Jed Rasula

[from Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum, National Council of Teachers of English, 1996]

the attenuated lyric personalism that is the dominant workshop mode has constricted the range of expression and blotted out the diversity of ethnopoetic traditions. John Koethe's analysis is astute: "Writing programs are not usually 'schools,'" he points out. But, "[i]n the absence of explicitly articulated theoretical principles regarding the nature and purpose of poetry, they inculcate, by default, a poetics of the 'individual voice' that valorizes authenticity and fidelity to its origins in prepoetic experience or emotion." In other words, ethnic diversity at the applicant and trainee level does not automatically translate into poetic diversity. So the writing programs have become a safe haven, a refuge from the sociocultural perplexities signified by "theory" and "postmodernism" (not to mention "late capitalism"), promoting a return to the now paradoxically reassuring anxieties of self-doubt.

Lucia Perillo

[from Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant, Copper Canyon, 2009]

Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs

The prison kennel's tin roof howls
while the dogs romp outside through the flakes.
The inmates trained a dog to lift my legs --
for months they rolled the concrete floor
in wheelchairs, simulating.

Through a window I watch them cartwheel now,
gray sweatpants rising against the whitened hill
traversed by wire asterisks and coils.
At first I feared they pitied me,
the way I flinched at the building's smell.

Now the tin roof howls, the lights go off
to the sound of locking doors. Go on, breathe --
no way the machinery of my lungs
is going to plow the county road.
Didn't I try to run over a guy,

spurned love being the kindling stick that rubbed
against his IOUs? Easy to land here,
anyone could -- though I think laughter
would elude me, no matter what the weather.
Compared to calculating how far to the road.

Signs there say: CORRECTIONS CENTER DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.
My instructions were: Accept no notes or photographs,
and restrict the conversation to such topics as
how to teach the dog to nudge
the light switch with his nose.

Now the women let their snowballs fly -- as if
the past were a simple matter that could splat and melt.
Only my red dog turns his head
toward the pines beyond the final fence
before the generator chugs to life.

poets who have won the MacArthur

[my thanks to Emily Lloyd for this list]

Despite my raging joy that Heather McHugh has won half a million dollars, I deplore prize giving of all kinds because of the implied value judgments, politics, social bias, cultural pressure, category exclusions, etc.

Below is a chronological list of poets who have won the MacArthur.

How many of these poets have you heard of? How many have you read? How many have taught you things you value? What do your answers say about your position in or out of the poetry mainstream? What poets are not on the list who would be on your list? What is your response to the enthronement of poets (or anyone) in this fashion?

I highly recommend Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum for a fascinating contrarian view of the poetry policy makers of the 20th century.

Poets who have won the MacArthur:

A.R. Ammons
Joseph Brodsky
Derek Walcott
Robert Penn Warren
Brad Leithauser
A.K. Ramanujan
Robert Hass
Charles Simic
Galway Kinnell
John Ashbery
Daryl Hine
Jay Wright
Douglas Crase
Richard Kenney
Mark Strand
May Swenson
Allen Grossman
Jorie Graham
John Hollander
Alice Fulton
Eleanor Wilner
Amy Clampitt
Irving Feldman
Thom Gunn
Ann Lauterbach
Jim Powell
Adrienne Rich
Sandra Cisneros
Richard Howard
Thylias Moss
Susan Stewart
Linda Bierds
Edward Hirsch
Ishmael Reed
Campbell McGrath
Anne Carson
Lucia Perillo
C.D. Wright
Peter Cole
Heather McHugh

Karen Volkman

[from Karen Volkman's Crash's Law, Norton, 1996]

Persephone at Home

No good reflecting on what might have been
if I'd been different -- no straying
after foreign flowers, no hunger
for bitter fruit. In the beginning --

such a child -- I thought it punishment,
not fate. It is daylight I miss
mainly. What we are granted of sun here
is a dim relentless red. I wander

the reeking river, I pat
fat Cerberus on his many manic heads.
The moldy skiff makes its incessant
prompt arrivals, so efficient,

our dutiful Charon growling orders
from the prow. Huge-eyed, uncomprehending,
the new recruits stare round. Wives still
clutching their washing, wailing children,

soldiers blood-stained and battered
from the latest engagement.
Then that blessed briny sip, welcome
oblivion -- they're blank as babies.

All nights the shrieks of the tortured serenade
our marriage bed. Once it lulled
me rigid. For years after that
first celebrated rape,

I lay cold beneath his coldness,
stiff in his stiff embrace.
I'll give no prince to this kingdom.
That thing is dead.

For years, he broke me for it.
For years, I bled and bled.
That was then. Queen
of his blasphemous backwater,

I make my claim. On earth,
I am virginal abundance, fat and full.
Here, bony and empty, I straddle
my killer, my captor, my grief, my bane,

and tear and take
the torn lip, the raked neck, the aching thighs,
that will remind me
through the long black morning

I am alive.


White Lily

Gnomish in its rounded hunch
of greeny folds, three-fourths of the year
it resembles a weed. Now spring's

unseasonable heat
brings vindication. Trumpet
over frilled, frail trumpet

spills its bone-white notes
in April air. Below, in shadow --
shrunken, overawed -- skulks

the novice rosebush
we rooted in the fall. This
spendthrift, who's squandered

brilliant buds for months,
today knows the earthy weight
of morning-after. Our double

hibiscus, also, pinkly plumed,
succumbed to a plumber's truck
that veered too soon. But the lily

in her straight ascetic's
rigid pose, white as the ember
of a low, enduring fire

takes her pleasure like
the wife of the pastor
come to bed -- prim in her cotton frock

throughout the day, precise
in her firm instructions
to the maid, who cradled

in the rough caress of muslin sheets
bares her stoic shoulders to the room
and seizes in her strong white legs

the truant moon.

Anne Waldman

[from Anne Waldman's Manatee/Humanity, Penguin Books, 2009]

& in the dream it was wolves all the way down,
             wolf pack thrashing & gnawing at the corpses of other animals
cannibal heaven
misunderstood
a small splash, a chill

an eye caught
trapped!
stare!
quick!
             shift!
metallic shimmer
   cloaks & hoods of the imposters
rent apart by wolves
   "I am a youth with golden cymbals dancing"
then one, turns
              to me as in blame
would you come to my rescue?

reliable humans? would you?
  notice animals dressed as humans now, imposter humans

             strewn out on the charnel ground, clothed
battered & trying to be animal again, scratch wolf-eyes off the facade of human


images of many ravage sites flash by
       as if there is atavistic memory
creation of a perceptual world of death & destruction
long evolutionary gestation of death & destruction

                      we stopped to observe (my companion always with me now);
cougar, head snapped
entrails ripped out . . . & spread all around
those parts not eaten
cougar cups eviscerated, killer instinct or survival

what can we learn from the predatory nature of other animals
to surround the bison
down the cattle

the other way around, you said
we came first
                  so like them . . .

we in our sweet-smelling realm so like them--
pack of wolves


                        & all breaths escape to exhale in the continued plight of
wolves, loyal in their pack abode, cunning
bright-eyed ones

                               wolfskin!
                                                    ride over me tonight

& manatee
you can't mix a human monster ever enough to aid the manatee

surely our conscious plans have precursors in animal brains

Charles Olson

Proprioception

 

Physiology:                    the surface (senses—the 'skin': of 'Human

                                      Universe') the body itself—proper—one's own

                                      'corpus': PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of the body,

                                      in which the organs are slung: the viscera, or

                                      interoceptive, the old 'psychology' of feeling,

                                      the heart; of desire, the liver; of sympathy, the

                                      'bowels'; of courage—the kidney etc—gall,

                                      (Stasis—or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)             

 

                         Today:  movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik)

                                      the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,

                                      tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily

                                      tensions (—or relaxations of same). Violence:

                                      knives/anything, to get the body in.

 

To which

PROPRIOCEPTION:     the data of depth sensibility/the 'body' of us as

                                      object which spontaneously or of its own order

                                      produces experience of, 'depth' Viz

                                      SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM

      BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES

 

'Psychology':                 the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no flow

                                      because the 'senses' of same are all that sd contact

                                      area is valuable for, to report in to central. In-

THE WORKING            spection, followed hard on heels by, judgment

     'OUT' OF                  (judicium, dotha: cry, if you must/all feeling may

'PROJECTION'             flow, is all which can count, at sd point. Direction

                                      outward is sorrow, or joy. Or participation: active

                                      social life, like, for no other reason than that—

                                      social life, in the present. Wash the ego out, in its

                                      own 'bath' (os)

 

                                      The 'cavity'/cave: probably the 'Unconscious'? That

                                      is, the interior empty place filled with 'organs'? for

                                      'functions'?

 

                                      The advantage is to 'place' the thing, instead of

                                      it wallowing around sort of outside, in the

THE 'PLACE'                universe, like, when the experience of it is intero-

      OF THE                  ceptive: it is inside us/& at the same time does

'UNCONSCIOUS'         not feel literally identical with our own physical or

                                      mortal self (the part that can die). In this sense

                                      likewise the heart, etc, the small intestine etc, are

                                      or can be felt as—and literally they can be—

                                      transferred. Or substituted for. Etc. The organs.—

                                      Probably also why the old psychology was chiefly

                                      visceral; neither dream, nor the unconscious, was

                                      then known as such. Or allowably inside, like.

 

'ACTION'—OR, AGAIN, 'MOVEMENT'

 

                                      This 'demonstration' then leads to the same third,

                                      or corpus, thing or 'place,' the

 

                                                 proprious-ception

                                                 'one's own'-ception

 

                                      the 'body' itself as, by movement of its own tis-

                                      sues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then, wld be

    the soul is                  what is left out? Or what is psysiologically even

proprioceptive               the 'hard' (solid, palpable), that one's life is

                                      informed from and by one's owl literal body—

                                      as well, that is, as the whole inner mechanism,

                                      which keeps us so damn busy (like eating, sleeping,

                                      urinating, dying there, by deterioration of sd

                                      'functions' of sd 'organs')—that this mid-thing

                                      between, which is what gets 'buried,' like, the

                                      flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one

                                      uses, literally, to get about etc

                                                                       that this is 'central,' that is—in

                                      this 1/2 of the picture—what they call the SOUL,

                                      the intermediary, the intervening thing, the inter-

                                      ruptor, the resistor. The self.

 

    The gain:                   to have a third term, so that movement or action

                                      is 'home.' Neither the Unconscious nor Projection

                                      (here used to remove the false opposition of

                                      'Conscious'; 'consciousness' is self) have a home

                                      unless the DEPTH implicit in physical being—

                                      built-in space-time specifics, and moving (by

                                      movement of 'its own')    —is asserted, or found-

                                      out as such. Thus the advantage of the value

                                      'proprioception.' As such.

 

                                      The 'soul' then is equally 'physical.' Is the self.

    its own                       Is such, 'corpus.' Or—to levy the gain psychology          

  perception                   from 1900, or 1885, did supply until it didn't

                                      (date? 1948?)—the three terms wld be:

 

                                      surface (senses) projection

                                      cavity (organs—here read 'archtypes')

                                      unconscious the body itself—consciousness:

                                      implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a state of

                                      implicit motion.

 

                 identity,         therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and the

                                      abstract-primitive character of the real (asserted)

                                      is 'placed': projection is discrimination (of the

                                      object from the subject) and the unconscious is the

                                      universe flowing-in, inside.

 

David St. John

[from David St. John's Study for the World's Body: New and Selected Poems, 1994, Harper Collins]

Slow Dance

It's like the riddle Tolstoy
Put to his son, pacing off the long fields
Deepening in ice. Or the little song
Of Anna's heels, knocking
Through the cold ballroom. It's the relief
A rain enters in a diary, left open under the sky.
The night releases
Its stars, & the birds the new morning. It is an act of grace
& disgust. A gesture of light:
The lamp turned low in the window, the harvest
Fire across the far warp of the land. The somber
Cadence of boots returns. A village
Pocked with soldiers, the dishes rattling in the cupboard
As an old serving woman carries a huge, silver spoon
Into the room & as she polishes she holds it just
So in the light, & the fat
Of her jowls
Goes taut in the reflection. It's what shapes
The sag of those cheeks, & has
Nothing to do with death though it is as simple, & insistent.
Like a coat too tight at the shoulders, or a bedroom
Weary of its single guest. At last, a body
Is spent by sleep: A dream stealing the arms, the legs.
A lover who has left you
Walking constantly away, beyond that stand
Of bare, autumnal trees: Vague & loose. Yet, it's only
The dirt that consoles the root. You must begin
Again to move, towards the icy sill. A small
Girl behind a hedge of snow
Working a stick puppet so furiously the passersby bump
Into one another, watching the stiff arms
Fling out to either side, & the nervous goose-step, the dances
Going on, & on
Though the girl is growing cold in her thin coat & silver
Leotard. She lays her cheek to the frozen bank
& lets the puppet sprawl upon her,
Across her face, & a single man is left twirling very
Slowly, until the street
Is empty of everything but snow. The snow
Falling, & the puppet. That girl. You close the window,
& for the night's affair slip on the gloves
Sewn of the delicate
Hides of mice. They are like the redemption
Of a drastic weather: Your boat
Put out too soon to sea,
Come back. Like the last testimony, & trace of desire. Or,
How your blouse considers your breasts,
How your lips preface your tongue, & how a man
Assigns a silence to his words. We know lovers who quarrel
At a party stay in the cool trajectory
Of the other's glance,
Spinning through pockets of conversation, sliding in & out
Of the little gaps between us all until they brush or stand at last
Back to back, & the one hooks
An ankle around the other's foot. Even the woman
Undressing to music on a stage & the man going home the longest
Way after a night of drinking remember
The brave lyric of a heel-&-toe. As we remember the young
Acolyte tipping
The flame to the farthest candle & turning
To the congregation, twirling his gold & white satin
Skirts so that everyone can see his woolen socks & rough shoes
Thick as the hunter's boots that disappear & rise
Again in the tall rice
Of the marsh. The dogs, the heavy musk of duck. How the leaves
Introduce us to the tree. How the tree signals
The season, & we begin
Once more to move: Place to place. Hand
To smoother & more lovely hand. A slow dance. To get along
You toss your corsage onto the waters turning
Under the fountain, & walk back
To the haze of men & women, the lazy amber & pink lanterns
Where you will wait for nothing more than the slight gesture
Of a hand, asking
For this slow dance, & another thick & breathless night.
Yet, you want none of it. Only, to return
To the countryside. The fields & long grasses:
The scent of your son's hair, & his face
Against your side,
As the cattle knock against the walls of the barn
Like the awkward dancers in this room
You must leave, knowing the leaving as the casual
& careful betrayal of what comes
Too easily, but not without its cost, like an old white
Wine out of its bottle, or the pages
Sliding from a worn hymnal. At home, you walk
With your son under your arm, asking of his day, & how
It went, & he begins the story
How he balanced on the sheer hem of a rock, to pick that shock
Of aster nodding in the vase, in the hall. You pull him closer
& turn your back to any other life. You want
Only the peace of walking in the first light of morning,
As the petals of ice bunch one
Upon another at the lip of the iron pump & soon a whole blossom
Hangs above the trough, a crowd of children teasing it
With sticks until the pale neck snaps, & flakes spray everyone,
& everyone simply dances away.


Leap of Faith

No less fabulous than the carved marble inner
Ear of a lost Michelangelo & more
Blinding than the multiple courts & interior facets
Of a black diamond held up in broken moonlight

This final geography acknowledges its trunks of
Ebony & its boughs of summer rain

Though there at the gate where Dante burned his
Initials into the face of the oak shield
I hesitated before following the switchback trail up
To the precipice overlooking the canyon the abyss
So relished by philosophy & when I saw you
On the opposite cliff in your long cape & gold
Shoes with frayed thin ribbons snaking up your ankles

Like anyone approaching from the foot of a bridge
I simply stepped toward you & below the bones
Of the fallen shone in the lightning & the prayers

& certainly it was there in that country
Braced between twin brackets of stone I saw only one
Belief remains for a man whose life is spared by

A faith more insupportable than air

C. Dale Young

What C. Dale Young learned from Susan Hahn at Triquarterly.

Sixty Some

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Jed Rasula

[from Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum, National Council of Teachers of English, 1996]

The dominant modern institutions, according to Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, are colonization, psychiatry, and pedagogy, which focus and bring into line the renegade tendencies of the masses, the unconscious, and the child, respectively. The society of the spectacle engineers these elements into a coherent ideological motif, that of the nation, which is therefore less a polity than a fantasy. The fantasy is certified in its purity as a hegemonic "voice" at that point when individual members of the society or group appear to spontaneously exhibit the rules of order, the principles of cohesion, and reiterate in almost ritual fashion a miraculous unity of individual utterance and collective sentiment. This is the birth of the poetry workshop.

Sixty Some

Today Apobiz Press published my new book, Sixty Some.

Read it in your browser or buy a copy for your favorite ebook device.

Rae Armantrout

[from Rae Armantrout's Up to Speed, Wesleyan, 2004]

Entanglement

1

"Don't let the car fool you.

My treasure
is in heaven."

2

The material world is made up
entirely

of collisions

between otherwise
indefinite objects.

Then what is a collision?

(Or the physical world
collapses

into place

at the shock of
being seen.)

3

In the shorter version,

tentacled
stomach swallows stomach.

In a long dream,
I'm with Aaron,

visiting his future,
helping him make choices.

Robert Bly

[Robert Bly in Five Points 10, 2006]

Something About Morning Pajamas

When you've been sleeping all night in a warm bed
There's sometimes a playful odor in your pajamas
It's a bit lowlife, but satisfying
It is some sort of fragrant warmth
That your balls created during the night.
It's a mammal delight related
To the way the calf
Loves the cow's udder.
That mammal delight is one of the nouns
Of this earth.
Don't be ashamed, friends.
Don't throw the pajamas in the washer.
Don't open the window;
Forget the Pilgrims.
Think how sweet it is
That advice should come
From a source so deep.

Monique Wittig

[from Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, translated by David Le Vay, Beacon, 1969]

As regards the feminaries the women say for instance that they have forgotten the meaning of one of their ritual jokes. It has to do with the phrase, The bird of Venus takes flight towards evening. It is written that the lips of the vulva have been compared to the wings of a bird, hence the name of bird of Venus that has been given them. The vulva has been compared to all kinds of birds, for instance to doves, starlings, bengalis, nightingales, finches, swallows. They say that they have unearthed an old text in which the author, comparing vulvas to swallows, says that he does not know which of them moves better or has the faster wing. However, The bird of Venus takes flight towards evening, they say they do not know what this means.


The golden fleece is one of the designations that have been given to the hairs that cover the pubis. As for the quests for the golden fleece to which certain ancient myths allude, the women say they know little of these. They say that the horseshoe which is a representation of the vulva has long been considered a lucky charm. They say that the most ancient figures depicting the vulva resemble horseshoes. They say that in fact it is in such a shape that they are represented on the walls of palaeolithic grottos.


The women say that the feminaries give pride of place to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero, the sphere. They say that this series of symbols has provided them with a guideline to decipher a collection of legends they have found in the library and which they have called the cycle of the Grail. These are to do with the quests to recover the Grail undertaken by a number of personages. They say it is impossible to mistake the symbolism of the Round Table that dominated their meetings. They say that, at the period when the texts were compiled, the quests for the Grail were singular unique attempts to describe the zero the circle the ring the spherical cup containing the blood. They say that, to judge by what they know about their subsequent history, the quests for the Grail were not successful, that they remained of the nature of a legend.


There are also legends in which young women having stolen fire carry it in their vulvas. There is the story of her who fell asleep for a hundred years from having wounded her finger with her spindle, the spindle being cited as the symbol of the clitoris. In connection with this story the women make many jokes about the awkwardness of the one who lacked the priceless guidance of a feminary. They say laughing that she must have been the freak spoken of elsewhere, she who, in place of a little pleasure-greedy tongue, had a poisonous sting. They say they do not understand why she was called the sleeping beauty.

Pamela Alexander

[from Pamela Alexander's Navigable Waterways, Yale, 1985]

The Garden in the Middle

Panes and eggs make fragile dozens:
two times six in cardboard nests, food
for angels who eat cake; three
times four the membranes between weathers.
Frames hold themselves in wooden hugs
that keep the world together, the glass
a cubist with twelve angles on what is:
peach tree; sea flexing; perhaps a house
being painted blue. Here, a Q:

a british line. A dozen people
wait to buy beer in the sculpture garden.
English sparrows and leaves also
stand in lines together, higher
than the humans. Big plants
digest sunlight and rumble in their juices.
People through the queue sit
to tea-cakes and quiches
at tables made of metal imitating
lace: ornate with curlicues,
the iron legs are painted white
as eggs. Dozens of dozens of windows
surround the lines of this and that:
the museum looks out, and in,
at its informal center. The courtyard

a disordered game board:
tables white squares, flagstones grey, both
scattered crazily. Couples
play hearts everywhere. Queens and
pawns and wandering knights take cues.
Jokers coin jingles
and wink. Second fiddles
fiddle with their drinks. And hundreds
of visions of the light touching things
pass through the tiny panes of eyes each
instant.

Hands hold the light up
as they gesture, conducting
conversations. When
the people in the garden talk, they are
what they say. When they are quiet
their bodies are maps of the cosmos,
hands five-pointed stars. Fish dive in the blue
streaks of their arms, angels rise
in their smiles.
Rings and bracelets flash like waves
landing, waves fragile
as glass, as white shells washed ashore.

Lynne Thompson

[from Lynne Thompson's Beg No Pardon, Perugia Press, 2007]

A Sorceress Strolls New Grass

I am neither mother nor turquoise neckwear
but you are such young women,
such new potatoes, and there is much
for me to tell you:

     that bishops joyride in the dead of night,
     that blue's favorite color is blue
     and earth is just a gaudy paragraph.

And though I am ripe as November, I can tell you

     no sorceress ever abandons midday
     and a sculptor is always better
     in a waterbed.

Of course, I'm vainglorious with my knowing and croaking --

but you women are writing your own Book of Migration
and without warning, I feel useless as an empty valise.
What you know makes the bandicoot fly and you converse
in flamingo and seashell, smell like smoke and rapscallions.

     You are tambourines
     in the stewing pot,
     a crucible of cymbals.

     Being fresh as new grass, you
     inspire me to astonish, then gloat;
     to beg no pardon, then begin.

Tom C. Hunley

[from Tom C. Hunley's Octopus, Logan House, 2008]

Niagara Falls Honeymoon

In this setting, how could there be a conflict?
The water keeps breaking on the rocks, like an
an endless stream of promises. She is just
out of college. He is just out of rehab. Man
versus nature, man versus self, man versus woman.
Tonight will be her first time. It will be his first time.
He doesn't have a quarter ounce of pot

stashed in his suitcase. She isn't pregnant. I am
an unreliable narrator, but you can believe me: there
will be a climax, plenty of dialogue, a plot twist that
looks tiny at first, though it changes

everything, and keeps growing. There will be
a resolution, and much later, an ending. For now,
he sits on a rock, she sits on his lap, and his
eyes try hard to hold all this new beauty
as water falls down the crags of her cheeks.

Mary Jones

[new poems from Mary Jones, my dearly-beloved 92-year-old aunt]

Tommy

There’s Tommy with Rascal
and Nicky and Sam
out there on the ice,
but that’s not where I am.

Not there on the ice
in Medway, not now
though that would be nice
but saddening somehow.

I came here to Chelmsford
to live out my years
— reminiscing with photos
happiness, tears.

Looking at photos
sorting papers and stuff
brings back many memories
but that’s not enough.


Lily

There’s Lily on the river
paddling the canoe
all by herself
as often she would do.

Our long green canoe
how many it has carried
all my brothers and my sisters
even more, when they were married.

And out there on the river
out there on the brook
up to the old swimming hole
or down to the dam, to look,

out there on the river
in the long green canoe
over the sky in the river
there she is, just passing through.

Edmund Wilson

[from Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, Scribner's, 1932]

The real elements, of course, of any work of fiction, are the elements of the author's personality: his [sic] imagination embodies in the images of characters, situations and scenes the fundamental conflicts of his nature or the cycle of phases through which it habitually passes. His personages are personifications of the author's various impulses and emotions: and the relations between them in his stories are really the relations between these. One of the causes, in fact, of our feeling that certain works are more satisfactory than others is to be found in the superior thoroughness and candor with which the author has represented these relations. We feel his world to be real and complete, not merely in proportion to the variety of elements it includes, but also in proportion as we recognize these elements as making up an organic whole. From this point of view, Dostoevsky is one of the most satisfactory of novelists; Myshkin and Rogozhin thrill us because they are the opposite poles of one nature; the three brothers Karamazov move us because they are the spirit, mind and body of one man. And if we ask ourselves why even so great a novelist as Dickens does not make upon us so profound an impression as Dostoevsky, we realize that it is because in the case of Dickens, wide and varied as the world of his novels is, the novelist himself is not sufficiently conscious of the significance of what happens there, so that, except in the very best of them, he has admitted a larger conventional element than the greatest novelists ordinarily allow and has been content ot press into service melodramatic "good" characters and villains into whom he has scarcely projected himself at all. . . .

Joyce has found for this new vision a new language, but a language which, instead of diluting or doing violence to his poetic genius, enables it to assimilate more completely and successfully than that of perhaps any other poet of our age to the new self-consciousness of the modern world. But in achieving this, Joyce has ceased to write verse. I have suggested, in connection with Valery and Eliot, that verse itself as a literary medium is coming to be used for fewer and fewer and for more and more special purposes, and that it may be destined to fall into disuse.

Rae Armantrout

[from Rae Armantrout's Versed, Wesleyan, 2009]

Solution

A solution is found
when creatures
from the last ice age
band together
to survive.

Circumstances spin
like the mobile
above a baby crib.

Follow along
with an endearing
first person,

a penguin.

You won't get far.

You're the thing
that waits

to trap
each passing thought,

the anxious
blank
that God loves.

Jack Spicer

[from Jack Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me: Collected Poems, Wesleyan, 2008]

For Harvey

When you break a line nothing
Becomes better.
There is no new (unless you are humming
Old Uncle's Tom's Cabin) there is no new
Measure.
You breathe the same and Rimbaud
Would never even look at you.
Break
Your poem
Like you could cut a grapefruit
Make
It go to sleep for you
And each line (There is no Pacific Ocean) And make each line
Cut itself. Like seaweed thrown
Against the pier.

Jack Spicer

[from Jack Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian, Wesleyan, 2008]

Dear Lorca,

When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem -- and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.

I yell "Shit" down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be as dead as "Alas." But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word "Shit" will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear.

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection -- as if a word could become an object by mere additino of consequences. Others pick up words from the street, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

I repeat -- the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

Love,
Jack

Cathy Park Hong

Year of the Pig

8.1

Brother, we were thralled by massif dead pigs floating
downriver          we hauled butchered feasted
then squalled for it was rotted meat.
Feeblest of bipeds we were but monks prayed for us,
cured us of our rankled bodies.
Now the new observatory’s been ransacked for its myths,
the telescope          shattered to a million bifocals
the furrier uses em now to sew tiny rabbit mitts
w’hayseed beads for forcep babes
of the landlord foe. . . .

-- read the rest of this poem and more poems by Cathy Park Hong and others at Octopus Magazine #12

Jack Spicer

A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance

What have I lost? When shall I start to sing
A loud and idiotic song that makes
The heart rise frightened into poetry
Like birds disturbed?

I was a singer once. I sang that song.
I saw the thousands of bewildered birds
Breaking their cover into poetry
Up from the heart. . . .

-- read the rest of this poem by Jack Spicer @ EPC

Courtney Queeney

Courtney Queeney talks about women poets in August 2009 Bookslut

ideas

To restore silence is the role of objects. — Samuel Beckett

Can it be the language now contains more words than there are things? — Clark Coolidge

What mind worthy of the name ever reached a conclusion? — Gustave Flaubert

Indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment. — Franz Kafka

The poem may have to mean nothing for a while or reflect in its meaning just the image of meaning. . . . There's something that isn't learned or even known yet. — Bernadette Mayer

Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself. — Francis Ponge

Thought is made in the mouth. — Tristan Tzara

There is a PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown vaster world. — Benjamin Lee Whorf

Walt Whitman

[from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1860]

Calamus 39

Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself with rage, for I fear I effuse unreturned love;
But now I think there is no unreturned love -- the pay is certain, one way or another,
Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe, or written one of my poems, if I had not
    freely given myself to comrades, to love.

e-chapbooks

Visit 2River to sample their e-chapbooks. The newest e-chap is ˆHow the World Was Made by Christien Gholson.

trying to publish a poetry e-book

Instead of publishing my first full-length poetry book in the traditional way, I decided I would go all-digital, no paper unless a reader decides to print a hard copy. Factors contributing to my decision include my wish for as many people as possible to read my poems, my geek longing to learn how to create an electronic book, my unwillingness to pay contest fees, my unwillingness to wait a year (or forever) for a publisher to select the manuscript and release the book; and my wish not burden the economy with cost and the planet with pollution caused by paper, ink, printing, inventory, and shipping.

When I began to convert my manuscript from Microsoft Word to PDF, webpage, and Kindle formats, I assumed it would be difficult and it might have been had the text been prose and not poetry. The key problems I encountered were inter-line and intra-line spacing, indents, special characters like em dashes and diacritical marks, and the table of contents. Microsoft Word is a horror, but there is not a replacement yet.

Converting to Kindle format was the most difficult because their converter does not give detailed error reports, and their Kindle previewer is not a full function previewer. Hyperlinks, for example, do not work. Nonetheless, I've done it, although I won't know for sure how well I've done it until I submit the book to Amazon and read it on my Kindle.

I will publish a how-to-guide when I'm finished.

Caroline Bergvall

[from Caroline Bergvall's essay "A Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants," in Jacket #37, 2009]

In French, one doesn’t just clear one’s throat, one has a cat in the throat. One would need to spit the cat (‘le chat’) out to clear one’s throat. Literally, ‘un crachat’ is a spittle. One could also clear one’s throat and realise that one has spat out a chatte (French slang, pussy). This adds and maintains a crucial libidinal and erotic bond with one’s pussycat. At a profound level, one could certainly argue that this phrase is a reminder that what separates humans from animals, at least since the 18th Century, is articulated language. It is articulated language that keeps the cat from turning into a human. Articulated language that separates the human from the asocial groaning of the ‘noble savage’. Articulated language is all that which becomes possible once the cat, the animal, the pure physiology of sound, has been successfully removed from my throat.

Conversely, it is all that which is threatened with inarticulacy if the throat is not cleared, if the cat still meows. As I become aware that I am trying to speak, my body morphs, my cat appears. Cat is the tone in my speech, its accentedness, its autography. Cat is my hesitations, my speech’s subjective accent, the tone in my speech, the stutter of my silencings, the explicit accentedness of its functionality. So what if I were to decide to talk with a cat in the throat? The question is highly charged. While it leads to libidinal fantasies, it also addresses questions of cultural and linguistic dominance, and attending issues of language policy and language erasure within the culture.

I am reminded that English-speakers do not so much struggle with cats as with frogs. It is a croaking frog that the English will wish to clear. Given the dubious and long-standing historical traffic of culinary jokes and insults between the French (‘frogs’) and the English (‘rosbif’) and bearing in mind the old wars of invasion and occupation between the two countries, one could here speculate that ‘having a frog in the throat’ resonates more with military and political history, and the known influence of French on the development of English vocabulary, than with strictly contemporary matters. However, John Tranter brings contemporaneity to it when he signals to me in a correspondence the wonderful John Ashbery line: ‘I hear the toad crooning’.

Paul Hoover

[from Paul Hoover's Poems in Spanish, Omnidawn, 2005]

The Presence

We know it and we feel it —
the fierce will of things

to set themselves apart,
isolated by their beauty,

bereft in isolation.
Museum of the Thing:

the living glove, earthen shoe,
a parakeet’s soft feather

that seems to be made of fur —
yellow tuft of sunlight

falling through the air
like nothing but itself,

as water is nothing but water,
grinding and turning as if

there were no passage.
Where does the work get done

that tenders so much beauty
and leaves us in such grief?

Sweetmeat and papaya,
your own face in chrome

with its hint of speed —
all these chaste subjects

love us in their way —
needle & thimble, dog & bone.

Whatever is absent in them,
let is speak its name:

fingerprint, blue smudge,
a typewriter with new keys —

one for infinity and one for sleeping.
Each night the objects come

to watch us in our beds,
above which hang

the dusty family portraints
retreating toward a quaintness

that can only be remembered —
mother in her kingdom

of white gloves and black bibles,
the mouse she trapped in her hand

as it leaped from a cabinet.
And father, poor father,

whose kindness went on forever,
into a clear confusion,

what were those sounds I heard
from the bed beyond the wall?

Which way should I drive now
to find the house we lived in,

vanished including its trees?
Gone the upstairs bedrooms

with their perfect shining floors,
not even a ghost to warm them.

All things come to witness
these absences like objects —

pears so near to ripeness
they melt in the hand

and roads that go only south,
with a sound of tires like rain.

Buy Paul Hoover's book @ SPD or Amazon

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Inversnaid

This dárksome búrn, hórseback brówn,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A wíndpuff-bónnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a póol so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wildnerness yet.

Hayden Carruth

[from Hayden Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems: 1946-1991, Copper Canyon, 1992]

The Wreck of the Circus Train

Couplings buckled, cracked, collapsed,
And all reared, wheels and steel
Pawing and leaping above the plain,

And fell down totally, a crash
Deep in the rising surf of dust,
As temples into their cellars crash.

Dust flattened across the silence
That follows the end of anything,
Drifted into cracks of wreckage.

But motion remained, a girder
Found gravity and shifted, a wheel
Turned lazily, turning, turning.

And life remained, at work to
Detain spirit: three lions, one
Male with wide masculine mane,

Two female, short, strong, emerged
And looked quickly over the ruin,
Turned and moved toward the hills.

But Hayden Carruth's book @ Amazon

more reasons to pub digital

Stephen Burt on print publishing

Ekleksographia

Read poems by Annie Finch, Sampson Starkweather, Evie Shockley, Tomaž Šalamun, and many more in issue two of Ekleksographia, guest edited by Amy King.

Kent Johnson on Eliot Weinberger

[from Kent Johnson's "Notes on Notes on Translation," Jacket 36, 2008]

[Eliot Weinberger]

21. To translate is to learn how poetry is written. Nothing else is so successful a teacher, for it carries no baggage of self-expression.

[Kent Johnson]

To translate is also to more deeply learn, and marvel at, how grammar works — in one’s own language and in another. And it is to begin, however tenuously, to learn and marvel (this via J.H. Prynne) at the mysterious space or interval between languages — that shimmering area between repelling poles of grammar, which traces or residues of meaning cannot traverse. An area which is very much at the heart of poetry’s substance, perhaps . . .

Sara Michas-Martin

[Sara Michas-Martin's poem from Jubilat 16, 2009]

Pareidolia

I didn't notice last time
the hooked branches and fenced-out
sky -- the leaves' flammable
glare. I didn't hear the bells swing
in my sideways glance or see
the creatures with spiked horns
clash in the bark's design.
In the ferns a nervous shadow, a person
stooped to bury
tokens in the ground. A squirrel
splashes the brush and I'm
spooked, a flood-burn
to the exterior. The lady in the briar
jostles the bats in her hair. Up close
they are heavy birds, thunderous
when they snap away.
Through filtered light I see
my lion take shape. I watch her
pace, maybe swagger, no
this time she's lying down.

Fanny Howe

[from Fanny Howe's The Lives of a Spirit & Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken, Nightboat, 2005]

Crosses and Branches

I shall not be married, I suppose. Berry by berry and nut by nut, the tree will grow bare. Like a bird feeding its fledgling, the visionary clasp will first melt, then chill. And stately raindrops will fall on the long lawns, beyond the portions of the poor, myself hutted and hatted, face up.

The service is over. Will he look at me? No, and I grieve. Mute is my mouth, which can only speak the truth, or nothing. Probably I will be an old maid, asking, What was I created for? My children, after all, have grown and are gone. Still I long for something daily, to discover and to know like numbers. A man was never a thing to love, but an experience to have.

I visited its brink one twilight, it was like a certain old thorn, the kind that looks sharp but crumbles between your thumb and forefinger. My black apron was carrying roses toward a glass door. I was told he could never do with a talkative wife. In company he is quiet. It's a poor harbinger of luck who has no knowledge of happiness. I was not pricked.

I paused behind the monuments, and gazed toward the city lights beyond the rectory. If I seem hard to you, while the stars gather and glitter in my eyes, it's because these indefinite abstractions put a shawl over my hopes. G-d of Heaven, be clement! Not often do people test the divine conflicts and come out prevailing in prayer.

See, I've had a suffering night! The whispering of zephyrs, the carol of crickets. I felt I was imprisoned in a drawer between shrouds and sheets, all folded and cold. If there was bread, butter, pastry, and salt on the shelves of my own pantry, none of it could nourish the breath in me. A terrible dream seized me like a tiger trainer.

I was a little girl being shipped from America. We were seated at a table, the food like ashes on each plate, and he puckered his black eyebrows and smote his chest with the force of Demosthenes. The boat rocked to and fro. The elements were in a ferment: tempests and whirlwinds and mountains of waves on either side. The wind came almost wholly from NNE, and the sails were in rags. Oh Papa, save me and leave!

His smutted face engraved itself in my terror, as he thought I was happy! It was then that the water changed color, and apertures in the clouds gave glimpses of writings. My underminded structure sank into childhood. The boat grew wings and was flying like a twin-engine on a runway of sea.

This little girl sat in her chair, strapped, her face pale with suffering. She smoothed her hair under her beret, and gazed steadily through the porthole into the stormy sea. A silk ribbon hung around her neck, and a gold chain -- both in the repository of her jewel casket at home. She carried a little satin bag with a tassel of silver beads, and was the image of polar winter. He handed her a cookie, this man who was dangerous people.

Like the hollow tree or chill cavern, forsaken, lost, wavering, the little girl's expression. Then she bit, as if with the wild beast and bird, as if hunger and cold were her comrades, the green wilderness her mother, and as if she was chewing a juicy berry, or saccharin root and a nut. It was wonderful then to see the ocean turn into mossy banks, soft as pincushions and the pinions of the plane wobble and fly.

She was alone again, and free -- all this expressing the force behind fragility. I woke and woke again, and went out to walk in the designated area. You can't make a diagonal path across any part of the grass here, but must follow the asphalt. Little wire fencing is looped along the borders there, and no signs are unnecessary. When I look at a wire, or a knife, sunk into the earth, I know that one element accepting another is really saying NO.

Yet because I lived here, and had been instructed, I also sensed that this landscape wanted to represent the Messianic age. How? Each path was designed as if the next, at last, would represent progress; and each step was, paradoxically, drenched in the tangle and nostalgia of the old days. There were a good many rules driven toward field and furrow (don't walk on ice, don't stray and get lost) and none of them together has produced perfection of action in one soul. The pleasure of reliving old flaws may be irresistible.

Now when there's only a very small splash of disarray (a bent red tulip, a snap of thorns across the grass) and the rest around remains in order, you imagine that this disarray was meant to be! So, too, the human being is composed of intentional mess, of necessity, and the will. Misreading, buoys the spirit. I think every event is unpredictable.

Papa's rules are innate to his landscape; they force you to think twice. How can I scale that wall, never? If the watchtower man has his back turned, can I make a dive into the flume, and crumpled up, get shot? And it's only when you lie down defeated and dream that you experience a love that is frosted with hot lightning and colors, shapes and textures so transparent, they are apparitions of perfection.

In dreams you see through solids! It's Papa's way of showing you how to know G-d: with all your parts abandoned, cast down, while your spirit is free to move about.

Buy Fanny Howe's book @ Amazon

Poetry

You can read what they feed you or . . .