of 17th century utopians of whom almost nothing remains,
seeking the faint echoes of their presence, and her tracing of a kind of ancestry leads her to the doorstep of none other than Wallace Stevens -- who also was interested in tracing his ancestry, and who seems one of the most potent of the souls that ghost Howe's own poetics. A group of poems that bear Stevens' address as a title have the odd sense of being whispered,  half-overheard conversations with spirits of the past. And, as in Stevens' own poems, they try to worry out the nature of beauty. This poem might be spoken by Stevens in his study, or by Howe in her own study, or Howe looking into Wallace Stevens' window on Westerly Terrace in Hartford.

Face to the window I had

to know what ought to be

accomplished by precedecessors

in the same field of labor

because beauty is what is

What is said and what this

it -- it in itself insistent is 

Those last three lines are such a ringing esthetic credo. Like all Howe's work,  they ask for full engagement, inviting the reader work out the relations between these words and lines, relations which are not fully determined already but contain the possibilities for multiple meanings. But how rewarding this work is, and how startling that such a forceful and intelligent definition of beauty -- that old Romantic problem! -- is made here in 17 words, most of them tiny, and together they make an abstract and irresistible music:  "it -- it in itself insistent is" is music for ear and mind.

And these poems, of course, would be impossible without the poet's allegiance to her method:
her crabbed, curious, gnomic collecting, her cobbling of order in the detritus of time.

You don't read such a book straight through and be done with it; you don't expect each part to yield meaning right away, and some of it may never come clear. That's what it's like, listening to history: confusion and multiplcity, glimmers of clarity, waves of inscrutable speech. How's book part library, part forest, spaces in which an American woman is walking and thinking with words pinned to all of her clothes.

Ten Years Ago Today: Poetry, Difficulty, and a Very Annoying Word [by Mark Doty ]

I've just gotten home from school (I'm a guest teacher at Cornell University in Ithaca this semester) which means I've walked a bike-path through the woods, still ice-coated from this weekend's storm. It's amazing. When the wind blows the trees crackle, with a sound that's a bit like hissing oil in a skillet and a bit like the sound that that the highest lick of seawater makes as the tide comes in and sinks into dry sand. I like this walk and it's a good time to sort through the conversation and events of the workshop I've just taught.

Today we were looking at poems by Terrance Hayes from WIND IN A BOX. My workshop's centered on the poetic sequence, so we're interested in poems composed in groups, or longer poems in sections. I think my students were slightly frazzled by the daylight savings timeshift today, and I was feeling sort of spun-around myself, because right before class I'd been reading an essay by Charles Harper Webb in the current issue of THE WRITERS CHRONICLE. Webb's essay concerns difficulty in poetry, which he thinks there's too much of; I paraphrase here, but he seems to feel that many poets write for an elite group of other poets who appreciate coded gestures and opaque language that may be incomprehensible to the general reader. The thing that startled me about the article was that Webb says that such poetry has turned away from "natural human taste."

Whoa. It's clear that it's in the nature of human beings to make things, but as to calling what we make "natural"  or "artificial" -- well, that's a scary business. Webb feels that poems that are readily understood by the general reader (he cites Billy Collins and Sharon Olds as examples) are natural, and that more demanding work isn't; astonishingly, Webb identifies the general reader as someone who'd probably like A Prairie Home Companion.

I could talk about what I disagree with in this position for several weeks worth of blogging, but suffice to say that the presumption inherent in calling any kind of art "natural" is unnerving, because of course it implies that whatever the critic doesn't care for will go tumbling into the abyss of the other category. "Natural" has a long history of ugly usage. There are plenty of states remaining where I could be arrested, if the authorities so desired, for my private practice of "unnatural acts," and one doesn't have to look far back in time to find the ways in which what was presumed to be "natural" for women or for people of color was in fact simply an expression of the prejudices of the moment. "Natural," as they say, pushes my buttons.

I can only be grateful that poets refuse to take such a position seriously. The two greatest of American poets were, of course, practioners of disparate poetics practically incomprehensible in their own time; how long did it take Whitman and Dickinson to find their audience? Should they have attempted to speak to the "general reader"? (Whitman, of course, did so, as time went on, and not always with very happy results. His great poems are the demanding, uncompromising ones.)

What looks difficult to us is often merely different, and isn't it a pleasure to encounter what we don't know how to read yet? There ought to be room in the huge house of American poetry for all sorts of practice, from the plainspoken to the highly wrought, from the direct to the encoded, from the open to the secretive. And besides, if what we strive for is to be "natural" -- well, which to prefer, the artifice of the spider or of the bee, the termite or the paper wasp, all makers of intricate systems?  I am not convinced that nature is all that plainspoken.

Okay, enough rant. I was thinking about my class, and about how my dear and earnest Cornell students, who dwell in a culture that places great value upon intellectual achievement, on working hard
to find correct answers, seemed to struggle with finding their way in Terrance's poems. What I understood, after we talked about two pieces, was that they weren't quite hearing his tone; they hadn't found access to the voice that informs the work, the over-riding or indwelling current of feeling.
For them, the poems were emotionally difficult - which presents another, more interesting dimension
to Webb's argument. There are many sorts of difficulty, after all, and what "difficult" is depends on who's doing the reading.

This post originally appeared on March 10, 2008

Next Line, Please: The Trope of a Nation [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week's prompt involved a game of "reverse scrabble," in which players found as many words as they could from the main word, "operation," and then used these words in a poem. Now one might read that and say, what benefit could that possibly have to the rhyme and reason of poetry? Well...

If you thought it impossible to write a poem about politics in 2019 that didn't make your stomach hurt, think again. I give you, Millicent Caliban's “Operation 1776,”

“Hamilton”—an opera with rap oration,
the art of Miranda, the trope of a nation:
to tear them away, to part from taxation.
Wanting the option to reap their reward,
the poor prone to riot, to feather and tar,
the gentry pen notes to air their pain.
In Boston, a port, the harbor is near.
Men say “nope” to the King and go for the tea.
“Do not tie us to Empire! We yearn to breathe free!”

Stephanie Cohen’s “The Operation” succeeds beautifully with its emotional complexities, its fascinating adjectives, and its impressive wordplay:

To ease me into a prone riot,
the anesthesiologist, near my ear, sang Lou Reed’s,
“Perfect Day” with a ration-
al tone dripped in toper tropes.

“You’re gonna reap just what you sew”
Roped to a table, I buoyed to a torpor
to treat my torn aorta. Its pores gulping
tons of musical notes; I became noise.

I wanted to repo the rate of nope and tar the vice
of human voice at the opera. Reduced to
the body’s notion, my ape-ness tore me open-
“I’m glad I spent it with you.”

Michael C. Rush used the prompt to create a musical mosaic in “Operation Intro.” The alliterative energy, which owes much of its existence to the nature of the prompt, is striking:

Playing air poet,
rioting into a pain rap
on an ornate iron piano
near an open air patio—
rip one, tip it, top it,
tap no poor pen to atone—
a pro, a rat, prone to opiate,
options no rite, apes no portion
ripe in art, pines into an apt ratio
in a not-rote era.

Christa Whitsett Overbeck’s “Hedonic Operation” sings a similar song but with a very different tune:

Portion, like slices of ripe pear,
the ratio of pleasures—

Rate the opiate:
a nice pinot
or porn noir—

Opine on art or opera—

Tear the fruit
to the pulp, I ate—
not unlike words
to the poet

And finally, a full-throated huzzah to Anthony Clifton, who crafted a sestina that cunningly echoes David's own “Operation Memory.” Here Anthony uses the same six end-words, one of which is a number and a variable.

"Operation Triple Bypass"

for David the Shepherd

I. Practice Practice Practice

Pain is always—always—an option. When
Will we mercifully earn time again for bed?
A piano lullaby (too much to ask?)—A hundred
Cherubs riot, humming the middle
Portion of Carmina Burana, dream of jobs
At Carnegie Hall, velvet rope, sold out shows, loaded

With diehard connoisseurs, open carry, loaded
With hope, ornate ideas, and pure joy; When
We are out to lunch, on a field trip, on to new jobs,
A zillion reasons to stay fixed with rope to the bed,
Whether young or not-so anymore, into the middle
Of middle age, or whatever one wants to call fifty.

II. Homecoming

I remember Otto was open at 8th St. & 5th
“Ave Maria” playing, ordered Pinot Noir, loaded
Patron bumped into me in the middle
Of the joint, happy drunk, a real trip. I remember when
You handed me your book, signed by poet, I rubbed
The cover, a tap for luck, as we talked about odd jobs.

I dug your rap about retiring from your current job
(I believe you did that rat race since 1996)
After a great lunch I ran off envisioning bed—
A siesta before a feast with friends (“parti” in Norwegian), loaded
With protein, bursting with flavor, plenty of Patrón. When
I got home, via train, I sighed, smiled, patted my middle.

III. New Ark

It ain’t easy to find oneself in the middle
Of this trap, or whatever you call New Jersey. Jobs
Come, go, they’re given, torn away. When
I scraped up enough cash to buy one
Ton (okay, ounce) of knockout weed, then loaded
A pair of bowls Goldilocks would’ve deemed just right, numbed

Myself, repainted my already-vivid daydreams that rubbed
Me into rapt attention, fiddled with, diddled my middle
Chakra, left me far from fulfilled, like a ripe gun unloaded
Into one’s favorite enemy (the one who stole your job?),
A rat of no consequence, maybe even just one of one’s
Least favorite friends, in the rain I wandered, wondered: When

I get wherever I’m going, after bed, post-dirt nap—when
I get to Heaven, Hell, one or the other, or land en pointe in the middle
Of Purgatory—will the poor soul’s job be to simply implode?

For more poems, players, and words straight from the horse's mouth, visit the American Scholar's page and read the full post!

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

___________________________________________________

Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

____________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

___________________________________________

An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

 _______________________________________

The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

________________________________________

Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

A Process Note

All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief.  My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
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A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell 

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.

Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?

Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs   of lovely   & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.

Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.

I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the

Poet Spotlight: Veronica Golos [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books, Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown (3: A Taos Press), Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, poems from which are translated into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi, and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch, and adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA. Golos has lectured at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Hunter College, Julliard School of Music, Regis University, University of New Mexico, Dine Technical College, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University; she is co-editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, former Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and core faculty at Tupelo Press's Writers Conferences. She lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband, David Pérez.
____________________________________

Artist Statement

What is "difficulty" in a poem? And to whom is it difficult? And why? The debates over what is Feminist poetry for example, underscore a question: Is there a feminine voice? And if so, is it one relegated only to the female? IN my own work, I have the female voice, that is, poems clearly in the voice of a women, to be one that may be, I hope, perceived as universal, as well as particular. I model this thinking based on comments made by Toni Morrison. In my newest collection, GIRL, I find that both the text, content, and texture of the poems create in many readers a disturbance. That creates both link and space between the poet and the reader. It creates movement. Ultimately, what we mean to do, I think, is the "break the ice" that surrounds the reader, and, the poet.

____________________________________

Poem     because

her mother inscribes          an open=eyed Braille         with her slap slap slap                                   

the girl           never                          cries   refusing                                     

            her secret     to her chest

like the Spartan boy                        and his fox

 

inside her     in the hold

of her mute                           never  

 

the blue-black                      of the slap

face arms her back

 

invisible                                that ink

 

^^^

 

sometimes in the summer she heard singing

            dense music peeling from the bark of trees

                        who sang? wind like weeping. whose?

                                    a wild sound roiling

                                                into the lovely ears of the girl: "live, yes, live."

 

^^^

 The dark god has stuffed my mouth with silk -- Vikas Menon

 

Poet Spotlight: Karla Kelsey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Karla Kelsey is the author of four books: Knowledge Forms the Aviary; Iteration Nets; A Conjoined Book; and Of Sphere. With Aaron McCollough she edits Split-Level Texts and with Poupeh Missaghi she edits Matters of Feminist Practice. Her website is www.karlakelsey.com.

______________________________________

Difficulty: A Spillage

To honor being’s complexity requires, of necessity, a fray along the edges of the known, a jostling of the lens of representation, a discharge of difficulty. Difficulty: resistance, a refusal to compress or cauterize excess according to received form. Or according to received relation, knowledge, sensation, thought, utterance. Because in what overflows the easily recognizable body, object of thought or material we find vivacity, living tissue, incandescence powering syllable, word, sentence, line, text. And thus to reinvent what has been given, to make and be made new, to bathe in the thrill of what transpires beyond ease.

_______________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey

THRALL

Enthralled     to the buzz of neon we yield to instruction     we stare
at the gallery’s sole object     a red square of light projected     on the wall
source invisible. We     yield, I yield inhaling 1-2-3-4-5     exhaling 1-2-3-4-

5 mind sky-blank and     you, you stand beside me     a solid object,
steadfast in Yves Klein Blue.     If you yield I do not know because      
surrender is     individual     is sole     my body, my I, my     mind, my

me abandoned to mystic red, scarlet red, coquelicot red and I     cock-lee-co      
I red-corn-rose     I wild-poppy-poppy, do you     pulse with this, you, next
to me, you blue, you     International Klein Blue?     The square pulses

me poppy     source invisible, with the same     questionable status of
objects revealed     many years ago by a boardwalk     psychic     off-season
air crystalizing     just before snow.     Holding up the nine of swords

she had said     this is you as you believe yourself     to be, facedown and    
pierced     by these swords. But notice the flat sea, the rising sun     and so
pull     will you pull-pull     who will pull-pull     tucking a greasy strand

of hair under a purple     turban, yes, she wore a purple satin     turban    
those swords from your back? Whetted blades     hilts of hammered gold    
the psychic said     cigarette, sweatshirt with rhinestone-studded cat my time

us nearly     up     they need to come out. The cat’s emerald eyes     flash      
in candle light.     Petals crumple     in the bud     then bloom, showy    
before flattening and   radiate out a perfect red disk before falling away.

____________________________________________

The swords had     needed, I     need, needed     need mystic     scarlet  
coquelicot     red corn roses coursing through my body seeding, blooming,
tissue-heads     shuddering in     wind. I need because       under fabrics and

plastics we are exposed, vulnerable to     impression and it is exhausting    
this pretense     otherwise, exhausting to wake early, make coffee, shower,
dress     advance into the day with formal hello and     yesyes as if the moment

wasn’t all around us vibrating     green and     shimmering and     spitting
gravel     like sparks, like stars.     As if we didn’t ourselves vibrate     star    
spark. And after noon the vibration   becomes inner violin, tremolo up to

a high pitch, tremolo down and at night the sea, violet     lashing     lashing    
leather     wealing skin. And the wounds     singing     until the salve of
sleep, mugwort and     sage, ravensara dabbed on in dream.     Or here

before the gallery’s red square of     light, stigmata vision, biochemical    
aria     of photons through pupils igniting     photoreceptors at the backs
of eyes.     Pulse triggered along the optic nerve neurons fire and     fire

a sensation of     color simulating the body where the swords had been
until     one day     the plant body     awakens     to stigmata     not wounds
but pollen collectors, little flicking tongues     glandular tissues emanating

viscid secretion as, for example, in the orchid     the offering of orchids on
each side of     dying. Their bright     mouths and soft     exhalations sticky
with ontological     clarity. Here in the gallery the body pours with stained-

glass     light       and I vibrate, you vibrate     I-you vibrate, our photo-
receptors discharging nerve impulses such that Monet’s   Les Coquelicots
or Poppies     Blooming, 1873     flashes onto the screen     of my mind.

___________________________________________________________

Red square of light     a breezy day     the bank of poppies like stigmata
blotted     a boy in a sailor hat and a woman in blue     woad blue or indigo
blue     not International Klein Blue, but yet she is     your mother, perhaps

she had once been     brighter, and the small boy, the small boy     was
you. You     prior to full expression, prior to     standing here in the gallery    
next to me in the twenty-first century, the small cake of     ultramarine    

lodged inside your abdomen not yet     awakened     you and your mother
walk     broken brushwork and     divided light.     You walk     in
1873, in Argenteuil, suburb of     Paris, an agréable petite     ville     despite the

tanneries, silk mills, ironworks, gypsum mines producing     plaster of Paris.    
Producing statuettes.     Enormous iron forms.     You and your mother    
Camille Doncieux, impressionist muse with     halfmoons of dusk below her

eyes, she is so Camille     such a Camelia     imported half-rose this Camille    
Léonie Doncieux, Camille Donciex Monet, Camille     Monet, Madame C.
the First.     You and your mother walk     or are pushed by incline and

wind     and even this       pushing     is gentle, easy, in     Argenteuil     1873,
Are-jaunt-oy, Argent-euil, from argento, silver     silvery, shiny     gleaming    
surface of the Sein and from     -ialo, clearing, glade, place of     silver, place

of     shine quickly rebuilt after the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War.     Just
fifteen minutes from     Gare Saint-Lazare, the Sein     widening to permit
regattas, banks forming a graceful     promenade where mother in her hat    

where you with your small dog take each day     the air. Argenteuil’s decline
in agriculture a pity, yes a     pity but     wonderous the advancement of    
industry, modernity     say the painters, say     not only Monet but Sisely,

Renoir, Manet, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne lighting     their    
cigars in the     shine, adjusting the brim of your mother’s hat so that her
face     dapples, her petit fils, her pink dress     dapples and     large stone

houses, gardens, are to be had for a     song. Monet will paint 180 canvases    
here     immortalizing sailboats and regattas, train trestles and     towpaths,
gardens and     factories, picnics, idylls     Camille-Camille     wanderings.

Poet Spotlight: Vi Khi Nao [by Kristina Marie Darling]

VI KHI NAO is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.  Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
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On Textual Difficulty

Textual difficulty allows me to take wit to the next level of the linguistic playing field. Textual difficulty can also make one’s work more disruptive and when done right, more electrifying and sharp. I love and I try to condition the materiality of humanity’s mundane emotions so they align homosexually with my love affair with tenderness. Sometimes they express themselves non-linearly, awkwardly, and playfully on the page and I let them be so. They may look difficult, but they are not really. Humor is important to me. No one in the heteronormative culture wants amnesia, but amnesia exists when obvious connections appear to be absence, thus provoking humor. More known for my Sapphic writing, some of these poems here take a homosexual detour, provoking some comedic heterosexuality that resembles more loosely to a lemonade stand. This is where sometimes my writing stands: at the intersection between amnesia & wit.

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A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao

G O O D  M A R R I A G E S  S H O U L D  L I V E  O N I C E

Slender glacier teases the innocent husband

To hand over his wife, the ice tray.

The icy husband resists

Of course, he resists

The wife, divided and compartmentalized

Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side

Love is confusing: indeed, when husband can't gather wife together

On Sunday and on thirsty days

Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass

No one believes in singing with divided tears

A choir is required, and then a drink to quench the thirst of voices

Husband can't believe that wife

Can hold a mosquito that long

He can brush away her subconscious

By draining her of her liquid free will

Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely

Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello

Even solid objects can be unfaithful.

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T R A N S C R I P T S A F T E R E M P T I N E S S : O N

I N C U B A T I O N A N D R A P T U R E [i]

This sparkle, after the great forfeiture, fathered vacuity. Her mounting nerves at a loss.

After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.

Our desires—she clamps in her private closet for me.

Below the orchard: an unwieldy climate, burdened with crystal. Extra-large to counter the atmosphere of dampness—a lover’s heart, feasibly—never comfortable about releasing fear.

Her offspring unbuttons fragrance of verdant madness, hung to the tributary by a cedar tree.

If a sapling has to die, why not for bereaved moonlight? Its happiness, muted by light.

Abandoned in a rental car, love would fade, jokingly; not really.

 

* * *

It’s possible to surrender now, after the body resists rapture.

But a blouse forgives—

while waiting for spring to arrive—Her ears close their doors, patiently delaying the echoes from departing the room—as

A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river—

To change the discourse of time

But hunger, doubt, emptiness—these all travel flippantly, casually without lovers

Stabbing their backs

* * *

 

The summers came and departed. Leaving verdant holes in the sweaters of winter

Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything

Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance

Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped

To incubate is not easy, it’s easier to watch the eggs cross the street than the chickens

Every step counts, despite what the statistics of hit & run tell us

Don’t be deceived by the fake changes we see & report

We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we know they have a high tolerance for insomnia

So stab the night if you want; it won’t get you very far.

 

[i] Ayumi Malhotra, Mia: “Notes from the Birth Year: On Gestation and Becoming”: https://www.poetrynw.org/mia-ayumi-malhotra-two-poems/

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T H E   A F T E R N O O N                                O N   I M P U L S E  

 

Just before morning closes                                Her deformed smile

Your hands dismiss                                           Respiratory foams

Razored on the edge                                        Your face

Couldn’t resonate with me                                So let us be foes in the aftershave

Poet Spotlight: Allison Benis White [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. Her next book, The Wendys, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

In her introduction to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison writes, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” To be an “outlaw woman” on the page, to create a disruptive, ungovernable, or unclassifiable text, is vital to my poetics, as it serves to ensure an intellectual and aesthetic freedom outside the binary, the linear, the traditional. “The duty of the writer,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “is to remind us that we die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is a tall order, which often requires a new kind of language, syntax, form, and/or approach. The outlaw or difficult text asks the reader to give themselves briefly to an unfamiliar world, to a particular mouth and mind, to another human being who will die but is not dead yet.

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A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White

DARLING

Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.

—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

________________________________________                                    

“And Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.”

       Maybe this is the dream

                                                   of the dead bathed in milk—

                                                                                                                                                               

so many red feathers

 

in my mind. I remember being alive  

         as a child—on a towel in the grass,

                                                                                   

                             from a white plastic kettle,

 

                                                       I poured air into a cup,   two cups.

 

 

 

           What else still     but to imagine heat, sugar, death.

                                                                                                           We drank nothing

 

                                                                     and it was good.    

___________________________________________

“‘A lady to take care of us at last,’ said one of the twins, ‘and you have killed her.’”

 

 

   Smoothing the brain,

                                       holding a knife   to build another

 

                 mother. Like a house in the trees,

                                                       I wanted to believe in God

                                                                                                           to be safe

                                                                                         and have somewhere to go.

 

We are all the same   and inconsolable, legs twitching                               

                                                                 during the nightmare.     Please wake me up,

 

                                 press one finger between my eyes

                                                                                             like a doorbell.

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Meet the Press: Headmistress Press: An Interview with Mary Meriam

N.B. The following responses by Mary Meriam are a kind of tonal cento in the spirit of Nicole Santalucia’s newest chapbook, Spoiled Meat. To read a more forthright appraisal of Santalucia’s new work, look at the generous recommendation Meriam offered on the February 2019 Reading List over at Poetry’s Harriet blog. Also, check out Santalucia’s chapbook here. While you’re there, you might acquaint yourself with the many finely written chapbooks available in the Headmistress catalog. ~Dante Di Stefano

 

How did Headmistress Press come into being?

Some bitch like me sets the fire, cranks the heat, makes an online journal of lesbian poetry and art, Lavender Review, swallows the flare.

The flower pots and lesbian poems blaze one little fire at a time. Books sprout from Headmistress Press, thanks to some bitch Risa Denenberg taking care of the practical side.

Could you talk a bit about your catalog? What do Headmistress books have in common?

Yellow fires and red fires and cover art by lesbian artists, 52 books that are on fire. Pick the best chicken hut, make the best gas station, send them through the post office, and the readers: all on fire. 

Tell us about your Lesbian Poet Trading Cards.

When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames, Rita Mae Reese knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. Her fire burns in the Chicago Tribune. Pretty soon Kathleen Rooney swirls in flames: Call attention to lacunae in the traditional literary canon and the clouds shrivel up. Dry out and put a face on the absences that exist in many readers’ knowledge. Drop like dog shit and provide another strategy to fight the invisibility that is often all too prevalent in the assembly of both anthologies of past writers and the tables of contents of current literary journals, as when editors say things to the effect of “we wanted to publish more work by (insert under-represented group here), we just couldn't find any.” 

You’ve published two books under the Sally Jane Books imprint. Could you tell us about these titles?

To the sides of the streets and highways, where heroin addicts are left for dead, we start a wild and free imprint, where farmers grow lettuce, we trade sheep, text and art in exciting, fun, and innovative shoelaces and guns. 

What else is on the horizon for Headmistress Press?

2019 AWP Book Fair in Portland.

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

Some bitch like me. 

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat won your most recent Charlotte Mew chapbook contest. Would you tell us about the contest and about Santalucia’s book? 

Spoiled Meat is a foul-mouthed rural fantasy, allegory, satire. It’s rage against the world’s waste, sickness, horror, corruption, injustice. It’s a witch’s hell-call for change. Some bitch Santalucia recounts the apocalypse with authority, takes the blame, makes the change. 

Could you end the interview with a poem from Spoiled Meat?

Here’s the bitch-action I nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

            Pennsylvania on Fire 

            Some bitch like me sets the fire, 
            cranks the heat, burns the toast, swallows 
            the flare. 

            The flower pots and front lawns blaze 
            one little fire at a time. Flames sprout 
            from the gardens on Hanover Street. 
            Yellow fires and red fires and motherfuckers 
            drive trucks that are on fire. The chicken hut, 
            gas station, post office, and the neighbors: all on fire. 

            When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames 
            a gust of wind knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. 
            Her fire burns on fear. Pretty soon the black sky 
            swirls in flames and the clouds shrivel up, 
            dry out, and drop like dog shit
            to the sides of the streets and highways
            where heroin addicts are left for dead, where farmers
            grow lettuce and trade sheep for shoelaces and guns,
            where starving cows are auctioned and eaten alive, and the people 

            confuse women for beef and love for needles. 

 

            From Spoiled Meat by Nicole Santalucia

---

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press, edits Lavender Review (lesbian poetry and art), and is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas-Monticello. Her newest collection, My Girl's Green Jacket, is reviewed at Entropy and Lambda Literary. A new poem appears in the February issue of Poetry.  

Poet Spotlight: Julia Story [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Julia Story​ is the author of ​Post Moxie​ (Sarabande Books), the chapbook ​The Trapdoor​ (dancing girl press), and the chapbook ​Julie the Astonishing​ (forthcoming in March 2019 from Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in ​Sixth Finch, Tinderbox​, and ​Tupelo Quarterly​. She is a Midwesterner who now resides in Massachusetts.
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A Brief Statement about Textual Difficulty

The poems I am working on now are based on the life of Christina the Astonishing, the 12th-century saint who came back to life at her own funeral and then spent the rest of her days living in trees and towers, as she had rejected heaven and had chosen instead to return to earth for a life of suffering. As I write these poems, some of which are her (the “her” is a character called Julie rather than Christina) letters to Jesus about her chosen life on earth, I find them getting smaller and smaller--the poems themselves are small, but the images too diminish as Julie spends her life erasing herself, or as already erased. Living on the edges of things and people, her experiences (and even her prayers) can be best documented in fragments.

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A Folio of Poems by Julia Story 

Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing

 

How She Would Return from the Dead.

The body brought out like empty wood,
silent as a dark whale in dark water.

The body a citadel in trees: getting there was
land-swimming, pushing aside loneliness,

a white man in rubber boots and all
his little dogs, the sun flashing in and out

like god’s face upon the water before
the invention of cardboard and radio

transmissions. And then the second before
she knew she was going to give it all up—

everything, all of it, until she was walking
down the road in the dark with lungs full

of the scattered, old-fashioned promises
of beginning again—the house

of her body would light up, the feet
marching as they had been instructed to do.

________________________________

My fugue state, but brittle.
Pieces of me broke off,

each one a little you.
That night we washed our

socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old

Murder She Wrote.​ A blank
face as white as breaths on

the screen. I wept because
I knew it was my face.

Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.

_______________________________

We approach the defunct
nudist colony.

Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.

Every moment
an ossuary.

I’m a body.
You are dead

like the invisible
nudes. But you

walk with me.
The moon

mothered in clouds.

______________________________

As you know, I am no one’s
bride. And yet I belong to you

and you are like me, a suit
of armor made of mercury.

The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.

I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart

and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.

_________________________________

The smaller I am, the easier it is
for people to dream of me.

I go into their heads like a seed,
planting my tiny doorway

and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.

They gave me a homestead by a little lake,
rustling itself in the breeze.

But the land rustled up three corpses
by the end of winter.

How industrious this sadness is,
making its ramp into me every day.

Building its house and also its saw,
its level, its nails, and whatever

substance makes these walls.

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
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A Process Note

I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”

Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.

Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure. 

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A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?

Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says

Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back

Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)

the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]

well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time

[schottische] slow polka to you

and over the table, the bedspread
                               under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's 

The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece 

Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]

________________________________

Sandwich

Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.

You — in the white shirt —

I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.

You don't know that.

It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.

They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.

You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.

Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.

M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.

They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.

What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.

I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —

A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.

There was a tremendous knocking.

_____________________________________

Shame Helps

A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.

How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.

And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.

______________________________

Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.

                                                Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
            (he's got courage like Turing)           

                        They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
            Big logs

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up

e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
                                                penis.

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

______________________________________

What? is your line

I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice

windowless

quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

an absent Noah leaves the room

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE

the chorus   too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

but I or you end up in a boat
racing   it's a matter of race

____________________________________

1718 – Nantucket Beach