founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

December 2012

q & a

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cci • number 3 CONTENTS

December 2012

POEMS lucie brock-broido 311 Father, in Drawer Extreme Wisteria mary karr 320 A Perfect Mess The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives The Obscenity Prayer Loony Bin Basketball richard kenney 330 March Anaerobe Words Are the Sum marilyn chin 340 From “Beautiful Boyfriend” david harsent 346 Three Poems after Yannis Ritsos tom sleigh 352 The Advance atsuro riley 358 Striplings sharon dolin 362 Three Poems from “A Manual for Living” eliza griswold 370 Ovid on Climate Change Ruins Libyan Proverbs dana levin 378 At the End of My Hours michael lista 387 Fowl Today’s Special Parkdale, then Princess Street The Scarborough Grace letters to the editor 394 contributors 398 back page 411 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by art chantry “postmodern pegasus,” 2012

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Poetry • December 2012 • Volume 201 • Number 3

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Father, in Drawer

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him. With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it. Also directives from our dna. The nature of his wound was the clock-cicada winding down. He wound down. July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes Of cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell. Barges of coal bloomed in heat. It was when the catfish were the only fish left living In the Monongahela River. Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in By the slink from the strap Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin. The nature of his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast. In the old city of Brod, most of the few Jews left Living may have been still at supper while he died. That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle Tinsel color, washing To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west, Ohio-bound. This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

lucie brock-broido 311 Extreme Wisteria

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangea Of her crushed each year a little more into the attar of herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of such. Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

312O POETRY Both of your poems recall Emily Dickinson’s #772, which features a dead lady’s drawer and also rose attar (essential oil) as the “gift of Screws.” Would you agree that Dickinson’s poem plays a role in your own work here?

Dickinson’s poems still hold for me their mysteries. Her letters are another story. I’m in cahoots with those. But I have been in Widerruf with Dickinson for decades. This is not a term that exists in any known literary theory, save one mention of this phenomenon in an introduction to Paul Celan’s Last Poems:

Celan was the skilled practitioner of the art of the Widerruf, the refutation of a given poem (often Rilke’s) by one of his own. The late poems begin to dismantle even that scaffolding ... By forcing the flood of colors, images ... through a series of nar- rowing locks, [he] creates a parallel universe of language ... in which a stylistic devolution “creates out of its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

That is to say, I think we’re all in conversation on the page with that which came before us, or even during us. We inherit whatever canon we’re in the midst of, a great collective influenza. In the very poem of Dickinson’s you mention, “Essential oils — are wrung — / The Attar from the Rose,” there is some fair- ly clear evidence that she herself was in Widerruf with a particular Shakespearean sonnet. After summer’s “distillation,” he writes, a flower is extracted into “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass.” An attar in a vial, concise. I had to do some research to come up with that — for instance, Vendler’s Dickinson. As for your inquiry regarding the “lady’s drawer,” I confess I was hoping it may have been an orchid, akin, let’s say, to a lady’s slipper. So I set myself online. I came up only with steamer-trunks full of details about lingerie. What I mean to say is that, in my own work, often, I may have been with Dickinson, but she was not with me.

lucie brock-broido 313 “Father, in Drawer” comes across as both stoic and emotional, a really exquisite balance for an elegy to achieve. From your perspective, which particular elements of the poem help it to walk this line?

I don’t have a stoic bone in my body. Would that I could conjure even a feigned indifference to — anything. To the contrary, I am different to everything. In real life, emotion is easy; holding back is tough. On the page though, it’s the opposite: that’s what I strive for — the chill (of course), the stupor (a necessity), but never quite the letting go. A backdrop for “Father, in Drawer”: My father, David Broido, was forty-four years old when, in Philadelphia, he died on the morn- ing of the Fourth of July, 1968. He was alone. By noon of the fifth of July, I was in the middle of writing a love letter to him. Strange how someone is always alive until you know otherwise. I had no idea what we were in for. That letter that I posted — wound up: where? Later that afternoon, my sister and I were told that he was gone. We were inconsolable. I think poetry is a cold art with a big heart of all heat. Almost half a century later, the willful “affect” of that colder self, on the page, pre- vails. I wrote the poem, intentionally, with sharp edges and all hope of innocence in ruins. My father’s father died at the age of thirty- nine, also on the Fourth of July (already a loaded day to us), also of a massive cardiac event with no warning. The poem is, in part, about the mandates of a destiny. Turning, as I am wont to do, for a moment, to the untimely de- mise of Michael Jackson — when his brother Jermaine (who had announced that death) was asked how he could accept such a loss, he said he did not know. I believe he said five words: It is what it is. Every time I hear a person say this phrase (especially if they mean it), I’m stunned anew. For me, I don’t think I’ve ever simply accepted that anything — is what it is. I’ve no such calm to speak of.

There are some intriguing place-names in this poem. Could you say some- thing about the Monongahela River, and also Brod?

314O POETRY There are many small villages in eastern Poland called “Brod,” thus (perhaps) the name Broido. My family came also from Russia, Lithuania, so it may have been something like Broydovsky. My father was brought back to Pittsburgh to be buried; it’s where we grew up. Two rivers — the Monongahela and the Allegheny meet there to form the Ohio. This is the city of Jack Gilbert’s “Refusing Heaven,” where he writes of the ninety-two bridges that crossed his youth. The stepmother in the poem was my father’s second wife. She was slinky, unnerving, and divine: our own private Elizabeth Taylor on our own hot tin roof. Family lore has it that my father taught Miss Taylor (the real one) how to water-ski. On the Monongahela River.

The poem is heavily populated by fsh! But the daughters, with their de- scending “tinsel” scales, fnally seem more defnitively fshlike — and in some ways, more transformed — than the deceased father. Could you say something about this?

Our father, on that one day when his life ended, had no chance left for transformation. Then we were the only ones left for that. When you’re that young, and you experience your first death, the world — which was massively colorful — goes black and white. In the poem, the two daughters become selkie-like — they must shed their skin to become human, to live on land. That’s why, near the close of the poem, the sisters begin to lose their rainbowed mermaid scales, which, in turn, wash into the ever-yellowing confluence of the two rivers (Ohio-bound); real life sets in. Back then in Pittsburgh, the rivers weren’t toxic yet, and we were taught to swim and fish there. There were mooneyes and ghost shin- ers, but I was fixed only on the catfish — it had whiskers and a tail.

“Extreme Wisteria” contains “extreme” hyacinth as well as wisteria. Are extreme flowers like extreme sports — i.e., are they dangerous?

Flowers do not tend to be dangerous. Poems, in my opinion, always are.

lucie brock-broido 315 Wisteria is, first: a hardy, deciduous, capable-of-earnest-grasping shrub which bears small flowers. After that, it can be pressed (violently if you will) into an attar of its former self. In this poem, wisteria is also a state (of mind), the place one heads toward when feeling wistful. There are other states — such as “Irrinois” — that district somewhere between Annoy and Irritate. Or the state the poet Liam Rector dreamed up, called “Sentimentia,” the place where sentimen- tality bleeds into dementia, and the result is extreme truth on the page. Attar of hyacinth is the scent I’ve worn all of my adult life, the only scent in fact. (I eschew change.) So consummate is this pressed oil, though, that on more than one occasion, I’ve been told of the lin- gering presence of my absence in rooms I’ve been in. The man who runs the elevator in the building where I live once told me that, were I to commit a crime, I would be apprehended instantly. Hours after I am gone, he told me, the evidence of hyacinth goes up and down with the elevator all night long. Are extreme flowers like extreme sports? What I know of extreme sports: my favorite is called “Extreme Ironing.” You think I’m mak- ing this up. Participants take baskets of heavily wrinkled clothes, their boards, their irons (electricity, not portable, seems to get there once you do). The sport is played in radical settings; at the edges of cliffs, or hanging from high bridges. The athletes are called “Ironists.” I am one of those.

Both of these poems, but particularly “Extreme Wisteria,” use the sentence fragment to signifcant grammatical and poetic effect. Could you say more about this choice?

On fragmenting: I’m in love with the idea that a poem should always try to be smaller than itself. The white space should be as detailed and passionate as that which is said aloud. A beautiful assertion from Brodsky: “The more invisible some- thing is / the more certain it’s been around.”

316O POETRY We’re very interested in the “Abandonarium” (and its attendant capital- ization)! What is it?

This would be the place you go (or where they put you) when you’ve been — abandoned: jilted, left, forsook. The “green rooms” are where you wait before your vitals are assessed — much like the back- stage antechambers where they put you before a performance, where you sip bottled water, or if you’re nervous you take tiny Ativans, re- fluff your hair. There could be other “asylums.” The “Sanctimonium” — the room you’re carted off to when you’ve been unbearably self-righteous. The “Pandamonium” — where you mingle with mortally adorable Asian bears. Or there is Franz Wright’s brilliant enclosure: the nicatorium, that Lucite booth in Midwestern airports, almost now extinct, where smokers are condemned to breathe amid each other’s fumes between connecting flights.

The poem describes a vivid personality or archetype but is careful not to give us too much identifying information. Was the poem inspired by a particular person? Why does the poem omit this information, if indeed it does?

The third person speaker of “Extreme Wisteria” is a biographer, in- deed, an autobiographer, who annotates the account of the history of a life — a life of my own, in fact. On the page, I am more than accustomed to being misconstrued as a thirteenth-century monk lucubrating in his dark anchorage. Or a pre- lingual child singing from the bottom of a well where she fell in Midland, Texas circa the “Me Decade.” All that is my own fault. I brought me up as a ventriloquist, and in my early twenties I swore to god (in an extreme anti-Plath moment of my life; I have since come back to the fold) I would never stoop to speak in my own voice on the page. I’m done with all that now. No matter what mask, it is I (it is I, not the wind) who speaks. I prefer to be legible. It’s time to get simple here. Though I am wildly capable of certain linguistic fabrications,

lucie brock-broido 317 I am in it for the truth. ok: a truth. I am no longer interested in the hokum-pokum of the dramatic monologue. In “Extreme Wisteria,” there is no detail that does not contain some hank of truth. It is I who has a one-horse open sleigh in my living room. It is I who fancied myself Cleopatra for a spell at the age of five, especially at Halloween. It was those gold sandals I longed for, the one-shouldered white drape of a sheet. There is one affixed irrevocable truth at the center of the poem, and that is the declaration that Brock-Broido’s “single subject is the idea that every single thing she loves will (perhaps tomorrow) die.” That’s a riff on what the poet Peter Davison once wrote in a review of my work. I don’t think that review was much of a rave, but — so fully-fathomed did I feel, I wrote him a fan letter. His crystal sum- mary was exact, concise, and I thanked him for his “surgery.” I will admit to two fabrications in the stockpile of objective cor- relatives in this single poem. One: on scarlet fever: if I were a more reliable autobiographer, a more open book, I would have said strep throat, or even the mumps. But the poem didn’t have any sonic room for “mumps.” Two: I’ve never lived with a lemur. I just liked the sense of the ridiculous of that. If I’ve obfuscated the “vivid personality or the archetype” first, I wanted to rough me up — I always do. A great percentage of my tenderness occurs in real life, not on the page. But I do have some re- gret about the perceived extravagances of my Supposed Persons. As Dickinson wrote in an early letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.” I never mean to be opaque. I say: take me at my word. No one believes me. I know my work can be quirky, but in my mind’s eye I am almost transparent — nearly naked! — exposed to the point that I could be taken as just a player in the most extreme sport, called the Running of the Nudes. On the speaker: as Miss Earnshaw said with her passion and its violence: I am Heathcliff. Ambrose Bierce, in a sharp-tongued review, wrote that Oscar

318O POETRY Wilde was a “gawky gowk” who “wanders about, posing as a statue of himself.” I’ll be taking that one to heart as well.

lucie brock-broido 319 mary karr

A Perfect Mess

For David Freedman

I read somewhere that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible, the whole city would stop, it would stop. Cars would back up to Rhode Island, an epic gridlock not even a cat could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved the unprecedented gall of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm. They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical as any day laborers. They knew what was coming, the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant it burst. A downpour like a fire hose. For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled, paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato. And it was my pleasure to witness a not insignificant miracle: in one instant every black umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera, the sails of some vast armada. And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress to accompany the piano movers. each holding what might have once been lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled under the corner awning, in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette around. The city feeds on beauty, starves

320O POETRY for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight, to my deserted block with its famously high subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon opened its mouth to drink from on high ...

mary karr 321 The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives

Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote all last night’s infomercials — an anorectic son who bought with Daddy’s Amex black card the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer, plus a steak knife that doth slice the inner skin of his starving arms. Poor broken child of Eve myself, to me, the flightless fly, the listing, blistered, scalded. I am the rod to their lightning. Mine is the earhole their stories pierce. At my altar the blouse is torn open and the buttons sailed across the incensed air space of the nave, that I may witness the mastectomy scars crisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers. To me, the mother carries the ash contents of the long-ago incinerated girl. She begs me for comfort since my own son was worse tortured. Justice, they wail for — mercy? Each prostrate body I hold my arms out for is a cross my son is nailed to.

322O POETRY The Obscenity Prayer

Our falter, whose art is Heavy, Halloween be thy name. Your kingdom’s numb your children dumb on earth moldy bread unleavened. Give us this day our wayward dead. And give us our asses as we forgive those who ass against us. And speed us not into wimp nation nor bequiver us with needles, for thine is the flimflam and the sour, and the same fucking story in leather for never and ever. Ah: gin.

mary karr 323 Loony Bin Basketball

For Phil Jackson

The gym opened out before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines. Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of lost and unmapped cities.

Frank hugged the pimply ball over his belly like an unborn child. Claire dressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes. David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all saw him the same.

The psych techs in Cloroxed white were giant angels who set us running drills, at which we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos. Our metronomes run different tempos, John proclaimed.

Then Claire started seeing dashes stutter through the air behind the ball. Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked planetary orbits for nasa and now sat sidelined by her eyes’ projections.

Only Bill had game. Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray, belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he emerged, clean as an egg.

324O POETRY He was a lithe and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even Claire could count, then he bent panting, hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups, and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that he went.

Inside his head some inner winch did reel him back from the front of his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self I’d come in wanting to kill, and I left him there.

mary karr 325 “A Perfect Mess” is a panoramic view of the exhilarations and accelerations of city life. The lines “For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled, / paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato” and “I heard a tenor exhale pure / longing,” for example, seem to resonate with Frank O’Hara’s great poem “The Day Lady Died.” Are there other poems of the city that reside in your mind’s library? And do you like city life yourself?

The city obsessed me even before I lived in one. As a kid, I imag- ined Eliot’s “unreal city” — a paradigm of the dehumanized in some way, bodies and souls deformed by the mangle of traffic and noise. In reality, it’s a daily spiritual exercise not to want to mow down my fellow citizens with a machine gun. Ever notice how only other people are traffic? One prayer of mine is to try to imagine myself inside the face of every single person who passes. A Buddhist pal told me that’s a Tibetan exercise for compassion. It makes people’s facial features very particular ... Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough. The Brooklyn of Whitman and Crane, the New York of Lorca, parts of Howl all feed me.

Music, particularly jazz, enters into poems of urban life. “Coming home after midnight” feels like a nod to Nat King Cole, among others. Is life in New York still jazzy?

Feels more hip-hop to me, but I know more about that music than I do about jazz. To the extent that jazz is collage, then a riff on the form, form bent: sure, it’s jazzy.

The poem is dedicated to the co-author of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder — How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. Is a crammed, cluttered world a better place? If so, how?

David Freedman’s an old writer pal from Boston. His contention is that messy people (like myself) are more efficient — visual organiza- tion like piles or how my books are all color coded may work better

326O POETRY than the compulsive filers’ ocd approach. I know right where my cardamom is even though my spices aren’t alphabetical.

Tell us why the poem ends with an ellipsis!

Because the city is still breeding beauty the way yeast makes dough grow plump. You only unplug from it, the current never stops ...

“The Blessed Mother Complains ... ” juxtaposes infomercials for exercise machines with mastectomy scars; the poem tells us that these are among the things the Blessed Mother must witness: it is to her that the “flightless fly.” They “wail” for justice and mercy; but why is there a question mark after the latter word?

She’s wondering herself if justice and mercy are possible. Even Jesus bitched about his suffering, and if we read him right, he suffered our agonies too. No one leaves this planet without having plenty of heartbreak.

“The Obscenity Prayer” is reasonably self-explanatory, but would you care to comment on the proximity of obscenity to prayer in general? Also: does the poem have any kinship with Hemingway’s “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada” from A Clean Well Lighted Place — or any other such work of parody?

The best prayers are fuck you or fuck this shit. Or fucking help me / him / her / them / us. Someone once told me the only sins are sins of ingratitude. (I’m speaking of sin here not as breaking a rule, but as choosing to turn from God or — if you’re a nonbeliever — from the loving or best or sanest aspects of the self.) The obscenity in the poem is that psychic bitterness I’ve always struggled against. Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink. Yes the poem owes a debt to Hemingway’s “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name ... ” which is more elegant in its nihilism, prettier, but less specific. I wrote a record this

mary karr 327 year with country hunk Rodney Crowell (Kin is number one on the Americana charts today, she brags). Rodney’s Sex and Gasoline has a song called “The Obscenity Prayer” — which is all about the slavery of desire. Basically, it says give it to me. “Give to me my Playboy channel, killer weed, and sheets of flannel.” Funny song.

“Loony Bin Basketball” is dedicated to Phil Jackson, the remarkable for- mer nba coach whose nickname was “Zen Master” because of his interest in Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What do you imagine he would make of this poem?

Phil Jackson is a good friend. He’s called “Zen Master” because he has a serious practice in Buddhist meditation, and his book Sacred Hoops is a very wise way to think about competition not as war with the destruction of the other as its goal, but as a way to fully enter the instant. Sport as a celebration of pure presence with the excel- lence shared. I dedicated the poem to him because a recent class in mindfulness I took was taught by a Buddhist, and I felt close to him in that attention to breath, which is a spiritual solution in the poem to suicidal ideation. He says about it in tonight’s e-mail: “Truly Mary, I thought of Jack Nicholson and One Flew Over The ... however, that scene with Big Chief and those players doesn’t do justice to your poem. Catatonic Bill had game!”

The players described in the poem are far from the likes of the professionals Jackson so successfully coached. Can you tell us more about how you encountered (or imagined) Frank, Claire, and Bill?

We all hold excellence and quality in ourselves no matter how defunct we may seem to ourselves or the world at large. The basketball game was from my stay in the mental Marriott almost twenty-five years ago — a place where I decided to start acting like I believed in God even though it seemed like horse dookie. I just needed to.

328O POETRY The lines are rather breathless in tempo, and at the end of the poem you write: “Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self I’d come in // wanting to kill, and I left him there.” Can you talk a little bit about these lines, about breath and God?

Our autonomic nervous system breathes for most of us, and a priest friend told me once, when I asked him how I was supposed to know God’s will for me, that I should see what is. If you’re breathing, just presume you’re supposed to be alive and start looking around for some way to make yourself useful. If you’re suicidal, your mind is actually the keenest threat to your survival. Yet depressed people still listen intensely to their minds even though said minds never have anything good to say. Think of it, you try to employ the diseased organ to cure itself! If someone outside your body were shouting those awful things you say to your- self in such times, you’d plug your ears and sing lalalala. You have to stop that mind or die. A simple meditation practice I started twenty- three years ago involves counting my breaths one to ten over and over. Pure hell at first. I evolved through various practices — some Christian and Ignatian spiritual practices taught to me by a Franciscan nun and a few Jesuits along the way. I came back to breath last year. For me God is in the moment, and I tend to do everything I can to avoid being in such a stalled, unproductive place as the present. The ego has to stop inventing its reality and notice what’s actually going on, which process kills it (the ego) a little if you’re lucky.

mary karr 329 richard kenney

March

Sky a shook poncho. Roof wrung. Mind a luna moth Caught in a banjo.

This weather’s witty Peek-a-boo. A study in Insincerity.

Blues! Blooms! The yodel Of the chimney in night wind. That flat daffodil.

With absurd hauteur New tulips dab their shadows In water-mutter.

Boys are such oxen. Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow- Waver. Equinox.

Plums on the Quad did Blossom all at once, taking Down the power grid.

330O POETRY Anaerobe

Touch swollen tonsils: gill slits. Inside eyelid: slimelight. Cheek: shark. Here foreknown I’ve dived down dawnless microbial snows, phosphor blue to blue- black, to black. I fend fish. I find the saffron curb of the sulfur vent, veering voiceless again into the segmented, swaying, white, toothed tube- worm, Time.

richard kenney 331 Words Are the Sum

1

As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through And after molecules, which too Constitute us awhile, pluming

Through our slowly changing shapes Like beachscapes Through a duneless sandglass, say

(I said, once) — all these So utterly forgetful, wiped clean As numbers with each new use, lint-free.

How not so words, which pass our minds And mouths and ears from hind- Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why

So? Words are the sum of their histories: rose And roke and no and blanketing snow.

332O POETRY 2

So much less LEGO-like, click- Click together than like slick Tentacular

Colonial hydrozoans tossed Together in the copper pots Of predication — all cross-

Shock and shimmery tangle — How can Anyone calculate semantic

Sets so dervishly complex? How can we not expect not less but hellish Much more than to mean what we say? Then guess:

How can we better but Hope to become in sum what We say when we say again love?

richard kenney 333 “March” is full of wild music — poncho / banjo, witty / insincerity, yodel / daffodil, hauteur / water-mutter, oxen / equinox, did / grid — what about that particular month elicits these ebullient rhymes?

Cannily I refuse the pyrrhic tactic here, appealing to March’s rum- bustible reputation, insofar as then I’d have to explain why this poem doesn’t go out like a lamb. The fault is in myself and not my rain hats. I remember James Merrill once suggested I might stop banging the casseroles; he declined he’d ever say such a thing; I understood him to be speaking about style, not content. He did once write, a little more gently if no less pointedly, that one might want to “resist the temptation to play Mozart in transcriptions by Liszt.” I didn’t under- stand that at the time. A quarter-century later I understand, and find myself unregenerate. I have a weakness for acoustical bombast. I do understand that one person’s luna-moth-in-a-banjo may be another person’s percussion-hammer-in-an-ear-trumpet.

Does the luna moth caught in the banjo create any music of its own?

But seriously: respecting “music” in poetry — I mean prosodic and echoic effects of the managed kind — do I think these are not just famous features of an historically decorative art, but rather limbic torsion-wrenches crucially applied to the threads of felt thought throughout the monkey house generally, the nature of which may be known and explored first and best in verse? — that however these im- plements may be misplaced or intentionally and reasonably declined by individual practitioners, they’ll always remain available, because both their employment in hand and their traction in the heart are prefigured in our evolutionary nature? That’s what I think.

Where is the Quad?

There was once a man who said “God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree

334O POETRY Continues to be When there’s no-one about in the Quad.” — Ronald Knox

Not that Quad, but the tree-lined one existing only as observed on college campuses in that gong-tormented season when pheromone trumps faculty, and frisbees clog the atmosphere, sophomores molt, and all that.

In what ways are boys “such oxen,” and what happens to them in spring- time (the oxen as well as the boys)?

I think that rather than appealing to the obvious Darwinian meta- phors, cave art, Flintstone atavisms, etc., I’ll invoke spacemen, land- ing, as they will, on the Quad. Would the Arcturans think that boys are like oxen? Not necessarily at first, but once they got to know the girls.

“Anaerobe” gets its title and subject matter from microbial organisms that don’t require oxygen to exist. The poem explicitly traces the process of evo- lution, with images of gill slits, sharks, tubeworms, and time. How has the speaker of the poem been “foreknown,” and what is the mechanism by which he has “dived / down dawnless / microbial snows?”

That poem is really Michael Collier’s, who once entranced me with a description of his descent in an Alvin deep-sea submersible, under the scientific direction of his (and my) friend, the oceanographer John Delaney. That “snowy” image — straight and literal, from his experience. Delaney has done much of the pioneering research on the geology, chemistry, and ecology of deep thermal vents — “black smokers,” as they’re called — off the Northwest coast. The notion of an archaic biology independent of solar support — intimations of the beginnings of things — those resonances came by way of Michael’s story, subsequently informed in the course of a short trip with John aboard a University of Washington research vessel. Thanks Michael, thanks John!

richard kenney 335 How might disease (“swollen tonsils”) constitute part of the evolution- ary movement described here? Is there a sense, given the progression of the poem, in which time only exists through its embodiment in individual moral creatures?

I’m not sure how to respond to these thoughts. I was thinking less of disease than of metamorphosis, according to the Darwinian dream, which explicitly denies foreknowledge, but nevertheless wakes up in us, speaking English. How moral creatures might rise to the surface of such a dream—that would be a poem! I’ll be technically ready in ten years, and intellectually ready never.

You’ve written of quarks and texts before:

Eclectic quarks a dish collects to parse into initial text — miraculous, exotic sky! —

The quotation is from “Physics” in your 1985 book, Orrery. Does this indicate a long-standing interest in quarks? “Words Are the Sum” refers to “so-called quarks.” Is there skepticism here about scientifc terminology, or physics itself?

I’d say I feel for quarks about as I feel for quaggas, but less. I could tell a quagga from a horse chestnut, but they’re of different kinds: the buckeye is for my pocket, in a tactile, thing-ish sense; my quagga’s just a word, in the catnip sense. I feel the same way about blancmange and hyrax. It’s maybe more than just interesting that Murray Gell-Mann borrowed his quarks from Joyce. He’s a literary man, a polymath genius, a cavalier in two cultures. It seems to me that from a tonal perspective, the word requests just that degree of gravitas that I or the duck it imitates may be inclined to accord it. As for the objective

336O POETRY reality of mathematically inferential spooky objects — absolutely presumed by many scientists, no doubt dismissed as social constructs by some literary critics down the hall — I prefer the middle way of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” I cheer physics (speaking of twentieth-century physics, not screws and inclined planes) much as I cheer Chartres, especially the stained glass. I accept that my mind was designed for cracking nuts in the Old Stone Age, not quantum or cosmological paradoxes at inhuman scales. This is our creation story, weird and beautiful. I believe in quarks and the Big Bang and all the rest of it, on Sunday. Still, I sometimes remember that there have been other stories, ex- travagant, childish, or charmingly wrong in retrospect, and I think of the cockroaches in my circuit breaker box, and their chances of understanding the final paradigm there, and I feel like the dreamer who suspects he’s dreaming. When I read Stephen Hawking, current incarnation of the Pythian Oracle, making fun of the shaman who suggests it’s Turtles All the Way Down, and then offering his own best suggestion that it’s Particles All the Way Down — then I re-read “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

How is the sudden blossoming of sound toward the middle of “Words Are the Sum” related to the “shimmery tangle,” the “dervishly complex” sets of words we have at our disposal?

I was thinking about the human shape as a vortex, a plume of matter, and how the atoms which constitute us don’t “wear man’s smudge or share man’s smell” when they move on to other deportments, any more than do the letters in our words. But the words them- selves — they do. Hence, the “sum over histories” idea. Atoms and letters are wiped clean with each new use; words accrue associative meaning. Anyway, from an audible standpoint, the formal conceit that permitted the poem was the rhyming elaborations of the five vowels: all the long ones in part one, all the short ones in part two.

richard kenney 337 The molecules of which we are made will eventually be recycled by nature. If, as the poem says, “words are the sum of their histories,” what is the sum of individual human histories? The poem asks: “How can we not expect not less but hellish / Much more than to mean what we say?” Does the poem answer its own question in some way?

You know, the expression “sum over histories” comes from Richard Feynman’s refinements in quantum theory. I frame no hypotheses re- garding Feynman or any serious science, especially as uttered in num- bers. I am perfectly innocent of this kind of thing. But the notion that a particle has a position and a velocity, and that these might be under- stood as a sum over histories, makes common sense to me. It would be true of a quarter or a buckeye in my pocket, and, more interest- ingly, of all the words in the lexicon. I often think of Robert Graves’s brilliant poem, “The Cool Web.” Denotative meanings are often treated like LEGO blocks, snapped together into data-bearing sen- tences. But the lexical connotations ripple out across the associative web altogether unpredictably, construed as a sum over all the histo- ries the word has known, as modified on the human tongue in count- less unique circumstances. So: in speaking them, we can’t help but say not only less than what we mean, given the famous “limitations of language,” but — look at the web quivering over the horizon into etymological invisibility! — at the same time and more so, more than any speaker could ever know. Try to predict all emotional resonances resultant when two words are brought into proximity, wheezes Dr. Complexity; now try three — you see how it is. It’s a combinatorial problem, perfectly unmanageable. Absent prediction, one simply has to try the experiment, and see how it shivers out. For this indeter- minacy, I conjured electrochemical discharge in a mess of stinging jellyfish. Denotation: snapping LEGO blocks. Connotation: tossing a bouquet of enormous, dripping, tentacled Portuguese Men of War into a copper pot. I’m not sure “shimmery tangle” quite gets it.

The poem’s last word is “love.” We were put in mind of Auden’s strug- gling with the last line of his famous, and (in his lifetime) suppressed

338O POETRY “September 1, 1939”: “We must love one another or die.” “We must love one another and die.” The fulcrum, in both poems, seems to be hope. Any thoughts on this?

I suppose I think what others have thought, that the first version spoke a commonplace: we are mayflies. The second version, the sort of miracle revision one could hardly in cold blood think one’s way to, rattles our bones and frightens the future. I love the line, but the love of which I think I was thinking at the time was Frost’s, in my favorite essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Frost speculates of poetry that its “figure is the same as for love.” Forty years ago that struck me as a handsome poeticism; in the intervening years I’ve come to under- stand he meant it. So, hope.

richard kenney 339 marilyn chin

From “Beautiful Boyfriend”

For Don (1958–2011)

My skiff is made of spicewood my oars are Cassia bract Music flows from bow to starboard Early Mozart cool side of Coltrane and miles and miles of Miles Cheap Californian Merlot and my young boyfriend

•

If I could master the nine doors of my body And close my heart to the cries of suffering Perhaps I could love you like no other Float my mind toward the other side of hate

•

The shanty towns of Tijuana sing for you The slums of Little Sudan hold evening prayer One dead brown boy is a tragedy Ten thousand is a statistic So let’s fuck my love until the dogs pass

•

All beautiful boyfriends are transitory They have no souls they’re shiny brown flesh Tomorrow they’ll turn into purple festering corpses Fissured gored by a myriad flies

•

Down the Irrawaddy River you lay yourself to sleep No sun no moon no coming no going No causality no personality No hunger no thirst

340O POETRY •

Malarial deltas typhoidal cays Tsunamis don’t judge Calamity grieves no one The poor will be submerged the rich won’t be saved Purge the innocent sink the depraved

•

What do I smell but the perfume of transience Crushed calyxes rotting phloems Let’s write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poems Masque stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion

marilyn chin 341 What would be you willing to tell us about Don, to whom the poem is dedicated?

Don was my beautiful boyfriend, who died suddenly of an aneurysm during Thanksgiving week, 2011. He was the love of my life. He was only fifty-three. He closed his eyes, fell into a coma, and I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I had written various quatrain sequences in an eight-year span (yes, I’m one for slow-brewing a good sequence) and stitched these together after his death. In the “Beautiful Boyfriend” series, some quatrains are tributes to my beloved, some celebrate “boyfriendness” — a love that is different from “husbandness.” A concept that has nothing to do with mating but with eros.

Tell us about the “nine doors” of your body.

From the Bhagavad Gita — the commentators will tell you that the nine “gates” consist of two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth, and two doors beneath the navel — one for the “organs of regenera- tion,” one for the business of excretion. Obviously, the ancient texts had the male body in mind. The female body has one more “door” which the patriarchy completely ignored. Well, in any case. I prefer the number nine to the number ten. It’s richer for numerological reasons. And yes, I am aware of that secret tenth door.

How do the “cries of suffering” impede loving someone “like no other?”

Carnal and “romantic” love, eros, can take precedent over other kinds of love. This is not a critique as much as an observation of my own experience. With my “beautiful boyfriend” I learned blissful abandon! I learned to celebrate the fleeting moment. But as an activist poet, I can’t help but hear the cries of those less fortunate. That the bliss of eros must sooner or later be interrupted by the bad news of the world.

342O POETRY What is the “other side of hate”?

Hate, as in the trauma of war, of poverty, of discrimination, of trib- al violence, all that dark stuff of humanity. The antithesis of which would be unconditional love, of course.

The poem ranges quite widely in terms of its geography, citing such places as Tijuana, Little Sudan, the Irrawaddy River; are these focal points of “calamity”?

For most of the year, I live in sunny San Diego which borders Tijuana, the infamous sister city. There is a neighborhood in East San Diego that some refer to as “Little Sudan.” One could hear prayers coming off of rooftops. San Diego for me is a place of both multiple exiles and sunny pluralism. Relocation and dislocation. It is also the site for both my home and my homelessness. Of breathtaking landscapes and arbitrary borders. I have complex feelings about this place. I of- ten escape from it, and sometimes I escape “into” it. Right now, it’s a lonely place without my love. The Irrawaddy River is an ancient holy river rich with temples and sacred sites along its banks. In the sequence, I tried to offer my lover with funereal rites in different landscapes, and the places are deeply symbolic. I wanted to drift his body saint-like on the sacred Irrawaddy River and give his commoner’s death holy ramifications. Later in the series I also honor him with a gun salute and caissons; he was in the air force in his youth and deserves recognition. I was not able to say goodbye properly, because he died suddenly. But the imagination does not need a visa to roam the planet to give him a vivid send off.

A variety of music is heard: early Mozart, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. Do places and works of art somehow outlast or transcend those “beau- tiful boyfriends” who are “transitory,” and victims of “malarial deltas,” “typhoidal cays,” “tsumamis,” and what the poem calls “the perfume of transience?” What, in other words, constitutes “oblivion”?

marilyn chin 343 Alas, we are transitory creatures — our “perfume” lasts a short mo- ment on earth. Oblivion is final; each of us will die, our flesh will rot and return to earth and we will be wiped out of existence. I am certain that there is no hereafter. And yes, poets continue to make the insistent argument that art is “immortal.” I suppose this was in the forefront of Emily Dickinson’s mind as she carefully prepared her packets of poems to leave in her dresser for eternity. And the music of dead composers continues to move us. Yes, my beloved is gone; and though I wouldn’t bet on it, I hope that my ele- gies will help his memory linger a little longer on earth. I want to talk about the first quatrain a bit, for it sets up the rest of the sequence. I wanted to prepare the reader for quatrains that are inspired by both Eastern and Western traditions. I open with a sump- tuous Chinese line, with the characteristic brocades: “spicewood,” “cassia bracts” ... the skiff erotically signifies the woman’s body. Then the third line moves toward western music: Mozart, Coltrane; “miles and miles of Miles” is a perfect iambic trimeter frag- ment, ending with a pun. (This is the kind of line that my teacher Donald Justice would be proud of. I recall his saying that ideally there should be at least three interesting things happening in a line.) The Miles I was thinking about is the Miles of Sketches of Spain and not the Miles of Bitches Brew. We move from a traditional erotic Chinese landscape to European classical music to African American jazz with- in one quatrain. I was aiming for a strange but elegant fusion. Thematically, this opening quatrain is a universal message — it’s about surrendering to love — a sunny afternoon adrift with mu- sic, wine, and love. How splendid is our short life on earth — how blissful our human moment. But formally and stylistically, this short quatrain is also packed with inspired Eastern and Western references, and I am delighting in the process of creating a new hybrid East / West quatrain form. The quatrains that follow, then, shape-shift into different physical, emotional, and psychic terrains. In a sequence, each quatrain com- petes with the others for recognition. I tried to make each one as

344O POETRY strong as possible — vivid, self-contained, yet open and elliptical enough for the reader to relish and reread many times to make per- sonal connections, to get the full resonance. And the experience of the entire sequence must be even more sumptuous than the parts.

marilyn chin 345 david harsent

Three Poems after Yannis Ritsos

reversals

There are graves under the houses and houses under the graves and linking the three

a broad stone staircase where the dead go up and the living go down. They pass one another

wordlessly which might mean they don’t know, or else they’re pretending not to know. You can smell

the orange grove on the hill; you can hear children bowling barrel hoops down the street.

Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring. Their secrets cloud the water.

Later they walk back through an avenue of cypresses, carrying the jug like a bastard child.

346O POETRY trapped

In the house across the street, in a room directly opposite his, was a long mirror. When he looked out of his window, he would see himself in the room like a thief caught in a trap. He threw a stone.

His neighbor ran in to the sound of breaking glass, then came to the window and shouted across:

“Thank God for that: whenever I looked in my mirror there you were, doing something shifty behind my back.”

The first man turned away. The long mirror in his room brought him face to face with his neighbor, knife in hand.

david harsent 347 the accused

Just as he locked the door, as he pocketed the key, as he glanced over his shoulder, they arrested him. They tortured him until they tired of it. “Look,” they said, “the key is your key, the house is your house, we accept that now; but why did you put the key in your pocket as if to hide it from us?”

They let him go, but his name is still on a list.

348O POETRY Tell us about your engagement with Yannis Ritsos’s poetry: what draws you to his work; does it resonate with your own; in what sense are these three poems “after” his?

I first came across Ritsos’s work in versions by Alan Page, published as a pamphlet by Ian Hamilton’s little magazine the Review. Twenty brief lyrics. I was immediately drawn to them. They had about them a concreteness that traded off image and event, and a concomitant deep mystery that depended on those same aspects. They seemed to be ready to explode at the touch. There’s a means to an end in his work that can, I suspect, be found in mine: slant approach, dark ter- ritory. These poems are noted as being “after” Ritsos because I have taken significant liberties in order to find versions in English that (in my view) do the originals justice.

Where and when do these poems take place? Do they describe, say, Greek towns at a particular point in history?

Certain of Ritsos’s poems could be dated with some precision given that his work was banned first by the Metaxas regime, then during the civil war, and later by the military junta. References to war, gunfire, and repression are evident in his work. Many poems were written while he was in prison or in island detention camps. However, I don’t think a poem like “The Accused” needs to be thought of as linked to a specific time or place. In fact, there’s a terrifying univer- sality about it.

Tell us something about the staircase in “Reversals” — how is it that the “dead / go up and the living go down?”

For the purposes of the poem, the dead are no less sentient than the living. There are many examples in Ritsos’s work of people saying they’re dead ... that they must be dead. An exchange in one poem goes: “‘You know, I suppose, that death is nothing more than an ugly rumor,’ he said. / ‘There’s nothing on earth to show that death

david harsent 349 exists.’ / / ‘I know it as only the dead can,’ she replied.” (My version.) In “Reversals” the dead and the living pass one another; they don’t make connection; maybe each denies the other; maybe the living are shades to the dead, just as the dead are shades to the living. That the dead move among the living is a staple of Greek drama. Ritsos’s work has much truck with the dead.

What could it be that the living and the dead “don’t know,” or pretend not to know?

That they are cheek by jowl. That they might, in some respects, be indistinguishable.

What might the women, and the children know? What are their secrets like?

The children, I think, know only what children know. The women know what only women know.

The “children bowling barrel hoops down the street” remind us of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “Children’s Games,” in which kids have no toys, but make do with objects close at hand. Is there a connection?

I can’t say no because who knows where Ritsos got his image? But I doubt it. I suppose kids have improvised in that way through the ages.

There’s a strong undercurrent of violence here that is belied by what are, on the face of it, ordinary activities: flling jugs with water (in “Reversals”), looking in the mirror (in “Trapped”), locking the door to one’s house (in “The Accused”). How do the poems account for the transformation of day- to-day rituals into ominous and dangerous moments?

That transformation, and the unsettling ease with which it can be made, is part of Ritsos’s history and part of his genius. To gloss the three (insofar as that’s possible or, indeed, advisable): in “Reversals,”

350O POETRY not so much violence, perhaps, as a strong sense of unease. The se- crets of the dead, the secrets of the living, the secrets that women hold close and keep to themselves, the tension that this juxtapositon- ing suggests. In “Trapped,” a notion of inescapability, a fear of being watched that becomes obsessive in a police state, the certainty that no one can be trusted. In “The Accused,” a nicely exaggerated con- ceit (though it’s reductive to say so, just as this kind of exposition is always reductive) in which an act as banal as locking your own door excites the overheated imaginations of the Mind Police.

The voice of the poet in these poems is, on the face of it, detached and taci- turn. Yet he seems to have an intimate and even omniscient awareness of everybody’s inner lives. Where does a poet ft in, in such scenes as these poems evoke?

It might be seen not as taciturnity, but lightness of touch. (I have said of Ritsos elsewhere: His touch is light, but his effect is profound.) His method, in the short lyrics as in his much longer poems, is to report rather than to comment, and is never to explain or draw con- clusions. In dramatic monologues like “The Dead House” or “The Moonlight Sonata,” direct speech does the job for him. The aware- ness of which you speak comes, surely, from ownership: the poems are his, as are the people, the events; he’s co-opted them, or they come directly from his imagination, or something of both.

Are the people described in each of these poems guilty or innocent?

Everyone is guilty. Don’t you know that?

david harsent 351 tom sleigh

The Advance

1

Out the barred window sandbags in a sagging wall surround the guard post where a soldier half-hidden by the flag holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost.

It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps pulled tight over the troop trucks. Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys,

telling some joke in Arabic in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”: I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations,

the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares, If you sleep in a cemetery, you’re bound to have nightmares.

352O POETRY 2

No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy, the head is its own country obstinately surviving, the pupil of its one eye peering through the glass’s pure transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic, long-legged thighs almost like an obscenity the eye watches over — no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks from tank-treads scarring the concrete to give any of it drama — and what about the way the lips’ frozen smirk keeps daring me to touch the sexless V between the thighs staring up at me?

tom sleigh 353 3

The barracks dissolve into a reef of rubble in the fog. On either side of the road, crater after crater flashes with glints of glass, plastic bags, a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair.

The tv station, the power stacks thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded posters and banners strung across the streets lead to an absolute nowhere:

all that’s left in the emptied town after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets fluttering up around the car that winds

down the coast road deeper into mist, headlights probing like instruments in a wound they illuminate the more they violate.

354O POETRY Could you tell us a little about the background or context of this poem?

I’ve always been unsettled by Barbie and her male spin-off, Ken. I remember being in Provincetown, Massachusetts, something like ten years ago, and walking down Commercial Street. In the front yard of a guesthouse was an entire collection of Barbie dolls sitting around a fountain, all of them smiling that slightly demented, frozen smile. Some were in fancy dress, others were in beach wear. It was funny — and creepy — and whenever I walked by their little non- stop party, I was charmed, amused, and a little repulsed. Then in 2007 I was in Syria and Lebanon doing an article for Virginia Quarterly Review on how the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli War had affected Palestinian refugees in both countries. While I was there, a mini-civil war broke out in Lebanon: car bombs were going off in different Beirut neighborhoods, civilians were shot, a Palestinian ref- ugee camp in Tripoli was completely destroyed in a battle between the Lebanese Army and an Islamic militia, Fatah al-Islam. But rather than rehash a lot of details, I’ll summarize by saying that toward the end of my trip, I went to the south of Lebanon to the town of Qana. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s said to be the same Qana where Jesus worked his first miracle by turning water into wine. Of course, there’s also another Qana across the border in Israel, but I’ll leave it to the scholars to fight out which one is Jesus’s. My driver took me there because he’d been a member of a res- cue squad during the 2006 war, and he and his ambulance crew had been among the first responders to the bombing of present day Qana in which an extended civilian family, huddled together in an un- derground garage of an apartment building, had been killed by an American-made Israeli Defense Forces bomb. As we drove to the south, skirting blown up bridges and bombed-out roads, he told me what he’d witnessed: the smoke from the Israeli bombs was so thick that it was hard to see; cell phones were ringing in the dead people’s pockets — or the body parts’ pockets — and so after having answered a few of these calls, with the inevitable consequences of the conversa- tions, after a while he just let them ring.

tom sleigh 355 He also recalled trying to dig out a little girl from a mound of rub- ble where she was buried up to her chin, digging at the debris with his bare hands until he’d gotten her uncovered as far as her armpits. But when he took her under the armpits to lift her free, her whole torso came away: she’d been blown in half. Just at the moment he told me this, at the very spot where it had happened, we saw a naked doll with its head blown off. The irony was repulsively heavy-handed, but charged in a way that made both of us a little spooked by the coin- cidence. Of course I didn’t think of Barbie at that moment, but I’m certain she’d been lurking in my consciousness somewhere. And of course it was impossible to ignore the parallel between the dead girl and the decapitated doll. So here was this doll: a sign of the war that I didn’t know exactly how to read, except in the way that a poem tries to read such things. So much for the general background. For more specific contexts, the mention of the barracks in the first section refers to a command post where we had to stop to get clear- ance to go farther south. I remember walking past shelves of supplies and hearing the voices of Lebanese soldiers joking around while I went to the john. “Zubrak,” which I needn’t translate, is just another example of the amazingly rich lexicon of Arabic profanities. As to PSYOP, I first heard the term in some movie or other. But it became more a reality when I learned that the idf sometimes drops leaflets warning civilians to vacate towns that are about to be bombed. Also, the aura of secrecy that surrounds the terms “Black Op” and “White Op” (terms that a State Department official once explained to me after a mutual acquaintance of ours had suggested that he — the official — was carrying on a clandestine spying operation in a Somali refugee camp in Kenya, where again I was doing a story for Virginia Quarterly Review), like black magic and white magic, maybe had something to do with Barbie as a kind of sexual fetish — at least if you’re an eight-year-old boy who grew up in tiny towns in Texas and Utah.

356O POETRY In Michael Donaghy’s “Reliquary,” the poet describes a “broken doll the photojournalist packs / To toss into the foreground of the wreck.” Is there any connection between Donaghy’s poem and yours?

No, not directly: I hadn’t read his poem, though it’s interesting how both of our poems take up elements of his concern with media ma- nipulation for political ends. I like the knowing air of disillusion in his poem. One thing you discover when you begin researching these kinds of “incidents” is that the internet is one of the circles of hell, and that hell is the complete erosion of concepts like “objectivity” or “facts.” But in my poem, I’m not all that concerned with what you might call journalistic standards of truth. The doll is more an emblem of survival, a provocation, a stand-in for some kind of atrocity — but it’s also just a piece of molded plastic, more indestructible trash like the plastic bags in the third section.

Freud would probably call section two “uncanny,” with its focus on the decapitated doll and its riveting eye. Would you agree?

Absolutely. I reread Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny,” as well as the essay he takes off from by Ernst Jentsch, and I was struck by how both of them link the ordinary and the domestic with what the Beowulf poet would call “the wyrd” — an unanchored sense of dread and foreboding that makes, as Freud points out, what we call heimlich al- most synonymous with unheimlich. The homely and the un-homely become a kind of Möbius strip: a headless doll in a field of rubble turning to a dead girl turning to Barbie and her pals grinning away under a guesthouse’s carefully focused porch lights.

tom sleigh 357 atsuro riley

Striplings

1. field

Truck a passel (a poke) of wildling boys

We call ourselves (our pack) the orphan-slaves

Upcountry — loosed from mothers

Farmed out for scratch by mamas

Pale (pink-backed) tobacco-crew

Bossed by peeled-stick (breakback) donkey-switch

Tarred cropper-force

Forced cropper-line

Right far afield past Social Knob

Dark welty feld near Luris

358O POETRY 2. bunkhouse

Most nights the boy they called Tynan suppered us with scrapple from a can. Or some black-eyes he’d’ve road-begged; a quarter-peck of crowders scrounged off vines.

The broad back-skin on the tallest boy —a (spreading) welt-weave, a lattice.

Last good gloam-minute after work we’d strip off there in the side-yard, yawping; taking turns de-tarring un-burning arc-aiming cool hose-spray each on each.

Eleven of us / chigger-scritches, scablets. Eleven of us / none of us clean.

Where the boss of us bore down on us — our rank of bedrolls on the floorboards — one and one and one, eleven of us — ranked sack-beds on floorboards — boots of — black breath of — the boss of us bearing down on us — ain’t none of us (not a one of us) clean.

atsuro riley 359 3. after-road

And so (the heaving) boys got trucked to candy’s stop up Hwy. 52 one night and dumped.

360O POETRY “Striplings” feels as if it might be drawn from a story, and yet isn’t one exactly. Can you say more about this?

Drawn from, yes. I’ve known and carried the tale of this “pale (pink- backed) tobacco-crew” for most of my life. I think the poem might be something like its sensorial concentrate; a kind of sense-trace of the story; facet-flares off an old old accrescence at the core.

In “Field,” the frst of the poem’s three panels, there seem to be different voices at work. How do the lines on the left relate to the italicized lines on the right?

The voice of the teller goes about his “official” narrating business on the left; all the while the cropper-boys themselves are chiming in with their emendations, their side of the story on the right. (That this call-and-response field-song colloquy ends up looking like a field — an incidental bonus.)

What is a poke? And what are crowders?

A poke is a small sack; a clutch of things (or people). Crowders are (greener-tasting) cousins to the black-eyed pea, pretty much rampant through the South Carolina hot months.

Why is the “After-Road” panel so brief— just one prose sentence ?

All the best old tale-tellers of my upbringing were crackerjack at economizing for maximum reverberation and haunt; I bear their ex- ample in mind here. And I hear master Bashō too, exhorting still (from way on back in seventeenth-century Japan):

— The surplus meaning is infinite here.

— Is there any good in saying everything?

atsuro riley 361 sharon dolin

Three Poems from “A Manual for Living”

Based on Epictetus approach life as if it were a banquet

Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion: Caress what can’t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts.

Let pass what’s out of ken: lover, job, riches, a ripe peach until it reaches you.

Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine. Money’s not your fault.

You’re a feathered peahen preening for marzipan men.

Impeccable models, often peccable, drop their pants at inopportune instants.

Implore no more for what is, is no more.

362O POETRY everything has two handles

Whether to grapple the hurt or hold the calm: Can reason spread where ire infests the mind?

The handle you refuse to grasp proclaims you more than one you lurch to reach.

Why mire in the right/wrong amphora song.

No vigilance in this choir of one. No fast hook in the urn’s broken-off arm.

Vie with hot verities.

The pie is getting cold.

sharon dolin 363 our duties are in relation to one another

Feel unique in roiling solitude? Oh, you are not alone though you may feel fallen, snow up your nose. Join with others in your dank reclusion.

How do you find something worth saying? How do you find desire to find desire to find something worth saying?

And yes. That is where you might be: twice — or is it thrice — removed in a receding mirror of acedia. Finding a way to

find a way to want to find a way back in to conversation. This is what negative numbers (a negative soul) feel like: You want to want to want ...

If you go back far enough — lateral excavation — will you hit bone? So many converging lines yakking to themselves over a haywire switchboard

you used to find out who you were through cookie crumbs tossed down your own path. Now that you have no crumbs, don’t

even have pockets to turn out—only the memory of such acts, such things. How weary, stale, and profligate it seems to be to plasticize these

lines. You’re in a hamless state of mind. Now get out and talk to anyone your age: Like you they’ve all got Death studded on the tongue, which

livelies up the talk they walk.

364O POETRY Could you talk a little about A Manual for Living, the larger collection from which these three poems were taken?

Beginning around 2009, and continuing on and off into the pres- ent, I found myself once more in my own Dantescan dark wood. I don’t remember how I came into possession of this little book, but I thought, Yes. How ironic. Why not be the one dispensing advice when I feel completely lost? The Enchiridion of Epictetus (written in 135 ce) struck me as an ancient self-help book by a Stoic philos- opher, which was translated by Sharon Lebell into a contemporary American demotic. While reading it, I began to write down some of the chapter headings (Lebell’s invention) as a way to begin a poem. Now, I was in the least likely place from which to provide sage advice to anyone — but I began to write, with a certain edge, a series of po- ems that are my own self-help book and it has grown, over the course of three years, into a series of more than twenty poems. They are my “ghost poems” — the poems I have been writing even when I feel like I’m not writing poems. At times, I find myself ar- guing with Epictetus, as in one called “Don’t Demand That Things Happen as You Wish,” especially during his platitudinous moves into a Panglossian “best of all possible worlds” mentality. At other times, I do my best to try on the advice, though sometimes, I must admit, with an acrid edge, while at other times with greater sincerity laced with irony.

The frst two poems here appear to be curtal, or shortened, sonnets. Did the sonnet form, or tradition, play any role in your thinking as you composed them?

The imperative mode and mock-authoritative tone, to me, feel all wrong for a sonnet; these are not songs in the sense of “little song” (sonetto), though they both do, now that you mention it, have cou- plet-like closings. They’re closer to being recipes for the soul.

sharon dolin 365 Clearly, too, the poems partake of the long epigrammatic tradition. Could you talk about that?

I have been very caught up in reading and writing sequences of most- ly prose aphorisms over the last few years, so these poems may be a by-product of that activity. They surely derive some of their epi- grammatic character from their use of direct address to the reader/self. I hope there’s a healthy mixture of skeptical and faux wisdom along with commonsensical, ageless advice in them.

There’s a lot of wordplay and internal rhyme in all three poems. Could you say something about your sense of music in these?

My goal here is to write poems with the seeming clarity of a manual (do this; don’t do that), but with a linguistic zaniness and obliquity that makes them anything but a transparent guide. These are poems, after all. I fool around with sound and verbal density the way a painter fools around with color and degrees of representation or abstraction. My poetic project is never to tell it to you straight; Epictetus’s little book, which one of his students compiled from lecture notes, already does that quite well.

This poem exhorts a quietist or Zen approach to life, in contrast to what the title — the epigraph from Epictetus — is suggesting. So do you consider the poem ironic?

Well, actually, Epictetus’s sense of a banquet is that with such abun- dance you should be patient and just wait for the plate to come your way in life; he does say not to fret if something passes you by, so I’m adhering quite closely to the gist of what he says while tarting it up a bit. I like to have it both ways — ironic as well as a gentle self-scold at the end: “Implore no more / for what is, is no more.”

What do “marzipan men” look or act like, do you imagine? Are they rela- tives of gingerbread men?

366O POETRY The whole image is required: “You’re a feathered peahen / preening for marzipan men,” and is, as Pound referred to the image, an “intel- lectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” that I’d prefer to leave to the reader’s imagination. To parse an image is to lessen its power, which derives, in part, from inchoate associations that the reader brings to it.

What is the context of the Epictetus quotation in “Everything Has Two Handles”?

In Epictetus, there is only one handle that will yield a positive out- come, and the other handle (approach) will yield a negative one. So, of course, Epictetus says to grasp the positive one. By way of example, he says to imagine you’ve been slighted by a sibling. Instead of grasp- ing the handle of “hurt” or “injustice,” grasp the handle of familial bond. Easier said than done!

This amphora has just one handle — the other is broken — so is the poem out to prove Epictetus (as quoted in the title) wrong?

No. The “broken-off arm” is what I imagine happens when you grasp hold of a situation with anger or stubborn insistence on seeing it your way — something that I and everyone else I know are prone to doing.

Could you say a little about the opposites in the poem’s ending: “Vie with hot verities. / The pie is getting cold”? Where did this pie come from?

Ah. Another place where I’d prefer to let the readers suss it out for themselves. But coming at these lines as just one more reader (and not necessarily the ideal one), I’d say that the advice is to contend with difficult, painful, pressing (hot) truths. And do it fast before the pie gets cold. The pie is a recurring motif and arises at the end of the previous poem in the series (not published here). It’s my folksy symbol for appreciating the simple pleasures already in your life, akin to Prufrock eating his peach, perhaps.

sharon dolin 367 I have to ask: does this broken urn, or amphora, have any relationship to Keats’s Grecian urn, or to other time-honored Romantic ruins?

Here’s my quick, two-handled answer: No. I just grabbed the same metaphor Epictetus used. And yes, it’s probably unavoidable. Let the reader discover what associations are possible.

Could you talk a little about acedia, the state of mind mentioned in the third stanza of “Our Duties Are in Relation to One Another”?

Acedia is the state of torpor from which these poems (and this one in particular) emerged. It is depressive sloth, a melancholic “why bother” state that even impedes writing or stops it altogether. And yet I have found that writing about it or through it is the only way out of it.

The eighth and ninth stanzas make allusion, in quick succession, to “Hansel and Gretel” and to Hamlet — an interesting couple (or three- some!). Could you talk about their roles here?

Hamlet is a paradigmatic case of acedia. And yet, what a talker! Even if you don’t get free of melancholia, at the least one can strive to write memorable lines about it. Hansel and Gretel — symbols of childhood — are a reminder that, like them, you can’t hope to find your way by going over the past. With these three figures, there’s also a sense of a greater impoverishment of spirit, a nostalgia for a time when you felt more equipped to handle life’s difficulties.

This poem is, in part, about writer’s block. Yet it’s considerably longer than the other poems in the group. Is there a paradox here?

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? It’s probably the longest poem in the entire series. You can call it a paradox if you like. I’d rather say, as I say to my writing students: The way out of a block is the way in. And that can take time.

368O POETRY I’m struck by the near-fnal image of Death as a tongue piercing. Could you elaborate on that a bit?

It’s accepting my mortality. And perhaps only those of a certain age can practically taste it (or feel pierced by it). Yet to me it’s a hopeful poem. Actually, there’s a Bob Marley echo I’m most happy with in the “livelies up” phrase — his music, for me, being one cure for ace- dia (melancholia); the company of others being one more.

Finally, is this a sociable or an anti-social poem?

Oh, very sociable. It’s one of the self-scolds I talked about earlier. And this time I’ve decided to let the reader in on my process out of the dark wood. I’m chiding myself for whining, and guiding myself out of solitude into friendship. Isn’t that the basic dilemma of the poet and of so many other artists? We work in solitude, yet we crave — even thrive on — companionship. (Just as an aside: I’ve writ- ten these answers in an artist colony in France, artist colonies for me providing the near-perfect alternation of solitude and conviviality!)

sharon dolin 369 eliza griswold

Ovid on Climate Change

Bastard, the other boys teased him, till Phaethon unleashed the steeds of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold their reins. Driving the sun too close to earth, the boy withered rivers, torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills burst into flame, and the people’s blood boiled through the skin. Ethiopia, land of burnt faces. In a boy’s rage for a name, the myth of race begins.

370O POETRY Ruins

A spring day oozes through Trastevere. A nun in turquoise sneakers contemplates the stairs. Ragazzi everywhere, the pus in their pimples pushing up like paperwhites in the midday sun.

Every hard bulb stirs.

The fossilized egg in my chest cracks open against my will.

I was so proud not to feel my heart. Waking means being angry.

The dead man on the Congo road was missing an ear, which had either been eaten or someone was wearing it around his neck.

The dead man looked like this. No, that.

Here’s a flock of tourists in matching canvas hats. This year will take from me the hardened person who I longed to be. I am healing by mistake. Rome is also built on ruins.

eliza griswold 371 Libyan Proverbs

The naked man in the caravan has peace of mind. He whose covering belongs to others is uncovered. He who has luck will have the winds blow him his firewood. He whose trousers are made of dry grass should not warm himself at the fire. He howled before going mad. He led the lion by the ear. Like the sparrow, he wanted to imitate the pigeon’s walk but lost his own. Walk with sandals till you get good shoes. Where the turban moves, there moves the territory. Men meet but mountains don’t. Always taking out without giving back, even the mountains will be broken down. Penny piled on penny will make a heap. Only the unlucky coin is left in the purse. As long as a human being lives he will learn. Learn to shave by shaving orphans. He who is to be hanged can insult the Pasha. In the house of a man who has been hanged don’t talk of rope. The small donkey is the one that everybody rides. Fish eat fish and he who has no might dies. My belly before my children.

372O POETRY Could you talk a little about the Ovid myth to which “Ovid on Climate Change” is alluding?

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of a boy named Phaeton who is teased by other boys for being fatherless, a bastard. His mother, Clymene, tells Phaeton that his father is Apollo, the sun god. To be certain that his mother isn’t lying, Phaeton travels to visit Apollo’s palace, where the sun god swears by the river Styx that he will grant his son any wish in order to prove his love for him. Phaeton asks to drive his father’s chariot of the sun, which is driven by fiery horses so dangerous that Zeus himself won’t drive it. Fearing for his son’s life and the fate of the world, Apollo tries to convince Phaeton to ask for anything else, but Phaeton refuses. So off goes Phaeton, who is quickly overpowered by the horses’ galloping force. He loses control of the chariot, which veers too far from the earth, causing a freeze; then it veers too close, drying up rivers, scorching the earth, burning cities, and causing the Ethiopians’ blood to boil through their skin, turning it black. In Greek, Ethiopia means “land of the burnt faces.” This myth is the source of the name. Eventually, in order to save the earth, Zeus had to knock Phaeton off the chariot and to his death. For days, Apollo, in mourning, left the world in darkness.

Some people consider climate change to be a liberal politician’s myth. By referencing classical mythology, does the poem support that perspective?

No. It certainly doesn’t intend to. Honestly, I think climate change deniers are very rare these days; even the world’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, has grudgingly admitted that climate change is real.

The last sentence, “In a boy’s rage / for a name, the myth of race begins,” packs a lot of interesting but also potentially volatile suggestions. What is the poem claiming about race right here?

eliza griswold 373 The poem turns to race because Ovid’s telling of the myth turns to race. Because I frequently work as a journalist in Africa, I am curious about the roots of the continent’s country names. Often they are left over from days before independence and reveal quite a lot about the power dynamics of imperialism. Like Ethiopia, Sudan means “land of the Blacks” in Arabic.

Imaginative metaphor seems crucial to “Ruins.” Yet in the case of the dead man in the Congo, the poem states, “The dead man looked like this. No, that.” Why the refusal of metaphoric description right here?

Because the dead man was real and so was the fact that he was miss- ing an ear, which had been removed, probably by whoever killed him — either to be worn as a totem or to be eaten. With images like that, I’ve found metaphor to be unhelpful on the page, and also in my head, where images recur over which I have little control. This practice was fairly common in the war in Eastern Congo some years ago. Consuming human flesh became a means to consume an enemy’s power. When I was reporting on this, I became concerned that by writing about contemporary cannibalism, I would be contrib- uting to stupid old stereotypes about Africa as some kind of cannibal land. In researching the history, I found a couple of interesting facts. First, Christopher Columbus coined the term “cannibal” when he was writing about a certain ethnic group, probably the Caribes, who, a rival group told him, ate their enemies. Columbus used this tale as an argument for converting the rest of the world to Christianity. Also, during the colonial period, many Africans believed that the white colonists were cannibals because so many Africans never returned from working for them in the copper and gold mines. Because the colonists ate canned food, the one common African understanding was that the whites were chopping up the Africans into little pieces and sending them home in cans.

374O POETRY This is, in part, a poem about travel. Do you fnd a poet like Elizabeth Bishop to be helpful when you’re thinking through issues around travel in poetry? Or perhaps some other poet?

I love Elizabeth Bishop, but she’s too good a poet to be very helpful to me. I have been looking at her books lately, though, in terms of structure, to see how she moves from place to place to construct a book that is more than the sum of its individual poems. The other day, while looking at Geography iii, I was wondering, why iii? I tried to findi and ii, but then a friend said that they are implied poems. Her books North & South and Questions of Travel embody those po- ems. I loved learning that, and it made perfect sense to the way I hope that I approach things with a wry twist. I find both James Fenton and Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski helpful in writing poems about observed horror. Both contain a kind of fury that I recognize, but that fury is useless if it comes off as scolding or moralistic. “Ruins” surprised me because I didn’t know how full of rage I was from some of the things that I’d seen until I wrote it. That’s why I kept the line, “Waking means be- ing angry.”

The speaker does seem angry — and wounded, too. Anything you’d like to add about that?

Ha! Life is wounding. For all of us in different ways, I’d imagine. This speaker is trying to come to terms with how not to carry displaced rage into situations where it doesn’t belong; how to take that rage and integrate it into life so that it becomes generosity, wisdom, even love, rather than rage that helps no one. If you want the context of the poem, here it is: I’d just finished some rough work in the field and found myself at the American Academy in Rome for a year, which is one of the most remarkably beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It was a wonder- ful place to heal, but it was also at sharp odds with where I’d just been and what I’d seen. The incongruity was a bit tough at times to handle.

eliza griswold 375 The nun in turquoise sneakers is an irresistible image. Where did it come from?

It came from a nun in turquoise sneakers who was facing a very long climb up a flight of stairs in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere.

Are these actual Libyan proverbs in “Libyan Proverbs”?

Yes, they are actual Libyan proverbs, and they come from a little book I bought in a hotel gift shop in Tripoli, which was next to a book about Muammar Qaddafi called Is Qaddaf a Feminist? On the cover was a picture of Qaddafi flanked by his famous female bodyguards. These were the days before Qaddafi fell, and so books in Tripoli were propaganda. There was no free press.

These are mostly presented as a series of proverbs, or aphorisms, with- out commentary. Is there any implied critique of them — or, conversely, approval?

Do you mean of the things they say? Like do I endorse the fact that men who wear trousers made of dried grass shouldn’t sit by open flames? No, I don’t mean to critique or endorse them on an indi- vidual level like that.

“My belly before my children” is a surprising notion, especially for American readers in this day and age. It’s also highlighted since it appears last in the poem. Could you say more about this line and its placement?

I found this proverb to be very powerful, and to be a reflection on the nature of power under Qaddafi in Libya and tyrants elsewhere. The idea is that I feed myself before I feed my child. Or I take my coun- try’s oil, get rich and fat, and leave my citizens to starve.

376O POETRY The poem almost moves into narrative in the four lines beginning “He howled before going mad,” before again reverting to proverb. What is go- ing on right here in the poem?

“He howled before going mad” is a proverb. I take it to mean, Pay Attention. That before something goes wrong, there is an indication that it’s going to do so. The poem is a narrative, I hope, but not nec- essarily one driven by an individual tale: this is the story of the nature of abusive power.

“Where the turban moves, there moves / the territory”: these lines are very evocative in both sound and sense. Could you say more about them?

The turban is a symbol of the leader’s strength. In this poem, these lines reflect Qaddafi’s brittle omnipotence and the eventual collapse of his regime.

eliza griswold 377 dana levin

At the End of My Hours

i

here I’m here I’m here I’m

here here here here cricket

pulse — the katydidic tick

(and then a pause) tick

(and then a pause) in greening trees — tales

of a gratitude for water, the hollyhock’s

trumpet Yes, Tenderness

her glove and hoe — her bad trip

love/grief, her medic tent

talking me down, kissed fissures

in the world’s despair, what I’d

loved — alive for a while — a day called

Rip and Brood, a day called

Glorious Hour, the long hunt and the worm found

in the battered petunias — every

morning in summer

that last summer

378O POETRY before the bees collapsed and the seas rose up to say Fuck You

ii perplexed by how it hadn’t been unfailingly compatible, our being numerous — how half the time we couldn’t see the shapes we were supposed to make made grave our disasters — a god’s glass bearing down to burn the wheat crop — to keep time alive inside a tomato, splicing fish into fruit — some wanted to defy limitation were offered famine bric-a-brac townships virtual cities

dana levin 379 where you could stand in market aisles

still expecting cherries

iii

his rhythms were your rhythms

Murray the cat — sleeping à deux

draped your length from hip to knee

like a scabbard — unsheathed his yawn

tortured finches for breakfast

yowled and yowled round the ravaged bowl

till you fed him chicken

from your own plate

another mouth

pearling the wheel of appetite, coveting

a bloody mash

to keep it going — such a dumb rondeau

who invented it!

eating to live to kill to eat, even

380O POETRY cat on a stick when fields failed, no crave for rain against the blasted scape nor love nor god at the end of my hours, but garlic and butter a splash of cognac steak frites

iv and when soil burned and order failed and dogs then people starved in char I remembered an extraordinary peace, the privilege of being left alone with bread to eat and famous butter “the chefs use,” the venues of white sleep, cannabis and Klonopin the soma-goods of art and when my back went up against a blackened wall for rumored beans in dented cans I forgot

dana levin 381 my body — became a future remembering

how it got that way, some

blah blah blah — about hoarding rivers

and hiding gold, we

died in droves — we killed each other and we

killed ourselves until our bones wore out

their plastic shrouds

v

I couldn’t quite

quit some ideas — trees and chocolate

I couldn’t stop yammering

over the devastated earth

pining for nachos — prescription drugs

and a hint of spring, though I could see

the new desert — its bumper-crop

of bone and brick

from shipwrecked cities — where now

382O POETRY the sons and daughters of someone tough are on the hunt for rat — the scent of meat however mean and a root sending an antenna up, to consider greening — what poems built their houses for once, in a blindered age, teaching us the forms we felt, in rescue — hoarded-up scraps whirling around my cave trying to conjure peaches

dana levin 383 Is “At the End of My Hours” a cautionary tale? In other words, should we stop the environmentally questionable practices of “keep[ing] time alive / inside a tomato” and so forth? Or do you see the poem as more of an allegory for the speaker’s state of mind?

Oh, well, I think we’re always on the verge of another Frankenstein moment: Killer soybeans! Monster corn! Mutant flu! But any cau- tion in the poem just arose out of the primary wish: to write an End Times poem. And End Times, apparently, according to the poem, is the experience of collapse — whether by global warming or nuclear war or some other man-made catastrophe, it does not say. The bees die, the seas rise; later there is famine and sickness, war and the collapse of civic order; and then, by section v, there’s some kind of aftermath where the speaker has survived (barely), lives in a cave, entirely canny and nostalgic, perpetually hungry and insane — a poet perhaps, when there is enough to eat — rambling in a fugue.

“The seas rose up / to say Fuck You”: this is such a vivid moment in the poem. Could you comment on it?

The poem just ... arrived there. And then it seemed the right way to be cursed by an outraged sea, bringing its retribution hammers down. And then it seemed right to have this crass, blunt diction fric- tion up against the loveliness afoot in other passages of the section (“tales / of a gratitude for water”): the linguistic equivalent of devas- tating Paradise.

I’m struck by how many foods are in the poem, and the fantasies about fruit in particular: “expecting cherries,” as well as “trying to conjure peaches” in the end. What should we make of that?

Yeah, I was struck by that too. I would have thought I’d be more inclined to rhapsodize about bacon. But the poem has a logical intel- ligence: no bees, no fruit. The first to go in the slide toward famine. I would miss peaches immensely as I scrabbled for ants. Deepening

384O POETRY down into the project of rendering End Times led to these questions, which became central to the poem’s concerns: what did I love, while I was alive? What will I miss, when the old world is gone?

Could you talk a little about your formal choices for the poem? Why did it need to be a sequence? Why do the sections themselves eschew stanza breaks and periods?

While I was still mulling (and not drafting) “Hours,” I had an ar- chitectural flash: five long columns, one to a page. This is often how overall structures hit me: in a flash, visually, very early in the compo- sitional process. Five sections felt like a good number; in retrospect, I see it offered an expansive field with a seeable limit, which some- how allayed my compositional anxiety. I like sequences because I like working modularly, thinking in terms of blocks I can move around. As I got more deeply involved with the poem, I saw that the sequence form was helping me string the poem out along and in time: both in terms of composing some- thing long, and in terms of rendering the timeline — this, then this, then this — that the central plot of collapse follows. Attending this architectural flash was a strange new drive: to ban- ish any pacing markers but the line break, including my ubiquitous em dash. I couldn’t quite maintain the prohibition against punctua- tion and ended up amending my assignment, but overall perhaps I needed to destroy the very poetic structures which had over time become so comfortable and familiar, in order to intuit and build in a new way — my structural post-apocalyptic scenario.

Murray the cat is the only delineated “character” in the sequence. His name seems to humanize him, but he also epitomizes the animal cycle, or the inescapable “wheel of appetite,” in your words, that drives the poem’s obsessions. Could you say more about Murray and his role?

Appetite’s what’s going to do us in in the end — personally, collec- tively. And here at home, Murray and I are fiddling while the world

dana levin 385 burns, he with his “seafood medley” and me with my tacos de len- gua and salt-dusted chocolate bars. He’s the loudest, most persistent feed me caterwauler around — but I’m an empty belly too, a meat- sack with another meat-sack for a pet. I cuddle up to a creature with fangs and claws; I eat next to him with a knife and a fork. We love our pets to pieces, but if pressed by desperation we’d eat them in a sec- ond — and they us. To hunger is to be a destroyer, a thing destroyed.

There’s an elegiac nod to the role of poetry in section v, as the speaker laments “what poems built their houses for / once, in a blindered age, teaching us / the forms we felt, in rescue.” Does this refer to the way poems teach us in our own age? And if so, are poems now endangered, much like certain animal species?

Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned and every man who wants to die at peace in his bed besides. —William Carlos Williams

386O POETRY michael lista

Fowl

The girl from Scarborough liked being slapped Down the hall from where her mother slept.

A big, hard-working hand, anybody’s To come medicinally down, antibody

To the slow infection of her Western face (what sucked the most was that it wasn’t fast).

Some birds don’t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl Scream across the sky their only vowel.

This river I step in is not the river I stand in. We’ll drive to Leslieville, wherever,

Park in the Guildwood GO lot and get stoned. Who’s there? Nay, answer me. Stand

And unfold yourself. Her heart begins to pound. No geese go winging to the rooky pond

No goslings disappear their small and speckled. If we endure this, it will make us special.

michael lista 387 Today’s Special

Well I guess that’s all locked up tight Says Sam who guards the mall at night.

Sam’s a puppet! He can’t use his eyes. His body is an excellent disguise.

I’m Muffy the Mouse! I’m condemned to rhyme Until the Christmas special end of time.

That’s Jodi, my human friend. The world goes on and on and will not end

Hiya there Jodi. Oh hi Sam. Jodi straightens Jeffrey’s magic tam.

Everything’s safe here let’s go upstairs Sam says through a moustache Props repairs.

Jodi is so pretty. I hate her. She carries Jeffrey up the escalator

To the kid’s department every night Where he turns into space and starlight

When I say the magic rhyme. Jeff’s a mannequin Until the mall goes dark. Then he’s a man again.

388O POETRY Parkdale, then Princess Street

Make them say yes before you even ask, L’essence de charme, c’est ça. The mind’s a damsel Locked in a tower with her fathom of hair. Coax the braid and it’ll all be over.

The rooms are plain where I am interviewed, Abstract and clinical, and so I glory Like a corpse plant, perfume the marble-faced With the reek and prodigy of my tomorrows.

Dying is so boring as the soul Rummages the liquidation sale For a final bargain —

But time outbids all comers, and we die Expensively in Princess Margaret Who was herself once so beautiful.

michael lista 389 The Scarborough Grace

An old man on Grace Street is going mad In a Canadian T-shirt he won’t change And red unwrinkling pants I thought had made Him stylish when I met him in the spring —

Five or six times a day I see him walk Down Grace Street to St. Francis church, and knock And pull its wooden doors, always shocked That his entitled holy place is locked.

Undreams Damascus from a baffled Paul, Rolls back the road where some unstricken Saul Rises up, as bubbles through a beer To a surface where we disappear

And wake in some uncalendared forever, An unwelcome Elijah passing over.

390O POETRY Can you tell us a little about the project these poems are part of?

They’re from something I’m working on called “The Scarborough,” which I’m describing as a book of poems that isn’t about Canada’s most famous rapist and serial killer, Paul Bernardo. He was known as the Scarborough Rapist (Scarborough is an eastern suburb of Toronto, where Bernardo is from). The crimes were committed across the greater Toronto area, from east to west over a number of years in the late eighties and early ninties, while I was growing up. He was convicted on my twelfth birthday, September 1, 1995, while I was having a pool party. Bernardo was a psychopath, a type of human — it isn’t an illness, and it can’t be treated, never mind cured — that was first described by a Canadian, Robert Hare. Bernardo was good looking; he and his accomplice, his wife Karla Homolka, an equally demented psy- chopath, were called “the Ken and Barbie killers” by the American press because they were beautiful and charming and ostensibly well put-together. When Bernardo was finally charged, the judge who presided over the case had to rule whether or not the videos of the crimes, which Bernardo had filmed, could be shown in open court. The judge, Patrick LeSage, ruled that Canadians could hear them but they could not see them. The poems are trying to do two things at once, two things that I can’t disentangle. They need to look like psychopathy — classically proportioned, handsome, manipulative, well-spoken, charming, glib, and ultimately devoid of empathy, uncaring of their true subjects. Underneath them runs a psychotic river, the evil Alph, that they’re able to hide with their public faces. But they also need to look like the dignity that LeSage was trying to safeguard in his ruling on the tapes. You can hear the crimes, the perpetrators and the victims, but you can’t see them. The hell of this all is that after some years of thinking in it, dignity and psychopathy look formally identical to me. The form that lets the Devil sneak in is the same that lets the innocent sneak out. The whole thing is an Orphic struggle, leading something unspeakable out by the wrist into the light, without ever turning to

michael lista 391 look at it. It takes place on Easter weekend 1992, when his last crime was committed. Early Greek Christians thought of Christ as a new Orpheus. I’m an atheist but I’m afraid I’m a Christian writer.

And “Parkdale, then Princess Street,” how does it ft in?

Parkdale is a neighborhood in Toronto. The first two lines are based on a plaque in Parkdale. The second stanza is in an interrogation room, I think. Bernardo was interrogated countless times before he was charged. The police just couldn’t believe this charming, handsome man was the monster that they were looking for. So they kept let- ting him go. Princess Margaret Hospital is in Toronto. And Princess Street is the main drag in Kingston, where I went to college, where all the shitty bars are. It’s also where the prison Bernardo will die in is.

In “Fowl,” a line says: “If we endure this, it will make us special.” How so?

That’s a line I can’t look back at. Sorry.

Can you relate “Today’s Special,” in particular its rhyming, with the larger theme you’ve described for us?

Today’s Special was a Canadian children’s tv show from the eighties and early nineties. It’s about a mannequin who comes to life at night when the shoppers have gone home to bed. One of his friends is Muffy the mouse. She speaks in rhyme. My little sister and I used to watch it when all of this was going on. There are a lot of Canadians, especially Torontonians, who felt a palpable paranoia in the air at the time that just sort of blanketed daily life, and made everyone and everything feel sinister. The poem follows the intro sequence, which you can find on YouTube. I always liked that they could carry him up an escalator that still worked at night, when everyone was gone.

Where does the old man in “The Scarborough Grace” ft in?

392O POETRY The Scarborough Grace was a hospital in Toronto, but the poem is about an old man who used to live on my street, Grace Street. We used to wave at each other, say hello, and he would flirt with the women who walked by. One summer his memory started to go. He was dressing like two-thirds of the Canadian flag, burgundy pants and a white Molson T-shirt, I swear to God. He stopped saying hello; he looked confused. And he became obsessed with checking the doors of the church I live across from. They were always locked. I don’t know if he was trying to get in or if he was making sure that people stayed out. One day he disappeared.

michael lista 393 letters to the editor

Dear Editor,

I was astonished when I realized, as I’ve been reading your excellent centennial issues, that I’ve very likely read every issue of Poetry for fifty of those one hundred years, starting in 1962 when I went to work for Paul Engle at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. I read Poetry for most of those decades not because I was interested in poetry or because I was a poet. Rather it was because almost every- one I knew was in love with poetry (or a poet!). And most of them published in — or wanted to publish in — Poetry. When I worked for Engle, the extraordinary poets Donald Justice, Charles Wright, Mark Strand, Marvin Bell, and George Starbuck taught at Iowa. All of them became my friends. After a tumultuous love affair with a student poet, I moved to Chicago in 1966. Paul Engle retired. George Starbuck reluctantly agreed to succeed him as director for three years. George and I married in 1968. He had been a contract writer for the New Yorker since 1958. When he died in 1996, my connection to poetry was over. Or so I thought. But I did not sever my connection to Poetry. About six months before we married, George asked me to host a cocktail party for him at my 2828 North Pine Grove apartment in Chicago. Saul Bellow, Karl Shapiro, Henry Rago (who was the editor of Poetry at the time), Paul Carroll (of Big Table fame), and Bill Knott (who spent the entire evening secreted away inside my clothes closet) were among George’s friends from his Chicago days, and all attended. I invited Nelson Algren. He brought along his buddy Studs Terkel. I especially remember Poetry’s Rago, because he was determined to persuade me to sell him two unusual lamps that decorated my bed- room. I’d picked them up at thrift shops. I was equally determined not to sell them. We had fun talking about lamps, not poetry. Those lamps light up my living room today. I’m glad I still read Poetry, glad that when I turned sixty I finally got around to writing poems, well after George died, after I’d lived all my other lives. Yet nothing has been as surprising as the joy I found in grief, managing to stay alive in the hard years of widowhood.

394O POETRY I feel gratitude toward those poets I knew almost five decades ago at Iowa. They must have been implanting their poems in me as I read them then (often just to be polite) so I could lean on them now that I am releasing my own.

kathryn starbuck tuscaloosa, alabama

Dear Editor,

This has been such a difficult, contradictory century to assess, and for that reason the lens of Poetry is welcome, particularly because Harriet Monroe and her successors were so intent on discovering what was new. That the new turned out to be ephemeral much of the time is not surprising; it is here, at least, preserved as it were in amber, like the Ephemeroptera of the Jurassic period. Poetry was midwife to Modernism, just in time to publish Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and it is arguable that no other American liter- ary magazine has so glorious a legacy. But along with the glory, the magazine must also accept responsibility for the inglorious aftermath of Modernism: the willful obscurity, the intellectual posing, the ham-handedness (or tin-earedness), the deadness, which Christian Wiman notes in “Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century” [October 2012]. The discovery of thrilling poems lent luster to the magazine in its early days, and then the brilliance of the magazine created the reputation of the poets that it published later on — reputations not always deserved, as it turns out. But that’s just how things are. I like literary history while at the same time I distrust it. It satis- fies my rage for order but it also obscures what is timeless and tasty in literature: the poems themselves. Literary history makes Robert Herrick minor, yet does there exist in English more bravura than “Upon Julia’s Clothes”? That’s hardly a minor poem. I hope this new anthology [The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine] will help me to see a through-line in twentieth-century (ancient now) American poetry and at the same time satisfy a need for tasty poems. One thing I wish Wiman would stop doing is trying to sell his read- ers on poetry. I think Wiman too would like to stop doing it; maybe

letters 395 he thinks it’s his job. I think Marianne Moore was probably right and that we should read poems with a perfect contempt for poetry.

daniel d’arezzo poetryfoundation.org

Dear Editor,

“Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century” reads like a legal argument put forward by a lawyer who knows deep down that his client is guilty. Modernism murdered poetry, and then, to cover up its crime, dressed the body in new clothes and propped it up in the front window, where it still sits to this day, accepted as proof by the foolish neighbors that all is well in the house of verse.

tim mcgrath poetryfoundation.org

Dear Editor,

The essays by Christian Wiman and C.K. Williams [“Nature and Panic”] in the October issue are alone worth the cost of my subscrip- tion — luminous brilliance, unsurpassed. I have not read such sublime and accessible essays on poetry in a very long time, and I will most surely use these essays for teaching. Some of the sentences are so beautiful, so full of clarity and veracity that they both overwhelm and comfort me.

c.p. mangel chapel hill, north carolina

The editor responds:

Daniel D’Arezzo is correct in assuming that I am tired of being a cheerleader for poetry. As I say in the essay, all such cheerleading “is defensive and misguided, not because there is no hope for elevating poetry’s importance, but because its power is already greater than any public attention can confer upon it.”

396O POETRY I’m sympathetic to Tim McGrath’s fatigue with Modernism but disagree with his overall assessment. I’m with W.B. Yeats, who thought that Modernism produced the greatest English-language poetry since the Renaissance. We’re still (rightly) wrestling with that inheritance.

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot reply to every letter.

letters 397 contributors

lucie brock-broido* is director of poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Her new book Stay, Illusion will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013. art chantry’s work has been published in over five hundred books and magazines and has been collected and displayed worldwide, in- cluding at MoMA PS1, the Library of Congress, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Louvre. marilyn chin’s books of poems include The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed, 1994), Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (W.W. Norton, 2002), and Hard Love Province (W.W. Norton, 2013) sharon dolin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Whirlwind (2012) and Burn and Dodge (2008), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. paul durica is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments. eliza griswold is a poet and journalist based in New York City. david harsent’s most recent collection, Night (Faber and Faber, 2011) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. In Secret, his versions of Yannis Ritsos, will appear next year from Sheep Meadow Press. mary karr’s last memoir was LIT (2009) and her last book of po- ems was Sinners Welcome (2006), both published by HarperCollins. She is currently developing tv series with hbo and Showtime. richard kenney’s most recent book is The One-Strand River (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Washing- ton’s marine station in Friday Harbor and lives in Port Townsend. dana levin’s most recent book, Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), received year-end honors from the New Yorker, the San Fran- cisco Chronicle, Library Journal, and Coldfront. michael lista * is the author of Bloom (House of Anansi Press, 2010). He is poetry editor of the Walrus and poetry columnist for the National Post. He lives in Toronto.

398O POETRY atsuro riley’s book is Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010). He’s recently received the Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Whiting Writers’ Award. tom sleigh’s most recent book of poetry is Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011), which won the Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Hunter College.

* First appearance in Poetry.

contributors 399 “Williams is a poet of imaginative composure amid real-world disarray. His fastidious, refined heart camps in the middle of the worldly misery that minimizes its claims.” Dan Chiasson, New York Times Cloth $27.50

The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu A Volume in Celebration of Poetry’s Centennial

To celebrate the centennial of Poetry magazine, the magazine’s editors have assembled this stunning collection—a book not of the best or most familiar poems of the century, but one that uses Poetry’s long his- tory and incomparable archives to reveal unexpected echoes and conversations across time, surprising juxtapositions and enduring themes, and, most of all, to show that poetry—and Poetry—remains a vibrant, important part of today’s cultural landscape. CloTh $20.00

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POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG The Selected Letters The View We’re Granted of Anthony Hecht poems by Peter Filkins Anthony Hecht “A deeply moving collection. Filkins edited with an introduction by traces out the rhythms of loss and Jonathan F. S. Post renewal, of childhood and adulthood, “An entirely captivating selection of in a blank verse so skillfully worked letters by one of the great poets of it seems effortless. Very few poets our time.” today write with such power and —Mary Jo Salter, Johns Hopkins assurance.”—John Koethe University Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction John T. Irwin, General Editor “Anthony Hecht was a magisterial $19.95 paperback formal poet, an heir of W. H. Auden and John Crowe Ransom, a peer of James Merrill and Richard Wilbur, The Iliad and these letters, artfully edited by Homer Jonathan Post, illuminate both his translated by Edward McCrorie life and his work. They are witty and with an introduction and notes by learned, jaunty and revealing, filled Erwin Cook with the news of poetry, and they Edward McCrorie’s new verse transla- remind us how fortunate we were to tion of Homer’s classic is an epic with have had him among us.” a contemporary feel to it, capturing —Edward Hirsch, John Simon the wide-ranging tempos of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation original. It underscores the honor $35.00 hardcover of soldiers and dwells upon the machinations of Moira, each man’s and woman’s portion in life. $25.00 paperback

The Johns hopkins University press 1-800-537-5487 • press.jhu.edu The Great American Poetry Show www.tgaps.net

* Poetry is sound holier than silence. * Poetry is the craft of writing which creates the work of art called poem. * Poetry uses pointed words to make a fatuously petty point, a preeningly pithy point, or some other pointy point pointedly in between. * Poetry looks in the mirror and sees scantily-clad imaginations frolicking in the seas of time. * Poems are heart bombs exploding in the mind. * Poets are paraphrasers paraphrasingly paraphrasing the mysteriously mysterious mystery of timelessly timeless time. * Avant-garde poet-rebels are unruly artists in revolt undermining and overthrowing the literary status quo. ◆ the national poetry series ◆ the national poetry series invites you to Enter the 2013 Open Competition harpercollins publishers penguin books university of georgia press fence books milkweed editions

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five books of poetry each year. Winning manuscripts are selected through this annual open competition judged by five distinguished poets. Each winning poet receives a $1,000 cash award in addition to having his or her manuscript published by one of the NPS participating publishers.

Recent judges have included John Ashbery, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Dean Young, Campbell McGrath, D. Nurkse, and D.A. Powell. Among the list of more than 150 esteemed NPS winners are poets Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Mark Doty, Terrance Hayes, Marie Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

entry period January 1 through February 15, 2013

entry requirements Previously unpublished book-length manuscripts of poetry accompanied by a $30.00 entrance fee. You must be an American citizen to participate.

guidelines Please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org for complete guidelines or send a self-addressed stamped envelope to this address: The National Poetry Series 57 Mountain Avenue Princeton, NJ 08540 Send a Greeting. Share Your Love of Verse.

Honor bold voices and pioneering prosodists with the Twentieth-Century Poets notecards—featuring short bios, snippets of poetry, and evocative art that complements our greatest poets’ remarkable visions. Each set of 10 cards comes with envelopes and matching Twentieth-Century Poets Forever® stamps. www.usps.com/store The University of Pittsburgh Press

Congratulates

TOI DERRICOTTE

on receiving the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

“For a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work represents a notable presence in American literature.”

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS upress.pitt.edu foundation events Poetry and Dance

In celebration of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new galleries of ancient art actors read passages from Homer, Plotinus, Sophocles, Seneca, and Virgil, with performances by Hubbard Street Dance. Thursday, December 13, 6:00pm. Free with museum admission.

111 s michigan ave, art institute of chicago poetryfoundation.org/events

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (Required by 39 usc 3685) of Poetry (publication no 0436740), published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, at 61 W Superior St., Chicago, Illinois, 60654-5457, for September 1, 2011. The annual subscription price is $35.00 for individuals. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, and managing editor are: publisher, the Poetry Foundation, same address; editor, Christian Wiman, same address; managing editor, Valerie Jean Johnson, same address. The owner is the Poetry Foundation, same address. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are none. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding twelve months.

EXTENT AND NATURE OF CIRCULATION: AVG # COPIES EACH ISSUE # COPIES SINGLE ISSUE PUB POETRY (PUBLICATION # 0436740) PRECEDING TWELVE MONTHS NEAREST FILING DATE a Total # of copies (net pressrun) 36,777 32,183 b Paid circulation 1 Mailed outside-country paid 24,185 25,119 subscriptions stated on form 3541 2 Mailed in-county paid subscriptions 0 0 3 Sales through dealers and carriers, 1,402 1,288 street vendors, counter sales, and other non-usps paid distribution 4 Other classes mailed through the usps 0 0 c Total paid distribution 25,587 26,407 d Free or nominal rate distribution 1 Outside-county as stated on form 3541 67 44 2 In-county as stated on form 3541 0 0 3 Other classes mailed through the usps 0 0 4 Outside the mail 8,441 4,684 e Total free or nominal rate distribution 8,508 4,728 f Total distribution 34,095 31,135 g Copies not distributed 2,282 1,048 h Total 36,377 32,183 i % Paid and / or requested circulation 75% 85%

CHRISTIAN WIMAN, EDITOR back page

December 1912

Readers of the third issue of Poetry received an unexpected Christmas present in the form of the first English-language publication of poems by the Bengali writer, musician, and artist Rabindranath Tagore (translated by himself), who would, in the following year, become the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s appearance in the magazine marked an “event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry” according to Ezra Pound in an introduction that accompanied the poems. In pri- vate letters to Harriet Monroe, Pound as the magazine’s “foreign correspondent” used the language of a big city journalist, proclaim- ing Tagore’s work “The Scoop ... the event of the winter ... the only real fever of excitement among the inner circle of literature that I’ve ever seen here.” While Pound came across as giddy in his awareness that Poetry had acquired “six poems at least” while “nobody else will have any,” Tagore seemed “only vaguely aware of the seething liter- ary wire-pulling that swishes beneath his Olympus.” Tagore would receive a copy of the December 1912 issue from his son, who was then a student at the University of Illinois. A visit to Urbana in January 1913 led to a trip north to Chicago where Tagore became one of the first visitors to Poetry’s office at 543 Cass Street. The awarding of the Nobel Prize later that year was followed by Tagore receiving a knighthood from the British Empire in 1915, solidifying his position in English as well as Bengali literature. The December 1912 issue also contained poems by William Butler Yeats, who would write the in- troduction to Tagore’s Gintanjali: Song Offerings (1912), and John Reed, who would die in Soviet Russia in 1920, a year after Tagore re- nounced his knighthood in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

Paul Durica