Birthdays of Poets

Fidel Castro - Eulegise or Otherwise

2016-11-27T22:27:00.003-05:00

It is the duty of poets, from their point of view, to chronicle the times from their standpoint.

For all his faults, I am a fan of Castro. His persecution of the LGBT community while more vigourous than other nations was reflective of their thinking. His rounding up of opposition was more overt than Americas, who operate more overtly.

The likes of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning point to that: America ensures to only fo after the most dangerous, whereas Castro rounded up all who were dangerous.

Feel free to post anti castro pieces underneath, my tribute is at this link:

Elegy for Fidel Castro

Other poems you may like:

Every Book Has Its Last Page - Ingrid Andrew Obituary

2015-11-27T09:57:00.001-05:00

Dedicated to the memory of the late writer, artist and musician Ingrid Andrew…

Every book has its last page
When turned, signifies the end
Such is life, and its many chapters
We turn the last page on our friend
But life, unlike a look, its length we know not
When finished ask in surprise, is that it?
Be sure to read each chapter and page, each line
Miss not the tears, the tales, worry and wit.

The late Ingrid Andrew. We published her verse “They Are Tearing Down the Mountains” in Cartys Poetry Journal a few years aback along with some artwork, if I remember correct… always sad to hear of someones passing, but heartening to see the tributes on their wall…

Reference:

Cartys Poetry Journal, Feb 2010, “They Are Tearing Down the Mountains” (PDF)
WordPress website

DSCN0250 Joy's Leftow

2013-04-15T14:02:00.001-04:00

2013-04-12T22:23:00.002-04:00

Tonight I've decided to use this space for personal reasons, to assist my memory. I remembered reading in an essay by Robert Bly in his book American Poetry about Neruda's poem "The Dictators." How he decided to spend so much time on Neruda in a book titled American Poetry, I don't know, but he did. The book is a collection of essays he wrote in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, some of which he revised in the late 1980s before the book was published in 1990. Anyway, here's a translation of the poem (don't know whether this is Bly's translation or not):

An odor has remained among the sugar cane:
A mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
Petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
Of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
A delicate underling converses
With glasses, braid collars, and cords of gold.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
And the rapid laughs with gloves on
Cross the corridors at times
And join the dead voices
And the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping is hidden like a water-plant
Whose seeds fall constantly on the earth
And without light make the great blind leaves to grow.
Hatred has grown scale upon scale,
Blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
With a snout full of ooze and silence.

Bly shares his opinion of this poem: "It seems to me a masterpiece of the political poem." He goes on to say

Neruda's task is to entangle in the language the psychic substance of a South American country under a dictator. The Spanish original, of course, is much more resonant. But even in the translation it is clear that Neruda is bringing in unexpected images: "The tiny palace gleams like a watch" - images one would expect in an entirely different sort of poem: "rapid laughs with gloves on." Suddenly a blind plant appears, that reproduces itself by dropping seeds constantly on the ground, shaded by its own huge leaves. This image is complicated, created by a part of the mind inaccessible to hatred, and yet it carries the reality of hatred radiating from dictators into the consciousness with a kind of massive intelligence.

Okay, the reason I remember this poem is because of that complicated image of the leaves and the seeds and the shade and the plant growth in the dark. In my memory, though, I had somehow associated this image with another poem, possibly one by Lorca, which describes a house that isn't exactly haunted but has the scent of oranges in it, and the people living there remember their ancestors who also lived there. And over the house there sits a cloud of inaction. One day I'll understand why I remember these things the way I do. And hopefully I'll find that poem with the orange-scented home (Pretty sure it isn't in Bly's American Poetry).

I would like to know why Bly regards this as a masterpiece of political poetry. Perhaps he thinks this verse could apply to any society which has endured a visiting oppression. Early in his American Poetry book, Bly comments on "our recent poetry" by American poets. He says that, with them, "the poem is considered to be a construction independent of the poet. It is imagined that when the poet says 'I' in a poem he does not mean himself, but rather some other person - 'the poet' - a dramatic hero...". However, "The great poets of this century have written their poems in exactly the opposite way. In the poems of Neruda, Vallejo, Jimenez, Machado, and Rilke, the poem is an extension of the substance of the man, no different from his skin or his hands...". Okay, so then, where is the "I" in Neruda's poem "The Dictators"? Hm, in this poem, we know of humanity by the odor that inspires nausea and by the weeping, but the description is just that, description, and not an expression of an "I". Perhaps that is the source of the power of this particular poem. The oppression imposed has silenced the "I", as indicated by the "speechless death rattles." Then again, silence in the snout of the oppressor is a show of power because there's no need to engage in dialogue when you rule over people who have been beaten into submission.

POET ON PAINTING?

2012-10-16T15:21:00.001-04:00

Authors on Artists: Amy King on Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo

Paint Is the Abyss’ Law, Living the Accent: Marginalia on Absorption

Paint Is the Secretion of Scene on Leonor Fini’s Set

I now confer status on you. As in, everything is as

good as the next thing. Better yet, in this season,

I am implicitly requesting your death

on a platter. That said, should I begin without

interrogating the

great mystery that separates

dark matter from the everyday? Dive into beauty untinged by

the detritus of degenerative mechanics? But...

CONTINUED @ BRIGHT STUPID CONFETTI

WILL THE REAL WALT WHITMAN PROBLEM PLEASE STAND UP? TOUCHING PERFECT BODIES WITH HIS MIND

2012-10-16T15:19:00.002-04:00

I cannot fathom that Walt Whitman was the first to write on a variety of controversies typically attributed to “Song of Myself,” including the complexities of slavery, the overt hand of eroticism, and the soul beyond the confines of religion, atrocities of war, etc. In fact, a number of writers come easily to mind who preceded him on such matters (i.e. William Blake, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe).

It is my estimation that readers took offense to a primary feature that taste alone, presumably, should have dictated as unpopular: his form. Whitman’s stylings were, of course, the undoing of form as tradition dictated. As Allen Ginsberg noted, he ‘broke open the line,’ writing into the frontier, where no precedent had been set. Whitman’s was Gertrude Stein’s notion of “contemporariness” – his form was “ugly” in its sprawling. His non-adherence to tradition is as palpable as his lines are long utterances of street cadence. Nothing contains them except the page’s physical limitations – and even then, they stretch over from margin to margin and margin again. Whitman embraced the anarchy and energy of an abstracted American spirit, one that knew roots but reveled in where it could grow and co-habit with instead (“The Dude abides.”).

Despite the critics’ disdain, his work was read by the many. Whitman is known for “cataloging” as form — the catalog that wraps arms around the crowd and enters it, gently and with force, shaking hands where they work, wiping death in soldiers’ tears and encouraging the child-like steps of people out of tune. He asked individuals to exist aloud — for a lifetime. His “Song” carried on for reasons beyond, but to focus on the “problem” of his lines would have been a legitimizing force…

Whitman touched the world in a fashion unsanctioned. Or as Leonard Cohen puts such reverential reach in “Suzanne,” “Cause you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.” For critics to make much over his blatant disregard for and implicit undoing of respected poets who laid the groundwork in “expert verse” for centuries would have appeared at once trivial as well as requiring the articulation of a vision that could inspire – ‘You mean, anyone can set off on their own without obedience to the motherland?’ — where fear still contained many. We were no longer Europeans, but what could we be without holding onto a history?

Thus, Whitman’s lines heralded a fantastic anarchy that was neither chaotic nor reactive – his form was simply unabashed and pressing and has since charged many with possibility where nothing has been outlined. I have quoted this sentiment elsewhere, but as it echoes in John Ashbery’s statement after reading Gertrude Stein, it is fitting again, “And if, on laying the book aside, we feel that it is still impossible to accomplish the impossible, we are also left with the conviction that it is the only thing worth trying to do.” Whitman, whether certain or unsure, continued publishing the catalog of as many Americans as he could fathom without respect for past guidelines — and in doing so, he articulated and determined a spirit that did not kowtow to the popularity of the day.

It is far easier to censor from moral grounds (i.e. sex and soul disrespected!) than it is to put work out of print that disobeys in a more oblique and revolutionary manner. In other words, one may remove or re-name pieces in the game at some risk, but to change the game entirely incurs greater efforts towards returning the offender to the original board. The critics would have none of this loose woman-man scrawling her lines in the name of America!

If Whitman had presented his catalog in rhymed couplets, his verse may have stood in line with the then-sanctioned poetry trajectory, appearing less remarkable and offensive. His would have been less dangerous, and who knows if we would know him now or not.

Of course, I am glossing over a host of other factoids that serve to enumerate accounts of why “Song of Myself” was so problematic and not ready to be consumed by the public-at-large: it has been debated that Whitman himself was homosexual. He wrote of slavery but was not an abolitionist. He self-published his now-famous “Leaves of Grass.” He published a letter from Emerson as his blurb without permission. Goddamn his lack of reverence! And thank the monkey-shining heavens for it.

Controversy over Whitman continues in almost-silly fashion these days, with folks like the Westboro Baptist Church protesting in his name. Perhaps they shudder that Whitman was so effortlessly feminine in contrast with how so many attempt to exhibit their masculine energy. The latter often flex for fear-inspired respect. Whitman’s muscular and emotional cataloging of people evokes a farther-reaching respect that holds both gendered energies in long embrace, an embrace that conflates and intensifies as the lines build and sing crudely and wax eloquent (Shakespeare was the soap opera lyricist of his day too, no?) – no wonder the church fidgets so loudly over his name: lines cross chasms that order the world and make sense to them.

What would happen if a conflating disorder descended and we were all suddenly able to dance across boundaries with our kilts in our hands and lady beards down to the soles of our boots – what if we entered churches, those public platforms, and criticized our leaders securing the natural order of inequality? Who could tell which power held then? How would essays and sense-making find their way back to security? My lines spilleth over; I am undone and undoing …

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of
his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist
and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more…

Banned Books Month: Amy King on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

2012-10-16T15:12:00.004-04:00

Epigraph to The Color Purple

September is all about banned books here at PEN American. We reached out to writers, editors, literary illuminati, and PEN staff to write about the banned books that matter to them most. Today’s piece comes from poet Amy King, author, most recently, of I Want to Make You Safe.

The ban on this book reminds me of the ban on Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret. I very much appreciated the girl-specific content found there that was not sanitized for a health class. I also surely could have benefited from The Color Purple when my hormones were ramping up and I knew boys were expected to enjoy Playboy in bed but had no clue as to what girls were permitted, except to be “lady-like” and modest. The Color Purple is no more “graphic” than what is implied by billboard ads on city streets or overtly depicted on television or in superhero comics (during the “romantic” scenes). Instead, this scene with Celie is female-affirming and instructive in ways that girls, and even a few women, might benefit from:

Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody. It git hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But other parts good too, she say. Lot of sucking go on, here and there, she say. Lot of finger and tongue work…She say, Here, take this mirror and go look at yourself down there…I lie on my back and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick the looking glass between my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose…

I say, Where the button? Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little. I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me that this right button to mash. Maybe. She say, While you looking, look at your titties too. I haul up my dress and look at my titties. Think bout my babies sucking them. Remember the little shiver I felt then too. Sometimes a big shiver….But when I hear them together all I can do is pull the quilt over my head and finger my little button and titties and cry.

Never did telling such an American story raise so consistent an ire as that of Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple. The list of school board meetings and library debates conducted over the availability and consideration of this book, especially in relation to the youth across the country, is historical as well as contemporary. Put your finger randomly on a U.S. map. Chances are, the debates carry on somewhere in that state over which aspects of this text deem it most worthy of shelving for “mature” eyes only. The hypocrisy is racial and gendered. In high school, we sat riveted by the jealous, money-grabbing, womanizing exploits of fellows in The Great Gatsby and via Hemingway’s skirt-chasing, bull-running, and hunter protagonists, but when a story primarily about poor black women trying to make their way rears its head, it becomes a target of “worthiness” and “offensiveness” meritorious discussions, seemingly permanently. We live in modern day America where video games and graphic “Law & Order” episodes depict, or at least describe on the daily, some of the most brutal violences we may never have heard of, but this book remains a focal point of contention. Is it the rapes? Dealing with the daily difficulties faced by blacks in a town run by whites and a court system that denies the former’s humanity in favor of the latter? Or could it be the unapologetic homosexuality? “Graphic sexual content?” Learning how to self love? Pick your issue; eliminating this book from most curriculums and libraries, even now, is a cakewalk.

But this novel is no light consideration of such fragmented controversies; they are aspects of a well-wrought story. The Color Purple hit me, a native Georgian like Walker, but on the other side of the proverbial fence as someone who grew up indoctrinated in the ideology of whiteness, with a palpable fear that the book inspires in my kind. This fear is charged by the realities the story brings to light, ones that expose the underbellies of histories long hoped to have been forgotten or pardoned and vacated, even as they are repeated through lore or in the guise of friendly family gestures (“Grandpa’s gonna trade you for the lil pickaninny down the street, you don’t work harder!”). Upon reading Celie’s diary entries and letters, I understood that the myopic, one-dimensional notions I had learned about African Americans while growing up had left me bankrupt in a way that Walker’s novel would not allow. Celie took me through violence hoisted on her and other women she knew and loved, she drew me into the depths of depression and confusion, she charged me with her own efforts away from self pity and towards confidence, she overtly carried me into the arms of a love that “dare not speak its name” without shame and with joy (a feat still treated cursorily or glossed over whereas Walker gave life to lesbian sex as well as deepening it with Celie’s pain: “She say, I love you, Miss Celie. And then she haul off and kiss me on the mouth. Us kiss and kiss till us can’t hardly kiss no more. Then us touch each other… Then I feels something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost babies mouth. Way after while, I act like a little lost baby too.”), and more than a paragraph can encapsulate. However made up Walker’s story may be, I knew that the parts were true for many, including some for myself, and this knowledge deepened my own interrogation of what I had received as well as what I continue to receive in the culture I move in. Celie’s story doesn’t end when the book closes or a library board shelves it in locked recesses. I live in a world that resounds with stories of young girls being raped, experiencing first love, where court systems rule against poor blacks and further commit violence against them. The Color Purple speaks to such events, boldly celebrating some while condemning others. This story’s power lies in its believability and truths; they are perhaps uncomfortably familiar still.

The book continues to be banned, not really for the reasons cited, but because of its affinity with the many realities children and adults alike experience today. In other words, the book might still be too relevant for some; it is no fairy tale and stands as a critique of a country that has advanced in technological terms but perhaps not so quickly via social relations, especially as they echo with unexamined class, gender, and racial strife.

Even today, I meet forms of attempted censorship of the book. Some contend that their children don’t live in proximity to the issues Walker raises, thus it has no bearing—or that the book doesn’t speak to them because it isn’t about them. I reply to those readers, often in my own classes, that they’ll be in for a shock when the bubble they have designed to protect themselves from what their children may or may not know or be able to handle fizzles and fades before their lovely, hopeful faces. If their children can’t process such stories delivered in the medium of this moving story told in diary entries and letters—on paper only—then they are selling their children short and lessening their chances of learning to navigate a very complex and nuanced planet in the process—and they are not developing their empathy muscles. Besides, The Color Purple is a redemption story finally, something we could all use at some point to pull us out of our own ruts, however occasional or different they may be.

To read more pieces from Banned Books Month, click here

Amy King’s books of poetry include I Want to Make You Safe, Slaves to do These Things, I’m the Man Who Loves You, Antidotes for an Alibi, and The People Instruments. She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett, co-edits esque with Ana Bozicevic, works with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Find more here.

Web Links:

PEN AMERICAN JOURNAL

AWP Conference -- Chicago 2012 [Video]

2012-04-10T21:47:00.001-04:00

Starring (Poets in order of appearance):

Annie Finch, Saeed Jones, Daniel Nester, Patricia Spears Jones, Cole Swensen, R. Erica Doyle, Cate Marvin, Brent Cunningham, Danielle Pafunda, Jamaal May, GC Waldrep, Ryan Doyle May, James Yeh, Matt Hart, E. Tracy Grinnell, Brenda Iijima, Molly Gaudry, Sina Queyras, Mathias Svalina, Matt Yeager, Elisa Gabbert, Vanessa Place, Janaka Stucky, Mike Young, Metta Sama, Lauren Hunter, Jennifer Bartlett, Sommer Browning, Paul Legault, Ana Bozicevic, Amy King, Anna Moschovakis, Justin Marks, Matvei Yankelevich, Sampson Starkweather, Julia Cohen, Paige Taggart, Chris Tonelli, Corina Copp, Eileen Myles, Kazim Ali, Tonya Foster, Giovanni Singleton, Dodie Bellamy, Julie Patton, Treasure Shields Redmond, Alice Quinn, Gloria Frym, Patricia Lockwood, Cheryl Strayed, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Peter Gizzi & Clay Banes, Kimiko Hahn & Nicole Cooley, Brian Teare, Christopher Salerno, Timothy Yu, Bruce Covey, Agape Redwood, Annie Finch --

Watch on Vimeo -- http://vimeo.com/39944590

Or at Youtube -- http://youtu.be/I9s63AVZzNg

Criticism By Alan Gilbert

2012-04-10T21:35:00.001-04:00

"When I was a grad student at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-’90s, the comp lit students thought they were the cool kids, the Poetics Program poets thought they were the cooler kids, but..."

CONTINUED @ Harriet - The Poetry Foundation

What She Said: The All Women Writers Issue

2012-03-04T15:52:00.001-05:00

SENTENTIA 4

What She Said: The All Women Writers Issue
164 pages
edited by Paula Bomer, Amy King and Jen Michalski
$10 (+$2 shipping)

Including work by:

Betsy Boyd, Ana Bozicevic, Mikita Brottman, Megan Calhoun, Ching-in Chen, Andrea DeAngelis, Kathy Flann, Sherrie Flick, Heather Fowler, Ana Garcia Begua, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jen Grow, Toshiya Kamei, Elise Levine, Sara Lippmann, Khadijah Queen, Treasure Shields Redmond, Metta Sama, Ellen McGrath Smith, Sara Jane Stoner, Meg Tuite, Carolyn Zaikowski, Darija Zilic

Art as Therapy/Shameless Plug

2012-02-07T23:16:00.001-05:00

I’ve been surprised lately by learning about things that happened in my hometown of Cleveland (Ohio) when I was a kid. The biggest surprise came in the form of a movie called “Kill the Irishman” which I saw online through Netflix. I’d never heard of Danny Greene that I can remember until I saw this movie the other day. Now I want to read the book by Rick Porello to learn more about what happened to the mafia after Danny Greene was killed.

Another thing I’m remembering lately is something I knew of as it was happening, although I didn’t think at the time it was such a big deal. Cleveland’s WMMS radio was named by Rolling Stone magazine the nation’s best each year from 1979 to 1987. I had no idea. If you’re from Cleveland, you know a thing or two about rock ‘n roll unless you just don’t pay attention to popular culture. I graduated from high school in 1985, and I remember when petitions were circulated to gather support for the construction of the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. One of the DJs at WMMS, Kid Leo, actively promoted the cause of bringing this Hall of Fame to Cleveland, but I only know of this through the nice entry Wikipedia has for “The Home of the Buzzard” as I remember it. Nowadays, WMMS is promoted as “Cleveland’s Rock Station”. The graphic logo of the Buzzard has been replaced with a pair of orange wings and what looks like a sign for U.S. Route 100.7WMMS between them. What I remember clearly are the station promos done by Sting (“This is Sting of The Police, and when I’m in Cleveland I listen to WMMS ooo-ooo-ooo”) and Pete Townshend (“This is Pete Townshend, and I’d like to remind you that rock ‘n roll will always, always, always, always, always, overcome … eventually”) and the station itself (“The Rock Capital of the World”) (“Buzzard Radio”) etc.

This remembering started about three weeks ago when I remembered a recipe for fish soup that I haven’t made for years. Don’t know what made me think of it, but I’m glad I did. I made the soup again shortly after I thought of it again, and again I was glad I did. Then I got into a conversation with a friend, and I mentioned an out-of-body experience I had when I was a teenager. I had heard a song on the radio, a rock song, which told a sort of detective story about the man in the jar (who had no face). This man, “he wanna get out/he’s smashing the glass.” It’s a song by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. If you’re from the United States, but not from Cleveland, then apparently (according to the nice article about WMMS at Wikipedia) there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Anyway, when I was a kid, this tune hit me like a mallet over the head. I didn’t think of it at the time, but it seems to me now that Alex Harvey, by composing and performing this tune, was metaphorically smashing whatever glass he had in mind. After all, he concludes in the song, “I must be the man in the jar.” Shortly after I heard this song, I drew a picture of a man in a jar; then, while I was asleep, I dreamed I got up out of bed and walked across my room to sit down at my desk. The picture I had drawn while I was awake was plain to see in my dream. Soon, in my dream, I walked back over to my bed and sat down. I swung my legs up to get into bed, and as I did so I saw in my peripheral vision that my legs were already under the covers. I was putting my legs into my legs. Then I laid back, and as I did so, I felt in my dream like I was falling. The next thing I knew, I felt my heart thump strongly (I had happened to fall asleep with my hand on my chest). Then I woke up and my heart beat rapidly. I was a little startled, but it wasn’t scary. I felt a bit relieved by the whole experience. At the time, I had been feeling sort of trapped. I wouldn’t have known though what to say to anyone about that feeling. I believe my experience of the art of the song and my drawing to go with it were therapeutic for me. Maybe, for Alex Harvey, composing and performing that particular tune were therapeutic for him.

Last, but not least, the shameless plug. Here is a poem from my chapbook Philip & the Poet (available from Mayapple Press). Writing it was a therapeutic experience for me. I was able to gain a perspective on certain past events of my life and certain attitudes and patterns of thought that I can see now are better left behind rather than played over and over like, well, a broken record.

Driving Home

Today I got a haircut. God cut it.
“How many hairs have I got?” I asked.
“Everybody’s gotta be a wiseguy,”
says God. I laughed. Really I was joyful.
“How come I’m not joyful more often?”
“Trust in my Word,” God says. I give him
a dollar tip. “Thanks, now I can get my
mother that operation.” “You’re killing
me,” I say. “That’s just your cross,” says God.
“All part of the mystery, you understand.”
I leave to visit my relatives in Cleveland.
On the turnpike, as I stop to pay the toll,
it’s God taking my change. “You’re on
the right road,” says God. “Keep going.”
God reminds me, “Trust in my Word.
My Word goes out and does not return
until it is fulfilled,” says God.
“Is life like that too? I go out and don’t
return until I am fulfilled?” I ask.
God smiles at me and winks. “Next,” says God.
Haven’t I seen that smile somewhere before?
When I get to my father’s condo, I see
my father looks just like the barber.
Then he looks like the toll-booth attendant.
Then he looks like my father again.
Before I can say anything, he says,
“I’m glad you’re here. How was the drive?”
I begin to cry. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“The drive was fine.” Suddenly I turn
into a cross and lean on my father’s shoulder.
He smiles as though nothing has happened.

108 Beads per Rosary + 108 Poets per REVOLUTIONESQUE

2012-02-07T19:14:00.000-05:00

Harriet @ Poetry Foundation remarks, “you’ve got to check out Esque Mag Issue 3 … It’s beautiful.”

Announcing Esque (click!)

For the third issue of esque, REVOLUTIONESQUE, we asked you to tell us about the revolution. We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district of your heart, you defined your revolution and told us what it is.
Here are y/our findings.

108 poets talk about the revolution:

Alex Dimitrov, Alex Rieser, Amanda Deutch, Amber West, Amish Trivedi, Amy Lawless, Anja Mutic, Anne Fisher-Wirth, Annie Finch, Becca Klaver, Betsy Wheeler, Bonnie MacAllister, Brad Liening, Brenda Iijima, Brian Howe, Cara Benson, Ching-In Chen, Chris Martin, Chris Pusateri, Christina Davis, Claudia Serea, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Dale Smith, Dan Hoy, Dana Teen Lomax, Danniel Schoonebeek, David Baratier, David Brazil, David Buuck, Diane di Prima, Donna Fleischer, Dot Devota, Dustin Luke Nelson, E.C. Messer, Elise Ficarra, Elizabeth Treadwell, Emily Kendal Frey, Erin Lyndal Martin, Evie Shockley, Filip Marinovich, Franklin Bruno, Gloria Frym, Hank Lazer, Harold Abramowitz, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, J/J Hastain, Jan Clausen, Jan Heller Levi, Jared White, Jeffrey Grunthaner, Jennifer Karmin, Jennifer Mackenzie, Jessica Reed, Jocelyn Lieu, John Ashbery, John Colburn, Jon Cotner, Joshua Ware, Kate Schapira, Kathleen Ossip, Kimberly Alidio, Kristin Prevallet, Krystal Languell, Larry Sawyer, Lars Palm, Laura Carter, Laura Hinton, Lauren DeGaine, Laynie Browne, Liesel Tarquini, Lily Brown, Lisa Samuels, M. G. Stephens, Magus Magnus, Maryam Alikhani, Matt Clifford, Maya Pindyck, Meena Alexander, Megan Volpert, Michelle Detorie, Mike Palmer, Nicholas DeBoer, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Noelle Kocot, Ossian Foley, Paige Taggart, Patricia Spears Jones, Paul Cunningham, Paula Cisewski, Peter Ciccariello, Phillip Griffith, Piotr Gwiazda, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rachel Levitsky, Ray Gonzalez, Richard Loranger, Ricky Ray, Rita Stein, Rob MacDonald, Sara Jane Stoner, Sharon Mesmer, Sophie Podolski trans. Paul Legault, Stephanie Gray, Thom Donovan, Todd Colby, Tony Mancus, Vincent Katz, Zvonko Karanovic trans. Ana Bozicevic

With a special Naropa section featuring:

Allan Andre, Angela Stubbs, Ariella Ruth, Jessica Hagemann, Lauren Artiles, Lindsay Miller, Matthew Wedlock, Meryl DePasquale

Please share widely, with gratitude,

Amy King & Ana Bozicevic
http://www.esquemag.org/

Apostrophe, Odes, Ekphrasis, Oh My!

2012-02-02T13:31:00.000-05:00

*Click for Poetry Workshop Info*

The Rooster Moans: Poetry Cooperative
Dates: July 8 – August 4, 2012

With Amy King

For as long as we can remember, poets have addressed the sun and moon, distant lovers and heroes, while also separately singing odes to the gods. The Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington once said, “We learn about the soul, and we have to listen to the soul.” Just as some poets use music for inspiration, ekphrasis is not simply a description of an art work, but influenced by the art work and, sometimes, the artist’s life. Carrington’s own paintings evidence her own efforts towards querying the world she inhabited beyond the limits of perception; her life also reveals many lively, unconventional turns that inspire and provide unexpected permissions, something poets often require — consciously or not.

In the course of this workshop, we will look at a the work and lives of a variety of artists, as well as poets, and consider how ekphrasis can extend beyond mere description of the visual arts but may also be combined with address (apostrophe) or incorporate the ode as a means to reflect appreciation, and content from, an artist’s work.

"Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the 'natural' world ..."

--John Ashbery

Book Review by Joy Leftow: The Weight of Wings by April Bulmer

2012-01-27T13:23:00.001-05:00

Book Review: The Weight of Wings by April Bulmer

Reviewed by Joy Leftow

I first saw April Bulmer’s poem, “Mai Po,” on another poet’s website while browsing online looking through websites of other writers who had other commented on my work or glanced through my blog. The poem, “Mai Po,” touched me and brought together universal qualities of longing, sadness, the passing of time and personal search. I immediately googled April Bulmer, located her and told her I wanted to review her book, The Weight of Wings. Ms. Bulmer kindly forwarded a copy of this small but packed-with-valuables collection to editor Brad Eubanks and myself since he too was enthralled with her writing. The Weight of Wings is a mixture between a novel and a spiritual journey, written in poetic verse. First I read the book to myself, stopping and browsing along the journey. I paused to engage with the spiritual theme and read the small-but mighty book through to its end. To absorb more of the work and to examine how it sounded when read aloud I read it to a poetry co-conspirator. After reading several pages, I asked if he was bored. “No,” he said, he appreciated my reading and would I continue. Thus I completed my second reading.

Later I sat and examined the fine papyrus paper purposely frayed and roughened at the edges of this sixty-page manuscript, running my fingers across it. The feel and look of the paper made it feel sacred. I opened the book. I measured it as though its measurements would reveal its meaning. The frayed cover measured 5 ¼ x 5 ¾ inches and the pages within were 5 x 5 inches. It was typeset with Cochin, “a font named for a family of 17^th and 18^th century Parisian engravers.” [1] This made me feel the weight of time while experiencing a journey of verse.

Lulled into the rhythm and pace of the words I discovered a range of characters. I decided to list and outline each character to define where they fit in the text. Next, I realized there are over twenty characters and some reappear. The voices follow themselves or a member of their community.

It was there I stopped counting. I began concentrating on the threads that run through the prose. What connects all the characters is a personal relationship to their savior, “Most blessed of Women is Rosie, earthen vessel in whom Jesus now grows.”[2] Each character struggles to maintain their faith and purity while simultaneously trying to survive in a sometimes harsh, unforgiving environment where loss, pain and loneliness intertwine with passions and desires. They are either residents of a convent or live in a nearby religious center. Thus they are connected through their faith as well as their losses.

The first poem throws us right into the battle.

Mr. F. Johnson

I laid down by the little plot, my heart tethered to the stone.

And God fell upon me like a warm blanket, though I still

shivered in the cold.

I prayed early that evening. God my horsepower. For Him my

faith cantered, unreined. But your death, daughter, was a saddle

a dark weight; your body folded untidy as a map in the rumble

of the black coupe. Heart a compass, the needle spinning dizzy

till it stiffened north.

It is noteworthy that much of Bulmer’s poetry appears in theological reviews such as The Anglican Theological Review, as well as in feminist publications and anthologies. Some of her other works are, Spring Rain, Oh My Goddess, Holy Land, The Goddess Psalms, and A Salve for Every Sore, all published by the well-known Serengeti Press. Bulmer utilizes simple language that becomes complex and has layers of meanings hauntingly presented.

In an email Bulmer explains, “The mention of ‘bruised bone’ and ‘oracle’ in ‘Mai Po’ are references to ancient Chinese divination practice. These early people heated bones and tortoise shells to read the cracks and lines that appeared.” Bulmer visited the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto years ago and toured an exhibit of these inspiring spiritual relics.

Bulmer’s works encompass every man’s struggle between good and evil; she brings us back to basics. In a world where every bad deed is counted and dividends for rewards run steep, stakes are high. Brimstone and fire tactics often help the populace behave and survive. Putting your best foot forward is what’s expected although humanity has always struggled with issues such as greed or lust. These desires coincide with our desire to be good and do right.

Bulmer brings profound new meaning to our inner struggles and brings to light the uncertainty that the only reward we receive in this life is the confirmation that if we are good enough, we will enter the kingdom of God after death. Sometimes reaching for the light at the end of the tunnel seems useless when suffering and loss are all we know. Here may be the point. All of Bulmer’s works dance with the desire for the universal search for truth and righteousness while trying to survive the day in a human body with desires and needs. It gives the word guilt more power.

As I spread my wings though the poems, I was carried through a dream-like sequence of events, mixing eroticism and religion with hints of sexual behavior. In addition the characters always attempt to make sense of themselves and their struggles in a way they can understand.

I thought God so loved the Virgin, he himself stepped out of his

work pants, hung his belt on a nail. I wedded him in a bridal gown…

But God so loved me he sent Diamond. …

I trip on my way to chapel … The thorns

break my skin, my ankles and calves bleed. Diamond takes me

to his shed where he stores his tools and bags of loam, lays me

down on a burlap sack: a leak in the roof, a hymn gentle from

the chapel….A hot drink, eggs scrambled

over fire, crusty bread Diamond hacks from a loaf. When the

cinders die, shadows sweep the ashes.

When I got to “Annie,” I wondered if I was misunderstanding. I worried so that I finally wrote Bulmer and asked her if I was on point, raising several issues.

My new dog liked the smell of my yellow soap, thanked me

with kisses to the elbow, wrist and knee. He growled a little

when I clipped his nails and when I snipped at his dewclaw

he broke the skin on my left thigh. I bled.

He didn’t like it among the brooms and buckets, whined for hours.

He was asleep on the rag bag when I opened the door. I carried

him to the bedroom, his body warm against the sleeves of my

cotton night dress. We slept cheek by jowl.

At noon he stood at the window like a little man, wiped the dew

from the window pane and cried. It was the sheriff and a vigil of

town folk at the front door. They kicked at me with their hob-nailed

boots, struck me with shovels and frying pans. The sheriff shot my

dog--a weight he slung into a burlap bag and carried to the river.

Sunday, and no heaving and crying at church. All cheeks were dry.

But as the choir rose, I heard a high-pitched howl, a soulful baying

that swelled my heart to a full moon.

“Did they really kill the dog and beat the woman because the two had sex and they had to be punished?” I wrote her. Bulmer replied, “My fantasy worlds are a little bit eccentric (as you gathered in reading about the woman who slept with her dog). I have a low-key life. I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading about it. You highlighted the major themes of the book. Thank you for your keen reading.”

And my heart swelled to meet the moon and I too heard the cries of a dog dying for doing the forbidden when obviously a dog wouldn’t know better. I wondered too at the charity of letting Annie live. I figure they released her so she might repent her sins. I wondered how the townspeople knew what she and the dog had done.

I recommend all of Bulmer’s work heartily. It is not for the feint of heart--neither is it for prudes. I love the lilt of Bulmer’s words and how they continue to sing in my head, resonating long after the reading is done.

April Bulmer was born and raised in Toronto, but now lives in the small city of Cambridge, Ontario. She has published six books of poetry. Many of her poems deal with women and spirituality. She holds three Masters Degrees in Creative Writing, Religious Studies and Theological Studies. The prose poems that appear here are excerpts from her second book The Weight of Wings (Trout Lily Press, Stratford, 1997). Each piece in the collection deals with the spiritual life of a character in fictional Sweet Grass, Saskatchewan. April's newest manuscript is entitled "Women of the Cloth." To contact her and order books: aprilb@golden.net

Article first published as Book Review: The Weight of Wings by April Bulmer on Blogcritics.

[1] Final page, text

[2] Mrs. Gross, page 11

2011-12-11T12:20:00.001-05:00

Amy King writes: A review once described my work as “moving between the registers of the fabulous and the mundane;” as I write, however, I don’t purposely aim to interlace tonalities – I amass, pile, and occasionally flatten as I beat my matter into text.

Poetry needs no one new party to lead it into the fraying future; if we’re to save the world, let’s raise a revolution as shapeshifters. In other words, this book is about metamorphosis through a radical cherishing. I am ravished by the world, aren’t you?

Please support Small Press Distribution - here.

~~~~

"Rarely have the nude and the cooked been so neatly joined” as in Amy King’s I Want to Make You Safe. If “us,” “herons,” and “dust” rhyme, then these poems rhyme. If that makes you feel safe, it shouldn’t. Amy King’s poems are exuberant, strange, and a bit grotesque. They’re spring-loaded and ready for trouble. Categories collapse. These are the new “thunderstorms with Barbie roots."
                                                                                               — Rae Armantrout

Vulnerability, fragility, and anxiety are all flushed out into the open here and addressed with such strong sound and rhythm that we recognize a resilient, defiant strength within them. King puts relentless pressure on forces seemingly beyond our reach and, in bringing them closer, exposes their own vulnerable centers. This is a poetry equally committed to language as a tool with social obligations and language as an art material obligated to reveal its own beauty. King’s language does both magnificently.
                                                                                                    — Cole Swensen

Amy King’s poems seem to encompass all that we think of as the “natural” world, i.e. sex, sun, love, rotting, hatching, dreaming, especially in the wonderful long poem “This Opera of Peace.” She brings these abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living: “Let the walls bear up the angle of the floor,/Let the mice be tragic for all that is caged,/Let time’s contagion mar us/until spoken people lie as particles of wind.
                                                                                                    — John Ashbery

I love Amy King's smile in photos of Amy King, Amy King's exuberance and looping, bashing panache (flamboyant manner, reckless courage) in the poems of Amy King, I'm going to say Amy King every chance I get in this blurb to make you think "I gotta read me some Amy King," especially if you're "looking for anything/that will pull the cork, boil the blood/of displeasure," as only the poems of Amy King can in the world in which Amy King is King (and Queen).
                                                                                                     — Bob Hicok

The first poem I read by Amy King was "MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN" and it struck me with a force I had previously felt on encountering masterworks by Lorca and Dylan Thomas. I won't live long enough to see if her poetry will continue to equal the magnificence of theirs, but the fact that she achieved it once (at least) proves to me it could.
                                                                                                      — Bill Knott

~~~~

Randall Radac aka John Lee Brook has a new book!

2011-06-24T13:48:00.004-04:00

Posting below by editor Joy Leftow, is a short interview with Randall Radac who has had poetry and art published in The Cartier Street Review.

http://www.headpress.com/ShowProduct.aspx?ID=96

Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble is the best price. Amazon wants more than the price of the book to ship it.

JL: How did you came to write this book?

RR: After meeting some members of the Aryan Brotherhood in jail, I observed they are fascinatingly violent people with almost magnetic personalities. I decided to write a book about them after doing some research and discovering very little had been published about them.

JL: Radac, how bout some spice on this latest publication?

RR: The book is written under my pen name, John Lee Brook and it takes a close look at a White Supremacist Gang. The FBI has says, “In for life and out by death”, the Aryan Brotherhood known as “The most ferocious and notorious of any of the prison groups.”

As an ex-convict in close contact with the Aryan Brotherhood I've written a devastating exposé, revealing how the notorious white supremacist prison gang has become perhaps the most powerful criminal organization in America, an achievement much more remarkable considering that the majority of its members remain behind bars, and its infamous Commission—the folkloric threesome, Thomas ‘Terrible Tom’ Silverstein, Tyler ‘the Hulk’ Bingham and Barry ‘the Baron’ Mills—are kept in maximum-security solitary confinement, as the US government makes an open effort to subdue the organization by any means necessary.doctorradic@msn.com

JL: Any other little blurb, RR?

Yes, despite government efforts to curtail them, the Aryan Brotherhood continues to thrive. My book Blood In, Blood Out demonstrates how a combination of Machiavelli, Nietzsche, meditation, secret codes, brutal violence and sheer will enable its buried puppet masters to continue to tug at the strings of an organization at the forefront of the black market trade in drugs, arms and money laundering. In Blood In, Blood Out, John Lee Brook provides both an extensive overview of the Aryan Brotherhood and a thrilling look at its untold recent history.

About the Author:
John Lee Brook’s study of the white supremacy movement has led him to strange places, where he met hard men with strange beliefs. Blood In, Blood Out: The Violent Empire of the Aryan Brotherhood (Headpress Publishing/June 2011) is his first book about white supremacy.

Publisher: Headpress, June 2011
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1900486776
ISBN-13: 978-1900486774

To contact RR, write: johnleebrook@hotmail.com or doctorradic@msn.comjohnleebrook@hotmail.com

"I Read This": Poetry South 2010

2011-06-05T18:15:00.005-04:00

One of the many things I am grateful for is the New Pages website. I happen to live near the owners, Casey and Denise, and I have begun to read magazines they give to me in order to write a review. For my first effort, I read and wrote about the 2010 issue of Poetry South. It is 64 pages jammed with 49 lyric and narrative poems, among other things. My whole review comes to less than 400 words. If I were you, I'd grab a cup of coffee, enjoy the full review, and then read more reviews at New Pages.

Book Review - 39 Poems by Charles Butler

2011-03-24T13:34:00.001-04:00

Article first published as Book Review: 39 Poems by Charles Butler on Blogcritics.org

39 POEMS by Charles J. Butler

ISBN 978-0-9772718-8-7

Publication date 2010

74 pages

No Shirt Press, Brooklyn, NY

Reading through the 39 Poems brought to mind Hitchcock’s movie, The 39 Steps because each poem stretches the reader and the page towards the next poem and set of steps without explaining where he is going. Also the poems on the pages of the book are laid out in emulation of climbing up and down steps so that while reading I felt like I was skipping steps. Each poem relates to life’s struggles; the various ways love affects us and how meaningful respect is. He writes about everyday things moving us up and down steps lyrically and emotionally.

Butler describes how one can be oblivious to a murder and walk across bloodstains on our big city streets without recognizing them in the book’s first poem, Crimson Stroll. Suddenly while stepping over the red brown stains, the author recognizes it for what it is, seeing a stark vivid beauty of someone’s life bled out on the streets.

Someone’s life bled out

At your feet

Think on it

Times you bled

Times you made others bleed

Look on it

Big dark path on 8^th ave

Brooklyn side

in your way

look on it

the fuel that moves us all

dried out on a dirty sidewalk

who bled …

are they dead

look at it

a dark stain

it’s almost…

beautiful

a bit of Canada flashes up your neck

and ears

back in the world you move around it

and move on

wishing for cold rain

to wash away the stain human sin

most of all

your own

We’re all here – all human and suffering – and this is the grist for this author to describe how we’re all the same and different at the same time, but he wants to show us that we have the capacity to be and do more that drives us and of course this is what drives this poet to create poetry. The stains our lives create must contain beauty otherwise why do we exist? Butler’s struggle is to align himself with the humanity in all of us, despite the murder the chaos, the beauty the differences between rich and poor, black and white, and he struggles with it all, climbing up and down, retreating and coming to terms with wrongs and rights and even the grays and imperfections.

The problem is that our climbing stretching and reaching is never done. You go up you descend and then you begin all over again because that’s the way life is, it’s never done until you’re done - or dead and gone - is more like it - or if you’re a quitter. Butler is no quitter and no matter how far down he’s gone – he bounces back to reexamine his roots and the course of his life, fighting to stay in touch with his spiritual side. This spiritual side is at the root of Butler’s talent, as he controls his anger hurt and humiliation when he’s experienced racism. For any of you who have never experienced racism, normal is a good place to start to understand what it’s about when you get stopped on the street because of the color of your skin.

nature of the beast

now

I’m not gonna say I’ve lost

count o’the many times I’ve been blackstopped

but

it’s more than a few

remember

I’m 16

walkin’ on a bed-stuy street

goin’ noplace fast

blue n’ white rolls up on me

unis pile out …

nicely they ask me if I’m carryin’

a gun

nicely I say no

nicely

they ask if I would submit

to a search

mind you they don’t have

to ask me

a goddamn thing

and they know it

I know it

An’ the brother

watchin’ this

who wishes right now

he was

someplace else

knows

nicely

I say

go ahead

I can relate to this struggle and suffering. All my life as a Jew and especially in my childhood I was called a Christ killer. The recent advent of the Mel Gibson movie and his ensuing drunk arrest and slurred comment about Jews brought it home to me again. But this is a tactic of the upper echelon. They want to keep us all at each other’s throats so we will keep our busy bee status and keep making the rich richer. It’s a means of control and humiliation and it makes us hurt. Mr. Butler knows this hurt intimately and writes about it poignantly.

39 Poems cover a range of experiences; awareness of the haves and have-nots, racism, love, hurt, abandonment and loss, and more importantly the urge to understand and come to terms with it and explain what it’s all about. After all this everyday stuff is the mesh of our lives. The ability to sublimate sets humans apart from other species, to take our hurts and pain and transcend them for the greater good – to create beauty in ugliness is the work Mr. Butler attends to.

In DMV rag, Butler speaks for all of us who have ever been to the DMV.

We’re in the dmv now

Hundreds of black

And brown faces

some whites

all of them wanna be someplace else

but here we are …

it’s all mad

gotta be

half the world is on fire an’

the other is on line waiting for their number to be called

lookin’ for a place t’ sit

an empty seat

is like

fool’s gold

Don’t we all feel like this when we visit official offices, public school registration, social security, Medicaid, even the closed down US passport passport bureaus, and welfare’s the worst. I have a poem about it called, “Welfare’s Still A Bitch!”

The searching and questioning never stop just like in the movie The 39 Steps, there is always another side to examine to analyze understand and conquer. His poems speak to maturity and growth and show how youth and mistakes although unavoidable are only part of climbing and descending those steps, a poem for each step.

In word one baby, Butler explains why a writer writes.

why

write?

writing since he was eleven

thru good days

and dark times

the pain of living

the come hither call

of death

and madness inbetween

even hung ‘em up for a time

didn’t last

why write?

he’s free

Is the author describing himself here or is he speaking for everyone? We all know writers write about what they know and well, … if they write about what they don’t know … everyone knows that doesn’t work. Artists from time immemorial have been known to describe angst which often spurs their creative urges. Does every writer experience angst? I can’t speak for every artist. Many writers have spoken and written about their angst yet angst alone doesn’t make a man an artist. There is some other indistinguishable indefinable something that inspires a writer to create, that makes his writings stand out among others, something that prods him to spend his time writing while others commune, have sex, watch tv or do other things while writing remains a lonely task which takes time.

Words don’t miraculously appear on the page. Writing is what gives Butler the freedom he speaks of above. His words create a freedom that exists nowhere else around in our world and he helps the reader to feel it too. Through that freedom we see what he sees; a stark world filled with fertility and barrenness that provides us not only with a place to survive but a place to grow and thrive. The growth in Butler’s poetry and words inspires me too. I recommend 39 Poems sincerely and without any reservation.

Mammoth Bones & Contemporary Beef - Bernard Alain - reviewed by Joy Leftow

2011-02-06T21:02:00.002-05:00

Mammoth Bones & Contemporary Beef, a witty new chap that may be small but wallops a strong punch that will knock you silly and leave you begging for more.

The editor in me kept looking for that one line that needed help. I finally gave in to his sparse economy of language that flows with an unconscious rhythm and wry dry humor. So dry it made me thirst for more, and I read the entire 36-page chap in one setting that went more quickly than I liked because I couldn't stop reading and laughing. I chewed as much meat from those mammoth bones as I dared!

Congrats Alain, you made a big hit with me - and … what? You thought I’d leave it at that because we used to edit the same mag? Gimme a break. I laughed so hard my eyes teared up and I cried. Not once but several times over a couple of hours. The honesty is over the top handed to us on a pedestal. The chapbook's cover with its mammoth creatures mimic the poems. They are bigger than life and than all of us together. Thank his mom, Anatholie Alain for that, for keeping the organic life form emerging from Alain’s third eye blind.

The hallucinations
have started
The pain more severe
disturbances of the
heart
…
sitting in a dory
out east
not giving a rat’s ass

Only a poet (and sometime even poets don’t) know how to lay out the work so true to form that it remains poetically true to its sparseness and economic wording. He references other poets to let us know he wonders if he matches up, makes the cut or has he been circumcised like most of us. He experiments with sounds and placements of vowels instinctually letting the poem find its own roots and meaning. He lets the poem decide where it needs to go,

The slow process of submission
The eventuality
Arriving at some maniacal correction
For the s’s

So obsessed he
Was possessed
…
who was he kidding

even Blake thought he might’ve liked the
devil

The words evolve to take us on a journey – a rampage inside ourselves where we explore to learn more about why we are who we are. Who else but writers would care where we are spiritually talent wise in life, and who but a writer would mix the two. The book sold out on Amazon but is available here.

Far From Kiltartans Poor He Died

2010-07-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

William Butler Yeats poems in memory of Major William Robert Gregory celebrate him as an Irish airman, not giving the fact that he was a lover of the empire and stood against everything the poor of Kiltartan loved or wanted.

This poem explored that aspect of Lady Gregorys son, who did not share his mothers politics.

He died far from Kiltartans poor being shot down by friendly fire in Italy, and far from for them in fighting for Crown and Country.

----------------- The Poem -------------------------

Far from Kiltartans poor he died
As to fight for his dream he tried
To outdo his enemy he vied
Only by his own to be shot down

And a poet who of the war vowed not to write
As it was no a writers war to fight
Nor a fit subject for verse in his sight
Wrote of an allied airman who fought for the crown

For far from the cause of liberty
So for Serbia and Belgium to be free
And Ireland too - far from that he
Wore uniform among the clouds

It was for empire to remain great
To be the worlds most powerful state
White, English, of the Reformed faith
He died, far from Kiltartans crowds

For it was far from fighting for Kiltartans poor
He died far from Kiltartan it is sure
He desired to keep them so, his heart was pure
British, to the very bone.

And the Kaiser, whose forces he faced
Whose Empire his own displaced
Was no more Kiltartans enemy disgraced
Than was the Hero from among their own.

"Paris, 7 A.M." by Elizabeth Bishop

2010-06-08T12:53:00.004-04:00

-->

Paris, 7 A.M.

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment:

some hands point histrionically one way

and some point others, from the ignorant faces.

Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge

so much that days are journeys round the suburbs,

circles surrounding stars, overlapping circles.

The short, half-tone scale of winter weathers

is a spread pigeon's wing.

Winter lives under a pigeon's wing, a dead wing with damp feathers.

Look down into the courtyard. All the houses

are built that way, with ornamental urns

set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons

take their walks. It is like introspection

to stare inside, or retrospection,

a star inside a rectangle, a recollection:

this hollow square could easily have been there.

– The childish snow forts, built in flashier winters,

could have reached these proportions and been houses;

the mighty snow-forts, four, five, stories high,

withstanding spring as sand-forts do the tide,

their walls, their shape, could not dissolve and die,

only be overlapping in a strong chain, turned to stone,

and grayed and yellowed now like these.

Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls

with the star-splintered hearts of ice?

This sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon

escaping endless intersecting circles.

It is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell.

The urns have caught his ashes or his feathers.

When did the star dissolve, or was it captured

by the sequence of squares and squares and circles, circles?

Can the clocks say; is it there below,

about to tumble in snow?

In Bishop's first book of poems, North & South (1946, Houghton Mifflin), this poem is the sixteenth of thirty. It is preceded by poems which are more well-known, including “Wading at Wellfleet”, “The Man-Moth”, and “The Unbeliever”. The poems following this one in her first book are anthologized even less often than this one, although The Poetry Foundation has posted “Roosters” online here.

The scene of “Paris, 7 A.M.” is a dreamlike state of consciousness in which one observes but does nothing. The speaking persona goes anxiously from clock to clock within “the apartment”, and then goes to the window and looks down at the courtyard and up at the sky, but there is no leaving the apartment or other action within it. The sense of stasis is bolstered by the notion of deadness in the absence of death:

Winter lives under a pigeon's wing, a dead wing with damp feathers. (lines 9 to 10)

The childish snow-forts...could not dissolve and die... (lines 18 to 22)

This sky...is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell. (lines 27 to 29)

What can we say about why this person is anxious? We get a clue early in the poem: “days are journeys round the suburbs” (line five). Using Surrealism to conflate a cosmological perspective with that of a domestic one in these early lines, we are left with the question: “What is the urban?” The poem provides no answer, and a memory of “flashier winters” provides no solace, no re-invigoration. This poem does not clarify, elaborate or affirm but disorients and troubles. The “I” is casting about, attending first to this, then to that, and not finding a place to feel at ease.

Another clue as to this anxiety comes in lines 14 to 17:

… It is like introspection

to stare inside, or retrospection,

a star inside a rectangle, a recollection:

this hollow square could easily have been there.

Usually, retrospection and introspection are expected to be separate, even mutually exclusive, territories. But here the speaking persona seeks to collapse these territories into one. The “It” of line 14 is the scene in the courtyard; the “I” would like her interior and her exterior weathers to be the same. But they are not, and this disappoints her, causing her some anxiety.

After looking down into the lifeless courtyard and reflecting on a childhood memory that doesn't seem to help, this person wants to know where the signs of life are (“Where is the ammunition...?”). With no one else to turn to, she wants to know if the clocks can tell her what she wants to know. The “it” of the line next to last includes the pigeon, the Etoile (i.e., the star) and the sky, and the final question of the poem asks, “Is a catastrophe about to happen?”

Steig Larrson and me

2010-05-22T13:48:00.003-04:00

Steig Larrson, the man behind the stories that gave him his name fame glory posthumously led a fascinating life. Larrson could be one of the characters he became famous for writing about in his millennium series. Fighting to right Nazi wrongs in Sweden, he was a well known journalist who founded Expo, an antifascist magazine. Here in the states people don't usually think much about the Nazis but in Europe people give more importance to World War II and the havoc it created in history. In Sweden, its importance is even more meaningful. According to Lev Grossman in Time Magazine, "Fascism is a live issue in Sweden, and fascist groups have been known to attack reporters who investigate them." Larrson was a known target as the founder of Expo, the antifascist magazine he published. Larrson had built himself quite a reputation as a dragon slayer and his daily life and that of his life-long companion, Eva Gabrielsson, were affected by the backlash. Now there's an inheritance issue because Gabrielsson and Larrson never married in spite of being together over thirty years, so his family controls all. What deepens the suspense is Eva has a copy of the number 4 book on his computer in her possession. I watched her speak about this in a recorded television interview. Apparently they worked together and she edited most of his work.
I first felt compelled to read the girl with the dragon tattoo because of the colorful cover plus all I'd heard and read about it, but when I sat down and read through it, I became enthralled. He's gone and passed on but I love his shit!
Larrson wrote fiction to relax and he loved detective stories. I guess it gave him a break from the harsh reality he faced daily. Strangely even the aftermath of his life reminds us how life is often as strange as fiction.
Larrson proves that writers can create anything. Like my friend Anthony Whyte recently said over coffee, you can take a usual situation where people are sitting at a table drinking coffee and all you need to do is put a gun on the table and boom - the center of attention changes drastically and you can do what you want with your characters. All one has to do is let things fall into place and put things where they should be to add a little drama and spice.
Hooked on Lisbeth, the heroine whose intelligence and resourcefulness never fails her, I sped read the entire book submerged in the characters and events. Little Lisbeth, my heroine, is barely 4 feet two and 94 pounds soaking wet, is an exceptionally skilled computer hacker who survives impossible circumstances. She is lithe, super strong and can kick karate ass as well as Sarah Michelle Geller plus can defeat any enemy intellectually as well. I also love "Kalle fucking Blomkvist" another main character in the trilogy who could be Larrson's alter ego. Together he and Lisbeth could solve any mystery.
The wording is sometimes a bit dry but according to Grossman, that may be due to the translators facility with subtleties but it didn't damage my attention span or interfere with the excitement. This fast paced thriller kept me spellbound like a movie playing in my head.
After this I was compelled to read number two of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire, the perfect mix of action and expository to drive its thrust. Now I'm going to read number three next.
It is writers like Mr. Larrson who excite me to write. His characters are so finely tuned and defined that we know them as intimately as our closest friends. For those who don't know the series, I wasn't surprised to see Lisbeth buried alive in the end of part two of the trilogy. Lucky for me the first chapter of part three is included at the end of part two. I can't wait. I'll keep you updated!

2010-01-04T07:19:00.004-05:00

Symbolon

2010-01-02T00:44:00.003-05:00

Hello everyone -- I'm working on a new poetry project, which Andy Christ has given me permission to share with you here:

The idea is basically to publish a bi-monthly poetry newsletter highlighting new and recently published work by Michigan writers (or writers with connections to Michigan). The publishing method will be threefold:

1. Emailed newsletter in PDF format
2. Archived newsletter in PDF format on a site/blog
3. Mailed newsletter to everyone who can't stand reading things online or prefers this method of delivery for whatever other reason.

This pretty much keeps costs at a minimum while still enforcing the need to stay connected and "up" on what projects others are working on, have had published recently, etc. It is also a pretty "green" way to go publication-wise, without wholly sacrificing the print option entirely.

If you're interested in learning more about the project, check out http://symbolonpoetry.blogspot.com/. I'm going to publish and archive the newsletter there at first. Snail mail and email subscribers will also receive the PDF in those formats.

In the meanwhile, if you have a recently published or unpublished poem you're working on to share, please send it along to symbolon.poetry@gmail.com. I'm gathering goods for the February issue.

Thanks for thinking on it. And Happy New Year!

Reading John Ashbery's Poetry

2009-11-13T18:35:00.010-05:00

Usually I include excerpts here with links to the site that has the full article, essay, etc. This time I'm including the whole thing because none of this is online, and the book it's from is not so easy to find. The book was written by David Shapiro and published in 1979 by Columbia University Press. Shapiro's idea was to provide readers with something like a Reader's Guide to the poetry of John Ashbery. He titled his book John Ashbery: an introduction to the poetry. I only learned of this recently from Gina Myers, who I recently met. Gina writes, teaches and edits; you can see what she is up to online mainly at http://lamehouse.blogspot.com/ but also at http://www.h-ngm-n.com/ and even at http://www.360mainstreet.com/. In Shapiro's book, John Unterecker (1923 - 1989) wrote the Foreward. That's what I'm including here, Unterecker's Foreward to Shapiro's John Ashbery. If any copyright issues ensue, you mustn't blame Ms. Myers. She will learn of this after it's been blogged, not before. Mr. Unterecker begins and ends his Foreward with general remarks about Ashbery's poetry, and in between the beginning and the ending of his Foreward Mr. Unterecker (pictured) looks pretty closely at a poem from Ashbery's most-awarded book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, called "The One Thing That Can Save America."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------Begin Foreward

The poetry of John Ashbery seems “difficult,” I think, only because we normally ask of literature vast simplifications. “Don't,” we are always saying to literature, “don't, whatever you are, be as complex as life, as liberty, or as the pursuit of happiness!”

We want literature to be a little difficult, of course, but only a little. A “fruitful ambiguity” flatters us because we have no problem distinguishing paired pears from pared apples, even in a tureen of strawberry jello. And though allegory seems heavy-handed, we enjoy a sophisticated chase through any symbolist jungle. We like always to outsmart the detective, recognizing far sooner than he does that the man in the aquamarine beret is not only not the axe murderer who wore two left shoes but almost certainly the missing husband of the disturbingly uncommunicative but beautiful Tasmanian heiress with whom each and every one of us has fallen desperately in love.

Literature normally flatters and reassures us. It shows us what we all want to see: a pattern, no matter how faint, superimposed on chaos. But when the pattern wavers, vanishes, reemerges briefly in the form of a nervous mirage, and then once and for all dissolves into universal jumble, we are likely to become uneasy and possibly cantankerous. “This is difficult stuff,” we find ourselves remarking, meaning by difficult either outrageous or representational or both.

The writer who presents normal human experience in something like its everyday complexity really is outrageous. He offends us by not making rational the incomprehensible or, at best, confusing overlaps of routine existence. Instead, he diagrams such stuff as shifting personality, “I” trying to adjust constantly to all the personalities that are busy adjusting to “me.” Or he notices how easily anyone projects – frequently with disastrous consequences – his “I” into every “you” in sight, and sometimes fatally fails to do so.

Such a writer, representing the real world of the mind, finds meandering thought his true vocation. What goes on in, say, the assembled heads of an audience during a poetry reading – even one by John Ashbery – would look, if mapped, something like neighboring three-dimensional termite nests. Not just dreamers, daydreamers, and the senile find listening difficult; all of us, most of the time, play peek-a-boo with the stuff that comes in at the ear. We respond to what we hear, all right, but as well to the secondary stimuli that bombard us through eye, nose, mouth, and rubbing skin. For literally everything starts us thinking. We listen to the world most obliquely, tuning in and tuning out, dancing a sort of intellectual buck-and-wing as “private” thoughts commingle quite irrationally with the flow of public phrases that endlessly spill from a jabbering world.

What I am arguing, of course, is that Ashbery's “difficulty” is more imaginary than real. Ashbery presents, often in meticulously representational detail, a normal man's way of apprehending – though not of voicing – reality. In doing so, he is drastically unconventional, since the normal man devotes a great deal of time and energy to disguising the way his mind works. What comes out of the normal man's mouth or typewriter barely resembles the wanderings of his hit-or-miss mind: the ill-heard sentences, the details of his own observation that he can't help notice (the flick of an eyelid, the shadow of a smile), all of the colors, smells, and textures that intrude on him and that, perhaps heroically, he pummels into submission whenever he attempts to “communicate.” We are all hard-working citizens of this kind, much of the time either oblivious to the ways in which our heads work or so disturbed by those ways as to pretend we have no heads at all.

Like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and others who have attempted to ensnare the psychic processes we so carefully suppress, Ashbery focuses hard on the way the mind deals with the random stuff that drifts into it. But much more recklessly than Stein or Joyce, he offers us not the thoughts of a “persona” – an Alice B. Toklas, for instance, or a Stephen Dedalus – but the abruptly bare phrases that float through his own mind. Or at least he does his best to give us the illusion that those phrases are what he presents, phrases not just obscure but for almost everybody else in the world totally baffling. By drawing on private materials, he forces us to have the strange experience of roaming through someone else's head. “The landscape looks familiar,” we are likely to think as we read through a non-sequeturing Ashbery poem, “but the hands are the hands of Esau.”

Once in a while, he lets us glimpse the process at work:
I know that I braid too much my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.

Later on in “The One Thing That Can Save America,” the poem I am quoting from, these private matters surface again as “the quirky things that happen to me.”

Such things, central to the private energy that fuels the public poem, are its root force, but they clutter up the surface, effectively entangling us in Ashbery's own business of living. Nevertheless, because purely private material can in no conventional way be simplified by literary analysis, we are much better off experiencing it directly rather than trying to “understand” it. “Understanding,” which most readers of poetry have been trained by generations of text-analyzers to believe is the object of reading, can be extracted from an Ashbery poem only at the price of distortion. What Ashbery offers instead is a chance for us vicariously to engage in something that might be called experiential process; he immerses us in a shifting context of unpredictable “meanings” and tones that constantly qualify everything that has gone before them yet that also are constantly qualified by everything that has been established.

Consider, for example, what happens to the phrases from “The One Thing That Can Save America” when they are reinserted back into the poem. Because paraphrase in Ashbery is not just unnecessary but almost impossible, I'd like to quote the whole poem, pausing now and then to watch shifting tones operate rather than trying to make translations of phrases that are perfectly transparent once they are extracted from the amalgam of the poem. What I hope to reveal is nothing more than technique: Ashbery's method of confining meaning to the page, his system of preventing us from discovering a “solution” to something that is in fact not a riddle but an unsolvable work of art.

This poem that I have arbitrarily made central to my discussion is also almost literally central (pages 44 and 45 of an 83 page book) to Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and centrality seems initially to be its central concern. The tone at the beginning is neutral, though phrases like “flung out” and “knee-high” force the reader into momentary minor adjustments of physical point of view:
Is anything central?
Orchards flung out on the land,
Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?
Are place-names central?
Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Brook Farm?
As they concur with a rush at eye level
Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough
Thank you, no more thank you.

Punning transformations of Stony Brook Farm and Alcott into Story Book Farm and Adcock seem to put us either somewhere in the nineteenth century, on a thruway or possibly on railroad tracks, or in contemporary childhood; but the tone skids away from neutrality and toward a very clear petulance (“enough/Thank you, no more thank you”) as abruptly aggressive (and concurring) places threaten to gang up on the speaker:
And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness
The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,
Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.

Again point of view has shifted, for we discover that the scenery we had accepted as “real” scenery is in fact only something that is “like scenery” in a commingling community of jumbled “civic pride” and “civil obscurity.”
The second stanza brings us to the first flat assertion of the poem:
These are connected to my version of America
But the juice is elsewhere.

“The juice,” of course, is private – most likely private energy – and though the tone is again close to neutral flatness (with perhaps an ironic pun on breakfast orange juice), it soon shifts into a rhapsodic lyricism:
This morning as I walked out of your room
After breakfast crosshatched with
Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
Forward into unfamiliar light,
Was it our doing, and was it
The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
We were measuring, counting?
A mood soon to be forgotten
In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow
In this morning that has seized us again?

Both time and perspective tangle in this complex scene that is like a painting but not one, a structure built of crosshatching glances in which the observing “I” is both active participant (and consequently invisible) and yet made visible to his own “downtown” memory as he thinks back on the significant moment. Able to be both in and out of the scene, he has no difficulty in translating the streaks of intersecting glances into an invisible pattern superimposed on light and then considering whether this might indeed be how “the lumber of life” is made significant (measured, counted). “Lumber” achieves a lovely suspension, forcing us to recollect the woods of the first stanza – orchards, forests, plantations, Elm Groves, overgrown suburbs – while at the same time anticipating the “crossed girders of . . . shadow” that will threaten to obliterate the morning that “has seized us again.”

Crosshatched by glances, by planes of light, by simultaneously interior and exterior points of view, and by triple time (the opening statement's “objective” time, the “morning,” and the “downtown” memory of morning that soon will be forgotten), the stanza's multiple perspectives present an “it” impossible to define and also impossible not to respond to.

It is at this stage of the poem's development that another neutral statement returns us to the passages I have already quoted.
I know that I braid too much my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to boom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you instantly know what I mean?
What remote orchard reached by winding roads
Hides them? Where are these roots?

By now something of the pattern of the poem should be apparent. Stanzas begin in something like a neutral tone, the speaker addressing what at least seems to be a general audience. But that audience, as in this third stanza, soon breaks up into quite private components – as well as the obvious “public” one. Here, for example, the generalized you becomes both Ashbery talking to himself and, by the seventh line, Ashbery addressing the “you” of the breakfast scene. His subject, however, is privacy and its relationship to something as public as music, painting, and poetry. And the abrupt shift in tone of the “golden chimes” question lets him move from a neutral tone to something very different that might capriciously be called oracular. It also lets him distance his material by shifting his statement into a totally different rhetoric – in this instance, a rhetoric that sounds suspiciously like that of Wallace Stevens. Critics – and, for that matter, uncritical readers – have a hard time with allusive echoes of this sort. That is, they can never be quite certain if the shifted “voice” is parodistic, referential, or perhaps even deferential. And there is always, of course, the possibility that the passage may not be deliberately allusive at all – simply a matter of Ashbery unintentionally sounding like another writer. (The last lines of the second stanza, the passage about the “crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow/In this morning that has seized us again,” sound to my ear a good deal like passages in Hart Crane's poetry; and I am reasonably certain that the final stanza's “All the rest is waiting/For a letter that never arrives” is supposed to trigger us into an “Ah, T.S. Eliot!” response. But what seems to me a Crane allusion may very well not be one; and my conviction that the last stanza's Eliot-like passage is a deliberate allusion tempts me – irrationally – to see the “roots” line of the third stanza as a faint echo of “The Waste Land.”) Such “problems” seem to me ultimately unimportant. That is, the echo or even the possibility of echo is enough to distance the tone. Similarly distancing, the questions at the end of the third stanza force the opening stanza's “real” orchards into a metaphoric role. And distancing through language alone, language that is both serious and a little funny, “quirky things” have some kind of relationship to historical, geographical, and literary landscapes. Yet in spite of all these distances, “I” – both as person and as writer – exist and exist in a present definable America.

The last stanza seems to me to reassemble the scattered tones of the first three. But precise meaning is carefully evaded. The poem is not a sermon:
It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago.
Its truth is timeless, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
“We” has by this time become an amalgam of Ashbery, the “you and I” of the second stanza, and the reader that the poem is addressed to; it will become explicitly in the last stanza America. But each “we” also exists separately.

Like the “quirky things” of the third stanza, the “star” that our fate might lead us to in the final one strikes me as rather funny – a cross between the theatrical and heavenly kind. And indeed the ominous Eliotic letter that “never arrives” also takes on faintly qualities when it is ripped open, its contents discovered to be “wise,” its message warning of danger and of the steps that might be taken against that danger now and in the future both known and unknown.

Like much in Ashbery, funny and serious material coexist in one context. The tone of the last stanza grows, however, increasingly “concerned”; and if we never find out what the mysterious undelivered message is that we manage symbolically not to receive, to tear up, and yet to assimilate, we do have some sense of its urgency. It has something, of course, to do with the need for fences and for the walls of small houses, for places that are “cool”; but its “meaning” - like the “meaning” of the poem – is available only to the person who apprehends it without “knowing what it is.”

I offer this non-reading of a poem as a demonstration of technique, but I hope it is also a warning against false readings. Happily, David Shapiro, whose own sense of the integrity of poetry is very strong, approaches Ashbery neither as New Critic nor as historian, but as fellow poet who himself works in modes similar to those used by Ashbery.

He asks us to recall what most of us have casually assimilated: the literatures of America and Europe, an awareness of the history of music and painting, a little knowledge of classical and contemporary physics. Using these tools, he helps us explore not the “meaning” of Ashbery's poetry but the sensibility that gives rise to it and the cultural context of which it is a most vital part.

His approach is unorthodox. His insights into the ways a major contemporary poet organizes his art give us a sense not just of the techniques used by John Ashbery but of a structural aesthetic drawn on by a whole generation of poets, painters, musicians, and sculptors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- end Foreward
I like this Foreward's claims regarding Ashbery's poetry. For instance, that "Ashbery's 'difficulty' is more imaginary than real." With one reservation, I also like the notion that "Ashbery presents, often in meticulously representational detail, a normal man's way of apprehending – though not of voicing – reality." And "Ashbery focuses hard on the way the mind deals with the random stuff that drifts into it." That's helpful.
But I don't agree with all of Mr. Unterecker's assertions. For instance, that Ashbery "offers us not the thoughts of a 'persona' – an Alice B. Toklas, for instance, or a Stephen Dedalus – but the abruptly bare phrases that float through his own mind." It could be that, in his day, Mr. Unterecker was better than I am at reading minds, but I doubt it. Also, the poem Mr. Unterecker chose to peruse has such a level of complexity that it becomes a bold claim, one which Mr. Unterecker shows no interest in establishing, to say that this is "a normal man's way of apprehending - though not of voicing - reality." And finally, Mr. Unterecker claims that the meaning of "The One Thing That Can Save America" is available only to the person who apprehends it without knowing what it is. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but from what Mr. Unterecker has written in his Foreward, I'm not willing to accept this as a conclusion. To me, such a conclusion mystifies rather than clarifies Ashbery's work. To be fair, Mr. Unterecker offers this Foreward as an example of a "non-reading of a poem as a demonstration of technique" with the hope that "it is also a warning against false readings." But it seems to me an opportunity to talk about technique more if one begins by crediting Ashbery with having invented a persona with which to implement the various techniques. I was hoping for more from one who wrote a reader's guide for the poems of W.B. Yeats.

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Reading John Ashbery's Poetry