The Best American Poetry

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 4 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

AR: How did you become a poet? What is your process?

DD: First, of course, I was named after a poet. The Commedia played an important role in my family history. My great grandfather brought a copy of it with him when he came to America from Sicily. Poetry was a constant, if muted, presence throughout my childhood. My grandmother loved Frost and Sandberg and Millay. I she would occasionally recite the poems she’d memorized in grade school (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fog,” “First Fig”). My father, who was a postal worker, loved Emily Dickinson, so her books were always around, and I read her at an early age. We also had The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote (I remember reading the poems in the preface to the novel at an early age), The Aeneid, El Cid. My mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and then a secretary when I was growing up, was a great reader too. Both of my parents were extremely religious Roman Catholics (my mother converted from Southern Baptist to Catholic), so there was the poetry of the Bible as well, especially The Book of Job, The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, The Song of Songs. 

I’ve always loved reading, and from grade school on I kept a journal. When I was eighteen, I read Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. That trio of poets made me want to write poetry. I continued to write because I fell so in love with poetry in all its varied forms, and writing it helped me (continues to help me) to be a better reader of it. My writing life will always be subordinate to my reading life.

My process varies from poem to poem, but for the most part now, I come up with an idea, a phrase, a title for
a poem and when I have time, I sit down and write a draft. For most poems, a draft will take about two hours to write and I’m reading aloud and revising as I write. Sometimes, I might begin a poem during my lunch break (I work as a high school English teacher) and then finish it after the last bell rings and before I pick up my daughter from daycare. Then, I might go back to it after the children are asleep or in the morning before work. Usually, I take a poem as far as I can within a few days, reading it aloud and revising it as necessary. Then, I set it aside, and either send it out to magazines or just let it breathe in a word document (I mostly write on the computer). Sometimes, there might be minor revisions from that point until it is published in a book. And even after that, there are lingering questions. For example, in the poem that starts this interview, I’m not happy with the rhythm of the line: “my dear little one. Teach me what the fire.” I think it might be better to change the sentence structure of the poem so that the line reads: “Teach me, my dear little one, what the fire…” If I’m ever lucky enough to have a Selected or Collected poems, I might make that change, but I’m also aware of many poets (Auden comes to mind) who tinkered too much with old poems. I’m no Auden, of course, but I understand the impulse toward endless refinement, and how corrosive that impulse can be.

AR: Your poems take on various forms. Which forms are you most comfortable working with? Do you choose form before writing the poem, or does the poem dictate the form?

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

NA: Thanks for your kind words! I am blushing! Can you give an example of your stanzaic nonce pattern poems?

DD: It’s a fancy way of describing seven syllable per line, five line stanzas, written in a recurring zigzag pattern. Here’s a few stanza from MIDWHISTLE, where I’m invoking William Heyen and ruminating on his Whitmanian and Dickinsonian pedigree:

Sing for us, the dragonfly
            in the arc of an anthem,
the bumblebee zigzagging
                         the sidelines of an empire.
            I praise your Lord Dragonfly,

Bill, & praise the ambition
            it must take to un-Amherst
a clover & a bee from
                       the funerals in a brain,
            from the prairie and its yawp.

NA: I am so impressed. You are a master of many forms!

DD: I don’t think I’ve mastered many forms, but I have certainly tried to (with varying degrees of success). I’ve written hundreds of failed villanelles, thousands of botched haiku, fifty or so unremarkable sestinas, and a rusty old red wheelbarrow  full of ballads, triolets, rondeaus, bops, kwansabas, pantoums, haibun, ghazals, abecedarians, and so on. I have one sestina in Lullaby, and one kwansaba suite and one abecedarian in my second book, but I haven’t mastered any of those forms. Nevertheless, I enjoy working in those forms, especially when I’m thinking about a poem that I love written in that form. It’s so impressive to me when a contemporary poet writes in one of these inherited forms in a way that expands the structure and strengthens the tradition. I think with wonder and admiration of how a poem like Tim Seibles’s “All the Time Blues Villanelle” can go toe to toe with “The Waking” and “One Art” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”

Sometimes, I choose the form before writing the poem. That approach doesn’t often result in a poem I’m willing to send out into the world. I’ll write a sestina, but it will feel forced or academic or less immediately resonant than I want it to be or it’s just not making sense in the way I’d like it to make sense, so I’ll set it aside and never think of it again. Most often though, the form will suggest itself organically as I’m writing. At some point, maybe even within the first few words, I’ll see that this poem wants to effloresce into a sonnet, or this is a prose poem, or this demands quatrains. Then, I will work toward the form by accretion and improvisation and revision-in-the-moment.

My three books of poetry also use form as an organizing principle. Sonnets thread through the books as do prose poems and other poetic structures in much the same way that themes and tropes thread the collections, providing order amid a species of repetition.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews’ lucky numbers are nine and seven. Nine, she says, is navy blue. Seven is red, Victory Red, like her mother’s lipstick when she was a child.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 3 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: You said in the first part of this interview series that you collaborate with your wife on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. And that you two have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I’d love to see a sample of what that exhibit looks like?

DD: In our most recent exhibit, which was funded by a grant from the Poetry Foundation, we gave poems to
local artists and had the artists paint, sculpt, or collage a response to the poetry. The poets featured were you, David Lehman, Richard Blanco, Eloisa Amezcua, Christine Kitano, Nicole Santalucia, H.L. Hix, William Heyen, María Isabel Álvarez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Christian Teresi, Leah Umansky, Nicole Santalucia, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, and a few others. My wife also made broadsides of the poem and artwork. We had local elementary school children respond to lines from the poems, as well, and we hung their crayoned responses in the children’s gallery, which is attached to the main gallery at Tioga Arts Council. Posted on the right is Richard Blanco’s “Cloud Anthem” from his most recent collection. The collage/painting was done by the artist, Andrea Kelleher. 

 

NA: You collaborate with other poets, recently with Nicole Santalucia on a collection of Ashbery poems. And I heard that this book, Generations, inspired you to write a long poem in response to William Heyen. I wondered if you could talk a little about those projects and/or poems?

DD: Nicole and I have been collaborating on our Ashbery book for over two years now; the book is a series of epistolary prose poems addressed to John Ashbery. The poems began as letters to each other mediated by the figure of John Ashbery. I’m not sure what the final shape of this project will be, but I’ve enjoyed working on it with Nicole, who is such a dear friend and such a wonderful poet. I feel that I’m always learning from her, and she’s so funny, in her work and in real life. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend (and her wife Deanna Dorangrichia, who is an amazing artist). These friendships were given to me by poetry.

I also wrote a long poem titled MIDWHISTLE, written in stepped septasyllabic cinquains and addressed to Bill Heyen and to my son, Dante Jr., who was unborn when I wrote it. I think it’s safe to say this is the first long poem written simultaneously to an octogenarian and to a fetus.

I’ve always wanted to write a long poem. As an undergraduate I read and admired A.R. Ammons’s Garbage and Tape for the Turn of the Year, Williams’s Paterson, and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I’ve tried on many occasions to write my way into a book-length poem, but I could never find a way. Then, I read David Lehman’s Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and reading that book started me thinking of the long poem again. Reading Bill Heyen’s long poem, To William Merwin (Mammoth Books, 2007), along with the impending birth of my son and my deep engagement with Heyen’s oeuvre, precipitated the initial outpouring, which became MIDWHISTLE.  

Thanks to Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace, the University of Wisconsin Press picked up MIDWHISTLE and it will come out in spring 2023 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. I’m excited to see this book come into the world along with the other collections that will be published in the series during 2022-2023: American Sex Tape by Jameka Williams, Shopping or The End of Time by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Betsy Sholl’s As if a Song Could Save You, Joshua Burton’s Grace Engine, and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl.

 

NA: A lot of poets have a favorite poem to read from their books. Maybe I should call it—their favorite read-aloud poem. Do you have one from this book? Or maybe just a poem to close with here? With a short opening commentary on how it came to be?

DD: I like this one. The title is a gentle half-parody of those long expository James Wright titles that I love (and that he modelled on Li Bai’s titles). The title does describe the genesis of the poem. I had been reading the Merwin translations and watching a television show about the arctic expedition and this poem came from there. The diastole and systole of this poem expresses everything I want to say, and keep trying to say, and haven’t quite figured out how to say, in all my poems.

Poem for My Two-Year-Old Daughter After Reading W.S. Merwin’s Translations of Musō Soseki and Spending a Few Hours Meditating on the Ill-Fated 1845 British Arctic Expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror

I’ve also made friends with wisteria
and the cattail light of morning. Come sleep
inside a bottled ship’s rigging. Be glad
you’re loved without longitude, forever.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano Part 2 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: Your recent book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a triptych, or one of three books under one cover.  How do you like being published alongside Harvey Hix and William Heyen?  

DD: I love it. Etruscan Press does such high-quality publishing work. Their books are beautifully made and thoughtfully chosen. The support of Phil Brady and Bob Mooney has meant more to me than I can properly articulate. The dedicated staff at the press are paragons of professionalism, especially Pamela Turchin and Bill Schneider, who organize and run much of the daily operations. 

It’s an honor to have my book joined to the books of Harvey Hix and William Heyen. I hope that more publishers follow this tripartite publishing model. Heyen and Hix are poets I deeply admire, both for their bodies of work and for how they have constructed their lives in poetry. Both men embody a poetic stance I aspire to emulate: engaged, attentive, protean, ambitious, empathetic, and endlessly curious.

Harvey’s book How It Is that We continues his interrogation and deconstruction of the sonnet form, while nimbly moving among the detritus of 21^st century discourses, texts, and personae. Reading it is like looking at starlight through a field of orbiting wreckage. I feel adrift and then suddenly I’m jolted into a new way of seeing.

Bill Heyen’s The Nazi Patrol continues his project of bearing witness to the Shoah through the poison orchards of the present. Here, he employs his single-line couplets to great effect. There’s something so compulsively readable in this collection, a raw velocity that feels like a kind of falling.

Harvey and Bill have written enough for five or six lifetimes between the two of them. The amazing thing to me about the prodigious output of both men is the exceedingly high quality of the work.

If you are reading this conversation and you haven’t read Hix, I’d suggest my favorite books by him: Rain Inscription (Etuscan Press, 2017) and Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). I’d also suggest his remarkable translation of the Gospels and Christian apocrypha, The Gospel according to H.L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020).

I’d recommend Heyen’s Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003) and The Cabin: Journal 1968-1984 (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012). Heyen’s journals are an incredible document. I think Phil Brady described them as the work of a 20^th century Samuel Pepys. In one entry, Heyen will be having a martini with Anne Sexton. In the next, he’ll be wondering if the garbagemen took his golfclubs. He chronicles all the important events of his family life, and of his life in poetry, against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and on and on.   

AR: I recently listened to your conversation with Dr. Philip Brady about the collaborative project Sign and Breath. You read an incredible poem, “My Favorite Things,” which you had just written the day before. It made me curious to know where you find your inspiration? Do you strike proverbial gold with most of the poems you write?

DD: I find inspiration from my daily life, from my family, from my friends, from my memories, from things that I see when I’m walking the dog, from my job, from music, from movies and television, from art, and, most of all, from my reading life.

I’ve spent many years writing and reading poetry daily. Now, I write now when the mood strikes me and when circumstances permit. Like most poets, I have left years and years and thousands and thousands of bad poems in my wake. I think of all the marble composition notebooks, floppy disks, and old laptops full of my embarrassingly bad poems gone to rest in some landfill somewhere. I am grateful for all those years of woodshedding that brought me to where I am today. Still, I go through periods where nothing that I write works out the way I’d hoped, but I never feel frustrated. Writing is always a joy and a pleasure and a privilege that I don’t take for granted. I am ambitious with my poetry. I want to write great poetry, but for me it’s not so much about striking gold. It’s more about living a life of poetry. At the end of the preface for Generations, Phil Brady quotes a letter from Harvey Hix that reads: “To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.” To live by poetry. That’s all I want.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews grew up in a cardboard box, painted red and white to look like a typical brick house in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 1 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: Your latest book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a mini-anthology, featuring three books under one cover, called Generations, and published by Etruscan Press.

I thought we should start with the title poem, which I love.

DD: Thank you Nin and Amanda. I’m grateful to be able to have this conversation with you both. Generations also features The Nazi Patrol by William Heyen and How It Is that We by H.L. Hix. Here’s my title poem, which is the last poem in Lullaby with Incendiary Device:

Lullaby with Incendiary Device, Breached Hull, & Oil Slick

Before you were born, I dreamed you
into each cadence I would ever hear.
You board a paper boat and cross the sea.
One note of bluebird’s orison endures.
I love you so much the schooners inside
my heart keep crashing into each other
and capsizing, but, at least, they aren’t
all sunk yet, and no sailors have drowned
so far. What I mean by this is simple:
stay close always. Teach me to crayon fire.
Better yet, teach me the crazy hairstyles
of fire burning on the water’s surface,
my dear little one. Teach me what the fire
looks like from the underside of a wave.

AR: Many poems in Lullaby with Incendiary Device are about your children. Did becoming a parent change your poetry? If so, how?

DD: I have a four-year-old daughter (Luciana, who we call “Chi Chi”) and a seven-month-old son (Dante Jr.). Lullaby was written in the first two years of my daughter’s life. It’s really her book.

Becoming a father changed me and changed my life in innumerable subtle and immense ways; inevitably, then, parenthood changed my poetry. Parenthood, like poetry, reorients, intensifies, and recalibrates one’s attention. Parenthood turns you toward another, in much the same way that poetry does, or ideally, should. For me, poetry has always involved an interiority turned to face the world, an act of opening up, which involves a shedding of ego (breaking the mind forged manacles of Blake’s Urizen, echoing E.M. Forster’s injunction: “Only Connect”). Poetry and parenthood both involve what Seamus Heaney called a kind of “earned communion.” Both involve attention directed outward. There’s the shared duende of poetry and parenthood too: the knowledge of our own mortality in every diaper change and volta and skinned knee and spondee and snuggle and heroic couplet rocking you from blue hour to blue hour.

On a more practical level, parenthood changed the way my life was organized. My life now revolves around the schedules, needs, and wants of our little ones. I’ve had to dial back some of the poetry-related things I love doing like writing book reviews, but I still find time to read and to write and to engage with other poets living and dead.

My daughter and I have begun writing poetry together and my wife and I read the children poetry in addition to books like The Runaway Bunny and The Giving Tree and Dragons Love Tacos. My wife and I also collaborate on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. We have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I run a reading series. We are developing community workshops and we’re working on a poetry trail (a series of signposts with poetry displayed on them throughout the county). My children are a part of all these endeavors from planning stages to execution; they’ve both attended many local poetry-related events since the time they were in utero.

For me, the goal is that poetry be a constant part of my daily, ordinary, unromantic, middle class, suburban life, and that that life be a constant part of my poetry. The older I get, the less difference I feel between the poems I read and reread and memorize and dwell in, and my actual, seemingly boring, quotidian life.

Also, on a practical level, parenthood gave me a new set of experiences to write about. You don’t really know what fatherhood is until you live it yourself, what it’s like to be in the room when your child is born, what you feel when you hold your son or daughter for the first time, what it’s like to see them take their first steps, how they acquire language and relate to the world, what it’s like to be sleep-deprived and wakened in the middle of the night to clean up vomit off a beanbag chair and yet to feel happy about it, what it’s like to live daily in close proximity to the mind of a toddler. These are such intense, piquant, inestimably valuable experiences. And these experiences connect you, more deeply, to the great round of the human condition as it has unfolded for millennia.

Lastly, I’ve come to see my writing as a bequest for my children. I hope that my poetry means something to them when they grow up: that they have this series of artifacts from my time on earth, that they might see my work as a chronicle of the joys, pains, enthusiasms, struggles, desires, and perplexities of a lifetime. Ultimately, I pray that having access to these records of my interior life will help them through their own difficulties. If nothing else, I hope they see repeated over and over and over again, in every line, how much I love them and their mother, and how grateful I am for this life. 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews is harvesting the winter lettuce in her garden today. 

Elizabeth A.I. Powell on Rituals and Spells so Nothing Heinous Happens [by Nin Andrews]

It’s Easter Sunday, and I'm remembering how my father used to equate religion and superstition. He practiced both, just in case. He made me practice them, too, insisting that I go to church, understand the basic tenets of the faith,  pray on my knees before bed, and also, that I never pass the salt shaker hand-to-hand, and if I spilled salt, I tossed it right hand over left shoulder. I was instructed to hold my breath when we drove into a tunnel or under a bridge or past a graveyard. I still find myself touching wood, crossing my fingers, my toes, myself, and I can still hear my father’s voice advising me on how each superstition is best performed. Maybe it’s no surprise then that I was completely taken with Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s series of prose poems that were published in the recent issue of the Seneca Review titled Rituals and Spells so Nothing Heinous Happens. There was quite a buzz about one that also appeared in Pleiades and Poetry Daily. I decided to ask Elizabeth to say a few words about these poems and to let me post a poem from the series.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell:

These poems use the ritual and spell-like qualities of poetry to try and discern and examine the liminal space between rituals and spells on the one hand and madness on the other. Rituals live in our mythologies and religions, but when a ritual goes off kilter it turns on a person. I’ve tried to reflect on the space where that yin and yang meet, the between thing between the two. Samuel Coleridge famously said poems are the best words in the best order, which is similar in definition of what a spell is, giving letters in the right order, or a state of enchantment enacted by words.  Spells are more like content in poetry, and rituals are more like poetic form in that they observe a set of forms to enact a kind of worship.  Indeed, many of us have written ourselves out of the mental abyss through poems. Where ritual becomes pathological or a mental illness is interesting because on the one hand you can pray and it's lovely, but when it is obsessive, compulsive, and superstitious it begins to be a most egregious interrogation.

Touch Wood


Everyone agrees since I’m the prettiest, I’m the stupidest. Our grandfather sips scotch, loosens his tie we picked out for him to wear to MC our Miss America Pageant. This year’s real pick for Miss America was from Wisconsin: in ten years she’ll host the 700 club that fuels the Moral Majority that will upset me. You don’t even know where Wisconsin is, my sister says. I will remember this moment forever, and when I’m nineteen, I’ll go to the University of Wisconsin, where I will be incredibly miserable just to prove that I know where Wisconsin is.

I’m touching wood, wearing an evening dress. In reality, we are all wearing our grandmother’s silk nightgowns, hitched up. What are you doing? my cousin asks.
I am touching this wood, I say.
That’s not wood, she says.
Yes, it is! Grandpa this is wood, right? I say. It’s Formica, Josephine, he says. He calls all us girls Josephine. Maybe its because Josephine is Hebrew for God’s increase, and he has lots of granddaughters. We don’t yet know the name for flirt. We love him fiercely. Bet you don’t even know what Formica is anyway, my older cousin says. It’s melamine, a laminate, right Grandpa?

Our grandfather announces: No Miss America if you can’t get along. Also, Formica is made of melamine. Wood is from trees, Josephines. We are the e pluribus Unum of Josephine, he is the king of midcentury modern office furniture. He’s a long way from Vilnius. If we can’t be Miss America, we want to work in the family office furniture business as his secretary, have a mahogany desk and a credenza. Now that I know it is Formica I have touched instead of wood,
I am anxious to proceed. We are getting ready to walk down the stairs with books on our head to show poise, but we have to wait for our grandfather to announce
us to our audience, which is the rest of the family. Our cousins are behaving perfectly, so they might win.

I hobble in my grandmother’s gold lame 1940’s shoes, I love them more than the 1972 Democratic National Convention passes my grandfather got us because he supplied chairs. I sleep with mine under my pillow. To me, wood is the brain of God, but I touch the bannister made of brass, which means, jinxed, I will lose, which will make me sad and itchy. I balance two books on my head.

 

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances” was a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker.  The Boston Globe has called her recent work “wry and fervent” and “awash in synesthesiastic revelation.” Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” was published in 2019 in the U.K. 

Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com

Part II: A Conversation with Poet and the Editor of Etruscan Press, Philip Brady [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: As an Etruscan poet, I have been asked many times: What are the markings of an Etruscan poet? Do you think I should submit to Etruscan? How should I answer?  In other words, people want to know what Philip Brady looks for in a manuscript.

I'm grateful for and humbled by the number and quality of the manuscripts I see. While I may not be able to publish them, I still profit from having a birds-eye view of the literary landscape.
I've learned a lot from the experience. I've learned for instance, that I don't belong to a school. I respond to neo-formalist and post-structuralist poetry, non-narrative and plot-driven prose.   Something indefinable in the diction, syntax, voice, structure, authority or tone of a work gets my attention. The response is visceral. I'm drawn in, and soon I've shifted from the posture of editor, pencil twitching in the corner of my mouth, to reader, delighting in the next surprise. You can feel it in the first lines or sentences. It's a pulse, an electric charge—an awareness of form and dimension, perhaps; an awareness of play. No matter how serious and dark the subject matter, certain works emit light: "gaiety" in the old sense of the word. As Yeats has it, "All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay."

We want to provide a platform for that kind of writing across traditional genres, writing with heart and seasoning.   We feature work which emerges out of a sense that genre isn’t bound by a set of conventions but is instead a manifestation of a human impulse. There is an impulse to sing, an impulse to regale, an impulse to explain. Yes, genre solidifies into tradition. But the best work—the most new and most ancient—still thrums with that primal impulse. "Form in dread of power," as Emerson puts it. We look for work that carries the tradition but emerges from the source.

So, as the conductor says tapping his baton, "More brilliance, please."

AR: What is your favorite part of the editing process?   

Making the phone call to tell a new author we’ve accepted their manuscript.  

AR: And the best part of being an editor?

I just got off the phone with Laurie Jean, author of Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul, and Laurie told me she had accepted a position as Dean of Studies at Susquehanna University. Her book (along with her experience, charisma, and leadership) was part of what made that possible. I want to receive more phone calls like that.

AR: What are the most inspiring, interesting, or remarkable situations you've experienced since starting Etruscan? 

 When Bob Mooney and I conceived Etruscan, we thought we would begin with a small book of poems and grow as we learned. Then 9/11 happened. Bill Heyen, eminent poet and towering anthologist, proposed a book called “September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.” He wanted to capture America’s first reaction to the tragedy. But Etruscan didn’t, so to speak, exist. We had no distributor or designer or marketers or deal-cutters or editors. We knew about publishing the way foodies know about restaurants: we knew what we liked. But we told Bill OK and he buttonholed 127 writers including John Updike and Erica Jong and Lucille Clifton and Robert Pinsky and he even made up a few writers like Edwina Seaver and Rose Carmine Smith with a wink to Joyce Carol Oates.

            Then we contacted a pro named Tom Woll who had made his bones at Vanguard with Dr. Seuss back in the days of three martini lunches, and I met Tom halfway between Yonkers and Providence at a bagel shop on Rte 17 and Tom hooked us up with Mortimer Mint, a Dickensian refugee who made his fortune distributing the Guinness Book of World Records, and Morty sold ten thousand copies and we thought publishing was a cinch and then 8000 copies came back—we didn’t know about returns. That was our baptism into publishing.

NA: Lately you have been publishing books that are triptychs, or three poets under one cover. Could you talk about that?

The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. 

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

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

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus, boosting sales and increasing circulation.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along Robert Miltner, a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. Fortunately, all three authors enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the chronic problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, fashioning “centos” from one another’s work to weave between the volumes, and doing a post-Trio interview included in the book.

So, the next step was to actually solicit a tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, an up-and-coming Etruscan, Dante Di Stefano, recently submitted a book to Etruscan. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought. Heyen is 81 years old; Hix is 60, and Dante is 42: so, Etruscan Generations.

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

An Interview with Amanda Rabaduex, Poet and Intern for Etruscan Press [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve had the good fortune of being published by a few different presses, and while I am enormously grateful to all of them, I have found some easier to work with than others. Etruscan Press is one of my all-time favorites. The process of taking a collection of poems from manuscript to book with this press was a pure pleasure. I’ve been so impressed by all their editors including their managing editor, Bill Schneider, and their production editor, Pamela Turchin, as well as their interns, especially Amanda Rabaduex, whom I met on  Zoom.  It’s been so long since I entered the poetry scene, I began to wonder, What is it like for poets like Amanda who are just getting started today?  How do they navigate the online literary scene?  And what is it like to be an integral part of Etruscan Press?  

NA: Why poetry? 

AR: This is honestly a question I've asked myself for quite some time. I worked as a Russian linguist and paralegal in the Air Force straight out of high school. When I separated, I planned on going into law, but I kept feeling a pull towards words, so I switched my degree from pre-law to English. I was enamored with etymology first, and then poetry. It felt like a very natural evolution. In etymology one learns how much history is carried in a word. Each word is special in its own way, and poetry, in my opinion, is the best way to showcase words. It is the art form for word lovers. For a while I was simply a reader of poetry. What really pushed me to write poems was the death of my grandmother, with whom I was extremely close.  After she passed away, writing poetry became very grounding for me. It became a way to process the human experience. Prose demands order from words, but poetry is comfortable letting words sit in space. Letting them ruminate alone like a question waiting for an answer, which is what I feel life is - a question. In this way, poetry reflects life. I keep thinking of a recent episode of the Untenured Tracks podcast, where poet (and my mentor) Dr. Phil Brady compared prose to poetry:

Our lives do not correspond to this fanciful completion that is represented by sentences, which is, of course, why we love sentences, why we love novels, because it gives us what we can’t have. Poetry, I think, gives us what we do have, which is the sense of fragmentation and incompletion.

Once I witnessed how even the end of a life – or maybe especially the end  – leaves a sense of incompletion, poetry is the only thing which helps me with this sort of existential fog I am trying to sift through.

NA: Does working for Etruscan Press change how you read poetry books? Or how you think about writing poetry?   What is the most important thing you’ve learned there?

AR: I think my experience with Etruscan Press, in addition to working as a reader and an editor for other publications, has given me the notion that getting poems published is a bit like winning the lottery for a newer poet. There are so many poets writing and submitting great poetry right now that a poem or manuscript has to come in at just the right time and get seen by the right readers and editors to have a chance of being accepted for publication. The poet must hone their craft to the best of their ability, but they also need a little luck once they send their words out into the world. To be honest, it is sometimes intimidating for a person, like me, who is beginning to establish themselves as a poet. As a reader, however, it gives me even more respect for the books that I read.

NA: I’m showing my age with this question, but I’d love to know how you started publishing? How do you navigate the online poetry world? And select journals, esp. online journals, to submit to?

AR: I wrote poetry for a long time before I considered sending anything out. By the time I felt comfortable
submitting work, the website Submittable was up and running. This is a great tool for both journals and writers in one way because it makes sharing work so much more accessible. The problem for newer writers, which I am embarrassed to admit was also my situation, is that many send work to journals without reading or vetting them. Only in the past couple years have I realized how many publications are out there. At first, I was simply excited to see a call for submissions, so I'd send my work nearly anywhere.  I changed my approach after I had a bad experience with a little online publication who accepted a piece of mine but never ended up publishing it or responding to my messages. After this, I wanted to learn more about which journals were trustworthy and to be more purposeful about where I send my work. I subscribed to many journals. Now when I am sending work out, it is to places which inspire me in some way. I also ensure they publish poems which are aesthetically similar to mine so that I am not wasting my time or the editors' time. I sometimes wonder if the new system for submissions might affect the trajectory of poetry or create a new movement. In a system where so many more are submitting their work, does a poem have to be edgier or more experimental to garner attention?

NA: I had similar experiences. Ugh. Usually it's just that the poems never came back. I'd wonder how long I was supposed to wait. When I started writing, I was heavily influenced by four writers: Henri Michaux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yannis Ritsos, and David Lehman. There have been many others of course, but those were the first to shape and inspire me as a writer and a prose poet. I’m wondering if you could name three or four writers who have been important to you.   

AR: I consider a person's spatial gaze as inexorable from how they move and create in this world, so I have a difficult time narrowing it down. When I'm thinking about this question, I think of those who have influenced my perception of words as an art form as well as those who influence the style and themes in my poetry – the latter of these is a rotating door, as I'm still experimenting and honing my style. I don't feel I have a signature writing style, quite yet. If I consider the poets who have been the most foundational for me, the first person who comes to mind is Gertrude Stein. I'm heavily influenced by Modernist writers and artists, as this was the movement I focused on in my grad studies when I was earning my M.A. in English, but Stein was the person who made the concept of language as an art form very apparent and accessible for me. Her writing made me question the reality of language and the weight that signifiers carry. I can return to Tender Buttons and it means something different each time I read it, which makes the words feel both meaningless and magical all at once. I love the paradox because it reflects how I feel about life. Sylvia Plath is another poet who was foundational to me as a writer. When I began seriously writing poems, I was already a wife and a mother, and I don't think I would have felt brave enough to become a writer at this stage in my life without reading and being inspired by Plath's work. I am always looking to her use of metaphor when I write. Another important poet is Jane Hirshfield. I had been reading Ram Dass and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali around the time I first read Hirshfield. The quiet contemplative quality of her poetry echoed the space I was in at the time, and Hirshfield is the poet who guided me, in a sense, into contemporary poetry. She showed me that words can feel both gentle and powerful, that they can create a stillness and introspection, yet be enormously moving to the reader. I try to embrace that same spirit every time I sit down to write.

NA: How do you navigate the online literary scene? Are you active on social media platforms? If so, which do you think is best for poets?

AR: I started my Twitter account during the pandemic after noticing how many poets and journals post on that platform. It has been a great place to read poems that I would have never come across otherwise, and I also like seeing the call for submissions from journals. I am an introvert, though, so I'm not especially comfortable posting a lot. I actually keep my profiles on other platforms private because of this. I consider Twitter, in particular, as a place to network with other writers, and as a place to find inspiration. I often step away for days at a time, though, as there is such a multitude of voices online that it can become overwhelming. I just learned a new word last week – infoglut – a combination of 'information' and 'gluttony,' which someone came up with to describe the type of overload we can experience now thanks to the internet. I want to avoid infoglut and burning out on information. As with many other facets of life, I'm trying to find balance.

NA: I’ve been lucky to have been published by a lot of different presses over the years, most recently Etruscan Press, which feels like a community. But I don’t really know how it works. What do you do for the press?

AR: It really is a community – I am glad you feel that way, too! Everyone there creates such a welcoming space and I feel very lucky to contribute in any way I can. I've drafted two study guides for forthcoming titles which educators will be able to use in the classroom as part of Etruscan's Outreach Program. I've assisted with quality control of their new website, and I've been contributing to their social media initiative with posts, and I've learned some graphic design skills to help with this.  I enjoy how multi-faceted the role has been. What I've enjoyed the most is learning how a book starts as a project of the writer, becomes a project of the press, and then ultimately belongs to the readers. And Etruscan keeps both the writer and the reader in mind as they are producing new works. They are like a bridge between the two. Seeing this process in action has somewhat demystified the publishing process for me, while also instilling a tremendous amount of respect for all of the work that goes into making a book a tangible thing.

NA: What poet (s) are you currently reading?

AR: The first that comes to mind is C.T. Salazar – I just wrote a review on his first full length collection – Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking. I love how he uses sound and space. Some other poets I've loved reading recently are Dante DiStefano, Arthur Sze, Marianne Boruch, and D.S. Waldman. On any given day I usually have multiple books in my purse or multiple sites pulled up on my computer. I try to read as much as I can. I'm waiting for Ocean Vuong's Time is a Mother to arrive in the mail. Vuong is an absolute master with words – I feel like he will go down as one of the greatest poets of my generation.

NA: I think you described yourself as a baby poet, but I’ve really admired what I’ve seen of your work.  Maybe we can end with a poem?

AR: I did! I called myself a toddler in the world of poetry because I feel like I'm still finding my footing. Thank you so much for your kind words about my work, Nin.

Here is a poem which first appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, which I wrote after reading Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, which has facts about trees like how they make a noise imperceptible to our hearing when faced with a drought, or how mycelium creates a complex network and survival mechanism, of sorts, for trees. So much happens underground – it is incredible.

                                            trees scream ultrasonic when thirsty

                                                      If you are the eight minutes before we know the
                                                      sun has exploded
                                                      I am the last scent of a daydream

winter, want, water, seeds
world's largest organism – 4 mile fungus
it all begins underground

down there the sun is a rumor
I sit next to carved stone
whisper to my grandmother how it is up here

hotter now, burns blister quickly
miles away out my window
mountains on fire

sometimes bruised purple
is how songs are written
how we let ourselves sing

let ourselves believe
since she died
I've been waiting to be buried

I've been listening for the sound of trees 
vibration starts in roots
works its way up

I thought I heard them once
they said they would drink the bones 
if they could

 

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator, and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current poetry editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smokey Mountains.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020. Her picture appears on the top left and bottom right.

A Conversation with Poet and Editor, Philip Brady [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

Philip Brady is a poet, professor, and editor whom I've had the good fortune to know in all three of these capacities, and he is someone I always learn from, whether by reading his works or by listening to him talk. In the last two years, while dealing with a very ill son, spending weeks in hospitals, I found myself falling out of love with poetry. But there were a few important exceptions. Philip Brady is one of them--his work is both personal and mysterious, lyrical and beautiful crafted. And his poems speak to me. So, when I began chatting and emailing with the poet and Etruscan intern, Amanda Rabaduex, and discovered we share an admiration for Dr. Brady's work and a curiosity about his practice and process, I decided to put together this two-part interview. 

Carmel 
       by Philip Brady 

Why do we turn away from the eternal?
Robinson Jeffers asked. The Pacific surf,
crashing against the inscape of his skull,
washed off brine and starfish, and left,
turn from the eternal. Frail vowels
spiral into the cerulean sky
so vast it seems almost believable
there is no other we. No turning away.
I am in thrall to the inhuman voice
chanting the mantra beyond silence:
turn eternal. Drown your secret loss.
Let every moment achieve utterance.
Even the stones of Tor House mark the seconds
between the rasping slant rhymes of the ocean. 

AR: Why poetry?

We could talk about the only art that has no native means of apprehension (reading is breathless; listening cannot scan). We could talk about the yaw between lines inviting the unutterable. We could cite political and cultural revolution or say that poetry is the only art where what’s inside gets said, unmediated. We could talk about transgressing against capitalist values: so much genius and effort lavished on artifacts which have so little commerce.

But I want to share something H.L Hix has written—not about what poetry expresses but how it  emerges from a source which warms and illumines.

To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense; live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.

 AR:  Is there a form you feel most comfortable writing? Do you like to experiment?

Writing is not, for me, a comfortable activity. It’s based on a paradox. A. Writing is hard. B. It’s supposed to look easy. As Yeats says, “A line will take us hours maybe / But if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching have been nought.” For this paradoxical state of affairs (A & B) I blame Homer. Before he started to “articulate sweet sounds together” on the page, bards rocked and chanted, feeding the voice, and the voice fed the utterance. Or that’s the way I dream it. But I write crouched over a screen with my eyes watering and sudden beeps from Facebook and my right foot going numb, and everything has to be constructed and verified and revised down to the nub.

As for experimentation, often we think of modes of writing as expressive of a belief system: movements such as post-modernist vs. neo-formalist. They harden into postures, emerging, we assume, from conviction or temperament. But in my life prosody has shifted with age. The young man I was yearned to break out of his body, off the page. Lines jumped and high-stepped and enjambed. Now I am old, I want to hold things together, not “withering into the truth” but gyrating inward, with crazed balance, like a slinky on the fritz.

AR: What was the best advice you were ever given about writing?

I love what Jerome Rothenberg says about writing, “I write those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and for whose existence I feel a deep need.” Rothenberg connects his composition and reading, which makes him a great writer and a great editor.

NA: Did you have any idea what you were getting into when you became an editor?

Before I became an editor, I was a teacher and a reader. But reading manuscripts as an editor is very different from receiving them as a teacher, where your job is to nurture and instruct, or as a reader, where you can appreciate and be instructed. Readers can screen. We peruse the codex: the colophon, the pedigree, the blurbs that confirm value with words like “luminous” and “sublime,” the mysterious or catchy titles: Return to a Room Lit By a Glass of Milk, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Autonecrophilia, The Book of Orgasms, or What Narcissism Means to Me. By the time we open the book and scan the creamy page with its noble Garamond, we are prepared to give each poem what William Stafford called “a certain kind of attention.”

            These conditions do not prevail in the editor’s office. Editors receive only a brief cover and we must address the draft of the internationally unknown poet without the benefit of context. No book, no reviews, and certainly no rarity. There are thousands. They have no reticence. They come, as Philip Dacey says, “so encumbered.”

            Reading unsolicited manuscripts mars editors. Print is limitless. If you are not an editor, you may have no idea of how many serviceable poems are making their doleful rounds. At conferences or bars or beaches or subway platforms, we editors pass one another and nod in silence, recognizing the vampiric gaze and slow shamble of the endless scroll.

NA: What are you working on now? Could we see a short poem or an excerpt of your new or recent work?  

I have two on-going projects. The first is an anthology, co-edited with Shanta Lee Gander. It’s called Sign & Breath: Voice & the Literary Tradition and will be published by Etruscan in 2023, and I’m delighted that you are contributing, Nin.

Here’s a description:

What is Poetry? If the question brings a sigh or cringe, it may be because myriad attempts at definition all have one thing in common: they divide. If poetry is one thing, it is not another. If it is formal, it is not free; if prophetic, not quotidian; if lineated, not sentenced. And so on.

This new critical anthology, Sign & Breath, takes a different approach. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book regards poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. That faculty precedes any genre, as utterance precedes the alphabet. It striates all verbal and literary art. It is sound beneath text; its rhythms curve time and striate narrative. Its signature is that undefinable quality we call “voice.”

 Sign & Breath is an anthology of artists giving voice. 50 contemporary artists each offer one page that sings in any genre. Contributors represent diverse traditions, from Page and Spoken Word Poetry, to Rap, to prose fiction and memoir, to song lyrics. Following each entry is a discussion by the author about the role of voice in composition and presentation. In addition, the text will link to a virtual platform featuring performance videos and author interviews, to be hosted here.

 This book will contribute to a dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective: poetry as voice.

My other project in progress is a sequence of poems, called Jamb, which uses seven syllable lines to play with the notion that enjambment is a central technique in modern poetry—resisting connection, syntax, and narrative, and opening a place “where lines quaver to appear/ less incomplete and fracture/ assures nothing happens—not/that no thing takes place but that/ Nothing is actually/enacted…”

And here’s a link to recent work.

Philip Brady’s newest book is The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics (Broadstone, 2021). He is the author of two essay collections, Phantom Signs and By Heart from the University of Tennessee Press; a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians, a memoir, To Prove My Blood, and three previous books of poetry. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and an anthology of contemporary poetry. 

Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award; six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State.

Brady has taught at University College Cork, on Semester at Sea, at the University of Ibadan, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the National University of Zaire (DRC). Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the MFA faculty of Wilkes University. For more information please visit www.philipbrady.com

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator, and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current poetry editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains. 

A Conversation with Australian Prose Poet, Cassandra Atherton (by Nin Andrews)

NA: Why prose poetry?

CA: I love prose poetry’s compression and the allied sense of breathlessness it so often conveys. Where lineated poems tease the right margin, the prose poem embraces it. I also adore prose poetry’s celebration of the quotidian—those daily engagements at the heart of so much experience. It’s a form of poetry that always looks so approachable, largely because it’s composed of sentences and paragraphs, and it is able to exploit the illusion that that a reader may be about to encounter prose fiction or nonfiction rather than a piece of writing focused on the figurative possibilities of language. I like to think that once you have started reading a prose poem, you are compelled to finish it because you are inside a block of text that just keeps going—until the final full stop. It’s hard to resist the beguilements of a rectangular block of poetic text that floats beautifully in the space of the page or on the screen.

NA: You co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction. In writing it, did you come away with a new appreciation for the form? Were there any surprises?

CA: Prose poetry always surprises me. Its protean nature is the reason I never tire of it. Co-writing Prose Poetry: An Introduction was such a joy because I lived in a prose poetry world for three years—and in that world, almost all I did was think, write, eat, and breathe prose poetry. I have a wonderful collection of contemporary prose poetry, too. I especially enjoy some contemporary prose poetry that plays with a kind of ghosting of lineation. Some prose poets use slashes or spaces between words or phrases in the prose poem, and others use different forms of punctuation—such writing can be extraordinarily suggestive and playful.

NA: You are also working on an anthology of Australian prose poets. Is there a difference between American and Australian prose poetry? 

CA: American prose poetry is part of a longer tradition than Australian prose poetry, which has only begun to flourish in the last three decades or so. Where American prose poetry has a wonderful relationship with neo-surrealism, Australian prose poetry is often connected to its colonial history and to re-imaginings of the suburban. However, the American and Australian traditions are often connected via their humor, which is often dark and uncanny, invoking aspects of the enigmatic or mysterious.

NA: How about between male and female prose poetry? Do you think women are doing anything unique with the form?

CA: Both women and men are writing powerful prose poetry in the twenty-first century. Women are at the forefront of some of the current developments and innovations in the form. For example, I’ve always adored Holly Iglesias’s book, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, which asks pertinent questions about the prose poetry form and its traditions. In the various prose poetry projects in which I’ve been involved, I have always given priority to exploring the way women are able to politicize the rectangular prose poetry box. They often do this by playing with the prose poem’s use of the conflicting tropes of confinement and freedom. Words are squeezed vice-like inside the block of prose poetry until they explode into the space around it.

NA: What are you currently working on?

CA: I like to keep busy, so I have lots of projects. I was thrilled when Peter Johnson asked me to co-edit an anthology of US, English and Australian prose poetry with him. The prose poetry anthology is all new work and it’s electrifying! It’s coming out later in the year with MatHat Press. I’m also working on a collection of prose poetry, Saving Face, which is about the Hiroshima Maidens. They were Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped and were taken to New York for plastic surgery. I’m very fortunate to have received an Australia Council grant to fund this project.

NA: I’d like to close with one of your prose poems:

Hiroshima is for Lovers

You must forget that I kissed you in Hiroshima. Leave behind our hot silences and the way your shoulder pressed against mine on the blue streetcar circling the city. It is all a cliché. It has happened many times before. Remember that your body is marked by others’ narratives and their stories don’t belong on my lips. Nothing happened. Your wife is waiting at the hotel bar with a bottle of cold, white wine and an empty glass. Everything happened. In your hotel room, you stretched my arms above my head and placed my palms on the window. From behind, you pressed me against the glass, like a specimen. I saw the steel skeleton of the A-bomb dome against the blue sky. I tried to speak but my words slipped down the Ōta River and into the Seto Inland Sea. We stand on the Aioi bridge and I imagine its T shape is a ventricle, and you are its beating heart.

Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. Her prose poems have been translated into Japanese, Korean.  Cassandra co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020) with Paul Hetherington. She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, senior editor at Spineless Wonders and associate editor for MadHat Press. Cassandra is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia.

 

Love Most of You Too by Dustin Brookshire [by Nin Andrews]

I have a particular weakness for what I call gossip poems--poems that make me feel as if I’m eavesdropping on a juicy conversation. They remind me of my father, a talented gossip, though he preferred to call himself a raconteur. He gave me lessons in storytelling when I was a girl, asking how my school day was in the evenings. If I said it was fine, that everyone was nice, he would sigh, “If you have something ‘nice’ or ‘fine’ to say, please don’t bore me.” He wasn’t asking me to say mean things. He wanted to know what I was secretly mulling in my mind. And to shorten the distance between what I said and what I thought. 

Dustin Brookshire, whose second chapbook, Love Most Of You Too  is due out from Harbor Editions today, is a master at the gossip poem. The man, I think, really could write soap operas. Witty, smart, entertaining, he knows exactly how our thoughts twist and turn between reality and fantasy, and on and off-topic, as well as in and out of the present moment. His poems create a sense of intimacy and personal drama in a blink. Reading his poem, “I Should Write Soap Operas,” I feel as if he’s confiding in me, only me, that I am his new best friend. How can I resist? How can I not laugh out loud? I especially love his ending, “I’m only saying/ it’s OK not to accept what’s in front of you at face value.” 

I Should Write Soap Operas

My neighbor, well technically she isn’t my neighbor
since she lives on the other side of the building, two floors below,
appeared with a baby a few weeks ago.
I’ve been meaning to tell Paul about the baby
but the daily hum drum of life — work, rest, write —
has blocked my thoughts, but today,
we were walking Daisy and turned a corner
and there she was — baby strapped to chest
with its legs swinging. I think it might be a boy,
but I’m not sure. All the other times I’ve seen it,
it has been covered in a red blanket, which is no help
since red is like yellow when babies are concerned.
Anyway, I’m losing track of my point.
I think the baby is stolen. Paul tells me she is probably babysitting.
I say, She probably stole it. Then add,
But not from another country, as if this legitimizes
my comment. Paul rolls his eyes and tells me she can steal
the baby in one of my poems, but this is not
why I am writing this poem. I’ll admit
I’m the kind of guy who enjoys a giggle
when I hear of someone objecting at a wedding.
I’ll admit I’ve watched Soap Operas since I was eight
and rooted for the villain most of the time.
I adored Vivian and Sami on Days of Our Lives.
My mother threatened to quit taping episodes
when I would cheer for them. You might not know,
Sami stole her baby sister. Well, she stole her half baby sister,
but only she and her cheating mother Marlena
knew about the half part. I’m not saying this is the case
with the mystery baby in my building. I’m only saying
it’s OK not to accept what’s in front of you at face value.

About Love Most Of You Too, Beth Gylys writes: “His poems explore the vicissitudes, limitations and foibles of life and love, sometimes hilariously, sometimes subtly, sometimes with the force of a razor blade to a wrist. The book both pays tribute to his poetic idol, Denise Duhamel, and solidly establishes Brookshire’s singularly sassy, incisive confessional voice. From the more serious poems that address homophobia to the politically charged poems to the hilarious “Rule #3 of Sexual Relations” (a delightful romp, impossible to summarize), emotional acuity, ferocity, and facility with form are on full display in this page-turning gem.”

Dustin Brookshire, a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist and curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series, a Zoom-based poetry reading series. He is the author of the chapbooks Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012).  Dustin’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in or is forthcoming in Assaracus, Whiskey Island, Mollyhouse, The West Review, Oddball, Gulf Stream Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, and other publications.  He has been anthologized in Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012) and The Queer South: LGBTQ Writes on the American South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Visit him online at www.dustinbrookshire.com. 

An Interview with Elizabeth A. I. Powell [by Nin Andrews]

I met Elizabeth A. I. Powell years ago when we were both students in the MFA program at Vermont College. A young mother with three small children and another one in her future, she was studying fiction back then. I lost touch with her until years later when I saw she had won the 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga prize for her fabulous collection, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully under Imaginary Circumstances. I thought, Wait. Is that the same Liz?  I was reminded of Nickole Brown, another Vermont college graduate, who studied fiction and who also became a prize-winning poet. 

NA: How/why did you transition from fiction to poetry? Can you say a few words about your evolution as a writer? 

EP: My evolution as a writer follows the trajectory of my evolution as a woman. I had to learn to listen to my own voice, not the voice and criticisms of others, and it took a long time deciphering what was valid criticism and what was someone holding forth opinions in the moment. I had to learn to trust myself.  I gave up on my first love, poetry, in my senior year when told it wasn’t very good at all by my classic nemesis---my stepmonster-- when I returned from the Bennington College July program. 

So, I changed to fiction. When we were in grad school I had a prof there say,” Oh no, not another damn women’s story!” It was a lyric essay, really, about childbirth. From then on I tried to turn every story into some other kind of form. Writing fiction in third person was too much like moving heavy furniture around a room.  There was no discussion of hybridity, especially at VC. Here’s the deal, I had to make it matter only for myself.  I was buying whatever anyone wanted to sell me. Then one day I realized the truth in the Dylan song, “Everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do.”

NA: You are a master of the lyric essay as well. I love the poem (or is it an essay?), “Summer Undid Me: Guerlain Imperiale (Bedroom), 1853.” 

EP: Oh, Nin, thank you! It is a kind of detoxification from too much summer sun, reading books about Napoleon and Baudelaire, spritzing too much Guerlain, and a narcissist lover gaslighting me into another dimension! It is an argument about how we use our senses and how easily we can be fooled by history, marketing, artifice. Ultimately, it’s how can we tell the dancer from the dance. It’s creative inquiry, which belongs to essay and poetry and becoming. It is a kind of poetic journalism, which is to say, a sister to documentary poetics. 

NA: I am a fan of all your books, but I especially love Atomizer. I admire its humor, intensity, and lush sensuality. I'd love to hear you talk about the experience of writing this collection. Maybe say a few words about the difference between writing the personal and the persona poem? 

EP: I don’t think we can write something until we have really lived it and leaned into the question of it. When I’m stuck on a poem it is usually because I haven’t lived the needed experience to finish the poem. With a persona poem the same is true for the writer. One can try on masks, but ultimately one must have the empathy of understanding the narrative arc of the poetic problem. I love what method acting’s Sanford Meisner has to say (about taking on personas), that we must behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

I started “Atomizer”  with my concerns about the intersections of technology and biology, and capitalism’s influence on how we find love and attachment. I was heavily influenced by French philosopher Alain Badiou’s work, In Praise of Love, which depicts contemporary love as a mutual truth refinement, one that can’t be calculated through marketing and technology, but by saying YES at every turn. I, in turn, turned to my own five senses as a way to interpret romantic love (as well as agape love) and how it all plays out.  

NA: Who are your influences? And what are your guilty pleasures?  

EP: Always, Paul Celan. Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. Sam Shepard, Don DeLillio, and Raymond Carver. Reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets  gave me a freedom back I didn’t know I’d lost. For the sounds of sense and the sounds of a rural life, Frost has meant a lot. Comedy and comedic timing, voice and satire has kept me good company, especially through Jewish humor. I learned so much from my mentor at UNH, Charlie Simic. But it all started sitting in my room as a seven year old listening to JFK’s famous speeches album on my little record player. Listening to Joni Mitchell has been important, speaking of records. My guilty pleasure is to engage with pleasure without guilt, and when that is not possible, to eat as much high quality chocolate as possible in my most comfortable pajamas. 

NA: What are you working on now?

EP:  I’m working on a manuscript of poems and lyric essays called, Into the Mistake, about reproductive trauma as an epigenetic and environmental conversation through time and texts; how our lives live in us and grow like rings in a tree. It also features growing up in NYC in the 80s and the idea that maybe mistakes are more mystical than we sometimes think. The book pretty much believes in process theology.

NA: Could we have a poem from the book? Maybe "The Ordinary Odor of Reality"? And some commentary along the lines of how the poem came about? 

This poem came about when I visited OVR (Olfactory Virtual Reality) in Burlington, VT where they are doing critical work on using olfactory technology to treat veterans and trauma survivors with PTSD. When I was there they had bottles and bottles of scents like: gas fire, baby powder, coolant, match strike, hot sand.

THE ORDINARY ODOR OF REALITY 

Is as strong as our bones
steeped in our bodies
like Red Rose Tea.
Outer space smells like rum,
so says spectral analysis, 
but all my trauma reeks of
baby powder and chlorine.
We breathe 86,400 times a day.
We ingest each other through 
our nostrils straight into 
our amygdala like 80s cocaine or salt
water over our heads. I have inhaled 
my worldview from the sterility 
of Brutalist architecture, schoolrooms 
I have sat in. I am having a smell dialogue 
with mold and wet earth and sand 
that resides in the woods and playground 
inside my memory. What are 
your odor threat cues? Coolant? Match 
strike? Summer day? All arranged
in form, a story? I put on 
the Olfactory Virtual Reality
Headset that looks like space goggles
with a scent-o-graph that changes 
with each virtual image, in order
to confront the Aqua Velva, polyester 
bedspread, peppermint schnapps, 
urine and semen and tobacco,
the capture and pillage 
of my seventh year. Now 
in warrior headdress I combat
the reality of the moment
that launched my career
in PTSD. Cyber psychological
treatment, imaginal exposure
therapy to locate the past
so, I can crash back through,
on a treadmill with my space goggles 
and therapist, and relive it
to master it, and take a shovel 
to rebury it in that wet earth, 
but without me. 

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a Small Press Bestseller and named a “Books We Love 2016” byThe New Yorker.  Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K.  Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Stand (UK), and American Poetry Review. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com

"The Last Orgasm" [by Nin Andrews]

Preface     

If anyone reads this book, they will think they know what kind of person I am. They will, I am certain, imagine me as someone else, someone I can never be—simply because I have written this book of orgasms, and this book will do that to them, and to me. It will make me appear to be the kind of person who is in the position to write about orgasms, who knows all about orgasms: their songs and dances and secret languages. They might go so far as to compare me to Noah Webster, claiming that just as he compiled an entire opus of words, carefully defining and distinguishing each one’s particular origin, pronunciation, spelling, and proper usage, so I have collected an opus of orgasms. And I will have to admit, with surprise, that even if I don’t imagine myself to be that sort of person, even if I don’t consider myself an author anymore, much less an author of an opus of orgasms, even if I no longer converse with orgasms in my daily life, the orgasms continue to seek me out, as orgasms will, as if they need my blessing, as if I and only I can hear their pleas, their wishes, their last breaths.

>>>>

When asked to describe her writing life, Nin Andrews once wrote: "I have always felt a little apologetic about my poetry. Because I am not sure that I am the person who writes it. Rather, some other mystery woman sits in front of my computer, typing happily away. This other is bold and loud, and my father, who met her on occasion, described her as unbecoming, uncouth, and socially unacceptable. When she was a girl, he threatened to wash her mouth out with soap and water, as was done in those days. Ivory soap—it made her vomit. But all the soap in the world could not clean or shut her up. It is she who gives voice to orgasms (or is it vice versa?), and who has not a worry in the world about what others think. Me, an inhibited wisp of woman, I can only watch her and sigh."

Ed. note: Nin Andrews's book "The Last Orgasm" (2020) is available from Etruscan Press. The "orgasms" collected here are in the manner of such writers as James Tate, Lydia Davis, Vallejo, Lorca, Henri Michaux, Frank O'Hara, Kafka, and Rilke.

David Lehman, Denise Duhamel & Nin Andrews: Reading at the KGB Tonight 4/12/21

 

<<
I am so excited to be reading with David Lehman and Denise Duhamel tonight for the KGB series, I can barely breathe. I am thinking of this as my ten minutes in the presence of fame—as well as in the presence of two of my all-time favorite poets.  I can’t wait to hear Denise read from her new collection, Second Story, which includes a long poem in the form of Terza rima about her terrifying experience with hurricane Irma, as well as her equally terrifying poems about the last few years, under the influence of Donald Trump. And I am so excited to hear from David Lehman whom I expect to surprise us by reading from his forthcoming collection, The Morning Line, due out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  I owe so much to both of these poets. David was my first real poetry professor. I would never have pursued poetry if it were not for him. And it was Denise who taught me how to read an orgasm poem aloud.  -- Nin Andrews >>

 

The reading starts at 7 pm.

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86561522512?pwd=UW1BRXU0dVZHZ2ZWM0xHWUtjWWNkQT09

 

Meeting ID: 865 6152 2512 Passcode: 799004

<<
I'm grateful to David Lehman for giving me the chance to say a few words about his April 12 KGB Bar reading with Nin Andrews and Denise Duhamel, because it was David who introduced me to their work. Back when the reading series was new, in the late 1990s, with Star Black and David in charge, he gave me a copy of "The Book of Orgasms" by Nin Andrews, and I was blown away by the sheer happy lusty sexiness of the concept and the individual poems illustrating the poet's orgasmic "quest," which is a never-ending one inasmuch as the "last" in any series is the first in a new series. I also recall a night at the bar when, drinking Tanqueray martinis, Lehman insisted that feminism and fun were not incompatible, and won the bet with Duhamel's Barbie poems in her book "Kinky." As for Lehman himself, will he read daily poems, poems "in the manner of" his favorite dead poets, or a Baudelaire translation? What this virtuoso trio has in common is authenticity, humor, wit, daring, and sensibility, which is just about everything. >>  -- Fred Chervil 

 

The How-To Poem with Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Nin Andrews]

I had all these great ideas for a blog post last night as I was drifting off to sleep, feeling thrilled to have just received my second vaccine, and dreaming of life after Covid—dinners out, coffee shops, friends. But this morning, when I woke, I felt done in. Overnight, my brain seems to have turned into Jello. I’m not sure if there’s a coherent thought in there, thanks to Moderna. Usually when I lack inspiration or brain power of my own, I pick up a poetry book at random, and it helps get the juices flowing. Or at least, I have an enjoyable moment with someone else’s poetry. But today, those poetry books are staying on the shelf.  No way can I focus on poetry.

Instead, I’m reaching for my guilty pleasure—self-help books.  Because there isn’t a subject I don’t need a how-to book for. Or a book for dummies. Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I am amazed to find a whole shelf of books, written just for me. So far, I have read Walking for Dummies--I mean how does anyone put one foot in front of the other? Daily Sex for Dummies. Daily, seriously? Tying Shoes for Dummies—it’s true, I don’t even tie my shoes correctly. And The Dummies’ Guide to Love and Happiness.  

What can I say? I love instruction manuals, precisely because I can never follow directions. I remember, many years ago, in a college poetry class, one student said, “Nin never does the assignment. She just goes off into her our own world.” “Yep,” the teacher said. “But at least she has another world to go to.” I am not sure if that’s a good thing. But I try to do what I am told. Well, more or less.

I also love instruction manual-poems like Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual,” and Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “How to Make Your Own Automaton,” which she reads in this video below. And then offers advice on how to write your own how-to poem. Frank is brilliant. And she gives great advice.  Now, if only I can follow it. 

 

Writing Prompts for April's Poem-a-Day Challenge (by Nin Andrews)

It’s April, the cruelest month, and here in Virginia the rain has been falling so steadily, I am worried it will never dry out again. I feel soaked to the bone. Brain-foggy, too. Socked in. But, in spite of that, I’ve signed up for one of those write-a-poem-a-day groups. Now, I know a lot of you BAP readers are naturals at writing daily poems. Maybe you follow William Stafford’s advice of lowering your standards, and just keep writing no matter what. Or you’re a regular Emily Dickinson or Frank O'Hara--scribbling brilliant lines every other second. Or you’re like David Lehman who wrote a poem a day for two years (gulp) and then published his lovely book, The Daily Mirror.  Me? I don’t write a poem in a day, or even in a week. Ever.    

But, I have decided to give it a try. After all, it's what poets do in April, right? And I want to say, I'll be relying on all those poets who so graciously offered up video prompts for Lit Youngstown's Lit by the Imagination project, poets like Denise Duhamel, Stephanie Strickland, Peter Johnson, Jeff Friedman, Dante Di Stefano, and others. So many others. Every day there’s a new poet and a new prompt here. 

I want to post a few examples here, just to give a taste of what's ahead. Like this one by Nicole Santalucia:

And this one by Lauren K. Alleyne:

And this one by Leona Sevick:

 

Overcoming Writer’s Block with Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown (by Nin Andrews)

Many years ago, my shy teenage son came home from high school and said he had almost spoken in class that day. “But the words got stuck right here," he said gesturing at the base of his throat. “Maybe tomorrow, they will actually come out of my mouth.”

I thought of him a lot over the last year when I developed a serious writer’s block. I had ideas, the desire to write, even the urgency, but the words would not come. I kept thinking, Maybe tomorrow I will be able to write again. But there was a little space in my office where ideas fluttered around like uncaged birds and never landed. Even when I did put something down on paper, there was a distance between what I meant and what I said. I thought of William Stafford’s advice to lower your standards in order to keep writing. But how low? 

And how does one deal with the feeling that the muse is simply absent? Day after day I would wake up hopeful, only to find she was still on vacation. Maybe she moved to another town, or a beach resort—she knows how much I hate those brightly lit vacation spots with tourists and palm trees and so much sun, my skin fries, and my soul, too. But it’s not just she who left me. My dreams were missing, too. Even my daydreams. It was as if my mind were a blank page, or maybe a whole book of blank pages. I blamed my writer’s block on the news, the weather the pandemic, a family crisis, loneliness, old age, even my pajamas.

Yes, my pajamas. Because my entire wardrobe for the last year could pass for pajamas. There’s no reason to worry about appearances during a pandemic, of course. But every poem I wrote (if I could call it a poem) seemed to be wearing pajamas too, or joggers with elastic waist bands—nothing I'd want to present to the world.

I have tried so many things to overcome my writer’s block. First I listened to hours of poetry podcasts by the amazing poets, Pádraig Ó Tuama  and Tracy K Smith.  Although I love the podcasts, they didn’t make me want to go to my study and compose my own work. They did make me wonder if I’d ever be able to write a poem as beautiful as the ones they featured. 

Next, I watched poetry reading after poetry reading on ZOOM. I paid attention to some of them. I love the convenience of listening to a performance in the comfort of my home. But I am not the best audience when I am too relaxed. My mind wanders. I begin to wonder, “Is this poetry reading ever going to end?” Or, “What is that thing on the wall behind the poet’s head?” Or, “I wonder what that paint color is — Farrow & Ball Blue Ground? Benjamin Moore Aegean Teal?” But there were notable exceptions—poets I wish I could listen to forever including  Major Jackson, Tim Seibles, Shara McCallum, Leona Sevick, Denise Duhamel.

Next, I signed up for a class with Natalie Goldberg, whom I have always loved. But the classes were pre-recorded, and after I listened to a few of them, I lost interest. I do like the prompts she gives. It occurred to me after watching her that I’d love shorter classes. Maybe five to fifteen minute videos. Something to appeal to my limited attention span. I would really like to have poets offer prompts and/or short teachings online. So I started a project with LitYoungstown for which I am collecting videos of poets reading a poem and offering a prompt—the series is called Lit by the Imagination, and will be posted in April on Lit Youngstown’s Facebook page. Who knows? Maybe I’ll start writing again soon.

Finally, I read Write It, Jessica Jacobs’ and Nickole Brown’s book of uniquely inspired prompts, and was so
impressed, I started taking free classes (free but you do need to pre-register for them) with the authors. What brilliant teachers and poets they are!  They call them “generative classes” because they hope to help us generate our own work. They teach and read between offering prompts, and the two are fascinating to listen to—their insights, the poems they select, the way they think about poetry and writing.  In addition, they chat easily with their audience and create a sense of community, something I have missed during the pandemic. I feel as if a little touch of heaven is offered in each class.  I’ve become a bit of a groupie. I am already looking forward to Sunday, March 28th, their next session. 

Here’s a prompt from their book, and two video prompts:

“The poet Jack Gilbert wrote, We die and are put into the earth forever, / We should insist while there is still time. If you only had one week to live, is there something you would insist on doing? Is there something that keeps you from doing that thing now?"

And so, with National Poetry Month just around the corner, I insist on returning to writing. With a little help from my poet friends, I think and hope this will happen. 

 

 

 

English Flavors by Laure-Anne Bosselaar [by Nin Andrews]

 

            I love to lick English the way I licked the hard

round licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for six

good conduct points on Sundays after mass. 

            Love it when ‘plethora’, ‘indolence’, ‘damask’, 

or my new word: ‘lasciviousness,’ stain my tongue,

thicken my saliva, sweet as those sticks — black

            and slick with every lick it took to make daggers

out of them: sticky spikes I brandished straight up

to the ebony crucifix in the dorm, with the pride

            of a child more often punished than praised.

‘Amuck,’ ‘awkward,’ or ‘knuckles,’ have jaw-

breaker flavors; there’s honey in ‘hunter’s moon,’

            hot pepper in ‘hunk,’ and ‘mellifluous’ has aromas

of almonds and milk.  Those tastes of recompense

still bitter-sweet today as I roll, bend and shape

            English in my mouth, repeating its syllables

like acts of contrition, then sticking out my new tongue —

flavored and sharp — to the ambiguities of meaning.

 

 

I love this poem, which Laure-Anne Bosselair so graciously agreed to record for Lit Youngstown’s forthcoming series of poetry videos. I love the idea of tasting the words, relishing them, not as Mark Strand does in his famous poem, “Eating Poetry,” when ink runs from the corners of his mouth, but as a savorer of flavors and textures and sounds.  I especially love how she closes the poem with an image of herself sticking out her tongue as a Catholic receiving the sacrament in order to take in “the ambiguities of meaning.”  

Listening to her read in her beautiful Belgian accent, I am reminded of my childhood friend’s Belgian mother who used to call me mon petit chou. When she said chou, her lips pursed as if in a kiss, I felt so loved. I was certain mon petit chou meant something sweet like my little treasure. Or poppet.  Years later, when I was a French student, I discovered she had been calling me her little cauliflower. Apparently, it’s a French term of endearment. I assume it’s the sound of the word, chou, that makes it so. Or perhaps there is a reference or meaning that I am missing. But then again, maybe the French appreciate cauliflower a lot more than I do. As Bosselaar puts it, when learning a language, one must stick out one’s tongue “to the ambiguities of meaning.”

Reading and Rereading "One Tree" by Philip Metres (by Nin Andrews)

 

In the fall of 2019, I was at a The Lit Youngstown Literary Conference in Youngstown, Ohio (amazing how
long ago that seems now) when I heard Philip Metres read his poem, “One Tree” from his wonderful new book, Shrapnel Maps. And like many poems that are also parables, the poem stuck with me. And stuck with me.  And stuck with me.

When I first heard it, I thought I knew exactly what it meant. I could see it unfolding in my mind. After all, it seems like a simple story, and a true one. I know the neighborhood where the poet lives, and his wife, Amy Breau, a fabulous poet in her own right. I smiled, picturing her, rushing outside with her hair on fire, screaming, “NO!” as the man began chainsawing a limb from her sacred tree, while Philip, the consummate peacemaker, stayed inside, wishing he could hide. But in the end, when the chainsaw was lowered into the tree, I thought, Phil! You let them cut her tree? Because “someone must give”?

I was particularly irked by his apologies to the neighbor, his repeated claim, “it’s not me,” when it was, too, him. After all, “we” said no in the third sentence, not she. What a coward! I thought.

The poem triggered memories of my own family where my mother fought and lost many local, environmental battles. This was back in the 60’s when sexism was even more alive and well than it is today, and my father was so horrified by her activism, he asked that the local newspaper use her maiden name when they wrote about her. He didn’t want the businessmen in town to know that she was his wife. I sometimes wondered—if he had stood by her side, would she have been more successful? After all, people listened to men back then. Not to women.

As I was driving home to Virginia after the conference, a line kept repeating in my head:  “Always the same story: two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” I began contemplating the poem as a parable of the one tree—or the sacred tree of life. What will or won’t we do to defend it? I loved how he compared the tree to the baby brought to Solomon. It makes a lovely environmental parable.  Or so I thought.

But then, this winter Philip Metres sent me a video of another tree poem, "Olive Tree" for a project called Lit by the Imaginationthat I am working on for LitYoungstown (we are asking poets to read a poem and offer a prompt based on the poem. These short videos will be posted in April on the LitYoungstown Facebook page). I thought of the olive tree, and the term—offering an olive branch. And of the closing words in the poem, “first brambles, then olives.” Written at his brother-in-law’s home in Palestine, the poem reminded me of Metres’ faith, hope for, and interest in peace and conflict resolution, especially in the Middle East. And suddenly I realized I had misunderstood the first tree poem. Somehow I had fallen so in love with the image of the wife, the glorious, fiery wife with her passion and vision so clear, I had not paid attention to what the poet intended.

The speaker of the poem isn’t championing his wife or the tree. Instead he’s pondering the question of what one should do if he sees both sides of a conflict. “Must I fight for my wife’s desire for yellow blooms when my neighbors’ tomatoes will stunt and blight in shade?” he asks. The tree is not the tree of life, but a tulip poplar, one of the fastest growing native trees of the eastern United States, and a tree that grows so wide, the Native Americans used to make canoes from their trunks. Like the wife in the poem, I had tulip trees in my yard as a child, and they grew to be over 90 feet tall in a relatively short time. In the end the poem, when “they lower the chainsaw again,” I suppose they are putting the chainsaw down on the ground, not raising it to the tree. And the speaker is apologizing, “Dear neighbor it’s not me,” as he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of his hot-headed wife. The poem is not an ecological parable but a political parable about neighborly love, or the lack thereof.

Now, when I reread the poem, I wonder at how often we blame the hot-headed, unappeasable women of the world. Is that a word, unappeasable? I am picturing them now, whole tribes of unappeasable, rising up as one. Needless to say, I still vote for the wife.

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps, Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. 

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God (by Nin Andrews)

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation. 

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm. 

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence. 

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive
them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit. 

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song. 

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night. 

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us?
For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long. 

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.  

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind. 

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created?  How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.” 

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”  

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me. 

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

The Virtual Poetry Conference [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve been daydreaming about the magic wand I kept under my bed as a child.

If my sister or I were sick, I waved it in the air. “Go away sickness. Now!” I would lie back in bed, imagining the gods were listening. I can hear my father’s voice advising me, “Don’t worry. This too shall pass.” He’d hand me a pill—aspirin or penicillin and sometimes Sominex so he could get some rest. For himself he kept a cabinet full of Demerol. 

My son has been seriously ill this summer. And a friend has become mentally ill, so ill she believes she can never leave her apartment again. When I talk to her, I think of that Henri Michaux poem, “Teaching a Statue to Walk.” It’s as impossible to get her to open her door as it is to teach a statue to dance. But people tell me my friend makes sense in this time of Covid. A lot of crazy things seem to make sense now.

After reading the news, I sometimes wonder if the entire nation has become mentally and physically ill. Before this year I didn’t realize the fragility of our minds and bodies. And our democracy. How quickly health can decline! I keep waving my imaginary wand, wishing we could all attain some level of normalcy. But what does that mean? I don’t want to ask for grandiose or political answers here, though they might be merited.  

As a writer, I define normalcy simply as the ability to write in a coffee shop, meet friends for a drink, go to a non-virtual reading where I can peruse books at my leisure, have them signed, and hear the audience laugh and applaud. I wouldn’t mind attending a writers’ conference again, just to feel some sense of literary excitement and camaraderie. It’s lonely—this life of writing at home, far from my poet and writer friends, and it’s scary and heartbreaking to think about all that has happened this year, not to mention what might lie ahead.

But then I reason: at least we have our virtual community. Our virtual readings and perhaps our virtual conferences. I was hesitant to fill out the AWP form and to answer that question: Should the conference be virtual in 2021? The obvious answer is yes. Why risk our health? The obvious question is how? And what would that look like? Will people attend? Books sell? What about all those panels, readings, tables of the latest poetry collections, and random conversations with other writers? What about the dinners and long walks in distant cities? Is there a virtual replacement? What does a virtual conference look like?

I don’t know the answers, but I thought I might try one out. I’ve been eyeing a few virtual conferences  including Lit Youngstown’s small and intimate Fall Literary Conference,  Poets on the Coast, led by the fabulous poets, Kelly Russell Agadon, Susan Rich, and Laura Da’, The San Miguel Writer’s Conference, and  The Brooklyn Book Festival.

Maybe if I attend one, I will be able to answer these questions. Who knows? Maybe I’ll prefer the virtual event to the real thing. The virtual experience could be superior in many ways. I won’t have to stress about my appearance or where I will get my next meal. Or if I can afford the airfare or the conference hotel.  Perhaps the virtual life will be better than the real one. I’ll become a virtual poet, proclaiming the virtues of my virtual existence.

I am beginning to understand my friend a little better.