The Best American Poetry

John Yau: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Eve Aschheim

__________________________________________________________________________________

Things I Should Tell You Before It’s Too Late

 

Princess Sitting Duck isn’t my real name

I am not one of the ones marred

 

By inexplicable outbursts of an obstreperous nature

Most times I am a curtain of conviviality

 

Don’t make friends with my dog

I used to collect ideas until I realized

 

I don’t have any of my own

Learn to shirk your duties

 

With dignity I always say

I used to dress in a squirrel suit

 

and play in the forest

where it flanks the railroad tracks

 

leading to the haunted mines

I never reached the rank of colonel

 

You can hold my hand

as long as you don’t lose it

 

I serve drinks in tall blue glasses

I am never sure which principles are mine

 

Sometimes I get glassy-eyed

and pee on the neighbor’s porch

 

I no longer throw stones at children

I bow whenever I see a high-ranking dignitary

 

stop to tie his shoes

or zip up his fly

 

Princess Sitting duck isn’t my nickname either

____________________________________________________________________________________________

John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

                  John Yau, 1983. Oil on canvas by Robert Berlind

 

 

 

M.L. Smoker: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

Borrowing Blue

I’m not the painter here. I leave that to you, but blue
is the color of my father’s camping cup, left tonight
on the Formica counter. This pen I am writing with.
and the beaded moccasins and belt I danced in
before my mother died.
My grandmother had made these for her as a child—
spelling out in blue beads on blue beads
each of our names, our collective history
in an invisible pattern only we would recognize.
Not the blue of Montana sky either,
not that at all, but the pulse of lake water lapping
at your ankles, the temperature rising
as a storm gathers on the plains.
The push and pull of forgiveness.
I’m already thinking of leaving again.
Did I tell you this? How can I speak of this wind,
how it has no color, no sense,
no guilt. It makes me feel even more lonely
than I would ever let on.
I’m guessing you figured this much already.
(We will never stop missing them, will we,
the parent each of us has lost.)
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I would see
in the paintings if I were to visit you.
I like to think there would be some kind of end
to the blue, a visual end to what is never
adequate: blue flame, blue bead, blue ovary,
blue lung. See how easily we fail?
How can we believe that our secrets are in good hands—
yours resting at the bottom of Flathead Lake, mine held
in a small leather suitcase beneath the stairs.
I have not worn those moccasins or that belt for over
six years now. We should both be ashamed.
Look at us.  Look, as the grey fog
settles into your streets outside, how the near-white
canvases wait. You almost didn’t notice again.
Just like I almost didn’t notice the wind
dying down for evening.
So yes, let’s call it Montana blue, the vanishing point:
Maybe this is the real reason I have never learned
to trust in color. How can you take back
the kind of blue you’ve been dreaming of—trust
it will make something unhappen—
if it is the same blue you’re made of?

______________________________________________________________________________________________

M.L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.   She currently serves as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny. ◙ She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. ◙ Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. In 2009 she co-edited an anthology of human rights poetry with Melissa Kwasny entitled, I Go to the Ruined Place. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. ◙ She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years. In 2015 she was named the Indian Educator of the Year by the National Indian Education Association and was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama.  She currently works at Education Northwest as a practice expert in Indian Education. [For more on M.L. Smoker, click here.]

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Flathead Lake, Montana

 

Geoffrey Young: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

Geoff Young, Dec 2020. Background-- painting (detail) by Morgan Bulkeley, called 'Facing Heroes.'  Photo by Lillian Anderson.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

His Apprenticeship Never Occurred to Me While I Was out Surfing

 

I want to thank Bob Dylan

Not only for the songs and movies

But for the March 1978 Playboy interview

In which he tells how he got turned on to folk singing

 

He was fifteen years old

He owned an electric guitar, he loved Elvis

And then he heard Odetta’s first record

He learned every song on it

 

Proceeding to Harry Belafonte and The Kingston Trio

Uncovering more & more as he went along

Until finally he was doing nothing

But Carter Family and Jesse Fuller songs

 

At 19, the discovery of Woody Guthrie’s music

Opened up a whole new world

And like a bullet shot from a bow he entered it

Somehow I always figured that Zimmy was born

 

With the complete history of blues and folk

Just taped to his lungs

That when he breathed the songs came naturally to life

With the likes of Leroy Carr, Blind Willie McTell,

 

Leadbelly, Bill Monroe, and Muddy Waters

All harried bluesmen in dark caverns playing for drinks

Living from one clean white shirt in a cardboard suitcase to the next

As if Bob never had to read Kierkegaard or even sheet music

 

Or woodshed for endless teen hours

In order to strum axe and blow harp

At the same time, remembering

All those words, distorting voice for chorus after chorus

 

As if he never had to drive himself nuts

Just to write the songs in the first place

After twenty years, he said, I’m still using

Those same three chords, the ones Odetta played

 

And thanks for admitting it, Bob

I mean about Harry Belafonte

And The Kingston Trio, too

Jesus, we could be brothers!

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Born in 1944, Geoffrey Young grew up in San Diego.  After a Fulbright year in Paris, he worked at La Galerie Sonnabend for a spell.  In 1982 he moved from Berkeley to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  Over a thirty-year period, his small press, The Figures, published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction.  ◙ Recent books of his poetry and drawing include Pivot (2020), and Asides (2020). The trilogy:  Alibi (2019), Sauce (2018), and Sight Unseen (2018) exist in small editions. ◙  For twenty-seven years he directed the Geoffrey Young Gallery, which closed as of Christmas, 2018.   Over the years Young has written catalog essays for more than a dozen artists. [For more on Geoffrey Young, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Baruch Joselow: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

____________________________________________________

Blacker Pacific

 

Travel this glass canyon

on your back, on a sled

pulled by dogs blue with fear.

 

As long as the blankets

are thick, and the medicine 

takes, you may arrive at base

 

without having lost it all.

Don’t tumble or drag

a finger through the snow.

 

Even the smallest arch

is a figure of strength, bending

its back to hold the load. That

 

scratch of the runners on glass can’t

come to seem musical, but with luck

it can be polished out

 

until what is reflected,

clear as a bell, is the journey

itself, the tale you’ll tell.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Baruch Joselow is the author of numerous books and chapbooks, including Excontemporary (Red Hen/ Story Line) and Begin at Once (Chax Press). Her poems have appeared in dozens of magazines and in several anthologies. Joselow has collaborated on artists’ books with visual artists in the U.S. and Ukraine. Born in Baltimore, Joselow spent most of her adult life in Washington DC, where for many years she was on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She now lives in Lewes, Delaware, and works as a psychotherapist. [For a recent interview, click here.]

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eamonn Wall: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eamonn Wall. Photo by August Jennewein

____________________________________________________________________________

The Grassy Garbage of Inwood

 

If anyone walks through here from out of town

he/she/it will hardly be pleased by grinding

boomboxes, the leaves of twenty autumns,

every brand of beer can, bottle, and cigarette

known to the bodega owners of this great city.

And I agree that Inwood Park is an unholy mess

and would be hard pressed indeed to write the

Fall/Spring/Summer/Winter verse The New Yorker

demands for each pristine season because I don't think

that he/she/it in the dentist's waiting room

in Cincinnati would like to read a nature poem

with a beer can in it. No way. Remember too

The New Yorker pays big money for nature poems.

Nevertheless, we are here as usual in the afternoon

and when we pass the first radio you wiggle your

little ankles to the beat and when I put you on the

grass you pull it as if it were the belly hair of paradise:

you find a Winston butt and show it to me before

diving into the vast anthropology of leaves. Your

mother said to me before we left the house: "Don't

let him near the trash," but what can I do,

a child must learn what his hands are for? Finally

it's time for the stream where a bird is drinking

beside a can of Heineken Holland Beer. You walk

on the stones, crouch, and let the water flow

through your soft fingers and I shout to The New Yorker

and the gardening weeklies that this is the natural world.

I take you away from it in tears, brilliant world of

grass and radios stretching out and bursting, and a

slinking butt lying there for you to notice it.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford, Ireland, who has lived in the US since 1982: in Wisconsin, New York City, Nebraska, and for the past twenty years in St. Louis. His books of poetry and prose include Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015 (Salmon Poetry, 2015); From the Sin-e Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press. 2000); Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame, 2011). Current projects include a new collection of poetry and a new book of essays on contemporary writing. He works in international education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

____________________________________________________________________________________

 

Grace Cavalieri: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________________________________________

The Sound That Haunting Makes

 

I'd like to talk about how the day went, talk as we used to do,

not with singing words, but smaller celebrations gathered until

we noticed the ridges of each other—

the missing parts that no one else could see.

 

I don't mind that you’re away, an understandable

shift—aerodynamic in fact—you loved to fly—but

that you would forget me is impossible.

Did you see this sweater’s lost a button loop?

 

And that excessive fruit makes the basket spill?

Are you laughing at my decorating skill?

Are you assuring me the problem is in the straw,

its weaving, the oversized pear, the lopsided chair?

 

I'd like some decisions from you, yet I understand—

as a passenger of time—you are beyond my reach.

I need some help with perceptions, logistics—

teaching myself to live under the weight of visibility.

 

Since we seem to be of two different geographic climes,

can you direct me closer to you? You, who flew from Japan

to California using only the stars. Should I sit here in the sun

or move my hands, my heart, a little to the left?

 

I understand these are contradictory criteria—

the living and the dead—yet at times, through my devotion

to the past, plus my unreasonable emotions, I feel a

radiant warmth encircling me. Of course, at other times

The cumulative effect of memory left on its own is staggering.

Yesterday, you were solid as stone, rich with detail, revolving around me,

and other days like this one, I'm sure you understand,

It's as if it never happened.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland's tenth poet laureate. She founded "The Poet and the Poem" for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 44 years on-air. Her latest books are Showboat (2019), which centers on her 25 years as a Navy wife, and What The Psychic Said (2020, both books from Goss 183 Pub.). Her latest play is "Quilting The Sun," Theater for the New City, NYC, 2019. She was married for 60 years to the late sculptor, Kenneth Flynn. They had four children. Grace lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

                Kenneth Flynn with one of his sculptures

 

 

 

 

Matthew Rohrer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________

News of the Dead Pope

 

Out of a window musical notes float in single file

past the windbreak of sage-colored trees.

 

The notes are black with mourning. Black birds

hang in the stillness over the courthouses

and other sacred buildings.

 

At the lake a child notices the sound as if it were coming from the ground,

out of a strange nautical cellar nearby.

 

The news travels quickly on such a clear day,

through the clouds shaped like Valkyries,

the clouds swinging swords.

 

On the child’s screened-in porch a radio lights up.

It is old and made of wood;

nevertheless it rises to the occasion.

 

The child, who heard everything

including the bankers sobbing in the chapel across the lake,

 

thought he might play saxophone when he grew up.

____________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. His book-length poem The Others won the 2017 Believer Book Award. His book A Green Light was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. “News of the Dead Pope” is from his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton in 1995. He attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City, and then moved to Brooklyn, and that is where you will find him from now on. [For more information on, and poems by, Matt Rohrer, click here.]

_____________________________________________________________________________

30th Anniversary of the Death of Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

It was thirty years ago today that Tim Dlugos died at age forty of AIDS. Tim was a poet of enormous talent and creative energy. He was beloved by many, myself included. His warmth, humor, and congeniality made him very easy to like. When his friend David Trinidad brought out Tim's collected poems (A Fast Life) in 2001, I was impressed by how much great work Tim had produced in his short life. Like so many others, I still miss him and, as the poem below demonstrates, still dream about him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Next Best Thing

 

I am having lunch in the humongous

cafeteria at my workplace. I’m not sure

what my job is, but the cafeteria is packed.

I scan the room and see that my best friend,

Michael David Lally, is sitting alone ten or so

tables across from me.  So I go to join him.

 

But just as I start heading his way, he bolts up

from his chair and scoots off to another table

where Conway Twitty is also having lunch.

Conway is alone and looks like a successful

businessman. He has glasses and wears a suit.

I can’t imagine why he is in our cafeteria,

but he and Michael seem to be in an instant

intense conversation and I don’t feel that I should

interrupt them. Their faces are only an inch apart.

 

Then I am in front of the Childe Harold, a great

bar in Dupont Circle that went out of business

some time back. I’m sitting on the little brick

wall in front waiting for Tim Dlugos. We’re

having lunch together. I haven’t seen him since

he died and am hoping I won’t have trouble

recognizing him. But along he comes, looking

older but good. He has very long hair, mostly gray,

and he’s clutching a briefcase from which papers

seem to be tumbling. It’s so good to see him again.

 

Bernard Welt happens along. I want to invite him

to join us for lunch, but I also feel selfish about

seeing Tim. We have so much to catch up on.

So I don’t invite Bernie, and feel a little guilty about it.

I am trying to call him Bernard rather than Bernie,

just as I want people to call me Terence rather

than Terry, but I ask him if he would mind if

I started calling him “Bernardie” instead.

Tim thinks that’s funny. Then we part ways.

11/28/2020

__________________________________________________________________________________

Here is a Tim Dlugos post I wrote for this site in 2008. There's a good bit of information online about Tim, including sites that offer examples of his work. This DC site is especially good. Tim's greatest poem is, arguably, "G-9," which can be found here. 

 

 

Meg Kearney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Gabriel Parker

______________________________________________________________________

George Says Stop Writing About Yourself

(New York, December 2001)

 

This one’s for George, who urged take off those

shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped

in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

 

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t

bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—

how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like

a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers

 

and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy

with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak

of babies, about not having them or the ugly one

who’s so much a part of your nights she must be

real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.

 

Don’t talk about holding her above your head,

calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost

smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond

Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.

It opens the window to the stench, three months

 

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there’s a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________

On Election Day

 

I hear democracy weep, on election day.

The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.

The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.

The dead unleash their fury, on election day.

My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.

The sister does her washing, on election day.

Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.

The men prepare for dying, on election day.

The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.

So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.

On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.

On election day, the mother refuses her milk.

On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.

On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.

The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.

Your eyes slide, on election day.

Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.

No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.

On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the

       golden leap to girdled crest. 

The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.

Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.

The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.

The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.

The beggar made a king, on election day.

“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.

Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.

The ghosts wear suits, on election day.

On election day, sulfur smells like beer.

On election day, the minister quakes in fear.

On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.

On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the

        hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.

The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.

Galoshes and tears, on election day.

The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.

The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.

I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.

 

(November 4, 2008)

________________________________________________________________________________________

Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.  [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sandra Beasley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Vocation

 

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino.

For six months I played Brahms in a mall.

For six months I arranged museum dioramas;

my hands were too small for the Paleolithic

and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.

I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them

Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.

I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit.

I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.

All I want to do is sit on a veranda while

a hard rain falls around me. I'll file your 1099s.

I'll make love to strangers of your choice.

I'll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it

on that veranda. If it calls you, it's your calling,

right? Once I asked a broker what he loved

about his job, and he said Making a killing.

Once I asked a serial killer what made him

get up in the morning, and he said The people.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode (forthcoming February 2021); Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. ["Vocation" is from I Was the Jukebox: Poems. Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Beasley.]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Ahmos Zu-Bolton: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ravis

 

My brother turns his life insideout,

from a jail in Leesville,

from a half-way house in Lake Charles,

from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.

He is prisoner of his own rage,

trapped behind the swollen bars

of some lingering chains

and some sudden cage.

 

I speak to him from miles away,

from the cell next door and

lightyears away,

from motherlands and the fertile earth

our Mississippi father plowed:

 

I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,

the father who died fighting for his son,

the big brother with muscles in his miles,

the preacher with his pitiful prayers,

 

I am trying to give him

the key to the cage, the hammer

to break the chains, the plot

the escape, the magic, the ju-ju

the tunnel under the demon walls,

the North Star to follow,

 

I climb inside all his sins,

find them in the flesh of this poem,

do bloody battle with them,

rip them apart like a white man's curse,

become their bitter judge,

their merciful jury,

their solemn executioner,

 

I leave them on the open floor

of his cell, spread out like the pages

of a testament, shadowboxing him

like a mirror,

 

I can forgive them

those far-away long-ago sins,

but I can't erase them,

for they have their own afterlife,

their own ghost pulsating

on the hot breath where

my brother's frustrated bloodline boils...

 

yet no loving offering

from my elderly black hand

can reverse his youthful middle passage

as he sits

on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,

sent to his silent room

like a spoiled boychild,

where he conjures secret maps

for whatever freedoms

he chose to rock his dusty soul with.

________________________________________________________________________________________

I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died  at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

______________________________________________________________________________________

Joan Retallack: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

 

The Magic Rule of 9

 

Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to

get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over

death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good

a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of

many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with

great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and

greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.

That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all

multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:

1x9=9, 9=9; 2x9=18, 1+8=9; 3x9=27, 2+7=9; etc.

This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the

species that longs for more than a first glance affords.

Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, you

don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird

falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.

Who among us truly understands the decimal system.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.” 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Donaghy: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Shibboleth

 

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.

Another couldn’t strip the cellophane

From a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

 

By the second week of battle

We’d become obsessed with trivia.

At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,

An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

 

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,

Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,

Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.

“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together.  See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Kim Roberts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Roberts (photo, Art Omi, Oct 2019)

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Double Indemnity

 

No, not insurance. What I

meant to say was “double identity,”

 

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,

William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

 

Lady Gaga. For these folks, surely,

The Postman Always Rings Twice.

 

But now I’ve Mildred Pierced myself

to the image of James M. Cain,

 

typing away in his little white house

in suburban Maryland. His typewriter

 

is preserved in a university library;

I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the change

 

from manual to electric to electronic

to what-the-hell-is-a-typewriter

 

and no one will be archiving

our battered beloved iPads,

 

even if they once belonged to Yo-Yo Ma,

Flavor Flav, or Marky Mark.

 

Now all our devices must do at least

two things: phone-cameras,

 

calculator-umbrellas. But in truth

all of us lead double lives, an outer

 

story plus a hidden story, separated by

such a thin skin. Tell us that one again

 

Ford Madox Ford, Kris Kristofferson,

Humbert Humbert, Richie Rich.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Roberts is the editor of By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). She has published five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017).

______________________________________________________________________________________

 

Doug Lang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Lang at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

______________________________________________________________________________________

Lang’s Special Fortune Cookies

 

Nothing special is coming your way.

Your luck will not change today.

Your sense of humor is of no use to you.

No one is thinking of you this evening.

Your determination has gotten you where you are today.

You will always be surrounded.

If you see someone, why not have doubts?

You have no sense and you don’t know what time it is.

Nothing in this one.

 

Please ignore the music. it is not for you.

If you stop looking for what you want, you will be sure to find it and lose interest in it.

Everything will now come your way and go right past you.

You do not need to be patient anymore: do not think, do not listen, do not heed signs.

You should regard delays and setbacks as normal.

Versatility is beyond your reach.

A good home is too expensive.

 

You are unable to show your true self to others. You have no true self.

You will conquer all obstacles and achieve world domination, but first you must shave your mustache.

You will notice that nothing has changed in the near future.

You are capable of repeating everything endlessly.

Don’t put your egg in one basket.

A true friend always walks away when you start whining.

A small house will not hold as much as a big one. This should not be a problem for you.

You have a superficial understanding of the arts and music.

You will never forget a friend who owes you.

You will go a long way.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Doug Lang is from Swansea in Wales. He came to Washington DC in 1973, the year that his novel, Freaks, was published by New English Library. He ran a now legendary reading series at Folio Books in Dupont Circle from January 1976 to June 1978. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, along with his wit, intellectual generosity, and good will, made him the most popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught writing for 37 years. His most recent book is dérangé, published by Primary Writing in DC in 2013. A new collection, In the Works, Selected Poems 1973–2013, is forthcoming from DC’s Edge Books. For more of Doug’s poems, see the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. For his 2008 post on the poetry of the 1970s, click here.  His film blog from 2007 is also worth checking out. For a multi-part, six-hour conversation between Terence Winch and Doug Lang, visit PennSound. The Doug Lang Papers are held by the Burns Library at Boston College.  [editor’s note: Doug is currently off-line, but I will make sure he gets any comments on this post.] 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

   Doug Lang with Blaise Cendrars book in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann.

Patricia Spears Jones: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

If I Were Rita Hayworth

 

I would hear Spanish first.

My father would teach me how to shimmer.

My mother would keep her mouth shut.

 

I would wear red dresses at age 12

and dance like a woman many years older.

I would dance in my father's arms.

 

Later I would dye my hair red

and pluck the last Spanish words from my mouth.

 

I would masquerade as an American­

that healthy girl next door who knows

how to crack a whip.

 

I would dream only in black and white

(after Technicolor, some peace is needed).

 

As the Studio built a whole world for me

full of fresh cream and gingerbread, I would seek

out the darkest men, nigger dark, then fuck them

into marriage. I would wed a Prince of Darkness

and bear daughters named for the perfumes of Arabia.

 

If l were Rita Hayworth, strung between living a lie

and bearing a sickness so furious it ages me to dream of it,

I would rage in my illness, make a black hole

wide enough to swallow the damnation of my beauty.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Spears Jones grew up in Arkansas and has lived and worked in New York City since the mid 1970s.  She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. The recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2017, Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and other books. Her poems are widely anthologized, including in the forthcoming in 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, msmagazine.com, and numerous other print and online journals.  She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). She curated programs as Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn.  She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University, and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence.  She has taught summer poetry workshops at Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and Wild Seeds Workshop for Medgar Evers College and at The Poetry Project, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, for Cave Canem New York classes and at branches of the NYPL and the BPL. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Billy Collins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________

 

Afternoon with Irish Cows

 

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

 

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

 

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

 

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

 

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Billy Collins is a former US Poet Laureate. His latest collection is Whale Day (Random House, 2020.)

___________________________________________________________________________________

 Cows in county Cork, Ireland. Sept. 2020. Photo by Jennifer O'Riordan.

 

 

Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

 

Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Bill Nevins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo (detail) by Tony O’Hara

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

No Prisoners

What can I say?
We met in Santa Fe.

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist
And she knew John Berryman.

Poets
are worse
than lawyers
she said
worse
than mosquitoes
Like those big flying cucarachas
down south
they get in your hair

Poets!
Poets tell you stories!
Stories about
anarchist painters
who won’t take cash
from the cruel corporate state
so
they live in boxes
made of cardboard
under bridges
without berets
without brushes
without canvas stretchers
without grants
without patrons

without brushes

Poets
she said
are like syrup
on a pancake
they soak in
until they wipe out all the taste
of the pancake itself
and fill it in with words
words
words
sweet, sticky
words!
Poets make everybody else
taste
what they taste
she sighed.

I
hate
fucking
poets
she said

First,
she hissed,
after the revolution
we’ll kill
all the poets!

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Nevins has two books of poetry from Swimming With Elephants Publications: Heartbreak Ridge and AWE. Bill is an Iona College graduate who has lived in New Mexico since 1996. He is profiled in the 2007 film Committing Poetry in Times of War. He is also a widely published cultural journalist. He may be reached at bill_nevins@yahoo.com.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________