founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

February 2012

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume cxcix t number 5 CONTENTS

February 2012

POEMS a.e. stallings 387 Momentary nate klug 388 Dare philip levine 389 How to Get There d. nurkse 392 Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes josé antonio rodríguez 393 Sunflowers robert pinsky 394 Creole connie voisine 396 “The Altar” by George Herbert joanie mackowski 398 Consciousness dean young 400 Spring Reign vijay seshadri 402 Imaginary Number philip metres 403 Compline albert goldbarth 404 Keats’s Phrase wendy videlock 406 Flowers carol frost 407 What the Dove Sings greg glazner 408 You’re arrowing out toward what. Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder, In Whose Unctions “You could lighten fiona sampson 413 From “Coleshill” david biespiel 416 Room FROM 100 YEARS rabindranath tagore 419 Poems lisel mueller 422 A Prayer for Rain weldon kees 423 Small Prayer eleanor ross taylor 424 Mother’s Blessing janet lewis 425 A Lullaby langston hughes 426 God robert frost 427 Not All There robert creeley 428 A Prayer

C OMMENT various 431 One Whole Voice Jericho Brown, Fanny Howe, Kazim Ali, Jean Valentine, G.C. Waldrep, Joy Harjo, Eleanor Wilner, Dunya Mikhail, Gregory Orr, Grace Paley, Jane Hirshfield, Gerald Stern, Carolyn Forché, and Alicia Ostriker

contributors 466 back page 483 Editor christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor valerie jean johnson Editorial Assistant lindsay garbutt Reader christina pugh Art Direction winterhouse studio

cover art by felix sockwell “PegaPoe-asus,” 2011

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Poetry t February 2012 t Volume 199 t Number 5

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a.e stallings

Momentary

I never glimpse her but she goes Who had been basking in the sun, Her links of chain mail one by one Aglint with pewter, bronze and rose.

I never see her lying coiled Atop the garden step, or under A dark leaf, unless I blunder And by some motion she is foiled.

Too late I notice as she passes Zither of chromatic scale — I only ever see her tail Quicksilver into tall grasses.

I know her only by her flowing, By her glamour disappearing Into shadow as I’m nearing — I only recognize her going.

A.E. STALLINGS 387 nate klug

Dare

Not, this time, to infer but to wait you out between regret and parking lot somewhere in the day like a dare

Salt grime and the foodcarts’ rising steam, at Prospect St. a goshawk huge and aloof, picking at something, nested in twigs and police tape for a while we all held our phones up

It is relentless, the suddenness of every other song, creature, neighbor as though this life would prove you only by turning into itself

388 POETRY philip levine

How to Get There

Turn left o≠ Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 and

Hook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decorating the corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchase on Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river.

A little deal table holds a tiny American flag — like the one Foreman held as he bowed to receive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City — ; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouse roses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box — which is none

PHILIP LEVINE 389 of your business — you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money,

ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn

has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a man

sleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through

all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle resting

on crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sits

a take-out co≠ee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus — actually

a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded

impossibly young and athletic, and — as always — alone. “Give what you can,”

390 POETRY says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enough without giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.

PHILIP LEVINE 391 d. nurkse

Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes

Ignorance will carry me through the last days, the blistering cities, over briny rivers swarming with jellyfish, as once my father carried me from the car up the tacked carpet to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it.

392 POETRY josé antonio rodríguez

Sunflowers

No pitying / “Ah” for this one — Alan Shapiro

No, nor a fierce hurrah for what it does without choice, for following the light for the same reason the light follows it.

Just a thing rough to the touch, a face like a thousand ticks turning their backs, suckling at something you can’t see, and a body like a tag o≠ the earth so that my child hands couldn’t tear it out from the overgrown lot next door. My palms raw with the shock of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly except when seen from a distance — a whole field of them by the highway, an 80-mile-per-hour view like a camera’s flash. All of them like halos without saints to weigh them down.

JOSÉ ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ 393 robert pinsky

Creole

I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.

My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty. The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor,

Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two.

The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter.

So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons:

Soldiers, clerks, o∞cials, citizens with their household slaves. Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands —

Which might be good places to retire on a government pension, Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife.

Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I do Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul,

Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls.

As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate Imperial Processes of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable

Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled

With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they Needed to swap, blend and improvise languages — couples

394 POETRY Especially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess — Roman, barbarian — I find that Creole work more glorious than God.

The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand.

It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry.

Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand, And he got the job as was his destiny — full-time, once he graduated.

Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy, Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years.

At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family owned A piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford. He gave him a small

Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, “almost a Professional.”

Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing. Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat,

I imagine, and made loans or change. Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn” Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place:

Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while. Schiavone means “a Slav.” Milford is a variant on the names of poets —

Milton, Herbert, Sidney — certain immigrants gave their o≠spring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.

ROBERT PINSKY 395 connie voisine

“The Altar” by George Herbert

Tulips panted against the wall. So much need to feed a crisp stem, I thought, as we put our fingers in the bullet holes above the bed. Typed captions translated photos of Rivera, Kahlo, Trotsky and his wife

in her boxy suit, devoted smile, that hopeful hat with bent feather below an image of the assassin who would get her husband in the end. George Herbert was what I translated, The Temple, the only book I brought,

where he says the heart must be a stone on which to build God’s altar — no love without a±iction: my hard heart meets in this frame. In those days, I loved the jungle, spread like wool below

an unsteady sky and the crumbling pyramid’s altar top flocked with moonlight. I loved the monkeys throwing sticks and rinds at tourists from their nests in the trees. The noise at night, the hysterical crush

of insect limbs rubbing, animal want, all night banged against the window, each with an urgent song of me me me. How loud the fecund world can be. Mi corazon duro, I wrote, bored, and smoke rose from other tables,

from the wheels of the cars on the cobbled roads, and once I saw a mouse, suicidal, enter the frantic crowd. I cried out at the park in Mexico City where Indians, ropes on their ankles, dove like

fatal birds to the ground while a Hassid, in his 19th-century cloak kept after me, Speak English? English? He said, We’ve all become vegetarians. There isn’t a butcher for miles. I watched his black hat disappear

396 POETRY into the swarm of vendors, masked dancers. Was that it, devotion? Young and gorgeous for it, I crept away one night, met a German hippie and he pulled my swimsuit aside in the volcanic lake. The fat Costa Rican’s co≠ee plantation unfolded below, the ranging packs of filthy dogs, the water so hot and sulfured I gleamed like something ephemeral. Sometimes I saw movies, cheap Hong Kong action films dubbed into Spanish with Mandarin subtitles. But that started to get di∞cult, the young men dying with extravagance, the improbable ballet of whizzing swords, gun fights in teahouses filled with caged birds. Herbert, consumptive and small country parish-bound, wrote that struggle must be the same as resolution, as faith itself, while he su≠ocated in his sad minister’s bed, for years arguing with God and himself. It’s the uglier business, willing yourself from despair to belief.

In those days, I thought the saints, robes heavy with must, with ancient, gnarled hands, deserved the nothing they felt their way toward. In those days, my favorite saints were the ones who burned away young — I admired them in the cathedral paintings, hooded eyes, the brutal wings of their ribs, gilt halos, baroque frames. What does it mean, devotion? Mothers weep in the corners of those paintings while a man, each morning, sweeps the church floor.

CONNIE VOISINE 397 joanie mackowski

Consciousness

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander

the halls of the skull with the fluorescents softly flickering. It rests on the head

like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel and awkward as soon as one stops to look. That pile of fallen leaves drifting from

the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove,

to the grooves in that man’s voice as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves

of books with moonlit opossums and Chevrolets easing down the roads of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single

tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet

itself is a swarm, a pulse with no indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo.

Our compacted galaxy, its constellations trembling like flies caught in a spider web, until we die, and then the flies

buzz away — while another accidental

coherence counts to three to pass the time or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine

398 POETRY strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

JOANIE MACKOWSKI 399 dean young

Spring Reign

Thank you whoever tuned the radio to rain, thank you who spilled the strong-willed wine for not being me so I’m not to blame. I’m glad

I’m not that broken tree although it looks sublime. And glad I’m not taking a test and running out of time. What’s a tetrahedron anyway? What’s

the sublime, 3,483 divided by 9, the tenth amendment, the ferryman’s name on the River Styx? We’re all missing more and more tricks, losing our grips,

guilty of crimes we didn’t commit. The horse rears and races then moves no more, the sports coupe grinds to a stop, beginning a new life as rot, beaten to shit, Whitman

grass stain, consciousness swamp gas, the bones and brain, protoplasm and liver, ground down like stones in a river. Or does the heart’s cinder wash up as delta froth

out of which hops frog spawn, dog song, the next rhyming grind, next kid literati? Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all philosophy ants in a muddle,

an engine inside an elk’s skull on a pole. Maybe an angel’s long overdue and we’re all in trouble. Meanwhile thanks whoever for the dial turned to green downpour, thanks

400 POETRY for feathery conniptions at the seashore and moth-minded, match-flash breath. Thank you for whatever’s left.

DEAN YOUNG 401 vijay seshadri

Imaginary Number

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small. Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased. The soul scrambles across the screes. The soul,

like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses.

402 POETRY philip metres

Compline

That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struck With great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,

Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov & rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet,

Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season.

That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-

Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost. We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep

The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into ink For light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.

PHILIP METRES 403 albert goldbarth

Keats’s Phrase

My father’s been dead for thirty years but when he appears behind my shoulder o≠ering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world — “Albie, grip in the middle and turn with a steady pressure” — it’s measurable, if not the way the wind is in a sock, or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence, alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative capability” — the phrase of course is Keats’s,

from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian version of early maritime cartography: the known world stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think of a polar bear!” ... the game one plays with a child. But I say with adult certainty that when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet those empty hours in his mind were populated just as unbearably — and indeed, yes, there

404 POETRY were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind his eyes each night until her return. For Keats, however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable “dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency or sugar daddy powering the universe in all its spangled beauty and veiled mystery from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf. “Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said “I tried to support it by not going in.”

ALBERT GOLDBARTH 405 wendy videlock

Flowers

for my mother They are fleeting. They are fragile. They require

little water. They’ll surprise you. They’ll remind you

that they aren’t and they are you.

406 POETRY carol frost

What the Dove Sings

The mourning dove wearing noon’s aureole coos from the rhododendron, oo-waoh, shadow o- ver what to do. Oh. And the sad rhetoric spreads through suburb and wood. Those who hear dove moan love no querulous warbling more — the going hence about which is there no- thing to do? From no small rip in fate the you you never shall be more will be extracted. Dove knows the rubric and starts in, who, who is next and soon?

CAROL FROST 407 greg glazner

You’re arrowing out toward what.

The sunlight almost unfaceable, and weightless, and the gravities, wind-flickers, shadows, the ripped black places crows make on the phone poles —

how to keep your own counsel, even against the little stabs, the winds and chromes —

š

Various flashes, the o∞ce door, a supper glass, a last smear of streetlight on the bedsheets.

Nothing. On into the soaring, black release.

š

The messages say syllabus and vetting that and will be absent. Nothing. On into the what? the air you’re gliding on or falling from, the wind of it making ahs and salves in the hollow of your chest, Celina of a bodily sibilance like willows, of the shimmering, midsummer glance.

You would allow yourself a message. How to make it low-key. How to keep it to a few lines.

š

408 POETRY On into the wind of whatever is happening. What leashes you seems to have come undone.

You lean down into the white heap of black words. You pad out toward the water fountain into someone’s eyeshadowed look, the lush backwash of her skirt.

You weigh maybe three or four ounces, swirling down the stairwell in whichever wind this is, your ribs aching with what they sing so shamelessly.

GREG GLAZNER 409 Sick to death of the hardpan shoulder,

the froth of noise the undersides of the cedars make,

the windblown dark that hints and fails for hours at e≠acement — maybe I could claim it isn’t

praying, but it’s asking, at the least, begging that these lungfuls of this blackness

eat whatever keeps on swelling and collapsing in my chest, and be done with it, no more noise

left hanging in the spaces between brake lights than a smothered rush that sounds like su≠ering

and is nothing. Instead a sobbing isn’t so much easing from my throat as shining like black light from my torso,

veining the leaves of weeds, stoning the whole roadside in a halo — I can feel the heat of truck lights on my back,

I’m inside that brilliant gravity, I think of time, I’m in the driver’s nightmare and it shudders by —

410 POETRY In Whose Unctions

After Stevens

By now the snow is easing the live nerves of the wire fence and the firs, softening the distances it falls through, laying down a rightness, as in the spackled whites, the woodgrains of a room’s hush before music, before a lush legato in whose unctions the excruciations ease, as in the first thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods of the late quartets, whose dense snow of emotion, downdrifting, formal, whose violins and cellos, desiring the exhilarations of changes, turn loose an infusion of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent, repetitions, evolutions salving down into the still air, the wound, the listening.

GREG GLAZNER 411 “You could lighten

up a little,” he says, shutting the rusted tailgate, “maybe at least lean down from your high horse and look busy,” picking up his work gloves and his spade.

“You’re not the only hick on the clock with an education,” he says, half- laughing, half-wheezing, and spits, his bottom lip bulging with a load of Skoal,“even if you do think pretty highly of your poetry.”

412 POETRY fiona sampson

From “Coleshill”

The deer racing across a field of the same clay and tallow color they are — if they are: or are they tricks of the light? — must feel themselves being poured and pouring through life. We’re not built but become: trembling columns of apprehension that ripple and pass those ripples to and fro with the world that shakes around us — it too is something poured and ceaselessly pouring itself.

February shakes the fields and trembles in each yellow willow.

FIONA SAMPSON 413 The violin’s back is not veneer — the strummed wood shudders together. Undivided by caution each note is its own first thought.

My first thought’s a kind of prayer that I might resonate entire — sometimes it’s such a meager portion shaking a little, as if it ought ...

Every day, the same desire to push myself through the door that leads to some bright place,

brighter than the concert platform, where the whole self echoes together — the outer to the inner pleasure.

414 POETRY Everything runs together — the light smells of spring, the unreasonable brightness of this peg, this sheet, this line tethering linen between sky and mud as if the garden marked a pause in that eternal return whose looping trace is the blood hissing through the ventricles. What gives you life’s the thing that kills. Until you spill the lip trembling on its bright liquid all you need’s this play of surface — all that you need. All you have.

FIONA SAMPSON 415 david biespiel

Room

After it came in like a dark bird Out of the snow, barely whistling The notes father, mother, child, It was hard to say what made us happiest.

Seeing the branches where it had learned To stir the air? The air that opened Without fear? Just the branches And us in a room of wild things?

Like a shapeless flame, it flew A dozen times around the room. And, in a wink, a dozen more. Into the wall, the window, the door.

You said the world turns to parts. You said the parts are cunning spheres. You said you always love the face of sin. You said it’s here, the lips and eyes and skin.

Outside the snow deepened With heaves of discontent. Inside, the tremor of our life Flew in and in and in.

416 POETRY FROM 100 YEARS In the course of reading poems to include in an upcoming centennial anthology of work from our pages, we found ourselves appreciating more poems than could be included in the book. Throughout the coming year, we will feature selections from past issues that illuminate current content, but won’t appear in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine. What follows are poems that dovetail with this month’s prose section, “One Whole Voice.”

“A Prayer for Rain” by Lisel Mueller is reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press. “Small Prayer” is reprinted from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press, © 1962 and 1975 by the University of Nebraska Press, © renewed 2003 by the Uni- versity of Nebraska Press. “Mother’s Blessing,” from Welcome Eumenides by Eleanor Ross Taylor (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1972), is reprinted with the permis- sion of George Braziller, Inc. “A Lullaby” by Janet Lewis is reprinted by permission of Ohio University Press. “God” is from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor, © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. and by permission of Harold Ober Associates in the uk. “Not All There” is from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1936 by Robert Frost, © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company. “A Prayer” by Robert Creeley, from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975, © 1982 by the Regents of the University of California, is reprinted by permission of the University of California Press. rabindranath tagore

Poems

i thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

ii

No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my master’s will. Hence- forth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song. Men hasten to the King’s market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work. Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time, and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum. Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him, and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence!

RABINDRANATH TAGORE 419 iii

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded. Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange smell in the south wind. That vague fragrance made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion. I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and this per- fect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.

iv

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou are not seen. If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart — thy love for me still waits for my love.

v

I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.

420 POETRY vi

Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh, thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colors and sounds and odors. There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest. But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor color, and never never a word.

December 1912

RABINDRANATH TAGORE 421 lisel mueller

A Prayer for Rain

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war — o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again.

March 1964

422 POETRY weldon kees

Small Prayer

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes. Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen, That time may find its sound again, and cleanse Whatever it is that a wound remembers After the healing ends.

October 1947

WELDON KEES 423 eleanor ross taylor

Mother’s Blessing

This timeless blood was here before begat. Infinity runs in your veins — Not mine, nor yours, Nor Eve’s, not Adam’s — Gat of God, And spinning like ta≠y Godwards back again. Sapped through the centuries to us — Grafting a limb there for the Jesse tree — Remultiplied infinitely, From heart to heart tick-pulsed, Ill clad, ill fed, ill fit — Here, child, do what you can with it.

July 1968

424 POETRY janet lewis

A Lullaby

Lullee, lullay, I could not love thee more If thou wast Christ the King. Now tell me, how did Mary know That in her womb should sleep and grow The Lord of everything?

Lullee, lullay, An angel stood with her Who said: “That which doth stir Like summer in thy side Shall save the world from sin. Then stable, hall, and inn Shall cherish Christmas-tide.”

Lullee, lullay, And so it was that Day. And did she love Him more Because an angel came To prophesy His name? Ah no, not so, She could not love Him more, But loved Him just the same. Lullee, lullay.

December 1938

JANET LEWIS 425 langston hughes

God

I am God — Without one friend, Alone in my purity World without end.

Below me young lovers Tread the sweet ground — But I am God — I cannot come down.

Spring! Life is love! Love is life only! Better to be human Than God — and lonely.

October 1931

426 POETRY robert frost

Not All There

I turned to speak to God, About the world’s despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn’t there.

God turned to speak to me (Don’t anybody laugh) God found I wasn’t there — At least not over half.

April 1936

ROBERT FROST 427 robert creeley

A Prayer

Bless something small but infinite and quiet.

There are senses make an object in their simple feeling for one.

February 1966

428 POETRY COMMENT “One Whole Voice” is comprised of extracts from God at Every Gate, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, to be published later this year by Tupelo Press. various

One Whole Voice

jericho brown

Now, I have a voice. Entered, I am lit. Remember me for this sprouting fire, For the lash of flaming tongues that lick But do not swallow my leaves, my flimsy Branches. No ash behind, I burn to bloom. I am not consumed. I am not consumed.

I will never understand the spirit of my ancestors, but I know it. I know it lives in me. And though fear insists on itself, I intend to acknowledge this spirit as one that overcomes us. I write because my writing mind is the only chance I have of becoming the manifestation of their hope. I write because my writing mind is the only chance I have of becoming what the living dead are for me. I exist because I was impossible for someone else to be before me.

š

The Black church is a very theatrical place, full of pageantry and prone to pomp and circumstance. I’ve always thought of the order of service as being a lot like a poem. I knew what was going to hap- pen, but I didn’t know how it was going to happen. I knew my pastor would be preaching in a robe, but I didn’t know whether or not it would have a train. I knew someone would shout in ecstasy at some point, but I never knew the exact point or how loudly or whether it would be a man or a woman. Would it include running or simply a flailing of the arms? This is the way I think of form and surprise and suspense in poetry. Hearing sermons gave me my first ideas about how a spoken thing is an artful thing, a piece of work with highs and lows and, yes, a moment of climax.

š

VARIOUS 431 I love the church now, and it scares me. I still listen to and seek out recordings of the preacher Carlton Pearson. I am a lover of gospel music until the day I die. But to be honest, when friends invite me to church, I usually find an excuse not to go because I’m afraid that someone behind the pulpit will at any moment attempt to erase or degrade my existence as a gay man. It’s not a comfortable feeling, not a feeling with which to enter a house of worship.

š

Hope is the opposite of desperation — it’s not as comfortable as cer- tainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompa- nied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it. Today I believe that anything one visualizes consistently becomes reality. Isn’t that what prayer is? Maybe that means my beliefs have not changed at all: lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. I am a believer. True believers see their way as the way. That doesn’t mean I can’t stand someone else’s way. It means that I am capable of joyfully getting lost in my own. Spirituality is important to me because I think there is something among us greater than the physi- cal, something we know exists and can address directly. I love God. I love liberty. I shame one if I lose the other. I think of God now as way more patient than I could ever be. I have to believe that God is better than I am, and better than all of us. That’s the only thing that could make God God.

š

Poems ask us not to understand in the same way that we often find ourselves not comprehending the possibility of a God in this world. One of the first poets I loved was Essex Hemphill. There’s a young man with whom I had a short a≠air, who is a jazz pianist study- ing at the Berklee College of Music, and once I showed him some poems by Hemphill. He read one and said, “I don’t get it,” and I said, “You don’t get it because you’re trying to get it. Stop doing that.” Then I said something I actually felt smart saying: “The first time you heard Thelonious Monk you didn’t get it, but you liked it. It felt good, and you were ok with that and you moved on. Then the next

432 POETRY time you heard it, you were like, ‘Oh, and there’s this.’ Then the next time you heard it you were like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s this too!’” I said, “Just read the poem. Just enjoy the poem.” So he sat there and he read the same poem and he said, “Oh, wow, that is a lot better!” Is this the problem with perceiving God? Poems do carry mean- ing, but that doesn’t mean their meaning has to be the first thing that attracts us to them. If that were the case, we wouldn’t know who the hell Wallace Stevens is. I’ve never believed that what attracts us to poems is knowing what’s going on in them. As a matter of fact, I think just the opposite. Maybe that’s the problem people have with poetry. That’s not what we’re taught about how words can be used. I do want poems to have meaning, but I also think that having mean- ing isn’t the end of the conversation about poetry — or about faith.

fanny howe

I imagine God is everywhere already and not extra — that is, without an adjective, an adverb, or any outside attribute. The creator is creation itself...... Lucky to be well. To have my cell. Wine, words, wafer, in all their forms.

I don’t think many of us have what is called perfect faith. We go with the sun, up and down, and live half-stunned by emptiness and the e≠ort to stay on a horizontal plane in a circular situation. However, it may not be mad to hope that we are safe. I would call modern “faith” an openness to this possibility.

š

The word faith is not an attractive one to me. I can only think of faith as footsteps over ground. But then there is coincidence, and a slowly developing sense of a hidden structure, which increases with work, experience, and age. How people stay in your life. How mem- ories are so strong and books passed along through decades, and at the same time there is no evidence of yesterday as a place. Dreams. Predictions. I wonder, too, when there is a ghastly event like explod- ing earthquakes and tsunamis, if the person suddenly killed might be

VARIOUS 433 the person who was standing at the sink half an hour before the trag- edy happened, or ten years before it happened and not the one there. Meaning is a secret, and one’s fulfillment in time is unknown.

š

If I can only be horrified by my species, then I will have to kill myself. If I find others recognizable, I guess I will continue. It’s as simple as that.

š

I started going to Mass on brief experimental forays when I was a teenager and a close friend went to church. Then I took instruction from an Episcopal priest when I was nineteen in California, between trips to North Beach to listen to jazz and poetry. I wanted the world to be both magical and full of meaning. I was scared of what drugs did to my friends. I haven’t ever used drugs, though now I would love to bite a hash brownie. I was always in a state of shock or awe at existing. It was inevitable I would end up Catholic, and a lover of all religious literature and acts from around the world. Simone Weil said Catholicism is a religion for slaves. She meant it as a great compli- ment. And I understand why. I have always imagined that the great religions came from those who had seen very little justice in this life. It’s not really a paradox.

š

True prayer seems to belong to extreme situations. And it is addressed to the silence of the night. The people at prayer on Fridays across the Muslim world have given us a great image of humility before the un- knowable. Right in the middle of war.

š

I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts. Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think there is a heaven for poems, novels, music, dance, and paintings — but they probably are hard-worked sparks o≠ a great something that may add up to a whole cloth in the infinite.

434 POETRY kazim ali

The secret night could already be over, you will have to listen very carefully —

You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind —

You can search alongside others, but I don’t think others can help you understand your own nature, or if they can it is much further along a spiritual journey than I am. I’ve always been on my own, a single person in the field of physical matter, on his back looking up into oblivion. There have been times when teachers appeared to me, but they were always single individuals, too, someone I had to be smart enough to follow and not always a wise old man with a beard (though it was once! — dear Jonji Provenzano, a construction worker by day, yoga instructor by night). They have been teachers of various sorts, sometimes children, sometimes people who were trying to hurt me, figures of substance appearing, trying to get me to look at myself, to see something. But to join with others in a gesture of similitude — I can’t draw anything from that, or at least at the moment have not been able to. I’d rather be wandering in a trance through the streets of a busy city, peeling an orange and whispering to the universe, than sitting in a pew listening to a sermon or kneeling on a rug reciting chapters.

š

If I’m a Muslim, I’m a Muslim in a number of di≠erent ways. Spiritually, what I think about God is pretty much in line with the Quranic idea. This asserts the unity of all creation and the absolute lack of distance between the individual and the divine. God isn’t up in Heaven looking down. This is close to what I think. When I read the stories that appear in the Quran and the Bible — such as Adam and Eve, Joseph in Egypt, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Moses and the Israelites — it’s the Quranic stories that really make sense to me. So, in this way, I’m a Muslim. But if you put me in a room with twenty Muslims, we probably wouldn’t agree on much. Though if you put any twenty Muslims in a room together, they wouldn’t agree on much. That’s a hallmark of Islam. We have very pluralistic views.

VARIOUS 435 š

I started writing poems about spirituality and religion as a way to grasp what I believed. It might be time for me to keep quiet about this for a while. If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it.

š

I suppose there’s a connection between the multiplicity I find in the religious traditions and my writing. Everything can be two or three things, and I often find myself doubled back, writing lines in a poem that can switch meanings by the end, or writing a second poem that goes against the meaning of the first one, or writing a poem that answers an earlier one. I’m drawn to the idea of plural thought and multiplicity, like the convex mirror in the Mughal ceiling, which the late poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote a poem about. There are reflections in all di≠erent directions. You can see two things at once, and both things can be true.

š

As a gay person and a Muslim, as someone who questioned established political, social, and gender norms, I had a long way to go before I could ever speak myself. It is easy to fetishize or romanticize silence when you are silenced. I was silenced by myself in this case, but si- lenced nonetheless. In understanding God or death, though — two of the things we humans really want to know about — you have to come to terms with silence in one way or another. Some poets want to talk into the silence, sound out its limits, and others want to explore that edge, what happens to the world when you look out at it from the lip of the unknown. Some poets do both of these things. I think I am in the third category, though I have traveled there from the second: I could never go into the cave of metaphorical silence, not until I had learned myself how to speak. I love that verb “learn” — in Urdu (and in pioneer vernacular as evidenced by Mr. Edwards from Little House on the Prairie asking his son, “What did they learn you at school today, boy?”) it means both “learn” and “teach.”

š

436 POETRY The people who have accepted me for who I am as a gay person have always been flabbergasted that I want to have anything to do with religion or God. But the most religious people I know have never had a problem with my sexuality. It’s the people who are caught up in the temporality of God and money, the this-worldness of everything, who have a problem, because they want to see things go the way they want them to go.

š

Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you’re allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don’t really think you’re going to be answered. You’ll either get what you want or you won’t. It feels to me like that, a situation where you’re under the most duress. Often people who are not religious at all, when suddenly something terrible happens, they know they have to pray. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all engage with the spiri- tual at di≠erent points. Prayer is not a refuge or shelter so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance of whatever storms exist in the world. You don’t really pray for your situation to change, you pray to be able to handle your situation. It’s not the world you want to change; it’s you that you want to change.

jean valentine

A day a year ago last summer God filled me with himself, like gold, inside, deeper inside than marrow.

This close to God this close to you: walking into the river at Wolf with the animals. The snake’s green skin, lit from inside. Our second life.

I am drawn to poets whose work allows the Other its existence. Not in accepted spiritual terms, perhaps. But that would be part of

VARIOUS 437 the Other’s quality, sometimes, I suppose. Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” for instance, and John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.” Hopkins, Herbert, and, strangely, maybe Yeats. But most of all, Paul Celan and Anton Chekhov — can we count him as a poet for a minute? I think of his story “Easter Eve.” One of the literary works that speaks strongly of faith is not a poem but Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. In art, I think of the shift in seeing ordinary light that the artist James Turrell has brought about — it is sacred when you see it. Celan wrote, “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against.” Maybe this need is faith.

š

The Christian image of faith I like is the mother and child. Both the mother figure and the world of nature (which appeared animated, like in Disney films, but only benevolent) were a faith life to me: the mother as here, nature as here, in the same entire a≠ectionate world as animals and us. But in those days I saw everything as a physical reality: for instance, the claw-footed bathtub had clawed feet, not im- itation claw feet; and the leaves moved, as I did, because they wanted to. And that is where I am now, with some important di≠erences. The important di≠erence is that the reality of mother-love, and the sense of belonging in nature and human nature — that reality which I had sensed under the tree, under the stars, at the stable in the human warmth that was to be trusted — that reality broke up; and I began to understand, as I do now, what the Buddhists call impermanence. I have come to understand that earthly love is real, but lasting only in the unseen. As it turns out, that is plenty.

š

For me, there’s a likeness between poetry and prayer that is not so much thanks or supplication or other conscious activity, but the more unconscious activity of meditation or dreaming. The likeness lies in poetry and meditative prayer and dreaming all being (po- tentially anyhow) healing, and all being out of our hands. For me, poetry is mostly silence. The deeper the better. There’s much to be said for consciousness and the rational mind, but it wouldn’t be said in support of the kind of art that I feel most touched by. For me, the

438 POETRY unconscious life and beauty (so, truth and beauty!) feel closer to the whole world we live in that is God than other consciousnesses in my life. It goes without saying that you can be close to these two states of mind in su≠ering, as well as in places. When I say the poetry I like best is mostly silence, I mean that it seems to have come out of silence, to exist in the midst of silence, and to go toward silence.

š

Once I saw a museum photograph of Lucy, the skeleton of a woman from Ethiopia, whose age is about 3.2 million years. The photo was the kind where they reconstruct a face from bones, and I remember liking her face and reading, without any particularly avid interest, the short paragraph about her. Then I went to sleep. When I woke up, I felt slightly hypnotized and went to the desk and wrote for most of the day, without will or thought, but with happiness and excite- ment. About four or five in the afternoon, I went outside and called my friend, the poet Anne Marie Macari, and told her I was a little alarmed. I had experienced depression in my life but never the man- ic; should I be worried? Anne Marie laughed gently and said, “Isn’t it strange how when good things happen, sometimes we feel like we’re doing something wrong?” So I went back and wrote some more, slept, and wrote some more in the morning, till about noon. And then I just put down my pen. I knew it was done. This makes me think that there is, at certain times and places, a clear, unwilled porousness between not only other beings, but what they have to say, or to give. This didn’t surprise me, because I had had similar experiences before, of a smaller kind; but this experience was so “far-out” and lasted so long, that it left me much less lonely, and almost completely without doubt that we are not only not alone, but we are accompanied and loved. I don’t, obviously, mean just po- ets or other artists: everyone, probably everything. I wonder, too, does this state of porousness exist all the time, and we only tune into it now and then?

VARIOUS 439 g.c. waldrep

Come down to the water, whisper the cripples on the tall banks of the levee. We call what we’re doing dancing because we like that word better than some other words. It’s the sort of thing a god might do, a god in the shape of a river, in the shape of a bird, in the shape of a bone tucked inside a scar.

Poetry arrived in my life at the same time I was making a serious religious commitment, so the two have always been intimately, even essentially, intertwined. I can’t imagine writing poetry outside the very large architecture faith a≠ords (although I know, of course, that many — perhaps most — poets do). The question I more often ask my- self is not about the relationship between faith and poetry, but rather the relationship between prayer and poetry. They’re not the same, by any means, though there is some intrinsic relationship. Sometimes I speculate the two are like adjacent apartments in the same building: when you’re in one, you have no direct access to the other, but if you listen closely you can hear sounds — sometimes mu±ed, sometimes sharp — coming from the other side of the connecting wall. I feel that way about prayer when I am reading or writing poetry and about poetry when I am praying.

š

The defining aspects of my childhood were race and class in a small Southern town. Religion, such as it was, was a middle-class cultural ornament. I was raised United Methodist (mainline Protestant). Frankly, this didn’t mean much. In that milieu you had to go some- where on Sunday, or people would talk. There was a conservative Mennonite group in my neighborhood, however, and as a teenager I socialized some with their young people, even as I made fun of them behind their backs. At the time I didn’t drink — family history of alcoholism — and if you were a teenager in that time and place and didn’t drink, your social options were pretty limited. An occasional Friday night of Trivial Pursuit with the Mennonites beat staying home or hanging out sober at the Hall Tire parking lot.

440 POETRY The Mennonites marked me, though, more than I thought. And in my late teens, after I’d left Virginia, I became involved in shape-note singing (also known as Sacred Harp singing), a Southern vernacular tradition my family had been part of several generations before. I was drawn to the music both for its own sake and because it helped me to reconnect with my rural Southern roots, which I had to some degree severed when I set o≠ for college. If the music had been about cotton fields and mountains, I suppose I would still have been drawn to it. But it wasn’t. It was music with a theological content, and one cannot, I think, keep singing it — whatever one’s initial motivation— without that content having some e≠ect. If the music felt true, then perhaps there was some truth in the words, also.

š

One does not invite the Holy Spirit into one’s life and expect it to operate on one’s own terms, as a sort of butler to the soul. (Not a tame lion, as C.S. Lewis famously put it.) I gradually, quietly started making the cultural changes I had long dreaded, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t bear any longer not to make them. In some conservative Anabaptist communities, young people live double lives — behaving one way around their parents or elders, and leading something of a secret life as they explore more “worldly” conduct. I did exactly the opposite — I kept as much as I could secret from my friends and family for as long as I could. I knew I would lose friends and cause a rift in my family. Both of which happened, of course, when I left those acculturated Mennonites and went to the Amish.

š

The Amish, conservative Mennonites, and related groups do some things very well and some things, perhaps, less well. We aspire to integrate pacifism (we prefer the larger term and concept “nonre- sistance”) and stewardship (which can include environmentalism) into our lives, individually and collectively. We also recognize the essentially countercultural nature of our faith. We do what we do for scriptural reasons, or at least making application of scriptural principles. We do what we do because we believe in God. We believe Jesus Christ was and is His Son. And we believe the canon of New Testament Scripture is His Word to His people. One can

VARIOUS 441 debate the significance and interpretation of particular texts within Scripture — which of course we do, more or less continuously. But these basics are bedrock. For me, a serious commitment to faith — a living faith, within an orthodox tradition such as conservative Anabaptism — meant that certain questions were settled, if not in my heart, then in the wider sense of how and what the world is. Moving within and among those settled questions, as a subjective human intelligence and a sensual being, is the freedom. You could say that the tenets of faith provide something like conceptual constraint, though “constraint” is not the word I would use and certainly not how it feels to me, any more than a physical building is a constraint, if one moves in and around it.

š

Most Americans, I think, compartmentalize, because it is conve- nient: we find our modern lives intolerable otherwise. Now I am a teacher. No, now I am a consumer. No, now I am a parent, a man of faith, a poet, an investor in o≠-shore oil drilling, etc. It tears the soul. Even a serious faith commitment can become simply one more compartment. The Anabaptist conception of faith, on the other hand, is encom- passing. Whatever one is doing, one should be doing it with a spiritual aim and value, hopefully in some connection with the life of the body, which is the church. It may seem inconvenient, but our lives are united and made complete in Christ, and in the community and fellowship of fellow Christians. Of course I know (non-Christian) poets who feel the same way about their art, about the community of work and feeling that poetry convokes. When I am someplace like the artists’ colonies of Yaddo or MacDowell, I tend to hear quite a bit about this. But for me, poetry inheres within the whole defined by Christ, His Word, and the church.

š

Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger.

442 POETRY joy harjo

To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you.

When we write, perform, heal, or are otherwise in that creative space, we can find ourselves beyond time. N. Scott Momaday has a beauti- ful passage about his grandmother Ko-sahn appearing to him in that space where he speaks about the power of words, about the calling into being. My earliest memories have nothing to do with Oklahoma. In the time between birth and speech, I lived primarily somewhere between the natural world and the dream world. I would travel to other times where I was not a child. And it was not Oklahoma. I knew the earth as a living being.

š

Often I feel beyond any of the definitions ascribed to me as a per- son who is political, a feminist, indigenous, and so on. It is my spirit who is writing, speaking, singing, playing saxophone, and acting. My spirit is acting through a time and a place, a skin and a history. And I am identified with the time, place, skin, and history even as it all feels small and far away. I am absolutely in the world — the struggle, the concerns, the celebration, and the mourning. I am entranced by the diversity of experience on earth, even as I feel, how do I say it, beyond it, when I am in the dreaming/visionary place.

š

I stay clear of membership in any organized religion. From my study of history, theology, and metaphysics, especially from the perspective of an indigenous person in this country, I understand that organized religion is responsible for dismantling and destroying indigenous cultures all over the Western Hemisphere. This is still happening within our tribal nations. Factions from organized religions are be- hind nearly every armed conflict currently going on in the world. Most churches are corporate structures whose aim is to grow the congregation, to make money.

VARIOUS 443 š

I had always wanted to travel to the South Pacific. I finally made it to Hawaii in 1990 and gave a performance at the University of Hawai’i at Ma¯noa. I will never forget it. A chanter composed a chant in honor of the event. I felt as if I had come home. After I heard the chanter sing, I was changed. The way I heard poetry and the possibilities of poetry changed, just as they had when I realized that most poetry in the world was not written down, not in books, but was oral. The po- etry of the Mvskoke Nation is carried in the songs. The chanter was talk-singing a poetry I had been hungry for my whole life. The ances- tors are addressed, as are the plants and the rains. I could literally see the waving of life in the chant. I wanted my poems to be like that. Incantation and chant call something into being. They make a cer- emonial field of meaning. Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. The poem that first made me truly want to become a poet was sung and performed by a healer in Southeast Asia. As he sang and performed the poem he became what he was singing/speaking, and even as he sang and spoke, his words healed his client. When I saw that in the early seventies on a television program, the idea of what it meant to be a poet shifted utterly for me.

š

What is common to all indigenous peoples is a belief that we are all relatives, all being. All is sacred. I have been given glimpses of what some call the “everlasting.” I have seen this place in a newborn’s eyes, in sunrise, in dusk, the darkest night, and the face of a flower — here and in dreaming. The everlasting is who we truly are, where we truly belong. It is the stu≠ of poetry, music, and dance, of all arts. In this place, we are one person, one poem, one story, and one song.

444 POETRY eleanor wilner

The day came when they had nothing left to o≠er him, having denuded themselves of all in order to enlarge him, in whose shadow they dreamed of light.

The two most significant moments of my childhood were not in- dividual but cultural, the moments when my life intersected with events that tore away the meanings I’d been taught: the opening of the concentration camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Life magazine brought those images into our home, and they became, for me, indelible. Those atrocities were unforgettable because indigestible, because they left no one with clean hands, and because they not only did not fit any of the precepts or assumptions with which I had been raised, they shattered the child’s comfortable world forever. And the larger world was, from then on, inseparable from my inner life. But aside from history and the crimes of its managed savagery, there is that larger existence which transcends human atrocity and the follies of history, the great and unthinkably brilliant and com- plex web of life, what Darwin called “the tangled bank,” in which we have our unlikely existence, and of which our awareness gives us some understanding. And yes, being a part of that, rather than, as our childhood religions have it, apart from it — that is very much some- thing I feel, and never so feelingly as when I write poetry.

š

Protest, too, is a form of praise. As is lament. And because our me- dia lie to us around the clock, and we are filled with false cheer and manufactured fears, I suspect that too much of our own witness is forced to counter them both, and is bent by the very forces it at- tempts to counteract. The last years, from Reagan through Bush, the continuous expansion of violence matched by the concentration of wealth, along with a vicious campaign of disinformation, have dark- ened our days and the chances of the common life. My own recent poems could not help but respond to that, though they may be too re- active. I don’t know where one draws the line between speaking out and becoming a chameleon darkened by the shadows on the branch

VARIOUS 445 to which it clings. I do know that I don’t feel as if the choice of what to write is entirely my own, simply because of the way the poems come. But even the darkest poems can’t help but contain the light or at least the awareness of its absence.

š

I was raised as a skeptic. What I retained from Judaism, or attribute to it, is from history rather than doctrine or observance: a distrust of institutions and government, a dislike of tribalism, an overdeveloped sense of the absurd, a hopeless desire that “justice shall come down like rain,” sympathy for the underdog, and the notion that it is pos- sible to argue any point, with anyone, even with God. “Therefore choose life” is the one credo I’ve kept, though, like all oracular direc- tives, how best to do that remains undisclosed.

š

Once, as a young reporter, I had the privilege to interview Jacques Lipchitz, a formidable man, who looked not unlike Michelangelo’s Moses. He said that all art must be a combination of abstraction and representation, that without some representation it has no human meaning. “But what,” I asked him, “about those artists for whom life has no meaning?” To which he replied: “I am not interested in sick men!”

š

I am in the habit of saying, when people wonder at the chutzpah of revising Biblical stories, that they should imagine the chutzpah it took to write them in the first place. The plain truth is that we know that a book like Genesis tells us nothing about the origins of nature and our species, but a great deal about the people who wrote it. It seems to me, by the same reasoning, that the mythical realm — which opens when we reenter its symbolic gardens and wastelands and lets us see through the transpersonal eyes of figures who have accompanied us through time — would tell us much that we, at this radically di≠erent moment in time, need to know about ourselves. That includes how we may be justifying current crimes and dangerously magnifying ourselves by the use of atavistic myths whose tribal glorification and

446 POETRY ethno- and anthropocentrism have become untenable. The poems I have written about the women in the Bible come, obviously, out of female as well as contemporary experience, and women, by and large, have lived a di≠erent history — since history is really only a version, one that we seem condemned to repeat, not because we don’t know it, but because it’s the one we do know, the one the history books treat with such veneration, as if the more people a ruler kills, the bigger his share of history, the more important his exploits.

š

Would I describe myself as an atheist? Yes and no. Theism means belief in a god or gods, and so atheism would suggest the rejection of that kind of construction, which is to say, the notion of a god as a per- son, in short a kind of divine projection of a figure who is something like ourselves, and cares what we do or think or want. To me this is personification of what is beyond us, and is arrogant and altogether too satisfying. It seems to be part of what comes from the childhood of the race. Does this mean I believe that nothing is holy? No. Do I believe in worship? Yes. I agree with David Foster Wallace, who in his famous commencement speech at Kenyon College said:

You get to decide what to worship. Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worship- ping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

He goes on to say that if you worship money and things, you’ll never have enough; if you worship sexual allure and beauty, you’ll always feel ugly and fear age; if you worship power, you’ll fear weakness and grow paranoid; if you worship intellect, you’ll feel stupid and a fraud, and so on. All of these he calls the “default settings”:

On one level, we all know this stu≠ already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the

VARIOUS 447 skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

I quote this because I couldn’t say it better. It’s why I write poetry, to keep that “truth up front,” to pay attention to what otherwise goes unnoticed as we go on default setting.

š

What, then, is the di≠erence between a poem and a prayer? It de- pends on what is meant by prayer. There is prayer and prayer (pace Gertrude Stein). If it’s the sort of prayer that is a kind of plea bargain and assumes an auditor who is capable of answering the prayer, or the pleader wants something material to ensue as a result, then it is nothing like a poem. But insofar as the poet must relinquish a cer- tain kind of control, and attain a kind of self-forgetfulness; must, as the ancients had it, call in the Goddess, the Muse, the power of the imagination — that which must be invited and cannot be commanded — in that sense, in which prayer involves a humbling and earnest entreaty for vision, and creative deepening of perception toward a kind of ease of being, then ok, the di≠erence begins to fade. It was William Blake who identified the imagination with the divine: “Imagination / (Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever).” I like that he blurred the di≠erence, moving us toward relying on the imagination’s “renewable energy,” without (one day) needing such figures from the old dispensation and mys- tery cults of an older world. I do think the mythic imagination of our time is relocating the sacred in the living and dying world, so perhaps that is a religious statement, though it involves subversion of the anthropocentric religions from the childhood of the race, and means that we must relinquish the egotistical idea that nature takes us personally, and begin to take nature personally.

š

For me, the poem is never just about experience, it is an experience; we can’t know where a poem is going, and should be surprised (and even enlightened) by what it reveals. The whole point of getting out of the way and inviting the imagination is that you have a chance of discovery, of the imaginative freedom to create what you didn’t

448 POETRY consciously already know, or didn’t know you knew, or couldn’t see until you’d found the metaphoric instruments to transform it into vision. As many writers through the ages have reported, it’s this relin- quishment of will, this non-attachment to the ego that makes possible entrance into a kind of otherness, a shift in perspective that brings fresh insight. I think of the constant litany in writing workshops to “write what you know,” and then of these lines from Constance Merritt:

Write what you know. And go on knowing only what We know? And never know the lakeness of the lake?

dunya mikhail

In this way he makes music. He lifts his hands to the clouds and braids her tears into a flower. In this way he sings.

A wave breaking outside the sea. In this way I go on.

Poetry is my homeland and my religion. The first emotional con- nection I could make with my new place, when I moved to America, was the moment I went back to writing. It was about a year or so after my arrival. I think it was the poem titled “I was in a hurry” that I wrote first here. It starts with the words “yesterday I lost a country.” I noticed then that wherever I was (even on an airplane over cities I knew or did not know), just being with poetry, I felt at home. There is that sense of belonging unconditionally. You witness your two special lands (the old one, Iraq, and the new one, America) fighting each other. It’s only in poetry you can yell at them both to stop. They may still not stop despite your good poetical yelling, but where else can you give life to that voice that takes no side?

š

My mother is a Catholic who never misses Sunday Mass, but I went to church with my father only two times a year, on Christmas and Easter. I didn’t, however, learn that I was Christian until my com- munion time, when I was nine. During my teenage years I read the

VARIOUS 449 Bible and the Quran. I was reading everything that I could read out of curiosity and just for the love of reading. What I loved in the Bible was its stories, the symbols and the signs I found full of poetry. What I loved in the Quran was the musicality of its language. When I was in college, I worked on writing a new religious book that took the best of those two books and created a third. But that writing was not good enough to put in the one suitcase I took with me when I left Iraq.

š

In biology class, my teacher taught us about amoebas. “An amoeba has an eye and a foot,” she said, “but it doesn’t have a real form. You can draw it any way you like.” So I discovered poetry is an amoeba: it has an eye for witnessing, a foot for leaving traces, and a flexible form.

š

With poetry, I feel I am in love. With prose, I feel I am in a marriage.

š

Doctors know a lot about disease and witness a lot of problems, but all they do is give you a small piece of paper with a prescription. Poets do the same. But doctors can heal you. Poets can only give you x-rays so that you see your wound.

gregory orr

River inside the river. World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose That the rose obscures.

When I was sixteen I discovered writing poetry. A high school librarian, a wonderful woman, introduced us to all kinds of writing and encouraged us. The first time I wrote a poem, I knew this was it.

450 POETRY As one might predict, that first poem was a poem of escape. That’s one legitimate function of lyric poetry, to imagine an ecstatic mo- ment, a release from the heaviness of the world. One of my favorite poems is Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” What is that poem about but a longing to be where beauty exists, with the bird high up in the tree, rather than down here in the shadows where we su≠er and die? Keats’s brother had already died in his arms, and Keats knew he would probably die soon. Of course you don’t have to be dying in order to appreciate the release of ecstasy. The high school librarian, Mrs. Irving, wrote on my poem, “You continue to astonish me.” I thought, ok, that’s a reason to live. I was completely lonely and isolated and despairing. Hers was a gesture of love and approval, and it went a long way toward confirming the joy of making poems, and the excitement of my discovery. Over time it became clear to me that an even deeper existential function of the lyric was to express what you feel inside, and try to give form to it — to turn the world into words, and then to make those words cohere into something. This to me is the making of meaning. When I say I tend to think of poems as “making” meanings rather than discovering them, it’s a signal that I was coming from a rather desperate place in which each poem becomes what Frost calls “a mo- mentary stay against confusion.” I also think of Emily Dickinson, another existential high-wire act. She has a wonderful poem that goes:

I stepped from Plank to Plank A slow and cautious way The Stars about my Head I felt About my Feet the Sea —

I knew not but the next Would be my final inch — This gave me that precarious Gait Some call Experience —

She’s sketched a pretty bleak situation, and one doesn’t for a moment doubt that were she to fall o≠ the planks, she would plummet. For much of my life, I felt that I stepped from poem to poem.

š

VARIOUS 451 In my twenties and thirties, even my forties, “spiritual” was not a term I was comfortable with. I was too afraid of people laughing at me, or maybe even of laughing at myself. My religious life was trau- matically terminated at the age of twelve. By religion I mean those notions that naive religion o≠ers as consolation. Nor does most reli- gious terminology guide me forward. Certainly, the other world, the post-death world of conventional Christian thought, is not persua- sive to me. On the other hand, poets’ attempts to articulate spiritual meaning I often find very compelling. Paul Éluard said, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” Yes. I understand this to mean that the spiritual is here in the palpable, physical world around us, the world of people and things. And that it’s the task of language and imagination: to unveil the spiritual.

š

I have faith that when the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual life is activated inside a person, when one becomes fully human, feeling and caring deeply, this represents a resurrection of some kind. This happens for me often when I read poems or hear songs. The feel- ing of being moved represents a resurrection. Every time meaning or feeling flows into your experience, that’s resurrection. I choose to believe that this has something to do with the beloved. One of the perils of being human, and of lyric poetry, is narcissism, the solip- sistic sense that the self is all there is. Likewise, one of the perils of trauma is extreme isolation of the damaged self. To me, the beloved is that figure that exists independent of the self, that figure that calls us into relationship with the world and saves us from what I consider the emotional, spiritual, and psychological error of solipsism and narcissism. The beloved calls us out into connection with the world, into reciprocal relation with the world. Sappho has a poem, fragment #16, in which she has a line: “whatev- er one loves most is beautiful.” I go to that line when I want to remind myself that the beloved is “whatever one loves most” and that the recognition and acknowledgment of the beloved floods the individ- ual life with meaning. Notice Sappho says “whatever” — she doesn’t limit it to being a person, and I think that’s crucial. The beloved can be a person, a place, a creature: for example, the passage in the eigh- teenth-century poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb) where he devotes seventy lines to celebrate his cat Jeo≠ry.

452 POETRY This visionary poem was written in a madhouse, and anyone read- ing those lines knows that “my cat Jeo≠ry” is Smart’s “beloved” — is that entity that sustains his anguished being. And Sappho makes clear that each person chooses his or her own beloved (or be- loveds) — that it’s a choosing/longing of the particular, individual heart.

š

I keep returning to Sappho’s line. One of the terms we poets use in our considerable e≠ort to avoid religious and spiritual terminology is “beautiful.” Of course no one can define the word, or everybody defines it di≠erently, and yet we believe in it. Beauty is an article of faith among poets. I think many of us are trying to sidestep religion, and beauty is a word we use to do that.

š

I woke up one January morning in 2003 with a phrase in my head: “The Book that is the resurrection of the body of the beloved, which is the world.” A voice in my head spoke this phrase with great clarity and authority. I didn’t speak it. Of course, we hear a voice speak to us constantly; we hear “Radio Free Brain” chattering inside us all the time. This was a di≠erent voice, one that spoke with enor- mous certainty. Somehow I understood completely what this fairly cryptic phrase meant. I wrote it down, and then poems started saying themselves to me. And I wrote them down. I risk my professional reputation saying this, but the voice would pause, and I would know that that poem was over, and then it would start again. I think there were probably thirty things spoken to me that morning. I just lis- tened and wrote them down. I was quite intrigued, to put it mildly. The next morning there were more, again with my having just a sense of recording them. This went on for several months.

š

I remember having a discussion with a friend thirty years ago about where poetry comes from. He said, “I write poems to discover mean- ing.” That of course is a pretty standard statement. I said, “I write poems to make meaning.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said,

VARIOUS 453 “I believe existence is meaningless, and we have to create meaning in order to sustain ourselves.” At the time this was true to my experi- ence. Through acts of will and discipline and imagination, I tried to make meaning, but it wasn’t enough to get to the other side of the existential wall I kept encountering. Now from the other side of that wall, I can think back on my life, when such a grim statement as “life is meaningless” was true for me. I can see that I had to create mean- ing, and love, and secure environments for myself, and that the most exciting form of meaning I could create was poetry.

š

Death is a mystery. We’re fascinated by it or appalled by it. After hearing the voice in 2003, my preoccupation with death suddenly seemed ludicrous to me. It’s not that people don’t think about it or shouldn’t think about it, but I realized that I really ought to be think- ing about being alive, and speaking about being alive. I respect that speaking about death in poetry is an indirect way of speaking about life, but the indirectness of it just struck me as suddenly ludicrous. Rilke cultivated what I would call a cult of death. Some of his poems about death and what a blessed state it is seem ridiculous. I wrote about death constantly in my earlier work. But I’m alive. I used to say that the lyric poet is given the responsibility to talk about two of the big human mysteries, sex and death, or love and loss. I had always used poetry to talk about love and death, though more often than not about death and loss. But now I’d rather talk about life.

grace paley

She laughs mentions God throws her life up up into the sky in fearful sleep I see it a darkness widening among my lucky stars

I don’t think in terms of being an atheist or not. I would just say that we live in mystery, and the making of this world is simply great and mysterious. I was listening, just this morning, to a man talking about finding rocks that were four billion years old. So we live in mystery.

454 POETRY I’m not unsatisfied with that. I don’t have to find a god or not a god. There’s a quote — I don’t remember who said it — “Find me a god because I am full of prayers.” I think my husband could be described this way. He’s an old Episcopalian boy. He has lost his god, but I think he’s full of prayers. I’m not full of prayers. I’m full of language.

š

I think there is really a problem with the use of the word spirituality right now. It’s too loose. People who don’t want to talk about reli- gion use this word. They want you to know that they are spiritual people, even though they are not religious, that they have souls, so to speak. I am wary of that kind of conversation. I prefer for people to talk about the reality of what’s happening, and what they feel for one another, what men feel for women, women for men. How we feel about our children. Is this spiritual? Spiritual is just a word people use when they want to be part of some great “religious” conversation.

jane hirshfield

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

During the years I was at Tassajara, I wasn’t writing. Everything was very strict and very simple. We were told, “Do nothing but practice Zen,” and I wrote one haiku during those three years’ time. When I returned to poetry, a rather di≠erent person in many ways, I brought with me two things I now can see would be useful to any young aspir- ing writer: the monastic model of non-distraction and silence, and the experience of calling oneself into complete attention. The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate immediate existence through my own body and mind, was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life, and to learn to stay within my own experience more fearlessly. I never considered going to graduate school. I did this instead. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious weighing of one course of study against the other, but something in me did know: you cannot write until you can first inhabit your own life and mind.

š

VARIOUS 455 No one undertakes something as di∞cult as Zen practice because they already feel the perfection of “things as they are.” We humans turn toward a spiritual practice in part to restore ourselves from some felt form of separation or exile. We feel something is wrong, or missing. This is not my usual vocabulary, but one of my poems, “Salt Heart,” has a passage that may be relevant here: “I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal. / All others stemming from this.” Separation from others, separation from self, are close to the root of su≠ering. Christians might say “separation from God,” Sufis might say, “sepa- ration from the Beloved.” Jung might call it a failure to recognize all parts of the psyche as parts of one self; that shadow-self, refused, grows perilous. Buddhism proposes that the separation of selfhood itself is a mistake of the mind, an attitude in some way reflected in our English use of the word “selfish.” While Zen is the particular practice that drew me, I certainly don’t believe there’s only one “right” spiritual path — if something is true, it will be findable any- where, and there are as many spiritual paths as there are people, and probably sparrows and frogs and pebbles as well. Still, for me, this not uncommon sense of being exiled from full presence in the world brought me to both Zen and poetry. Perhaps urban, contemporary life is already an exile of a kind. There is a Taoist poet in Women in Praise of the Sacred, Yu Xuanji, who says at the end of one poem, “Everywhere the wind carries me is home.” That was not something I felt as a child.

š

Horace memorably said that the purpose of poetry is to delight and instruct, and if there isn’t joy, why bother? If a work of art were not beautiful to us — though at times this might mean the most recalci- trant kinds of beauty — we wouldn’t stop to o≠er it our attention. The nourishment of Cezanne’s awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us. Art wants to seduce. It wants to en- trance. And because it is also entrancing, its second purpose, Horace’s instruction (an idea, to be sure, rather out of fashion these days), is forestalled from bullying didacticism. We are meaning-making animals, and meaning, to me, can itself be a resonant beauty. It may well be that beauty, at base, always holds also some measure of mean- ing, however unparaphrasable. A mathematician can be moved to tears by a proof.

456 POETRY š

A central task of any life is to a∞rm what comes — to step through the world’s o≠ered door. What I hope may also be felt in my own poems is that this agreement is not a simplistic or passive acceptance, but is hard won. Sometime during my second year of monastic life, I looked at the poems I had written in college. What I saw was that every poem yearned toward vanishing; every poem ended with a little trail of ellipses, or some conceptual or imagistic drift into fog. I was horrified. “My poems are suicidal,” I thought, “they want not to exist.” And I knew that I didn’t want to be the woman who wrote them, who yearned so strongly to disappear.

š

Zen is often described as a practice but not a “religion.” In the Western tradition, Deism, which says that the body of God is distrib- uted equally through all existence, comes closest perhaps. Take the God-ness out of it, and you’re close to Zen: what is is enough. You don’t have to add anything to reality to feel awe, or to feel respect, or to see the radiance of existence. Radiance simply is. It isn’t necessary to do a conceptual somersault in order to place it inside a specific entity. It may seem simplistic, but I truly believe that if you put a person in a prison cell with nothing but the chance and the desire to pay attention, everything they need to know about the radiance of the world is there, available. I also believe that if you brought a group of mystics, from every possible tradition, into a room, they would understand one another pretty well. At the most profound level of mystical experience, there is, I suspect, no di≠erence in what people feel.

š

My associations to the word “religion” are not particularly happy. I do realize that such associations are always idiosyncratic, but even in childhood a divine being never made much sense to me. The Judeo- Christian belief system I saw around me didn’t hold much appeal. My family did have a Passover Seder each year, and I liked the horseradish, the bitter herbs, and the salted hard-boiled egg, but the story didn’t take root as “mine” any more strongly, say, than the

VARIOUS 457 Thanksgiving story of Pilgrims and Indians or the Christmas carols we sang at school. I suppose I feel that at this point in the world’s history, all these stories might be better felt to belong to us all, as our great, common, human heritage. Their use as devices of division grieves me. Identity politics isn’t something I find congenial, even as, on the other hand, I would not like to see the world made homog- enous and single. For me, this is perhaps the most deeply troubling koan of our cultural age — how to preserve di≠erence without forti- fying the sense of combative separation.

š

A work of art o≠ers a paradoxical liberation: it is something that changes everything while being perfectly useless in any ordinary sense. I suppose some people collect paintings because they think their value will increase in ten years or a hundred years, or because owning a certain object conveys social status. Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is patently real. But I think poetry, as an art form, proves that cannot be the whole story — no one gains so- cial status from knowing or “owning” a poem. Art’s role in the con- temporary world may well be precisely to be un-useful, to reveal the importance of uselessness in our lives. You can’t eat a painting. You can’t do anything except stand before it, know the world di≠erently, and walk away changed. That’s what a painting can do, what a poem can do. Art halts the mind’s unthinking plummet and lets you see the experience as a new whole.

gerald stern

Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went to the four corners though I don’t say it out of pride but more like a type of regret, and I did it because there was no one I truly believed in

I am attracted to the prophets Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Hosea, among others. I must say that, though they were interested in justice, as I am, and even kindness, their purposes were the worship of God; that one strayed from justice when he or she was not godly. Whatever

458 POETRY I mean by justice, I think it has little to do with the existence of God or worship. Thus my alliance with the prophets is only a kind of temporary friendship. We leave each other when they put on the phylacteries and start waving their index fingers, when they start pushing people back into the fold. I am not the least interested in this. Yet, when I reduce their vision to its poetry, I am at home.

š

I suspect that the actual writing, the continuous writing, the writ- ing over and over again, the commitment, is a kind of devotion. Maybe it’s not the devotion of a priest; it is certainly the devotion of a mourner.

š

Paul Celan said that “attentiveness is the natural prayer of the human soul.” Sometimes I feel that it is a question of concentration, that I am shocked by interruption, but I feel that it is absolutely more than that, indeed, other than that. My mind, my heart, my very soul, in its attention to language, ideas, and form, is, I believe, really in that state that Celan refers to. But I’m a little nervous about false piety and have never used the word prayer in this context.

š

Most issues of faith in America refer to what we used to call orga- nized religion. In my view, and I realize it’s a traditional view, it is di∞cult to find true faith in those institutions. There are a number of poets in America who reflect on a literal level their religions, and some of them are, in spite of that, excellent poets. But faith — as we describe it, or as I describe it — is something di≠erent than that.

š

As far as the question of where I am now — which interests me most — it’s really a question of what you call “God.” What I call him, her, it, is existence itself. Maybe the word would be “Being”; maybe the word would be “The Name.” I have no interest in an old man — or woman — with a beard. I have no objection to a personal God, but

VARIOUS 459 I just don’t believe it. I don’t think anything listens, except psycho- logically, to our personal prayers. I like the fact that, at Auschwitz I think it was, there was a play in which God was put on trial. My faith is in existence. And I don’t care who this makes happy or unhappy.

š

It is getting more and more di∞cult to praise things; more and more di∞cult to move from the grittiness of daily detail and elevate the reader’s attention to something else. I suppose what is left are indi- vidual acts of courage, a∞rmation, and hopefulness. Yet, at the same time, I am supremely happy — mostly — and find joy in life itself. I don’t know what goes on here.

carolyn forché

Sewn into the hem of memory: Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God not of philosophers or scholars. God not of poets.

These days, I am a syncretist, and I don’t attempt to resolve contradic- tions between spheres of faith and belief. I consider all descriptions of divinity or the deity, descriptions in language, to be figurative, metaphorical in some way. The deity is known to the deity. We ap- prehend God or En-Sof (the infinite in Kabbalistic belief) or Raman in the way that we can. I believe that the divinity is in all things and that it is possible to know God from within. I believe that God, En- Sof, is everywhere, so the holy is everywhere. For me, holiness used to mean that which resides in the exemplary being of Christ or the exemplary beings of the apostles or martyrs. I now have su≠ered an intense dispersal of this concept, and the world is at once fallen and holy, both at the same time — the world of matter, the world that is manifest around us. So everything is utterly di≠erent from what I might have said when I was a young girl, and yet in another way, it isn’t. I’m not a doctrinaire Catholic, though I do still attend Mass.

š

460 POETRY There’s no clinging to God for me; it’s more a matter of cleaving to God, being with, saying yes to.

š

The wonderful experiences I had in El Salvador transformed my thinking and my spiritual life. The time there returned me to some- thing, but without the encumbrance of certain institutional aspects of the church that have to do with its earthly manifestation as an in- stitution. It was very freeing. I didn’t want to leave, but not because I wasn’t afraid. Whenever I came close to being wounded or hurt or killed in El Salvador, and there were a few occasions, I was terri- fied. I would immediately be nauseated. I was not good at this. Other people were much better at it. But I didn’t want to leave, neverthe- less, because I didn’t want to leave this community. I had recovered the presence of God, only this time it was in humanity. I was in El Salvador, living in a place very full of horror, but also full of light. That’s where I wanted to stay.

š

Over the years, I read the great Western poets of the twentieth century, Celan and Akhmatova and Jabès, who were known here as political poets, but they were also, as a matter of fact, spiritual poets. I came to realize that spirituality is as misunderstood as poetry in our culture. It goes unrecognized. It’s safer to relegate these poets to the political sphere. As dangerous as the political is, the spiritual is far more dangerous. These poets don’t easily extricate morality, ethics, the sacred, and the political. For them, it’s not possible to think of these as isolated categories, but rather as modes of human contempla- tion and action which are inextricably bound to one another.

š

Poetry can pass through history, but poetry is not dependent on his- tory. When I’m thinking about the spiritual, I’m thinking about a capacity to be awake, a consciousness. In the United States, they’re always saying that poets write about the self. The self has a deep in- wardness. The self is also that which knows God. I don’t think many poets write about the self. In contemporary American poetry, what

VARIOUS 461 we often encounter is not the self but personality, which is a very di≠erent matter.

š

The thing about writing poetry is that the more you’re there working, the more you’re there writing, the more you realize you are not writ- ing it. The little threads and weavings that come into the poem — one is not consciously aware of these things, because something larger is working in you. This is an experience close to revelation, to the realm of prophetic language.

alicia ostriker

To be blessed said the dog is to have a pinch of God inside you and all the other dogs can smell it

I was raised in the thirties and forties in an adamantly atheist fam- ily of socialist Jews. Neither my parents nor my grandparents were religious. The first Passover Seder I ever attended was at the home of a friend in middle school, and I had no idea what it was all about. My religious education consisted of being told that religion was the opiate of the people. So how did it come about that I go through life seeking God, and at the same time questioning all the texts that claim to know what God is? In my case, beginning in early adolescence, I sometimes found myself experiencing the world around me, the universe around me, as holy. I could be crossing the street to go to the subway — which emerged from underground at Dyckman Street where I lived in a housing project in upper Manhattan — and there were the shadows of the elevated train tracks and the two platforms, and the bright blue sky above with some small white clouds, and the brick buildings set in grass plots behind me, and the dirty lively street and the rushing tra∞c, and suddenly everything in the world was One. I knew that

462 POETRY the realities I could see and also the realities I couldn’t see were just as they were meant to be, very good. Even the evil things were meant to be as they were; they were good, too, were right. Everything fit and was moving together; everything was filled with holy energy and unity. Art, too, could reveal the holiness. I remember the moment I first laid eyes on Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I’d been taken to an opening of a show at the Metropolitan Museum by the wealthy parents of a girlfriend. Her father was an art dealer who lived on Fifth Avenue, and I was this rough diamond, this scholarship kid, this object of their charitable benevolence. They were trying to “civilize” me, as Huck Finn would say. I was usually pretty resistant and resentful of their kind e≠orts. Remember I was a red diaper baby. Part of the ideol- ogy I drank with my mother’s milk was that rich people were my enemies. I was proud of being poor and clueless. But there I was in this roomful of ladies wearing mink coats, pushing my way past them, when suddenly in front of me appeared this painting! This Revelation! This, at last, was what people meant when they talked about Art with a capital A. At the same time, it was a manifestation of Reality with a capital R. The divine Reality, the divine energy that sweeps through the universe, that is the truth inside everything, that we can’t see with our eyes — and there it was in those swirling blues and yellows, and those curves of trees. The energy was there in those brushstrokes.

š

I’ve never been a fan of the God who sits on an exalted throne remote from us, the sex-hating dualistic God that Blake cleverly calls “Nobodaddy,” who is nothing but an egocentric tyrant demanding to be worshiped. I’ve never been interested in transcendence, or an afterlife. I’m for immanence. This life, and that’s it. If there’s sacred- ness to be found, it’s to be found right here.

š

My first real encounter with Judaism was reading the Bible one sum- mer while I was in college. My then boyfriend — subsequently my husband — had said he thought I’d like it. Ha. That was an under- statement. Reading the Bible was a quite di≠erent experience from

VARIOUS 463 reading poetry, even the poetry of Whitman and Blake. I bonded with that Book as if it were a dream of my own. Mine, I kept think- ing, this is mine. Of course I was reading the magnificent King James translation, but it was the stories that captured me, first of all. When Sarah laughed, I laughed. When Jacob wrestled all night with a stranger and in the morning said, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” I wept with joy. When David danced before the Lord, I wanted to dance, too. When Job raised his voice in an- ger and challenged God’s goodness, I understood where Jewish anti- authoritarianism — and my own habit of questioning authority — came from. I felt that the men and women in the Bible were my mothers and fathers, and the God was my God — whether I liked him or not.

š

It seems clear to me that the being whom we in the West call “God the Father” swallowed God the Mother in prehistory. That is to say, the God of male monotheism, who keeps demanding worship, the warrior and judge and tyrant God, absorbed the powers of goddesses who were worshiped for millennia before He came on the scene. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, and other ancient goddesses, were in charge of things like childbirth and lawmaking, for example. But remember the wolf who swallowed the grandmother in the story of Red Riding Hood? Grandmother doesn’t die, and God the Mother doesn’t die. She’s there inside the belly of the beast. Which is to say, we can see traces of her in the Biblical texts. What I really believe is that we can all be midwives of the Divine Female; we can help her be born into the world again.

š

Like other poets, I am often asked if I have a spiritual practice. Yes, writing is my spiritual practice. Ultimately, the words come from somewhere beyond myself, though they travel through me in order to reach the page. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!” says D.H. Lawrence. Probably many poets would say the same, especially today. Although it is going on below the radar of the critical establishment, isn’t it clear that our culture is in a post- secular age? Poets — and novelists and playwrights (think Angels in America) — everywhere in America are struggling with matters of

464 POETRY the spirit. Matters of spiritual experience, I should say, outside of churches and synagogues, outside of doctrines and dogmas. This renaissance of spirituality has nothing to do with the right wing fun- damentalisms that play such a destructive part in our political life. From Lucille Clifton to Franz Wright, the testimony grows.

š

I do believe in the future. I believe that a future can grow organically out of the past, and that when women’s multiple and layered spiritual experiences and revelations, and the poetry born from them, con- tribute as much as men’s spiritual experiences and revelations have on our speck of a planet, everything will perhaps look di≠erent. God, the soul, good and evil, will have new meanings. Maybe we’ll have a better world. A better world is what my mother and father believed in. We can’t overcome six thousand years of worshiping a god made in man’s image overnight, and we can’t stop the wars and violence committed with the help of that image tomorrow. But there is a say- ing in Talmud: “It is not incumbent on you to finish the task. Neither are you free to give it up.”

Some of the individual entries by Carolyn Forché, Jane Hirshfield, and Grace Paley have appeared earlier, in di≠erent forms, in the Mars Hill Review, AGNI Online, and pw.org.

VARIOUS 465 CONTRIBUTORS

kazim ali’s * books of poems are The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005), The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions, 2008), and Bright Felon (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). david biespiel is the president of the Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon. His most recent book is Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces (Kelson Books, 2010). jericho brown * received a Whiting Award and a Radcli≠e Fellow- ship at Harvard. His first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won an American Book Award. robert creeley (1926–2005) first appeared in Poetry in August 1957, where he went on to publish sixty-six poems and many reviews. paul durica is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments. carolyn forché is the author of four books of poetry, most re- cently Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004). She directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. carol frost’s latest poetry collection is Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010). Her new book, Trilogy, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. robert frost’s (1874–1963) “The Witch of Coös” first appeared in the January 1922 issue of Poetry — “We know they had a grave down in the cellar.” greg glazner’s Singularity (1997) and From the Iron Chair (1992) are published by W.W. Norton. His poems in this issue are from his multi-genre manuscript “Opening the World.” albert goldbarth’s collections of poetry have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His new book, Everyday People, is just out from Graywolf Press. joy harjo * was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation. Her seventh book of poetry is How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2002).

466 POETRY jane hirshfield’s most recent book is Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). fanny howe’s newest poetry collection is Come and See (Graywolf Press, 2011). She teaches at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. langston hughes’s (1902–1967) “Blues” was published in Poetry, November 1926 — “Gonna buy me a knife with / A blade ten inches long. / Shall I carve ma self or / That man that done me wrong?” weldon kees (1914–1955) first appeared in Poetry in July 1938 — “The ectoplasm of Immanuel Kant unwittingly appears.” nate klug’s poems have appeared in the Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and Zoland Poetry. This year, he is working as a hospital chaplain in Bridgeport, Connecticut. philip levine is the eighteenth poet laureate of the United States. His most recent book is News of the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). janet lewis first appeared in Poetry in June 1920 — “‘Look,’ said God; / And with slow fingers / Drew away the mantle rock.” joanie mackowski has published two books of poems, View From a Temporary Window (2010) and The Zoo (2002), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series). philip metres’s new chapbook is abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011). His most recent essay, “Beyond Grief and Grievance: The po- etry of 9/11 and its aftermath,” can be found at poetryfoundation.org. dunya mikhail’s books in English are The War Works Hard (2005) and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009), both published by New Directions, translated from the Arabic with Elizabeth Winslow. lisel mueller first appeared in Poetry in April 1958 — “love’s primal claim: / here in the body truth grows palpable.” d. nurkse received a 2009 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book is A Night In Brooklyn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). gregory orr’s most recent collections include How Beautiful the Beloved (2009) and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (2005), both published by Copper Canyon Press.

CONTRIBUTORS 467 alicia ostriker’s fourteenth collection is The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979–2011 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). grace paley * (1922–2007) was a poet, fiction writer, activist, and self-described “combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” robert pinsky’s new Selected Poems (2011) is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. josé antonio rodríguez’s * first book is The Shallow End of Sleep (Tia Chucha Press, 2011). Read more at JoseOrBust.blogspot.com. fiona sampson’s latest collection, Rough Music (Carcanet Press), was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. vijay seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), The Long Meadow (2004) — both published by Graywolf Press — and The Dis- appearances (HarperCollins India, 2007). felix sockwell is an editorial illustrator and gui designer for small and large companies. a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). Stallings is a 2011 Guggen- heim fellow and recently received a MacArthur Fellowship. gerald stern’s forthcoming books are Stealing History (Trinity University Press), “a sort of record of a mind in the year 2010,” and In Beauty Bright: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2012). rabindranath tagore (1861–1941) appeared in the third issue of Poetry, December 1912. His poem “Thou hast made me known ... ” was his introduction to the English-speaking world. eleanor ross taylor’s latest book is Captive Voices (lsu Press, 2009). She is the recipient of the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. jean valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). wendy videlock lives in Western Colorado. She is the author of Nevertheless (Able Muse Press, 2011). connie voisine is the author of Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

468 POETRY g.c. waldrep is the author of four collections of poetry, most re- cently Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), in col- laboration with John Gallaher. He teaches at Bucknell University. eleanor wilner’s Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010) was published in an Italian bilingual edition, Voci dal Labirinto (Plumelia Edizioni, Bagheria, Italy, 2011). dean young’s most recent book is Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). His new and selected poems, Bender, is forthcoming.

* First appearance in Poetry.

CONTRIBUTORS 469 7RITERS 2ISING 5P 0RAIRIE 0OETRY 0RIZE 0RAIRIE 3AMPLER

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    26th Year New York State Summer Writers Institute July 2 — July 27, 2012

TEACHING FACULTY POETRY FRANK BIDART‡+ENRI COLE‡ROSANNA WARREN CAMPBELL MCGRATH‡3EG BOYERS FICTION AMY HEMPEL‡RICK MOODY ALLAN GURGANUS‡MARY GAITSKILL CLAIRE MESSUD‡MARGOT LIVESEY DARIN STRAUSS‡-OANNA SCOTT DANZY SENNA‡VICTORIA REDEL ELIZABETH BENEDICT NON-FICTION PHILLIP LOPATE‡-AMES MILLER

VISITING FACULTY

RUSSELL BANKS‡-OYCE CAROL OATES ROBERT PINSKY‡MICHAEL OND$$7-( MARK STRAND‡SIRI HUSTVEDT -AMES LONGENBACH‡7OM HEALY ANN BEATTIE‡PAUL AUSTER WILLIAM KENNEDY‡MARY GORDON RICHARD HOWARD‡-AMAICA KINCAID HONOR MOORE‡&ARYL PHILLIPS FRANCINE PROSE‡-ORIE GRAHAM

For more information and to apply, please visit: www.skidmore.edu/summer VY^YP[L!5@::>0‹:WLJPHS7YVNYHTZ :RPKTVYL*VSSLNL‹:HYH[VNH:WYPUNZ5@  NEW FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS

“This indispensable guide offers specifi c examples of programs that work well in diverse and far-fl ung communities. There is no guide like this, and it’s long overdue.”

—PEGGY SHUMAKER, Alaska State Writer Laureate

BLUEPRINTS Bringing Poetry into Communities

Edited by KATHARINE COLES 320 pp., paper | $8.95

With essayists —including Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Hass, and Patricia Smith—describing how poets and artists have brought poetry into different kinds of communities, and a “toolkit” loaded with experience- based advice, tools, and strategies, Blueprints is a necessity for arts organizers and those in the poetry community.

Purchase at www.UofUpress.com or at your local bookstore. FREE E-BOOK can be downloaded at: www.UofUpress.com or www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/poetryinstitute.html

A copublication with the Poetry Foundation “If Anton Chekhov returned as a modern day poet, Richard Hoffman would be his name. His poems reverberate with the same lucid witness and precision....Emblem is a marvelous new book.”—Terrance Hayes

BARROW STREET PRESS

www.barrowstreet.org

“...the very title of this fourth volume of Hightower’s verse, we are told, is Ben Franklin’s revision of Jefferson’s proposed S!"#–E$%&!'( Scott Hightower opening of a famous document which originally characterized “these truths” as sacred, but which cool-headed Ben changed to self-evident. Per- haps there is some savor of Jesus in these breathtaking poems after all. Read ’em and wipe away your tears.”—Richard Howard CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

You supply the readers, we’ll supply the poems!

Free copies of the April 2012 issue of Poetry will be given to reading groups that request them by March 23. You’ll be able to consider the thought-provoking commentary and poems — or simply read them aloud. All we ask in return is that you send us a brief account of your discussion.

Requests for free issues must be received by March 23. Only one address per reading group, please. Issues will ship late March. Requests will be accepted online only at:

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/NPM Congratulations Lisa Russ Spaar 2011 Recipient

!e Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, established in 2005, is awarded each year to a poet with strong connections to central Virginia. !e $10,000 prize recognizes signi"cant recent contribution to the art of poetry and a broad range of achievement in the "eld.

PRESENTED AT THE 2011 LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA LITERARY AWARDS CELEBRATION

Visit www.weinsteinpoetryprize.com for information about previous recipients and www.lva.virginia.gov the selection proccess.

POETRY 2012 International Poetry Competition

$ Grand Prize 1,000 20 entrants will be published in Atlanta Review

Enter Online: www.atlantareview.com Deadline: March 1, 2012


 

www.atlantareview.com PO Box 8248, Atlanta GA 31106

arpoetry.indd 1 10/26/2011 12:38:28 PM

2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships

Five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships are awarded annually through a national competition open to young poets. Each fellowship is in the amount of $15,000.

Complete rules and application forms will be available on February 1 at poetryfoundation.org/fellowship.

POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG

Read
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BELLDAY BOOKS ANNOUNCES THE 2012 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE

Bellday Books will publish the winning book and award $2,000 and 25 copies to the author. CONTEST FINAL JUDGE: Rae Armantrout Rae Armantrout has published 10 books of poetry, including her most recent book, Money Shot (2011), and Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Postmodern American Poetry, several editions of Best American Poetry, and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). She is professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

Submission Deadline: Postmarked March 15, 2012 x Submit manuscript of 60-90 pages of original poetry in English. The manuscript must not have been published in book or chapbook, but may contain poems that have appeared in print or on the Internet. x Manuscript must contain 2 title pages: Name and contact information should appear on first title page only. Name should not appear anywhere else in manuscript. Manuscript should be typed, single- spaced, paginated, and bound with spring clip. x Include a table of contents page. x Enclose SASE for announcement of the winner. x Manuscripts cannot be returned. Complete rules: belldaybooks.com x Check or money order for $25 reading fee, payable to Bellday Books. x Mail entries: Bellday Books, Inc., P.O. Box 3687, Pittsburgh, PA 15230.

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@;@; B     The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers Volume One, 1890-1930 Edited by JAMES KARMAN $95.00 cloth

NOW AVAILABLE! The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers Volume Two, 1931–1939 Edited by JAMES KARMAN $95.00 cloth “Robinson Jeffers remains the least understood of the major American poets from the fi rst half of the 20th century. These letters are crucial to anyone working seriously on Jeffers and his poetry and will deeply reward any reader interested in his work and life.” —Tim Hunt, Illinois State University “What Stanford University Press accomplished in The Collected Letters of Jack London, it is now accomplishing on behalf of another giant of American letters. In The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, James Karman is setting new stan-dards for skillful editing, and the project will further establish Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision.” —Kevin Starr, University of Southern California Stanford Most Stanford titles are University Press available as e-books: http://www.sup.org/ebooks 800.621.2736 www.sup.org

Push Past the Obvious

M.F.A.in Creative Writing Adelphi has given me the confidence to be my own second pair of eyes. - Danielle Mebert B.A. ’04, M.A. ’05, M.F.A. ’11

The Adelphi M.F.A. in Creative Writing offers you:

t
Advanced workshops in poetry, fiction, dramatic writing and creative nonfiction t
A Professional Development Practicum that introduces students to the professional and practical life of writers t
Lively engagement with nearby New York City’s artistically active boroughs t
Scholarship, internship and teaching opportunities For more information on Adelphi’s M.F.A. program, visit academics.adelphi.edu/artsci/creativewriting.

Judith Baumel Jacqueline Jones LaMon Poetry Poetry The Kangaroo Girl; Now Last Seen; Gravity, U.S.A. Martha Cooley Vince Passaro Fiction Fiction Thirty-Three Swoons; Violence, Nudity, Adult Content; The Archivist “Voluntary Tyranny, or Anton Dudley Brezhnev at the Mall” Dramatic Writing Igor Webb Substitution; Getting Creative Nonfiction Home; Davy & Stu (film) Buster Brown’s America; Kermit Frazier Now That They Are Dead Dramatic Writing Smoldering Fires; Interstices; Ghostwriter (television) POETRY FOUNDATION EVENTS

Dreamweaver: The Works of Langston Hughes Actor and writer David Mills provides a dramatic rendition of Langston Hughes’s poems and short stories, highlighting the poet’s unending love for Harlem. friday, february 10, 7:00 pm saturday, february 11, 3:00 pm

Poetry Out Loud: Chicago Regional Finals Champions from Chicago high schools recite poems for the chance to represent Illinois at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington DC. At stake are over $100,000 in scholarship awards and school stipends. friday, february 17, 10:00 am

Fjords Fjords presents the poetry of Zachary Schomburg with shadow puppetry, live silhouette, video, and manipulated slide projection. Tickets available at manualcinema.com. thursday, february 23 – sunday, february 26, 7:00 pm

Shoot the Canon Poetry presents poets performing covers of and reading dis- coveries from the last 100 years of the magazine, featuring Christian Bök, Peter Gizzi, K. Silem Mohammed, Tracie Morris, Vanessa Place, Sina Queyras, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, and others making it new all over again. thursday, march 1, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

POETRY FOUNDATION a 61 WEST SUPERIOR STREET a CHICAGO POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/EVENTS back page

February 1930

In the 1880s the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway commis- sioned the Chicago firm of Burnham and Root to design and con- struct a luxury hotel north of Las Vegas. The Montezuma Castle was the first hotel of its size and caliber to be illuminated entirely by electric lights, serving as a lure in the Santa Fe’s policy to increase its profits through tourism. Architect John Wellborn Root’s sister-in- law, Harriet Monroe, also did her part to promote the Southwest. In exchange for free train passes, Monroe wrote articles and stories on the West for the Atlantic, Fortnightly Review, House Beautiful, and Putnam’s Magazine, and was a frequent guest at El Tovar, a “Harvey House” hotel located near the Grand Canyon. By the twenties, the Fred Harvey Company had created the nation’s first chain of hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe, combining modern facilities with guided “Indian-detours” in “Harveycars,” privately rented automo- biles. “Attractive, quiet-voiced young women of the Southwest now guide discriminating travellers among the crags and canyons of New Mexico and Arizona,” explained a December 7, 1928 Chicago Tribune advertisement, “as capably and surely as the old trail masters once handled pack-train or raiding party.” Today the Montezuma and El Tovar are relics in their own right.

Paul Durica

“Back Page” is a monthly feature of artifacts from the last one hundred years of Poetry. author

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