The Best American Poetry

Wednesday [by Mark Ford]

It was announced on the radio this morning [Wednesday, October 15, 2008] that the British Library has paid half a million pounds for a collection of the manuscripts of Ted Hughes. Hughes was a great believer in the importance of writing with a pen, rather than on a keyboard, and I remember a late letter included in his Selected Letters, which I recently reviewed for the New York Review of Books (it's in the current issue), in which he attributed the decline in quality of stories submitted for a prize for teenage fiction which he judged to the fact that the stories were all written directly on to the computer. Probably every writer has his or her set of peculiar 'conditions' which have to be met for the work to get written. Hughes had a particular penchant for writing on train journeys, and in small enclosed spaces like the tiny hall where he set up his study in the flat in Chalcot Square where he lived for a couple of years with Sylvia Plath. Speaking for myself, I need loud music to get me going, and I'm not alone in this. In 1993 I took part in a poets' tour of Japan with MIck Imlah and Simon Armitage. Simon brought over cds of the latest band to emerge on the Manchester scene - I forget who it was - which he'd play at deafening volume while knocking out a poem. I find, like Hughes, I can  write almost nothing directly on to a screen with any satisfaction. Even this blog I've been writing out long hand first, and I've an idea in the blogosphere (spelling?) that this might make it unique. If you don't believe me I'll send you my handwritten drafts - for a trifling consideration, certainly for far less than what might be fetched by an equivalent page of Ted Hughes.

Hughes was published by Faber and Faber (though in fact there was only ever one Faber -it was Faber and Gwyer initially, but Gwyer dropped out, so they  doubled the Faber to make it sound better). Hughes was taken on by T.S. Eliot after The Hawk in the Rain won the Poetry Center's First Publication Prize for 1957, judged that year by W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender. In those days Faber were located at 24 Russell Square ('that magic address!' as Philip Larkin once exclaimed), and if it's raining and I get the tube into work, my walk from Russell Square tube station to University College London takes me past the old Faber offices, now a part of London University. A round brown plaque commemorates Eliot's editorial labours there, and I've often wanted to locate his precise office, which had two doors so he could slip out the back when Vivienne made one of her unwanted visits in quest of her errant husband. And it was there late in life that he found true love with his secretary Valerie ('Say hello to Valerie / Say hello to Vivienne' as the Bob Dylan song puts it). By then Eliot had come to be known as the Pope of Russell Square, and young poets approached his august presence in abject states of fear and trembling. The American poet Donald Hall recalls visiting Eliot on his first trip to London, and, after some desultory literary chat, finally asking the master for some serious advice. Eliot thought hard, and then asked Hall if he would be wintering in London. The eager ephebe replied in the affirmative. Eliot nodded, pondered again, and finally said, 'Then I advise you to purchase some long underwear.'

(Mark Ford)

from the archives; posted October 15, 2008

We miss you, Mark (Strand, 11 April, 1934 - 29 November, 2014) [by Moira Egan]

Strand in L'Aquila (wonderful, hospitable place; tragically affected by the earthquake), upon his having won the Laudomia Bonanni Prize in poetry, 2008. 

"Solemn truths! Lucid inescapable foolishness! None of that for me! To be the salt of Walt, oceanic in osteality! Secure in cenotaph! The hysterical herald of hypogea! The fruit of the tomb! The flute of the tomb! The loot of gloom! The lute of loot! The work of soon, of never and ever! Saver of naught. Naughtiness of severance. Hoot of hiddenness. I give you my graven grave, my wordy ossuary, tell-tale trinket of transcendence, bauble of babble, tower of tripe, trap of tribute, thought-taxi from one day to the next, nougat of nothing, germ of gemini, humble hypogeum!"

-- from The Monument, Ecco Press, 1978. If you don't know this one, get ye to the bookstore. Harold Bloom tells us that it "teaches us to bear the truths of Unamuno, Nietzsche, Whitman and the other seers of poetic narcissism." Also, it's hilarious, brilliant, and, in its own sardonic way, very touching. 

Cynthia Macdonald (1928-2015) [by Moira Egan]

Cynthia Macdonald died last month at the age of 87. Typical for our Social Media Age, I found out about her death on Facebook. This sad news was often relayed with a comment along the lines of "I hadn't known her work, and it's blowing me away." Cynthia had published half a dozen searing and beautiful books and won many of the major prizes for poets; she wrote libretti, was an opera singer, and a psychoanalyst. Cynthia was one of the most formative and helpful people in my life, as I made my slow and complicated way back into being a poet.

Cynthia was my professor for two summers at Columbia University. I had to take the summer courses because I was working full-time at the Law School to get the tuition exemption so that I could pay for this extremely expensive degree. I couldn't skip out from work more than twice a week to take the requisite classes, almost all of which were held during the 9-5 work day. What was born of necessity soon became one of the most meaningful and useful experiences of my time in the MFA program. 

In those days, Cynthia was co-teaching the summer class with Richard Howard. With Richard's lexicographical, polyglot genius and Cynthia's wicked wit and brilliant way with metaphor, they were an utterly formidable team. Things I remember from the class: poems by Thomas James, in those now-famous, "samizdat" xeroxed copies; they came to mean a great deal to many of us. Words like susurrus, palp, and estrenar, which, though I rarely see or use them, take me back every time to those summers of intelligent immersion in the beauty of words. Cynthia's pronouncement that "writers who are subject to writer's block are usually adults who didn't play as children." That hit home. 

Another time, I don't remember why this happened, but I certainly remember that it happened: Cynthia, imitating the improbability of operatic deaths, let out a classically trained, high-something note that went on for what seemed like hours, and that shook the windows of our dingy little classroom in Dodge Hall. Someone had graffitied "DUCK DON'T" just above the "DODGE" that was emblazoned on the pillar of the old brick building that housed the School of the Arts. This was Dodge Hall before the coffee bar in the lobby, the Dodge hall whose wooden railings up the stairs had been known to inflict serious splinters in the hands of those foolhardy enough to grasp onto them during the ascent to the 4th floor Writing Division.

That second summer was the real font of memories. My father had died in February of that year. When Cynthia showed up again, so happy to be back in her natural habitat of New York City, she asked me how my previous school year had gone. "Well, my father died," I answered, first thing. She truly understood what a blow it had been, on so many levels. We talked about his life as a poet, about his frustrations and failures, and what I would then do with that. After a kind and in-depth conversation about my loss, we moved on to gossip and chat: about the rather notorious visiting prof we'd had ("That must have been very difficult for you," she'd said), and about the ever-changing cast of characters in the cosmic game of musical chairs that was the poetry department at that time.

That summer, for reasons I won't go into here, I had asked for an additional reader for my graduate thesis. Cynthia was the one who had drawn the short straw. "Moira," she said to me after a week or so, "I come here in the summer to teach and to be in New York, not to read somebody's thesis, and when I was told I was going to be a reader for your thesis, let me tell you, I wasn't very happy." Pause. "But, after all that, I'm really enjoying it!" 

I will always be grateful to her for having understood my over-the-top metaphors and fast-and-loose use of form. Her thesis evaluation was so eloquent and lovely that part of it formed the basis of the blurb she wrote when, years later, my first book was published. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To borrow the title of her last full-length collection, "I can't remember" the extent to which we kept in touch during those in-between years, but I know that we did. In the summer of 1998, I was getting ready to leave for a teaching job in Greece. Cynthia was in New York, and so was I, packing up my life and figuring out how I was going to do this monumental thing: move to a country I'd never even visited, where I knew not one soul. And Modern Greek? How would I communicate?

I do remember that she and I arranged to meet at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. We ordered cold white wine and fried calamari, and we talked and gossiped like old friends. She asked what my various classmates were up to. She told me about the challenges and joys of her psychoanalytic practice. She told me how much she missed the beau she'd been with for a few years, with whom she'd recently had a break. I won't say here exactly what she told me, because it was rather personal, but it was poignant and sweet. I told her of my excitement about going to Greece, and my fears about not speaking the language. "Well, you know your etymologies," she said, encouragingly. She insisted on picking up the check. 

We hugged good-bye, and that was the last time I saw her. 

And that's how I'll remember Cynthia: generous to a fault, smart beyond all reckoning, a veritable force of nature. If you aren't familiar with her work, please do seek some out, and be prepared to be astonished and maybe even a little bit frightened by just what a metaphor can do.  

Rest in peace, Cynthia. You are much missed. 

[photo of Cynthia Macdonald by Gay Block, from the Folger Library]

 

 

 

L'uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio (Mark Strand, 1934-2014) [by Moira Egan]

I don’t know how many times the word “dark” appears in Mark Strand’s Collected Poems, which recently appeared at our doorway with a glorious thump. I guess someone at Knopf can tell us. But I can tell you that the word “dark” appears 126 times in L’uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio, a bi-lingual selection of his poems from 1964-2006, which was published here in Italy in 2011. And yet, when, early on, his poems were criticized as being too dark, he famously replied, “I find them evenly lit.”

Mark and Dark. There have been some dark hours over here, as the phone calls and sympathy messages keep pouring in, from poets, editors, critics, publishers, and admirers of his work. We're functioning as the Italian center for condolences, and it's so sad, yet it's also a great honor. Mark himself referred to Damiano as his “voice in Italian,” even inscribing one book to Damiano “from his American brother, or twin. Or author of twin texts. Or necessary precursor of Damiano’s poems.”

In another book (which one it is will become immediately obvious), he has written: “The man cannot thank you enough—and the camel thanks you too. Seriously, thank you for this second life.” Much has been (and will continue to be) written about Mark’s place in American letters. But this “second life” as a major force in Italian poetry has grown exponentially since 1999, with the publication of L’inizio di una sedia, the first bi-lingual edition of his work here.

Here I sit, surrounded by upwards of a dozen of Mark’s books in translation, “a cura di Damiano Abeni,” and, more latterly, with my name on the cover, too. They were published by various houses, ranging from the small, beautiful, and arty to, well, about as big as they get—and in the series that’s considered by many to be the most prestigious for contemporary poetry in Italy. In Italy, too, Mark won just about every prize that can be awarded to a foreign poet. There’s even a DVD, “Ehi, Mark! Scusa il ritardo, scusa il ritardo...” which features Mark and Damiano reading poems in various locations around Rome, playing, too, on that idea of the “necessary belatedness of the translator.”

But it’s not just the influence of Mark’s own work, nor that “second life” that his poems took on in their beautiful and fated-seeming Italian versions. In 2003, Mark and Damiano co-edited West of your cities: nuova antologia della poesia americana. It was the first time in large circulation that the Italian reading public came to know work by the contemporary American poets, born in the 1930s up through the 50s, whose names are so familiar to us: Bidart, Gluck, Graham, Hass, Koethe, McHugh, Pinsky, Simic, James Tate, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and yes, Mark Strand. In his introduction, Strand explains (and I’m back-translating from the Italian here): “for a large number of foreign readers, American poetry seems to have stopped with the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School. This volume is an attempt to update the attentive reader and to show that American poetry is alive and well.”

There’s comfort in knowing that the mind and heart of a poet will remain ever “alive and well” in his or her books. A number of friends have made that observation to us in the past few days. I take that to heart, here among these books that offer darkness and light, wisdom and humor, and some brand of comfort, on an afternoon that can’t decide if it wants to be cloudy or bright, dark or light.

Tucked inside one of these books is an airmail envelope, the old-school kind, postmarked June 5, 2002, 80 cents to wing it over from The University of Chicago to Rome. It’s too perfect. It’s this poem:

 

2002

I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.
He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
His beard, and says, “I’m thinking of Strand, I’m thinking
That one of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe
Or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
In a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’
Leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls. And when
We get to the Great Piazza with its marble mansions, the crowd
That had been waiting there will welcome us with delirious cries,
And their tears, turned hard and cold as glass from having been
Held back so long, will fall and clatter on the stones below.
                                   O let it be soon. Let it be soon.”

 

This typescript has a different phrase at the end of the ninth line, as well as a penciled-in revision. But the poet has chosen well with his “delirious cries,” which is the way the poem appears in his Collected, that gorgeous, 510-page celebration of “his canonical work.” He’s inscribed our copy: 

                                    For Damiano and Moira

                                    Much love                                   

                                    Many thanks

                                    Mark Strand

 

And we’d like to take this opportunity to say the same, back to him.

 

                                    Dear Mark

                                    Much love

                                    Many thanks

                                    Moira and Damiano

 

2002

Non sto pensando a Morte, ma Morte pensa a me.

Si rilassa in poltrona, si sfrega le mani, s’accarezza

la barba e dice «penso a Strand, penso

che nei prossimi giorni uscirò in cortile, brandendo la falce

o guardando controluna la mia clessidra, e Strand si mostrerà

in giacca e cravatta e insieme sotto gli alberi spogli

dei boulevard passeggeremo fino alla città delle anime. E quando

giungeremo nella Gran Piazza dai palazzi di marmo, le moltitudini

che lì attendevano ci saluteranno con pianti deliranti,

e le loro lacrime, rese dure e fredde come vetro dall’essere state

tanto a lungo trattenute, cadranno e scrosceranno sul selciato.

                        Oh, che sia presto. Che sia presto.»

 

Tempus fugit, or Late August [by Moira Egan]

(Seamus Heaney & Damiano Abeni, Casa delle Letterature, May, 2013)

 Blackberry-Picking

        for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

 

(from Death of a Naturalist)

 

This year, my intention for teaching is to get the students to think about physical details from all five senses. This is the poem I'm taking in for the first day. Thank you, Seamus. 

Happy Thanksgivukkah from Over Here [by Moira Egan]

Though I worry that it sometimes veers into corniness, gratitude practice can be a lovely and helpful thing. I know that when my mood has swung very low, no sweet chariots in sight, I start to think about the things for which I am grateful. Though I live in a city that often drives me crazy, I am grateful that it's a beautiful city (and that you can't beat the food and the wine here). I am grateful that it seems that the Italian Parliament has finally voted to kick Berlusconi out. (Long time coming, but still.) I am grateful that my husband loves me despite the aforementioned mood swings, low and high, sweet chariot. And I am extremely grateful for the surprise of a 2013 book of poems that, well, if it doesn't exactly celebrate the mood swings, it certainly talks about 'em: thank you, Passager Books, for the really beautiful objet that you made out of my Hot Flash Sonnets. 

I am grateful for the extraordinary friendship that Damiano and I have struck up with the guys of Osteria di Monteverde -- the restaurant that always tops our list of answers to the oft-asked question "where should we go to eat in Rome?" And I am grateful that we got to start our Thanksgiving week by cooking dinner for them. (Scary to cook for such accomplished restaurateurs? Hell Yeah!)  

I am so grateful that I found the little plastic hoojie that allows our ancient food processor to work, so that I was able to make the tricolore hummus specialty of the house, I mean, this house. It's plain old, cuminy hummus, cilantro hummus, and chipotle hummus. I am grateful that I have discovered where I can find cilantro and chipotle in this town.

Yes, I'm grateful for our nearby "exotic food store," where I can find cranberry sauce and maple syrup for times such as these. They're there alongside the other exotic things: coconut milk, tahini, ginger pickle, oatmeal. When that cranberry sauce starts to move off the shelves in mid-November, the shopkeepers begin to get a sense that that American holiday is coming up soon. "Ah, si', il vostro giorno del ringraziamento. Auguri!" they say, and I say, "Grazie." 

But still, it's a weird feeling to be celebrating this day when no one around you even knows it's a holiday. If you managed to forget something for the evening's meal, well, all the shops are open: that's an advantage. But it feels as if you're walking around in a holiday nostalgia bubble, quite alone, as the normal Thursday people and the loud traffic whirl by, all unawares. 

Italians often ask me: But don't you miss your family? Of course I miss them, and on days like today, walking around in my holiday nostalgia bubble, I feel it very keenly. And though I'm grateful for my friends here, I very much miss the folks I left behind (you know who you are). 

Finally, I am extremely grateful that tonight I won't be cooking. Instead, we will be joining the ranks of numerous adults and children with various North American ties, all celebrating this day of Thanksgiving, coming together into one big holiday nostalgia bubble in a dining room in the middle of Rome. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and let the wild spatchcocking rumpus start! 

Are You Going to Your Stretching Class? [by Amanda Smeltz]

Last year, I spent six months or so in San Francisco. There, my dude talked me into trying yoga, which I’d badmouthed for a long time. I’m all, spare me your woo-woo shit. My great-grandpa was a coal miner. Etc.

But, when in Rome. We started going to hatha classes with some very kind and articulate instructors. I fell for it. What little I know of yoga practice is meditative and expressive, challenging and rewarding. It’s difficult the way poetry is difficult: you have to work at it a lot to find its fullest expression, but you also shouldn’t “work” the joy right out of it. There’s paradox near the heart of the practice, much the same as verse.

Despite the fact that there is nothing more grating than a privileged-looking twat on the L train bumping people with her yoga mat and Whole Foods grocery bag (i.e. me), I do think there’s room to explore that old Western-made gap between mind and body. When poetry becomes embodied in the vocal chords and mouth, I delight. I feel satisfied and at home, the way I do when singing. And yoga leads into some fascinating embodiments of mental activity, too.

Here are two contemporary poets who I admire hanging out in a mind-body space with yoga poems. I like that Simond’s poem below still lands on the skeptical side, and I love where Ish Klein’s wild mind flies to when musing on Virabhadrasana I, or the pose known as Warrior One, pictured at the top.

 

Yoga

Sandra Simonds

 

From 2007-2009, I did a lot of yoga.

            I was in graduate school and full of hope.

I believed in literature and love.

     Well, maybe I was a bit cynical.

            It’s hard to remember.

I fell in love with someone

            named Craig Wesley Freeman.

Recently, he has told me things that

     I can’t recall from the beginning

of our courtship. “This car

            smells like semen and wine,”

he said I said back then.

     He told me that we were both passed

out at a Waffle House and when

     we woke up in the red booth he couldn’t

remember where I lived and I couldn’t either

     so we drove around Tallahassee

for four hours asking people where

     Sandra Simonds lives and everyone

gave us directions to a different

     Waffle House, which is so inconvenient

and shitty. When we finally got home,

     I wanted to sit in the backyard alone

and look at the pecan tree even though

     it was five a.m. I remember staring

            at a bright celestial body and asking,

     “Jesus H. Christ, is that the sun

or the moon?” and for a split second

     I was so freaked out it made me think

that everyone in my life had died at once

     and I was left alone and that the feeling

of being abandoned was equivalent

     to the feeling of emptiness that

            would make me want to slit

     the throat of a soft pig.

 

Yoga was incredibly boring.

     My mom called it “stretching.”

Over the phone she would ask,

     “Are you going to your

stretching class?” How did

     she get so cynical? The women

who taught yoga were mostly

     beautiful and had Barbie-long arms,

legs, plastic vaginas without holes, and wore

            outfits with suns and moons on them.

They made ordinary looking

     women with soft folds

of fat flesh around the abdomen

     and neck feel bad about themselves so

     what’s the deal anyway?

     This too is a kind of cruelty.

They always told us

     about the charity yoga workshops

they taught and “Couldn’t we spare

     something, even a smile” to help them?

 

I resent beautiful women who are flexible

            and talk about Deepak Chopra

     like they’re fucking him.

     I resent other things too.

I resent it when people tell me to

     “be like the Buddha.”

Hey, fuck you.

     I’ll be like the Buddha if I want to.

 

 *

 

Warrior One

Ish Klein

 

No center. I hold

every action’s reaction and again:

consequences beyond my neck.

 

One life: to feel!

In every way!

Enough!

 

The warrior way to learn: men fight.

It is a dance: deflect and/or rearrange

the onslaught of force.

 

Childlike I began:

first I ran, then begged,

then let death catch up my feebleness.

 

There is no hiding.

When you are killed

you are absorbed by the killer.

 

A part of the heart at least.

1970, so long to my country. Its greenery, its song.

My match knew it too, allowing an opening.

 

Buddha is a beast and trained spirit

and can access those willing.

A strong man, a soldier is good to hide in

 

to align with while reaching.

I think therefore I am elsewhere.

Nearly touching: to be everywhere.

 

Nothing directly. Too explosive. Force, fear, love and self-

protection determine my direction. I pray: do not put me

near hate too long, it’s exhausting, let me be in love.

 

A cut worm is not killed.

Each side grows again.

The plow is for working.

 

It does not only displace:

it doesn’t pave or willfully put worms on a black top

to serve them to the sun. It teaches detachment.

 

It’s run by someone, sometimes two beings run.

A person and an ox

appreciate that soil is sown by worms.

 

We have each been through tubes:

in earthworms

and dead relatives too.

 

All earth is an altar.

As oceans will illustrate.

Have you been in the waves?

 

Have you panicked?

Undertow taking you way out

and the sun a hot mean hand on your head?

 

Waves take; the sand wants to record.

Silicon! A devilish element!

So in ocean you are in and a solution.

 

One wants

beyond one form.

There is more to record.

 

Sense is interested. Not fashion, or before.

Essentially we are each all our time.

We are beautiful somewhere.

 

I would like slow. Roll the plains

for fun. I would like to be allowed to hang around

as an avid apprentice to a master craftsman.

 

Part-time. I am not the only.

I have a boat I can row out,

I have an inflatable raft for sleeping.

 

In sleep I get back to my body.

It used to hurt. A man steers the plow,

the ox pulls.

 

A girl/me met a man, fell under.

Get up, get up, the adults say.

Mad, I stayed down.

 

In response am cut.

The tongue, back, up,

leg, back, tongue again, back, leg, back, neck.

 

Mister, this is history.

You must get over it. You too missy.

you have to work to learn to fight to like to work

 

and know with whom

this earth churns—a star with and against whim.

Tides take what will let them. Motion essence.

 

Why do I think there is a gold castle that will have me?

In the middle of the ocean?

Because I can be anyone who loves me?

 

Castle as of first house;

gold as for protection.

 

Yoga is from Sandra Simonds’ book Mother Was a Tragic Girl, from Cleveland State University Poetry Center in Cleveland, Ohio, 2012.

Warrior One is from Ish Klein’s book Moving Day, from Canarium Books in Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Iowa City, 2011.

Preview: David Lehman, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jackson Taylor, Joseph Quintela and Friends at Dumbo Sky, 10 Jay Street, Suite 903, October 17th, 7-10 PM [by Nora Robertson]

In its inaugural exhibition, Dumbo Sky presents artist and poet Joseph A. W. Quintela’s sculptural series, Portrait of the Artist as the Cast of You in Eye. Molded from shredded dictionaries on Quintela’s own body, this collection of self-portraits engages questions of self-definition, blurred identity, multiple personas, and building an understanding of others via de-formation of self.  The closing reading this Thursday will feature such poets as Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jackson Taylor, Maya Pindyck, Ronnie Norpel, and Joseph A.W. Quintela.  The poets will read in pairs with short intermissions following a closing celebration.

Lehman received considerable attention for his daily poems in The Daily Mirror, which he characterized as “bulletins from within,” and he will be reading on this occasion from the forthcoming New & Selected Poems that collects his work to date, “a retrospective hall of mirrors.” Named an emerging poet to watch by O Magazine, Griffiths is known for her literary portraits and is at work on Poets on Poetry, an interview project on individual human experience and culture in poetry. Director of P.E.N.’s Prison Writing Program and a founder of the MFA program at The New School, Jackson Taylor is the author of The Blue Orchard, a novel that won acclaim for its portrayal of a scandal in the life of the author’s own grandmother. He is currently directing the writing program at St Joseph's College.

Dumbo Sky is a new literary and visual art space located at Dumbo’s waterfront, launching this fall with literary events, art exhibitions and theatrical performances. Thursday night October 17, 2013, the closing reception is at 7 PM, reading at 8 PM, open wine / beer bar, FREE. -- Nora Robertson

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poems (Week 2)

 It’s Time, It’s Time

New Year clocks on over fog valley,
temperate Tibetans account for contributions.

Suburbs struggle and sweat through a summer
scented with mumbles and deceptions.

Fat detractors and software spruikers expire,
the paddockbashers steam from the load.

The thin mechanic massages a cigarette:
“Could ship ʾer off, up the road –

get the Billinudgel Boys to take a look,
but a cracked head is a cracked head.”

The skyline oils in the mercury ascent,
from mosquitoes and humidity exiles fled.

The boss does the Copacabana in Caloundra,
Jim Wage sneaks off for a lunchtime splash

loosens his tie, stuck jaw wide, at his wife
and her lover coitus interruptus confabulation.

The advice at the lectures is dorothy dixed,
VB-addle cognition until everything is fixed.

LIAM FERNEY

Scourge of Brisbane’s poetasters (indeed of all that breed) Liam Ferney (1979-) is an irascible risk-taking entertainer who earns his living as a PR flak. Encountering, together with his colleague Jaya Savige, Forbes’ Ode to Karl Marx was one of the major events in his early career. Earlier still, from the age of 14 he was involved in poetry readings and festivals. His latest volume Boom has just been launched.

"The Miracle of Poetry" (a tribute to Seamus Heaney by Paolo Febbraro) [posted by Moira Egan]

[Paolo Febbraro, Seamus Heaney, and Damiano Abeni at the Casa delle Letterature, Rome, May 2013]

[According to the Poetry Foundation's website, "Paolo Febbraro is a poet and critic. His collections of verse include Il bene materiale (Libro Scheiwiller, 2008) and Deposizione (LietoColle, 2010)." He is also one of our dear friends. This piece was first published in Il Sole 24 Ore, 1 September, 2013.]

It’s very much worthwhile to learn English to read a poet. To learn a language in its chromatics, in its folds, in its rhythmic inclinations. And certainly, in literature, that language is always the language of someone in particular. Take Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and essayist who died on August 30. To read his work means that you will have seeds sown in you by a different gaze, that you will resonate with a clarity that the reading is extracting from within you. 

Poetry: that was his secret. For Heaney, it was a lasting miracle: never an art simply granted, to be polished or updated, but an unforeseeable gift, an abundant grace. He had a distracted and good-natured way of reading his poems in public, briefly explaining the occasion of the composition of each: he generously made use of the time granted to him by his audience, but at the same time, he seemed to be surprised by the attention. Born in 1939 to Catholic farmers in Ulster, where there was a Protestant majority, he spent his early years on a farm, tramping through the fields of peat, scouring the natural wells and cavities of trees. Later, a brilliant student at St Columb's College in Derry and at Queen's University in Belfast, he met other young authors such as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, and he began to suspect that he, too, could be a poet. He published his first attempts at poetry under the pseudonym "Incertus." The decisive moment of his life was the discovery that he was able to "dig” with “the squat pen" into the land that his forefathers had worked, with agility and expertise, with the assuredness that comes through work, the work to which their arms had been trained by the traditional tools. Every true poet asks himself: why was this given to me? Seamus Heaney understood – in the early years of the 1960s – that he had to weave his own roots into his reading of other poets. That he had to weave the language of his own oppressed homeland -- the Gaelic singing and gutturals -- into the splendor of the language of Shakespeare, learned from the English conquerors. 

He absorbed the violent energy of the absolute line from the great Gerard Manley Hopkins; he traversed the already visionary topography of Ireland with Patrick Kavanagh; he found a brother in Englishman Ted Hughes and in the incisive concreteness of his words. His poetic debut, Death of a Naturalist (1966) seemed to birth another world entirely in the minds of his readers, along with the irreplaceable terms that can create that same world in the conscience, as well.  

The Troubles that broke out in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s threatened the naturalness of his writing. In his collection, North (1975), Heaney applied his prehensile gaze to the poor human remains found in peat bogs, shrunken into a final gesture that hints at the psychic depth where violence lurks and commits its own eternal crimes. Later, in Station Island (1984), he made ​​a pilgrimage among the ghosts of the everyday news and the sense of guilt, and emerged, having confirmed the desire to be himself, out of the blackmail of those who erect barriers and their opponents who, with altogether similar means, want to tear them down.

The definitive turning point came with Seeing Things (1991). He who sees is not he who perceives, but rather, he who truly connects to the landscape, who completes it with memory, who lets himself be impregnated with it by having been mysteriously chosen by it. This "extra seeing" of those who perceive the miracle in the thick of appearances is not the result of a romantic abstraction, a secession from the world; instead, it is its most faithful interpretation, what remains of its integral crossing. The percussively monosyllabic language of Heaney opened up to a different, flowing sonority, to create ever more closely "the music of what happens."

Meanwhile, Heaney became a professor of poetry at Oxford and at Harvard, and portrayed the poets he loved in lively, mobile essays. He posed to himself the fundamental questions about the responsibility of art, assigning to art the task -- even if it is unconscious of it -- of "atonement." Probably as a result of the wishes of two friends, Nobel Laureates Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, the Stockholm committee became aware of his ability to traverse different worlds, to keep them together in the powerful syntax of the imagination. Heaney was traveling in Greece in October, 1995, when the Swedish Academy decided to bestow an absolutely incontrovertible honor, seventy years after the one that was accorded to the "Celtic magus," William Butler Yeats.

Now, however, is the time to mourn the man; to mourn his gaze, narrowed and benevolent; to mourn his great cordiality, based on instinct and rationality both; to mourn his unconditional affection, which suddenly improved the quality of your own existence, even that part of your existence that had already passed. When you met him, he delegated the first warmth of the encounter and the conversation to his wife Marie, and then he chimed in, counterpointing with fragrant wit.

Recently, Italy has come to embrace a friendship with Heaney, already an imitator of Dante and Virgil. A friendship that he had begun to reciprocate with his work on Giovanni Pascoli, another unrivaled "poet of the earth." Seamus Heaney was a fun person and gentle, highly educated and able to link you right into that Human Chain, which he chose as the title for his final collection (2010). He had a masterful simplicity in allowing the poem to take shape. What we have as our firmest possession, he still seems to tell us, is what is based on familiar, but finally unknowable, data. Years ago, when we started talking about the volume in which his collected work will soon appear, in the Mondadori series, I Meridiani, he told me of his doubt of being worthy of this honor. I almost could not find the words to answer him.

***

(I Meridiani: the Italian collection of Very Important Writers, published by Mondadori, similar to the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade or the Library of America)

[translated by Moira Egan with Damiano Abeni] 

Late Summer Reading (part 2): Rosie Schaap's Drinking with Men [by Moira Egan]

I first “met” Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking with Men, in a most unusual and literary way. Damiano and I had just finished up our “Poetry & Translation Song & Dance Routine,” as we call it, for this past spring’s group of University of Washington Rome Center students. One of them came up to me and said, “I really liked your poem that was on that podcast.” “What podcast?!?” I hadn’t known.

So when I got home, the first thing I did was google it, and this is what I found. Have a listen if you want to hear a smart and interesting discussion of poems more or less related to drinking and bars. I was delighted to be in such august company (Shakespeare, Gary Snyder, Heather McHugh) and to hear Curtis Fox's very interesting take on Mr. Shakes’s “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” I was also delighted to hear how deeply and completely Ms. Schaap “got” my poem.

I then did what any grateful poet in the 21^st century would do: I found her email address and wrote her a thank-you message. And I told her I was going to be giving a reading in Brooklyn in June. And, on the appointed Sunday, there she was, in the audience at the Lunar Walk Reading at the Two Moon Café.  

In the meantime, I’d gotten hold of a copy of her terrific memoir, Drinking with Men, which I began to devour. How could anyone not love a book that mentions, in the very Introduction, one of the great classics of urban single life: Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. This is a book that I own and tongue-in-cheekily cherish, a manual for the single career gal living the 1930s city life, which instructs on such useful topics as Necessary Kitchen Equipment. You might think she’s going to tout that then-newish invention, the electric toaster, but no, she’s more concerned that every single woman have a proper set of martini-mixing equipment for entertaining purposes. Gal after my own heart.

And Rosie’s is a book after my own heart. There are so many, many memoirs out there, as you know, and some of them make me want to cry – with boredom. I have discovered, in my recent years of memoir reading, that the ones I really like use as their foundation something like an objective correlative (yes, I’m a poet). They focus on a very specific theme or image, and present the life viewed through that particular lens. Peter Trachtenberg’s Seven Tattoos was maybe the first one that I read of this sub-genre: a lyrical yet fiercely intelligent meditation with each chapter focused, quite like a poem, on one of the author’s (then) seven tattoos. 

Drinking with Men is a smart and beautifully written memoir organized around the search for the perfect bar. Journeying from the bar car on Metro North, where our protagonist whips out her tarot cards to do readings in exchange for beers, to various bars and pubs in Ireland, Montreal, Massachusetts, and New York (of course), we are given significant glimpses into a lyrical, wide-ranging, and ever-exploring psyche. Though I felt a real kinship at many points with this “narrator,” you don’t need to have an Irish soul – real or imagined – to be moved by the various poetic and personal journeys that she takes us on. 

At a couple of points (for example, while I was on the bus to and from New York for the visit during which I would Meet the Author in Person, at her Bar), I just had to stop reading in public because I get very pink and misty when I start to cry. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn some wonderful things – about martinis, metaphors, and making a life on your own terms. 

A coda: When I visited Rosie at the wonderful little neighborhood joint where she tends bar of a Tuesday evening, I got to be an honorary “regular.” This was a real thrill, as, on that podcast, she’d so brilliantly situated my “Bar Napkin Sonnet #11” within the problematic context of “regularhood” and being a woman. Not to mention it was so much fun to meet the real regulars. 

I knew that Rosie would “pull” a good Guinness, and she did, but I also got to experience some things at her bar that, well, we just don’t have so readily in Italy. For one, and I hope I’m writing it correctly, an Oliver Twist martini – yes, with olives and a twist. A real treat. Then, and the Italian readers of this blog should probably go elsewhere right now, a most amazing concoction: a grilled cheese sandwich with kielbasa, and grape jelly on top. Salty, sweet, smoky: it was perfect. Thank you, Rosie, and thank you, Regulars. 

Rosie Schaap writes the “Drink” column for the New York Times, and is the author of Drinking with Men, a memoir that will make for great late-summer reading. 

Cheers! 

Late Summer Reading (part 1): Poets House Showcase [by Moira Egan]

I’m certainly not going to complain about where I spend my Augusts these days. But I must confess to a little pang of nostalgia when one dear poet girlfriend who lives in New York wrote to tell me about hanging out in the East Village with another dear poet girlfriend who will be staying in New York for the next few months. 

How I loved New York in August, especially my old, East Village stomping grounds. You know the story: the city empties out. It’s hot as hell, but the streets are relatively quiet, and you can walk in the shade. You can get a table without waiting 45 minutes. [I’ll never forget: one time my mother came to visit, and our first-choice place for dinner had a 45-minute wait. One of the group went to a nearby restaurant to check out that situation: there, it was an hour and a quarter wait. We stayed put. Mom said, “Now I really understand why you’re so tired when you come home. The hunting-and-gathering here is completely exhausting!”]

But in August, much less so. Or so it was when I lived there. Which (gulp!) I just realized, was fifteen years ago. How did that happen? 

And in other news, which I’m sure you’ve heard by now, poetry has died again. Many wise, eloquent, and even snarky protestations have been made. I’m going to add my voice to the crowd averring that poetry is most emphatically still among the living. And I’m going to do it in good Creative Writing Workshop fashion: by showing, not telling.

So if you’re in (or near) New York this August, and especially if you haven’t been yet, hie thee immediately to Poets House for this year’s Poets House Showcase. By popular demand (so there must be a few more people out there who don’t believe that poetry is dead), the Showcase has been extended until August 17. If you can’t find something to your liking among the nearly 2900 books of poetry on display, well, what can I say? 

 

I had the pleasure of seeing the Showcase, right before it opened, when I was in New York in June. I was leaving the next day to get back to Italy, so it was a rushed visit, but Executive Director Lee Briccetti graciously took me through the exhibition space – and of course, I wanted to stay all day. All week, for that matter. And yes, I admit, it’s a particular thrill when you have a book in that year’s Showcase. (Or two, if translations count!) 

Here is a listing of the books that are included this year. 

Just for fun, I scrolled through this list the other day and saw that Damiano and I have managed to get hold of just about two dozen of these titles. (That’s not too bad, considering that we have to add to the carbon footprint, in one way or another, any time we need to get a book!) I haven’t read every single poem in every one of the books that we have – not quite 1% of the books represented in the Showcase. But, even within such a small sample, I have to say that I have found poems that have made me cry, made me laugh out loud, made me re-examine certain ideas and, yes, even poems that have given me another perspective on Rome, the city in which I live. 

And so, to conclude, though it is wonderful and interesting to live a stone’s throw from a bunch of ancient monuments, whenever I visit Poets House, I get those New York State o’ Mind pangs. If you’re lucky enough to be close enough, get down there and see for yourself. It is an embarras de richesses, and you won’t be sorry. Viva la poesia!

(Poets House photo from Poets House website) 

Some More Summer Reading [by Moira Egan]

It's been an Andrea-infused whirlwind at the West Chester Poetry Conference this week, and it's also, I will formally state, been a lot of fun. 

And I don't mean this post to seem a cheat, but I'm going to share with you some excellent ideas for summer poetry reading. Mezzo Cammin, an online journal of formal poetry by women, has just published its 15th issue; to celebrate, they have published 15 reviews of poetry books by 15 contemporary poets. 

I'm going to re-recommend the wonderful Babette Deutsch, as I have done in my review. I knew her name mostly from books that I inherited from my father, but her Collected Poems blew me away. She is a poet whose voice should not be forgotten. Give her work a try -- not to mention the other 14.

Thanks to David and Stacey for having asked me to blog this week -- and if you're around, I'd love to see you at my reading in Brooklyn on Sunday.

Over and out, Moira

All best tropical storm wishes! 

Formally Speaking: Housekeeping the Sonnets [by Moira Egan]

Last night we had the great pleasure of listening to Julia Alvarez read -- her poems! She said herself that it's been a while since she thought of herself as a poet rather than a novelist. 

At our sonnet panel earlier in the day, we had talked about the value of bringing simple diction and earthy detail into contemporary poetry in form, and it was wonderful to hear her talk about her own early loves: many dead white guys. But how to insert a female, as she said, immigrant voice into that tradition? Well, she said, go into the poems -- go into the sonnets, and start to housekeep them. 

She read a couple from the sonnet cycle 33, and some other wonderful pieces: "Naming the Fabrics," "El Fotografo," "Recitation," and gave the lovely image of wishing to be the bead in a necklace of a generation. If you haven't read her poems in a while, please go and find some; you won't be sorry.

While I was sitting there, I suddenly remembered a very funny incident from long ago that involved Julia Alvarez -- or at least a recipe by her. Back in the happy days of being able to get the New York Times -- on paper! all those sections! O Sunday Joy! (kind of hard to do this in Rome!) -- I came across a wonderful-sounding recipe for bread pudding. The hilarity comes in with the guava paste. 

This must have been around 1994/5, I don't remember exactly. I was living in Baltimore at the time, and it wasn't an era of great availability of "international" foods. We were having a dinner party and I HAD to make this wonderful-sounding bread pudding! But the guava paste! My mother and spent about 3 days driving from store to store, causing quizzical looks with our requests for -- guava paste. Finally, after a city-wide quest, we did find some in a tiny grocery store in a burgeoning Latino neighborhood in East Baltimore. Bread pudding joy at last.

This really is one of the best desserts I've ever made. It's rich and sweet but has that guava tang, that contrast. And last night, I was reminded by this poet of the homey nature of housekeeping, of taking care, room by room, and also of stanzas, of simple but earthy joys. This recipe embodies all of that. When it's cool enough to bake again, give it a try. And if you can't find the guava paste, let me know: there's an international grocery store in Rome that carries it. I'll send you some!

Julia Alvarez's Pudin de Pan (Bread Pudding) (from the New York Times)

INGREDIENTS

• 1 loaf high-quality sliced bread, crusts removed and cut into 1-inch squares
• 6 cups whole milk
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick sweet butter, plus more for greasing the pan
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 cup dark rum
• Grated peel of 1 lemon
• 4 eggs, well beaten
• 3/4 cup dried prunes, pitted
• 1 cup guava paste (available at Spanish groceries)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar (unrefined, if possible)

PREPARATION

1.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

2.

In a large saucepan over medium-low heat, warm the bread, milk, sugar, salt, butter, cinnamon, vanilla, rum and lemon peel. When warm, remove from heat and stir in the beaten eggs. Add the prunes and stir well. Pour this mixture into an oiled 9-by-12-inch baking dish. Slice the guava paste into thin strips and press into the top of the mixture. Sprinkle with the brown sugar and bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until the top is golden and the pudding smells great.

YIELD

Eight servings

 

 

 

Formally Speaking: Notes from the West Chester Poetry Conference [by Moira Egan]

Overheard at dinner:

"When reading Merrill, you just have to suspend your heterotextuality." 

"You are right there in the liminal zone." 

* * *

Tomorrow: sonnets on parade. A wee sampling:

From the inimitable Kathrine Varnes: 

The Fleshpot Sonnets (a crown)

1.

This moment's peach -- sometimes it's just enough

sweetness, despite the stone and bitter skin

or because of both, because. Because the thin

juices won't behave: soaking the white cuff

edges, filling, spilling from the palm's trough,

flesh of water, sugar gracing the chin,

tracing the neck like a contemplation of sin

we can wash away. We don't even have to bluff.

 

So what will I steal tonight as the toddler sleeps?

A husband lingers in the hallway's dark

and glances, settles his eye where he'd recruit,

I with the monitor's glow upon my cheeks

two hours a day. Leave now? I can't debark

while writing towards this bivalved, cleft-fleshed fruit.

 

* * *

7.

I gave up padded bras, certain offense.

I shunned the curve of underwire glam.

Let me be the woman that I am,

I said. Let infants find their milk, the tense

cry of hunger loosen. Impotence

inspired by well-fed babies? Sham.

Shame. Before the press of the mammogram,

let breasts be breasts, whatever audience.

 

Let breasts be breasts. Our season's brief as is.

It's hard enough to find a bra that fits.

(And those who asked the schoolyard, Does she stuff?

now look askance--filled with J. Alfred's fear

a thousand times repeating: Do I dare?)

Declare this moment and this peace enough.  

 

(With the permission of Kathrine Varnes. From Hot Sonnets, Entasis Press, 2011)

Pretty yummy, isn't it? 

 

Ode to jet lag

Jet lag is not fun but it can be funny. Imagine sitting across the table from your sister, having a perfectly normal conversation, when suddenly, although you seem to be awake, you are not, and you start talking in your sleep. You say completely irrelevant and inexplicable things, like "Not everyone can be a chef."

Maybe the Delphic Oracle had jet lag.

Though I have always suspected that Tori Amos was the Delphic Oracle for our age. No, I never was a Corn Flake girl, either.

This week, after the jet lag: sonnets, sestinas, and live reporting from the West Chester Poetry Conference. For now, sogni d'oro.

"That grand old Irish/Italian tradition" [by Moira Egan]

One of the great things about being an American poet who happens to live in Rome is the proximity to the American Academy in Rome. In recent years, things have become even better for us poetry-loving Romans, thanks to AAR trustee William B. Hart, who endowed an eponymous Residency for a senior poet to join the community at the Academy. 

Karl Kirchwey, poet, professor, and, for these past three years, Heiskell Arts Director at the AAR, has provided some wonderful programming in conjunction with the poets' visits (a remembrance of Brodsky, readings and seminars on and in translation [Italian/English and Polish/English], and the fascinating facets and various reworkings of the Ovidian oeuvre, for example). 

Poets who have been lured to Rome by this fellowship include Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and, most recently, Seamus Heaney. And you can well imagine the thrill that passed through the DNA of this Irish lass when it was announced that Mr. Heaney would be the Hart Poet in Residence for 2013! 

Putting Down the Hammer [by Stephanie Paterik]

I’ve been a happy renter all of my adult life, relishing the freedom of a short-term lease. But in the fall, without warning, the unfamiliar desire for a place of my own crept into my bones.

It might have started at last year’s AWP conference in Chicago, where a group of poets lectured on the craft of assembling a manuscript. They said you need a room of your own, a space where you can hang poems on walls – live with them, listen to them, rearrange them. New Yorkers in the audience (myself included) laughed out loud as we pictured our studio and one-bedroom apartments with wall-to-wall furniture.

But, wouldn’t it be nice?

Pretty soon, I couldn’t stomach the cranky landlady, hang artwork on other people’s nails, or live with Rental Apartment White on the walls. Quickly and miraculously, my husband and I found a good deal, closed on a home and hired contractors to begin renovations last week. 

Every other night, we take three trains to Brooklyn to visit our home. I bring a book and enjoy the anticipation. When we arrive, we swing open the door, turn on the lights and find our space transformed.

On Day 1, the floors were meticulously covered with paper. Day 2, a living room wall disappeared and old brick, wood and piping were exposed. Day 3, brick and wood gave way to gleaming white columns. We order pizza and sit on the floor of our empty apartment, appreciating all of it.

Tomorrow, a light fixture might show up. A countertop might come down. We never see the workers – we never see the work – so it feels as if our home is inventing itself day-by-day, eager to surprise and please. I know it’s the product of sweat and craft, but I like to pretend there’s some magic involved.

I felt the same way watching my parents’ first house rise out of the desert. We would visit the dirt lot to take pictures and appreciate every plank. The stakes with little red flags marking the construction perimeter seemed to grow straight out of the ground.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I’m rediscovering the joys of being a reader as I wait for my home to manifest. Usually, periods of reading but little writing fill me with guilt. I should be making something! I should be knocking down walls and writing lines! Who am I to enjoy another’s hard work without doing my own?

But this week, I’m content to admire other people’s creations – an indulgence we writers sometimes strip from ourselves.

I wonder, when you became a serious writer, did you also become a serious reader? Did you start studying the workmanship of novels and poems, breaking them apart to understand how to put yours together? And did that enhance your appreciation but diminish your ability to get lost in it a little bit? Did you start measuring how your own writing stacked up against everything you read, endlessly calculating the balance?

The beauty of the reader is her ability to open a book, be surprised and imagine that it made itself in an instant, or that it always existed. She almost can forget the creator, the toil – a literary Big Bang.

It’s fun to forget the work and rediscover the art of appreciation. Sometimes, there’s pleasure in putting down the hammer.

Prompt: Read something, anything for fun. If you’re looking for a recommendation, might I suggest The Paris Wife, a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley? The author, Paula McLain, earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and published two poetry collections. It's so enjoyable, I'm actually losing sleep to read it.

All to No End from Literary Los Angeles [by Jenny Factor]

            all to no end save beauty
            the eternal -

  from The Crowd at the Baseball Game by William Carlos Williams

It's been a big week for poetry around here. Last Friday, the Mayor of Los Angeles named our city's first poet laureate--baseball-loving poet, Eloise Klein Healy. Eloise is probably not the first baseball-loving poetry royalty. But is she the first poet to pitch puns and sling similes for the Boys in Blue?

I'm not an expert, so I invite fans in the stands to throw peanuts. But if I'm not mistaken, Marianne Moore batted for the Yankees. Eve Merriam, a very fine poet, and a winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize in her youth--in fact, she wrote one of my favorite poems on new love ("I'm telling my hands not to blossom into roses"), penned these ecumenical lines:

Bare-handed reach
to catch
April's
incoming curve.
Leap higher than you thought you could and
Hold:
Spring,
Solid,
Here.

I loved attending the little poetry inauguration ceremony at the downtown library, falling though it did smack dab in the midst of an Antioch University Los Angeles poetry residency. I stole an hour away for happy announcements in a musty, muralled place. After, back "home" on the Antioch front, poet Kazim Ali came to visit from Ohio, and put us into our bodies and into sound. Then my mentees and I began to work on crafting their project period contracts, pulling books off shelves, as we will off and on all week, coming to a common vocabulary about literature and their own work and the changes and growth they hope for in the term ahead. And also a conversation about passions, about finding words in all their pockets. I love the dialogue and the magic of it. And the accidental discoveries.

Like this one. Here is another poet West Coast poet who has taken up the Dodger cause: B.H. Fairchild writes about a certain player's time spent as a Brooklyn Dodger during his own pre-poetry Kansas youth in "For Junior Gilliam." Gilliam served as second and third baseman for both the Brooklyn and Los Angeles' era Dodgers, was named 1953 Rookie of the Year, and ultimately became among the earliest African American major league coaches.

So on behalf of all Dodger-loving poemphiles everywhere:  Congratulations to the first poet-laureate of L.A., Eloise Klein Healy!

More on Sipping on Sunsets [by Moira Egan]

Don't you love it when the New York Times imitates life? When I saw today's article about sipping on a sunset and thinking about Italy, I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry. I came back from Sardegna to Rome just in time for the latest heat wave. They've begun naming heat waves here the same way hurricanes are named in the States. Well, sort of the same way: it's not alphabetical and they are named after classical characters, both mythological and historical. The first one I heard about was Charon, then there were Minos, Ulysses, Scipio. Now it seems to be Nero. Insert Rome Burning Joke here. Except there really are fires in Rome, which isn't funny.

But here you see a lovely couple enjoying the sunset over Santa Teresa di Gallura in Sardegna. And here I will confess that I prefer Campari over Aperol, hands down. No, wait, hand holding cold glass beading with condensation--