July /August 2013

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

July / August 2013

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccii • number 4 CONTENTS

July / August 2013

POEMS fanny howe 299 Yellow Goblins christina davis 300 From “Mankindness” phillis levin 304 Lenten Song seán hewitt 306 Ancestry michael ryan 307 I Self-Help A Thank-You Note james galvin 310 Roadside Ditch Natura Morta On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live james longenbach 312 Allegory sandra beasley 316 The Exhibition Was Very Beautiful Flour Is Firm robert thomas 318 The Gift Catchy Tunes bruce bond 322 The Delta wilmer mills 324 Double Vision Diluvian Dream david mason 326 Another Thing scott cairns 327 A Word Dawn at Saint Anna’s Skete Idiot Psalm 12 gowann 330 An Old One Walks emily warn 331 The King and Seer sadiqa de meijer 332 Pastorals in the Atrium Lake Ontario Park Jewel of India steve gehrke 336 The Ships of Theseus philip schultz 338 Greed Age Appropriate anonymous 342 From “Old English Rune Poem” Translated by Miller Oberman david orr 346 Busker with Harp The Big Bad kay ryan 348 Salvations

remembering poets marjorie perloff 351 Allen Ginsberg donald hall 354 Richard Wilbur joshua mehigan 357 James Dickey clare cavanagh 362 Wislawa Szymborska bianca stone 365 Ruth Stone

the view from here laura manuelidis 371 The XYZ of Hearing: The Squid’s Ink roger ebert 373 All My Heart for Speech amy frykholm 376 Earthward hillary chute 379 Secret Labor hank willis thomas 382 Better Speak

comment michael robbins 387 Ripostes

letters to the editor 398 contributors 399 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Consulting Editor christina pugh Art Direction alex knowlton

cover art by marcellus hall “Balcony ( from Kaleidoscope City),” 2009

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Poetry • July / August 2013 • Volume 202 • Number 4

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fanny howe

Yellow Goblins

Yellow goblins and a god I can swallow:

Eyes in the evergreens under ice.

Interior monologue and some voice.

Weary fears, the usual trials and

a place to surmise blessedness.

fanny howe 299 christina davis

From “Mankindness”

Because he, because she, in so far as she (in so far as he) exists

is on the way to battle.

Not what is your name, but what the battle?

300O POETRY 2

“Each one of us has come here and changed” —

is the battle. Born a loved one, borne a loved one.

christina davis 301 3

My father fought in this war, thus I can speak of it. My mother fought in this, thus I can speak. My friends, my lovers have fought, have worn (like the tree) their several directions at once. And I,

in so far as I can say “I”

have fought to be related to these — we strive and strain but also try to ripen the entity of the Other.

302O POETRY 4

We kiss on lips, where the tenses attach.

We enter the conundrum of another’s becoming.

We look for someone who can raise us up again to feet, or near to standing.

We tend in our terrors to forget (we do not store them) felicities.

I try each day to stay near beings, mornings when I am most mild. And may I nothing harm, in case it is them.

christina davis 303 phillis levin

Lenten Song

That the dead are real to us Cannot be denied, That the living are more real

When they are dead Terrifies, that the dead can rise As the living do is possible

Is possible to surmise, But all the stars cannot come near All we meet in an eye.

Flee from me, fear, as soot Flies in a breeze, do not burn Or settle in my sight,

I’ve tasted you long enough, Let me savor Something otherwise.

Who wakes beside me now Suits my soul, so I turn to words Only to say he changes

Into his robe, rustles a page, He raises the lid of the piano To release what’s born in its cage.

If words come back To say they compromise Or swear again they have died,

There’s no news in that, I reply, But a music without notes These notes comprise, still

304O POETRY As spring beneath us lies, Already something otherwise.

phillis levin 305 seán hewitt

Ancestry

The damp had got its grip years ago but gone unnoticed. The heads of the joists feathered slowly in the cavity wall and the room’s wet belly had begun to bow.

Once we’d ripped the boards up, it all came out: the smell, at first, then the crumbling wood gone to seed, all its muscles wasted. You pottered back and to with tea, soda bread,

eighty years shaking on a plastic tray. One by one we looked up, nodded, then slipped under the floor. We moved down there like fish in moonlight, or divers round an old ship.

306O POETRY michael ryan

When did I learn the word “I”? What a mistake. For some, it may be a placeholder, for me it’s a contagion. For some, it’s a thin line, a bare wisp, just enough to be somewhere among the gorgeous troublesome you’s. For me, it’s a thorn, a spike, its slimness a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect: touch it and it becomes what it is: ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy standing upright in his white communion suit and black secret.

michael ryan 307 Self-Help

What kind of delusion are you under? The life he hid just knocked you flat. You see the lightning but not the thunder.

What God hath joined let no man put asunder. Did God know you’d marry a rat? What kind of delusion are you under?

His online persona simply stunned her as it did you when you started to chat. You see the lightning but not the thunder.

To the victors go the plunder: you should crown them with a baseball bat. What kind of delusion are you under?

The kind that causes blunder after blunder. Is there any other kind than that? You see the lightning but not the thunder,

and for one second the world’s a wonder. Just keep it thrilling under your hat. What kind of delusion are you under? You see the lightning but not the thunder.

308O POETRY A Thank-You Note

For John Skoyles

My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent, line drawings that suggest the things they represent, different from any drawings she — at ten — had done, closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in. For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem; for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one. She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card, and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard.

Such love is healing — as you know, my friend, especially when it comes unbidden from our children despite the flaws they see so vividly in us. Who can love you as your child does? Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss owning you now — yet you would be this generous to think of my child. With the pens you sent she has made I hope a healing instrument.

michael ryan 309 james galvin

Roadside Ditch Natura Morta

No one can draw fast enough To capture the cut Iris before its form falls From its former self. But when we passed a patch In the ditch, She told me to stop and she stepped Down, opening her clasp Knife. She spared one iris With an impressionistic Cocoon on its stem And cut the flower beside it. Once home She rendered in a careful hurry. She drew into the night as the iris died. I woke grafted to her In a vague, translucent hammock of dread.

310O POETRY On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live

All those poems I wrote About living in the sky Were wrong. I live on a leaf Of a fern of frost growing Up your bedroom window In forty below.

I live on a needle of a branch Of a cedar tree, hard-bitten, Striving in six directions, Rooted in rock, a cedar Tree made of other trees, Not cedar but fir,

Lodgepole, and blue spruce, Metastasizing like Bacteria to the fan- Lip of a draw to draw Water as soon as it slips From the snowdrift’s grip

And flows downward from Branch to root — a tree Running in reverse. Or I live on a thorn on a trellis — Trained, restrained, maybe Cut back, to hold up

Those flowers I’ve only heard of To whatever there is and isn’t Above.

james galvin 311 james longenbach

Allegory

In the Forest of Wearisome Sadness, Where one day I found myself wandering alone, I met my heart, who called to me, asking me where I was going.

The path was long and straight, row after row of conifers receding To a horizon that because of the geometry Seemed farther than it really was, Like the door at the top of a staircase in Versailles.

But as if the forest’s maker had been offended by elegance, A pile of rocks disrupted the rows: the forest once Had been a field. I remember that field.

I was carried there by my father, beside him My grandfather, who planted the trees. Until they were tall enough to survive, He mowed the field, piling up rocks, taking down brush with a scythe.

How, since I’ve known the forest almost since birth, could I have been lost? Why, since the forest is beautiful, is it not a place of delight?

Repeatedly I asked these questions of my heart, But like a good physician, he elected To keep silent, leaving me to answer for myself.

312O POETRY 2

Late at night, when I’m lying in bed and cannot sleep, My heart reads to me from the Romance of Pleasant Thought. Always I’ve heard the story before, and typically, Since the stories are true, I am their hero.

I’m riding my tricycle on the sidewalk near the house where I was born. Because I am unsupervised, I indulge in what seems at the moment A daring wish: I ride the tricycle beneath a sprinkler.

Immediately I am overcome with remorse. The evidence of my trespass is everywhere to be seen, And for the first time in my life I contemplate a lie.

Would my shirt dry faster if I stood in the sun, where it’s hot, Or in the shade, where cool breezes rustle the leaves?

In the version of this story that appears now In the Romance of Pleasant Thought, I admire not so much my ingenuity As the evidence of my early devotion to empiricism, The way I manage terror by examining how things work.

james longenbach 313 3

It’s done, there’s nothing more to say. My heart is gone from me. Because he has fallen in love He has abandoned me.

It’s pointless making myself uncomfortable over this By being mournful or sad. It’s done, there’s nothing more to say. My heart is gone from me.

He does nothing but mock me. When I tell him pitifully That I cannot live on my own, He does not listen. It’s done, there’s nothing more to say.

After Charles d’Orleans

314O POETRY 4

Imagine you’ve been in love forever, since before you were born. You walk the field. At every third step You scoop out a handful of wheat From the seed bag, scattering it broadcast. As the sun comes up, you’re walking in a golden cloud.

Inside the cloud, time no longer exists. Your back’s not bent, your body is a boy’s.

Outside, since it’s time for wheat, the summer rains are finished. Otherwise it’s oats. Every third year it’s clover. You’re tired of walking, of sowing, tired of being in love.

The advantage to people like you, Though there are many disadvantages, is this: When the earth no longer needs what you can grow

You plant hundreds, then thousands Of seedlings, conifers, trees that bear no edible fruit. You arrange them in rows, you tend them, You’re proud of them. You make the field disappear.

james longenbach 315 sandra beasley

The Exhibition Was Very Beautiful

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 907

The exhibition opened on a rainy Thursday, with cello suite. They hung the paintings to be viewed from both front and back. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings. Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Those visiting the exhibition were encouraged to touch. Captions were available in Braille and audio. The exhibition tasted like cherries. A critic asked if the exhibition was a “facile juxtaposition of ideals.” The mother of the exhibition calls constantly and the father, never. The exhibition has taken to pouring a little scotch in the coffee. When designing layout, remember it is crucial how a bias cut fits at the exhibition’s hips and foot traffic turns to the right, not the left. They hung the sculptures to be viewed from both above and below. They painted the walls a shade of “eggshell, minus calcium.” The exhibition did not consider itself an exhibitionist until the incident at the east window. The exhibition is very sorry and will refund upon request. Stingrays flapped their great gray sail-wings. Luna moths flapped their great green sail-wings. No matter how short a trip, the exhibition packs two pairs of shoes. The exhibition never knows when it is coming home again.

316O POETRY Flour Is Firm

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 4234

Baking two parts flour to one part water could stop a bullet. So good soldiers carried their hardtack over their hearts. Break it down with a rifle butt, flood it, fry it in pig fat to make hellfire stew. Gnaw it raw and praise the juice.

Does wheat prepare for this as it grows, seeking the light in a half-thawed field? Do stalks know their strength is merely in their number? What is ground down we name flour in promise that it will be made useful. Otherwise, it’s just dust.

Sheet iron crackers. Teeth-dullers. Would you call it starving, if a man dies with hardtack still tucked in his pocket? Can you call it food, if the bullet comes only at the moment he gives in and swallows?

sandra beasley 317 robert thomas

The Gift

When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen table in its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it.

Safe from the elements. Protected from rust and more esoteric forms of corrosion.

My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve. I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if I were transparent —

and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guess at the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway.

I took the set into my room, shut the door, determined to master every fork and zugzwang,

that strange position where you’d be safe if only you didn’t have to make a move.

Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at rest in a velvet sack next to its dainty box of bullets. I wouldn’t need many.

And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautiful than the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolled

and cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke. When I finally slit through the layers to open it,

the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastry in baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center.

I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fit my hand: centuries of engineering and design

318O POETRY coming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work. Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art,

I could depend on it. The only other device I own that fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses,

and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them with to wipe the oil from my fingertips

as I dropped the bullets one by one into the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there,

like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closet with a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes.

I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship. If I ever use it, it will be at close range.

It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside. It may be the only way

to get inside someone I love when every other route has been systematically barred.

robert thomas 319 Catchy Tunes

It’s not just this. Every written word is a suicide note. And a love letter, too.

There may be no one to talk to who would get it, but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room,

or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star, will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen

claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him: the genius who said the crashing of planes

into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held, although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option

to not attend and that somewhat diminished its perfection.

I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall before the orchestra played one of his works

that sounded to me like the voices of the parents in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they’d been arguing about real estate.

No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz. His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra,

and she joined him for the interview and said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawn

320O POETRY of their summer house outside Cologne (this was years before he was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper)

and teach them to read each constellation as notes on a stave and to sing

the words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars’ melody: “The dog ran away in the snow” and

“Go get the sleigh in the cellar.” It was a game but it was hard: work and play at once.

Their father explained to them, “God does not write catchy tunes.”

You could tell she meant it to be a charming story, but the audience sat in silence.

Suffer the little children.

robert thomas 321 bruce bond

The Delta

If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore.

You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.

There are laws of heaven and those of place and those who see the sky in the water,

angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house

after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick,

a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.

Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things

you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life.

Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth

outside at night, someone in your family dies. There are laws we make thinking

it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a floodplain by the Mississippi

that once poured slaves upriver to the fields. We are a hurricane in the making.

322O POETRY We could use a magus who knows something about suffering, who knows a delta’s needs.

We understand if you want a widow to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes.

He is not himself anyway and walks barefoot across a landscape that has no north.

Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog, a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind, a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless, than you will ever be.

bruce bond 323 wilmer mills

Double Vision

At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot: “You talk too much!” She’d told her customers That “made” gets “mad” and “poet” goes to “pot” Without the letter e. The “amateurs,” She’d said, “inherit everything: the sand, The stars, the world that only God possesses.”

While washing dishes with a bleeding hand, She’d told them, “through ‘possession’s’ double ‘esses’ There’s a line that cleaves; things come apart; ‘Refrain’ means both ‘hold back’ and ‘go again’; Things join in wholes of which they are a part.”

She “touched” the people. Was it such a sin? Her broken pencil left a double line On my tab, both legible as one design.

324O POETRY Diluvian Dream

All afternoon I walk behind the mower, Imagining, though paradoxically, That even though the grass is getting lower, What I have cut is like a rising sea; The parts I haven’t cut, with every pass, Resemble real geography, a map, A shrinking island continent of grass Where shoreline vanishes with every lap.

At last, the noise and smell of gasoline Dispel my dream. What sea? Peninsulas? They were the lands my inner child had seen, Their little Yucatáns and Floridas.

But when I’m finished, and Yard goes back to Lawn, I can’t help thinking that a world is gone.

wilmer mills 325 david mason

Another Thing

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone, you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy, a mouthing out of silence, a way to see beyond the bedroom where you lie alone. So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud you soloed under, riven by cold gales? And why not be the song of diving whales, why not the plosive surf below the road?

The others are one thing. They know they are. One compass needle. They have found their way and navigate by perfect cynosure. Go wreck yourself once more against the day and wash up like a bottle on the shore, lucidity and salt in all you say.

326O POETRY scott cairns

A Word

For A.B.

She said God. He seems to be there when I call on Him but calling has been difcult too. Painful.

And as she quieted to find another word, I was delivered once more to my own long grappling with that very angel here — still here — at the base of the ancient ladder of ascent, in foul dust languishing yet at the very bottom rung, letting go my grip long before the blessing.

scott cairns 327 Dawn at Saint Anna’s Skete

Agion Oros, 2006

The air is cool and is right thick with birdsong as our bleary crew files out, of a sudden disinterred from three sepulchral hours of prayer into an amber brilliance rioting outside the cemetery chapel. With bits of Greek and English intermixed, the monks invite us to the portico for coffee, παξιμάδια, a shot of cold ρακί. As I say, the air is cool, animate and lit, and in such light the road already beckons, so I skip the coffee, pound the shot, and pocket two hard biscuits. And yes, the way is broad at first, but narrows soon enough.

παξιμάδια — pahximáthia — Greek biscotti; ρακί — rahkeé — Greek grappa

328O POETRY Idiot Psalm 12

A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness

O Being both far distant and most near, O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender Tether binding us together, and binding, yea and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves, Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One whose dire energies invest such clay as ours with patent animation, O Secret One secreting life anew into our every tissue moribund, afresh unto our stale and stalling craft, grant in this obscurity a little light.

scott cairns 329 gowann

An Old One Walks

Snake walks with that old squiggly stick, walks slow down by the waterfall, from stone to stone down by the waterfall, shuffling on his bare feet while dancing on the edge of it. Now shimmer that, now shimmer this, while now just one, an Old One steps the beat of it. How may he walk with that old squirmy stick? Soft, soft he goes, and gathers sun. Soft, soft he goes, he has no bones. Soft, soft he goes, and gathers wind. About his neck, a bone flute hums the flux of it. Something congeals and flows. Snake says, just spirit matters.

330O POETRY emily warn

The King and Seer

The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?” The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.”

The King is a restless seeker. The Seer is a ruler and thief.

I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves. They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing. Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches, which disappear when the tree reaches them.

“Who are you?” the King asks. “It is not like that,” the Seer says.

The Seer leaves the King alone in his throne room and starts walking to China, kicking up gravel, hurrying to find the next king.

On the road between country houses, he stops to listen to trees digging the air for crickets. He wonders whether the King is mad now like the trees, or dancing and recounting the story without an end.

emily warn 331 sadiqa de meijer

Pastorals in the Atrium

The tour has only started when I’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know even as a stumbling sleepwalker: landschap with tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures —

marvelous for painters, says the docent, was the enormity of the sky, rarely cloudless, and she’s already turning to an Italian hillscape when I say wait! this is

my bloodstream, as my finger makes brief unintended contact with the canvas, and then my voice an ambulance I tell her there should be a diagram to indicate the grazing motion, how the grinding molars of the Holsteins make the river go —

or else, self-portrait in the glassing-over eye of a stickleback caged in a jam jar, left too long in the sun —

but now the river is across the room because the docent has ushered me toward an upholstered bench and is murmuring, sit, sit, I have here from the staff room a coffee, here you are —

and I’m making the gesture for no, those fields I ate and was made of live in me, uncloseable parentheses

332O POETRY Lake Ontario Park

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. — General Jeffery Amherst in a letter dated July 16, 1763

Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells. Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine. We fill a pail with sand. The day is robin’s eggshell fine.

My mother’s shoulder had three shallow scars. Shining archipelago. The quiet theaters of our lives. Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow.

Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices. Night sweats without monument. The lake has the sea on its breath. One man has an island.

sadiqa de meijer 333 Jewel of India

From the dim hallway, walls swollen with summer damp.

Concave threshold to the morning’s livid light.

When my father said Gerrard Street East, his voice.

The passing subway tremors upwards, into me, reverberates in ligaments and membranes.

On canvas shoes through minor parks, a pinball in a rudderless machine.

My father, transiently animate. Funny in the ebbing language, bantering with shopkeepers.

A lifeguard pours bleach in the fractured blue wading pool, sloshes it out with her legs.

If I could, I’d view a produce stand as he did, fill a paper bag with dillweed, bitter melon, ladyfingers.

Miraculous reversal poster in the window of the Portuguese apothecary.

Who lived where he never resembled somebody.

Belled, metal restaurant elephant. They’re barely open. The woman fills and seals samosas in the uproar of a standing fan.

I have tea. Father, dayflower, I keep arriving at this dead end where the menu says exotic, stamped with sickle chilis.

The fan blades clatter frantically in their cage. A ghetto blaster spools ghazals.

334O POETRY Her husband, over the counter, shouts: The pavements here are very bad. You must take your walks on the pitch, in circles. This is what all of us do.

sadiqa de meijer 335 steve gehrke

The Ships of Theseus

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians ... for they took away the old planks as they de- cayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Vita Thesel

The answer of course is that the ship doesn’t exist, that “ship” is an abstraction, a conception, an imaginary tarp thrown across the garden of the real. The answer is that the cheap peasantry of things toils all day in the kingdom of language, every ship like a casket of words: bulkhead, transom, mast steps. The answer is to wake again to the banality of things, to wade toward the light inside the plasma of ideas. But each plank is woven from your mother’s hair. The blade of each oar contains the shadow of a horse. The answer is that the self is the glue between the boards, the cartilage that holds a world together, that self is the wax in the stenographer’s ears, that there is nothing the mind won’t sacrifice, each item

336O POETRY another goat tossed into the lava of our needs. The answer is that this is just another poem about divorce, about untombing the mattress from the sofa, your body laid out on the bones of the double-jointed frame, about separation, rebuilding, about your daughter’s missing teeth. Each time you visit now you find her partially replaced, more sturdily jointed, the weathered joists of her childhood being stripped away. New voice. New hair. The answer is to stand there redrawing the constellation of the word daughter in your brain while she tries to understand exactly who you are, and breathes out girl after girl into the entry- way, a fog of strangers that almost evaporates when you say each other’s names. Almost, but not quite. Let it be enough. Already, a third ship moves quietly toward you in the night.

steve gehrke 337 philip schultz

Greed

My ocean town struggles to pick up leaves, offer summer school, and keep our library open. Every day now more men stand at the railroad station, waiting to be chosen for work. Because it’s thought the Hispanics will work for less they get picked first, while the whites and blacks avoid the terror in one another’s eyes. Our handyman, Santos, who expects only what his hands earn, is proud of his half acre in Guatemala, where he plans to retire. His desire to proceed with dignity is admirable, but he knows that now no one retires, everyone works harder. My father imagined a life more satisfying than the one he managed to lead. He didn’t see himself as uneducated, thwarted, or bitter, but soon-to-be rich. Being rich was his right, he believed. Happiness, I used to think, was a necessary illusion. Now I think it’s just precious moments of relief, like dreams of Guatemala.

338O POETRY Sometimes, at night, in winter, surrounded by the significant silence of empty mansions, which once were cottages, where people lived their lives, and now are owned by banks and the absent rich, I like to stand at my window, looking for a tv’s futile flickering, always surprised to see instead the quaint, porous face of my reflection, immersed in its one abundance.

philip schultz 339 Age Appropriate

Sometimes, mystified by the behavior of one of my sons, my wife will point out if it’s age-appropriate, making me wonder why I still shout at ballplayers on tv and argue with the dead. Last week, my oldest son, with a wild pitch, turned my left ankle into an eggplant. I didn’t yell at the doctors who refused my insurance, or get angry with a friend who told me to soak it in bourbon and garlic. No, I read Montaigne who said self-revelation is the purpose of discourse, which, in his day, meant knowing whether to be flattered if a friend didn’t use a food-taster, or amused if a witch cast a spell of weeping on an in-law. Blaise Monluc, the king’s lieutenant general during the civil wars, Montaigne says, threw so many hanged Protestants down a well you could reach in and touch the top one’s head. Yes, Monluc, who was fond of saying “When the scaffolds are full, use trees,” knew what was appropriate. On occasion I’ll run into a lobby to avoid greeting a friend,

340O POETRY not because my mind vanishes and I can’t remember his name, which is true, but because I must flee what is darkest in me. In other words, when evicted from a strange lobby into a stranger street, where every scaffold is full and bodies dangle in the long blue sorrow of the afternoon, without context, explanation, or sympathy, it’s good to know, even momentarily, how to live, among the relevant, the passionate, and the confused.

philip schultz 341 anonymous

From “Old English Rune Poem”

F i (feoh) Wealth is a comfort to every man yet every man must divide it mightily If he wishes to have the measurer’s mercy

u ii (ur) The ox is steady-hearted and over-horned A fierce and famous beast it fights with horns Glorious moor-stepper that is a noble creature

R v (rad) Riding is mild for warriors at their hearthsides and strong-bold for he mounted on the back of a mighty horse over a distance measured in miles

G vii (gyfu) A gift is the grace and praise of men and warmth and worthship to all exiles sustenance for him who is stripped of all else

W viii (wyn) Joy is won by whoever knows little of woe sourness or sorrow and who has for himself breath and bliss and fullness and a fortified place

n x (nyd) Need is bound in the breast yet nonetheless becomes for the sons of men a help and healing both if they heed in time

z xv (eolxh) Elk-sedge is found most often in a fen it waxes in water and wounds severely burns in the blood of each man’s body who with his hand takes hold of it

342O POETRY m xx (man) Man in mirth is dear to his kin yet must every one betray the other for that reason the Lord dooms wretched flesh be taken by the earth

Translated from the Old English by Miller Oberman

anonymous 343 Translator’s Note

All surviving Old English texts are, in varying ways, mysterious to contemporary readers and scholars, and the “Old English Rune Poem” comes with its fair share of mystery. In addition to there being no known author of the poem, there is no surviving medieval copy. The only known copy of the “Rune Poem” was in Cotton MS Otho B.X, folio 165. In 1731, the Cottonian Library was moved to Ashburnham House, which was devastated by fire in that same year (the name of the house itself suggesting it may not have been the best place to keep flammable items). Luckily, a handwritten copy had been made early in the eighteenth century. This copy also was lost (to a different fire), but not before it was copied by George Hickes, who published a print edition in 1705 in his Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus. In its entirety, the “Old English Rune Poem” consists of twenty- nine stanzas, one for each of the runic symbols comprising the futhorc alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons. I have tried here to stay as close as possible to the literal bones of the poem, while at the same time attempting to make it sing in modern English as I believe it does in the Anglo-Saxon. Naturally, that’s impossible. One challenge particular to Old English translation is the loss of the references that those poets gained through compound words. The landscape of Old English poetry has a spare and muscular beauty because compound word formations hold incredible amounts of poetic information. Rune xv, for example, “eolxh” or z, is used as part of the compound word “eolxh-secg,” generally translated to mean a kind of marsh grass, perhaps favored by elk: “elk-sedge.” “Eolxh” is the genitive singular form of “eolh” or “eolc”: an elk. “Secg” can mean a reed or sedge, but it also carries the meaning “the cutting thing.” “Secg” contains the word “ecg,” or “edge,” and can mean “sword,” or the one who wields it: a warrior. In the context of the “Rune Poem,” then, the “eolxh-secg” carries traces of a personifica- tion that is eroded by translation. In rune xv, the grass is described as wounding every “beorna” who touches it. The “eolxh-secg,” as a compound word, can almost be imagined as grass swords, turning the fen into an army with swords held aloft.

344O POETRY Old English is a language that existed for a relatively short time, and many of its poems take as their subject or metaphor the collision of an older warrior culture with the new Christian faith. The “Old English Rune Poem” surely takes its place on that same battlefield, where the poet has set himself the task of adopting, saving (or co- opting) for use the pagan runes, and so it seems important to let as much of his efforts shine through as possible. In service to this goal I have, wherever possible, tried to use only the caesura as punctuation, as there was relatively little punctuation in Old English verse. Pure transparency being impossible, there are places where in this and other of my efforts, the fruits of my own labor “gedreosaþ:” fall or fail. — mo

miller oberman 345 david orr

Busker with Harp

For a birth

The fact of the harp swells into the air, Alien and familiar and entirely too large, An elephant lost in the suburbs, And opens with its cry a strange passage

Between the harp itself, the fragile harp, And the almost guilty knowledge Of the stroke of luck that brought it here And the care with which it must depart.

346O POETRY The Big Bad

At last we decoded the terminal message, Only to find the pattern we had expected Was false — a false trail of false bread crumbs Designed to leave pitfalls undetected.

We found a new pattern. We found a hand Moving pieces we had thought were only Part of the board, and shifting them to vantage points We had ignored. We rewrote the battle plan

And reconfigured the satellite array To show our progress from the very beginning. The fault should be traceable — and hence correctable — And once we found it, we’d be winning.

We found a new pattern. We followed its track To a forest beside an abandoned tunnel Diving wide as a boxcar into the rock. A stale breeze blew over rusting shovels

And all of our instruments confirmed a hit. We set a perimeter. We sent in a scout. From the interior, nothing looked back at us. No tracks indicated a force had come out.

But we had a pattern. At dawn, we dispatched A team of our best, our trackers and stone killers, To see if the signals were finally a match And if so, to counterattack. And now we wait.

And now we wait. The tunnel gives nothing back. The trees are revealing the first signs of gold But the air is unmoving. The air is still. It is quiet here, and getting cold.

david orr 347 kay ryan

Salvations

Like hope it springs eternal, existing in discrete but spherical units, a mist of total but encapsulated salvational events. If any two of these bubbles bang against each other no walls collapse or double to a larger chamber unlike the halls of soap.

348O POETRY remembering poets

marjorie perloff

Allen Ginsberg

June 1993: the National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine at Orono was holding a large conference on the poetry of the thirties. Most of those attending stayed in the dorms on campus or the motels close by, but about ten of us were put up in an upscale country inn some ten miles from the university. One of my inn-mates was Allen Ginsberg, who had been invited to pay homage to the ninety-year-old Carl Rakosi and of course to give some readings as well. Allen attended every session dutifully. But in the late evenings, he turned to his real preoccupation: the analysis of prosody. Around midnight, he would appear in the lounge and engage whoever was present in a series of language games, centering on the metrics of Ezra Pound. I soon became one of Allen’s partners in crime. He would recite a line from the Cantos and I would help him figure out how to scan it. Throughout these sessions, he was friendly but aloof: I was never quite sure he knew who I was though we had shared the stage at various events at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York and had corresponded for some time about his archive, which I helped bring to Stanford. In this, the last decade of his life (he died in 1997), Allen looked for all the world like a post-wwii college professor: navy blue blazer, red tie, white shirt, neat laced Oxfords, slicked-back short black hair. I always marveled that this super-famous radical provocateur-poet had adopted such a deceptive appearance. But was it deceptive? Not really, when we remember that back in his Columbia days Allen was always trying to impress Lionel Trilling, sending the famous professor poems and waiting for his approbation. And by the eighties, when his Beat credentials were no longer in question, Allen actually did become a college professor, teaching at the Naropa Institute, later Naropa University. His lectures on poetry and poetics are now available online at the Naropa website. This past week, I have been listening to these lectures and marveling at Allen’s interest in the minutiae of prosody. In July 1987, for instance, there’s Allen, explaining to his class what a molossus is: a foot of three long syllables in a row used in Greek quantitative meter. His example is the following line from Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly:

marjorie perloff 351 / / / / / Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid

where the first three words constitute a molossus and the last two a spondee. But, Allen explains, a molossus is a term referring to length, not stress, and he proceeds to define long versus short syllables and to distinguish quantitative metrics from the stress prosody of English. In Pound’s poetry, he argues, quantity and stress are in tension. Then Allen refers to Pound’s citation from Basil Bunting, “dichten=condensare,” and explains why “my grandmother’s glasses” is a much better phrase than the prolix “the glasses of my grandmother.” Get rid, he insists, “of the draggy extra bullshit.” Pound was always, for Ginsberg,

the first poet to open up fresh new forms in America after Walt Whitman — certainly the greatest poet since Walt Whitman ... the man who in his supreme savant investigations of vowels went back to the great musicians of Renaissance times to hear how they heard vowels and set them to music syllable by syllable.

Again and again, Allen pays homage to Old Ez, even though Pound knew nothing of Ginsberg’s own poetry. But back to Orono. In the lounge over coffee or tea (no alco- hol, no drugs), Allen read Pound’s “I Vecchi” (“They will come no more / The old men with beautiful manners”) against some extracts from Greek poetry, trying out various ways of reading a given line. He never let up: the intensity could be a bit overwhelming for the rest of us. And when we asked him what he had thought of this or that speaker at the conference, he would nod impatiently and say “fine,” only to return, as quickly as possible, to his own experiments with rhythm and meter. He wanted to include us all in his project but had little interest in our own work. His was, so to speak, a one-way street but it was certainly not a vacant or dull one. The next time (sadly, the last time) I saw Allen was under very different circumstances. One Friday morning in the spring of 1996, I was doing my weekly marketing at Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades. Gelson’s is the very incarnation of Allen’s “A Supermarket in California”: “What peaches and what penumbras!” What “brilliant stacks of cans following you!” It’s a kind of food museum with all its

352O POETRY gorgeous fruits and vegetables, its gleaming meat and fish displays, its cornucopias of exotic cheeses. I wandered down to the deli and took a number to wait my turn when I noticed that there, standing on the sidelines, was a hunched up little figure who looked familiar. It was Allen, waiting for Stanley Grinstein (the well-known L.A. art patron who, with his wife Elyse, had founded the Gemini G.E.L. Gallery) to finish his shopping. Los Angeles is a cruel town when it comes to accolades for the famous. No one in Gelson’s so much as glanced over at Allen. I went up to give him a hug, and we strolled up and down the aisles, chat- ting. He was spending a few days with the Grinsteins while hoping to make a video with Dennis Hopper. He looked tired, unwell, and somewhat distracted, and I thought of his description of “Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” But even eyeing grocery boys now seemed too much of an effort. In front of the bakery counter, Stanley Grinstein found us, and Allen said goodbye and toodled off into the sunlight. No one in Gelson’s had recognized him. I never saw him again. Since that time, whenever I reread “Howl” or “Sunflower Sutra” or “America,” I see, beneath the bravado of all that ‘”yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories,” the scholarly, learned, almost pedantic “rose rabbi,” who parsed Pound’s lines to anyone who would listen, and who, in the California supermarket, which he had, so many years earlier, turned into an icon, stood isolate in the crowd, dreaming, no doubt, of that “lost America of love” that had always escaped him.

marjorie perloff 353 donald hall

Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur is the author of a poem reprinted on the back of a pack- age of breakfast cereal. “A Wood” decorates the recycled paperboard container of an organic granola which calls itself “Absolutely Nuts.”

•

When I was a freshman at Harvard, I read in the New Yorker one of Louise Bogan’s adroit and decorous poetry reviews. She praised a first book of poems by Richard Wilbur. The name was new to me and I was stunned by the quoted poetry’s wit, intelligence, and precision. “Tywater” spoke of a soldier killed in the war — Wilbur was an infan- tryman, 1942–5, at Anzio, in France and Germany — whose

body turned To clumsy dirt before it fell.

And what to say of him, God knows. Such violence. And such repose.

I crossed Mass Ave. to Gordon Cairnie’s Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where I bought The Beautiful Changes. A year later I met Wilbur while he was a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows — which gave him three years of unfettered time. I was twenty, sodden with admiration, and showed him what I was trying to write. In turn he let me see the poems that would become his second book, Ceremony. Now he is ninety-two, still writing beautiful poems, co-teaching one term a year at Amherst, and looking approximately forty-seven- years-old. His appearance and demeanor have always resembled his work — handsome, formal, warm, wry, and as dandified as the curls of his studied italic hand. His wife (Charlotte Ward, known as Charlee) told me about first meeting his family. When the couple parked outside the New Jersey house of Wilbur’s childhood, Charlee watched a young fellow skip down the stairs, dressed in tennis whites and carry- ing a racquet. It was Wilbur’s father — and Charlee told me, “I knew what I was in for.” She aged like a human being, and died in 2007.

354O POETRY Robert Lowell had published Lord Weary’s Castle, his magnificent, aggressive, iambic thunderstorm, a year before Wilbur’s first book. “Wilbur and Lowell” became the young poets at the center of the universe, in line for Pulitzers, Guggenheims — all the prizes cited in introductions at poetry readings. But reputations soar and crash, flash and fizzle — then come to life again. In 1959 W.D. Snodgrass walked naked in Heart’s Needle, acknowledging desperate personal feeling. Sylvia Plath wrote powerful poems, devastating and enraged, about things usually private, then killed herself. Lowell’s work altered entirely, from majestic pentameters to the swift free verse of For the Union Dead, and “Skunk Hour” with “my mind’s not right.” In the forties, when we first met, I remember Wilbur saying that he was not about to spill out his guts for anybody. In the heyday of confessional- ism, Wilbur’s reticence was grounds for dismissal. There is nothing wrong, I hope, in writing out of your own life. If there is, we are not permitted to admire Wordsworth. But the seventeenth century, the greatest moment of English poetry, rarely provided a display of one’s guts. Milton wrote a sonnet on his blind- ness, but Andrew Marvell was not conducting a courtship in “To His Coy Mistress.” If we must mention something so vulgar as a subject, I suppose Marvell wrote about death. The poem also defines itself as tetrameter couplets, always octosyllabic, that bow to each other like courtiers, line by line, and within each line by caesuras — until it ends with a monstrous enjambment swooping to the poem’s conclusion. But I write about acquaintance, not about prosody. I omit speaking of Wilbur’s many translations, major work, especially his immaculate, hilarious, and popular renderings of Molière. I attended the first production of The Misanthrope, and have continued to see Richard Wilbur. We have read together, served on committees, corresponded, and Charlee and Dick came calling at my house. For me, the early memories remain most notable. Sixty years ago, he was generous to talk to an incipient poet ripe with ambition and incompetence. I brought him the draft of a blank verse poem which I considered finished. Wilbur praised it but gently noted that it didn’t end. (I went back to it.) Meanwhile he showed me the poems of Ceremony as he wrote them, and the way he worked astonished me. He showed me some stanzas under the title “A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” (a sentence from Traherne), lines that mocked and entertained asceticism. It began, “The tall camels of the spirit / Steer for their deserts.” When

donald hall 355 he first showed it to me, it occupied half a page, twelve lines and a fragment, inked by a Bic, in handsome, complex rhymed stanzas with lines of differing length. It stopped mid-line mid-stanza, at a semicolon; Wilbur was stuck. For a month or two, whenever I dropped by, I asked about the progress of his tall camels. They remained stalled. One day he handed me the completed poem, twenty- eight lines on the same piece of paper, continued in pencil after the blue semicolon, without a word crossed out. This beautiful, deft poem — clear and complex in thought, rhymed and metered with art — took one draft, over a month or so. I expressed my amazement. He told me he did a lot of walking up and down.

356O POETRY joshua mehigan

James Dickey

One hot summer afternoon in 1996, as I stood in my underwear ironing shirts and watching daytime tv in my tiny Brooklyn apart- ment, the telephone rang. I answered it without lowering the volume on the television, then returned quickly to the ironing board, where I’d left a cigarette burning. “Mr. Mehigan?” the caller asked. I tried to answer but had walked too far for the cord and the hand- set sprang from between my ear and shoulder and bounced across the wood floor. I scrambled to get it. “Hello?!” I said. “Hello,” said the caller, calm. “Sorry!” I said. “I —” “Mr. Mehigan?” interrupted the voice. “Yes?” I said. Silence. “Is this Joshua Mehigan?” the caller asked. “Yep,” I said, letting a touch of absurdity creep into my tone. “Can I help you?” “— — Mr. Mehigan?” “Yes, who’s this, please?” “Mr. Mehigan, this is Apollo.” I kept quiet while I decided whether or not to hang up. “Uncle George?” I asked. “No, Apollo,” corrected the caller, gently. I now discerned he was from the southeast, past seventy, and might really be my mother’s uncle George, who had a funny sense of humor. But he pronounced my name “Me-again.” Then I remembered giving out my contact information at a poetry reading the previous weekend. “Is this about the reading on Thirteenth Street?” I asked. “No,” said the voice, still calm but faintly disappointed. “Mr. Mehigan, this — this is Apollo ... God of Poetry!” I stood for a long five seconds as the caller softly repeated himself like a game-show host offering a hint. I had no idea who it was but wasn’t going to hang up now.

joshua mehigan 357 •

Two days earlier, I’d written James Dickey about his essay collection From Babel to Byzantium. He didn’t know me. I was twenty-six, working at my first office job, and looking for intelligent, readable poetry criticism. I’d bought Dickey’s book at a Washington Square book table and couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered writing him. Poems like “The Sheep Child” and “The Heaven of Animals” had helped draw me into poetry when I was nineteen. I’d recited “Falling,” Dickey’s four-page account of a stewardess’s plunge from an airplane, to my girlfriend, my friends, my mother. But Dickey had seemed too big to pester. With Deliverance, his ap- peal had long ago reached beyond the self-regarding duchy of poetry into the vistas of popular fiction and Hollywood, and onward into my tenth-grade locker room, where two kids shouted “Squeeeaaal!” as they shoved a chubby boy onto the floor. Dickey had even played Sheriff Bullard in the movie. Where poetry was concerned, he’d read at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, won the National Book Award, and served the Library of Congress as poetry consultant. Another thing stopped me from writing him, too. As I think even Dickey recognized, he was a writer of baffling inconsistency. Whenever I started to feel sure of him, I’d find a poem that really made me wonder. The same went for his fiction. After tearing through Deliverance in a day, I’d spent five minutes frowning over Alnilam in the Strand before returning it to the shelf. But then I’d read From Babel to Byzantium. As a recent mfa graduate, I ate up its decisiveness and trenchancy, both qualities that seemed wanting in the criticism of that time. “I like this book,” I thought, “and must therefore notify its author!” I had not, however, expected him to call me up and impersonate Apollo. In fact, any reply had seemed improbable. It’s embarrassing now to admit that when I finally realized whom I was talking to, I dropped to my knees, made a high-pitched sound, and swore, and just about started crying. Despite this display, he spoke to me, on his dime, for an hour and a half. For weeks, the notes I took sat on my floor, where they were damaged by shoes and, appropriately, spilled whiskey. I later tacked the mess to my wall, then lost it. By and large, he was funny and charming, surprisingly gentle in his manner, and also very sharp. These qualities I remember in the abstract. I don’t know what I’d read, to that point, about Dickey’s reputa- tion as a “creative liar.” Having been raised in a family of both Irish

358O POETRY and Georgian raconteurs and bullshitters, I pretty quickly got the odor and was pretty quickly reconciled to it. Conversation began with more impressive affairs than poetry. Dickey told me the Coen brothers were starting on a film of his novel To the White Sea. “Have you heard of them?” he asked. Then he flattered me by pretending earnestly to solicit my opinion about whether or not Tom Cruise would make a good lead. I didn’t bother saying I thought Tom Cruise was ridiculous. (The film, which was real, halted production in 2002. They’d cast Brad Pitt.) In general, my disposition throughout the conversation was of excited compliance, as if Dickey were a favorite but overweening and half-loaded grandparent. Movie talk led to discussion of Deliverance, and Dickey went straight into what he must’ve thought everyone wanted to know. He said Burt Reynolds was a great guy and, asking if I played guitar, told me about his composition of “Dueling Banjos,” which he did not compose. But poetry, he said, engaged him above all else. Our conversation, perhaps following the tone I’d established in my letter, was pessi- mistic. We commiserated about all the flat language in contemporary poetry and the assumption that writing lyric poems is a question primarily of inspiration. He surprised me by complaining that almost no one knew anything about traditional technique anymore, and that most who did had nothing to say. He mainly wanted to talk about his generation, but he began with me, since of course I’d included a couple of poems with my letter. His praise was brazenly exces- sive, but also irresistible. He invited me to study at the University of South Carolina. Released by now from the exigencies of reality, I answered earnestly that I would. I felt like one of the shaky old women who has just won a million dollars in the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Then, before the flood of adrenaline could abate, he moved on to the poets of his generation — managing, through his dim assessment of a dozen great mid-century poets, to put any praise of me into serious question. After a while, I realized that the truth might matter less than the glee of competitive sniping. He compared Richard Wilbur to a southern girl “who moved up north for school and someone said, ‘Don’t ever lose that accent!’ and she didn’t.” He allowed that Sylvia Plath had written good poems but referred to her as “the Judy Garland of American Poetry.” He admitted that James Merrill was an accomplished poet but added that he was also damag- ingly overrated by “the New York Homosexual Mafia.” He paused. “You’re not a homosexual, are you, Joshua?”

joshua mehigan 359 “No ... ” I answered. He continued talking, mostly about poetry, but over the next several minutes asked again if I were gay. Then, with that question in the air, he asked if I wouldn’t mind sending him a photograph. “I like to see who I’m dealing with,” he explained, suddenly seeming to grow cautious. Despite the Merrill comment, and the fact that he was willing to play in such a dumb way to a stranger, my impression wasn’t that Dickey was a hardened bigot. It also wasn’t that I was being cruised, as a couple of friends later suggested. That he was fixated on issues of conventional masculinity everyone knows. That he might be uncomfortable with homosexuality and comfortable saying so should probably shock no one, if American poets are anything like ordinary Americans. My guess is that if I’d said I was gay, he would’ve spluttered and then said something else to keep the mutual admiration flowing. Conversation returned to his generation of poets. “Well, Joshua. I think it’s clear that I was the best poet of my generation. Don’t you?” At this, my mouth dropped open for no one to see. I swallowed, and I told him just what he wanted to hear: “Yes. Yes. You are.” When it was time to end the conversation, Dickey mentioned matter-of-factly that he was tired because he was sick, which I hadn’t known. “But you sound so well!” I said. “Son,” he began, with serene wisdom. “I was drunk in some capac- ity every day for twenty-six years, and I smoked two packs a day for longer.” He told me about his jaundice and pulmonary fibrosis and confided calmly that he was often weak. He made me promise to quit smoking and mentioned again, as a fait accompli, my enrollment at his school. I offered a profusion of sincere gratitude, he stammeringly demurred, and that was that. That afternoon I told my girlfriend and parents, who had seen Deliverance, that James Dickey had called me and I was going to try to go south to study with him. I told my friends, who might’ve thought I was lying. A month later, I wrote one of my college teachers, who answered with tales that made Dickey’s household sound like the “Gimme Shelter” montage from Goodfellas. He also said that Dickey was deathly ill and that I should probably reconsider South Carolina. It wasn’t long before someone else told me another thing I didn’t want to hear. A second old teacher, hearing my prize story, responded with a lift of the eyebrows and a half-smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Dickey does that kind of thing all the time. He was probably just drunk.”

360O POETRY This had a predictable effect. But in the ensuing years I found that, as Dickey’s biographer Henry Hart recently wrote in Salmagundi, “Everyone, it seemed, had a ‘Dickey story.’” After I’d heard a number of others, and after I’d retired mine because of them, Dickey came up in conversation at a poetry conference. A close friend and I each dis- covered that Dickey had once called the other out of the blue. Finally this spring, one of the editors to whom I pitched this remembrance told me of numerous phone calls he’d received from Dickey, whom he remembers with both fondness and fear. In the end, it could seem unreasonably easy to get a telephone call from James Dickey. This, of course, is only an illusion. As an entrée to contemporary poetry, and as an entrée to oneself, one might cultivate a curiosity about the meaning of such an illusion. The January after Dickey called me, a friend greeted me in a bar with the New York Times. “Did you see about your friend?” he said, a little archly, spreading Dickey’s obituary on the bar. Fifteen years later, what matters most to me is the fact of the call. A big-deal writer, some of whose writing I loved, had read my letter, gotten my number from directory assistance, and called me up to talk. Whatever else was going on, I lived on the excitement for months. I’ve paid schools to do far less. Most poets could hope that, when they are old, past repair, and needful themselves, they trump their own self-interest and make some irrelevant kid feel less hope- less about trying.

joshua mehigan 361 clare cavanagh

Wislawa Szymborska

A little over a year ago, I was asked to write something about Wislawa Szymborska for the Polish journal Zeszyty literackie. She’d just died, and it turned out I couldn’t do it. I could talk about her at great length, to some people at any rate, to our beloved editor, Drenka Willen, or the wonderful Mary Schmich of the Tribune, both of whom love her work and use it the way I do, on a daily basis. But I couldn’t write, or couldn’t write much, since writing involved using the past tense in black and white, which meant, in turn, admitting that I was ending this time with a period and not a colon.

if in black on white, at least in thought, or some serious or silly reason, question marks are placed, and if in response, a colon:

That’s how she concludes the last poem of her volume Colon (2005), which my friend Stanislaw Baranczak and I incorporated into Here (2010). (Her books were so short, and so long in coming, that we had to combine them to satisfy American publishers, who generally prefer page counts over thirty.) I wish I could follow her lead. I’d like to keep pretending that a piece of punctuation, a grammatical trick or two, means that she’s still off writing in her little place in Krakow, or maybe up in the mountains with her friends. And the only reason I haven’t seen her recently is geography, Chicago being as it is kawałek drogi, a fair stretch of road, from Krakow. “The conditional is his personal best,” Szymborska writes in “No End of Fun.” This is how I began my piece for Zeszyty literackie last year:

“His” means human speech of course, and the observation comes from an unidentified space alien. I’ve always thought the alien was right. But I’m grateful for something else these days:

362O POETRY the present tense. We can use it in spite of a world that persists in putting things and people we love in the past.

I went on to quote from the innumerable American blogs mourning Wislawa’s death that I found online. It was easier to let other people do the grieving for me. I also wanted people in Poland to understand how much she meant to American readers writing on sites ranging from the Chicago Tribune or the New Yorker to “Between Parents,” “Billy and Dad’s Music Emporium,” “Yoga Studio News,” “Science Updates,” and “South Dakota Politics.” This time, though, I’ll try to be as brave as she was — her poems always tackle things that I can’t handle alone — and venture at last into the past tense. She was the kindest, funniest, most unassuming person I ever met. She may also have been the smartest, although saying that to her face would have killed the conversation instantly. I met her for the first time in Stockholm in 1996. Stanislaw and I had been translating her poems for years, and they were old friends, but she and I had only exchanged the occasional postcard. My knees were shaking: one mistake in Polish and my favorite poet would find out that I was a fake. Or so I thought. I went up to the Nobel Suite at the Grand Hotel to meet her, and the first thing she said to me and her friends was “So what should I steal?” Meaning towels, soap, coat hangers, shoehorns, whatever. We all picked something and made a pile for her. I forget what she finally took. The ceremonies were still a couple of days away. Stanislaw and I had gotten an advance copy of the Nobel lecture: we’d been asked to do the official English translation. Her friends were curious, though; they didn’t know the speech yet, but they knew what she’d said about it. She called it the “mowa do dupy,” the speech for shit. She’d had to kill a poem and a couple of prose sketches to come up with it, she said, since she couldn’t write speeches. I’m guessing the poem was about Ecclesiastes; I’m sorry I’ll never read it. Wislawa hated small talk as much as she hated speeches. But she loved to talk, as long as it wasn’t too small, or too serious. Adam Zagajewski thinks she thought up questions in advance whenever she invited friends over in case the conversation stalled. In hindsight, I realize he was right. “What’s your idea of hell?”: this to a dinner party of translators. I think I said “grading student papers.” I should have said “moving with books.” “Whose monument should be in every city in the world?” That question had a right answer: Louis Pasteur,

clare cavanagh 363 since how many of the people in each of those cities wouldn’t be alive without his discoveries? “Have you ever had a prophetic dream?” she once asked. I had: I’d foretold the death of my best friend’s cat. I nailed that one. She also held her famous after-dinner lotteries, where everybody won a little prize. At the translators’ dinner I won some Italian candy in an Indian Airlines air sickness bag (she’d been collecting international air sickness bags for the occasion). We all competed to find her the best (i.e., most perfectly ridiculous) presents. I remember how disappointed I was at first to see my gifts — a plastic Oscar from a California drug store, an Audubon Society stuffed bird that made authentic loon cries when you squeezed it — turn up later on the shelves at other peoples’ houses. Then I understood. Wislawa regifted; only the best presents didn’t end up as lottery fodder. The last time I saw her, just about two years ago, I gave her a box of Band- Aids shaped like bacon strips, and she asked if she could open it right away. She put one on her wrist, and then couldn’t stop admiring it. I kept thinking she was checking her watch, but no, she was checking her bacon strip. I nailed that one, too. She didn’t write letters, but she sent friends funny postcards that she made herself, collages, a bit like Terry Gilliam meets Joseph Cornell in Polish. Sometimes she wrote a few words on the back. My forty, or sixty, or maybe eighty words from Wislawa are among my greatest treasures. In high school, I got dragged to see the play “The Belle of Amherst,” with Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson. I still remember Dickinson/ Harris stuffing cryptic notes among the muffins she took to neigh- bors: “That’ll keep them guessing,” she said. The danger of writing about Wislawa is that she turns, willy-nilly, into The Belle of Krakow, the wacky, lovable poetess who happened to write some of the greatest poems of her century. There’s too much of that going around in Poland these days and I don’t want add to it here. “Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words, / then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” she writes in “Under One Small Star.” She managed to put weight and lightness together in a few lines of verse and do justice to both. How do you do the same thing for her? I don’t know.

364O POETRY bianca stone

Ruth Stone

There was a period of time after my grandmother’s death when I shuddered every time I saw one of the obituaries. Partly, I didn’t want to see any obituary, no matter what it said — I loved her severely and it felt too final. (The protectiveness and horror I felt at her death surprised even me.) And, on the other hand, I couldn’t bear the mythologies surrounding her life, regurgitated, diluted, and perpetuated. The loudest of them all was how she was “unknown” until well into her eighties, how her husband had committed suicide and she lived in obscure poverty, basically until she won the National Book Award in 2002. While the facts of her life are so important to who she is as a poet, the image of a senior citizen fumbling into success through overblown grief took away from the fact that she led a long life dedicated to poetry. From a relatively early age she was publishing and teaching, surrounded by devoted students, and for as long as I knew her (I am thirty) she lived a life rich with books, friends — and success. I grew up with a single mother of three, just like my own mother had. While Mom struggled to support us with her writing and work, I spent much of my life shuffling around with Grandma to ease the load on Mom. “We’re a pair, you and I,” Grandma would say. “We’re buddies.” Early every morning, she’d be up making coffee and rye toast and blaring npr. I’d sit beside her drinking coffee loaded with vanilla creamer and sugar and listening along. She taught me to read and write early. Immediately I was under the impression that everyone was at least aware of contemporary poetry, if not writing it. One of my most uncomfortable memories was returning to a third grade classroom after missing school and telling the teacher I was sorry but I was at my grandmother’s reading. “Oh!” The teacher replied, with peaked interest. “I didn’t know your grandmother was a palm reader!” Grandma spent most of her time in her house in Goshen, Vermont, high in the Green Mountains, on a winding dirt road. The house is large and creaky, ancient, heated with stoves in the middle of the rooms, and filled to the brim with books and writing. In 1953, Grandma won Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, and she received the Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry in 1956. She used the prize

bianca stone 365 money to purchase the farmhouse, and left only for long winters teaching at suny Binghamton and other places. She is buried behind the house, near the raspberry bushes she ordered from a magazine. When I think of my grandma, I think first of her hair. All my friends’ grandmothers had short gray hair and dressed in crocheted sweaters and nylon pants, doling out grisly low-fat cookies every time you came over, talking of nothing but soap operas and school- work. My grandma had vivid red henna-dyed hair, piled up on top of her head with bobby pins, like Katharine Hepburn. She shouted at police officers or any man who called her “ma’am.” She wore “slacks” and giant button-up shirts and religiously rubbed her face with organic moisturizer. She had an incredible look — 1940s to the hilt. With her long neck and high cheekbones, she was a classy grandma. She loved lying in bed reading P.G. Wodehouse or science books, eating Reese’s Mini Cups and drinking mediocre wine. She had poetry students scrambling around constantly; the most clingy of the bunch she usually let stay for weeks before kicking them out. She was kind, good at praise. But also stubborn and in-your-face. She suffered from constant anxiety. I ran like a literal wild-child in the forests of Vermont, barefoot for whole summers with her, bathing only in the brook. Twice a day she would stand out in the yard with her amazing low-howling voice, used only for getting children who were miles away, deep in their game, to come back and let her know they were still alive. Her voice! There wasn’t a time of day when poetry wasn’t somewhere in her voice and mind. She talked to herself constantly, most of all in the car. On drives down to the store to get supplies, she’d be having a soft conversation with herself, some of which I could hear, and most of which sounded like a poem being assembled. I’d watch, mystified by this process. I distinctly remember that she said once, “Why did you leave me?” In her slow melodic undertone, she was communicating with poetry, and with the dead. “Once I looked out the window and I saw a whole procession of people going by,” she said to me in Goshen. “And then they just disappeared.” Her relationship with the world existed with one arm and foot beyond the veil. Like her poetry, she was extremely present, and yet always elsewhere; in the ether, out in the Milky Way. It haunts me now, as I write this. I have her poems sitting next to me — this woman who wrote so often about death. I couldn’t see just how accurate, how wise those poems were, until I got a glimpse of loss. And the

366O POETRY irony is: it’s her we’ve lost, and she who gives us this darkly glittering guide:

I sit for hours at the window Preparing a letter; you are coming toward me, We are balanced like dancers in memory, I feel your coat, I smell your clothes, Your tobacco; you almost touch me. — From Tenacity

bianca stone 367 the view from here

laura manuelidis

The XYZ of Hearing: The Squid’s Ink

I went into medicine because I love poetry. Untaught poetry, anonymous poetry, not subject to fashionable academic adulation and dismissal. Medicine and its attendant sciences have been a sublime, though sometimes tragic education. Medical education enfolds the entire spectrum of creatures down to their molecular threads, somehow marvelously woven together. It refines every sense, hears hidden murmurs, notices small signs in the curve of blue-blushed fingernails. The art of medicine apprehends the dignity, pleasures, and grievous aspirations of different voices in their timing. If you listen. A mother’s voice is the first call to consciousness in the fluid womb. Her heartbeat Iambe’s meter of your evolution. Her muffled syllables begin time. My mother had a beautiful voice, the perfect pauses of an actress mimicking various accents of the risen and felled world, its timbre a thimble of history. Shakespeare was the issue of the house. Watching Hamlet in public theatre at three, and sitting still for the first time in my life, I apparently told my father that yes, it was a great play because everyone got killed in the end (though it took too long for Hamlet to die). Is there enough time now for any such soliloquy? Twitter has time for vanity but not the bird. For me, poetry is the voice that supersedes vanity. To concen- trate exclusively on “American poetry” can ignore the vast expanse of immigrant sounds bearing punctuated rhythms or haunting, free- floating tunes. Music introduces the meaning, and carries languages both harsh and melodious, its premonitions understood fully only in retrospect. Tell me how you know the patient earth is sick or well in a short glance? By the combinatorial nature of poetry. A reason to memorize poems. To trace their fingerprints. Once part of our heri- tage together, with Charles Ives and spirituals around the piano on whatever instruments we shared at home. As a physician I diagnose the visual patterns of disease, not race, not tribes (unless you consider rebel cells as tribes). I abhor sell- ing by clique. Are you gay, womankind, of a certain age, colored or uncolored, correct Christian or pagan? Or are you merely, remark- ably, human? Another limb of the natural world. As a reader, I want to

laura manuelidis 371 know what you envision when you coax your children to sleep, begin courtly dances of seduction, or — witless and self-betrayed — prepare for another war. So I try to read as widely as possible, to encompass the diverse world of the evocative word — often authored by unadvertised people(s), including the translations of the ancients and the dispersed. And they remain maximally contemporary, though not narrowly personal. Take “The Old Woman of Beare” on age (c. 800, tr. Brendan Kennelly):

I drank my fill of wine with kings, Their eyes fixed on my hair. Now among the stinking hags I chew the cud of prayer.

As a neuroscientist, I also have come to recognize the brain’s need for a narrative of subliminal truth, a perception of the unpredictable unknown over which we have little control. Having been swallowed at fourteen by the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu down to its sun- less sea. Riveted by the environmental and religious carcinogens of Blake (“How the chimney-sweeper’s cry / Every blackening church appalls”). Continuously delighted by the wide joy of Hafiz, first recited to me in 1966 by a who colleague as we walked the lav- ender hills of Tehran, our shadows smaller than Persian miniatures. Laughing at the spontaneous yelps of elation by scientists examining the first photos of nebula dying and being born. Now reading Haitian poetry (in slow French) and Emma Lazarus. Out loud. Also listening in the insomniac hours to the Poetry magazine podcasts, particularly Roberto Sosa and others, several times. Moondog too. Magical an- tidotes. What will I read tomorrow? More. Invasive perspectives. Spun in the womb of the universe.

372O POETRY roger ebert

All My Heart for Speech

Many lines of poetry are so long-embedded in my memory that I find them appearing when I speak or write. Sometimes I am quoting. Sometimes I am unconsciously drawing from the reservoir. Some poets lend themselves to that, because they have found a way to say something important in words that seem almost inevitable. These words for the most part I made no effort to memorize. They simply found a place for themselves, and they stayed. One poem I deliberately set out to memorize. In the eighth grade Sister Rosanne required us all to learn a poem by heart. I was assigned “To a Waterfowl,” by William Cullen Bryant. For years thereafter I regaled listeners with as much of it as they desired:

Whither, ’midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

The only other poet whose work I memorized was E.E. Cummings, because he called out to be heard aloud. That process happened naturally because I read so many of his poems aloud so many times. My undergraduate mentor Daniel Curley told us Cummings’s typogra- phy could act as a guide to reading aloud. In my interpretation it re- sulted in readings a great deal more spirited than Cummings’s own businesslike dispatches. I heard him in a reading once at the University of Illinois. The small bald man with wise eyes was introduced by Curley, came onstage, sat in a chair behind a table that held a water pitcher, a glass, a microphone, and a manila folder of copies of the poems he planned to read. He regarded us. “I will begin,” he announced, “and read for about forty minutes. There will be an intermission. Then I will come back out and read for about half an hour more. There will be no questions.” He read his work as I have heard him read it on recordings. Dry. A brittle lyricism. No attempt to sell or underline the language. He treated it as factual.

roger ebert 373 I’d always imagined the poems more like songs. At the University of Cape Town in 1965, I actually did a performance of Cummings at a smoky quasi-beatnik campus coffee shop, although that was hardly the start of a performing career. The great performer of poetry in my life has been Bill Nack, a classmate at the University of Illinois. Bill later went on to become a much-honored senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the biographer of Secretariat, but to this day he’s always memorizing a new poem or prose passage. When we were freshmen he presented me with the last page of The Great Gatsby, and followed it with the first page, which is not so commonly heard. Bill can go indefinitely, and he would, whenever we met. That inspired my career as an impresario. I devised a program titled “A Concert in Words” for Bill to perform at the annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and again after dinner one night at Rancho la Puerta, a spa we are both fond of in Tecate, Mexico. I wasn’t surprised that the campus event drew a big crowd, but I had my doubts about Rancho. After rising at dawn for a mountain hike, were these people ready for poetry after dinner? We filled a room. Bill dimmed the lights a little and read for an hour, mostly standing in front of the podium without a book. The campers demanded an encore. He read for another thirty minutes. Then he got a standing ovation and they marched on the concierge to demand a second performance. He read the next afternoon for another hour. His selections included Nabokov, Frost, Eliot, Yeats, and Cummings, of course. They enjoyed poetry more than they realized. I envy him his energy and his love of the words. He brings a fresh non-academic enthusiasm to his performances. I think he stirs a dor- mant love of language in many people, in these days when so much flat and lifeless prose is published. Is it unthinkable that today’s grade schools require the memorization of a poem or two? Sister Rosanne assured us we would thank her in later years. When I meet old class- mates from those years, I find she was correct. Another friend of a lifetime is John McHugh, who was born in Sligo, Ireland — Yeats Country. When we met in the late sixties he was a reporter at the Chicago Daily News (where Carl Sandburg had once been the film critic), and I was at the Chicago Sun-Times. John had apparently ingested Yeats in volume, and often on late beery nights he would recite him at O’Rourke’s Pub in Chicago.

374O POETRY I remembered more of it than I realized. One night at the Telluride Film Festival, I was pressed into service to do an onstage interview with Peter O’Toole. We covered many of his films and adventures, and then I said: “I understand you have always wanted to play Jack Yeats.” This was true, and he responded to it with a line or two by W.B. Yeats. They jarred something within me, and I answered with a few more lines of Yeats. Our eyes met, and something clicked. He quoted some more Yeats, and then I did, and we went on for ten minutes or so, and he laughed and said, “Well, I think we’ve done our job.”

roger ebert 375 amy frykholm

Earthward

Rusanna and I sit at my linoleum-topped kitchen table with the oven door propped open for heat. On the table in front of us are half- drunk cups of sugared tea and copies of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Uzh Skol’ko Ikh (Already how many). Rusanna is coaching me to read it in Russian. She is a painstaking teacher of pronunciation, correcting all of my soft and hard ts, my improperly rounded vowels, my strewn accents. But she is also moody and distractible. She interrupts our lesson to say, “Tell me about how American men make love.” When I confess that, at twenty-one, I have never had any lovers, American or otherwise, she scoffs and then pouts, “Why don’t you tell me the truth? I tell you everything. Everyone knows that American girls have more lovers than anyone.” Disappointed in love, Rusanna imagines that the country of Montana and John Wayne has men to equal her passion. She takes my reticence on the subject as selfish — I want all the men for myself, she says. We reach this impasse again and again. In our youth and vanity, we are like the poem’s speaker:

All will grow cold that once sang and struggled glistened and rejoiced the green of my eyes, the gold of my hair my gentle voice

Rusanna is Armenian. My kitchen table is in Estonia, where Rusanna is raising her daughter and I am teaching English. We are studying Russian almost covertly because both of us know that Estonian would be more useful and certainly more politically correct. But both of us have also become obsessed with the idea that I might pronounce myagkiznak with just the right softness. Truth be told, Rusanna hates the Estonian language, Estonian winters, and not least of all, Estonian men, whom she finds cold and unfeeling. I have become her repository for these complaints on the long, dark nights of winter, and in the meantime I recite and memorize Uzh

376O POETRY Skol’ko Ikh until its forms are so familiar I feel they have entered my cells. The door to the Russian language creaks open under Rusanna’s instruction, and I whisper the words of the poem on the bus, at the market, and as I fall asleep. I did not grasp at first that Russian would be best learned through its poetry. I memorized grammar structures and vocabulary lists. I treated the language like a fill-in-the-blank exercise, but when I arrived in Russia for the first time in my junior year of college, com- munication eluded me. After two years of study, no one understood me when I ordered bread at a bakery or wished a friend happy birthday. Near despair, I sat one day in phonetics class while the teacher tried to prod her American students to hear the melodies of the Russian language. We rehearsed the same sentence over and over again, testing different intonation patterns. Suddenly I understood. Russian was first and foremost a music. To speak it, you had to learn to sing it. The Russian language and Russian poetry are inextricably linked. Russians memorize dozens of poems. They employ poems in arguments and recite them on street corners. Their poets are beloved authorities on any subject. In 1991, when I went to study in a pro- vincial Russian city, I was invited to an elementary school so that the children could meet an actual American. “Be alert, children,” the teacher said. “This will be the only opportunity you may ever have to see an American.” Then she demanded that I recite a poem in English so they could hear my “American speech.” I did not know how to explain that Americans don’t typically recite poems — maybe nursery rhymes, maybe a line or two memorized in high school. But beyond “Hickory Dickory Dock,” we are an impoverished people. To my relief, I had recently, in a lovesick state, memorized Robert Frost’s “To Earthward,” and I was able to recite at least part of it while the children stared at me uncomprehendingly. They sensed the lack of authority I brought to the recitation. It was that, as much as the foreign language, that befuddled them. I have never stopped turning to Russian poems. Tsvetaeva was the first. But like a dog with a bone, I bury Russian poems in my subcon- scious and bring them out to chew on. I’ve buried Anna Akhmatova’s simple, earthy phrases like those she wrote upon learning of the arrest of her son:

amy frykholm 377 U menya sevodnya mnogo delo: Nado pamyat’ do kontsa ubit’, Nado, chtob dusha okamenela Nado snova nauchit’sya zhit’

Today I have a lot to do I must destroy all my memory I must turn my soul to stone I must learn again how to live —From The Sentence

Or Mandelstam’s aching fluidity, or the poem-songs of Yuri Shevchuk from the rock group DDT. Whenever I am lonely or tired, have a painful commute, cannot sleep, or lose the thread of my life, these poems, written in a language that even after two decades of study I only slightly comprehend, serve as touchstones. My very inability to master their meanings or even to perfect my ts serves a mysterious, orienting purpose beyond the knowledge of my mouth or consciousness. These poems stir what the visionary Julian of Norwich called my “love-longing.” They remain always just beyond my reach.

378O POETRY hillary chute

Secret Labor

I’m in a slightly unusual and generally fun position: I’m an English professor who writes about comics. This is a form that many people find captivating and many other people don’t even want to understand. My ongoing goal, to put it one way, is to articulate a formal and theoretical glossary for comics: what is the form’s grammar, syntax, “secret language” (to use a phrase of Art Spiegelman’s)? One thing I am always thinking about, then, is the relationship of comics to other forms, a kind of comparative media aesthetics. When I was starting out my research, I kept asking myself why I was so drawn to comics: was this form like anything I knew? The connection between music and comics comes to mind immediately. Cartoonist Chris Ware, in a sketchbook published in 2003, offers the following small but elegant note: “goethe: architec- ture is frozen music. This is, I think, the aesthetic key to the development of cartoons as an art form.” Comics, like music, is tem- porally subdivided; the effects of comics have, in fact, been called “symphonic.” In a later essay, Ware elucidates the Goethe quote, explaining that comics is a kind of built space. But the most fruitful analogy to comics might be poetry. Alison Bechdel, creator of the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, puts it this way. Comics, she says, is “like concrete poetry — it has to look like what it is.” And one of the most helpful critical essays I have read on comics isn’t actually about comics at all; it is Johanna Drucker’s lucid and thorough “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text.” Drucker’s arguments about the materiality of the poem — in particular, how its elements are spatially located on the page — unlocked how comics pages work with their spatially fixed grammar of panels, balloons, and text boxes. Writing about avant-garde poetry (specifically, here, the work of Tristan Tzara), Drucker observes “the use of visual information as a material in its own right. These are works that cannot be translated — either linguistically or typographically — without losing some essential value performed by the original work.” This sense of the poetic page as the space of performance opened my eyes to how comics functions narratively and graphically. Comics is a site-specifc

hillary chute 379 medium; it can’t be re-flowed, re-jiggered on the page; hence, it is spatially located on the page the way that poetry often must be. The rich relationships between word and image in which spatial arrange- ment is significant, and which characterizes contemporary comics, had precursors in all sorts of poetic experiments. This connection struck me afresh at a recent talk I gave on comics when a Romanticist poetry professor told me his students became better readers of poetry after having been exposed to graphic novels, because they were more attuned to lineation and other constitutive, spatialized features of poetry. So while Bechdel’s Fun Home is about poems — Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” even lends the chapter “That Old Catastrophe” its title — the book is what we might think of as an essentially poetic endeavor because of how its elements exist in space and meaningfully in relation to each other. Bechdel points out that “prose is literally one-dimensional — it doesn’t exist in space the way a graphic narrative does.” To cite another example, Lynda Barry’s gorgeous recent books, One Hundred Demons, What It Is, and Picture This, make the materiality of prose in comics clear: she “breaks up” the visual surface of her handwritten text — she ruffles it, we might say — by switching from lowercase to uppercase letters and print to cursive within the space of one sentence and even one word. Barry estab- lishes what I think of as an extrasemantic visual rhythm that is similar to what poetry also offers. Speaking of rhythm: at the most basic level, it is this notion that provides a way to think about the shared preoccupation of poetry and comics. For comics is about nothing if not the rhythm established by its verbal and visual elements: the rhythms set up between suc- cessive panels, between words and images, between blank space and the plenitude of framed moments of time. Joe Sacco’s work provides a great example — he even floats his text boxes elliptically across the page over images to place pressure on conventional, regularized pac- ing. (Like written poetry, but unlike music and film, comics gestures at rhythms of attention, but leaves the final movement of engagement up to the reader.) And comics, like poetry, is often an art of distillation and condensation. To invoke an amusing phrase from an interview I conducted with Scott McCloud, author of the classic Understanding Comics, comics is “secret labor in the aesthetic diaspora.” He explains about the form’s traffic in essence: “Nobody picks a comic up off the stands and gasps in admiration at all the

380O POETRY unnecessary panels that were left out. You don’t see that — it’s secret, it’s hidden — but that process does go on.” Comics can be so powerful precisely because they can be perfectly notational. Think of the distillation, and yet the fullness, of a poem like Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro” — something we also see, in a different key, in Spiegelman’s famous 1973 “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” a visually dense and nevertheless brilliantly compact one-pager he worked on for months. As with comics and so many different forms, most notably film, there is always the question of adaptation. But mostly, significantly, we’ve seen comics working alongside poetry, as with the avant-garde illustration experiments (say, Miró illustrating his own poetry in the forties), to amplify and productively transfigure instead of to directly translate. (This is evident in the fantastic “Poem as Comic Strip” pieces that appeared on poetryfoundation.org.) There is Spiegelman’s first post-Maus work, the stylish book The Wild Party, which offers drawings together with Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 hardboiled poem. There is cartoonist Eric Drooker’s collaboration with Allen Ginsberg for the volume Illuminated Poems, released in 1996 (Drooker also recently published a graphic novel version of Howl). And the lines of inspiration move in both directions: we also have works such as Monica Youn’s Ignatz, which is inspired by George Herriman’s classic comic strip Krazy Kat. I, for one, want to see more of that: poetry about comics.

hillary chute 381 hank willis thomas

Better Speak

My first meaningful interaction with poets came as a young adult when my friends and I would frequent open mics at poetry cafes in New York and DC. There are two defining moments. First, my mother, Deborah Willis, invited poet Sekou Sundiata to perform his opus The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop at the Smithsonian. Soon after that my friend Nekisha gave me a mixtape of spoken word that included Nikki Giovanni’s “The Way I Feel” and the Watts Prophets’ “Rapping Black.” I was in awe of the courage and shameless earnest- ness and vulnerability in their work. I felt the sharp contrast between the optimism and determination of the civil rights generation and the oblique nihilism of mine. They all but indicted the listeners for remaining silent or irreverent when times called for social or moral action. A few years later I encountered Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival.” The last few lines are emblazoned on my soul:

and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid

So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.

“Better to speak!” echoes in my mind whenever I feel like shriveling up and hiding in the corner rather than being exposed or critiqued. There is sheer audacity required to write words for a broader audience, even more to get up and read those words aloud. I feel the same is true for contemporary visual artists. To speak is almost to say “I know,” but in most cases artists are speaking about things they don’t know, or are still in the process of knowing. I feel like poetry is at its best when it speaks to this process of knowing, dangling on your heart right before it gets to your mind.

382O POETRY So much of my practice is a collaboration with audiences and other artists — sometimes it’s overt, sometimes subversive. As it happens, I was introduced to the notion of collaboration by Kamal Sinclair (now a collaborator of mine on Question Bridge: Black Males) who worked with a combination of poets, dancers, and musicians to write a multi- faceted, off-Broadway stage show called The Beat. It was a come- as-you-are and leave-your-heart-on-the-stage experience. That was around the time Danny Hoch wrote Jails, Hospitals and Hip Hop. I saw the written word translated into spoken word as activism. And then there is Saul Williams, whom I first encountered on a student film shoot at nyu in the late nineties. It was an adaptation of Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues. Saul was Sonny. After two days I was basically a disciple. I’ll never forget the moment he picked up a kalimba (African thumb piano) off of a coffee table on set. He strummed it a bit, then turned it over and found an old Burger King sticker on it. He said, “Now that’s deeper than all of us” and put it down. Not two years later I was creating work about commodity culture as it related to African American history and culture. Without a doubt, the best text-based work of mine came from an adaptation of an iconic sign from the civil rights era that read: “I am a man.” I was always amazed by the power of the image of a large group of African American men holding signs to affirm their “manhood.” It also seemed to exemplify the fissure between my generation and my parents’ generation. After all, the phrase we used was “I am the man.” How did we go from a collective statement under the repression of segregation to an apparently selfish statement for a generation “liber- ated” by integration? I wanted to explore that, so I created a series of twenty paintings in which I riffed on the syntax of the sign. The paintings were then arranged into a poem format with the help of a songwriter named Sparlha Swa. The last ten of them read “I’m the man, who’s the man, you the man, what a man, I am man, I am Human, I am many, I am am I, I am I am, I am. Amen.” Rather than judge or validate myself on anyone elses standards, maybe my greatest gift is my own consciousness. I am. Amen. Or as Langston Hughes put it:

So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on. I could’ve died for love — But for livin’ I was born

hank willis thomas 383 Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry — I’ll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die.

Life is fne! Fine as wine! Life is fne! — From Life Is Fine

384O POETRY COMMENT

michael robbins

Ripostes

Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. by Paul Hoover. W.W. Norton. $35.00.

When it was published in 1994, the first edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, edited by Paul Hoover, ran to 744 pages and included 411 poems by 103 poets. Nearly two decades later, the second edition runs to 982 pages with 557 poems by 114 poets. The number of poets has remained relatively stable while the number of poems has increased by over 35% and the number of pages by nearly a third. This thing is a phone book. “You review it!” is, I think, not an unreasonable critical response. But I didn’t make it this far by being reasonable, so here goes. Some millennial fever in the nineties led to a number of attempts to extend and codify the putatively alternative tradition of poetics gathered by Donald Allen in 1960 under the rubric The New American Poetry, 1945–1960. As Marjorie Perloff notes in a canny review of this anthological zeal:

In the two-year span 1993–1994, no less [sic] than three major poetry anthologies appeared that featured the poetry of what has been called “the other tradition”.... These three anthologies are, in the order of publication, Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950: Innovators & Outsiders (New York: Marsilio, 1993), Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960–1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994).

Allen himself had got the jump on these bouquets with The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised in 1982, but that collection, which cut five and added nine poets to the original roster and revised the selection of poems, was a modest affair. The original anthology was an Historical Event, and these new anthologies were clearly — sometimes explicitly — offered as Allen’s successors. Messerli even smuggles Allen’s title into his own.

michael robbins 387 Well, From the Other Side of the Century has been out of print for years. You can get a used copy in “good” condition for thirty cents on Amazon, a “very good” copy for thirty-one. Weinberger’s text is still in print but seems to have had little impact. Hoover’s Norton is the clear victor, the anthology that will define, for better or worse, classroom dissemination of “the other tradition” for a long time to come. It’s hard not to read in its reissue a riposte to the controversial Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, who has come under deserved fire for her exclusion of Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, and a great many more representa- tives of the other tradition. But let’s consider this tradition a bit more closely. A good deal has been written about the sociology of canon formation and literary anthologization — the best examples are John Guillory’s Cultural Capital and Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic. I don’t want to recapitulate this work here, but it’s important to note that the premise from which each of these post-Allen anthologies proceeds is flawed. The editors imagine that what they are doing is collating the productions of alternative traditions that already exist within the poetic field, that subvert and threaten the field’s dominant modes of writing and thinking. Each of the above projects is explicitly predi- cated upon the notion that there is a “mainstream,” an establishment, usually figured as “academic,” against which the anthologized poets are bravely swimming. Hoover tells us that “this anthology hopes to assert that avant-garde poetry endures in its resistance to dominant and received modes of poetry.” In fact, it is closer to the truth to say that this anthology, and others like it, have created the “other traditions” of “postmodern American poetry,” “avant-garde poetry,” “outsider poetry,” “new American poetry,” and the like. If the avant-garde historically represents a struggle against the institutional forms of cultural domination (in the case of “dominant and received modes of poetry,” these must include the major journals, English and creative writing departments, and publishing houses), what must we conclude about an “avant-garde” that is completely absorbed by and into those very institutions? Both Guillory and Golding argue persuasively that canons are made in and by the university — their mode of transmission is the syllabus. And these days you’re as likely to see Rae Armantrout as Mary Oliver on a course syllabus in contemporary poetry (or in the pages of the New Yorker).

388O POETRY As Peter Bürger has shown, the failure of the historical avant-garde (Dada, surrealism, etc.) to abolish the distinction between art and life can obscure the fact that it succeeded in changing the institutional conditions of art practice, such that no real avant-garde movement can be said any longer to exist at the level of style or form:

The historical avant-garde movements were unable to destroy art as an institution; but they did destroy the possibility that a given school can present itself with the claim to universal validity.

You will note the absence of a Norton Anthology of Mainstream Poetry. Today’s “mainstream” is a construction of today’s soi-disant “avant-garde,” which is a construction of poets in love with their image of themselves as perennial outsiders. That image requires embarrassing contortions to maintain when you’re granted (or burdened with) the imprimatur of W.W. Norton & Company. Hoover writes, with a touch of self-directed irony: “History determined that Rae Armantrout, an experimental lyric poet and close observer of human experience, won the Pulitzer Prize for 2010.” It’s easier to joke about teleology than to consider what the conferring of Official Verse Culture’s highest honors on the rebel faction should tell you about your categories. Indeed, Hoover’s introduction is a farrago of received wisdom. If you can think of a cliche about postmodernism, the avant-garde, or critical theory that Hoover has not regurgitated, please e-mail him in time for the eight-volume third edition. Obviously a consideration of postmodernity will require a responsible overview of its major figures, movements, and concepts, but Hoover simply quotes and rehashes where critical engagement is called for. You get the impression he’s ticking off items on a list: Fredric Jameson, check; The Waste Land, check; Tristram Shandy, check; Walter Benjamin, Finnegans Wake, Borges, Baudrillard, Dada, Derrida, John Cage, Mallarmé, the transcendental signified, check, check, check. After quoting from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Hoover writes that “with the loss of originality as a value, nature, the art of painting, heroism, originality, and the lyric poem begin to lose their savor, replaced by a Heraclitean stream of Internet words and images.” I don’t know where to begin. You know, back when originality as a value was lost? Around the time that nature lost its savor? When heroism was replaced by internet words?

michael robbins 389 (I must admit I rather like how the loss of originality as a value leads to originality’s losing its savor.) Because Hoover is so eager to reduce concepts to bullet points and arguments to gestures, you’d never know from his discussion that, for instance, Benjamin’s analysis of the changing conditions of art production and reception in modernity is political, directed precisely toward the “formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” For Hoover, it’s just a way station on the way to ... well, to Flarf, if you must know. The anthology proper begins with Charles Olson’s “In Cold Hell, in Thicket,” and ends, infinite pages later, with the words “Flarf is life.” (If, armed with such knowledge, you still want to purchase this book, we probably shouldn’t have lunch.) I really don’t want to write about Flarf, in part because there’s nothing worth saying about it — it’s just there, a dumb but harmless fad — and in part because its practitioners get off on being slammed in prestigious journals by reactionaries like me. But Hoover has bought into it wholesale, along with Kenneth Goldsmith’s so-called conceptualism, Brian Kim Stefans’s “cyberpoetry,” and the whole boatload of vacuous bullshit. Well, this is what happens when the avant-garde ceases to function as a historical category and becomes a fetish object. Hoover, like so many of the poets who fill up the last half of his anthology, has confused posture for position. Anthologies necessarily break down as they approach the present, since it is impossible to judge the worth and durability of contemporary production. Still, to peruse the pages of Postmodern American Poetry devoted to poets born since 1960 is an alternately depressing and comical experience, like reading an up- dated Stuffed Owl. At least Flarf flares up into flair on occasion, and Goldsmith (who seems unaware that poststructuralism’s historical moment has passed) recognizes that his poems don’t need to be read. For the most part, though, poem after poem by contemporary poet after poet are so drearily negligible that it seems unfair to pick out a few representa- tives. Edwin Torres, for example, is not really any worse than most of his compeers:

danger is the birth of angles shazz’d; lettroin; marved; eld enticing; the shape beckons rip in sky; throat opens

390O POETRY when ungorged; a curve features formless, out of reshaped voweletter yellow vegas bundesbähn welcome to the four-eyed boys

zizz’d; mreckt; taon; vevved shell-shocked leather-clad; mad punkt takes over soundpakt; easier to listen if you take away; fear; peligrøtz

A headnote informs us that “in a panel discussion [of course!], Torres commented” that poetry is “‘an already daring motion to undertake in this society.’” Well no, it isn’t, and Torres’s rebel-without-a-clause performance stakes rather too much on an overly familiar dynamic, skating away from sense while eroticizing danger — it’s just The Wild One as a subpar Godard knockoff. Torres’s poem crashes because, beholden to played-out notions of vanguardism, it seems hopelessly retrograde (the lines quoted above were published in 2007). But many of the poems here are simply dead — nonresponsive, flatlined, toe-tagged, rotting. Take Noah Eli Gordon’s “An approximation of the actual letter” (capital letters in titles are so mainstream):

I died in a book

& couldn’t touch the ink around me

it was autumn

I died in a book asking

the word for leaf for leave

I died in a book on the eve of music

in the distance, another distance

I died in a book, indeed. This appears to be a reheating of Michael Palmer’s “C (‘called Poem of the End’)”:

michael robbins 391 called Poem of the End

four evenings in a row now with a bridge in the distance

I came upon by chance

called Poem of the End

blue seven like this hazed: nothing but the printed lines

…......

It’s called Poem of the End I found it beside me where I slept

and called it Poem of the End whose name was crossed out

I found it in a letter and recalled writing from it

in broken sevens like this

This is one thing in 1988, quite another as inept ventriloquism twenty years later. Laynie Browne works a similar aesthetic to identical purpose:

To lose one must first possess

To possess one must bind matter to matter

With loss as guide, one desires to be matterless

The matterless guide resides in a borrowed form, contains no loss.

Residing within a body, this bodilessness is not confined to the invisible structures of any given form.

392O POETRY Rapid soiling of hands, linens, hangings of rooms, hollows of lungs.

The self possessed form — abandoned

upon departure from the matterful hemisphere.

... I’m sorry, I must have drifted off, you were saying? I don’t mean to single Gordon and Browne out: their poems are typical of a particularly lethal period style, one that is amply represented in this anthology. The problem is that an anthology like this should lead us to be able to state the difference between Palmer’s gorgeous, evocative lines and Gordon’s inert ones. But Hoover’s anthology doesn’t know the difference, because its principles of inclu- sion are programmatic rather than aesthetic. It’s not interested in teaching us how to read these poems, or in discrimination or judg- ment; it’s hardly interested in the poems themselves at all. It amounts to a lobbying push. This is one reason the headnotes are essential reading — the dis- connect between their self-satisfied posturing and the utterly safe and mild exercises they introduce is often hilarious:

Linh Dinh’s poem “The Death of English” ends with the lines, “It’s all japlish or ebonics, or perhaps Harold Bloom’s / Boneless hand fondling a feminist’s thigh.” He challenges every politically correct instinct with a knowing wink, as if to say, “Discuss that with your Introduction to Poetry class.”

I did. Somehow my Introduction to Poetry class managed to keep their shit together. Still, not only do I not doubt that Dinh and Gordon and their confreres have noble, or noble-ish, aims for their poetry; I rather insist upon it. Who could be against resisting the dominant ideology? As Barthes wrote, “whatever the imprecision of the term, the left always defines itself in relation to the oppressed.” Count me in. More’s the pity, then, that the urgent political necessity of a revi- talized left in this country is met by so many poets with recycled assertions about their brave defiance of “mainstream verse” (with its — shudder — “given forms”) and rote disavowals of “totalizing claims.” (One reason the left is in disarray is that totalizing claims give it the willies. Always historicize — but don’t overdo it.)

michael robbins 393 •

So if the poems collected here do not, at the ideological pole of reality, oppose the dominant ideology of American verse, is it the case that the anthology is simply an empty signifier? By no means. For one thing, as I suggested above, insofar as the “postmodern American poets” share an aesthetic, it has become the dominant one, as a careful reading of the most prestigious journals and mfa workshops re- veals. Armantrout’s much-deserved acclamation is merely a symp- tom of a broad shift toward the postmodern as the new normal. The techniques of postmodern verse — to generalize: a displacement of the subject and of narrative, expression deemphasized in favor of fragmentation and constructivism — are mimetic of what its practitioners take to be the real operations of language and selfhood. These operations are distorted at the level of ideology; postmodernism is therefore realist, as Ron Silliman recognized when he subtitled his anthology of Language poetry Language, Realism, Poetry. This new realism is the old realism by now, institutionalized to such an extent that talk of its oppositional value is wishful thinking. Or, more precisely, it is ideology. However, I am concerned not to give the impression that I am simply reversing the polarities of the standard mainstream/experimental division. Because the aesthetic(s) designated “postmodern” can, in fact, constitute one term in different binaries, ones not imagined by Hoover & Co., that have the advantage of retaining or deepening the complexity of the poetic field without mystification. To limit myself to an especially penetrating one, for the purpose of exemplification: Oren Izenberg, in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, has proposed an opposition in ontological, rather than aesthetic, terms — terms which have the benefit of making sense of many of the confusions I’ve already noted. Briefly, Izenberg, ironically drawing on Harold Bloom, makes a distinction between “poetry” and “non-poetry.” He does not mean by this (as Bloom does) to imply a hierarchy. His reading is neither prescriptive nor evaluative, but descriptive and historical. The term “non-poetry,” which the Romantic Bloom deploys in order to dismiss “weak” poets (and it’s telling that for Bloom this includes both Eliot and Pound), becomes, for Izenberg, a way of describing a different kind of intention behind the composition of poems. Bloom’s “strong” poets — Whitman, Wordsworth, Ashbery, Bishop — simply intend a different thing than,

394O POETRY say, Oppen or Lyn Hejinian intend. In fact, on Izenberg’s reading, Oppen and Hejinian do not intend a thing at all. Noting that

so variously fragmented, occulted, difficult, and silent; so as- sertively trivial, boring, or aleatory are the types of poetry on the “experimental” side of the critical divide, that critics who champion the work have gone to great didactic and theoretical lengths to imagine, explain, justify, and market alternative species of pleasure and interest to compensate for the loss of traditional aesthetics,

Izenberg argues that “what the poet intends by means of poetry is not always the poem” (italics his). That is, the poem — a verbal artifact, a series of marks on paper or phonemes on breath — is not the end of the poetic process, is not the aim of “non-poetry.” Izenberg is not claiming that experimental poets don’t have inten- tions for their poems or don’t care about their final shape. They sit down and write stuff that gets published in anthologies. Nor is he denying that some of these poems are compelling, beautiful, interest- ing, cool, masterful, or what have you. But they remain a secondary consideration (in a purely descriptive sense). What is primarily at issue for these poets is their “philosophical (indeed, their ontological) commitments rather than their strictly formal and ideological ones.” Izenberg is indebted to Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” here, which begins by positing a distinction between poetry “in a restricted sense” and poetry “in a general sense.” By the latter, Shelley means an idea of poetry as nothing less than “the expression of the imagination,” no matter what form that expression might take. Izenberg locates the commitments of poetry in this general sense in conceptions of per- sonhood rather than of poetic style. To be a poet of this kind is to act according to a concept not simply of what a poem is (the end result of poetic composition or a provisional marker of more radical commitments) but of what a person is. There are obvious consequences for poems — what you think a person is, on this reading, determines what you think a poem is — but for the poets of “non-poetry,” the most important commitment is to a conception of poetry that is much broader than the one whose aim is to compose verse that pleases and instructs. These poets — “insofar as [they] intend poetry” — do not intend “to produce that class of objects we call poems, but to reveal, exemplify, or make manifest a potential or ‘power’ that minimally

michael robbins 395 distinguishes what a person is.” To follow Izenberg’s argument further would take us too far afield, but I hope that this précis at least indicates that rich alternatives to the mainstream/experimental rift exist, and that some of them might more fruitfully describe the conflicts and contradictions within literary production. None of this should be taken to imply that there are no aesthetic differences between (to grant the terms for argument’s sake) the mainstream and the avant-garde, or that Hoover doesn’t occasionally get some of them right. Izenberg’s poetry/non-poetry divide can exist alongside (in accounts) or cut through (in practice) the more familiar categories. But Izenberg’s opposition can provide an alternative explanation of what “postmodern” poetry is up to, and, for me at least, his way of looking at the poetic field contains more use value than Hoover’s. There is an especially insidious reason that the particular bi- nary mainstream/avant-garde should be retired, at least insofar as it informs the syllabus through textbooks like Postmodern American Poetry. “Advocacy masquerading as description” — as Izenberg put it to me in a recent e-mail —

such anthologies are bad literary history and facilitate bad poetic pedagogy. By creating a walled garden out of the avant-garde, they project the close horizons of the poetic present onto a past in which poets read widely and were influenced broadly. These anthologies are aimed at relieving people of reading, as much or more than they are at giving people things to read. Considered as tools for writers, they turn the narrow-minded past they (falsely) describe into a (true) description of the present.

That the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry simply proves that the soi-disant avant-garde has no monopoly on falsely describing a narrow-minded past. Izenberg writes in Being Numerous that these distinctions “have cut poets of whatever kind off from fully half of their art.” In what universe are Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Frederick Seidel not indispensable postmodern American poets? The one in which George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Spicer are not indispensable twentieth-century American poets, I guess. But it tells against Hoover’s logic that Dove’s anthology contains so many of the postmodern poets of his own book, including Charles Olson,

396O POETRY Robert Duncan, Ted Berrigan, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, and Ron Silliman. And for what it’s worth, my own experience has been that it is students of poetry who identify strongly with the avant-garde who take the lessons of what not to read most to heart. They read less deeply in the tradition, less broadly among their contemporaries. I once tried to explain my admiration for Paul Muldoon to a young poet I know, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I opened a book to Muldoon’s poem “Yarrow”; she immediately balked: “I don’t like poems that look like that.” She meant poems written in regular stanzas. This isn’t anecdotal evidence; it’s an anecdote. Everyone I know has one. I’m not denying that there’s a great deal of good poetry in Hoover’s anthology (as there is in Dove’s). From Olson and Duncan and Spicer and O’Hara through, say, Harryette Mullen and Susan Wheeler, it’s almost worth wading through the Clayton Eshlemans and Michael McClures. And, yes, there are some terrific younger poets gathered here as well — Lisa Jarnot, Ben Lerner, Jennifer Moxley, Eleni Sikelianos, among others. Nevertheless, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology is a mean, small-minded venture that facilitates a sadly impoverished conception of American poetry. Hoover and Dove deserve each other. The rest of us can do better.

michael robbins 397 letters to the editor

Dear Editor,

No doubt the editors of Poetry felt that Amiri Baraka’s eminent position in African-American poetry and the Black Arts Movement gives him the authority to review an anthology that clearly positions itself as post-bam [“A Post-Racial Anthology,” May 2013]. But I wonder if that necessitated allowing him to rant and stamp. Unfortunately, Baraka’s thinking in the last few decades has gone rancid. Anyone doubting this should read his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” which clearly accuses American and Israeli Jews of being in on the 9/11 plot. Not only is the poem obviously anti-Semitic, it’s a piece of doggerel. As a critic, Baraka is sophomoric at best. He cites himself in the third person under two different names as if he were two different people (neat trick, that!) while he equates contemporary African- American poetry with Mitt Romney and being white with being Republican. He also invokes George W. Bush — er, I mean, his wife, Amina Baraka — to state, in essence, “if you’re not on our side, you’re on their side.” (He also complains that Amina was left out of the anthology.) But Baraka has forgotten that fundamentalism, black or white, is always the mirror image of the thing it opposes: identical, but in reverse. No doubt, there is a useful critique to be offered of Rowell’s anthology from the perspective of a more urban, working class, contemporary African-American poetic tradition. (If Rowell really does “dis” Etheridge Knight, for instance, then there’s something wrong not just with his politics, but his ear.) Alas, Baraka is not the poet to give that critique as he stopped thinking long ago and replaced the classic Marxist dialectic with a self-righteous mix of racial paranoia and politics — unless, of course, the editors’ point was not to bring light to the subject, but only more heat.

david charbonneau los angeles, california

398O POETRY contributors

sandra beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox (W.W. Norton, 2010), Theories of Falling (New Issues, 2008), and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life (Crown, 2011). bruce bond is the author, most recently, of Choir of the Wells (Etruscan Press, 2013) and The Visible (Louisiana State University Press, 2012). scott cairns is professor of English at University of Missouri and editor of Saint Katherine Review. His most recent collection is Com- pass of Affection (Paraclete Press, 2006). clare cavanagh is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale University Press, 2009). She teaches Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwestern University. hillary chute * is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010) and associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon Books, 2011). christina davis * is the author of An Ethic (Nightboat Books, 2013) and Forth A Raven (Alice James Books, 2006). She currently serves as curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. sadiqa de meijer’s * first book of poems is Leaving Howe Island (Oolichan Books, 2013). A portion of the manuscript won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. roger ebert * (1942–2013) was a journalist, screenwriter, and film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death. In 1975, he was the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. amy frykholm* is the author of three books of non-fiction, most recently See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity (Beacon Press, 2011). james galvin * has written seven books of poems, most recently As Is (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and two prose works from Henry Holt. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

contributors 399 steve gehrke has published three books, most recently Michelan- gelo’s Seizure (University of Illinois Press, 2007). He teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno. gowann * currently resides in a cabin, which he built, in the Cas- cade Mountains of western Washington. He is at work on a musical recording of original dance suites written for plucked instrument. donald hall was decorated with the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2011. marcellus hall * is an illustrator and musician living in New York. Some of his recent illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Time. seán hewitt* lives in Liverpool, England, where he is studying for an ma in Irish Studies. fanny howe’s most recent book is Come and See (Graywolf Press, 2011). She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. phillis levin is the author of four poetry collections, including May Day (Penguin, 2008), and editor of the Penguin Book of the Sonnet (Penguin, 2001). She teaches at Hofstra University. james longenbach’s most recent books are The Iron Key (W. W. Norton, 2010) and The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013). He teaches at the University of Rochester and Warren Wilson College. laura manuelidis* is a physician and neuropathologist at Yale University. david mason’s new collection is Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade (Red Hen Press, 2014). He serves as poet laureate of Colorado. joshua mehigan’s second book of poems, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in spring 2014. wilmer mills’s (1968–2011) books are Right as Rain (Aralia Press, 1999), Light for the Orphans (Story Line Press, 2002), and Selected Poems (Universtiy of Evansville Press, 2013). miller oberman * is pursuing doctoral studies of poetry and poetics at the University of Connecticut. Her poetry collection Useful was a finalist for the 2012 National Poetry Series.

400O POETRY david orr writes the column “On Poetry” for the New York Times Book Review. He is the author of Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (HarperCollins, 2011). marjorie perloff’s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (University of Chicago Press, 2010). michael robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012). He is at work on a critical book, Equipment for Living (Simon & Schuster). kay ryan’s most recent book is Odd Blocks, Selected and New Poems (Carcanet Press, 2011). michael ryan directs the mfa program in poetry at the Univer- sity of California, Irvine. His latest book is This Morning (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). philip schultz’s Failure won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His new book-length poem is The Wherewithal (W.W. Norton, 2014). He founded and directs the Writer Studio. bianca stone * is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (forthcoming, Tin House/Octopus Books) and illustrator of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012), a collaboration with Anne Carson. hank willis thomas * is a visual artist represented by Jack Shain- man Gallery in New York. His work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and elsewhere. robert thomas’s * latest book is Dragging the Lake (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His first book, Door to Door (Fordham, 2002), was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize. emily warn’s latest book is Shadow Architect (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She is the founding editor of poetryfoundation.org and now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp.

* First appearance in Poetry.

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• Work closely with faculty through workshops and individual mentoring. • Take advantage of the best features of residential and low-residency programs. • Choose from specializations in fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. • Refine your writing skills in convenient evening courses in Chicago and Evanston.

RECENT AND CONTINUING FACULTY INCLUDE Eula Biss Alex Kotlowitz Stuart Dybek Ed Roberson Reginald Gibbons Christine Sneed Goldie Goldbloom Patrick Somerville Cristina Henríquez S.L. Wisenberg Marya Hornbacher

The fall quarter application deadline is July 15. www.scs.northwestern.edu/grad • 312-503-4682 opEN the dooR HOw TO ExcITE YOUNG PEOPlE ABOUT POETRY

Edited by jesse nathan, dorothea lasky, and dominic luxford

A collection of inspirational essays and practical advice, featuring matthea Harvey, Ron Padgett, william Stafford, Eileen myles, Theodore Roethke, and many others.

Two new books from the poetry foundation and mcsweeney’s

The STRANGEST of THEATRES POETS wRITING AcROSS BORDERS

Edited by jared hawkley, susan rich, and brian turner

A vital collection of essays by poets who have traveled far from home, featuring work by Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many others.

“Poets in the World” series editor: ilya KaminsKy, director of the harriet monroe Poetry institute

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/INSTITUTE STORE.mcS w EENEYS. NET ABC congratulates ARTHUR SZE winner of the 2013 JACKSON POETRY PRIZE

The $50,000 award honors an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition. The judges for the 2013 prize were Reginald Gibbons, Natasha Trethewey, and C. D. Wright.

The Jackson Poetry Prize, established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation, is sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. and named for the John and Susan Jackson family.

LEARN MORE AT PW.ORG harriet reading series

Brandon Brown and Hannah Gamble

Brandon Brown is the author of The Persians By Aeschylus, The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, and Flowering Mall. In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater. Hannah Gamble is the author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, selected by Bernadette Mayer for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin- Parkside and lives in Chicago. Thursday, July 11, 7 pm. Free Admission.

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Amanda Ackerman and Luke Daly

Los Angeles poet Amanda Ackerman is the author of The Book of Feral Flora and several chapbooks, including Short Stones and The Seasons Cemented. Luke Daly is a Chicago-based poet, bookmaker, and visual artist. He coordinates writing programs and bookmaking workshops at the Chicago printmaking studio Spudnik Press and curates their library of small press literature and artists’ books. Thursday, July 25, 7 pm. Free Admission.

61 west superior street • chicago poetryfoundation.org/events A Glossary of Chickens Poems Gary J. Whitehead With skillful rhetoric and tempered lyricism, the poems in A Glossary of Chickens explore, in part, the struggle to understand the world through the symbolism of words. Like the hens of the title poem, Gary J. Whitehead’s lyrics root around in the earth searching for sustenance, cluck rather than crow, and possess a humble majesty. Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets Paul Muldoon, Series Editor Paper $14.95 978-0-691-15746-7 Cloth $29.95 978-0-691-15745-0

For the Time Being A Christmas Oratorio W. H. Auden Edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs For the Time Being is Auden’s only explicitly religious long poem, a technical tour de force, and a revelatory window into the poet’s personal and intellectual development. This edition provides the most accurate text of the poem, a detailed introduction by Alan Jacobs that explains its themes and sets the poem in its proper contexts, and thorough annotations of its references and allusions. W. H. Auden: Critical Editions Edward Mendelson, General Editor Cloth $19.95 978-0-691-15827-3

See our E-Books at press.princeton.edu poetry foundation events

Children’s Poetry Day

This special event designed to introduce poetry to young people will include live performances and a variety of interactive crafts and activities, including a scavenger hunt. The event is best suited to children ages 13 and under. Please note that the Poetry Foundation will only be open to children and their parents or guardians during this event. Saturday, August 3, 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.

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Summer Camps

Free summer poetry camps are available for students in grades 7 to 12. On Thursdays in July, students will discuss, explore, and analyze a range of poems with library staff while also creating their own work. Students dive deeper into the world of poetry while also developing their own creative abilities. Registration is required. Details and registration information at poetryfoundation.org/events.

The Poetry Foundation Library is open weekdays, 11:00 am to 4:00 pm, and select Saturdays.

61 west superior street • chicago poetryfoundation.org/events