“Dear Whomever—what beauty, you AMERICAN were something else I misunderstood; a half-life come crashing through the night. A medium is a ghost ship that makes it from port to port or it sinks but you can package information in any media still it gets taken in how the sun just does, filtered spasms of ions and turns out green; the holes in POETRY REVIEW me let life in or out in other ways.” — PEEBLES, p. 15 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 VOL. 49/NO. 5 $5 US/$7 CA KEITH S. WILSON

EXPLODING HAIKU & OTHER POEMS

PATTIE McCARTHY intertidal ordinary—

ALSO RALPH ANGEL BENJAMIN GARCIA NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

PLUS: NEW POEMS FROM CAMILLE T. DUNGY 2 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW The American Poetry Review (issn 0360-3709) is published bimonthly by World Poetry, Inc., a non-profi t corporation, and Old City Publishing, Inc. Edi torial offi ces: 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. Subscription rates: U.S.: 3 years, $78.00; 2 years, $56.00; 1 year, $32.00. Foreign rates: 3 years, $129.00; 2 years, $92.00; 1 year, $49.00. Single copy, $5.00. Special classroom adoption rate per year per student: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 VOL. 49/NO. 5 $14.00. Free teacher’s subscription with classroom adoption. Subscription mail should be addressed to T he American IN THIS ISSUE Poetry Review, c/o Old City Publishing, 628 N. 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123-3002. www.aprweb.org. KEITH S. WILSON 4 Exploding Haiku & Other Poems JENNIFER FRANKLIN 7 Biopsy Pantoum & Memento Mori: Editor Pistachios Elizabeth Scanlon PATTIE MCCARTHY 8 i ntertidal ordinary— Business Manager CAMILLE T. DUNGY 10 Caralog & Other Poems Mike Duff y BENJAMIN GARCIA 12 The Language in Question [defying gravity] & The Language in Question Editorial Assistant [When I called you] Thalia Geiger VIRGINIA KONCHAN 13 Anyone Will Tell You: The Truth, But Slant General Counsel APR Books Dennis J. Brennan, Esq. CATE PEEBLES 15 Night Sea & Other Poems Contributing Editors NOMI STONE 16 “When You Swim, Make Your Whole Body Like a Lung,” Says My Wife Rose Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham, on Our Honeymoon & Other Poems George Economou, Jan Freeman, Leonard NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER 18 Black Woman on a Plane, 21st Century Gontarek, Everett Hoagland, Steven Kleinman, & Other Poems Teresa Leo, Kate Northrop, Marjorie Perloff , RALPH ANGEL 20 at some point my translations Ethel Rackin, Natania Rosenfeld, Michael & Other Poems Ryan, Jack Sheehan, Peter Siegenthaler, Lauren JOSEPH GUNHO JANG 22 Plywood Rile Smith, Valerie Trueblood, Joe Wenderoth TAO TAO 22 Walmart Founder JEFFREY GRAY 23 Engagement, Again: American Poetry Stephen Berg Then and Now (1934–2014) COREY VAN LANDINGHAM 27 Reader, I [remember the midnights] & Reader, I [write (perhaps . . . )] Co-founder BOB HICOK 28 Gobble: a song of climate change & Sidney H. Berg Genufl ection: a song of climate change (1909–1973) BRITTANY CAVALLARO 29 Luxury Tax & You & Your Destiny STEPHEN S. MILLS 30 In Life My Husband Helps Put a Periodical postage paid, Philadelphia, PA, and at additional Woman Back Together Again & In Life offi ces. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The We Dance at a Gay Bar Named After American Poetry Review, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, a Dead First Lady Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. ANISA GEORGE 31 Garland Nationwide distribution: TNG, 1955 Lake Park Dr. SE, Suite 400, SAFIA ELHILLO 31 The Animal Smyrna, GA 30080, (770) 863-9000. Me dia Solutions, 9632 T wo Rolls & History Says (Hegemon Madison Blvd., Madison, AL 35758, (800) 476-5872. Printed HE XIANG 32 in U.S.A. Remix) VERNITA HALL 34 Singularity & Winter Melon Soup Advertising correspondence should be addressed to The American Poetry Review, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, ASKOLD MELNYCZUK 35 “Where Poetry Comes From”: Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. The Phenomenon of Oksana Zabuzhko Vol. 49, No. 5. Copyright © 2020 by World Poetry, Inc. and ALAN MICHAEL PARKER 37 The Trees of Kraków & Breakfast Old City Publishing, Inc. a member of the Old City Publishing ALICIA MOUNTAIN 38 Entreaty Now & Rewinding the Lesbian Group. All rights, including translation into other languages, Sex Scene on a Flight from Denver are reserved by the publishers in the United States, Great Brit- JOY PRIEST 40 A Personal History of Breathing ain, Mexico, Canada, and all countries participating in the Universal Copy right Conventions, the International Copy- right Convention, and the Pan American Convention. Noth- BOARD OF DIRECTORS ing in this publication may be reproduced without permission Jonathan Katz, Chair Jen Oliver Ava Seave of the publisher. Margot Berg Elizabeth Scanlon Nicole Steinberg Eileen Neff All previously published issues of APR from the fi rst in 1972 to 2013 are accessible online through JSTOR—www.jstor.org. BOARD OF ADVISORS Linda Lee Alter Rayna Block Goldfarb Judith Newman The American Poetry Review receives state arts funding support Natalie Bauman Werner Gundersheimer Carol Parssinen through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Richard Boyle Lynne Honickman S. Mary Scullion, R.S.M. state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Marianne E. Brown William Kistler Peter Straub This magazine is assisted by a grant from The Die trich Paul Cummins Edward T. Lewis Rose Styron Helen W. Drutt English Foundation. The columns in APR are forums for their authors, who write Ann Beattie Carolyn Forché Joyce Carol Oates with out editorial interference. Robert Coles Edward Hirsch Cynthia Ozick Rita Dove Emily Mann Frederick Seidel The Editors are grateful for the opportunity to consider un solicited manuscripts. Please enclose a stamped, self- addressed envelope with your manuscript or submit online at www.aprweb.org. ANNUAL PRIZES Subscription blank: p. 21 THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning Index of Advertisers: p. 14 poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.

THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman Foundation, an annual prize for a fi rst book of poetry, with an award of $3,000, an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 3 FIVE POEMS

KEITH S. WILSON

Melting Pot

mom removed her makeup and made three dinners my father played dominoes i fell apart in public once. after the diner. she ate hers last just as we fi nished online, and if you’re wondering our anniversary. our plates and glasses. she is absent from photos at his skill, know that dad is black the waiter didn’t notice, or pretended. (a note: daguerreotype was blurry and slow, and only getting older. he’d become a celebrity the food was fi ne and to stop their children who might die in the leader boards, and then change from the vagaries of victorian life, victorian his name. dozens of times, over and over mothers would hold their shoulders to keep them he used the names of everyone he knew—no one when it comes to a woman undone, still for the whole of the long exposure. wants to face a demigod. the story of america any number of suns might erupt. or none she would wear a black veil, blurred out is a black body reinventing itself of the photos or positioned behind a chair until it runs out of names. as if she wasn’t there. they are called hidden my father’s father was a cop. mothers). once i snapped at her and she started brain cancer took him. to cry and even my quiet felt powerful that’s the story of justice in america. in a way that made me want to cry myself, dominoes is less a game of chance than honor. as if both our silences were my own. their faces are black and white my tongue half a boy and made from dice just like me with a man’s shadow and mine. eventually dad’s name always betrayed him. they’d know the odds. to save time, he began to play as random words. he’d dash a career, from amateur to pro in the course of days. he ran out lives as quickly as patience. to some men, this is labor; inheritance ruins bones (american homes). some words sound feminine to strangers. my father, totally silent as he played, was the cypher of a man, and in these times they were silent back. until he was a sweet fl avor or a tree. then my father was a bitch

4 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Ode to the Police may your feet and hands be soft. may the pads of your fingers be like aloe vera kleenex and your chest fill the land with the strong and dependable comfort of medicated balm. may your hair glitter like the targets of stars and your sirens resound like children for their fathers. may we see you coming a mile away. may you taste the common taste of milk the way we taste the common taste of milk and your heart become extreme—large as a softball at the zipper of the ribs and therefore let it be enough. let it be so big you cannot breathe for all your other feeling

Still Life with Fruit Flies, Boiling Water, and Sink

either you die ruffly in the sky or in the ground, a dangle— jangle?—from telephone lines all of us aloofly like rhymes in the throat of history naïfly they say there are ways to marry continents but all of them involve waiting tables the blackened fruit of elbows gruffly scrubbing steps memorial after memorial day drowning you know is chiefly a function of power over time & what’s so great about constellations sitting stiffly that you cannot learn better from the listless paths of free lightning bugs being open as a palm ready to strike out fly if you consider it is a most tremendous name—

Transcendental Function: I Hear My Father’s Voice, Anesthetized i

god n e e in the quiet i am able to hear you d

t o

l e t

water y o u

babbling to someone g I believe o

opiate

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 5 Exploding Haiku 2021 december awards (what fi lls a lion can never fi ll a dog) i am undone. the bells clinging to my ribs Jeff Marks Memorial fl oweth over like what. low cantrip of my feeling. my spine is the space between Poetry Prize two colliding stars. portrait of a bird against glass. the aftermath of mirrors. Judge Carl Phillips is the author of 14 books of when i dream like that, a bullet’s sweetness. poetry, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall thank god, someday, for the release. surprise! Field. Since He is the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His collection, birthday batter, folded neatly. Double Shadow, was a finalist for the 2011 my fat who cares against my fat. National Book Award for poetry and won the 2011 Los Angeles Book Prize for Poetry. fi nally nothing to worry to say. stop my greying. stop silence, the wideness Winner receives $1,500 and publication. of the bed. who is there to impress? the young dead? Honorable Mention receives $500 and publication. ah, my god’s favorite joke is hell. All finalists published in Spring 2021 Awards issue. every body attracts every other. that’s gravity. $20 entry fee includes copy of Awards issue. cremate but they better not shave my face. Submit up to three poems per entry between once i dropped what i was holding Oct. 1 and Dec. 1. Name and address on cover a dozen times before i steadied my hand. letter only. Submit online www.december.submittable.com/submit mind over-mattered. off -brown anxiety to glass. or by mail at P.O. Box 16130, St. Louis, MO why wouldn’t i shatter? but a joy 63105. For complete guidelines visit www.decembermag.org. is working the body past what it would have you. or the choice to. or to sit in silence on a ledge resting after making a fool of my muscles and convincing my heart to be a mule decembermag.org i know the name of. like i’m the ugly that speaks fi nally in class and not a body breaks the quiet. TEACHERS the great typography of silence. the only list of true homonyms. Are you looking for a lively, challenging, and entertaining say almost nothing to ensure the air supplement for your reading list? Adopt APR for your class! stays right, and let the sweat drift off into space with the helium and zenith We off er half-price copies and subscriptions for classroom use. and scrape salt from your temple, a message Inquire: your body left that actually you contain oceans. Classroom Adoption The American Poetry Review perhaps lupus or lime. perhaps the fl eck of rust 1906 Rittenhouse Square, 3rd Floor that begins at the window of the brain Philadelphia, PA 19103 until the process or code T: 215-309-3722 (the divine happening) is undone. E: duff [email protected] it runs in the family. same our hands that are gusts of wind that, when we are tired let release, or animated, lift fl ags and bits of trash into the sky where the light is like the light and nothing else. einstein said that the universe is infi nite. skin, i make it that.

Keith S. Wilson is an Aff rilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. His book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press) was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

6 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW TWO POEMS

JENNIFER FRANKLIN

Biopsy Pantoum Memento Mori: Pistachios I am waiting for biopsy results again— I never know I’m an animal more in the mirrored room where time stalls. than when I shell pistachios in the kitchen, Knowing women are always at the mercy of men, after washing dishes, waiting for you to come even after I get the results, it will feel like my fault. home. I know how I must look, cracking the tight shells, popping the small green nut In the mirrored room where time stalls, into my open mouth again and again. I stare at the same insipid face. I never knew your trick to pry a stubborn Even after I get the results, it will feel like my fault. shell—slit not wide enough to open. I walk the treadmill, regretting what I can’t erase. You showed me how to place half I stare at the same insipid face. a discarded shell in the small opening, The longer I carry my body, the harder it is to tend. like a tool. It frightens me— I walk the treadmill, regretting what I can’t erase my new resourcefulness. My hunger. Until I die, this worry will never end. The way I wait for you as if The longer I carry my body, the harder it is to tend. I will never have enough. Knowing women are always at the mercy of men, until I die, this worry will never end. I am waiting for biopsy results again. Jennifer Franklin has published two full-length collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her third book, If Some God Shakes Your House, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.Visit her at jenniferfranklinpoet.com.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 7 intertidal ordinary—

PATTIE McCARTHY

I should say something about water a fast slack water your feet cold in it village bunting is contagious hunting for dulse on maximum autumn mom an afternoon turned english for an estuary hotter than expected rejectamenta the wrack the boy puts a conker in the walk archive leaves behind high & low & the season turns from shells tide lines & the boy pops a coast becomes longer the closer the brown float bladders one looks at it—you turn knotted spiral & toothed me inside out with your mouth leaves the holdfast attached

& the boy with a crab in his hand the season is the air left his heart in a fish & in his hand near water full of crows a fishhook & beneath his feet & seagulls the trees several feet of air between full of crows & one his body & the working wharf osprey the neighbor I take the photo from far away so calls a fishhawk the girl is just a speckle for scale the season is the way not herself but rather a landscape the air tastes of crow marker in the intertidal where we are calls & salt permitted to fish fowl & navigate the long fetch of the waves the law is unsettled as to whether the walk archive achieves fowling includes birdwatching through accumulation—the soft the image is my daughter paths mossy or midden her hands overwhelmed with hermit crabs yield a bit to each foot her rashguard a makeshift each sweet thud the walk pocket overflowing with hermit crabs ends where the water the high tide an unusual ten feet begins—water going out fast & the crabs everywhere is challenging archival material a perigean spring is king & even I bit my lips but the ebb of a king tide is dramatic the crows cawed

skeletal wrought the king tide is a spring iron light on the neck tide that has nothing people in love walk to do with the season too slowly we agreed this prediction is historic equinox to solstice not harmonic attached please find low tide history beginning at stake & reveals a delicate weave stones running six rods & when the tide is half in together with all tide water the mud mirrors clouds together with all tide water call it a half tide space

8 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW assume me to be a vengeful ghost not one who urges you to fall in love again Carnegie Mellon do not—miss me forever University Press instead the tidepool is only discrete at low tide New Poetry Fall 2020 swamp me the rest of the time the water was cold & the children were brave counting down Build Me Disturbing the a Boat: Light three two one & jump Words for Music 1968–2018 Samuel Green off the wharf into a king tide Michael Dennis 978-0-88748-660-9 Browne paper / $15.95 which was warmer near the top & so 978-0-88748-658-6 978-0-88748-664-7 we floated as long as we could until paper / $19.95 cloth / $50.00 the cold under water swelled up waves grind their edges—I’m in the library’s skirts—the water The Marksman Petition shimmers like skin & like the skin of it I Jeff Friedman Joyce Peseroff 978-0-88748-659-3 978-0-88748-661-6 expand to the limits of what paper / $15.95 paper / $15.95 ever time I’m given

Pattie McCarthy’s seventh book of poems, wifthing, is forthcoming from Apogee Press in 2020. Carnegie Mellon University Press Our titles are now distributed by She is a non-tenure-track associate professor at Temple University, where she teaches literature and 5032 Forbes Ave Chicago Distribution Center creative writing. Pittsburgh, PA 15289-1021 (800) 621-2736 www.cmu.edu/universitypress www.press.uchicago.edu/cdc.html

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 9 FOUR POEMS

CAMILLE T. DUNGY

Catalog I am keeping a list of all the things I’ve hoped for. I am also, always, the driver. Always. Think of that I was only eight. Not the driver, but I was coyote, called to sweetly by a light brown boy. the one who begged for the cats. Our father, No way that could have ended except with one of them so allergic he stopped breathing sometimes, hurt. That poor kitten. My dear father. Oh, Dad! gave in. So long as I fed them. So long as we kept them in the garage. Outdoor cats we called them. Metaphor of America All I wanted was a body, different from mine, I could love. as this homegrown Regardless of limits. painted lady chrysalis I have failed so many people. Other animals, too. My head has come off Sometimes, I think I will make a list. In case I’m ever asked and by a string of my own creation to explain where I went wrong. is dragged what remains of my last meal. Here, too, you see In the hills, behind our house, a classmate found a frayed my waste, and my brothers’ and sisters’. collar loose around a set of small bones. I see You can take this literally or not. disasters everywhere I look. Which is why Whatever I might have been has dissolved. I am recounting the facts as calmly as possible. When you moved me, I shook A coyote, probably. like a leaf preparing for autumn. The child panicked. But soon, I returned Those were the days before we settled to my patience. Call it potential who of us would get to thrive and who would suffer. if you’re feeling optimistic. There will be wings. Once, we turned our heads for a minute, maybe two. Bright, brown, black. With just a little white to set things off. I heard him first, my little cousin. First generation post-Loving. There’ve been plenty of names for a baby like him. In the backyard, he giggled to a coyote. Doggy, cute To enter our own doggy. Come here. How he howled when we dragged him inside! All that broken up joy. empty house Would it be better? It would probably She was seven when we stopped be better not to know the many ways a body using keys. One less thing to lose. can be destroyed. Now we punch a combination— easy, but hopefully not so easy My father would let me have it, a stranger could guess. This is where let me have all the cats, despite how his head swelled I should stop. They are bound each time he went into and out of our garage. to be angry—my beloveds. All love means compromise. I am giving away all our secrets again. Such vulnerability We saved my little cousin, but we lost is the root of much fury. . . . the first two cats to coyotes. Then our last great hope, I was small. One stone in our yard a kitten so briefly with us I don’t even remember hid a metal case with a lid its name....Oh! That little, shrill, and awful that slid like a matchbox top sound. Our car idling. Then shutting down. to reveal our key. Lifting that I won’t forget that. big brown rock, I’d think hard The garage’s buffed cement. of bashing someone’s head. Harm always came dressed in the body Fastidiousness is one way my father refuses of a stranger. Sometimes, I wrestle the degradation of his body. Only the small tail with my daughter—make her tiny not caught under the tire’s tread. The blood body work its way out from under beginning to pool and, already, congeal. the weight I make of my own. Oh! Would the rivers of the world continue to run In this way I try to teach her if not for the blood I’ve seen spilled? how it feels to break free.

I’d begged for it.

10 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW This is good Just out our window, at the tip of each branch on the spruce, I can see a bundle Kabir says, stay firm in that which you are, of tight shoots. Roundly pointed according to Bly. as a clitoris in its hood.

And, earlier, Don’t go off somewhere else. The mind wanders.

Outside our window There is an island somewhere, its sand is a spruce some house finches nest inside. lapped by gentle waves.

In winter the tree stands, blue green Don’t go off as the ocean off some island. somewhere else, Dungy.

All winter long You’ve been lonely. this spruce pulls into itself A wanting-creature. the way I pull into myself when I hunger. But stop now. Stop. I won a prize once. The finches are nesting. The man I spent my nights with couldn’t fathom how something that looked to him like everything would make me cry. Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the I’ve been climbing these stairs author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), for a hundred flights, I told him, winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. and now I’ve reached what I thought was the exit I see it is only the entrance to another landing. There will always be more stairs to climb. Loving that man P was like reaching into a shallow pond to find a lost ring. The water was warm but murky. There were lilies. An abundance— in the early stages—of writhing things bound to take flight. I came away with a handful of mud. What we talked about, mostly, was poetry. I still often wonder what he’d make of something marvelous I’ve read. This translation of Kabir (15th c.), for instance. By Bly. Known for his brawn. His brains. His—well-meant—yawping space for men. What is required for a successful translation? You have to be open to somebody else’s thirst. Willing to make of your own mind something like a cistern, a ladle, a well. My sister lived, in those years, a boat ride from an island the United States kept for a test site. We didn’t swim in the cordoned off parts, but close. Held up by the salt in the ocean, I let myself float. My sister said, Be careful. The water, there, was this deep blue green. Winter is over.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 11 TWO POEMS

BENJAMIN GARCIA

The Language in Question The Language in Question defying gravity after all // isn’t the same as flying When I called you a beluga whale, I meant it as a compliment. What a noble beast. You said this to me, after all // are you thinking of hurting yourself meaning me. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m starting to think isn’t the same as are you thinking // you might kill that this comparison is not without its faults. I was wrong in bed when I grabbed your belly fat, and I said it wasn’t fat yourself // we must be confident being more but my hand adrift in sensory deprivation. Total a-hole move, direct // an X drawn in orange on a tree trunk but it did remind me of my own body’s buoyancy. As a boy, I grew up near the sea, and my mother would say one morning it was there // 30 feet of maple una mujer le da sal a su hombre, you just remember that gone by the time I came back home // the city not knowing if she meant that salt can halt earth’s growth or tongue man’s junk to pearl. When my mother left, gave me no choice // sometimes we have no choice my father ate a box of Morton salt hoping he would die. and warning signs can go unnoticed // until I didn’t He didn’t die and I called you a beluga whale and I’m sorry you’re salty because you think belugas are dopey dolphins— think they were serious // they wanted attention but did you know they train their handlers and not vice versa? didn’t mean it sometimes it doesn’t hurt // death Belugas blow hoops of bubbles like smoke rings off a cigar right into the trainer’s face, and the sub smiles at his dom, feels like a solution // sometimes it hurts so much won like a cheap prize at the ring toss. Oh! And scientists after all // you are thinking of hurting yourself no actually recorded them mimicking human speech! Ask them how they know it wasn’t just clicks or squeals or noise, you are thinking of hurting // other people not us they’ll say: because it fell within our acoustical spectrum. walking a gorge late at night // leaves rustle their One beluga was singing, another appeared to be yelling out, out, out! Mimicking human speech, like humans at the zoo should I live and should I live // no one wants to die telling the chimp stop, stop, stop while it hurls fistfuls of poop. are you nobody too // good then we’re not alone This all started when you asked me: what is my animal spirit?! Don’t forget. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to choose please don’t die // it’s good advice I don’t want who you fall in love with. But I am trying to be a noble beast. my kind of sadness // is like my favorite tree I have been practicing white people speech for years and years. Forgive me. I was always about to understand you. planted long before me // shadow punctured now and then with light // when gusts ghost through and that’s enough for me // the garden thrived Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, was selected by Kazim Ali for the 2019 National Poetry Series (Milkweed Editions, 2020). He works as a Sexual Health and except the lilies planted in full sun // didn’t make it Harm Reduction Educator throughout the Finger Lakes region of New York. I planted a new tree // in the hollow of what I had lost one day I’ll rest in its shade // should I live that long

12 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW tive and literal language, and perhaps even god) as ANYONE WILL “just a metaphor” betrays two colliding visions: if all is reducible to metaphor, does that make sys- temic injustice, to say nothing of war, less “real”? TELL YOU Or, conversely, can it provide a way out (through linguistic subterfuge) of absolute relativity and total indeterminacy? Either way, we are reminded The Truth, But Slant of Aristotle’s injunction: “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” Similarly, the companion poems “Truth in a Nonmoral Sense” and “Truth in a Moral Sense” Books VIRGINIA KONCHAN don’t just turn a blind eye to the decaying fetish of “truth” in a post-truth/fake news era: they drive straight to the core of the matter, and, with seemly brio and ferocity, drag the (capital/lower- case) “truth” out, Medusa-like, by the hair. Anyone Will Tell You The devastatingly crystalline “Portrait,” in its An excerpt from the former: by Wendy Chin-Tanner entirety: Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95 “In sociology, we say mapping,/we say cartography Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019 Maddy draws me— instead/of understanding. To profess/to understand, you see, is hubris.” Ay, there’s the rub. But there’s a head, “Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. more: instead of truth, the speaker writes, “we should a pair of boobs, Look it all in the eye, good and bad,” said Henry say subjectivity.” But what do we say when subjectivity Miller. and beneath, a womb itself is undermined or fails? Then, in a gorgeous pivot, This form of courage, in poetry as well as life, where the egg, we read: “To name it,/I say loss, I say yearn, I say is rare, and yet it characterizes the wonder that is tell me . . . Before/us, our name stands constant, and a speck of black pen, lays. Wendy Chin-Tanner’s second full-length poetry the City stands/constantly shifting, like truth. Like collection, Anyone Will Tell You, beautifully. The words and meaning,/making meaningless the crude The figuration of the fertilizing egg as a “speck speaker of these elliptical, spare poems is both sub- facts of my making” (emphasis mine). of black pen” establishes a relation between the ject and object, mother and child, mourner and physical body of the mother and the generative celebrant—and in each poem, she proves herself This poem encapsulates the poet’s titular project work (however heavily metaphorized, in cul- capable of not just witness, but intervention—into (which takes place in the poet’s middle years, like ture) of writing: an association that overrides the the most complex forms of political and personal Dante’s Divine Comedy) so brilliantly—anyone (or, more bleak contiguity between women and mate- subjectivity, domestic life, aesthetics, and eco- Dickinson’s “no one”) will tell you, and while it riality/maternity, and biology as destiny. The devastation occurring in our world today. Chin- may read at first glance like an obliquity or for- somnolescent “Blue Moon” and “Supermoon” Tanner’s poems function as load-bearing walls, malism (tell you what?), to tell, or to ask to be poems describe a speaker who (hilariously, in and, in their delicious and generous ambiguity, are told (the truth, knowledge, a story), is in fact, in “Blue Moon,” “After the appointed fuck”) wan- dependent on the reader to create the associative the context of this collection, what it means to be ders the house at night, in cahoots not just with and etymological meanings—prior to or after the anthropos, to be alive. “Telling” saved Schehera- her sleeping children but with the rhythms, wild, movement of reader-response criticism had its day. zade’s life: to say “tell me” is an act of, above all, of the natural world. “And in/ the lightless worlds Nothing, including nothing, escapes her raptor- other-consciousness and empathy, and to be told, within, a miniature moon/ fl oats in my womb’s like gaze: Chin-Tanner, also a trained sociologist, or to be willing to be told, is the equivalent, here, slippery night,/ heart beating time, time beat- is an expert at both internalizing the playful and of conscience—of recognition of a power com- ing heart.” This last line suggests a profound con- potentially destructive aspects of Language Poetry, mensurate with the self. nection between the body and the cosmos, yet is while creating poems of astonishing beauty and Indeed, speaking of others—this text is haunted rendered (as everywhere) with such a light, magis- lyrical virtuosity—a hard feat, indeed. A master by a panoply of figures, both named (Orion, Bach, terial touch as to make it seem effortless. at the use of white space, her painterly, sculptural Lacan, Perseid) as well as ghostly present: Plath’s To focus overmuch, however, on the aspects poems bloom like Plathian “blood jets” across the cryptic visions and enraptured poem-spells haunt of gender and motherhood, and its concomitant page, using impressionistic brushstrokes to con- this text, yes (sans death drive), but also, within tropes of labor and delivery, that score the book vey meanings that are equal parts cerebral and this pressure chamber of language, we find Nie- would be to do a disservice to its other fiercely felt. The concrete poem “Velleity,” in particu- decker’s elevation of the quotidian into the sub- political aims. This is a book of awakenings, and lar, anchoring the book’s middle section, performs lime, Oppen’s radical use of white space and poems such as “The Mother in This Poem Is Me the near-impossible: it’s a work of poetic auto- enjambment (her line breaks sever, indelibly, like or You or Your Mother,” “Truth in a Nonmoral genesis that interpolates not just the beginning of tattoos), William Carlos Williams’ condensed Sense,” and “Truth in a Moral Sense” reveal the the world, and word, epistemology, faith, subject- imagism, Bishop’s ecstatic vision of the natu- speaker’s own deep investiture in issues of race, hood, and complicity, but also with the freefall ral world, Sappho’s erotic lyricism, and Marianne identity, discourse analysis, and culture—and yet (literally, on the page) of language through space Moore’s real toads. (lucky us!) they are crafted in the shape, tone, and and time. Formally speaking, the poems are largely form, of poems. An excerpt: “this is what/ happens when/ y ou unpunctuated, mostly in trisyllabic tercets or An excerpt: are born/ with a sail/ set in one/ direction . . . I couplets, and composed of short, pithy, but always/ place myself/ back at the/ c enter I/ myself also winding and syntactically complex—often both monster am/ the center.” dropped—lines, often containing just one word, and slave shame If a better rejoinder to Eliot’s modernist salvo like cast jewels. Everywhere, there is a productive and slay me of fragmented ruins and Yeats’s futuristic “center tension between the poet’s mode of speech (inter- that cannot hold” exists, it hasn’t yet existed like this is the rogative, imperative) and its relation to the poems, this. This is adamantly a feminist poetics: poems Labyrinth which are ambitious in their rallying together of like “Child” and “This Bed This Room” allude where you play alliteration, consonance, assonance, and a wide- to the aches and pains (physical and existential) of ranging juxtaposition between parts of speech, Theseus motherhood, but in a radically new, and unsenti- especially verbs and nouns (the reader is at times and I play mental way—the child or children referenced in even milk drunk on her outrageous deployment Minotaur these poems might take from the speaker, but the of unusual nouns, sometimes bordering on glosso- child also gives back, lending the mother a kind it’s okay lalia). Yet the emphasis here is less on formal con- of transpersonal consciousness, as well as connect- it’s just a ceits than it is on the intersection between the edness to the generations that came before. Sup- metaphor quotidian and the sublime. The poet has this to posing, Chin-Tanner’s work asks, channeling the say of her compositional method: “Resolution ghost of Nietzsche, “truth is a woman—what All seeming contradictions resolve with these lies/in resignation; this list of rhymes// s cribbled then?” These poems provide the answers, gleam- lines, which both soothe and disquiet—the idea on the back of a receipt.” Equally narrative and ing like polished knives. of role play (and, by extension, violence, figura- neo-lyric in turns, the more narrative poems in

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 13 this collection (e.g. “Butterfly”) do not spare the reader the shock of registered meaning any more than the more lyrical poems do—if anything, they mine the speaker’s culpability in the world: her carbon footprint, yes, but also her hand in, or at least her witnessing of, the death of nature all around us. Yet this same culpability is also used, elsewhere, as in “Apoidea,” to revel in the plea- sures and joys of prosody, itself a kind of redemp- tive force:

Though woman, lover, other, boss, the hive Without its matriarch, like Empire, dies.

In an ever-unfamiliar global village/soulscape, is it frightening or comforting to acknowledge “the/ sea too is/ a mirror”? Along with granted subjectivity to women and other minorities who have too long been forced to apologize for their existence, where now is the place for the expres- sion of power and passion? How can we, as poets and people, more radically embrace differ- ence? What does it mean to bring children into the necromancy of our contemporary moment? Despite the “day’s little deaths,” this speaker (a self-declared “professional digger”) is as ada- mant in her work as she is in her hopes: of, in the collection’s final poem, “The Caravan,” call and response, as well as the power of literature (read and written) to transform our consciousness and world. Thus, “this/ is how it/ i s written”: the poignant, heart-breaking, and indisputably heroic plight of the human in a post-human world.

Virginia Konchan is the author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon, 2020) and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018); a collection of short sto- ries, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and four chap- books, as well as coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2022).

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14 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW THREE POEMS

CATE PEEBLES

Night Sea Milk River In the Garden after Agnes Martin I, like the deer, During the War We had a great time appear Dear Whomever—what beauty, you walking into oblivion a feral thing were something else I misunderstood; before dinner muddy, single-minded a half-life come crashing through the night. A medium is a ghost ship that unburdened by the wind for juniper and easy fruit makes it from port to port or it sinks of tinkering conversation indignant among tombstones but you can package information in a glorious glut twitching desire any media still it gets taken in how of being shut up how gravity bests the sun just does, filtered spasms of by implied continuum the beasts in us, it is ions and turns out green; the holes spun off in ultramarine pieces in me let life in or out in other ways. the talent of feeding I am a person with comfort-seeking though I don’t think on light as a belief tastes, which makes me some version of you can imagine humiliation/ human woman and I only even a particle of vastness in preservation charted into every fired a Tommy gun but once, besides, I’m not able to tell you anything gene by grace nobody’s shot me yet—I see fuzzy buds really, but this is the real anchored in the underbrush, how we’re descending a rocky thing—a picture, an interior all shivering with faith in personal path you have to failure and night-vision goggles, a spot cinched in a net where in the trees to be/ to wonder for hours every thread makes you lift your foot what happened to you in the maternity its maker so twisted an increment higher or fall— to will a void—fix on its fullness ward waving my hands above the by subliminally fanatic smoke insufficiently akin to any more full to sweeten us illuminated gold triggers mother though I am not. how far you are I took the conch shell For the love, give me anything but from his small hand the flux remains gritty another flag and if you see me hanging and told the boy and stutters blue upon my flag over the garden wall I’m already I’d throw it back blue endless cells dead: my flag is blue in the morning, clear mist at night—my flag covers your a suffering wave is not into the sea because star with fire—like a wall is anything but about nature but that’s where empty a pissing post or a place to lean and kiss known best in the mind crab homes go but upon—my flag’s one star burning down lying, hid it once there was a grid the others dropping sleepless thoughts in my pocket so completely and in it two lovers in a line of gunpowder through the evaporating and the sea said over giving little forest. What ghouls the dogs become, captured under ladders in the snow. I’ll one feels as though boys whatever free them before morning, how the day one is a panic in complete they want when howls violet upon itself, I can’t even certain darkness one they cry for suggest with this pencil that wound— milk like a fawn has made some and whatever, beauty—come crashing terrible error generating forms stuck in a rain-choked through the night. The messengers are in sand some hades field its black hooves cool so different now. that we have got to unempathetic with need have we have got to know worlds beyond this Cate Peebles is the author of the collection Thicket (Lost Roads Press, 2018) and four chapbooks, including: The Woodlands (Sixth Finch Books, 2016) and James (dancing girl press, 2014). She is an archivist and lives in New Haven, CT. -

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 15 THREE POEMS

NOMI STONE

“When You Swim, Make Your rushes water into the library, into Spring Street’s yards, red brick apartments, Whole Body Like a Lung,” Says once a spring. Park the car below: My Wife Rose on Our Honeymoon bright puddles round the pipes. Yes, let the body swell and contract with the waves, which I try / to remember when I follow her Following Google Maps, all 12 in a van, into the sea, not heeding the ambulances in me as we skim above we choose stops: by the parking lot urchins, their million arms. At dinner later, over spaghetti carbonara, of Penn Medical, through icy grass and tiny silver sardines also soaked in oil, we talk about how there are some people and trash to the river, gathering what who are both afraid and uncurious and never leave their homes. Others charisma we can find. Reeds are lit in the sun. are very curious about the world, but sometimes afraid. I think but don’t say Deer droppings blaze up into golden stones. we are equal parts curious but me, more afraid. My stroke Drive another bend to Shep Lee, who left is sloppy so she teaches me how to frog my legs and arrow my arms Merrill Lynch to farm pears with his wife: near and every day I swim a little farther, above the spines. the river, but not near enough. They dig a well. I like it: the worm in my stomach tells me to leave, and I endure it longer Fieldworkers hold a recorder to Lee’s til it passes. I have been so afraid of my body, measuring everything lips: “What do the pears taste like?” We try wrong or weak: the mononucleosis that lasted a year, a long cough to find the old mill, but where it was is and the mistake of my lung’s skin folding Modway, industrial storage facility. Behind it, on the X-ray, miming a spot. I wept. I died again the river. After, I ask, does it feel closer? in my mind. Oh Rosie, I want to be brave, and I can! My student Elijah says, Well it’s in my shoes. Last year, you were pissing on my leg after an anemone stung it, when a wasp zoomed in. You gave me a look to say Nomi, relax, and instead / I flailed your wee into your face. This year, I let the wasps pass. Haloed Anglers dart American shad with a green-gold fear, then they pass. They pass. and drop flutter spoons as bait. Shad fly against Sonnet on Want, While Driving the river, up ladders of water. Fieldworkers write Through a Grove of Deciduous Trees in notebooks. They set it down. Pistachios are fat in their saddles. / Wearing tight yellow jeans on the moped, I think of our strap-on. Not sure if you I’m trained as a social scientist. guessed it, but I’ve been afraid of cock since For centuries now we’ve made maps, long before we met. Once one went in me when noted kin, drawn boxes around what I didn’t want it. Now we’re on an island, we know. Oh friend, can I learn where each road sends us to the sea, past groves, how to see it, the world—electric, to blue water. I want you most when we bright, terrible, and beautiful—but are eating, salt on your lips, wasps bombing not turn it into food? our plates, bringing sucked fish bones to the sky. Astride and hard, I ride you home, dreaming / you have one, or I have one, your coccyx Fieldworkers climb into a dank, cooled a shock against me, til want is cleaved from fear. beaver den. The oracles from my past: they clap their hands. We’d read about a zoologist, Charles Foster, who wanted to become animal, to know On Taking Students to the their secrets. Why not? Greek Gods did it to spy Millstone River and Reconsidering on mortals. As a child, the Category of Fieldwork Charles collected blackbird tongues, listened For Jeff Whetstone to mudflats. Our classroom is small, the world, We too, he argued, have golgi tendons, muscle spindles large. Through everything, to register space. One a river passes. bird has as many receptors on its beak as / a clitoris. It nuzzles Before piping it under the earth, towards a worm. Horse chestnuts stir in the wind. this town was a river. The mind He chooses

16 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW to be a badger and live in a burrow, even bringing his son. New in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets Finally writes, “This is Charles Foster, writing about being an animal.” Language The highly anticipated is the tunnel the world rushes through. new collection from a poet whose previous book / was a finalist for the Thirty-eight miles long, the river crosses Los Angeles Times Book Prize Sweetman, Applegarth, the Turnpike: “Rain in Plural is a collection of glorious our part flows into the Lake, siphoned and absolute brilliance.” in 1903 for Princeton rowers, who build — David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour their torsos as above them swans pass.

We meet a man who paints the river chocolate brown speckled with reflections of trees. Another who lives above it, sleeps to it. You can’t drink it or wash your face in it. But some people love it. An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut / was praised by Colorado Turtles are drunk from 8 months Review as “a seduction by of sleep: you could pluck them way of small astonishments” from the mud. Jasmine and Zoe find one “ These are beautifully crafted, with a maimed face. The students point contemplative poems that stay with their iPhones there. I do too. Elijah you long after you’ve read them.” lifts it above his head, then carries it. — Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Living Weapon: Poems To the water. / Willa records the rain falling on the trees into the Millstone. It isn’t special unless everything is special. But everything is special. / THE FACULTY Johannes Göransson Paddling under honeysuckle branches, Elijah finds a nest Joyelle McSweeney Orlando Menes of four teal-green eggs, pillowed with feathers Valerie Sayers and mud. Don’t touch it. I’m not very good Roy Scranton Steve Tomasula Notre Dame MFA Azareen Van der at paddling, but I keep going, til my shoulders burn, til the Box around the river Vliet Oloomi in creative writing RECENT VISITING falls away. The Field grows and grows to hold the boy’s • Full fellowship & tuition scholarship AUTHORS wet shoes, the mall where he bought them, just past Macy’s. And the hole for every student Margaret Atwood Kate Bernheimer • Home to Notre Dame Review Teju Cole he falls through whenever he is sad. The trees at the park and the swans. And the stars. and Action Books Lydia Davis Junot Díaz I meant from here to the stars, moving like quick currents between us. So much faster • Sparks Prize and Summer Ross Gay Internships in NYC Michael Martone than we could write it down. Alice Notley • Aesthetically diverse, Claudia Rankine internationally oriented George Saunders Note: This poem incorporates a fragment of a line from James Wright, “blaze up into golden Solmaz Sharif stones.” Creative Writing Program Lynne Tillman english.nd.edu/creative-writing Natasha Trethewey 574.631.7526 Lidia Yuknavitch [email protected]

Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. =

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 17 FIVE POEMS

NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER

Black Woman on a Black Woman in a Population Control Plane, 21st Century Wide-Brimmed Hat, Chopped up by lumber overlords. Trunks still alive if they were hardy, Minutiae in a bowl 21st Century my mother insists we are more than jerry-rigged hand She wanted folks to call her ma’am our tree, her ship is still on the way in need of a drink, Ms. or Mx, don’t matter which one, to take her from the managed forest. The fl ight attendant as long as they called her. But the men came, slaughtered a town, said, “It’s on me,” wood is profi table, and all the bones Adjusting the angle of a hat of women are worth more than ivory. I must’ve looked to complement her world, like I needed one. feeding the comfort of her mind, Years later I pace the same forests with my two children, thinking of a Such a rough climb, folks can get a good long look response to a friend who believes wobbly as the sun & think again, she’d had enough overpopulation is the causeway to during Leo season of ppl and their confusing ways. global woe. If she was with me today, I’d point to the root of my children’s legs come to fi nd out Besides, the well was full inside, the cute baby trees mama is so proud of. a brand new plane the books overfl owed her path Seems like they sprouted up overnight is hot to handle. to bed and her hat rack packed to protest the upheaval of our scattered kin The fi rst breath: with fl oppy brims to keep off with their own green lives, comforting space crucial, coughs. certain loads she didn’t feel like where moss grows, where women used to be. sifting through to wear anymore. My favorite path of looking winds up She had an appointment today Sorry for What when I’m in the air, with an old gentleman in a black Sorry for what, dear stranger, hat who lived at the crossroads, as you count exact change there’s no way for the books you want to vacuum seal death not too far from her own house science fi ction and homesteading up here I suppose, where she drank elderberry wine from her porch in the summertime. Sorry for what, dear stranger, even though I’ve never as you anticipate felt the urge to buy Old pops in black who lived on old and I anticipate, a traveling pillow. town road. She got herself ready meeting in the germ, tumbling apart pulling her eyes to the big trees, If something develops, Sorry for what, dear stranger if our machine defects, the otherworldly. They’d play cards, the edge creeps up tidy up those blessings & talk shit I’ll ask if I can hold and yes, seamless stranger the hand of the woman we’re both strange to one another who gave me a drink. and cannot anticipate each other’s thoughts

Then it’s time to land I could apologize all day long like nothing’s happened, for not saying what I really mean maybe you can hear it somewhere the captain standing someday it won’t be so strange at the door with his crew. to be quiet, knowing what we both mean

He’s younger than I am, Read me wrong a baby-faced white boy. or read me right perception at the edge of isolation We don’t know his name, or where he came from.

18 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW I Could Really Go for a Deep Hug FREE HUGS! screamed a white man at the hippie fest, but I wouldn’t hug him, an unknown, a man, old enough to be my father, it was the first time I saw hugging as a kind of currency

among the countercultural, it was cute I guess, I hugged women I’ll never see again, didn’t even know their names, I saw women hugging that man, he seemed ok, everyone knew him

but you never know, he believed in those hugs he was giving, he could heal the world, but I didn’t trust him, his hugs were fishing for something else, trust yr intuition, Nikki, which I did,

that time, and smiled, walked by, hugged women instead when they asked, I’ll hug my sisters, we share histories, it was comforting, resting for a minute, from bad men probably, ourselves,

the powers that permeate, there was no reason to advertise these hugs were free, no reason at all, currency was out of bounds, we are beyond, women holding beyond the value of labor

but the guy kept screaming from his position, everyday, FREE HUGS! FREE HUGS! his wide eyes, he was so CONVINCED he had what it takes, selling it, declaring himself free, c’mon

people now, I got these FREE HUGS, human contact at no cost, but something was not right, like when they tell you we’re lucky to live in the land of the free, to be proud, the hugs he was giving out cost someone something somewhere, probably a woman, where he acted out on her body what he wasn’t capable of giving, now he was FREE of her and his women troubles, He was the purveyor of FREE HUGS INC, meanwhile women, total strangers, hug each other everywhere, waiting in line to use the bathroom, trying to put our lives back in the aftermath, a coworker suddenly reaching over to hug you, letting you know she’s here, with you, in male dominated spaces, I hug you back and mean it, except at first it might be a shy hug, half-hug, but when my body hurts, thieving ache, low-down blue ache, fellow man, I mean, no, dude, I don’t want yr hugs, screaming enterprises of touching women beneviolently, I’m looking for real friends, kinfolk, women who understand, to share a deep ache of another day of terror perpetuated by the US government, I could really go for a deep hug, by women + femmes, the country’s number one targets, we’re not supposed to ask for what we need, here I am, asking for deep hugs, if someone is interested in hugging, I’ll hug back w/ what I can hold, which doesn’t feel like much to me at the moment, maybe it’ll be enuf for who I’m hugging, maybe I need reminding I can survive, we should survive, strengthening ourselves, bleakly

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, Witness, Kenyon Review, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press, 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof, 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee. Her third collection, Waterbaby, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2021.

“The poems in Regan Good’s The Needle find their home deep in the Northeast Corridor’s scum, rot, and decay—the source, ultimately, of regeneration. Born into a world where “it was HARRY TANKOOS BOOKS ever Easter in our yard,” the poet avers “I was ever thinking backwards toward the other way.” Poem by poem, The Needle charts the directions of that other way, where “One writes towards the worm, the white welter, / the purity of the hole.” Good is Cailleach returned, just when we’d thought we’d lost her forever.” —Claudia Keelan

BY REGAN GOOD “The Needle comes barreling out of time in an utterly original and necessary way. The poems AVAILABLE AT SPDBOOKS.ORG inhabit a landscape that is recognizably our AND ON AMAZON. own but at the same time ancient, burning with celestial fire and hunger. Intoxicating and grounded in the stuff of the earth, with echoes of Stevens and Yeats, The Needle is extraordinary.” —Tom Thomson

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 19 FIVE POEMS

RALPH ANGEL

at some point my translations It’s dark in the street at some point my translations It’s dark in the street, but still daylight and my notes flew directly to my ear another day in the plaza, and upon the monuments there, alone in these white chairs upon the plane overhead

I rest on sand and the birds on the wire, shivering an island and sleeping. rests upon the water I remember all the kinds of wind I walk the steps behind the fountain. the light could make if I walk I rearrange your room. by different streets I put pencils on the table, and a moleskine, the gardens a phone, my passport. I could hear the flowering I mostly Your bed’s empty and made. work to the last minute I hear skin I take down your death mask, and the photographs and bones and excerpts. at some point on the patio It’s small, my friend, and the linen curtains, the bread arrives and the washing of our they’re old. hands Outside, songs of laughter

Before the rose and yapping, of water and sirens, Before the rose is born and the bride is buried and from its long way back Before the body breaks into roses a tired light In the rushes and the reeds next door to the pharmacy slap your lips Gulls circling the pier where they calling hunger provide for you each day In your throat the night sky a new pasta filled with all the stars of the cosmos and a bottle of filtered water and your small yard and a glass of wine. and you Before the father And certain people Before sleeping on rocks And certain people in contemplation come back Before the uncut clothing I don’t know what age I am Life is mostly normal leave it on and this is when I wake up in the arms of strangers And as it is that a child at rest will think of home

20 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW only in the reflection of your eyes I still have dreams staring back at me from every stone every plant and will be born in a little while

The old man with the glass eye The old man with the glass eye and all the cash

Keepsakes in a drawer, as if you were running away

flicker flicker, hand held All of us as we drove crammed together with the windows open dark the light looking through water, a black speck in the blue To the left you don’t really recognize me to the right I put my hands up forever and while the low long bridge is meant for quiet and human ground we don’t say it for if I do

Ralph Angel’s last collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Excep- tions and Melancholies: Poems 1986–2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addi- tion to five books of poetry, he also published an award-winning translation of the Federico García AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Lorca collection Poema del cante jondo/Poem of the Deep Song. His recent work includes entropia, a collection of thirty-one images from the fine art photography publisher Dark Spring Please mail subscription form to: Press, and Strays, a limited edition chapbook from Foundlings Press. He passed away on March 6, 2020. Old City Publishing, Inc. 628 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123 T: 215-925-4390 F: 215-925-4371 E: [email protected] Please enter my subscription to APR for:

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 21 PLYWOOD Jacob Saenz JOSEPH GUNHO JANG Throwing the Crown

Throwing the Crown by When my father brought out a large beam of plywood that my brother Jacob Saenz, winner of the intended on using to make a crossbow and crashed it against the back of my thighs, I heard my mother scream, you are responsible for your own body. 2018 APR/Honickman I turned my head back and saw the bend of the plywood, the bend of my First Book Prize, is available father’s arms, ready, tinted teeth grinding and blending with the sawdust. I heard the wood speak to me then. The wood told me about its time in the in APR’s online store at East: about its cousins and how they loved to practice contortion; about the www.aprweb.org and at shape of the most beautiful logogram it had ever seen, and how it had always other outlets. Throwing the been jealous of paper for being the canvas for a thing that could somehow encapsulate even more than the space it consumed. My mother, half closing Crown was chosen by guest her eyes, never made it clear whether she was speaking to me or to my father. judge Gregory Pardlo. My father struck me as the type of man who wouldn’t understand. Jacob Saenz is a CantoMundo fellow whose work has appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy, Joseph Gunho Jang is an American poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Mar- gins, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, New Delta Review, Poetry Tri-Quarterly and other journals. He has been the Northwest, and elsewhere. Their chapbook was the runner-up for the 2019–2020 New Delta Review Chapbook contest, judged by Jos Charles. recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship as well as a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO. WALMART

TAO TAO Taneum Bambrick Vantage I got all my jeans from Walmart until a girl giggled to her friend, Vantage by Taneum “Does he get all his jeans from Walmart?” Bambrick, winner of the Now I import them straight from Japan; spun on vintage Levi looms. 2019 APR/Honickman The thighs come in a little tight First Book Prize, is until I break them in. available at APR’s website, Only takes a couple months. www.aprweb.org, and at I look fabulous. Everyone knows. other outlets. Vantage was Everyone says. chosen by guest judge On the street the other day Sharon Olds. I passed a guy in big, husky Wranglers. Poor bastard. Taneum Bambrick is a 2018–2020 Stegner I turned around for one more look. He looked so comfortable. Fellow at Stanford University. She is a winner of the Academy of American Poets University Prize, a Susanna Colloredo Environmental Writing Tao Tao is a writer living in San Jose. When he’s not writing third person bios about himself, he also writes poetry, code, unsolicited epitaphs, and long, rambling jokes with no punchline. Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest.

22 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Even the most celebrated and anthologized of ENGAGEMENT, AGAIN the poets I have mentioned, Adrienne Rich, met with sharp hostility when, by degrees and over decades, she began to write poems that were polit- American Poetry Then and Now ically engaged. When she made her turn from the New Critical style of “At a Bach Concert,” or “Ideal Landscape,” to activist poems about rape, JEFFREY GRAY police brutality, and same-sex love, the critical establishment turned against her. In 1963, Snap- shots, while nowhere near as explicitly political as later volumes, was greeted harshly. The reaction to Leaflets (1969) and The Will to Change (1971) was By and large, political poetry—poetry responding Writers against the Vietnam War” was founded worse. Robert Boyers writes in 1973 that Rich to national or global events, poetry of “engage- by the poets David Ray and Robert Bly in 1965, a “falls prey to ideological fashions like the will to ment” or even “witness”—was not the norm group that included W. S. Merwin, Galway Kin- change [Charles Olson’s phrase, which he seems in the United States through the 20th century. nell, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Robert not to recognize] so that, though she is too intel- When it was written and when it was read, crit- Lowell, and others. Ginsberg was, for most of his ligent ever to mouth petty slogans, she allows her- ical reception was hostile. Are these assertions life, the target of calumny and the butt of cultural self to be violated by them” (156; my italics). Boyers is controversial? Surely, it is too much to say, as Law- jokes about “beatniks.” (Ginsberg’s good cheer referring to lines such as “Leroi! Eldridge! Listen rence Ferlinghetti said at the time, that poetry in the face of unrelenting hostility may be one of to us, we are ghosts/ c ondemned to haunt the cit- before Sept. 11, 2001, was B.S., and that every- his greatest legacies.) His “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” ies . . .” (qtd. 156).9 He complains: “How changed thing after was A.S., but he was right in saying published in 1966, is a long antiwar poem, essen- she has become with the nauseous propaganda that 9/11 changed things. So was Amit Majmudar, tially a collage derived from the car radio while of the advance guard cultural radicals” (157). who, in his introduction to Resistance, Rebellion, the poet and his friend drove across the Midwest. Women critics (Vendler, Erica Jong, and Wendy Life: 50 Poems Now, writes, “As it did to so many Bob Kaufman—“the black Rimbaud,” as he was Martin) were sometimes kinder, but Nancy Mil- of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should called in Europe, where he had more of a read- ford agreed with most reviewers that the “moral have been broken well before” (xiii). So was Tracy ership than he did in the U.S.—came West with voice” of Leaflets “was achieved at some cost to the K. Smith when she recounted her experience as a William Burroughs and Ginsberg to join Ferling- poetry” (199). This is the kind of remark Harold creative writing student in the 1990s, when every- hetti, Jack Kerouac, and others, who, along with Bloom, with his many diatribes about the “school one was admonished “to avoid composing political the San Francisco Renaissance, were establish- of resentment,” consistently made, well into the poems,” and how after 9/11, “something shifted in ing the Bay Area as a new center for counter-cul- 21st century. 1 4 the nation’s psyche.” tural poetry. One thinks also of Robert Duncan’s Thus, even for Rich, who had become a pub- Yet one keeps having this conversation: The poem about LBJ, or of Robinson Jeffers’s regret- lic figure like few others and whose obitu- claim that American poetry has become more table poems about Roosevelt (“the vanity of the ary appeared on the front page of the New York political in recent times, which it demonstrably cripple,” etc.). Later, we can add Audre Lorde, Times, political poetry was written against con- has done, meets with the objection that poetry has June Jordan, Amiri Baraka (né Leroi Jones), late siderable odds. What about lesser names? They always been political. (Smith’s article, for example, Adrienne Rich, or Robert Bly’s poems about are lost to all but those willing to unearth them prompted a wave of protest on a number of poets’ the Bushes. However, in these latter cases we in the archives. They are certainly not repre- Facebook pages.) If we speak only of the United are creeping into the 21st century. Indeed, Bly’s sented in anthologies (“books in which our names States, the objection is unfounded. Is American poems on the Bushes, Rich’s on Iraq, Baraka’s on do not appear,” as Rich wrote in “Diving Into poetry more public in the 21st century than it was 9/11—the later poems of all these poets—are all the Wreck,” a poem that actually does appear in through most of the twentieth? Is it more politi- 21st century. the anthologies), which are the only vehicles by cal? Does it address current trends and events? The So this second objection, not the Jamesonian which most readers have any acquaintance with answers are yes, yes, and far more than ever. Dur- one (which is not so much wrong as not useful), poetry. ing the long arc from one fin de siècle to the other, has some merit—certainly, there were opposi- By the time Rich died in 2012, political poetry the idea of a politically engaged poetry was over- tional poets—until we ask: who read these poems? had taken its place as a viable and even invit- 5 whelmingly held in disfavor. Those who grew up How many of them got into college anthologies? ing avenue for all poets to follow, not only those, during the Cold War may find this obvious, in no And what was the critical reception? I suggest like Baraka, Jordan, Lorde, Ginsberg, or Rexroth, need of argument. But, in fairness, there are two that this has been the change: not only that many self-identified as political or outrageous (the long particular claims to support the idea that Ameri- poets today can and do write about the environ- retired “raw vs. cooked” opposition). No one can poetry has always been political, and they can ment, police shootings, race relations, or presiden- any longer objected—in no small part because be quickly reviewed: tial politics, but that they do so in the face of no of Rich’s own struggle, her own example—to First, Fredric Jameson was right: the politi- opposition on the part of the critics or the public. This poetry that engaged race prejudice, sexism, les- cal allegory is there beneath the most trivial TV lack of opposition was not the situation for most bian love, or U.S. military depredations abroad, sitcom, beneath the most Oulipian procedural of the 20th century. One function, at least, of the among many other topics. I am speaking of course poetry, beneath the uplifting poetry of Mary Oli- poet—to interrogate, to disturb—would seem to of trends, not of a before-and-after watershed, as in ver, or the sentimental poetry of the Instagram have been restored in the 21st century, though the the earlier comment by Ferlinghetti, for whom the poet Rupi Kaur (at present, by a staggering mar- explanation for this is troubling, as I will suggest. 20th century was a wasteland of solipsism, aesthet- gin, the most read poet in the world). But to say Engaged poetry was not taught in university icism, and pretense—mostly B.S., in short.10 that all poetry is political in this sense is like say- classrooms until late in the 20th century, by which Is the kind of visceral reaction Adrienne Rich, ing that all language is ironic, after which we have time much of the content excluded by the New among others, met with fifty years ago unthink- 6 to retire the concept of irony (or of politics) as use- Critics had crept, or burst, back onto the scene. able now in the enlightened and poetically per- less. When everything is blue, blue ceases to exist. The civil rights and feminist movements, the Viet- missive 21st century? It is not. Even leaving aside Second, certainly there were often engaged nam War and the antiwar movement, the new sense the New Critical continuities I have cited, con- 2 poets in the 20th century. Carl Sandburg’s The of identity embraced by a range of ethnic groups— sider a New York Times (Feb. 2014) obituary of People, Yes, written during the Great Depression these trends demanded a counterbalance to the her- the poet Maxine Kumin, an otherwise lauda- and read through the mid-century, was popular— meticism of much 20th-century poetry up to that tory commentary which however typifies, as Elea- before the word “socialist” had become as vituper- point, so much so that even the works of poets read nor Wilner notes, “the kind of past resistance to ative as it did after World War II, when the phrase as apolitical (Elizabeth Bishop, for example) began poems, especially poems by women, that stray too “the people” was dropped from popular circula- to seem more socially conscious, even activist, than far from the personal hearth, as if that were the 3 7 tion. Muriel Rukeyser, around the mid-20th cen- they had in the fifties and early sixties. But, for the boundary of the self and its most heartfelt con- tury, was, for many of us, one of the foremost of most part, in a modern poetry class of the 1960s, cerns.”11 The reviewer writes, these poets, documenting labor struggles in the one read Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Stevens, and South, the trial of the Scottsboro boys, the Spanish eventually Williams—and it would be a rare class Most critics agreed that Ms. Kumin’s finest poems Civil War; Kenneth Rexroth wrote about it too, in which Pound’s or Yeats’s admiration for Benito were those that trained their focus close to home. Those as did Edwin Rolfe—poet laureate of the Lin- Mussolini was even mentioned. Today the fascism is on large political subjects like mankind’s dubious stew- coln Brigade—but in poems virtually no anthol- foregrounded immediately, most likely before one ardship of the land, reviewers said, sometimes read better ogy included or includes even now. “American even turns to the poems.8 as prose than as poetry. (my emphasis)

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 23 slaughter. . . .”) anaphora, but to what purpose? In these cases, matters of content overwhelm mat- The American (and British) scorn for didacticism ters of form. To respond to Archibald MacLeish, a poem can certainly both mean and be. sprang from a particular depoliticized aesthetic And today? Here are some anthology titles of the past fifteen years: 1. Poems for Political Disas- and critical approach . . . ter, ed. Timothy Donnelly, et al., Boston Review Press, 2017, 2. Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, ed. Amit Majmudar, Knopf, 2017. 3. Ameri- can Poets of the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engage- No such critics are named. Wilner writes, poems by Robinson Jeffers, wrote, “Our aesthetic ment, ed. Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy, reveres the pure essence; it is anti-polemical, anti- Wesleyan, 2018. 4. The Ecopoetry Anthology, ed. What struck me about the language here ...was the programmatic, basically anti-subject matter. For Ann Fisher-Wirth (this includes both poets of attribution of opinion to some kind of large but uniden- us, propagation is propaganda, and we disdain it” the past and the present: William Carlos Wil- tifiable majority: ‘Most critics agreed...’ and ‘review- (Correspondence and Papers). Everson saw this liams, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Bishop, ers said...’ This vague and settled plurality, like the aesthetic as unfortunate; he mourned the loss of but also Robert Hass and Wendell Berry), Trin- ‘they’ of ‘they say,’ creates a kind of spurious author- the “committed spirit,” which Jeffers, he thought, ity UP, 2013. 5. Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural ity that arouses the very skepticism it fails to document, demonstrated. Poems to the Resistance (seventeen editors), Spuyten and seems one example of what had been a prevail- What about later, much later? In fact, there is Duyvil Publishing, 2012. 6. Scoundrel Time, jour- ing attitude. no need to use the past tense. Poets do not write nal edited by Daisy Fried, described as “the liter- Kumin’s poems about the Iraq war, such as manifestoes anymore, and probably never will ary resistance journal that has, since the election of “Extraordinary Rendition” or “Entering Houses again, but consider contemporary poets on what the 45th president, been developing a rich archive at Night,” are brilliant, at least as much so as her poetry is or is not. Matthew Zapruder, in Why of literary and artistic responses to the politi- poems about nature and personal relationships. Poetry? (2018), writes, “Unlike other forms of cal present.” 7. 100 Poets against the War, ed. Todd The fact that the reviewer felt it necessary to go writing, poetry takes as its primary task to insist Swift, Salt, 2003. 8. Poets against the War, ed. Sam on record as preferring the non-political poems and depend upon and celebrate the troubled rela- Hamill, Nation, 2003. 9. State of the Union: Fifty illustrates what Wilner calls the critical “undertow tion of the word to what it represents” (13). Paul Political Poems, ed. Joshua Beckman and Matthew of the past.” Muldoon, a brilliant poet who is certainly post- Zapruder, Wave, 2008. 10. American War Poetry: Poetry, in short, was a lot of things over the modern in key regards (procedural poems, sound An Anthology, ed. Lorrie Goldensohn, Columbia last century—experimental, personal, epiphanic, poems, pop music poems, general pop-allusive UP, 2006. 11. The New American Poetry of Engage- spontaneous, tender, obscene, learned, unintelligi- zaniness), writes, recently, “The poem itself is after ment: A 21st Century Anthology, ed. Ann Kenis- ble, or simple enough for house pets to read. What all the solution to a problem only it has raised, ton and Jeffrey Gray, McFarland, 2005. 12. The it mostly was not was political. The American (and and our reading of it necessarily entails determin- News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry British) scorn for didacticism sprang from a partic- ing what that problem was” (The End of the Poem, of Engagement, ed. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston, ular depoliticized aesthetic and critical approach, 374). Michael Robbins, critical enfant terrible and U. Michigan, 2015. not only during the New Critical era but a few author of the ground-breaking Alien v. Predator, When in the 20th century could one have seen decades before it and long after it, as I have sug- writes, recently, that “[a]esthetic life is a sphere of as many titles of this kind in any given decade? gested. After the 20th century, the word “didac- self-directed activity whose external ramifications, Similarly, we might browse issues of Best American tic” very likely will be pejorative to the end of despite periodic utopian exuberances, are minimal Poetry from 1988, when the series started, to the time, and the didactic predilections of the 2000 at best” (quoted in Menand).16 present, in order to note the distinct increase, over years prior to the fin de siècle will be forgotten. Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom those 30-plus years, in the number of poems about Poetry, from modernism onward, was not “con- would have agreed with every one of these asser- events, even with “political” commentary in the servative” in other regards: indeed, the important tions. prefaces.18 poets were (and were famous for being) experi- Louis Menand in an article reviewing, among It is inconceivable that Claudia Rankine’s Citi- mental, groundbreaking, and difficult—in short, other books, Robbins’s Equipment for Living: On zen could have been, at any time in the 20th cen- modern. That, the modernity, not the politics, Poetry and Pop Music, writes, “Some version of this tury, a New York Times best-seller or have won the was foremost. notion—that whatever the ostensible subject mat- National Book Critics’ Circle Award for poetry, Why and out of what circumstances was ter, poems are ‘about’ language—has been current or even have been published by Penguin (UK) engaged poetry repudiated? One can start with in English departments since the days of the New or Graywolf (US). The book’s formal aspects— the late 19th century, when Oscar Wilde said that Criticism” (11). He then quotes lines from Freder- poetry, prose anecdote, collage, multimedia, mix “art never expresses anything but itself” and “All ick Seidel’s poem “Now” which are so unequiv- of abstruse and direct diction—derive from mod- art is quite useless.”12 The modernists, weaned ocal and direct that the idea of “the troubled ernism and are no longer, in themselves, remark- on the Symbolists, extended this idea, with Ste- relation of the word to what it represents” flies out able. But an award-winning book of poems about vens (“Poetry is the subject of the poem”), Yeats the window: racism? No book of its kind garnered such acclaim (“a poet [should] keep his mouth shut/ f or he in the 20th century. Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes has no gift to set a statesman right”), or Auden Now, well into the 21st century, we can see We the people voted in has taken over. (“poetry makes nothing happen” and many simi- that the view of the poem as moral, even didac- lar remarks).13 In Ars Poetica, Archiblad MacLeish (Resistance 84) tic, having been held in abeyance for more than a wrote, “A poem should not mean/ B ut be,” a Try this exercise on other recent poems of hundred years, has returned from repression. We mantra that echoed down the decades, arguably engagement: could say, sticking to poetry in English, that we more central than any other poetic dictum of its are normalizing again after an anomalous long time.14 Like alcohol and gasoline, poetry and poli- How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda, century of anti-didacticism. How and why has tics were not supposed to mix. Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now didacticism, along with other repressed content, It is not of much value to argue that the idea We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes? been decriminalized, if it has been? of the autotelic work of art is somehow mistaken; (“Call and Answer—August 2002,” Robert Bly, First, as the post-colonialists would say, a return it is simply where history went. The remarkable NAPE 24 17) is never a return with the original contours and point—after all those centuries of viewing liter- features intact; it is always repetition with a differ- ature as primarily moral and instructive—is the What would a formalist reading contribute to our ence. The differences are too many and compli- near universality of this view in the Anglophone understanding of the following? cated to list here, but consider, first, that collages, 20th century. One could say that this ethos passed Some burned, their faces caught fire. procedural poetry, Oulipian techniques, found away amid the tear gas and marijuana fumes of Some were asphyxiated. poems, and so on are no longer approaches we 15 the 1960s, but it did not. In that decade, Rob- Some broke windows and leaned into the sunny day. associate only with experimental poetry or writ- ert Creeley wrote, “Poetry denies its end in any Some were pushed out from behind by others in flames. ing workshops. Today, a poetry of engagement descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the often uses these same techniques.19 (“When the Towers Fell,” Galway Kinnell, attention outside the poem,” to which Charles Second, one needs to look at the long arcs. NAPE 109) Olson absolutely agreed. In the 1960s, the Califor- Although the “end of irony” after 9/11 was obvi- nia poet William Everson (later known as Brother One can note the Whitmanic (or Poundian? ously an exaggeration, and if, at the year 2000, Antoninus), reviewing a posthumous book of “Some from fear of censure,/ some for love of you had to choose from a line-up the most influ-

24 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW ential poet in America, it would certainly be John Ashbery—nevertheless, the change was already well under way. If 9/11 was a turning point, as The U.S. arrived somewhat late to Tracy Smith argues, so be it. The round figure is nothing if not handy for teaching American litera- a poetry of engagement. ture forever after. -

The usual terms for engaged literature are prob- informed through media, as it would be for most Pound was institutionalized for twelve years, not lematic: littérature engagée, literatura de compromiso, poets; the same is true for his poems “Surge” and for his poetry, which his accusers would never “public” or “political” poetry, “the poetry of wit- “Grenade.” Claudia Rankine in “Don’t Let Me have read, much less understood, but for his anti- ness.” Of all these, perhaps the most important Be Lonely” saw on television the reports of a black U.S. wartime broadcasts. (For the poetry, he over the past half century has been “witness.” The man dragged to his death in Texas; she did not won the Bollingen Prize in 1959.) Amiri Baraka’s concept of a poetry of witness was paramount in meet Timothy McVeigh, nor did she witness the “Somebody Blew up America” got him an eve- the study of the poetry of Latin America and East- Bush election except through media; the writing ning on TV and a brief, absurd interview with ern Europe in the mid to late 20th century, in is not diminished by that. Naomi Shihab Nye’s Connie Chung, who asked him all the wrong studies of Paul Celan and post-Holocaust poetry, “Dictionary in the Dark” concerns the insidi- questions.21 More recently, Kenneth Goldsmith and in Carolyn Forché’s groundbreaking 1993 ous language of war. Timothy Liu’s poem “Ready- experienced some blowback after sampling the anthology Against Forgetting (in which most of the Mades” does not suggest he actually met President autopsy transcript of Michael Brown, the black poems were by non-U.S. poets). George Bush. Moreover, a number of these youth killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mis- But Forché herself has redefined “witness” sig- poets, adding to this mediation, use constructed souri. Goldsmith suffered some on-line critique; nificantly. Reviewing her own work and her coin- personae—a soldier in Iraq, or an Israeli speaking he did not lose his job. age of the phrase “poetry of witness,” she writes in of Palestinians, for example. By contrast, the most widely read poet in the Poetry in 2011 that Contemporary writers—leaving aside embed- world in the 1960s, Pablo Neruda, who wrote ded journalists—experience distant events through poems about the United Fruit Company, Ana- [a]s compelling as many such “witness” poems are, media. Yu interprets what Cathy Park Hong calls conda Copper, Standard Oil, and the various dic- “poetry of witness” originated in a very different con- “secondary witness” as a shortcoming, as if these tators of Central America and the Caribbean, stellation of thought, in which it was not regarded as contemporary poets are not doing the real work had to flee to Argentina in 1948, when the Chil- constituting a poet’s identity, nor prescribing a new lit- of witness in situ that Forché seemed to describe ean president, González Videla, issued a warrant térature engagée....In my sense of this term, it in 1993, while poets of color are. One might see, for his arrest. Stalin sent Osip Mandelstam and his is a mode of reading rather than of writing, of readerly instead, this acknowledgment of complexity (and wife to Siberia, where he died. Nâzim Hikmet encounter with the literature of that-which-happened, often complicity) as salutary in new poetry, not spent much of his life either in prison or in exile. and its mode is evidentiary rather than representa- as a demerit. Poets today no longer pretend to Ernesto Cardenal wrote poems about Somoza, and tional. (163) have access to unmediated realities. Indeed, most later served as Minister of Culture in the short- Although not presented as such, this is a serious people in the West today—poets or not, white lived Sandinista regime. (Imagine having a “Min- revision when one considers Forché’s earlier insis- or non-white—are spectators, from a distance, ister of Culture.”) Otto René Castillo, who wrote tence on a poet of witness being grounded in the through media, of the war in Iraq, the earthquake about the political situation in Guatemala, was specific reality—in that country, having experi- in Nepal, or the killings by the police in Fergu- tortured and burned alive by the military in 1967. enced that event—out of which he or she speaks. son, New York City, Baltimore, and Madison. - Still more recently, Cathy Park Hong, in And one of the strengths of the best contemporary “Against Witness,” writes of the problem of mak- poetry is not to present a view from nowhere but Timothy Yu writes the following of W. H. ing art (she is reviewing an installation by the rather to suggest, even to identify, one’s implica- Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” and its fre- Colombian artist Doris Salcedo but speaking also tion in events very far from oneself. quent invocation in the weeks after the attacks on of poetry) that represents another victim’s pain: - the Trade Towers: Oftentimes the poet has witnessed catastrophic condi- Auden’s poem was widely quoted in the immediate The U.S. arrived somewhat late to a poetry of tions that have happened elsewhere in a geographically aftermath of the attacks, its resonant phrases seeming engagement. I can remember the cover of the remote place...or conditions that have already been to anticipate the events of 9/11 (“The unmentionable August 10, 1963, issue of Life magazine, a Hearst bookended by the past. (157) odour of death/Offends the September night”) and publication, on which the face of Yevgeny Yev- their possible causes (“Those to whom evil is done/Do She asks, in her conclusion, tushenko looks out from the streets of Russia. evil in return”), culminating in the poem’s anguished Inside is a three-page spread accompanying Yev- What kind of proximity do I need to write as witness? tagline: “We must love one another or die.” Yet the tushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” about the massacre Do I have to experience the event myself? If I watched very fact that Americans would turn at this moment to a of Jews at that site in the Soviet Union, and the the video, can I write about it? Do I have to be related half-century-old poem by an English-born poet might be refusal of the government to establish a memorial to the victim? And what do you mean by relation? (161) seen as signaling a certain lack of comparable voices there. The poem is written in the “international” in contemporary American poetry. As Brendan But this correction, or adjustment, of the term open style of its time. There are large photographs Bernhard would write in a reflection on Auden’s poem raises problems for a critic such as Timothy Yu, of Babi Yar. This was fare, in a conservative mag- a decade after the attacks, “Poets who spoke with that who questions the value of representing “highly azine, for a broad readership. Yet no “political” measure of confidence and ambition no longer existed— mediated, often distant mass events to which the poem by an American poet of that period ever at least not in America.” (3; emphases mine)22 poet can have only an ambivalently impersonal received such attention, least of all from a national relationship” (6n). Yu quotes Ann Keniston and magazine. Almost certainly without reflecting on Yu is right to note that the recourse to a poem myself, noting that one feature of contemporary it, American editors and readership (but perhaps by a British poet, writing sixty years earlier, might engaged poetry is the “domestic ‘I’” who con- not the State Department) thought engaged poetry signal “a certain lack of comparable voices in con- fronts a “distant, calamitous place that the speaker was all right for a Neruda, a Yevtushenko, or a temporary American poetry.” Even more impor- learns of through the news,” but adds that this Nâzim Hikmet (the most widely translated poets tantly, Yu illustrates that the public today is more more mediated situation forms “a sharp contrast to in the world at the time), but not for the United receptive than ever to a poem of this kind (and the strategies of identification (however problem- States.20 In other words, the anti-didactic ethos to its uncanny echoes with 9/11). Today is the atic) pursued by many poets of color” (6). that prevailed in 20th-century American poetry key word. Yu fails to mention that Auden repu- The non-white poets included in The New Amer- was not characteristic of poets outside the United diated “September 1, 1939,” as well as “Spain,” ican Poetry of Engagement—among them, Yusef States (or, with exceptions, outside the English- and refused to include those poems in his Col- Komunyakaa, Timothy Liu, Naomi Shihab Nye, speaking world). lected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. Rather, he wrote and Claudia Rankine—would almost certainly With regard to eastern European and Latin in “Squares and Oblongs” that the “Orpheus who disagree with this characterization. Komunya- American poets, U.S. poets have seemed almost moved stones is the archetype, not of the poet, but kaa (who earlier in his career wrote poems about to envy the roles they occupied in their respec- of Goebbels” (181). Auden regretted these polit- the Vietnam War, which he did witness) saw on tive countries, extending to their persecution—as ical poems and insisted that poets should not try television, as did much of the world, two people Bruce Murphy suggests in “The Exile of Liter- to “exercise control over their readers” (180). Yet jump from the Trade Towers; his poem about the ature”—the like of which has never been seen “Auden’s words were everywhere,” as the TLS U.S. military’s “shock and awe” policy in Iraq is in the U.S. Howl was censored, but not for long. reported at the time, especially the line he most

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 25 hated (changed in one version, deleted in another): at a time when everything she warned against their interests and the nature of artistic fabrication, [are] “We must love one another or die.”23 has come to pass. What poets write today does singularly ill-equipped to understand politics or eco- Auden’s views were very far from idiosyn- not threaten anyone. In the purportedly loboto- nomics” (84). See below regarding his repudiation of the cratic. His aversion to political poetry, regrettable mized fifties, it did, or it could. The personal lives poems “September 1, 1939” and “Spain.” as it may seem to some of us now, was the aver- of artists, even poets, actually took up space in 14. MacLeish: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica sion of his time.24 All this has changed. We might J. Edgar Hoover’s brain. Muriel Rukeyser had it 15. When I refer to the 1960s, I mean not so much the even be nostalgic for a time when the Congress of right in the 1960s, in the poem “In Our Time,” fabled “Sixties,” which began in most places in the U.S. in Cultural Freedom, an arm of the CIA, sent Rob- though she seemed to describe, much more, our 1966 or 1967, but rather the actual decade, which largely ert Lowell to Latin America, to counter the influ- own time: belonged to the “tranquilized fifties,” as Robert Low- ence of the communist Pablo Neruda, and to ell called that period. The undercurrents are another mat- In our period they say there is free speech. show, as Allen Tate wrote at the time, that Amer- ter. None of them would come to the surface until late icans, vulgar though they were thought to be, They say there is no penalty for poets, in the 60s or be read in some classrooms until well into were capable of participating in international liter- There is no penalty for writing poems. the 1970s. ary culture.25 The Congress of Cultural Freedom They say this. This is the penalty. 16. Also characteristic, but more devastating, is the con- supported the career of Jackson Pollock; it funded demnation by Michael Robbins of James Wright’s “soft” the left-literary magazine Encounter, though few poetry: “if fetal alcohol syndrome could write, it would sound like this.” of its writers knew this. Hemingway worked for Jeffrey Gray is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Post- 17. The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Cen- the FBI while in Cuba. (Ayn Rand wanted to, and war American Poetry (U. Georgia, 2005) and of many arti- tury Anthology. cles on U.S. and Latin American literature. He is co-editor of supplied the agency with news clippings that she 18. (I would have to bracket Adrienne Rich’s 1996 Best thought indicated communist infiltration.) several anthologies, including The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (McFarland, American Poetry, which Harold Bloom greeted with horror, As regards the present, the fear is not that one 2012) and The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st Cen- but whose preface should be re-read every year.) In the might end up in jail but that one will eventu- tury American Poetry of Engagement (U Michigan, 2017 issue, edited by Natasha Trethewey, even the series ally be canonized by the State and depicted on a 2016), both with Ann Keniston. He is a professor at Seton Hall editor, David Lehman, emphasizes the public function of postage stamp, like Thoreau and Malcolm X. In University. poetry, closing his introduction with a full-frontal politi- first-world capitalism, unlike the worlds in which cal limerick by Robert Conquest (xix). Trethewey’s own Neruda or Castillo lived, absorption, not execu- Notes introduction concludes with lines by Czesław Miłosz, tion or exile, is the rule. Derek Walcott has spo- from the poem “Dedication”: 1. Tracy K. Smith, “Politics and Poetry” (New York ken of the vast blandness that absorbs artists in What is poetry which does not save Times, 10 October 2018). nations or people? (xxvi) the U.S. We might be hungry for oppression 2. For obvious reasons, I can deal here with only the 19. Examples in Keniston and Gray, The New Ameri- by the government, as Bruce Murphy has sug- 20th and 21st centuries. When we examine literature of can Poetry of Engagement, include Hugh Seidman’s pantoum gested, or nostalgic for real or imagined oppres- earlier centuries, the change is radical: up through Mat- “Found Poem: Microloans” (179); Philip Metres’s redacted sion, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 2003: “I’ve thew Arnold, but not much after, it was apparent to most poem “Testimony” (147); Timothy Donnelly’s splicing of become almost homesick for the smell of tear gas.” readers and writers that literature should instruct. Osama bin Laden and the Beverly Hillbillies in “Dream of 3. And from the movies. A film like Capra’s Meet John In a letter to Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop Arabian Hillbillies” (38); and several others. Doe (1941), with its depiction of the inherently good, hon- wrote, “One almost envies those Russian poets a 20. See Terry Eagleton on the relation between New est “People” vs. the fascistic rich (complete with leather- bit—who feel they are so important, and perhaps Criticism and the Cold War, in Literary Theory. clad motorcycle squads), would, after the war, never be they are. At least the party seems afraid of them, 21. Although Chung, incredibly, did not ask him the made again. whereas I doubt that any American poet (except key question, Baraka left no doubt in his essay “I Will 4. Kaufman, however, took a Buddhist vow of silence poor wretched Pound) ever bothered our govern- Not Apologize”: he believed the Jews were behind the from 1963 to 1975, so the world had changed considerably attacks on 9/11. The theory is alive and well in France and ment much” (Poems, Letters 863). by the time he took up writing again. throughout the Arab world. As poetry has changed, expectations sur- 5. Sandburg did get into the anthologies, but usu- 22. Auden was not yet a U.S. citizen. rounding it have changed. “How can a poet write ally with innocuous poems like “The Fog.” Moreover, 23. See TLS, “A Letter from New York,” re. Auden’s truth to power when power doesn’t read poems?” The People, Yes was itself innocuous, if not cliché: “Yes to poem and 9/11. asks Ben Lerner (xvi). Amit Majmudar writes, the paradoxes of democracy,/Yes to the hopes of govern- 24. Posthumous editions of Auden restore those poems. ment/Of the people, by the people, for the people. . . .” “Today, no poet, no matter what kind of pose he See also Edward Mendelson, “Revision and Power: The 6. The “political” bursting up or out was preceded by or she may strike, is ‘dangerous’ enough to perse- Example of W. H. Auden,” Yale French Studies 89 (1996): the important psychological breakthroughs of the personal cute....No poet attracts any malignant interest 103–112. or “confessional” poets of the 1960s and 70s. from the halls of power, at least not yet. In the old 25. In von Hallberg, 72. See also Saunders, The Cultural 7. Bishop like most writers of her time disliked poetry totalitarianism, oddly enough, the bastards actu- Cold War. of “social conscience,” although she admired the exam- ally gave a damn about poetry” (xv).26 26. For an update on the question of whether or not the ple set by Rukeyser, who had been her classmate at Vas- government cares about, much less monitors, writers, So this is the irony: at a time when the prevail- sar: “her life is one heroic saga of fighting for the under- see “Spying on Writers,” Christian Lorentzen, LRB, ing ethos was overwhelmingly to see the poem dog: going to jail, writing about silicosis, picketing alone 11 October 2018, p. 44. At one time, the spied-upon as an art object, and to repudiate any tendency in Korea. . . . I n comparison I sound about like Billie included Baldwin, Hemingway, Truman Capote, et al. toward political or social comment, the govern- Burke” (One Art 631). More characteristically, however, Now, possibly Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo (because ment and the public alike were aware of certain Bishop disliked Diane di Prima and was revolted by Diane of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra?), but these are reck- Wakoski. poets’ existence, their lives, their missteps, their less guesses. Poets? The article mentions none, for good 8. In Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1973), the biggest letters to presidents, their obscenity trials, even reason. their incarcerations (Pound’s, at least), while, at and most-read volume on modernism in its time, there is present, with political poetry proliferating among almost no mention of race, gender, or class. Nor does the poets of every stamp, and as widely disseminated meticulous index of that huge book have a single entry for Works Cited as poetry can be, the government and the popular “fascism.” “Mussolini” does appear in the index, but most instances are mere mentions. Books on modernism writ- Auden, W. H. “Squares and Oblongs.” Poets at Work. Ed. culture could not possibly care less. Surely, if we ten thirty years or more afterward would be framed com- Charles D. Abbott. Harcourt Brace, 1948, pp.171–181. are willing to admit it, the latter reality—oblivi- pletely differently. Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ousness—is at least one factor in the flourishing of 9. I.e. Leroi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver. political poetry. ———. Poems, Prose, and Letters, eds. Robert Giroux and 10. For a discussion of Ferlinghetti and of post-9/11 Lloyd Schwartz. The Library of America, 2008. It is not likely that Donald Trump will ever poetry, see Jeffrey Gray, “Precocious Testimony: Poetry Boyers, Robert. “On Adrienne Rich: Intelligence and convene a “Festival of the Arts” of the sort that and the Uncommemorable.” Literature after 9/11. Ed. Ann Will.” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth presidents throughout the last century, and into Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Rout- Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. Norton, 1975, pp. 148–160. this one, frequently hosted, and which artists ledge, 2008, 261–284. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Third could, if they wanted, glory in condemning, or 11. In American Poetry Review, and in The News from Edition. U Minnesota P, 2008. Poems: Essays on the 21st Century Poetry of Engagement (U Everson, William. Correspondence and Papers, 75/5 C, at least refuse to attend, and against which they Carton 10, Bancroft Library, University of California, could collect poems of protest, as Sam Hamill did, Michigan P, 2016). 12. These remarks were made in the preface to The Pic- Berkeley, CA. in 2007, publishing 260 poems in Poets Against Forché, Carolyn. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century ture of Dorian Gray. When asked about the passage, he Poetry of Witness. Norton, 1993. the War (3600 poets responded), addressed “to added that art “is not meant to instruct . . . It is superbly Laura Bush.” ———. “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of sterile.” Literary Art.” Poetry, Vol. 198, No. 2, May 2011, pp. The last and most vexing thought, then, is this: 13. Yeats, “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” The Wild 159–174. the fact that nobody minds means nobody cares. Swans at Coole, 1919. Auden was explicit in his prose. Goldensohn, Lorrie. American War Poetry: An Anthology. Even Adrienne Rich could not have foreseen this, Poets, he wrote, in The Dyer’s Hand, “by the nature of Columbia UP, 2006.

26 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Gray, Jeffrey, and Ann Keniston. The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st Century Poetry of Engagement. U Michigan P, 2016. Hong, Cathy Park. “Against Witness.” Poetry, Vol. 204, No. 2, May 2015, pp. 151–161. TWO POEMS Keniston, Ann, and Jeffrey Gray. The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology. McFarland, 2012. Lehman, David. “Introduction.” Best American Poetry 2017. Scribner, 2017. Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. “Letter from New York.” Times Literary Supplement. 5 October 2001, pp. 17–18. COREY VAN LANDINGHAM Majmudar, Amit, ed. Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now. Knopf, 2017. Menand, Louis. “Can Poetry Change Your Life?” The New Yorker, 31 July 2017. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/can-poetry-change-your-life Milford, Nancy. “This Woman’s Movement.” Adrienne Rich’s Poetry. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: Norton, 1975, pp. 189–201. Muldoon, Paul. The End of the Poem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Murphy, Bruce F. “The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of the Other(s).” Reader, I Critical Inquiry 17.1 (Autumn 1990), pp. 162–173. Saunders, Francis Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Let- remember the midnights. The hour’s stark cleaver—new year from old. ters. New York: The New Press, 1999. Smith, Tracy K. “Politics and Poetry.” New York Times, 10 October 2018. https://www. A stranger’s clove-tinged mouth, that kindling. Now I’m sleeping on the nytimes.com/2018/12/10/books/review/political-poetry.html couch. We haven’t kissed for a week (some winter bug I shouldn’t spread) Von Hallberg, Robert. “Tourism and Postwar American Poetry.” American Poetry and but I’ve resolved less pity, less sorrow. Remember, reader, how one glance Culture, 1945–1980. Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 62–92. Wilde, Oscar. “All art is useless.” https://flashbak.com/ could burn right through each scarved layer, touch bone? Tomorrows upon oscar-wilde-explains-his-comment-that-all-art-is-quite-useless-12176/ tomorrows. Embossed bralettes. The rough knuckle tracing a hipbone while Wilner, Eleanor. “Homeland Insecurity and the Poetry of Engagement.” The American Poetry Review, March/April 2016, 45 (3), 11–15. you sidesaddled the chilly fence? Enough—it’s untidy, trawling youth like Yu, Timothy. “Engagement, Race, and Public Poetry in America.” Jacket2, 20 March this. So what if I watch our neighbor step into her gleaming dress after we 2015. http://jacket2.org/article/engagement-race-and-public-poetry-america kill the lights. We had a glass of wine. There are branches of eucalyptus Zapruder, Matthew. Why Poetry. HarperCollins, 2018. inside a glass vase and my husband is dreaming his same dreams. The years are carbon paper. Jubilee—who could say it with a straight face? Have we inherited a right to happiness? The leather cools my fevered cheek, and I’ll APR ON SOCIAL MEDIA spare him. We aren’t made to last forever.

@TheAmericanPoetryReview Reader, I write (perhaps you’ve noticed) about love. He writes—what a man—of work. @AmPoetryReview These tired roles. But aren’t they mirrors? When in the garden Eve goes Give me a goddamned minute alone in yonder Spring of Roses does she a) recite her @american_poetry_review therapist’s decree to give herself a little break from we b) know by now by heart the Cosmo clipping on more tasteful lingerie—“One wants what one can’t see” or c) invent the division of labor? Adam off winding the Woodbine round his wounded ego. But maybe, keen reader, you long for d) all of the above. That love is work and work is love and toss me the pruning gloves but I don’t want to see you for at least a day? I’ve read the Marxist takes— no room for play makes Adam a dull, bourgie boy. Eve needs to get free, explore her sexuality with Anja, Ingrid, Jürgen and Klaus. That sex inside the marriage house is only ever okay. Or the book that opts completely out, no future happy ceremony on the statehouse steps, no children getting in the way. And I agree—“No” is my darling RSVP. But I’ve always courted in-between. Tennis with the net down isn’t any fun, and it takes more than one to hang the discount Christmas lights. “Frost was right” wasn’t in my wedding letter; when we work alone we love each other better.

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of The Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in Poetry, and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Steg- ner Fellowship from Stanford University, her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. She is a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Moving? Miss an issue? Please let us know. Write ✦ Phone ✦ Email Mike Duffy The American Poetry Review 1906 Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia, PA 19103 Tel: 215-309-3722 Email: [email protected]

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 27 TWO POEMS

BOB HICOK

Gobble: a song of climate change Genuflection: a song of climate change As I roll three buckets of water If a forest falls and no one is there in a wheelbarrow down the drive to catch it. If there is a last tree, last leaf. to water grass above a retaining wall, If clear-cutting lacks clarity. If I am an accessory a wild turkey crosses in front of me, to murder. If a conditional sentence nervous, edible, a male, yo bro, never finishes combing its hair. If a glacier dies we’re a team. The grass is dying, so am I, in Alaska. If a glacier is killed in Iceland so’s the turkey, yo everything, we’re a team. and buried at sea. If I like breathing. There’s a drought, the sky is naked, If I like coral. If I like liking the blue Earth. everyone can see it not raining, If forests had lawyers. If trees were CEOs. how do you offer the sky a glass of water, If CEOs were angels. If an angel falls from heaven, a turkey a glass of Wild Turkey, comes to dinner, opens her chest, opens his mouth how rude, yo bro, let’s get wasted, and stars pour out. If heaven rises. If heaven prizes go team. I’m wondering if we’ve killed the sky. canopy, under story, overgrowth. If appetite. If covet. The grass says yes, turkey bro doesn’t know, If capitalism is suicide by comfort. If shrug. the water table (and chairs) says duh, If “Will you look at the time.” If I abet extinction. science—fun when it explodes If I am an accomplice to poof. If trees are green engines, and plays with nematodes—is getting stoned god of every heart and lung. If clear-cutting and nodding its head, yo facts and figures is our brains proving they are knock-knock jokes. and test tubes and interferometers, we’re a team. If who’s there. If too late. If a tree is planted. I’ve heard turkeys are stupid If a forest is guarded by the Secret Service. but it’s people who say this If another tree is planted. If a forest stars and people who are unhappy in the next superhero movie and the sequel with the world as it comes to us, yo bulldozers, and the prequel and ta da. If breathe. If you. two-for-one sales, unrepairable Apple everything: If Eden. If grace. If the apple is the word “apple.” thank you for your destructive service, If a species falls and no one is there to notice please stop being on our team. Be careful it is us. If I take a knee. If I die before I pray what you don’t know how to wish for: human modesty, to wake. If I pray we wake before we die. for rain rain to not go away, for people to wake up and smell the methane, yo desperate times, meet desperate measures, Bob Hicok’s ninth collection, Hold, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. He is a recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and has also been awarded a Guggen- red rover red rover, send over heim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Virginia Tech. the do-over: go back, go team, go g-reen.

Kazim Ali Dana Levin * * COMING Beth Bachmann Adrian Matejka SOON * * IN Mark Doty Carl Phillips APR * * Danusha Laméris Sandra Simonds

28 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW TWO POEMS

The American Poetry Review BRITTANY CAVALLARO and The Honickman Foundation are happy to announce Luxury Tax the winner of the A fig in your drawer. A descant, a signet ring. Your index finger once you’ve chipped all the polish. Yes, you say, a pair of them in with the silk and the lace. A Windsor knot one-handed. The piece you bought for your husband. The plate 2020 in your wrist, how it’s thicker in the morning. Cheesecake. Pannacotta. The poet fled to Montana, nursing the gout APR/HONICKMAN in his leg. Flowers for your table. The granite has thicker veining than the marble, of course. Her name like forty flounces on a dress. Jacquard. Knifepleats. We thought you’d gone First Book Prize to Florence for the summer. A house exchange? A smaller dog. The outlet sells different goods than the flagship. A cord snaking away from it. The hours you supplicate in your green dress, in your girdle. Sat on your heels, your lips a bow, and what you say—like needles from your dowry, pulling, pulling, to make a whole, or cut one. Would you allow me to make you an accounting? The marks your necklace left. The twin beds together to make a king.

You & Your Destiny The thing that lifts you up out of the field like a pair of pincers. The stage you keep ascending to, but there’s another flight, another. The way you cried in bed after I finished the painting, and you said I’ve known since I was a boy, and I agreed though you didn’t finish. When I was a girl I knew CHESSY NORMILE that if I didn’t shave under my arms, I couldn’t bear children. If I didn’t make myself a basket Great Exodus, Great Wall, I was a fence instead. Chain-linked, porous, the place the trash catches, and I go for miles Great Party until I stop in a place just the same. My arms flung out in worthless praise. I’ve always The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an known too, I say, and with my other hand I pull the sheet up over my head. No, I walk award of $3,000 and publication of a vol- along myself for miles. I beat the grass. I’m here ume of poetry. Chessy Normile’s Great Exo- to scare up the birds—look how they tangle dus, Great Wall, Great Party, with an intro- like that, together, up in the sky like a pillow duction by Li-Young Lee, will be published exploding, like coughed-up coal, like a thousand crowns in search of a worthy head. in September 2020, with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. Brittany Cavallaro is the author of the poetry collections Girl-King and Unhistorical, both from The prize is made possible by the partner- University of Akron Press. Individual poems have appeared in Tin House, Southern Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry. Cavallaro is also the ship between The Honickman Foundation New York Times bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes novels for young adults. and The American Poetry Review.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 29 In Life We Dance at a Gay Bar Named TWO POEMS After a Dead First Lady And they play “Jolene” by Dolly STEPHEN S. MILLS and we sing at the top of our lungs as the boys all move in and out of doors to and from the dance floor to and from the water that is so close by here on the edge of the island and you say: Can you imagine writing a song about a bank teller In Life My Husband Helps Put you were jealous of and having it survive this long? and I laugh asking if you’ve forgotten I’m a writer a Woman Back Together Again and no matter what any writer tells you Her arm was in the other room that is always our goal: survival when he arrived— and popping up in odd places not with her body like a bar named after Jackie O in Greece still breathing in the living where her face is blown up on the side of the stairwell: room. In and out of consciousness. young and fresh Jackie And blood of course. a little blurry But not as much as you might expect. all before fame and tragedy So he retrieved the arm— which makes me think of other dead first ladies lifted it into a bag full of her and how people rewrite the stories of dead white women freezer contents always giving them extra room (paramedics do not carry ice— like when Hillary Clinton praised it would melt). Nancy Reagan for her work fighting AIDS This made him think of lifting his dead cat and all the gays gasped after he hit it with his car as a teenager: how easily the pieces are rearranged still warm. Don’t speak ill of the dead, they say He vomited then, Fuck that, I say but now he is a professional. but Jackie was different But still there’s something alarming about a piece brave and beautiful of a body completely separated with a keen eye for fashion from that body, which makes her an easy gay icon which is somehow still surviving. like her insistence on continuing to wear An arm thought to be cut off by a lover that bloody pink Chanel suit now on the run. that changed America Detached changed our access to information but can maybe be reattached. but that picture isn’t here in this bar Modern medicine and all. where we dance miles from home Most things do not get to my husband. trying to forget He brushes off the sick. the tragedies of America The tragic. of our moment The suicides. of our soon-to-be history But today and I think of the mother I saw recently when he gets home, he wants to hold me. in Washington D.C. taking her little boy Says he will keep me safe around the First Ladies exhibit as if I’m the one who needs reassurance. which is mostly dishes and dresses I smile. and how she stopped in front Kiss him. of Mamie Eisenhower’s dress Tell him our three-legged dog gets along just fine: turned to her son and said: so very capable. The dress is prettier than the woman. And he laughs and she wags her tail She wasn’t very attractive, was she? because she knows we are talking about her, and I remember how he looked up but doesn’t know why, at Mamie’s photograph doesn’t know about the woman whose arm and asked: But was she nice? was brutally cut off today. and I wanted to hug this boy And I can’t help but think of the blood— right in front of the dresses her blood—that was up both of his arms and the dishes after he lifted her onto the gurney. and his awful mother And I wonder if I had one of those forensic lights, but all I did was stand there if his body would glow against mine and listen as she answered: like a map of his day spread out across his skin. I don’t know. I didn’t know her. The same skin I take to my skin, against my beating heart, and into my still intact arms. Stephen S. Mills is the author of the Lambda Award–winning book He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried, both from Sibling Rivalry Press. His third book, Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution, is now also available from Sibling Rivalry Press. Website: http://www.stephensmills.com/

30 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW GARLAND THE ANIMAL

ANISA GEORGE SAFIA ELHILLO

I told my daughter the story of how my friend i was a child greedy in my skin hungers my stomach died. Almost ten years ago now. How he fell off a churned by festival meat the lamb in the courtyard mountain in Hawaii. And though the story made with its necklace of rope gone & in place of a memory me cry she wanted to hear it again and again. pools of its blood in the dust where i played barefoot And again the next day. “Don’t worry mama,” she said. “He’ll just turn into soil and grow a new with the cousins wearing the small boys’ alallah friend.” This is what I told her when I put the for which i cried until mama habab sent for the tailor fl owers she loved so much into the compost crisp pinstriped jalabiya & its smart striped trouser bucket when they had wilted and dried and begun to i took great care to keep it pristine & cried on days rot. “Don’t cry sweetheart,” I said. “They’ll just turn into soil and become food for new roses.” it was taken from me to wash twisting on the line like my truer body now i am the farthest His name meant a wreath of fl owers. And though I wish that life for my daughter would be i’ve ever been & the fabric tears canopy of fi g trees an unbreakable halo of blossoms, arranged in place of mothers i face homeward & feel I tell her—There will never be another Garland. once again that i am longing for my uniform to return from the water that i am waiting for the animal i took care to name to wake & nuzzle its wet face into my hand Anisa George is the Founder and Artistic Director of George & Co. To date, she is the writer i wake on festival days & reach for something to wear and director of several plays, documentaries and short fi lms, including “Animal Animal Mammal Mine” (Philadelphia International Festival of Arts), “The Seer” (nominated for Best Ensemble at & fi nd only that bright chiff on that irritating clanking of bangles the Edinburgh Fringe), and “Holden.” i wake on festival days to the smells of charring animal & no one to accompany me to the prayer no one to look upon my naked feet no one to touch me at all

Safi a Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Katherine Bode-Lang Book Award, Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House 2021), and the novel in THE REFORMATION verse Home Is Not A Country (Make Me A World/Random House, 2021).

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR “. . . the speaker in these poems achieves her own form of grace, writing directly APR welcomes comments, criticism, and dialogue in of the female body and learning to trust response to work in the magazine. Authors of poems, her own instincts. She wrestles with self- essays, and other work will be given an opport unity to defi nition . . . revealing, for readers, one respond to letters scheduled for publication. woman’s path through contradiction and tradition.” Letters should be sent to: —Robin Becker Letters to the Editor The American Poetry Review 1906 Rittenhouse Square Available from APR’s online store Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 31 TWO POEMS

HE XIANG

Two Rolls Let them persuade each other. To do what you want to do, work both official and unofficial channels. The only way to ferry mementos The official word came down: fine. unnecessary for survival to a new place Unofficially this was what I would have done was to make like the farmer in that riddle, with his chicken, all along: slide the envelope fox, and sack of grain: trip after trip, mindful into my notebook, into my backpack, onto the plane of the logic things have, the fox eats the chicken under my seat, against the side eats the grain, the canoe not too steady. of a cabinet in my bedroom. Hint 1: remember always to bring I take them out sometimes and count the people. Didn’t you fear something back with you, for perishables that it would be a discontinuity? Didn’t you fear like photographs and diaries and letters should not that it would turn out not to be? I show it be left alone with an appetite like time’s. to nobody, that voracious amnesia about to unhinge time’s jaw. I began with baby pictures, a small me sitting in a metal crib pulling a hat off my head, a plastic roly-poly righting herself History Says (Hegemon Remix) before turning back to flesh, falling over. I. I wasn’t going to carry more, not that time, I hadn’t planned History is muttering in the background. Please if you are not speaking can for the envelope of contact sheets you put yourself on mute? The conference line echoes. This isn’t my usual I found, two rolls, developed scene. in a workroom and cut by hand.

II. The Square The students in May. in May. I nibbled around the edges of history in school. Mouse bites that were almost American history, a piece on the Revolutionary War here, a crumb People on on the Kennedy assassination there. Even less on what was not American Anticipation side streets in May. history. I was a straight-A student who did not know the dates for World in May. Wars, civil wars, War of the Roses, and if you keep asking I won’t have the names of the wars either. Banners Hope in Dread in in May. May. May. In college I took a bye for world history, as if without evidence I had already concluded with certainty that all tomorrows were games in which Fig. 1: Schematic of what I found and could not leave behind. I was assured of being on the winning side. History says, those who do not know me are doomed to repeat me. [Hegemon says, the victors repeating Seconds plucked from the ordinary-divergent and set down their victory is hardly doom, so who is your warning really for?] in two-inch squares whose existence tugged at the loose end of chaos as a doll-like toddler propped up against III. a cushion, not something to turn your back on. I felt guilty, I suppose. Was I doomed? I tried a different tack, hoping to Hint 2: learn how to make room. Imagine you make inroads with adjacencies like the history of science and political returned to shore to find the chicken pecking at gold shavings. economy, but my copy of A People’s History of the United States that I Eye the water line of the canoe. Make do. aspirationally acquired remained as pristine as my copy of Wheelock’s Latin What you cannot leave behind, you must carry. (same impulse). I suppose I want to handicap myself, so that there can be no My uncle who taught me the riddle said, mistake later. I’ve been thinking— Shouldn’t. IV. Don’t. A man once said to me, “You can’t underestimate the power of history.” Leave it. He was trying to explain to me the nature of European rivenness. He said Not worth it. something about language, culture, a litany of wars, but what I heard was, Maybe not: but my growing older was proof no bell is uncracked except one unseen, nor its loveliest tone unless heard enough that I had once been from a distance. But let’s not dwell on what he said or what I heard. small, I was possessed of past, of big eyes and wet hair and puckered lips. What need then for baby pictures? V. Having left means the calculation of what History says, I belong to my victors. History says, the losers are put was worth it had been run and the answer was leaving. on display for all to see. [But what do I hear? Hegemon says, don’t be Hint 3: argue for what you want. Then, because ridiculous. Hegemon says, they are merely incidental to the agreed upon it is your uncle, call your father. story of the victors.]

32 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Now I find that I must piece things together for myself. So let us work backwards. Become a Friend VI. Dear Reader, June was a subwoofer. We’re so grateful for the support that our readership has shown the magazine and all the poets we publish. We hope you will join us, May was a half game of Go hiding some way out only if you could see that now in our 48th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. ripples are the sleeper agents of waves forming hundreds of miles offshore. In 2019, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 127 writers, including John Murillo, Brenda Shaughnessy, Kelle April was the no-knead bread doubling in size every four hours airy with Groom, Charif Shanahan, TC Tolbert, and many others. We published warm festering and expectation. the 22nd volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series, Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, selected by Sharon Olds, and we awarded the 10th VII. Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Maggie Queeney. Quee- ney’s winning poem, “Glamour,” appears on the feature page of the A calamity. // History says, wasn’t it ever. September/October issue. We believe that our mission to reach a worldwide audience with A finale. // History says, I wouldn’t wait around for it. the best contemporary poetry and prose, and to provide authors, espe- cially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work, VIII. is as important today as it was when we began in 1972. The American Poetry Review remains a fully independent non-profit, but governmen- Hegemon says, the protection of power is the ability to never have to bother tal support for the arts is far less, across all media, than it was in the learning history. Hegemon says, memorize what you must for this test. I past. Your individual contributions are more vital than ever. promise you’ll never have to think about this shit again. Your donation pays poets. We believe that to have a thriv- ing poetry community, we must support writers. We are grateful for donations of any amount, and all our donors are acknowledged in the IX. magazine (unless you request anonymity). In thanks for your contribu- Thirty years make up a saeculum, or perhaps it is a hundred. But if all the tion, we are offering books by poets who have appeared on our cover living members of a group of people who survived a calamity have already recently: Soft Targets by Deborah Landau (Copper Canyon Press, paperback) and The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy (Pen- forgotten, live as if there weren’t anything they had to forget, then what the guin Random House, hardcover), or the 2019 APR/Honickman First Etruscans believed about the length of a saeculum isn’t really the point here. Book Prize Winner, Vantage by Taneum Bambrick (APR, paper- back). For a gift of $100, you receive one book, for $250, you receive These poems are part of a chapbook manuscript entitled Emperor Penguins on the Square, two, for $500, you receive all three. which reflects on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests on the occasion of its 30th anni- versary as well as He Xiang’s childhood in Beijing and China’s development in the sub- Your support makes APR possible. Our warmest thanks for your sequent three decades. consideration and generosity. Sincerely, Elizabeth Scanlon He Xiang lived in Beijing as a child. Other poems from this series have appeared in Prairie Editor Schooner, which awarded them the Strousse Poetry Award, and will be forthcoming in Benning- ton Review and Ploughshares.

Tyree Daye 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735 Yes, I would like to be a Friend of APR. River Hymns Enclosed is my donation of: ❏ $1,000 Benefactor (Select 3 books.) Please send me: ❏ Soft Targets ❏ River Hymns by Tyree Daye, $500 Patron (Select 3 books.) by Deborah Landau ❏ The Octopus Museum winner of the 2017 APR/ ❏ $250 Sponsor (Select 2 books.) by Brenda Shaughnessy ❏ Honickman First Book Prize, ❏ $100 Supporter (Select 1 book.) Vantage is available in APR’s online by Taneum Bambrick ❏ $ (other donation) ❏ Send no books. store at www.aprweb.org and at other outlets. River Hymns was Credit Card: ❏ VISA ❏ MasterCard chosen by guest judge Gabrielle ❏ American Express

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Tyree Daye is from Youngsville, North Signature Carolina. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Name Review and Ploughshares. He was awarded the Street Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award in the City State Zip Fall 2015 issue. He is a Cave Canem fellow. A copy of the official registration and financial information may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll free, within Pennsylvania, 1-800-732-0999. Registration does not imply endorsement.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 33 TWO POEMS

VERNITA HALL

Singularity Winter Melon Soup for Suhanni For the children of Noy S.H., 90

Even among stars she’s a dazzler The day you buried your mother I remembered this three-year-old, doe-eyed, brown dwarf Mrs. Noy’s winter melon soup each warm swallow Spunky as sparked hydrogen she orbits singing in the throat a small bird the kitchen in Black Panther pjs flew from China to dreams America whispered or revolves past, breezily ballooning The world at war Japanese bombs exploding her pink princess petticoat on her village the son, age four, she buried You remembered electrically, eclectically radiant she ran with baby sister on her back Mastered eyes two blazing sunspots sewing patchworked English fresh-off-the-boat the foreign words sparse in her mouth as a small bird’s erupting with mischief and mirth black hair a nebula of tangles teeth Grew three children and giant gourds inside her patch of city garden a Cantonese-American pot- combed into a constellation pourri Your mother unearthed a new culture You remembered of rainbowed-bead-bound braids the rites—bowed thrice, burned incense, Joss paper, preserved circling a dimpled sphere of face tradition But even in the afterlife I think she would forego glowering or aglow ghost money to put yin food in the mouths of her small birds petulant or persuasive Dumplings dim sum oolong tea She stirred She is diva-licious worlds together her winter flesh spiced from the loveliest broth so She is revolution long ladled the Tao as nectar to her hungry hummingbirds a seed-speck of dust The day you bury your mother you remember layered in light and shadow like a black pearl, light years ahead of us

She brings you one by one her galaxy Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its of dolls, inviting you into her world People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize for Poetry and of the Robert Creeley Prize from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians, The attraction is irresistible winner of the Moonstone (Press) Chapbook Contest. With fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Ucross, Hall holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College and serves The point is always her on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories. singularity her being celestial leaving you eternally star-struck as stars do

First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Alicia Jo Rabins Heather Tone Maria Hummel Divinity School Likenesses House and Fire 2015 Winner 2016 Winner 2013 Winner selected by selected by selected by C. D. Wright Nick Flynn Fanny Howe

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34 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW wrong side of Soviet authorities. At the age of five “WHERE POETRY Zabuzhko found herself being babysat by a KGB agent for hours while her parents were interrogated in the next room. Surviving such an education proved excellent preparation for the years ahead. COMES FROM” Zabuzhko published her first poem at age ten— two years later than her heroine, Lesia Ukrainka. However, because her parents had been black- The Phenomenon of Oksana Zabuzhko listed, she wasn’t permitted to release a book of poems until the start of so-called “perestroika” in 1985. This period of “reconstruction,” dur- ASKOLD MELNYCZUK ing which Moscow loosened its stranglehold on its constituent republics, and which ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, led to a literary renaissance: “In the decade since Gorbachev’s per- This is what power really is: the privilege of herself was the daughter of a progressive father estroika, the new Ukrainian literature has enjoyed ignoring anything you might find distasteful. and a feminist, writer-publisher mother whom I an atmosphere of freedom it hasn’t known for cen- —Oksana Zabuzhko think of as Ukraine’s version of Mary Wollstone- turies,” wrote the literary critic, the late Solo- craft and William Godwin. Lesia Ukrainka wrote mea Pavlychko, adding: “Many writers, however, “Language, any language,” observed the young her first poem, “Hope,” at the age of eight in experienced that freedom well before the coun- poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my response to her aunt’s arrest for protesting against try declared independence in 1991. Indeed, it was life” because “nothing else has the power to syn- the tsar. Ukrainka, who had a working knowl- largely the inner freedom felt by writers and the thesize music and myth, two things without which edge of ten languages, also drew on Greek and intelligentsia that led to independence.” Writ- the world would be a totally unlivable place.” It’s Latin classics and leaned on the Bible for plots. ers have long played an outsized role in the evolu- a credo to which Zabuzhko has remained faithful I have permitted myself this long aside because tion of Ukrainian culture. The nineteenth century across time, even as the young poet evolved into the fact that Ukrainka’s name will mean less than poet Taras Shevchenko, born a serf, still enjoys the the mature fiction writer, polemicist, and activist nothing to anglophone readers summarizes Zabu- kind of iconic status which, these days, we reserve who is without doubt the most influential literary zhko’s dilemma. for religious figures, sports heroes, or celebrities: figure in Ukraine in the last half century. In an essay published in Agni in 2016, Zabu- statues of him cast their shadows in practically “You’re not really a woman,” reads the epi- zhko observes: every square in the country. graph to Zabuzhko’s Clytemnestra, immediately When asked, in filling out an author’s questionnaire, to I met Oksana Zabuzhko in 1990, at a poetry underscoring three central aspects of the poet’s name which works in my genre I admire and regard as conference in Kyiv a year before Ukraine declared work. First, she’s an inheritor of the Western lit- my predecessors, I choose to limit myself to The Man independence. It was an exhilarating period. erary tradition, grounding many of her poems Without Qualities, The Alexandria Quartet, Every city through which I passed was erupting in classic texts she then transforms into counter- and Life And Fate, but I have to skip the Ukrainian in demonstrations. The assemblies, known locally narratives. Here Clytemnestra and Ophelia finally tetralogy Richynsky Sisters by Iryna Wilde (1907– as “manifestations,” reflected the people’s desire speak for themselves. Elsewhere, she lets us know 1982) from which I first learned how major histori- to control their own destinies. I recall standing on she’s read the same fairy tales, studied the same cal events could be depicted from a woman’s standpoint. the stairs leading up to Lviv’s Opera House early Hebrew origin stories, the same Greek myths My Ukrainian literary mothers aren’t included in inter- one afternoon, preparing to go in for a tour, when and Roman history, along with the British clas- national reference books, and there’s no point in trying I heard the sounds of distant chanting. Turning sics, as have her counterparts around the world. to explain yourself by means of another unknown . . . around, I watched as tens of thousands of protes- Moreover, she’s translated not only Sylvia Plath Later, reading an enthusiastic review of my novel by an tors poured into the square in front of the Opera and Derek Walcott but also the poems of contem- American critic, I couldn’t help but shudder at a sentence House. This was Tiananmen or Tahrir Square, but poraries such as Marie Howe and Lucie Brock- intended as praise: “This is especially impressive because with a happier ending. Broido into her native Ukrainian. as far as my ignorant mind was concerned, it came out The following year I invited Zabuzhko to take Then there’s the epigraph’s implicit femi- of nowhere” (http://languagehat.com/the-bookshelf- part in a conference on “Poetry and Opposition.” nist subtext: Clytemnestra is indeed a woman— the-museum-of-abandoned-secrets/). That’s precisely The event brought together an international Helen of Troy’s sister, in fact—and she’s primed the moment when you feel you’re talking to the smiling cast of writers, including Derek Walcott, Amiri for battle. Initially it appears she might reject con- spectators from behind a glass wall. Baraka, Marjorie Agosín, Dennis Brutus, Rob- ventional male nostrums while heralding a much- ert Pinsky, Victor Montejo, Lena Jayyusi, Bohdan needed assault on the old order. Blade in hand, While a similar observation could be made by Rubchak, Sam Cornish, Sven Birkerts, William awaiting her husband Agamemnon as he climbs many writers from beyond the pale of the tra- Corbett, Martín Espada, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Fred the stairs, Clytemnestra imagines a different role ditional Western canon, each story has its own Marchant and Charles Simic. Zabuzhko subse- for herself: “It would be a hundred times bet- intriguing contours. In the case of Ukraine, the quently returned to the US several times as a Ful- ter to run off with some pilgrims,/Say, to Del- glass wall has lately cracked, though not in a way bright Scholar and a writer-in-residence. phi, and become a priestess.” But it’s too late for that could possibly please Zabuzhko or do much Zabuzhko reshaped the literary landscape in that. Preparing to murder her husband, she justi- to enlighten her once and future readers. A well- Ukraine with the publication of her short “Amer- fies her choice: “With a single lordly gesture . . ./ known writer said to me recently: “I’ve heard a lot ican” novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996). The I’ll outdo everything you have accomplished,/ I’ll about Ukrainian corruption. What about Ukrai- book’s complex prose style—sinuous Jamesian establish a new kingdom.” The promised world nian culture?” sentences scoring an intensity Plath would have never arises. It remains stillborn, a kingdom of z seconded—with its blunt yet sophisticated sensu- statues, more monuments in civilization’s grave- ality, its assertively feminist slant, and a ferreting yard. Means and ends are inseparable. “All wars,” Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Lutsk, a intelligence, remained a best-seller in Ukraine for noted Ford Madox Ford, “are sexual wars.” town whose origins date back to the 7th century. It over a decade and has been translated into sixteen The third note in the chord lies in the foot- has ties to the Rurik dynasty—one of Europe’s old- languages. Its subject is the trauma inflicted by note to the epigraph. The line is a quote from one est royal houses which endured in the region for totalitarian systems as it manifests in an intimate of Ukraine’s most important writers—the play- more than 700 years. Such deep history is impor- relationship. As the narrator is an intellectual, she wright, poet, and novelist Larissa Kosach, who tant in understanding the role pride of place plays in allows herself to speculate on the nature of that wrote under the pen name Lesia Ukrainka. No Zabuzhko’s work. Her poetry, scholarship, essays, trauma. A chapter from the book, translated by one chooses their biological parents; writers, how- and fiction reflect a writer determined to view her Halyna Hryn, was published in Agni in 2001. The ever, get to select their literary forebearers. Zabu- subjects in their historical contexts. Because of the entire novel, in Hryn’s pitch-perfect rendition, zhko has published a scholarly study of Ukrainka, way history was rewritten in the Soviet era, this finally appeared in 2011. In the last pages its her- and has edited three volumes of her collected let- has involved considerable archival excavation and oine, who has managed to stave off the impulse ters. Ukrainka is as important to Ukrainian lit- led to unsettling discoveries for which Zabuzhko to suicide, imagines herself making an announce- erature as Emily Dickinson is to us or George was better prepared than some of her peers. ment on the flight from the US back to Kyiv: Eliot to the British. A prolific writer, she was also During the purges of the seventies, Zabuzhko’s a political activist, a feminist at a time when the parents, both trained philologists, may have been “Ladies and gentlemen, we have created a wonderful commitment carried consequences. Moreover, she on the right side of history but they were on the world, and please accept on this occasion, sincere greet-

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 35 ings from US Air, and from CNN, and from the CIA, and the Uruguay drug cartel, crowded the city. President Yanukovych and his entourage were ultimately and the Romanian Securitate, and from the Central Committee of the Communist forced to flee to Russia. Party of China, and from the millions of killers in all the prisons of the world as well The People’s Rebellion succeeded in a way similar protests throughout as the tens of millions still at large, and from the five thousand Sarajevo children born the Middle East had not. Zabuzhko herself was a regular on the front lines of rape, who will, after all, grow up some day, and—onward and upward, brave new and in the five years since has played an active role in shoring up the free- world, and that actually is all I wanted to say, thank you for your attention, ladies doms for which over a hundred men and women gave their lives. Soon after and gentlemen, have a good flight.” the protests ended, Russia annexed Crimea and began a war on Ukraine’s eastern border which has thus far left some 14,000 people dead and nearly a Then, in 2009, Zabuzhko published an even more remarkable and ambi- million displaced. tious novel, this time impressively translated by Nina Shevchuk Murray. The Museum of Abandoned Secrets leads readers back through the labyrinth of the z last century’s extreme political and personal dramas, from today’s post-9/11 landscape to the Second World War. While the action in the novel takes The glass wall Zabuzhko confronted, while cracked, stands even today. place in Ukraine, its subject is global and its insights universal. Reading The situation recently prompted the Soviet-born British journalist Peter Zabuzhko on what took place in the US after September 11, one wonders Pomerantsev to observe in the New York Review of Books Daily that neither how a “stranger” can know so much about us, and can understand so clearly the London Review of Books nor the New York Review of Books has ever taken what has happened to our shrapneled democracy: “(A)ll talk about liberal notice of Ukrainian writers, despite numerous opportunities over the years. democracy, or the Party’s dictatorship, or whatever—it’s all crap, forget it. Like most walls, this one is built of ignorance and nurtured by propa- The politics of today is an amalgamation of the experience of twentieth ganda. A better-informed left-leaning intellectual community in the US century superpowers and the experience of the marketplace, of advertising. might have been expected to support an indigenous people’s efforts to pre- An amazingly powerful combination, if you know how to use it.” serve their culture and language. Instead, they took as fact versions of cul- Zabuzhko the novelist is an acute and unsparing chronicler of the mate- tural history chronicled by Russian-speaking emigres, whether the emigres rial world. Here’s how she describes one of the dubious characters who pop- themselves were from Ukraine or Russia. This ignorance often manifested ulate this richly peopled book: “He is capacious and amiable like a shaved, as scorn. Any number of writers I know referred to Ukraine having only whiskerless walrus, and his breathing is a bit heavy and irregular, as hap- a “peasant culture”—as though that in itself was somehow shameful. Or pens to well-nourished men past their prime: an early shortness of breath accurate. The notion of Ukraine possessing a contiguous yet distinct litera- that, if you’re not used to it, might be taken for erotic arousal.” And yet ture and history undermined the carefully cultivated image of a monolithic she does more than pin her subjects to their bodies: she also endows them Russian culture as representative of the variety and interests of the citizens with minds. of the Soviet Union. That was never the case and all the republics paid a In one of the book’s most illuminating passages, Daryna, the main char- heavy price for their “solidarity” with Moscow. As historian Serhii Plokhy acter, meets with a former historian now a newly minted oligarch named points out: “Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building proj- Vadym. Sitting in a restaurant Vadym owns, the pair engage in the kind ect has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not of wide-ranging conversation readers expect from Eastern European writ- divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the ers—and of a sort that’s generally frowned on by Western critics, with their Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground stifling, self-righteous fetishization of the quotidian—as though that were for this model outside the Russian Federation.” not the stuffing and filler of most Western fiction over the last century, as z though an engagement with the realm of ideas were somehow an insult to the inescapable mundane, rather than a complementary and necessary “Oh my sick, shaven-headed century,” Zabuzhko addresses the 20th cen- reflection of a common human impulse, our capacity for speculating about tury on the cusp—and the image feels shudderingly comprehensive. Her ideas, of abstracting from immediate experience, of dreaming in words. poems register everything from landmark moments in the writer’s personal (Isn’t that what abstraction is? Language dreaming . . .) The pair’s sprawl- life to speculations on faith to the public trauma of Chernobyl: ing conversation ranges from a discussion of ice cream to imported GMO Oh yes, the neighbor’s daughter potatoes injected with scorpion genes to realpolitik. At one point, Vadym Gave birth—a boy, a bit overdue. He had hair and teeth observes that “you can’t draw a boundary anymore between what you call Already, and could be a mutant reality and what’s been manufactured . . . r ealities that have been manufac- Because yesterday, only nine days old, he shouted, tured by people. . . .” Here Vadym echoes Donald Rumsfeld’s much quoted ‘Turn off the sky!’ He hasn’t said a word since. Otherwise, he’s healthy. remark: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own real- ity. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— In “The Conductor of the Last Candle,” the speaker imagines herself we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and attending a symphony in which she alone witnesses a conductor leading an that’s how things will sort out.” Pointing out one difference between the orchestra composed of lit candles: “No one sees them but me, / These flames US and Russia, Vadym observes: “The White House announced that Iraq the candelabra are loaded with like guns with bullets.” She plays the conceit had weapons of mass destruction—and everyone believed it. And never to its end. It’s like a conversation the soul—or, consciousness—might have mind that they still haven’t found those weapons—and, most likely, won’t. with itself, on emerging from Plato’s cave long enough to recognize the They’ll be morons, of course, if they don’t; if it were the Russians, they paradox of consciousness itself. would have planted some right away, and then no one would ever dig up The very word “Ukraine,” often translated as “borderland,” has in the what actually happened. There you have your reality. . . .” past generated considerable controversy. Can a nation that describes itself as a borderland really be a country? (But what to make of the Netherlands, which has recently scotched “Holland” from its self-identification?) In “A z Definition of Poetry” the poet imagines her own death: “I know I will die a difficult death/ Like anyone who loves the precise music of her own In the fall of 2013 I began receiving emails from Oksana warning me things body.” As her soul leaves her body, the writer in her refuses to miss this rare were heating up in Ukraine. Its president, Viktor Yanukovych, had decided opportunity: not to sign an association agreement with the European Union and was on “Stop!” it screams, escaping, the verge of formalizing closer ties with Russia. Oksana said the threat of On the dazzling borderline civil strife was real. She also mentioned that Russia had managed to influ- Between two worlds— ence a number of politicians across Europe and was extending its influ- ‘Stop, wait. ence into the US. This was the first I’d heard of what’s come to be known My God, at last. as the “hybrid war”—in which propaganda plays a more important part Look, here’s where poetry comes from!’ than conventional weapons. I was at the time preoccupied with recording the damage my own country was inflicting on the Middle East. I’d traveled Fingers twitching for the ballpoint, to Lebanon and Syria a few years before and had seen some of the damage Growing cold, becoming not mine. inflicted by our interventions on the region’s citizens, interventions which The liminal, ill-defined spaces, the amorphous regions are precisely the have led to the refugee crises presently overwhelming parts of southern territory where imagination flourishes. They give us room in which to Europe even while we behave as if the tragedy, affecting millions and sure shape and create ourselves as fully as our inner resources allow. to be felt for generations, has nothing to do with us. At first I dismissed her anxieties, but as the crowds in Kyiv’s Indepen- dence Square (which became known as EuroMaidan on Twitter) swelled, and the administration turned to violence to contain the protestors, the sit- Askold Melnyczuk has published ten books, including four novels. He is the founding editor of uation became impossible to ignore. Eventually nearly a million citizens Agni and Arrowsmith Press.

36 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW TWO POEMS

ALAN MICHAEL PARKER

The Trees of Kraków Breakfast I was naked in bed, where I panic less, It’s not just sentimental, no, no, no . . . reading, and wanting to go somewhere fun —Otis Redding next summer, because fun will help us age. Once there was a blueberry Let us go to Kraków together, in a bowl of granola. since I know a little Polish, The bowl was Melamine, the table was wood, I know the word “cupcake” in Polish is babeczka— the kitchen was linoleum and metal and wood, and the house was brick and cedar and aluminum and wood, babeczka, I say to my little toe. and the roofing material in the shingles In Kraków, I read, “The City Council has proposed was fire-rated Class A, don’t worry. a ‘renewal’ of the trees surrounding the Błonia There were trees: hawthorns and one river birch. by removing all of them at once.” There were azaleas and a Lindley’s Butterfly Bush. What will become of the sparrows of Kraków? The sky was 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, The sparrows stumble about the Błonia with a trace of argon gas and ice in crystals. Space was an almost perfect vacuum, as the accountants of Kraków with a few hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. pedal furiously to the mortuary, elbows wide. The alphabetical schoolgirls of Kraków Maybe the blueberry and one hydrogen atom were cousins, cosmically and/or metaphysically. line up to visit the next monument, The spoon that held up the blueberry and the Vistula River changes its mind again. was aluminum, the shine a little worn, The traffic cops of Kraków wave on, wave on. and the blueberry was violet in a gradient, Love, lie next to me, I am sorry I am so a tad puckered, still with a bit of stem. cuckoo with the clock. Let us plan a trip Today, class, we will all be astronauts. to Kraków, before the City Council kills us all. We’ll begin with breakfast, and then Love, in the oven we’ll search the universe for tenderness. of my chest, I have baked a cupcake, babeczka, take a bite. Alan Michael Parker is the author of nine collections of poetry, including The Age of Discovery, just out from Tupelo Press, and four novels. He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, three Randall Jarrell Poetry Awards, the Fineline Prize, the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, and the North Carolina Book Award. He holds the Houchens Chair in English at Davidson College. -

First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Ed Pavlic´ Tomás Q. Morín Laura McKee Paraph of Bone A Larger Uttermost & Other Kinds Country Paradise Place of Blue 2009 Winner 2012 Winner selected by selected by 2001 Winner Claudia Keelan Tom Sleigh selected by Adrienne Rich

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 37 iron taste in your mouth from how TWO POEMS your heart pounds. There is a thrill in the fear of tripping at this speed, of grass becoming sidewalk, of coming up bloodied. You don’t have to be good at this, ALICIA MOUNTAIN at anything. You have to run headlong into this life, pumping, hair wild, sweat wild, emptying your pockets as you go.

Entreaty Now Rewinding the Lesbian Sex Scene after Joanna Klink, for Mary Oliver on a Flight from Denver There were years I feigned sleep to close the eyes of desire. Go out barefoot to the car for what you left, Years I tried to see truth only in periphery, for what you didn’t have enough years I tried to look anywhere else. hands to hold. Go out as a soft offering for gravel. The entangled couple beside me, As a practice swing at walking their sock feet, farther and farther from the comforter, the cloud from the sighing waiting body caught in their small view you hold when you want to, of the open sky from the steady windowpane shadow wisping itself apart. cast by a night so bright There were years I stayed a satellite far above the earth. even minor constellations get to speak light. They are furnace-ready pilot lights I am still looking over my shoulder when the rest of the power’s gone out. for whoever whispered my shame to me. They are all the failed matches I am watching them walk down the aisle, that couldn’t get the cigarette lit, I am trying to keep my elbows and knees a persistent sign to go back inside of your life. out of their way. To make each night a ripe stone fruit. I am reclining my seat every inch To split and pull the pit from it. of unconfinement To bite the flesh of rest and let it drip. it will yield. And when you have made a mess of yourself, to know there were rows of orchard Which is not much. planted in you before any other knowing. So I am held close to this reflection. We are daylight animals. Spit slick lips and We still confuse the porch light hands in hair and with something that could burn us. reaching inside and what I know well— How much is enough quiet for you, head out of the frame. a bucket of quiet a highway a tundra. My gaze held unbroken, The brownstone block and its bus line. by their bodies. And its cloistered cement backyards, the pace at which gentle weeds grow them green. Who said you can’t drag your finger back across the screen of what you want? Weeks of absence loud with countdown. Who said you can’t do it over again? And again? Was the daytime grocery quiet enough, Who said you can’t ask for more? linoleum enough? Was the exam room Who guilted my fingerprints into anything but a caress a little chilly when the nurse left you smudged across our surface? alone with yourself? How often you awaken screens at a phantom sound of love. Whoever you are—whoever you were—look over my shoulder. The refrigerator breathing to you in the night. Watch me fall in love, seeing myself. Our blueprint plans are drawn and unbuilt and soundless. In economy, in the thin air, And what are we to do? seatbelt at my waist Here, a life— like I am something a sudden and short rain. Too quiet to protect for this duration, and you won’t be certain it was real. like her hands on my hips, pulling. Let go of the compass. It never had answers. Let the paper drop to your feet. Go now. Alicia Mountain is a lesbian poet and scholar based in New York. Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is the 2020–2021 Artist in Run downhill toward the creek, Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. run toward the thing that you think will mean a happiness without hesitation. Feel the swift force of your own mass behind decision. And legs churning, tall grasses stinging against skin,

38 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE

For over two decades, this prize has been jump-starting the careers of someofAmerica’s most vital poets. Are you next? This year’s guest judge: Ada Limón Submissions open now through October 31st.

PRIZE INCLUDES: The winning author and all other entrants will be · An award of $3,000 notifi ed in January 2021. An announcement of the · Publication of a volume of poetry winner will appear in the March/April 2021 issue of The American Poetry Review. For complete Distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium guidelines, visit www.aprweb.org or send a self- Open to all U.S. poets addressed, stamped envelope to: Book publication in 2021 Now Accepting Submissions Online at www.aprweb.org APR/Honickman First Book Prize The American Poetry Review Entry fee $25. Manuscripts, following guidelines format, must 1906 Rittenhouse Square be postmarked or submitted online by October 31, 2020. Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 39 A PERSONAL HISTORY OF BREATHING

JOY PRIEST

We woke to life in the 80s. The air dying freaked to extend time. & some of us from industry & industry dying. Train brakes went off to college with polluted memories. groaning to a stop & that singular scent & some of us ended up at the school clinic of horses, their muscular lather & manure with anxiety & traumatic stress, acid refl ux moving down river to Mississippi. Our grandfathers & lactose intolerance, the nurses said was genetic,

chain-smoked Viceroys in the house we didn’t have the phrase environmental racism & we developed asthma before vocabulary, yet. & sometimes we just forgot to breathe read books & held our breath, spelled or realized we’d been holding our breath. but didn’t speak. In our bodies, humidity thickened We tried kombucha & herbal teas, yoga & meditation, into an argument with speech. When we joined signed up for classes with suburban moms

our fathers’ households they trashed our plastic bags on Xanax & Ambien & we acted brand new. packed tight with medicine bottles & inhalers Until a man hawking cigarettes, second shift curated over the years by our mothers, who smothered us side-hustling like our fathers, stopped breathing our fathers said, mumbling something under their breath on a sidewalk. A man who talked to plants about being a man. We were daughters. We were Black like our fathers stopped breathing

& so, sons too. They vowed to make us stronger, in this state-sanctioned chokehold. & we found ourselves big-lunged, lit our cigarettes, handed us grip-pleated pacing the brainyard on a cocaine fl ight paper bags in place of pills. In the 90s springtime, unable to locate our lungs, left arms going numb we suff ered through neon particles of pollen saying, this is it this is it suctioned fi lm-like to all blooming surfaces, with our heartbeats running out,

innocuous in natural purpose, but perverted leaping & whinnying & lying down long-nosed by a chemical monopoly modifying plant sex in the grass, huffi ng, panting out. The train & the work of bees—we became allergic to apples of our childhood chugging backward because we were allergic to apple trees. At the plant to a slow stop in our minds, come to take us our fathers were talking their coworkers out of the ku klux klan to the afterlife. Its ghostly porters,

while we hooped on our still-segregated basketball teams, mask-less, fi nally, leaning over us outgrowing childhood over an iron-rimmed summer with our father’s faces, reaching toward us at parks oxidized to rust. At 14 we went to work with a bag to breathe into. The trail at drive-thru windows, fried batter air settling of white buttons down their uniforms in our hair. Black n Mild smoke breaks like a blinding current peeking through.

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She has received support from The Frost Place, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a 2019–2020 Fellow in Poetry.

This poem is the winner of the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, an award established by APR to honor the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.

40 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW