The Best American Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop
Image © Joseph Breitenbach

Celebrating the Library of America's ELIZABETH BISHOP: POEMS, PROSE AND LETTERS
edited by Lloyd Schwartz

Poet Spotlight: Veronica Golos [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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Poem     because

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

the girl           never                          cries   refusing                                     

            her secret     to her chest

like the Spartan boy                        and his fox

 

inside her     in the hold

of her mute                           never  

 

the blue-black                      of the slap

face arms her back

 

invisible                                that ink

 

^^^

 

sometimes in the summer she heard singing

            dense music peeling from the bark of trees

                        who sang? wind like weeping. whose?

                                    a wild sound roiling

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

 

^^^

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

 

Poet Spotlight: Karla Kelsey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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Difficulty: A Spillage

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

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A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey

THRALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao

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

Slender glacier teases the innocent husband

To hand over his wife, the ice tray.

The icy husband resists

Of course, he resists

The wife, divided and compartmentalized

Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side

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

On Sunday and on thirsty days

Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass

No one believes in singing with divided tears

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

Husband can't believe that wife

Can hold a mosquito that long

He can brush away her subconscious

By draining her of her liquid free will

Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely

Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello

Even solid objects can be unfaithful.

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

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

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

After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.

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

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

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

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

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

 

* * *

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

But a blouse forgives—

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

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

To change the discourse of time

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

Stabbing their backs

* * *

 

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

Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything

Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance

Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Just before morning closes                                Her deformed smile

Your hands dismiss                                           Respiratory foams

Razored on the edge                                        Your face

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

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

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

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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

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

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A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White

DARLING

Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.

—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

________________________________________                                    

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

       Maybe this is the dream

                                                   of the dead bathed in milk—

                                                                                                                                                               

so many red feathers

 

in my mind. I remember being alive  

         as a child—on a towel in the grass,

                                                                                   

                             from a white plastic kettle,

 

                                                       I poured air into a cup,   two cups.

 

 

 

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

                                                                                                           We drank nothing

 

                                                                     and it was good.    

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

 

 

   Smoothing the brain,

                                       holding a knife   to build another

 

                 mother. Like a house in the trees,

                                                       I wanted to believe in God

                                                                                                           to be safe

                                                                                         and have somewhere to go.

 

We are all the same   and inconsolable, legs twitching                               

                                                                 during the nightmare.     Please wake me up,

 

                                 press one finger between my eyes

                                                                                             like a doorbell.

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Poet Spotlight: Julia Story [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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A Folio of Poems by Julia Story 

Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing

 

How She Would Return from the Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________

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

each one a little you.
That night we washed our

socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old

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

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

Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.

_______________________________

We approach the defunct
nudist colony.

Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.

Every moment
an ossuary.

I’m a body.
You are dead

like the invisible
nudes. But you

walk with me.
The moon

mothered in clouds.

______________________________

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

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

The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.

I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart

and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.

_________________________________

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

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

and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.

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

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

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

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

substance makes these walls.

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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

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

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

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A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

[schottische] slow polka to you

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

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

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

________________________________

Sandwich

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

You — in the white shirt —

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

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

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

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

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

You don't know that.

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

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

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

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

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

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

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

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

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

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

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

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

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

There was a tremendous knocking.

_____________________________________

Shame Helps

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

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

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

______________________________

Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

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

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

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

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

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

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

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

______________________________________

What? is your line

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

windowless

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

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

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

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

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

an absent Noah leaves the room

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

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

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

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

____________________________________

1718 – Nantucket Beach

Poet Spotlight: Traci Brimhall [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014.  She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

A Process Note

The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment.

Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins.

_________________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion  

 

Maria Helena:

The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.

 

Maria Thereza:

In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth.

 

Maria Helena:

We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.

 

Maria Thereza:

Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.

 

Maria de Lourdes:

In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas.

 

Maria Thereza:

Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:

 

Maria Madalena:

Will we survive?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Of course not.

 

Maria Madalena:

Will the country?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Ask again later.

 

Maria Madalena:

Is God's love absolute?

Maria Aparecida:

Nana, nenê.

Maria de Lourdes:

The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers' wounds. It's painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.

 

Maria Helena:

It’s nailing together the gallows.

 

Maria Thereza:

It’s combing men's hair with its fingers, singing,
o nenê dorme no chão, and measuring their necks.

__________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Explains What Was Stolen in 1966

Poet Spotlight: Adeeba Shahid Talukder [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.

Artist’s Statement

As a Pakistani-American and neurodiverse poet, I am, at different times, both included in and excluded from my understanding of Self. My own thoughts elude me, though I have spent many years scrutinizing and pulling at their threads. My work resides in the Urdu poetic tradition but in the English language. My poems are still trying to understand themselves. So naturally, I have received criticism for my poems’ lack of “access.” It is the curse of being “other”— a rejection by those who hold power, but also their impatient curiosity.

To understand the perversity of many readers’ obsession with access, consider predominant Western attitudes towards Eastern countries, then consider, for instance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted his imaginings of undressed Muslim women in The Turkish Bath (1862). From this dimension, the idea of access is vaguely colonialist and orientalist, where reading a poem becomes an act of conquest, and the intent goes from honest engagement to intellectual domination. When the reader begins to feel themselves deficient in this regard, it becomes a “sour grapes” situation, where the inaccessibility of a poem proves it lesser.

What if we were to interrogate our motives behind reading poetry? To quell the desire for control and humble ourselves before each poem? What if we were to restrain ourselves from “[tying] a poem to a chair with rope/ and [torturing] a confession out of it”?

Subh-e-firaaq:

            Morning of Separation

  

You’re a saint, the mountain carver
told the lonely Shireen. More even
than stone.

He carved for her,
almost

a stream of milk. Then threw
himself off.

Fell, his limbs
with the leaves he clutched.

_______________________________________

Exotica: Three Poems

 

Ambrosia

He is a glass cup                 
in her hands;                                     

she pours
wine, honey, and lime-

light. A thing                   
of beauty;

 

Conquest

he steals

a glance or two,               
begins to stare—

she is the shape
of a woman. His

eyes are steel.
She blushes.

He moves closer,
demands her

secrets.

 

Domination

A cure for lust.

_________________________________________

 

On Beauty

When I was 19, I trembled
to meet men’s eyes.

Scarf, burqa, black
eyeliner. I was more
than Muslim,
more than beautiful,
more than sexual.

They wanted to know
what they could not
see.

~ ~ 

The cruel beloved of Urdu
poetry slays her lovers

with glances, leaves them
to languish, rubbing

their foreheads
in her doorstep’s dust. In this
intricacy is power:

I cannot lift
a suitcase, which means
I will never have to.

~ ~

James once wrote me poems

as Majnoon,
as the nightingale, as the prey.

I was engaged. Together,
we witnessed the snow consume
all of Ann Arbor,

picked it up in fistfuls, tossed
it up in the dark,

watched it fall like a spell.
He vowed to profess Islam,

as long as you know you’re the only god
I’ll ever worship.

~ ~

Poet Spotlight: Jennifer Minniti-Shippey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more.

A Process Note

I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces.

 *

Last Days of June 

A whole sun-skinned nation
later and I am on my knees
in the trolley, the trolley south
bound, everything dark and rattling—
June in this country comes
jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me
wailing hallelujah quite
silently, good-bye brave ponies
grazing in the green wind, good-
bye thin socks abandoned
to the soft mercies of rain,
good-bye plastic peonies on the high
heels of happiness.
I am trying, just try
ing to love this again, my life.

 *

Questions for Adam

What is love to you: the walls,
beyond the walls,
the garden, beyond the garden, the alley—

what of the words you made,
that avocado pitted,
that dog wriggling on the carpet,
that poetic form,
shorelines unmourned,
in what bright east heaving ocean you buried
your feet—

wanderer, o wanderer,
you ribless, you gutted, you
black-haired belovéd first,
what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom,
what of our mother dust,
our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera,
bright green walls and our red bookcase—

what is love to your black-penned vision
made in the shape of a god,
or some kind of cloud,
cumulous or nimbus,
what is love to your silence,
click-clack the machines of your dreams,
uncut nails of the Airedale terriers,

string of patio lights hung by your here-now
generosity, what of the garden? What of
what is beyond—

*

Third Tour

there’s waiting, then wait and
how dare you take so long to get here,

air blasted past dust and dusty blinds,
detonation of overripe, out-seasoned

vine-grown tomatoes, so
come through, blown open:

I’ll make tea, pay half the bills,
we’ll census dead birds and marvel

at their eyes still, still
unblinking into us

*

Sig Sauer

she put a gun in my hand   why else would I hold it?   I wanted her   the flags were half-masted   I wanted her so I held it   tell me about your war   I wanted her gun   in my hand, that not-heavy darkness   tell me your war, have you fed it?   here on my knees in the desert   a weightless dark in my hand   on my knees and wailing, a gun   on my knees in the desert   what danger in the market?   on my knees wailing a gun   in the purse, in her hand   what danger   a market   for desire, mark the prices   her hand inside me a gun   her gun inside, my desire   for every desire, a price   put a gun in our hearts   the trigger will pull us   the flags are half masted   we desire our war

*

When my dead meet they hold hands

 

In the land of Linnea                       and     of Sarah

red bougainvillea blossoms

            by whipping wind              are blown

through the heavy oak door.                    

 

The wind blows also through light-bodies.

 

            This one has eyes

                        she speaks

                                    On the left, she has a voice

                                                                        she watches

They crowd me.

 

Breasts press against my elbows           

                        warm palms in my back’s hollow

            a tongue in the dark                                    of my mouth.

 

A jade-green hummingbird in the red arbor,

                                                wings shiver wings in my hair

            they whisper

                                    as they lean              close above me

                                                                                                as they stay.

                     

Why

 

are the straw hats in the middle of the highway?               I shout.

 

Memory replaces nothing, not

                                    brown eyes or blue, not

                                                blonde hair or

bones or skin.

 

to my dead, living

                        to my dead, living jade-green

                                                                        to my living dead, jade-green

Maureen Owen & Barbara Henning on the Road (Terence Winch)

 

Watch out, Mobile, Austin, San Diego, and any number of other cities in the U.S.: Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning are on the road and heading your way, armed with the power of poetry and good will. Transformations may take place, mirth may ensue, and who knows what else may happen.

These two illustrious writers are an inspiration to septuagenarians everywhere. They have over-loaded a 2007 Civic (with “only” a 130K miles on it, says Barbara) with pots and pans, sleeping bags, bags of books, food, yoga paraphernalia, and suitcases filled with anvils, and headed out into the poetry-starved American landscape for an 8-week road trip/reading tour.

I had the pleasure of reading with them on their second stop---Washington’s DC Arts Center---on Sunday (January 20, 2019), and of hanging out with them for the weekend. I asked each of them to read a poem, which they graciously did. (I apologize for the slightly distorted audio quality, but you will still get the idea.)

 

Maureen and Barbara are publishing an on-going blog that documents their odyssey. And you can check their agenda to see if they’re coming soon to a spot near you.

 

 

Here’s Maureen Owen reading “balmy tomorrow/saturday more snow predicted/the lilacs are in turmoil”  from Poets on the Road:

And Barbara Henning reading “Here We Are” from A Day Like Today:

 

 

Young Charlie Manuel [by Dayn Perry]

[Guest Author Note:  Professional sportswriter, Chicagoan and Mississippi native Dayn Perry creates exuberant and frequently ribald poetry which generally takes flight from baseball cards and other images of ballplayers.  I could not rest easily without sharing these with more people.  Dayn Perry's futile efforts can be found here, mainly.]

 

Young Charlie Manuel packs his shotgun shells with loose-leaf tobacco. That way it just stings a little.

Young Charlie Manuel once benched all of West Virginia for not hustling.

While Loretta Lynn is rightly known as the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Young Charlie Manuel is just as rightly known as “Good Buddy to the Shenandoah Valley.”

Thanks to Young Charlie Manuel’s soothing presence and weather-predictive hinge joints, he is on occasion able to talk a tornado back into the clouds. “Hold on now, bossman,” he says to the approaching F4 while sitting in his idling pickup with the driver’s side window rolled down. “Let’s you and me figure this out. Hop in and we’ll take a ride.”

Young Charlie Manuel, while playing for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, walked into one of Tokyo’s finest restaurants for the first time, and the staff knew immediately to prepare him an off-menu dish of squirrel meat and dumplings. He said upon sopping up the last swaths of gravy with a flaky buttermilk biscuit, “では、神を恐れるチャウチャウ、小さい相棒をありがとうございました。 y’すべての右である、知っている ya’ll ですか?”

When Young Charlie Manuel needs to clear his head, he takes his black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88 — the one with the aftermarket Piper J-3 Cub engine, which he and Rebel Dabney towed out of the junkyard with a battleship chain — out on the rural route and opens her up just a bit.

Young Charlie Manuel would probably be able to relax a bit more if he didn’t have a vast haul of corn liquor in the trunk and strap-bolted to the undercarriage of that black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88.

Prolly be okay, though, since Young Charlie Manuel is deputized in every county that the creek runs through.

Did you see that shit? Young Charlie Manuel gunned her at the crest of that hill and easily cleared that doe and that opossum crossing the road. Woo-wee shit.

Young Charlie Manuel has, for several years running, been voted Meanest Sumbitch and Nicest Sumbitch in the Valley. Which one he presents you with pretty much depends on you.

Young Charlie Manuel would punch his way out of this dead-end town, ‘cept Young Charlie Manuel has always had thing for dead-end towns.

The next time a jurisdictional authority doesn’t survey a mounting disaster and mutter, “God Almighty Damn. Better call Charlie,” will be the first.

Ideally, he knows that the only way to get aholt of Young Charlie Manuel is by CB radio.

Fairfield Porter's Portrait of JA (1952)

Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery (Argyle Socks), 1952.

IM John Ashbery, July 28, 1927 -- September 3, 2017

Poet Spotlight: Karyna McGlynn [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a new poem by Karyna McGlynn.  Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Witness, Georgia Review, New England Review, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. She’s an avid collagist and is currently working on a new book, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A New Poem by Karyna McGlynn

HOW TO TALK THE MANIC AWAY

I used to be so mad—I had daggers coming out
of my puffed sleeves. I decorated Easter baskets
with the plastic daisies of my Fury & mounted
them on Playtex-pink three-speeds.
Every bike I ever owned suffered
a spectacular death: hit by a grey Grand Am,
tossed like a stone into the quarry, snatched
through a broken window, found mangled
in a ditch.  I shook my swampy sobs
out of their frames & ironed my playbills
for breakfast. I mounted my miscues
on the walls of a rocket. I covered
my mistakes in neon & called it Art.
I charged people to listen to me scream.
I moved to the desert because I'm supposed to
be capricious like that. Some people said
my hubris would be better in the mouth
of a dinosaur, or as the silhouette of
a disgraced news anchor. In a West Texas bar,
some girl asked if I'd seen the Marfa Lights.
I stood up whiskily on my stool & said,
“Bitch, I AM the Marfa Lights!”

I used to collect lace collars & white gloves
made for the Nervous & the Consumptive.
I stalked old ladies’ estate sales.
Some of still had boxes of seamed stockings
wrapped in tissue paper
& lavender water & bakelite hair combs.
None of this stuff ever fit or endeared me
to others. Imagine going through life
with white cotton seams around
your fingers. Imagine the Whole World
saying, “Don't Touch.” Still, in several
nightdresses I clambered over
a field of sods. There was a desk
in the distance with one light in its
Top Drawer. The night was open to me.
I took out my loudest shears
& cut a hole in the landscape
to make a space for the Silence
I was immediately accused of violating.  
My afterlife was a trial of ill-
fitting hats, spilled sugar & Little Girls
who loved their pet bunnies too much.
So much, they squeezed their lights out,
nestled their bodies in the doll carriage.
What shall I paint for the mourners:
an old schooner marooned in a field
of clover? A corpse that stinks its way
to the Truth? A bottle of warm
poppy milk? A dumbshow? Shall I
keep up appearances even though
I am slowly losing my sawdust
through an open seam? I know:
I should.

Poet Spotlight: Dora Malech [by Kristina Marie Darling]

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech.  Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech

 

Essay     as yes,

begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).

Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.

Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.

It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.

Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?

Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—

 

_____________

 

I do

            After Meg Ronan

 

Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.

 

_____________

After Plath: Metaphors I

            [I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]

Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.

 

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors II

            [An elephant, a ponderous house,]

Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.

 

______________

 

After Plath: Metaphors IV

            [O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]

Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.

_____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors V

            [This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]

A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors VII

            [I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]

Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.

Poet Spotlight: Lisa Olstein [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a poem by Lisa Olstein.  Lisa Olstein is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, LATE EMPIRE (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). PAIN STUDIES, a book of lyric nonfiction, is forthcoming in 2020. Recipient of a Hayden Carruth Award, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Writing Residency, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award, she is a member of the poetry faculty for the University of Texas at Austin’s New Writers Project and Michener Center for Writers.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A New Poem by Lisa Olstein

SOFT TARGET

I’d rather not walk through a lightning storm
to see you, but that’s just the weather.
Last night something struck out so suddenly
from deep inside me, arriving it seemed to flee:
a new feeling, a sudden realization, ancient
knowledge forged in the chemical present.
I meant to say soul, soul is where from, once
forged, it fled, bringing its news of another place
but it felt silly to say so. Anyway, a little death
as coyly in literature they say was in play
and outside the darkened room, too, explosions,
but not the good kind. You see what I did there?
By morning, I’d thought it would’ve died down
but it hasn’t: angry alto monks, darkest echoes.
I’m wearing my best boots for the occasion.
Maybe it’s useless to carry this umbrella,
maybe worse. Turbulence becomes you,
becomes me, erases the difference, the distance
by which we measure. I see I’ve played this
all wrong, waiting, rushing, talking, still talking
when silence is the only place we might meet.

Alone with John Ashbery (by Angela Patrinos)

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.  Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

                                                                                          At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

 

 

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.      

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.  But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.   

 

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

 

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said. 

 

He moved on to his translations of [Pierre] Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

 

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even.  There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in.  No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years.  As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.  This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”  He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.  It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.  The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.” 

Does he attend openings and visit galleries? He does.

John Ashbery confides that he is looking forward to the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

 

from the archives; originally posted April 16, 2008. Reposted today, April 7, which was designated "John Ashbery day" in perpetuity in a ceremony in the New York City Council in April 2006 during the John Ashbery festival we staged at the New School that week.  Participants included  Strar Black, Billy Collins,Jane Freilicher, Jorie Graham, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hammond, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Meghan O'Rourke, Ron Padgett, Jenni Quilter, Archie Rand, Eugene Richie,David Shapiro, James Tate, John Emil Vincent, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier.

Visiting Raftery the Poet in the Cemetery of the Poets [by Terence Winch]

Many decades ago, my brother Jesse took a beginners’ course in the Irish language. Out of that experience, he memorized a short, beautiful poem by Anthony Raftery, usually called “Mise Raifteirí.”  When we were last in Ireland, in October of 2016, he suggested that we visit Raftery’s grave, which turns out to be in the vicinity of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, the same area where our mother was from. So, with our cousin Martin Flynn and our good friend Dominick Murray, we took the short ride from the Flynn household in Cahercrea to the Reilig na Bhfilí (Cemetery of the Poets) in Killeeneen where Raftery is buried.

As Wikipedia informs us, Raftery (30 March 1779–25 December 1835), who composed in Irish, is often called the last of the wandering bards.  He lived almost exactly a century later than the great Turlough O' Carolan, the itinerant harper who composed hundreds of gorgeous musical pieces that are still widely played today, just as Raftery's poems, which were never written down in his lifetime, are taught today in Irish schools.  Raftery also played the fiddle, and I have a special affection for musician-poets. Both men were blind, a misfortune that had no apparent negative effect on their creative abilities.

I thought I had taken a photo of the signage regarding the other poets buried in the Reilig na Bhfilí, but if I did I can’t find it. One Internet source gives their names as Marcus and Peatsaí Ó Callanáin. I believe the signage stated that they were brothers and both rivals of Raftery. I don’t know if any of their poems are extant. [Please see the comment below by my old friend Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, who provides some invaluable information on Peatsaí Ó Callanáin.]  In any case, Raftery is without question the top dog in this beautiful, serene little graveyard. (photo of Terence Winch, Oct. 2016, by Jesse Winch)

There we were in this place to which the paths of glory but lead, caught up in its eerie, decaying beauty, when my cousin Martin gathers us to show us something. He holds up a white envelope sealed in a plastic cover. “Someone has left me a check!” he jokes. We all laugh. We debate the propriety of opening this mystery letter, but really there is no other choice but to do so. This place is nearly abandoned, with no office or staff or any other visitors. So Martin opens the envelope. Inside is a card showing a photo of children playing with a homemade little plane, with a real plane in the background, ca. 1940, and a caption reading, “ YOU WILL NOT DO INCREDIBLE THINGS WITHOUT AN INCREDIBLE DREAM.”  There’s also an indecipherable message in longhand. But here’s the kicker: folded in the card is a 20 Euro bill. Money, after all. Graveyard money!  We spent it all on caffeine and cake in a coffee shop in Galway City. Thank you, Mr. Raftery. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo of Martin Flynn by Dominick Murray; photo of Raftery's grave by T. Winch)

Here is his poem, with an English translation:

Mise Raifteirí, an file, lán dóchais is grá le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá Dul siar ar m'aistear, le solas mo chroí Fann agus tuirseach, go deireadh mo shlí Feach anois mé mo dhroim le balla, Ag seinm ceoil do phocaí folamh.

I am Raftery, the poet,    full of hope and love    With eyes without light,    silence without torment.    Going back on my journey,    with the light of my heart    Weak and tired,    until the end of my way.    Look at me now    my back to the wall,    playing music    to empty pockets.

And, finally, Raftery's work continues to make its way into the world, as this lovely song inspired by his poem---and performed here by Eleanor Shanley and John McCartin---attests. (I'm not sure at this point if they are the composers).

 

"I know how valuable my time is and I plan to never ever get a job again” [Joe Brainard, from an essay by Ron Padgett]

(Ed note: Last summer, Ron Padgett allerted us to his wonderful essay about his great friend the poet and artist Joe Brainard. I'm posting an excerpt below with a link to the full piece. Thank you Ron. sdh)

Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.

The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.

The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.

At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.

Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here. 

"The Unavoidable Sensuous Apprehension that We Were Indeed a Little Ball in Space . . . " David Lehman interviews A. R. Ammons

A recent issue of the New Yorker (the same issue that published David's poem "It Could Happen to You") included an article about the poetry of A. R. Ammons. The article mentions Ammons' Paris Review interview, which David conducted in 1996. You can read the interview here. 

Even better, you can listen to the complete interview tapes. These are a treat; as one would expect, Ammons' discussion of how he works is fascinating and filled with terrific advice for all poets, regardless of where they are in their career. 

David Lehman interview A. R. Ammons Parts I - III

(I almost stopped reading the New Yorker piece early on, when the author describes Ammons as "puttering." Clearly he never met this great genius--which I did, in Ithaca, on many occasions--or "puttering' would never have come to mind. sdl)

Educators Roundtable: Dean Rader & Marie Fuhrman [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.  For more information, visit his website. 

 

An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom. 

KMD:  You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others.  I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry.  What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them?  

DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way that highlights not just the thematics of poetic creation but its forms as well.

I also think more and more students are pursuing graduate studies in Native literatures. We definitely need more students--ideally more Indigenous students--getting PhDs in literature, English, AIS, and American studies. What has been missing for these students is a current anthology of Indigenous poetics that arms them to to graduate level work in Native poetries.

The second issue is about poets themselves and what gets taught in graduate creative writing programs. I think recent books by Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier might get taught in MFA programs, but there is a vast canon of Indigenous American poetry that does not get taught in graduate programs because graduate writing courses tend to focus on craft, and for years readers have been taught to read books by Native writers through the lens of theme or context or culture. This anthology helps correct that.

CF:  I agree with everything that Dean said.  As a teacher of Native Lit and advisor for our Universities IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program) I am responsible for teaching Natives and non-Natives about Indigenous literature.  I often teach classes for Native students only, but I have taught mixed classes as well.  What I have found in teaching both is that Natives would have to learn about Indigenous writing from a non-Native perspective and non-Natives were never given the chance to hear about craft or the impetus for a poem or story from the Native writer.  Often I would invite, via Skype or classroom visit, the writers and poets to talk to the students themselves, but this is not always feasible.  It is my hope that a collection like this one might be able to bring those voices into the classroom directly.  This way, both student and teacher may gain a better perspective and understanding of Native writing.

KMD:  In what ways is pedagogy politically charged?  Can our decisions as teachers create a more inclusive and just artistic community?  

DR: A great part of teaching is related to 1) knowledge and 2) comfort. Most poets and professors who teach did not, themselves, read poetry by Native writers in college or graduate school. So, they are less likely to teach it now. I think many professors shy away from teaching, say, Wendy Rose poems or Simon Ortiz poems or LeAnne Howe poems because they don’t know much about tribal histories or even larger Native histories. Furthermore, Native issues are not forefront in American culture right now the way African American and Chicano/a issues are. So, the political urgency of Black Lives Matter or the immigration debate may, for some, feel exigent. I would argue though American minority issues, the marginalization of people of color, and the absence of Natives from popular and political culture, and the larger issues of class make teaching works by Native writers paramount at this moment in history.

KMD:  What new directions do you hope that this anthology opens up within our thinking about poetry, literary tradition, and aesthetics more generally?  

DR: I hope this anthology encourages writers and professors to think about Indigeous poetry in terms of craft. I really hope our book shifts the lens a little bit so that people do not turn to Native poetry just to “learn about Indians” (as I heard someone say not long ago) but to learn about art. What if readers start thinking about Native poetry the way they think about Native painting and pottery--as modes of aesthetic production, as vibrant acts of creation.

CF: I can’t say this any better.

KMD:  Tell us about one particular contribution from the anthology that you would be excited to teach.  How would you utilize this particular work in the classroom?  

CF: I am excited to teach work by Nimiipuu poet Michael Wasson.  First, because he is from the Nez Perce tribe which is located here in Idaho, not far from the University.  Many of our students are Nez Perce and I think they would be honored and inspired to hear from one of their own.  Not to mention, Michael’s work is outstanding.  His poems are complex, multi-layered, and extremely poignant.  I am excited to bring poets into the classroom that reflect my students.

KMD:  Given the anthology’s unique structure, what does this book make possible within the context of writing programs?  For writing communities more generally?  

DR: The book’s combination of poetry and craft are going to be unique. I also like the idea that our book foregrounds influential poetic texts. This highlights the ways in which poetry is a kind of collaboration, or at the very least a conversation. It also helps illustrate direct influences and echoes.

CF: Generations and a sense of community are very important to Native people.  This book is way of honoring our teacher, our elders, and inspiring our children to write their truths as well.

Because this book is comprised of writing from poets all over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) it gives a more complete picture of the Native American experience, particularly the contemporary experience while honoring the past.  Though this book is not meant to be a historical work, it does help to fill the gaps in both the current events and the overlooked history of Native people in the U.S.

For more information about our anthology, our mission, and how you can bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.