The Best American Poetry

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.

Reading Poetry to Ward off the Covid Blues [by Nin Andrews]

It’s another day and soon it will be another month in this miserable COVID summer. The sunlight is streaming through my window, and outside, the goldfinches are swooping through the meadow that is so thick with black-eyed susans, it looks like an Impressionist painting. In the distance, I can see the cows in the pasture, calves running behind them, a newborn trying to stand up on wobbly legs. Most years I’d feel a sense of joy at all this pastoral beauty. But this year, I wake each day to a strange ache in my heart, almost as if I have lost a loved one. I try to write but usually find myself just staring at the page. Maybe poetry is the loved one I have lost, I think. A friend tells me I am suffering from the COVID blues. She says lots of folks are, including herself. She’s been riding her motorcycle after dark to escape the loneliness. “You need something powerful between your legs,” she jokes. Like me, she says writing poetry usually gives her a thrill, a sense of romance and escape from the humdrum of daily life.  

I am reminded of the Bruce Bond’s first paragraph of the preface for the most recent PLUME anthology, Plume 8:

“All good poems are love poems. They have something to lose. No less so in the aftermath of loss, or the thick of peril, in the crisis of the here and now that summons language as public and private, all at once. Relational, historical, psychological, poems recover, in light and in spite of human difficulty, a sense of their vocation. They ask us, as they ask themselves, why now. Why a poem. And more challenging still, why beauty.”   

Bond goes on to talk about the many beautiful poems in the anthology, and he’s right. Plume Poetry 8 is a stunning collection, featuring  many of my favorite poets including Lynn Emanuel,  Major Jackson, Albert Rios, Lisa Russ Spaar, Jeffrey Friedman, and Elizabeth A.I. Powell. Reading it does alleviate some of the misery of this peculiar time.  While it would be impossible to pick just one poem to admire, there is a poem by Cynthia Cruz that synchronizes with my current mood:  

The Music

Constellations of evening,

Sweet, the smell of fire
and filth of pines.

Racing through the woods
on silver shining

motorcycle.
What is the sound

of driving back
through black

magnetic fields of night.
Play the record back.

Unpack the accident
down to its haunting.

Its smaller rooms,
its trash and crackle.

This morning
the good voice
spoke to me.

A ghost
entering the body.

Then the sound
of a violin playing.

What I was
is gone.

Now just the din
of smaller sounds

of wayward and crawl.

And then, there is this oddly timely poem by Stephanie Burt, with an epigraph in ancient Greek (which I can’t type out on my ancient IBM Thinkpad, alas). Reading the poem I am reminded of the Molly Arden, whose work and translations of Catullus have appeared here as well as in various literary reviews.

After Callimachus (Hecale, 298)

The gods who made us made us such
          that whenever you or anybody laughs,
someone is probably crying; someone got hurt.
          If the foreground is joy, the background is always sad.
I admit it’s not much
          but it’s something to say, on that poor god’s behalf:
look what he had
          to work with. Look what we came from: water and dirt.

Another anthology that I’ve enjoyed reading in this time of COVID blues is Best Microfiction 2020, edited by Meg Pokrass, Gary Fincke and Michael Martone. I turn to microfiction when I want to be surprised, and this anthology doesn’t disappoint. While I don’t know many of the names of the authors represented, I am delighted to discover them. And to remember how sometimes a very simple piece of prose delights for reasons I cannot and do not want to explain, though a falling club, as described in the following story by Trent England, might be just what I need these days.  

A Quick Word about My Life

Ever since they opened up a falling club in our town, there’s little else that Theresa will do. After her daily shift at the ball bearing plant, she drives to the large, lime-stained building that used to be a Toys “R” Us, where she falls into foam pits, backwards, as though she’s a concertgoer in a mosh pit or a toppled statue of a despot. Like a gym, it has its members and regulars and Theresa remembers everyone’s names. Over dinner, she tells me about Dan who falls because he has a stressful job as a 911 operator or Janet who has three children to feed and thinks that any day her husband will get fired. I hear about Becki who sleeps with night terrors and Greg who can’t sleep at all. And while she’s telling me that if she falls enough she will one day earn a spot in the platinum level, which is the old stock room, and get to step off backwards from an even greater height, I wonder what she tells Dan and Janet and Becki and Greg about her own life or about me, or why, for example, when she leaves for work to drive to the falling club, she passes our house without stopping, without looking up at the window to see her husband standing there.

And now that I am mentioning examples of prose and poetry that have uplifted me, I’d like to close with a link to Dante di Stefano’s stunning COVID poem from last spring, and to the wonderful essays on becoming a poet on the Marsh Hawk Press Website, including essays by Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Stephanie Strickland, and Amy Gerstler. The most recent essay, by Julie Marie Wade, begins: Since I first began writing as a child, a small door inside my head has been propped open, perpetually. In the beginning, I didn’t know it was there, but now I’m sure I couldn’t close it, even if I tried—that essential parenthesis—that necessary gap between the frame and the wall where the first light and the last light stream through.

Larissa Szporluk Reports from Domodossola, Italy

1 April, Domodossola

First to go were the gatherings. With the gatherings, gone was the sound of the gatherings—the voices, the music, the cars, the vespas, mostly the voices. Once in a while, a sudden band of teenagers rounding a corner or tucked between buildings, laughing, breaking the law by gathering. Then spring came in out of the stopped-dead Carnival—birds, flowers, trees in bloom, everything budding, and then even the teenagers vanished. In came the changing of the guard of sounds. Bells got louder. Birds got louder. The electric saw across town of a man cutting wood got louder. Shutters going up in the morning, down in the evening, deafening. Silence got louder, so much louder that it covered the streets and windows and faces behind the masks of the few people allowed to go out and got into the skin and blood and started to take hope away because here, now, silence is synonymous with death. It isn’t beautiful or zen or musical. It is the song of the virus, of the Carnival it took over, of the virtues and vices of the human race it is eating as it slides across towns and regions and borders and oceans, hunting down people of all ages and shapes, growing stronger and longer as it gathers into itself not our bodies or money or talents or dreams, just our breath.

 

Larissa Szporluk's sixth book of poetry, VIRGINALS, will be published by Burnside Review Press in fall 2020. She teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Three Poets: Elizabeth A. I. Powell, James McCorkle, & Rick Bursky [by Nin Andrews]

Last week I started a series called A Virtual AWP, featuring poets that I would have loved to have met or heard read or lecture, whose books I'd have bought and had signed, had I attended. I felt then as I guess many feel now, that a dark wave was rising up above the planet. But I don't want to talk about that . . .

Instead I want to talk about poets like Elizabeth A. I. Powell whose book, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, was a New Yorker "Books We Love 2016" pick and whose new book, Atomizer, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University in the fall of 2020.  I have already been reading poems from her new collection including this lyrical essay from Plume, and this poem from The Los Angeles Review:

STALKING ME ONOMATOPOETICALLY                      

                                   “He closed my legs like a book,” Angela Carter

 

I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic
poem that kept pounding on the door of my mind at four a.m.,
rousing me with a slap on the face with its metaphysics
of sick lust and panic. The order was dated March 1, 2016.
A Thursday. Rainy. The sociopoem smelled of Paco Rabanne—
A Cologne for Men— and was devilishly handsome, so elegant,
so English-lyrically, well-anthologized, and attractive, seemed to have a form
that suggested well-bred content, an understanding of stanzaic
architecture, and deep image. Yet, this poem I loved had once tried
to stab Dorothy Parker at a dinner party. He had claimed
to have French kissed Helen Vender and Allen Ginsberg.
How could I rationalize or reconcile my love for the poem?
The poem tried to kill me, too, with the same red child’s scissors
once,  then another time it was tar and feather, because, the poem said,
“I love you so much.” On therapeutic advice I sought the restraining order
against the poem because it couldn’t contain itself, pushed me
down with a conceit stronger than my fragile couplets, how
it leaked anaphora like anti-freeze, bluish over the page
and into my life uninvited, thinking it knew me
better than I knew myself. The poem’s arguments were convincing,
but it was all fanciful diversion. A lie. All through the day
and all through the night: That poem. The poem telling me I looked fat
in my Lord & Taylor dress. So, I bit the poem’s ear,
again and again, until it bled a scary personification of ears. Stalking
me onomatopoetically down the sidewalk to where I kept my secret
sonnet turns inside. I just wanted to take a nap in Brooklyn,
sleep inside my source material, that pale of settlement,
the origin and end of everything in my family. So that the end
of my suffering might bring an insight, but the poem
turned my nap in Brooklyn into a series of disturbing
and surreal faces that made me awaken into the possibility that
I was the one who was so wrong, so ruined, damaged,
unable to sing. Yet, sometimes, honestly, I loved
what the poem said, when it convinced me of my tyranny.
I wanted to let go. I wanted its untouchable love. I waited for the poem.
The sociopoem’s persona looked like Sir Mick Jagger, wore leather
pants, had biceps, smelled literary and up all night,
like bay rum and old books. The poem had a spell over me,
its incantatory propulsion got into my blood and bile
with its rhythms that made my heart race. It mailed me
threatening letters, collages containing articles about what happens
to women my age, how they die, again and again
alone and withering, like a nasty old tree
from a St. Vincent Millay sonnet taught
in girl’s boarding schools. I wrestled the poem
until it swore to bless me, but it blessed me
in a language that made me feel uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a vowelic yawp. It was a brutal stuttering ich
that made me feel sick, unclean, subway ridden,
which gave the poem a great joy.

Another prize-winning poet I admire and would like to have met is James McCorkle, whose latest book, published by Etruscan Press, is part of Triptych. I think the following excerpt from his poem, "Fire Regime," gives just a hint of what he's up to in this wonderful collection.  

After the warnings, each a measure for the next
an emergency of slowness

is this any worse than before

I am haunted by the thought

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

As language evacuates
its own territories
who is swept along

in the rescue, in the naming
in the columns for those saved, those lost, sold or free.

                            # # #

 

 

 

Finally, I want to mention my friend, Rick Bursky, whose new book, Let's Become a Ghost, is just out from BOA Editions. A surrealist and a truly unique  poet, Bursky is a poet I trust to entertain, inspire, and to take me places I've never been before.

 

I NEVER KNEW MY FATHER COULD PLAY THE HARMONICA

 

I'm sitting with my mother and brother
eating chili at the small dining room table.
My father, dead twenty-six years, wears a black suit,
stands in front of the window playing the harmonica.
There's nothing original about the world,
but we get up each morning and go to work anyway.
A doctor tells us my mother's lungs have weakened.
My father is playing the blues, which I guess
he learned in prison. No one knows who's lonelier:
the ghost or the person who sees the ghost.
Not wanting to embarrass my father I don't look

at the frayed edges of his collar or the hems of his pants.

Last week I forgot to do laundry

and wore the same socks two days in a row.

My brother is first to leave the table,

says something about returning phone calls.

It's rare that we eat dinner together.

Years ago I would have said the light falling

on my father's shoulders made them look like mountains

in the distance with the moon rising behind them;

now I think cardboard theater props.

Sometimes my eyes feel like loaded guns

and I close them for the same reason guns have safeties.

I should be telling this in the past tense

but that would be the beginning of forgetting. 

 

 

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including forthcoming Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her first book of poems, The Republic of Self, was chosen by C.K. Williams as a New Issues First Book Prize winner. 

Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. 

She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. In 2020, she will be Distinguished Visiting Writer at Oregon State University.

 

Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, James McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014). He received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill and the NEA, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

 

Rick Bursky is the author of Let's Become a Ghost Story (BOA Editions, 2020), I’m No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance (BOA Editions, 2015); Death Obscura (Sarabande, 2010); the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize-winning The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), and the chapbook The Invention of Fiction (Hollyridge Press, 2005). He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Originally from New York City, Bursky lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. For more information, please visit rickbursky.com.

A Virtual AWP [by Nin Andrews]

AWP has come and gone, and as you know, many poets and writers and books sellers and editors missed it, believing it best that they not travel or socialize or present their books or new poems during this time of the coronavirus. I wanted to do a post or two featuring a few of the poets and writers I would have liked to have seen, had I been there, had they been been there, had things been different. 

The first is the poet, Amy Woolard, whose much-awaited first book won the Alice James Award. Her poems are smart, sexy, dark, witty, and surprising. I think that if I had bought just one book at AWP, it would have been her collection, Neck of the Woods. Here's a poem by Woolard, first published in April 2018 by The New Yorker. 

Spoiler

Was born a shamble. Was raised, as many, by a marrow & a follow.
Made first fortune before first word. Had it made. Follow left

The house each morning. Marrow worked to the bone. One
Sinister, one borrow I loved more than my own stalled self;

Early knew for certain one tomorrow I’d make a great ain’t. I
Lived from we to we. Tried to save my crumpled singles. Put on

A bold lip, pulled firm on my love like hinging down
A set of attic stairs. What a racket. What a small cord

Attaches us. My heart, still the spelling bee I throw each time
On purpose: we had words, then slept like ice in the slit

Of a tucked top sheet. After a spell, sure I slow-ached, sulked
My way awake. Once upon a table: coffee with chicory & make-

Shift bliss. My eyes, bigger than blue-plates—truth, it was almost
Too much to swallow. Took it to go. Clocked myself out. A time

Or two had my lights knocked out, my knee socks knocked off,
But soft. But still—a ceiling fan, a sill, & a souse who hung

On my every world. No two ways about it; I fell for us, hot &
Mussed as all get out. Took my Eastern time across to the Pacific,

Doubled down & doubled back. Put my face in the path
Of another’s full-palmed slap—struck by how dumb I was

Struck. Inked myself clear until I was sure as sure was
Numb. Got my house in order but never quite could give up

The drink, the way it confects me, the way I stay spoked
With what wrecks me. Curled myself all the way inside

The inside of our last joke, the punched line we lured
The most, as thicket as our thievery, our ashed plot

Unfallowing me like a neck’s own woods toward a choice
Choke of light: I can’t imagine, I reckon I can only imagine.

Next, I would not have missed Denise Duhamel's reading in which she was to read poems from her next book, forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press, including this one, originally published in The American Poetry Review, September/October 2019, Volume 48, No. 5:

DEAR MEMORY,

What have you done with my keys? I blame you
though it’s hard to hold a grudge these days
because I usually don’t remember
why I was angry in the first place. 
I look at a person sure she’s done me wrong
though the inciting incidents are lost. Former students
seem familiar, but their names disperse like cigarette smoke
blowing towards a stool where I once drank myself sick.
Now I’m not even sure what city that bar was in,
the welcoming pink neon letters, another cloud,
as though I am looking at tiny print
without my reading glasses. I was on a pink cloud
when I first stopped drinking. In fact, I once looked up
at the moon, weeping in gratitude. So there,
I do recall something! I was walking across
the Brooklyn Bridge in an ex’s sweatpants
though I’m not sure anymore of his name or if I ever
gave those sweatpants back. I’m usually halfway through
a movie on Netflix when I realize I’ve already seen it,
probably in an old-fashioned freestanding theater,
perhaps a matinee or a midnight screening. 
Perhaps a popcorn bucket on my lap—
that is, if I wasn’t on some fad diet. 
Did I take my pain pill or not? I’m drinking water
but not sure I can detect that bad taste all the way
back on my tongue. Maybe I have been drinking
more water than I thought. Is it time to go
to the gynecologist again? The office usually sends me
a reminder postcard, but today I’m holding
a letter from the Breast Center saying it’s time again
for my mammogram. I usually get a prescription
from the gynecologist about a month beforehand—this is how
it’s been the last few years. I wonder if my doctor is retired
or dead. I would call him, but I have forgotten his name. 
It begins with an S and I think I remember the exit. 
I look through the stack of business cards
I save for moments such as this, but no card for him. 
I go to take out the recycling just moments
after I took out the recycling. I stand at the fridge,
its door ajar—the cold lightbulb, an idea for a poem
which I’ve also forgotten, a sublime dream
that woke me in the middle of the night, a sublime dream
I was sure I’d never forget. Ah, here is my key ring!
But this gold one with the big square head—
what lock could it possibly open?

I would also have gone to a book signing by Sheryl St. Germain, whom I had the good luck of hearing read at the Lit Youngstown Literary Festival last fall, a festival I highly recommend to any poets and writers looking for a smaller conference to present their work. St. Germain's heart-breaking poetry book, The Small Door of Your Death from Autumn House Press and her stunning memoir, Fifty Miles, from Etruscan Press, tell the story of addiction, her son's death, grief, and more. Here are two excerpts from Fifty Miles: 

 

The Amaryllis Bud

opens slowly over the weeks after his death--it will be in full bloom come Christmas day. Grief doesn't come into one fully grown. It's slow, long-living, not like this potted amaryllis, a gift that will die soon after blooming. No, grief's roots go deep, touch enough to last a thousand years. 

January 9, 2015, 3:18 a.m.

You're dead a month today. Tonight one of your songs comes to me in a dream, you know, the one you called "weekend beats slow," the one you said was less a song than a collection of beats?  Over and over it runs through my head, insistent, until it wakes me, and I can't help but feel you are trying to speak.
    If you do come, I guess it will be in ways that are not embodied as you were on earth. I'm selfish, though, and want you back as you were, as a suffering, beautiful young man. But thanks for the music, if that was you.
    And, if it was some vision I created from the bowels of the unconscious, some hallucination, well, bring it on. 

 

 

Amy Woolard is a legal aid attorney working on civil rights policy & legislation in Virginia. Her forthcoming debut poetry collection, NECK OF THE WOODS, received the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, & elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, and The Rumpus, as well as Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction in 2016. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Her other titles include Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. 

Sheryl St. Germain is a poet and essayist whose work has received numerous awards. Her most recent book, a poetry collection, The Small Door of Your Death, was published by Autumn House Press in 2018. For 14 years, Sheryl directed the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and is co-founder of the Words Without Walls program.

Bittersweet Worlds [by Nin Andrews]

A few summers ago I was in Maine, looking out from our house at a meadow full of bittersweet when I asked a poet-friend and gardener extraordinaire, “How do you get rid of bittersweet?” The bittersweet was everywhere, strangling ferns and bushes and covering parts of the meadow where blueberries once grew. “It’s best to ignore it,” she said. “Look past it at the sailboats gliding across the bay because you can’t get rid of bittersweet. It’s like a hydra. You cut off one head, and two grow back in its place.” She was right. The more I pulled out the bittersweet, the faster it grew back. Finally, in a moment of frustration, I hired a man with an excavator to dig up the patch of the meadow where the bittersweet had taken over. Gradually, the meadow grew back in to its natural and beautiful self.

Now, when I look out at the meadow where the bittersweet once grew, I think of Maureen Seaton’s title poem, “Sweet World,” from her latest book published by CavanKerry Press, which I have retitled in my mind as “Bittersweet World.” Instead of invasive plants, Seaton writers about cancer with her characteristic wit and honesty and eloquence.  When I read her work, I pray, “May the bittersweet leave her with only the sweetness that she is.” I am such a fan of her poetry.

Sweet World

I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash

Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath 

at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V 

as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding

a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.

Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused 
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me 

and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days. 
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. 

Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app 
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before. 

A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it. 

Seaton’s book, Sweet World, and my friend’s advice to look past the bittersweet and out at the ocean, and to focus on sailboats gliding by instead of invasive plants, reminds me of the sports writer’s, Tim Wendel’s book, Cancer Crossing about his younger brother, Eric, who was diagnosed with leukemia at three years old but survived until he was ten on an ongoing regimen of chemical cocktails. The story goes back and forth between the story of the pioneering doctors who did their best to save Eric, his family life, and his father’s obsession with teaching the family to sail on Lake Ontario.  

The sailing serves as both a metaphor for cancer—for being at the mercy of the ever-changing whims of the winds and weather, and as an escape from it, a way of concentrating on something else. In one passage, Wendel describes a day when the family sailed into a squall, and his sister, Susan, chose to remain on deck:

“What were you doing up there?” I whispered, not wanting to get her in trouble with Dad.
“Singing,” she said.
“Singing? But why?”
“It made me laugh,” she grinned. “How the wind swept the words away from me before I could hear them.”

I looked at her as if she was crazy. Yet in the months ahead, I began to understand her tenacity and gallows humor in such conditions. Perhaps she realized that the squall line was somehow an omen for what we would encounter, on and off the water. Sometimes such storms would be on us before we knew it, and the only thing we could do was to hang on and find the courage to sing through it all.” (page 73-74)

The book is a heartwarming account of family life, cancer, medical advances, grief, sailing, life in the 60’s and 70’s, and more. It demonstrates how many stories an author can tell in a memoir, even a memoir specifically about cancer. The mix is where the magic of the book occurs.

I am also reminded of David Lehman’s book about his experience with cancer, aptly titled, One Hundred Autobiographies, a title he credits to the poet, Mark Strand, who died of cancer in 2014.  Like Cancer Crossing, Lehman’s book is a collection of interwoven stories in which Lehman displays his unique ability to keep the mind sailing, even when the body is faltering. Like Wendel, he compares cancer to a storm. Chapter 71, “The Sublime Pain of Being,” begins:

Not a day without pain. If not the neuropathy, the problems of adjusting to your prosthetic device, which sometimes malfunctions. The scar where they cut you open and the irritated skin surrounding the stoma. The seemingly interminable indigestion. These are unpleasant but banal. Only on some days do you feel the sublime pain of being alone in the universe. Like the experience of standing on a hotel terrace in Miami during a hurricane watching the wind subdue the royal palms, taking them down, all the way to the point where they are level with the ground; the storm howling in delight at its conquered foes—it puts the fear of the Lord in you. Back in September 2005 I was in Aventura on Florida’s Atlantic coast when Hurricane Katrina made landfall there. The passengers aboard the aircraft two days later were as hushed as the audience hearing a certain four-and-a-half minute John Cage composition.

The book also describes aspects of our Kafka-esque medical system. I was particularly disturbed by this entry from his wife, Stacey’s journal, an entry written at the end of a day of waiting for Lehman to emerge from surgery:

I was alone in the waiting area. Everyone else had gone home. The room was decorated like a cheap chain motel lobby and the garbage bags overflowed with empty fast food containers and coffee cups. Boxes containing scattered slices of cold pizza covered the counter near the coffee machine.

"You can wait for him in his room," the OR receptionist said when I next approached her. "At last," I thought. She gave me the room number, but her counterpart on the urological floor had no record of David. The nurses wanted me to go home. "There’s nothing you can do here," they said. "We’ll let you know when he’s released to his room."

I took the elevator to the recovery suite, but it was crowded, and I seemed to be in the way so I took a seat in the corridor. While watching the nurses tend to David, I did something I rarely do: I burst into tears. "Why is this happening? Why isn’t he in his room yet?"

Ms. Brady, "the patient advocate," went to find out. She returned with a smile on her face, her arms wide, as if she were going to embrace me.

"He’s staying here tonight," she said. "In recovery. Doctor’s orders." She was ebullient. It didn’t make sense. What was there to be happy about? "Now you must absolutely go home," she said. "You can’t stay here all night."

Why not? And why isn’t he in the recovery room?

As one would expect from any book by David Lehman, moments of literary insight and inspiration as well as autobiography, dreams, fantasies, and more, so much more, are woven into the text. In Chapter 30, "What's the Story," he explains his choice of narrative structure: 

I don’t know how the ordeal is going to turn out, and the road connecting memory and desires is not a linear path but a series of quick right and left turns dictated by the local authorities somewhat whimsically to regulate the flow of traffic. Glen, my literary agent and boon companion, thinks I should write an anatomy of cancer on the model of An Anatomy of Melancholy. But one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite, and if you have gotten a reprieve and time is still on your side, you must do what you want and only that.

Finally, I want to mention Cati Porter's poems from her book, The Body at a Loss, in which she describes how a diagnosis changes one's world. In her poem, "The Solution," she, too, uses the ocean as a metaphor for her experience. 

The Solution

One day you awaken to the sound of waves
And the world has dissolved, as sugar into water—

The sudden shift in being, from solid into liquid,
And your matter no longer matters, and when you rise up

To the surface you find there is no surface,
That all potential universes have in fact melted

Into each other, and that all that could be
Had, said, done, been, true,

Has melded into one, fluid as the sea,
Empty and full at once—because that is the way

Of it, as one day the world seems steady, solid, then
The next, the world is nothing more than a vast unboundedness

Where we drift with currents that are driven
By no moon, no you.

A Few Love Poems for Valentine's Day [by Nin Andrews]

How can I resist? It's a day for love, so I feel compelled to post just a few love poems here. First off, from one of my favorite poets, Shivani Mehta:

The Butterflies

You unzip my dress, a curve from the side of my left breast to the top of my hip. My body is a column of butterflies. One by one, roused by the light and cool air, they wake from sleep. One by one they open their wings, answering the instinct to be free. They scatter in all directions; I learn what it means to be in many places at once.

            -- from Shivani Mehta’s Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, published by Press 53

 

Next, from Dante di Stefano. As a Parton fan, I love this poem.

While Listening to Dolly Parton Sing “Lover’s Return,” I Imagine the Girl in You Talking to the Boy in Me

The old gods gather in my chest and throb
the miracles of flame and rusted fender,
composing a ballad for blue flowers
and grandmas toting shotguns up the hill.

I arm my grievances with handwritten
recollections of twirling skirts, moonlight,
hot mouths coming together in the dark,
the burning rafters of adolescence.

Call my kiss a romp through threshing machine
and clawhammer me up a sweet cudgel 
of melody as plain as a mattress
filled with straw tick, where we can trundle on

the big feelings of us joining as one
against the hogtied malice of the world.

            --from Ill Angels by Dante di Stefano, published by Etruscan Press

 

I am so looking forward to Nicole Santalucia's next book, due out this month. Here's a poem from that collection:

Keystone Ode to My Wife after Reading Anne Bradstreet at a One Hundred and Three Year Old Farm House

Between two clouds
and two seedless grapes
and two dandelions,
there are days that fall.
Between two horses
or two farm dogs
or two blackbirds,
there is breath.
Between two mice
or two lightning bugs?or two blades of grass
or two fallen crab apples,
there is a silent place to love.
Between two yellow wildflowers
or two fox kits or two red oak leaves,
there is energy that crashes.
Between two frogs and two trees,
there are two rain drops and two gusts of wind
that blow through darkness,
where two stars
and two far away planets
light up the sky.

            --from The Book of Dirt by Nicole Santalucia, published by NYQ Books

 

Then I think A. R. Ammons, who makes me laugh. 

Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

 

Tryst

I’m going to see you tonight:
birds that know where to fly
are loose under by ribs:

your eyes fly here to my mind’s
eye: I dwell on them;
what if I’m frozen

when I see you; what if I burn
completely up: the birds
may break out and go

too soon; too bad
if my self flies to you
early, and I can’t follow.

            --from A. R. Ammons, The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammon, published by W.W. Norton & Company

And finally, a few translations from the wonderful Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León that remind me of the Ammons' poems. 

Bird

More song than body
More flight than time
It doesn’t fit in itself
or in all its days

Tired of All Metaphysics

Simply put
           I think of sex with you.

            --from Plagios/Plagiarisms Volume 1 by Ulalume González de León,  translated by Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Nancy J. Morales, published by Sixteen Rivers Press.

Letters from Russell Edson [by Nin Andrews]

Last week, I interviewed Peter Johnson about his new anthology of prose poetry, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Really Fly, the title of which comes from Edson’s explanation of a prose poem:

“A prose that is a cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because the pilot doesn't seem to care if it does or not."   

I began to think about the second half of the quote—the idea that the poem works because the writer lets go of it. I have such difficulty trusting in my prose poems as he suggests one should. I asked Peter if he had any other insights or quotes or ideas from or about the enigmatic godfather of prose poetry. Peter informed me that he was not only a good friend of Edson’s, he also has hundreds of letters from Edson. So I asked if he would be willing to talk about Edson and his letters here.

Peter Johnson: I came to Edson’s work later than most prose poets. As I’ve said in numerous interviews, early on I was influenced more by Kafka, Novalis, and Theophrastus. But then some numbskull editor told me that one of my early prose poems was a “cheap imitation of Russell Edson.” Thinking I should at least know who influenced me, I checked out one of his books, and then we became friends after I started my journal. We are very different personalities but we ended up having a long correspondence over the years, and our wives even got along. We did a few events together, one being a week-long conference with you and Robert Bly, which was organized by Chard deNiord, and then Chard invited Edson and me to read at New England College’s MFA program, where we met a few prose-poem haters. He ended up writing me over 350 letters, some detailing everyday life but most being flat-out brilliant. When I asked him to do an interview, he balked, so I went through his early letters, created questions that fit his ideas, and then we went back and forth, creating a kind of long collaborative prose-poem interview, which you can find at https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1596&context=prosepoem. Robert Bly once told me it was the best interview ever done with a contemporary poet. If that’s true, the brilliance comes all from Edson and certainly not from my questions. After Russell died, I met his brother-in-law at Russell’s house to discuss what to do with his estate. Frances, his wife, was there but was experiencing early signs of Alzheimer’s, so it was a bit trying and sad because she’s such a sweetheart. His study contained a wealth of knowledge about him: composition books from grammar school, early drawings, letters to famous poets, even a manuscript of verse poetry. It’s been astonishing to me that no poetry special collections have shown interest in purchasing this archive or my letters, and one guy who heads one of the most important contemporary poetry archives in the country didn’t even know who he was. Just unbelievable, though Russell would have appreciated the snub. The two letters here occurred when I was trying to get my first book published and when he also was reentering the literary world. I was teaching “An Historical Breakfast” and my students were looking for satire in it. Russell talks about this and offers a response to the world of Po-Biz. In the second letter, he discusses process in his own brilliant way.

 

The Perfect Valentine’s Day Gift: A Constellation of Kisses, Edited by Diane Lockward [by Nine Andrews]

It’s February, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. I know the perfect gift for someone you love, especially someone you love to kiss: A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward and published by Terrapin Books. It’s a beautiful collection from start to finish. As Lee Upton writes in the foreword:  

<<<
A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You'll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union . . .  

May there be no end to the most genuine kisses, the right kisses, the ones that are good and meant for us to savor. And while we're at it, let's wish for no end to poems about kissing.
>>>

I thought I’d ask Diane Lockward to say a few words about the anthology.

What inspired you to put together an anthology of kisses?

I don’t remember when the idea first hit me, but it churned in my brain for quite a while. Then I saw that the poet Brian Turner had just put out an anthology about kissing and my great idea hit the floor. I figured he’d just beat me to it, but ordered his book from the library. To my great delight, it turned out that his book is all prose. So my idea was resuscitated. I then put my plan together and put out the call for submissions.

How long did it take to collect 100 great kiss poems?

The call was open for six weeks. From the day it opened, I was bombarded with submissions. The idea seemed to be very appealing to lots of poets. After all, who isn’t interested in kissing? And there are so many different ways to approach the topic. I’ve done three anthologies; this one received by far the most submissions. Making selections was very difficult. I had to consider not only the quality of the poems but also the variety of approaches, tone, form, length. I had to say no to many worthy poems. And I am haunted by the fear that I said no to some poems I should have said yes to. But I did not want an enormous collection. So about 100 poems seemed a good limit.

I’d love to have you post a few kiss poems below, and say a few words about them.

Last Kiss

First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who
count such things say an average person kisses for a total

of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks
was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere

you look. And you learn that cows kiss and squirrels. Puffins,
snails and meerkats! And you are overcome with sorrow and

an overwhelming desire to kiss—to be kissed. And you learn
that’s called basorexia and you have it. You watch the lips

of strangers in the supermarket—wonder if one would want
to kiss you. You know now that a minute of kissing burns

twenty-six calories and that a man lives up to five years
longer if he kisses his lover before he goes to work. You want

to tell someone that. And what’s worse, unlike the first kiss,
the last slipped by unnoticed—unnoted. It might have been

a spring day when daffodils answered the sun’s invitation or
an autumn day when everything else was burning. Or simply

a day you took out the garbage, did a load of wash. Then, someone
comes and takes your hand and you remember words

to a song you thought you’d never hear again and you remember
all those sunsets you forgot to watch and the smell of woods in rain.

And you remember the river, the river—how it presses
its mouth again and again to the swollen sea.

                                    —Jane Ebihara

Nightmare Kiss

The middle of a kiss, and though he opened
up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave
a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:
as if she’d fallen in an open grave,
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,
a simple kiss that rained and filled her head
with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;
why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,
with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead
of kissing someone who would let her out,
kissing someone nicer, who ate less.

                        —Tony Barnstone

How could I not love Jane Ebihara’s “Last Kiss”? There’s so much to be learned here about kissing. The poem is full of facts. Who knew about the kissing of meerkats and puffins? Who knew the word basorexia? The poem is also full of whimsy and longing. It breaks my heart that the speaker’s last kiss is one she does not remember. The longing is contained and controlled within the two-line stanzas, yet spills out so tenderly in the closing images of the poem—that river kissing the swollen sea! What a perfect ending.

With the Barnstone poem you get a sense of the variety in the anthology. This poem is, of course, also about kissing, but it takes a very different approach to the subject. It’s grotesque with its monstrous kiss, the poor woman literally consumed by the wrong man’s kiss. There’s nothing tender here. But what a smart poem! It’s a beautifully executed, two-sentence sonnet, though the reader is so pulled in by the subject matter that form might easily be missed. As in Ebihara’s poem, the imagery is wonderful. There’s the landscape of the man’s mouth where the woman now dwells and the stunning final image of the nicer man she might have kissed, one “who ate less.”

I’d also love a poem from you—maybe a romantic poem, or that wonderful poem, “My Husband Discovers Poetry”?

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband’s coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward is the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind, 2016). She is also the editor of The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics and two previous craft books, The Crafty Poet and The Crafty Poet II. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books. 

A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: a Continuation of an Interview with Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

How did this anthology come about?

            I’m very proud of A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. There are many excellent anthologies out there, but I think A Cast-iron Airplane is unique, and I was extremely happy that Marc Vincenz at MadHat Press had the vision to publish it. How did it come about? The seed was planted forty-three years ago, when I came across Alberta T. Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. At the time it was published people were speaking seriously about the writing process, even in freshmen composition courses. What made Turner’s anthology significant was that poets no longer feared that they might diminish their genius by describing how they wrote. Some of the poets in Turner’s anthology even reproduced various drafts of their poems with original cross-outs and annotations, so we could see how ideas and strategies for poems came about. Their commentaries affirmed my suspicion that there was no one way to write a poem. 

            Turner’s questionnaire was very specific, so much so that some poets refused to participate. They thought her questions were uninspiring or too rigid. One poet, whom she did not name, in a fit of hysteria, likened the questionnaire to something out of 1984, which suggested how distasteful it was for some poets to discuss their process. After all, one way to crown yourself a genius is to suggest that your poems are tiny gifts delivered by the gods in the wee hours of the morning, bestowed upon only special people, of whom you are one.

Alberta Turner was a friend of mine, and I think she would have been very happy to hear you talk about her book, especially about her questionnaire. She loved questionnaires.  So it was her anthology that inspired you?  I remember you talking about her when you were editing the journal.

            I was thinking about Turner’s book when in the last two volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (digitized at https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/), I asked a few selected poets to choose one of their prose poems and to write a commentary on it. Unlike Turner, I didn’t give much guidance. It would be nice, I said, to comment on it as a prose poem, but I didn’t want to restrict anyone. As it turned out, many of the poets chose to discuss the prose poem as a genre, anyway. 

            A Cast-iron Airplane is an expansion of that project. I think it’s a useful book. For one thing, it’s a solid collection of prose poems written by some of the best American practitioners of the genre. It also provides a good way of looking at the prose poem as a legitimate genre by focusing on what the poets themselves have to say. Certainly, if poets call their poems prose poems and confess that they were self-consciously writing them as prose poems, thinking about a tradition that preceded them, then we should pay attention to that. If we find, as Charles Simic suggests, that he never thought of the short prose pieces in The World Doesn’t End as being prose poems, then that, too, is significant. In short, by hearing poets describe their writing processes, we can often situate their prose poems in a broader literary, historical, and cultural context, which helps us to evaluate and appreciate their poems. 

            Two submissions—one from Charles Simic, and the other from Carolyn Forché—provide very different examples of the commentaries in the book. Rather than comment on them, I’ll let these two poets speak for themselves.

Carolyn Forché

“The Colonel”

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

COMMENTARY

I wrote the poem in a single night on an electric typewriter that faced a window tufted with frost. Between the sentences of the poem, I watched the snow fall on the other side of the black glass. The room was painted white and did not belong to me. I was not present in the room during the writing of the poem, but somewhere else. I was there again, in the colonel’s house, typing from memory verbatim the details of that night because one day I thought I might write about it and I didn’t want to forget anything. I worried that I would forget but I need not have: everything still comes back very precisely and sometimes in slow motion although the night I was taken to talk with the colonel is now forty years in the past. The poem that was not intended to be a poem emerged as a cube, shaped like a room. The moon in the poem hangs from a black cord the way a lightbulb hangs from the ceiling of an interrogation room. It may have to do with a trick of the mind, turning the room into the site of an interrogation. Or that is what I have thought at times in the years since. The parrot said hola not hello. I could have written hola but kept it in English. As children, we used to press our ears to the ground to listen for trains coming. Trains about to arrive. In that sense, we were listening for something that would happen in the time to come. I know that dead ears cannot hear anything. I know that. I had no power to convey the colonel’s sentiments to the American president.

Charles Simic

I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.

COMMENTARY

I remember the night well. It was quarter to three and I was about to compose a poem. My dog Igor was barking viciously at the moon out in the yard and getting on my nerves. In my laboratory, Ligeia had just put the final cleaning touches to a test tube and was reaching for a jar labeled prose poetry on the shelf, when to my horror I noticed that this admirable woman of rare learning known for her singular yet placid cast of beauty was chewing bubble gum. I threw a fit so loud and protracted, it even made that stupid dog out there shut up. You’d think, I asked heaven to be my witness, that after everything she had to put up cohabitating with that bum and souse, Edgar Poe, she’d have learned how to conduct herself in the presence of another lofty poetic genius sensitive to the slightest distraction? I must have blacked out after that, since I remember nothing else of that horrible night.

So how did the poem get written then? I’ve no idea. What I can swear on a stack of Bibles is that never in my life did I sit down with the intention of writing a prose poem. My book of untitled prose fragments, The World Doesn’t End, was not originally labeled prose poetry. In fact, the manuscript I sent to the publishers wasn’t called anything. What I had done is to copy some of my nearly illegible scribblings from old notebooks, which after I rediscovered them and read them, struck me as having poetic qualities of their own and strung all together surprisingly read like a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. After tinkering over them for several months and reducing the manuscript to sixty-eight pieces, I showed them to my editor at Harcourt who to my surprise offered to publish them. However, just before the book was to appear, I got an urgent call from her asking me what do we call this? Don’t call it anything, I told her, but she explained to me that a book needs to be called something, so that libraries and bookstores know on what shelf to put it. After giving the matter some thought, I agreed to call it prose poetry.

Looking at the poem today, I can guess what was in my mind when I wrote it. Warning children about being stolen by the gypsies if they wander off is a stock phrase East European grandmothers and mothers use to scare children. As a city kid, stuck living in an apartment building, the life of the gypsies, from what I saw of it in Yugoslavia, seemed far more attractive to me. Of course, I knew my little tale about how I kept changing identities had to be short. I had read and liked plenty of prose poetry before I wrote what I wrote here, but I admired most of all the brevity and stunning lunacy of Max Jacob’s, Daniil Kharms’ and Russell Edson’s finest poems. They are like parlor magic tricks which make you scratch your head after you see them, like the one called “Miser’s Dream” where a seemingly infinite supply of coins is plucked out of the air by the magician. That’s the marvel of a prose poem too. It looks like prose on the page, but acts like a poem in your head.

“The Colonel,” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Commentary used by permission of Carolyn Forché.

“I was stolen by the gypsies,” from The World Doesn’t End, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Poem and commentary used by permission of Charles Simic.

Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon  (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry(Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.

An Interview with Prose Poet Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

When I think of prose poets from this country, the two names that come to mind are Russell Edson and Peter Johnson. Neither you nor Edson ever write (or wrote) in verse, and both of you have (or had) a lot to say about the prose poem. I’d love to hear you talk about your own work today, and about the new anthology, A Cast-Iron Airplane That Can Actually Fly, tomorrow.

How did you become a prose poet?

            I’m the least likely candidate to be a prose poet. I had four years of French, nine of Latin, and five of Classical Greek. My Masters thesis was an introduction to and translation of the Psychomachia, a thousand-line Latin poem written by Marcus Aurelius Prudentius. With that background, I probably should be writing sonnets. So why the prose poem? For one thing, I was a terrible verse poet, mostly because I couldn’t have cared less about line breaks. But, of course, my situation was more complicated than that. Perhaps the best, and most concise, way to explain why I became a prose poet is to look at one of my early poems, called “The Millennium.”

                                                    The Millennium

            In the basement, in the playroom, Ken’s throwing darts at another Ken while the flies of fairy tales nod off on a concrete wall, on a red plunger by the sink, on a lonesome cue ball. Upstairs, a pair of twins dancing on a hardwood floor, pushing tiny Santas in miniature baby strollers. I need help to sit down. “Next you’ll be wanting a back rub,” my brother says, then leaps from a coffee table, toppling our Christmas tree. Not enough bulbs to poke holes through this night’s black logic. No one strong enough to turn The Great Telescope, still partially unwrapped.
             Four hours to midnight, my niece embracing her Sleepy-Time Barbie, eyelids set to close at the turn of the century.

            “The Millennium” is the last poem in Pretty Happy!, my first volume of prose poetry. It changed everything for me. I’m very fond of Pretty Happy!, but, looking back, I see how haunted some of the poems were by other texts, such as, Kafka’s parables; Novalis’s short prose; the character sketches of the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus (whom I had translated in graduate school); and even things as silly as the “Fractured Fairy Tales” episodes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and sketches from my beloved old copies of Mad magazine. Those influences were present long before I came to the oneiric landscapes of Charles Simic, Russell Edson, and Max Jacob. That’s not to say I didn’t have a voice or subject matter. I’m a mix of high and low cultures. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood near the steel plants in Buffalo, New York, but I went to a Jesuit high school where, as I said, I studied classical languages and was immersed in the Western Canon. It’s not surprising that in one of my later prose poems I have Socrates picking a booger from his nose while pontificating on father/son relationships. But how to the find the right way to express my high/low sensibility? How to find a style and form that was, well, “natural?”
            And then “The Millennium” arrived.

 

Then “The Milleunium” arrived. That’s when your poems changed?

            It was 1995 and I was back in Buffalo, sledding with my son on Christmas Eve as the world inched its way toward the Millennium. We were riding a sled made from plastic as thin and durable as cellophane. We went hurtling over a snowboarding hump, and upon landing, I heard a crack and felt a sharp pain in my back. A half an hour later I was in an emergency room with a number of drunks who had tumbled down the stairs at a Buffalo Bills football game. Three hours later, I was hauled off to Mercy Hospital. I needed no operation but was told if I fell down over the next month or two I would probably be paralyzed. So sitting on a couch in my mother’s living room, stoned on Darvocet and Valium, I took in my surroundings, grabbed my notebook, and decided to write some paragraphs. Many of the images and sounds were before or below me: my niece’s Barbie and Ken dolls, my mother’s artificial Christmas tree, the red plunger by the sink, a lonesome cue ball banging into another ball in the basement.
            But then the “flies of fairy tales” appeared, and the poem became a bit more apocalyptic and improvisational, as images and dialogue, real and imagined, collided, with the soundtrack of the Smashing Pumpkins’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” providing background music from my portable CD player.
            For once I never intruded on these images or sounds. Of course, the poem went through revisions, but the method, if that is an accurate word for letting one’s imagination roam and make unusual leaps and connections, was new and exciting for me. After “The Millennium” I felt comfortable with the poetic process, and most of the poems preceding it in the book were written after it.
            And did the freedom of the prose poem allow me to make this leap? Of course. If I’m walking down the street on the way to a friend’s house, I have to stop at traffic lights or make turns. Isn’t that what verse poetry is? Isn’t that why it’s called verse, from the Latin verto, to turn. In contrast, the prose poem is like an open pasture where no direction is necessary. Where anything can happen. Where contradictions and juxtapositions (those odd leaps that often transcend logic) are not only welcome but expected—contradictions and juxtapositions that would become even wilder in my next few darkly comic collections.

Yes, I agree. I think the freedom that a prose poem offers seems exhilarating to many poets, especially young poets. 

            But this freedom comes at a very high price. I edited a prose-poem journal for nine years, and poem after poem was overwritten. “Too much language chasing too little of an idea,” as Russell Edson used to say. So much prose poetry now is nothing more than people thinking out loud about a variety of irrelevant topics. Very few surprises. Very few linguistic leaps, as if their thoughts are somehow significant because they are poets. These poets do not bring to the prose poem the same discipline they would demand from their verse poetry.
            Everything I’ve worked toward in my prose poetry can be seen in my new book, Old Man Howling at the Moon. In it, we find a Grumpy Old Everyman, who is terribly angry that the old grand narratives he’s lived by are barely recognizable anymore.  He’s a ranter and a raver. He’s outraged and often outrageous, and yet he can also be funny, and in spite of his grumpiness, the book ends with this prose poem called “Happy,” which suggests a bit of consolation.


                                                    Happy

Gentle Reader,

            In spite of persistent rumors, let me assure you that I’m happy. 
            Happy as the Brazilian beauty in a red thong cavorting half-naked on the Travel Channel.
            Happy as the local loony screaming at the same tree every morning, convinced it’s an enemy from a past life.
            I’m happy I can say, “Don’t go away I’ve got the baddest poem right here in my back pocket,” and no one thinks I’m nuts. 
            Happy for artificial putting greens, yellow buses that swallow up children yet no one gets hurt. 
            Happy for tuna fish and the piano player at Nordstrom who asked me to sing along. 
            Crusty sand dunes, orchids, a solitary grayish cloud frozen in the sky―I’m happy for them. 
            Happy for the rust-colored bottom of a rap diva, for the ant-sized beauty mark on my wife’s bum. 
            Happy a sixty-six-year-old man can dance and play air guitar in his boxer shorts while his teenage son laughs himself silly. 
            Even happy for Plan A, though I’ll never understand it, and for the chance, no, pleasure, to spend a few idle moments inside this here ellipsis . . . 

 

From Old Man Howling at the Moon (Madhat Press, 2018).

 

Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon  (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry(Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.

Tim Seibles on Writing in the Trump Era [by Nin Andrews]

NA: In this era of Trump and the Republican stranglehold on truth, I have been having a hard time writing, or even thinking about writing. I feel helpless when I read the news or talk to people who are so politically different from me. Yesterday, I was at the doctor’s office, listening to two elderly white men talk about how great Sean Hannity is, and how our country is, at last, in good hands.  I could feel my blood pressure sky-rocketing. Afterwards, I sat at my desk, and instead of typing, I stared out the window, thinking of Roethke's lines, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade . . .” 

I began to wonder, how are others coping? I thought I’d ask a few other poets, starting with Tim Seibles. 

NA: How are you coping in the Trump era? Are you writing? 

TS: During these times of Trump—times of idiocy, corruption and the resultant despair—I have found writing to be a place of energizing solace.  Though it is an illusion (at least in part), when I’m working on a poem, I feel like I’m talking back to the horror and cultivating some form of resistance to the infection that this administration represents.  Poetry, whether it be raging, broken-hearted, or ecstatic, is life affirming. It reminds those who are interested that others also suffer and yearn and see the trouble.  In some ways—both obvious and not—poetry itself means that being alert emotionally and intellectually is worthwhile.  In my darkest moments, I still believe that such engagement will help decide what kind of future will follow this insane period.

NA: Please share a couple of poems on the topic.

TS: 

KNOCK-KNOCK

It’s quiet—
like a fly
in a frog’s mouth. 

Say something
loud
but secret
like starlight
banging on a bug’s back,

something
so true
that
just the suggestion

un-hands the clocks—

why pretend
that I’m not
what I am:

a hard-on
held by the head nun,
that rogue fart in the flower shop,
freak branch
on the family tree,
that mad song
in a mum city—I am that
misfit music, that
two-headed Ken,

that Whoopsupsidethehead,
antsinyourpants
whatcanIsay:

I bum-rush the world,
find another world inside:
that last chance,
the lost choir,
that Ghost Dance
come again—

who says

we can’t

be free?

NOT NEARLY ENOUGH          #2
                        for Cesar Vallejo

Yesterday, maybe—tomorrow perhaps,
but today, no one is reading
my poems, no one at all!
It’s as if my whole life
has been covered like a parrot’s cage,
so everybody can get some sleep.

I didn’t mean to shout, to blaspheme,
to interrupt, curse, use slang, obsess?
over women’s thighs.  I did not
mean to cause trouble    did I?
Maybe I did.  Of course, I did—

but for the best possible reasons:

• There’s no pretty way to fight ugliness.
• There’s not nearly enough love going around,
• nowhere near an adequate array of sexual
• collaborations: in fact, a wild lack
• of empathy and daring, especially
• from God who has fallen wildly
• short of my expectations.

Where is the man who sees war on TV
and runs screaming naked down the street
with the head of his johnson flapping
back and forth, thigh to thigh
like a flag in a jock-less wind!?

And, with her marvelously chocolate booberoos
glossed with sunlight and saliva, where is
the woman who bursts into Our Lady of Hope
Cathedral singing Tell me somethin’ good!?

We see children, we were children—
with dolls that peed, with wooden trucks,
with wind-up frogs, and hide & seek—
who knew better than what our parents said.
Tell me: how did we let these fuckheads run the world
off the road?!  We cannot snuggle our brains
up our asses and wonder why morons
come to power with their sad toupees,
their burger-driven breath, their prune-sized
hearts    and wonder why our lives fit like
barbed wire brassieres!  Am I right or am I wrong??

This is mostly what I’ve been trying to get at
with poetry, but maybe I overdo, maybe
I pile on, maybe I’m impatient, maybe I’ve lost sight
of what people really want, which is to cuddle
the status quo like a syphilitic teddy bear! 
My mother used to say—before giving me
a good spanking—
You have gotten beside yourself, you
onion-headed little maniac.  In fact,
I am standing beside myself, right now:
staring at myself staring back at myself,
asking—with musty contempt—“Why
aren’t you reading my poems?!”

Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. His latest collection, One Turn Around the Sun was released in 2017. He just completed a two-year appointment as Poet laureate of Virginia.

Photo credit: Jennifer Fish

Death, Poetry, and the Three Pigs [by Nin Andrews]

When I pulled a slim volume of poetry off the shelf and read the following description on the back, I knew I had to read it.  “In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive!” How could I resist a death that feels alive? The first poem in the book that I flipped to was this: 

Completion

We like to cross things off our lists.
The wedding gift has been shipped.
Groceries in the fridge. Book written.
Dying is the last item to be checked off the list.
I wish I could cross it off myself as I was
in the act. I’d insert a pink ink cartridge
in my special Pilot, draw a withering line
through the word die (maybe a smiley face?)
as my last breath left my lungs. Be there for me
if and when, as I might need you to hand me
my pen. Hand me my pen.

The poem surprised me, in part because I, too, have been putting death on a checklist, along with eggs, toilet paper, coffee, gardening, and calling Nicole. (I need to call Nicole!)  But I don’t mean death exactly, not as Dower does, but rather, thinking about death. Because I’m trying to be a better Buddhist, and thinking about death is an important part of Buddhist practice. There’s even an app for this called WeCroak, which I downloaded two days ago. Now WeCroak dings me 5 times a day and reminds me that I will die. And each time it dings, I think about Claire Bateman’s poem, “LXI,” from her miraculously beautiful book, The Locals, that begins:

                                                                            LXI

            In this realm, most of the citizens have become aficionados of their own death scenes, traveling repeatedly into the future to
        snap photographs from various angles, host parties, or engage in religious ceremonies, whether or not the dying version of any
        particular self is still a believer.

But sometimes when I practice with WeCroak, I worry that I’m not doing it right. For Buddhists death is supposed to be an opportunity to transform from the proverbial caterpillar into a butterfly. So thinking about death should be a way of thinking about this transformation, just as Dower does in her lovely poem, “Confessions of a Butterfly.”

Confessions of a Butterfly

I stuffed myself with milkweed
in my adorable larva stage
making my wings large

bright orange. I’m desperate
for people to admire
my delicate beauty and believe

I bring them good luck.
With my life span as short
as a rose’s, I don’t waste my time

fluttering through the fields
mingling with the flowers.
I plan to follow the heat, echo

in its warmth, power straight
into the sun, feel each ray slash
my wings, burn them to powder,

light up the world.

After reading this poem, I tried and failed to imagine myself as a lowly being changing into a winged one, and then lighting up the world. I think I am lacking what Claire Bateman calls Epiphany Insurance. As she explains in her poem, "XXXI:"

                                XXXI

        Question: What do the following inhabitants of this realm, strangers to one another, have in common?

        a. the scholar shredding his dissertation
        b. the scientist scowling at the printout of her test results
        c. the songwriter unable to move past the first stanza

        Answer: Each has neglected to maintain payments for the Individual Epiphany Insurance, allowing coverage to lapse. Thus, despite the severity of their woes, no one will offer them even the most perfunctory expression of sympathy. 

Whatever the cause, I find it difficult to think of the dead as liberated beings. If the dead could talk, I imagine they'd tell me how much they wish they were still here, eating ice cream or making love or just shooting the breeze, as they do in this flash fiction story by Meg Pokrass, from her new book, The Dog Seated Next to Me:

What the Dead Want

There are so many dead people in her life, especially in this house. They float around and exaggerate. They want to see something sexy. That nightgown? they say. They miss eating berries. They’re sure she’ll be okay. They say wonderful things about what you might do here on earth. They should have taken more lovers, had more beach weekends, seen more foreign films. They ask for autographs from the living.

 

 

And there is also this engaging flash fiction piece by Pokrass, which is more about absence than death. 

 

What Are You Doing, Friend?

His voice tender and sore. Not angry, like the photo. Not turning on this moment.

The woman lives in there still. What are you doing? she whispers, because he is not the him that can be spoken to.
This is surely a ghost. She walks around the house barefoot, looking at stacks of problems. Touching his absence.
What are you doing, friend? she might ask his light blue eyes that look like birds. 

I love the mystical feel of that poem, and of all the poems I've mentioned here. I sometimes worry that I lack any mystical visions. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been taking classes in Buddhism. (I’m a repeat student—I never progress.) Last week, we had a guest-speaker from Tibet named Tenzin who tried to simplify his lesson by fitting Buddhist principles into the story of the three pigs. The three pigs, he said, represent the three steps one goes through when becoming enlightened.

The first pig, he said, is the piggy who becomes happy with himself after meditating. And he’s so happy being happy. He feels great.  He can just sit there on his zafu, all blissed out. (Oh, to be the first piggy!)

But then, alas, one day he becomes the second piggy. This happens when he thinks of the other pigs, the other less happy pigs. He worries about them . . . Maybe his heart even aches for them. I’m not entirely sure what he does with his newfound awareness of the unhappy pigs in the world. I think he just sits there, dwelling on their condition. Maybe he writes poems about them.

But then, one day he turns into the third piggy, and he seeks to save all the other pigs. How he does this, I don’t know. Maybe he becomes a Buddha-pig. Or a Dalai Lama-pig. Maybe he teaches everyone to sit on his or her cushion and become a pig like piggy number 1.  

Now that I reread what I have written, I don’t think I have the story right. I asked my friend, Anne, a fellow student and Buddhist practitioner, and she said that the third piggy is actually a transcendent pig. Because he’s free. He has no bodily limitations. He might even be a bodiless pig.  

A bodiless pig? I give up. Now, all I can think of is Edson’s famous poem, “A Performance at Hog Theater.”

A Performance at Hog Theater

There was once a hog theater where hogs performed 
 as men, had men been hogs.

One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has 
found a mouse which is being eaten by the same hog 
which is in the field and which has found the mouse, 
which I am performing as my contribution to the 
performer’s art.

Oh let’s just be hogs, cried an old hog.

And so the hogs streamed out of the theater crying, 
only hogs, only 

hogs . . .

The Orange King (by Nin Andrews)

An Interview with Sydney Lea (by Nin Andrews)

NA:  On Monday, I posted an interview on this blog in which I talked about the anthology, Here, Poems for the Planet, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. I want to follow it with this interview with Sydney Lea, whose latest poetry collection is also called Here. I thought I’d start by posting the stunning opening poem from the book.

Here at Summer’s End

                                                                         –for Jerry Dennis

That birds have largely quieted may distress us,

and like neglected mail, the garden’s lettuce
went yellow weeks back, then simply dissolved. But we ought to pause
before we focus on loss
in a season still teeming with vegetation.
No matter the month, our sense of wonder remains–
unless we will it to leave.
Even now the mercury flirts with 85,
so it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide
to convene for migration.  We can watch their flocks in the roadbeds.

It’s a marvel as well, whatever the force is
that already starts to blanch the legs of the snowshoe hares.
Our longing is always for now to endure,
though since the dawn of thinking, many a thinker
has found death an engine of beauty.
Truth is, however, our world will never go dead:
those heads of lettuce have fused with humus below,
and after those starlings wing off, the juncos and titmice will show,
and the ghostly hares of winter

won’t be ghosts at all but creatures
with dark flesh packed onto bone under ivory hides.
Coyotes will hunt them to keep alive
through the ineluctable –I almost said awful– chill,
and even then, the ice-beads on softwood boughs may look,      
if we want, like permitted fruit. As a season nears,
or lingers, or ends, an amplitude can tell us
we still are subject to spells.
We’re here after all. Let’s chant it throughout the year,

like so much birdsong: we’re here we’re here we’re here

NA:  When I first read this poem, I read it as an exhortation to remain optimistic in the face of inevitable loss, and to keep our sense of wonder alive. It’s an appeal that I find hard to follow these days, thanks to climate change. Were you thinking of that when you wrote the poem?

SL: Well, in all candor, though I am as full of anxiety about climate change and fury at its deniers as I can possibly be, I don’t think confronting its apocalyptic threats is what I was thinking about. For me, a poem tends to begin not with some « idea » but  with a little inkling. I rarely have a sense of what it bodes until I have finished the poem…at which point that poem will reveal its about-ness to me– and even then only partly, perhaps.

As I recall, I was reading in Jerry Dennis’s terrific book, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, and I came on a passage suggesting that the sense of wonder will never leave us unless we allow it to do so. I happened to look up and notice a pre-migratory aggregation of starlings (invasive species!) gathered in our field. Then I started to write.

Given Jerry’s words, there can be small doubt that an impulse to optimism, or maybe rather a yearning for it, despite all the reasons for pessimism anybody can muster, preceded what I wrote.

Truth is, pessimism is too damned easy. It’s a safe escape. Anybody can do it, as I know too well, because I am inclined in a gloomy direction a great deal of the time. (Our GP calls me Eeyore and my can-do wife Tigger.) But the fact remains that unrelieved dreariness is a lazy person’s recourse, and it contributes nothing in the end.

NA: Peter Taylor, the southern fiction writer and a friend of my parents, once told me that in order to become a writer, I should rely on what he called my gift of gab, or what my father jokingly called my gift of circumlocution. In some ways, your work reminds me of Peter Taylor’s. I think, at the core, you are a New England storyteller, just as Peter Taylor was a Southern short story writer and a natural raconteur. I wonder what you think of that comparison, and of his advice.

SL: To be compared to Peter Taylor is an honor of which –no false modesty here– I am not worthy. But Robert Penn Warren, an early and precious encourager of my poetry and a friend of Taylor’s too, said something very similar about garrulity. He recalled sitting in the company of older countrymen and –women in Kentucky and being moved by the way they told stories. My upper New England connections go far back, and they provided similar experiences in kitchen, lumber camp, canoe, hunting cabin, and so on, and at a very early age I was enthralled by those voices, but also by the way in which the stories became a kind of community property.

So even if pure narrative is for me not as important an aim as it was when I was a younger writer, what I call narrative values– the speaking voice, character, setting– remain crucial to what I do. I do not, by the way, propose what I do as a self-evident virtue; it is merely what I do, and scarcely precludes my love for all manner of other approaches, including your own, my dear interviewer.

NA: In both your work and Peter Taylor’s, place is almost a character, a voice, a presence. And of course, the title of this book is Here. I wondered if you would say a few words about the importance of place in your work.

SL: Well, place is obviously a crucial matter to me. (My one novel is entitled, tellingly, A Place in Mind.) And in a curious way, that matter relates pretty directly to the whole narrative impulse to which you just referred. I would have to be a hell of a lot more « postmodern » (whatever that means) than I am to imagine a story devoid of physical associations. In my case a drifting away from sensory reality –here I am: what does it feel-look-taste-smell-sound like?– is a drifting into…what? Foolishness. Sometimes I like to make cases in my poems, to argue, to use rhetoric in its classical sense; but if I do that without « grounding » my commentary in something tangible, I just become an inane talking head.

NA: Many of your poems reflect on loss, or immanent loss, and speak of loved ones who have died. But I don’t think you mention the poets you have admired and known. What one poet (besides Frost) is or was a major influence in your work?  Just talk about one.

SL: I’ve spoken of Mr. Warren. I should also mention Maxine Kumin, who blessed me by suggesting that I avail myself
of common sense, which she had in uncommon and dazzling measure. Anthony Hecht strongly approved of my early efforts, also a blessing. To be absolutely honest, however, I’d say that Romantic English poets were my most compelling models, especially Wordsworth, with his conviction, as he says in the uncompleted Recluse, to find exalting poetic themes in   “the simple produce of the common day.”

Frost, another obvious mentor, as you note, was if anything anti-Romantic, but in one of my favorite of his lyrics, “Hyla Brook,” he asserts that “we love the things we love for what they are.” To refer to the poem with which you started, when I write that

               it’s wondrous, say, how starlings decide

               to convene for migration.  We can watch their flocks
                                             in the roadbeds

I am almost perversely aware that starlings are in most respects very unexalted birds; they are not eagles– but what’s wrong with “what they are”? The common day often can and must suffice.

You told me to limit my comments to one poet, and I seem to have defied you.

NA: I love this poem:

Chimera

The eagle’s wings were angled
In a stoop that seemed almost languid,

And yet in an eye-blink it flew
Past the window and out of view.

For me, now in my seventies,
It can feel as if everybody

Were gone, or about to be gone:
For instance, my brother-in-law,

dead some time now, young.

I loved him for years and years.
Parents. A sibling. Peers.

The great creature’s cutting across
The window: less sight than loss,

As if flight had exemplified
The concept, brevity,

And the bird were conscious of me,
And consciousness were crucial

In you or me or an eagle.

SL: Oh, I hadn’t known you’d be quoting me on an eagle. It’s kind of a good segue, though, in the sense that that poem is, I think, a corrective to sentimental views of nature, which Tennyson was right to describe as “red in tooth and claw.” Let’s marvel at the natural world, all right, but let’s not Disney-fy it; above all, let’s not imagine it as a great storehouse of metaphor, whose function is to provide poets with compelling figures of speech. One can be hopeful without lying.

NA: I am still wondering about your influences, particularly your spiritual influences. The title of the book, Here, sounds very Zen to me. And so many of your poems show a profound reverence for nature. Nature, a source of metaphors for many poets, is far more than that in your work. 

SL: I am skeptical of poetry –particularly my own!– as prophecy. And yet there are some odd prognostications in this book. Looking back, I note how many of the poems, including the title poem with which you started, express a sort of wonder at the fact that I am still living in a physical world. This may just be a product of being in my seventies. Many, probably most of these poems were composed before late August of 2016– when, at 73, I had a heart attack, and came close to not being in that world.

Had my own male forebears not all collapsed from cardiac events, including my father at 55, I’d never have thought to visit the tiny clinic an hour from our Maine camp on the New Brunswick border. I’d been training for an annual flat-water kayak race, thinking I’d do the twelve-miler rather than the six that year, because I felt about as fit as I had even the summer before. I noticed a pinch, something like a mosquito bite, in my chest. I didn’t pay it much mind. I had  no dizziness or shortness of breath, though I did feel unusually tired. I figured things would sort out if I took a nap. They didn’t, so off we went. After a three-hour ambulance ride from that small hospital, I arrived at the cardiac unit of the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

I don’t smoke or drink, and I exercise pretty vigorously. When I said that to the cardiologist, he said « Hmmm…Think genes might have something to do with it? » My right coronary artery was 100% occluded. A stent was put in and, three years later, this summer, I established a personal best in the race.

The poems that followed my coronary seem more consciously aware of how physical presence, here-ness, matters. In the collection’s final poem, for example, I write about sitting in my my long-time barber’s chair:

            I contemplated the ancient jug of Lucky Tiger,
            Paul’s horseshoe-pitching trophies,
           The snapshot, curling around its tacks,

           Of the 350-pound bear at his feeder.
           And Paul. And myself. Right there in the mirror,
           As ever. 

All those simple details felt like marvels. I have always known (and this may be the Buddhistic inclination you surmise) that I am at my best when I am as fully engaged in the present as I can be, at my worst when I am projecting problems and outcomes into the future. I am not a Buddhist but rather a radically unorthodox Christian; and I can get similar lessons from my church’s tradition: « Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself »; « Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? » And so on. Of course, I betray my own sanity every day, but I do know where it lives.

NA: There is such love of family, home, neighbors, and nature in your work, such happiness, such gratitude—even when you write of grief, sorrow, sickness, or your own mortality. I think of you as one of the rare happy poets I know. Or rather, one of the rare poets who writes well about happiness. That’s one of the things I admire about your work—I who come from a father who always said, “If you have something nice to say, don’t bore me.” Is this a conscious decision? To be uplifting?

SL: I have had several interludes of clinical depression, a couple demanding hospitalization, in my life. So, for all the countless blessings I have been granted, I do know what the dark side looks like, and I think my poetry collections may wander into it in their opening sectors. But I do purposely arrange those books (and sometimes individual poems within them) to suggest that there can be a path or paths out of despair. One sure way to block the escape, I believe, is the egotistical delusion that I can make immense changes in the universe by way of exerting my puny self. There is a Power, indeed many, far greater than trvivial me.

The final section of Here suggests that a lot of un-hip, bourgeois pleasures– matrimony, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, friendship– lie along the way up and out of the mire. As I may just have implied,I placed “Here Itself” in the final position by design. It rehearses some simple behaviors like getting a haircut or paddling the Connecticut River, which turn out to be subtly redemptive.

I know, I know: such redeeming moments would scarcely be available, say, to a Honduran mother robbed of her children as she endures life in one of the vile Trump's accursed camps. I have, I suppose, written my share of poems lamenting or attacking human-imposed suffering. Yet I remain utterly unconvinced that poetry is the best means of helping to alleviate such horrors. Rather than writing raves or boo-hoo poems about the conditions poets may observe (in too many cases out the window on their way to the faculty meeting), why not do something more practical? As for me, for two decades I’ve been deeply involved in a land trust whose mission is to conserve forest (400,000 acres of it, a pretty good carbon bank), but not merely to set it aside: we strive equally hard to provide sustainable provide timber-products jobs in the poorest county in Maine. For a quarter century I also taught in and chaired an adult literacy organization in Vermont, a wonderful outfit that, of course hardly because of my efforts alone, offered its own path out of despair for a great number of people.

None of my endeavors, none by the worthy institutions to which I lent what help I could– none fixed Syria. Nor Libya, Sudan, Guatemala...on and on. But the plain fact is that I am where I am, and where, I trust, poetry is available, to quote Wallace Stevens, "merely in living as and where we live."

NA: I know what you mean about the limitations of poetry. That’s why I’ve written The Last Book of Orgasms, which I imagine to be my last book of poems. Who has time for orgasms or poems these days? I am only half-joking. But again, I am reminded of something Peter Taylor said—that we write what we are given. I’ve always been interested in the word, given.

SL: Well, no more talk of quitting writing from you, maestra! That awful notion dispatched, I agree that the notion of the given–whether or not « religiously» construed– is an absorbing one.

It is, for one thing, despite all I’ve said about living  in the palpable world, often hard to say where « reality » leaves off and our subjective take on it intrudes. One might even make the case that since the Romantics, that issue is the one that poetry is meant to explore. And of course the dichotomy may be, probably is, a false one altogether. To revert to the influence on me of those old New England yarn-spinners, I have known men and women whose character and existence made it hard to distinguish capital-N Nature from human nature.

NA: I’d like to close the interview the poem, “Easy Wonder.”

Easy Wonder

                                        Oxbrook Lake, July 2014

My love, we floated for hours 
in kayaks, side by side, scarcely dipping our paddles.
No motors allowed here, no soul in any
of the southerly shore’s three other cabins.

Still, we orbited north,
through a calm, sequestered cove, where beavers had left
musked piles of mud on four flat rocks.
We didn’t smell fetor: the breeze bore it off.

The beavers somehow know
to place their mounds at every point of the compass.
We wondered how they could be so precise,
though ours, to be sure, was easy wonder.

The same breeze lifts the curtain
in our room, from which we’ve banished watches and clocks,
having no obligations, our children grown,
they and their children not due here for weeks.

The wind raises tendrils of hair
from your pillowed head. How I adore your hair.
The water, quiet marvel, appeared to lift us
above all tension, above despair

at those wrenching deaths last year,
your mother’s and brother’s, and whatever else could appall.
You trailed an arm in the water. I love
your arms, and your legs, which were tucked in the hull.

As if fixed in one place, the sun
shed just the right warmth on us as it floated there.
We floated too, between water and air,
as if we’d never be let down.

 

Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. His twentieth book, and his thirteenth collection of poems, Here, is now available from Four Way Books, NYC, in 2019.  In summer of ‘18, Green Writers Press re-issued his collaborative book of essays with former Delaware laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives.In spring 2020, Vermont’s Green Writers Press will publish The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life,his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011-15) as Vermont Poet Laureate.  Lea and former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate will publish their hybrid epic Wormboy with Able Muse in 2020.

My Trouble with Optimism and an Interview with Shara McCallum (by Nin Andrews)

Lately, I have been having trouble with optimism. And I have been having trouble with my trouble with optimism. I am, quite simply, depressed. I'm not even sure of the role of poetry anymore—both in the world as it is, politically and environmentally speaking, and in the world of po-biz as it is, with all its emphasis on social media and self-promotion. Poetry, which I like to think of as a contemplative art, is becoming anything but. For that reason, I have written what I believe to be my last book of poems, The Last Orgasm, in which the orgasm, like the poem, bids us farewell. I sometimes think I’ve become like the madwoman in Shara McCallum’s poem, "Why Madwoman Shouldn't Read the News."

Why Madwoman Shouldn’t Read the News

I know you’ll say I’m overreacting,
but my mother’s prophesying has come to pass:
Armageddon is upon us. Just look at the evidence:
the carriers of our species at every second
being raped and killed and the rare ones
who survive offing their lovers and children
(or worse, if it can be believed, wearing bangs),
molesters and gun-toters skulking
in every lunchbox, the environment
churning into an apocalypse. Oh, kids,
please save us the heartache and leave
in advance: calmly but quickly
abandon your seesaws and swings. Friends,
do you remember when we were young?
Life plump with promise and dreams?
Me neither. Anyway, who’d be naive enough
now to believe in anything so impossible-
to-attain as happiness or justice? Sure
we had a run of it. Even some laughs.
But the day’s arrived, as deep down we knew
it would, and spectacles streaming
from across the globe should convince
even the most skeptical of our soon-extinction.
Not that we listen to true madmen
anymore, but the older I get
the more certain I become: my father
would have been heralded a prophet
had he lived, would have joined his brethren
and sistren on every street corner, trumpeting
this end from the beginning.

 

The poem, from her book Madwoman, is also included in the anthology, Here, edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman. You can see her reading the poem here: 

Of course, there are many Cassandras out there, and who wants to listen to them? We humans are naturally designed to avoid pain and suffering—to shut our ears to any suggestion of it. Certain religions tell us we won’t even die. Not forever anyhow, not if we're good people, however that is defined.

As the popular Stanford Biology professor Robert Sapolosky points out in his book, The Science of Intelligent Achievement, one person’s negativity has a profound impact upon others' outlook on life. And worse, listening to negative speech for thirty minutes or more can cause neurons in the hippocampus to die. That’s right, those brain cells just give up the ghost when you tell them bad things are happening. After listening to negative speeches, a person’s problem-solving abilities are measurably compromised. I translate this to mean that after two years of listening to Trump, we Americans are dumber than ever. 

But, I remind myself, I should not be negative. I am not sure about this. 

When I was a girl, the youngest of six children, my mother read aloud to us to keep us from fighting at the dinner table. In the beginning she read the usual children’s books and fairy tales. Then one day she announced that she was tired of happy endings. She said American children and their parents like to think we all live in a Disney film. (She despised Walt Disney.) So she began reading us The Gulag Archipelago instead. I was only seven at the time. I remember my mind shifting from fairyland to the Soviet Union, where a boy could be imprisoned for stealing a cucumber, nude women were paraded before lusty men, and prisoners were tortured in unthinkable ways for crimes they never committed. For most, the only escape was death. “No happy endings here,” my mother announced gleefully.

I think I suffered from a form of literary PTSD back then. But I sometimes wonder whether my mother was right—Americans are raised to believe in a happy ending despite all evidence to the contrary. We think of ourselves as exempt from global crisis. Why else would we seek so desperately to deny the facts we are currently facing—that our planet is overheating, that we humans are to blame, and that we are in grave danger? 

But I keep telling myself I should not be negative. How can I be optimistic in this day and age? I feel so helpless. Can we poets do anything to help save the planet? Or to change minds about the reality of climate change? Is there a way to inspire hope in the curmudgeonly gloom-and-doomers like myself?   

That’s the challenge taken on by the environmental anthology, Here: Poems for the Planet, from Copper Canyon Press.
And what a beautiful anthology it is. I have rarely read an anthology from beginning to end without pausing, but this one was an exception. I felt, while reading it, that poetry was working is magic in me again, offering a renewed sense of faith, if not in the future, at least in the mystical power of poetry. There were so many stunning poems in the book, including “For the Children” by Gary Snyder (posted below), “Kiss of the Sun” by Mary Ruefle, and “First Verse” by Tim Seibles.  In the Forward, the Dalai Lama writes that “if we have the capacity to destroy the Earth, so too, we have the capacity to protect it.” I want to believe him. 

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light 

 

I opened this post with a poem by Shara McCallum, so I thought I’d close with a totally different kind of poem by her—and ask her a few questions. Shara McCallum is a poet I trust profoundly, and I always look forward to reading her work and hearing what she has to say.

Springbank, Great House
Port Antionio, 1796

Place of memory now in ruin.
This point overlooking the sea,
this cliff, this perch, paradise
to none but one who came
imagining he could be laird, could be
unmoored from class and caste.
The way past is always the way
through. Overland, we traversed
Blue Mountain, rocky passages
flanking us, abutted by gullies,
oversized plants casting their shadows.
The horses’ hooves trod and trod
until stone gave way to field,
and we entered the Rio Grande Valley,
approaching the house from behind—
first sight rising still in my mind,
bodying forth its false promise.
Leuk twice or ye leap ance echoes
now, late and fruitless. O, what foolishness
lies in the heart of man, gleaming
wish to be more that waits
for its chance to pounce and savage.

 

NA: I think of you as a social activist as well as a poet, professor, and mother. And you are writing these wonderful poems about Robert Burns. I’d love to hear you say a few words about your life as a poet in this difficult time—and how you put it all together.

SM: Thanks for all your kind words, Nin, and the good question here. I wouldn’t call myself a social activist. For me, that connotes being directly in the thick of political engagement or community organising and would mean being part of larger organisations or movements for social change in ongoing, sustained fashion—which I don’t do very much these days. Having said that, I do still distinguish between the work I do as a poet, when writing a poem, as being private vs. the work I do when reading poems and especially when teaching poetry, as being public and social. The latter comes out of being a poet but channels that self/knowledge/experience into my engagement with others and my service to others. When I’m in the role of facilitating workshops in community settings for example, which I do quite often, I am in the lucky position of being in the service of the art. It’s an ethical responsibility and one I take seriously. The bridge for me between being a poet and being a citizen of the world is in consciously seeing and speaking of the way that poetry, as with so many arts, can spur activism, how it can be a catalyst for change and for imagining the kind of change in the world we want to make manifest.

NA: Tell me about your new Burns project. How did this begin?

SM: The project began about four years ago when I was then living in London and had gone up to Scotland to give a reading. Being Jamaican and with a Scottish surname, I was naturally asked if I knew the story of Burns’s Jamaica connection. I didn’t. The story is a true one and is this: Burns had signed on to be a bookkeeper (an overseer) on a slave plantation in Jamaica. He had booked passage and was set to sail until a stroke of fortune changed his life. For many reasons, I found this story to be a thorn under my skin. Ultimately Burns didn’t go—he didn’t become imbricated in slavery—but what I couldn’t let go of is that he was ready to go. The book I’m writing is a book-length sequence of poems that imagines an alternate account of history, that gives one answer to the question of what would have happened had he gone.

NA: What is your secret to keeping the fire going—the poems, the engagement, the optimism?

SM: I love this question as it suggests I do all of this at once. I think, very much like you, I struggle with remaining optimistic right now, so I’ll speak to that part of your question at least. There are things I turn my attention toward deliberately that seem to help. One is history. As a poet, I am a lover of and lay student of the past (as the Burns’ project suggests) because it is a hopeful act for me, ironically, to interrogate the stories we tell of who we are. The past is always palpable to me, in the same way I know I carry my dead with me wherever I am in the present. This might sound morbid, but I often experience an eclipsing of myself—it is a tyranny the self!—in this way as being just the opposite. It’s a relief to see myself as small! Knowing and trying to sit with the disquietude of history reminds me that as bad as things might feel to me in the present, there have always been other moments like this one—and worse. This doesn’t diminish the losses I’m witnessing. Trump, who you mention specifically, is an unmitigated blight on this country and planet. The potential for ecological collapse is real and there is a huge amount at stake right now. But when I train my gaze on a different moment in human history or I take in a larger swath of time, that helps me to see this moment with greater perspective and, yes, with hopefulness. The other thing that helps has nothing at all to do with being a poet and everything to do with being a mother. I simply find I cannot endure for long the negative narratives you speak of so incisively in your blog here because I have a responsibility not to become entirely the Madwoman who wrote that poem you began with, who is very much drawn from the part of me that can easily and quickly fall into the mode of speaking she does. Knowing this about myself, for my children’s sake I have to sometimes shut out the ‘news’ and remind myself that life on this planet has always been chancy and that, yet, against those odds, it endures.

NA:I love that—against all odds, it endures. May we go together then, against the odds!

 

From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry, published in the US and UK, most recently Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her work has appeared widely in the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, has been translated into several languages, and has received such recognition as a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. McCallum is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University.

Who Is Your Ideal Audience? Are You Like Your Poems? (by Nin Andrews)

I need a handbook on how to market myself as a poet. And a cheat sheet for all those god-awful questions a poet has to answer about his or her work before a book goes to press—questions like, Who are you writing your poems for? Or to? Who is your ideal audience?   

Answer: I have no idea. I’ve never understood the lure of either writing or reading poetry, that seductive pull from some other world.

A few weeks ago, I gave a miserable reading—you know the kind, set in some the dank basement of a bookshop, church or bowling alley, given to a handful of disgruntled souls in folding chairs. Afterwards, an elderly man in a ball cap informed me that I am nothing like my poems. So what are my poems like? I wanted to ask. Instead, I told him that another woman actually writes my poetry. I just try to impersonate her for public events. (He laughed, but I wasn’t really joking.)

Since then, I have been thinking about poets who are like their poems, poets like Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, and Maureen Seaton, poets I read and then feel as if I have just had a conversation with them. I think I would feel that way, even if I didn't know them. 

I remember a picnic years ago in Cleveland when Denise Duhamel was teaching at the Imagination Conference, and a student by the nickname of The Beef (I think that’s what his friends called him) sat down next to her and confessed that, after hearing her read, he was certain she was his soul mate. As if to prove his point, The Beef began to perform his poetry for her, reciting poems about his life as an alcoholic. Denise, ever polite, sat smiling and nodding until the director of the program intervened.  I was both stunned and a little embarrassed to realize that I, too, have often felt that Denise is my kindred spirit.  And I, too, might want to show her the poems I have written in response to her brilliant work. Does that mean that The Beef and I are Denise’s ideal audience? Or the opposite?

Perhaps this is the poem by Denise Duhamel that inspired The Beef’s performance that day. 

David Lehman, like Denise, has a gift of making readers feel as if he's talking directly to them.  Or, in my case, as if I am still his student, back in his tiny office at Hamilton College, and he’s trying to teach me how to write a poem. I say this today, in particular, because I've been sorting through old journals, throwing away most of them (they are so embarrassing), and I've discovered a few entries that mention David Lehman and remind me of his recent book, Playlist.

Like this one from January 1980: 

I had a conference with DL today and, once again, my poem was unspeakably awful. How come I never see a poem’s stinkiness until the professor is looking at it? The good news—David Lehman just zoomed along like the poem wasn’t in the room with us. He didn’t say anything bad. Instead he suggested I name things in my next poem, name songs, name pens, name cereal boxes, name poets, name friends, name boys I love (no way), name drop. And don’t be afraid to talk about the weather. Poetry isn’t a suicide note. 

 

1/14/18

I began thinking
that listing the titles
would be poetry
enough and now it is
thirty degrees and rising
in Ithaca with the dazzle
of sunlight like
diamond spangles
in the snow, the sky
blue and cumulus
clouds drift slowly south

Tonight son Joe and I
will watch The Seven Samurai
until then I must work
on my foreword with
Bill Evans, “Round
Midnight,” backing me up
while the sun
shines right through 
the shades so I can’t even see
the type on the screen

on the forties station
Frances Langford
“Serenade in Blue,”
with its amazing
mood-shifting bridge
“but you remaining in my heart.”

And then there is this entry from April, 1980:

It was pouring rain today and I had another DL meeting and his coat was dripping next to my seat and I was soaked to the bone—trempé jusqu'aux os—he asked me how I was and I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to listen to him—he talked so fast—moving from poetry to French to funny (really funny!) stories about people to music to John Ashbery. He loves, loves Ashbery! And names. He loves names. He told me—Ashbery has impeccable taste. How can he have impeccable taste? I asked, and he answered, That’s just what Ashbery has.

And next, read this poem from Playlist:

 

12/21/17

La chute de reine
is a great French phrase 
for the curve at the base of a lady’s back
Archie would have approved
after lunch we’d head to Mayer’s Smoke Shop
and I’d read Barron’s
while he ambled over to Penthouse
after he found a dime and I, three pennies
on the corner of Tioga and Buffalo where
the old post office used to be
and later that day I wrote
a poem for John Ashbery
let’s have it, he said
okay I said here goes
and John said he liked it
particularly the third line
(the poem was only two lines long)

 

And I thought la chute de reine meant the fall of the queen!

The third poet I want to mention is Maureen Seaton. Whenever I read her work, just as when I read Denise Duhamel’s poems, I imagine  she’s sitting beside me, telling me how it is. Maybe it’s no surprise that the two remind me of each other—they have, after all, written so many poems together. They both make me want to laugh and cry and invite them into my living room or maybe on a trip to the beach. (That's why I drew them in shades--all set for our trip to the beach.) Seaton’s latest book, Sweet World, published by CavanKerry Press, is a brave and moving collection about her life with breast cancer.  

I'll close with the title poem from the book.

 

 

Sweet World

I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash


Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath 

at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V 

as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding

a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.

Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused 
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me 

and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days. 
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. 

Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app 
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before. 

A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it. 

An Interview with Dante Di Stefano (by Nin Andrews)

NA: Dante, I love your new book! I especially love the poem, "Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen" from last year’s Best American Poetry. Reading it, I imagined that you already were, at seventeen, in essence, a poet. Did you set out to be a poet? 

 

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished, and I wanted
only to love in that insane, tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

 

DDS: Thanks for your kind words, Nin. No, I didn’t set out to be a poet at all, of any kind. I’ve always loved reading and writing, but in high school I read mostly novels, and I kept a daily journal that mostly consisted of reactions to the books I was reading, quotes from those books, lists of new words I’d discovered, and philosophical statements (that I’m sure would make me cringe if I read them today). “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” begins with an autobiographical detail; it’s true that I read Dostoyevsky’s four big novels when I was seventeen. The poem attempts to recreate the frenetically pitched set of emotions that one only experiences either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of adolescence. None of the images and phrases are drawn directly from Dostoyevsky. Rather, I try to evoke what Milan Kundera called “the magical charm of atmospheres”: recalling what it felt like to lie alone in my twin bed at night pondering the fate of Dmitri Karamazov, dreaming of a girl I liked in my homeroom. “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” is an attempt to capture those lost atmospheres from a novelistic or cinematic vantage point.

NA: I admire your poems about your father’s illness and death. One of these poems is called, “A Defense of Confessional Poetry.” Are you a defender of confessional poetry? Do you consider these poems to be confessional?

DDS: The poems about the illness and death of my father are deeply autobiographical. Most, if not all, of the details in these poems are true to the events as I recall them. Whenever I write about someone I know I tend not to embellish. Of course, remembering is an inherently slippery proposition, but I try to remain moored to the truth of my recollection. Sometimes, I feel like this fidelity to “truth” is a failure of imagination on my part. However, it would feel like a betrayal if I invented additional details about the day my father died, if I changed a second of my daughter’s birth, if I altered my wife’s personality, simply in service to a poem. In this sense, I can understand the objections of your college poetry professor.

The title “A Defense of Confessional Poetry” was a bit tongue in cheek, but in the poem, I was also trying to emphasize the transformational and restorative aspects of reconciling, or attempting to reconcile, the death of my father with my complicated feelings toward him.

I’m not a defender of confessional poetry (or of any poetry for that matter). I deeply admire the first-generation Confessional poets (none of whom, except for Sexton, approved of the label “Confessional”). These poets (Berryman, Snodgrass, Lowell, Plath, Sexton) provided a radical rejoinder to the orthodoxies of high Modernism and New Criticism, while opening thematic space for subsequent generations of poets to write about virtually anything. It should be noted that Confessional poetry comes to prominence along with the Beat Generation and the New York School at the height of the Cold War. These schools of poetry overlap with, and bleed into, the civil rights movement, the counter-culture, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement, all of which signaled fundamental changes in American society. In these movements, speaking personally became a crucial form of intervention in the public sphere and an overt political act. The Black Arts Movement is also a part of this helix.

From the time of its coinage to present day, the term “confessional,” as applied to poetry, has proven problematic. M.L. Rosenthal’s initial formulation of the confessional mode of writing (in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies) posits confessional poetry as a kind of “soul’s therapy.” (“Soul’s therapy” sounds downright ridiculous in 2018.) Confessional poetry since Rosenthal’s appraisal of Life Studies, although variously defined, remains contingent upon the linkages between personal revelation, private guilt, and public authenticity. 

Today, in the world of reality television, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the boundaries of the personal and the private have blurred. The forms of confession practiced across the spectrum of contemporary media are staged and superficial, contingent upon spectacle, less concerned with discovering truths than they are with generating celebrity. Confessions (and scandals) may abound in social media today, but little retains the power to shock or to foment meaningful political change. It’s undoubted that the autobiographical lyric and the shadow of the confessional mode continue to dominate the mainstream of contemporary American poetry. However, there’s so much reality-clutter in our culture, so many ways that poets (and non-poets alike) shape and pedal virtual selves, that the lyrical gesture toward autobiography and confession loses its dynamism against the backdrop of so many proliferating identities and revelations. It seems like identity and authenticity are more contested from more perspectives than ever before.

I’m somewhat suspicious of the overreliance on autobiographical detail in my own poetry because it opens the door to the corrosiveness of narcissism, sentimentality, and nostalgia.  I’m constantly at war with these things, and with my own inexhaustible naivete. At the same time, I don’t generally confess things that are shameful in my poetry, although I recognize the power in that gesture. I don’t want to put all my business in the street. Many of my poems are persona poems, or poems about music and language. I strive to be protean, to speak in tongues; I’d like to get to the point where I could have access to the imagination in the manner of William Blake, Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson (Not to be as great as any one of them, but to write one or two poems that approaches “The Proverbs of Hell” or “Juilate Agno” or “The Windhover” or “I taste a liquor never brewed”).

NA: In your poem, “Bronx Pyramid,” you open, “Sometimes you might be tempted to invent/a memory  . . .” and later you write, “I have come to know that I am not I/and you are not you in the music; . . .”

I love this poem, and I wanted to know if you could elaborate on the sentiments expressed in it.

 

The Bronx Pyramid
after Carlos Henriquez

Sometimes you might be tempted to invent
a memory from a Brook Avenue,
a curandera’s chanting resurrects,
a stillborn third son, brujo’s serpent tongue,
a trumpet blown over the arco of
ordinary seconds. Now, I hear time
cajole a rhythm from the embalmed worm
of reverie hidden in my own heart.
I have come to know that I am not I
and you are never you in the music;
here, where musician and audience meet,
we remain thirsty for the what that is
and is and hangs there like a mother’s name,
carving infinite care from the silence.

 

DDS: “The Bronx Pyramid” is an attempt to write from inside the music of Jazz bassist Carlos Henriquez. Henriquez is one of my favorite contemporary musicians and this poem tries to articulate what it feels like to dwell in the notes of his music. It occurs to me that we never question how autobiographical a Coltrane number is, and yet if you listen to A Love Supreme you come away with the sense that this music has laid bare a life before you. In great music, there is an intimacy and a vulnerability we are invited to share in as listeners. This holds true for other kinds of music too; it doesn’t matter if Bob Dylan lived on desolation row or if Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. A poem can be encoded with truth in the same way as a pop song or as a jazz number. What I think I come to understand in “The Bronx Pyramid” is that the music of Jazz and poetry (and Rock and Soul and on and on) begins with the dissolution of the self. One of the greatest joys I know is to be in the midst of composing a poem, or saying a poem, free from the strictures of self-definition, charged with negative capability, awash in what Galway Kinnell called “saying in its own music what matters most.”

NA: Also, in your poem, “Stump Speech,” you begin:

You undress in poetry, but in prose
you redress. You grow old in prose, lose teeth,
forget the face of your brother, but call
to your dead and dying in poetry.

For you, poetry is reaching for a different kind of truth than prose?  

DDS: I believe poetry has a different way of embodying truths than prose does. Quoting Milan Kundera again, “prose: the word signifies not only nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life.” For me, prose embodies the incremental, the calendric, the historic, the national, the transnational, and the immediate; of course, poetry has something to do with those things too, but poetry thresholds itself between restraint and effusion. It has more to do with the mythic, the atemporal, the visionary, the legislation of unacknowledged worlds (to paraphrase Oppen); of course, prose can tread that ground as well, but I don’t think in quite the same way as poetry does. Also, the distinctions between poetry and prose have collapsed quite a bit, under, among other things, the weight of what Christian Wiman called “the train wreck of broken-prose confessionalism.” I’m not as pessimistic about broken-prose confessionalism as Wiman is, and I haven’t quite articulated all the differences I intuit between great poetry and great prose, but I sense there are clear distinctions. Part of why I write poetry is to clarify those distinctions, and to come closer to understanding what poetry is.

 NA: In your poem, “For My Creative Writing Students,” you have these lines:

“The need to say what you can’t say unspools/ itself from your mouths and hymnals a hope/as blue and speckled as a robin’s egg.” Do you think of poetry as a way to say what can’t be said? 

DDS: I believe there are truths conveyed in poetry that go beyond the limits of language, what Frost called “the sound of sense,” what Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” I don’t think poems have so much to do with intention; poems are a kind of throbbing through words that accrues to music, what Stevens meant by “the dove in the belly.”

NA: I love that. Honestly, I would love to keep asking you questions just to read your responses. But I will stop for now. I thought maybe we could close with "Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering."

 

Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering
 

Because all the animals are kings and queens,
I wait for the rain to paint me; I long
to dream the butterfly dreaming me while
the blood lotuses into test tube,
pillow cherry blossoms the lolling head,
and all over the world the living still
go on living despite the needle’s truth,
stitching saline into this purple vein,
as a hawk is painted onto a bough
and the window beads itself up with rain.

The great wave continues to crash against
the clear sky, peasants fly kites from the roofs
that appear higher than Mount Fuji’s snow,
the fisherman’s wife fucks an octopus
or two, and the paddies remain tended
even when the south wind blows your hat off.

We, in our frail bodies, are woodcut, sketched
on silk, silkworms ourselves, ideograms
for dying, riders galloping a ridge
toward a mountain we will never reach.

There is no way to paint the swan in you,
or the heron taking wing, the village,
its terrible stillness before the fire.

For now, you have only the orderly
joking with the phlebotomist, asking
her to draw your blood in a bikini
next time; this is your temple, your tea house,
your watermill frozen in its churning,
a wheel of rivulets like braided hair,
or like the sutures in your throat and chest.

And the hospital might trick you into
believing this pain might make you holy,
but you are already holy, the stooped
millworker with a turtle on a string,
the surface of a lake without ripples,
the portly monk laughing in his Saki,
the lumberjacks sawing planks in heaven,
the sound of traffic on 68th Street,
the sill cleaving flight, a regent of air.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Àlvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

 

 

 

 

--This interview was first published on December 11, 2018, back when I was doing a series of interviews with poets on the topic of confessional poetry.

 

NA: Dante, I love your new book! I especially love the poem, "Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen" from last year’s Best American Poetry. Reading it, I imagined that you already were, at seventeen, in essence, a poet. Did you set out to be a poet? 

 

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished, and I wanted
only to love in that insane, tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

 

DDS: Thanks for your kind words, Nin. No, I didn’t set out to be a poet at all, of any kind. I’ve always loved reading and writing, but in high school I read mostly novels, and I kept a daily journal that mostly consisted of reactions to the books I was reading, quotes from those books, lists of new words I’d discovered, and philosophical statements (that I’m sure would make me cringe if I read them today). “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” begins with an autobiographical detail; it’s true that I read Dostoyevsky’s four big novels when I was seventeen. The poem attempts to recreate the frenetically pitched set of emotions that one only experiences either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of adolescence. None of the images and phrases are drawn directly from Dostoyevsky. Rather, I try to evoke what Milan Kundera called “the magical charm of atmospheres”: recalling what it felt like to lie alone in my twin bed at night pondering the fate of Dmitri Karamazov, dreaming of a girl I liked in my homeroom. “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” is an attempt to capture those lost atmospheres from a novelistic or cinematic vantage point.

NA: I admire your poems about your father’s illness and death. One of these poems is called, “A Defense of Confessional Poetry.” Are you a defender of confessional poetry? Do you consider these poems to be confessional?

DDS: The poems about the illness and death of my father are deeply autobiographical. Most, if not all, of the details in these poems are true to the events as I recall them. Whenever I write about someone I know I tend not to embellish. Of course, remembering is an inherently slippery proposition, but I try to remain moored to the truth of my recollection. Sometimes, I feel like this fidelity to “truth” is a failure of imagination on my part. However, it would feel like a betrayal if I invented additional details about the day my father died, if I changed a second of my daughter’s birth, if I altered my wife’s personality, simply in service to a poem. In this sense, I can understand the objections of your college poetry professor.

The title “A Defense of Confessional Poetry” was a bit tongue in cheek, but in the poem, I was also trying to emphasize the transformational and restorative aspects of reconciling, or attempting to reconcile, the death of my father with my complicated feelings toward him.

I’m not a defender of confessional poetry (or of any poetry for that matter). I deeply admire the first-generation Confessional poets (none of whom, except for Sexton, approved of the label “Confessional”). These poets (Berryman, Snodgrass, Lowell, Plath, Sexton) provided a radical rejoinder to the orthodoxies of high Modernism and New Criticism, while opening thematic space for subsequent generations of poets to write about virtually anything. It should be noted that Confessional poetry comes to prominence along with the Beat Generation and the New York School at the height of the Cold War. These schools of poetry overlap with, and bleed into, the civil rights movement, the counter-culture, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement, all of which signaled fundamental changes in American society. In these movements, speaking personally became a crucial form of intervention in the public sphere and an overt political act. The Black Arts Movement is also a part of this helix.

From the time of its coinage to present day, the term “confessional,” as applied to poetry, has proven problematic. M.L. Rosenthal’s initial formulation of the confessional mode of writing (in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies) posits confessional poetry as a kind of “soul’s therapy.” (“Soul’s therapy” sounds downright ridiculous in 2018.) Confessional poetry since Rosenthal’s appraisal of Life Studies, although variously defined, remains contingent upon the linkages between personal revelation, private guilt, and public authenticity. 

Today, in the world of reality television, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the boundaries of the personal and the private have blurred. The forms of confession practiced across the spectrum of contemporary media are staged and superficial, contingent upon spectacle, less concerned with discovering truths than they are with generating celebrity. Confessions (and scandals) may abound in social media today, but little retains the power to shock or to foment meaningful political change. It’s undoubted that the autobiographical lyric and the shadow of the confessional mode continue to dominate the mainstream of contemporary American poetry. However, there’s so much reality-clutter in our culture, so many ways that poets (and non-poets alike) shape and pedal virtual selves, that the lyrical gesture toward autobiography and confession loses its dynamism against the backdrop of so many proliferating identities and revelations. It seems like identity and authenticity are more contested from more perspectives than ever before.

I’m somewhat suspicious of the overreliance on autobiographical detail in my own poetry because it opens the door to the corrosiveness of narcissism, sentimentality, and nostalgia.  I’m constantly at war with these things, and with my own inexhaustible naivete. At the same time, I don’t generally confess things that are shameful in my poetry, although I recognize the power in that gesture. I don’t want to put all my business in the street. Many of my poems are persona poems, or poems about music and language. I strive to be protean, to speak in tongues; I’d like to get to the point where I could have access to the imagination in the manner of William Blake, Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson (Not to be as great as any one of them, but to write one or two poems that approaches “The Proverbs of Hell” or “Juilate Agno” or “The Windhover” or “I taste a liquor never brewed”).

NA: In your poem, “Bronx Pyramid,” you open, “Sometimes you might be tempted to invent/a memory  . . .” and later you write, “I have come to know that I am not I/and you are not you in the music; . . .”

I love this poem, and I wanted to know if you could elaborate on the sentiments expressed in it.

 

The Bronx Pyramid
after Carlos Henriquez

Sometimes you might be tempted to invent
a memory from a Brook Avenue,
a curandera’s chanting resurrects,
a stillborn third son, brujo’s serpent tongue,
a trumpet blown over the arco of
ordinary seconds. Now, I hear time
cajole a rhythm from the embalmed worm
of reverie hidden in my own heart.
I have come to know that I am not I
and you are never you in the music;
here, where musician and audience meet,
we remain thirsty for the what that is
and is and hangs there like a mother’s name,
carving infinite care from the silence.

 

DDS: “The Bronx Pyramid” is an attempt to write from inside the music of Jazz bassist Carlos Henriquez. Henriquez is one of my favorite contemporary musicians and this poem tries to articulate what it feels like to dwell in the notes of his music. It occurs to me that we never question how autobiographical a Coltrane number is, and yet if you listen to A Love Supreme you come away with the sense that this music has laid bare a life before you. In great music, there is an intimacy and a vulnerability we are invited to share in as listeners. This holds true for other kinds of music too; it doesn’t matter if Bob Dylan lived on desolation row or if Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. A poem can be encoded with truth in the same way as a pop song or as a jazz number. What I think I come to understand in “The Bronx Pyramid” is that the music of Jazz and poetry (and Rock and Soul and on and on) begins with the dissolution of the self. One of the greatest joys I know is to be in the midst of composing a poem, or saying a poem, free from the strictures of self-definition, charged with negative capability, awash in what Galway Kinnell called “saying in its own music what matters most.”

NA: Also, in your poem, “Stump Speech,” you begin:

You undress in poetry, but in prose
you redress. You grow old in prose, lose teeth,
forget the face of your brother, but call
to your dead and dying in poetry.

For you, poetry is reaching for a different kind of truth than prose?  

DDS: I believe poetry has a different way of embodying truths than prose does. Quoting Milan Kundera again, “prose: the word signifies not only nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life.” For me, prose embodies the incremental, the calendric, the historic, the national, the transnational, and the immediate; of course, poetry has something to do with those things too, but poetry thresholds itself between restraint and effusion. It has more to do with the mythic, the atemporal, the visionary, the legislation of unacknowledged worlds (to paraphrase Oppen); of course, prose can tread that ground as well, but I don’t think in quite the same way as poetry does. Also, the distinctions between poetry and prose have collapsed quite a bit, under, among other things, the weight of what Christian Wiman called “the train wreck of broken-prose confessionalism.” I’m not as pessimistic about broken-prose confessionalism as Wiman is, and I haven’t quite articulated all the differences I intuit between great poetry and great prose, but I sense there are clear distinctions. Part of why I write poetry is to clarify those distinctions, and to come closer to understanding what poetry is.

 NA: In your poem, “For My Creative Writing Students,” you have these lines:

“The need to say what you can’t say unspools/ itself from your mouths and hymnals a hope/as blue and speckled as a robin’s egg.” Do you think of poetry as a way to say what can’t be said? 

DDS: I believe there are truths conveyed in poetry that go beyond the limits of language, what Frost called “the sound of sense,” what Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” I don’t think poems have so much to do with intention; poems are a kind of throbbing through words that accrues to music, what Stevens meant by “the dove in the belly.”

NA: I love that. Honestly, I would love to keep asking you questions just to read your responses. But I will stop for now. I thought maybe we could close with "Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering."

 

Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering
 

Because all the animals are kings and queens,
I wait for the rain to paint me; I long
to dream the butterfly dreaming me while
the blood lotuses into test tube,
pillow cherry blossoms the lolling head,
and all over the world the living still
go on living despite the needle’s truth,
stitching saline into this purple vein,
as a hawk is painted onto a bough
and the window beads itself up with rain.

The great wave continues to crash against
the clear sky, peasants fly kites from the roofs
that appear higher than Mount Fuji’s snow,
the fisherman’s wife fucks an octopus
or two, and the paddies remain tended
even when the south wind blows your hat off.

We, in our frail bodies, are woodcut, sketched
on silk, silkworms ourselves, ideograms
for dying, riders galloping a ridge
toward a mountain we will never reach.

There is no way to paint the swan in you,
or the heron taking wing, the village,
its terrible stillness before the fire.

For now, you have only the orderly
joking with the phlebotomist, asking
her to draw your blood in a bikini
next time; this is your temple, your tea house,
your watermill frozen in its churning,
a wheel of rivulets like braided hair,
or like the sutures in your throat and chest.

And the hospital might trick you into
believing this pain might make you holy,
but you are already holy, the stooped
millworker with a turtle on a string,
the surface of a lake without ripples,
the portly monk laughing in his Saki,
the lumberjacks sawing planks in heaven,
the sound of traffic on 68th Street,
the sill cleaving flight, a regent of air.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Àlvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

 

 

 

 

--This interview was first published on December 11, 2018, back when I was doing a series of interviews with poets on the topic of confessional poetry.