Sunday, February 28th, 2010
Winners of The Los Angeles Times Book Award will be announced on April 23. The poetry nominees are:
Apocalyptic Swing, Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Dearest Creature, Amy Gerstler
What the Right Hand Knows, Tom Healy
Practical Water, Brenda Hillman
Open Interval, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Should be frosty.
Featured poets will be: Brianna Colburn, Jordan Davis, DJ Dolack, Shafer Hall, and Justin Marks
The reading will be followed by a DANCE PARTY. DJs Tobychoo & J. Cannibal will spin funk, garage, freak 40 and 60s soul. Get down so you can get down. Or at least have a few…
As Richard Chamberlain once said: “Realistically, it doesn’t hurt to be good-looking, especially in this business.”
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
on Frank Conroy and Jane Austen
by Michael Rymer
I almost couldn’t finish writing this. Not because I was blocked or anything, but because I kept getting interrupted by a guy called P.
The first time I saw him was on a Sunday. I wasn’t writing. I was sleeping when he climbed through my bedroom window. Then he started marching around the bed, beating his chest and shouting, “Enjoy the sleep while you can! Enjoy the sleep while you can!” He woke my wife, too, of course. It was only 9 a.m. She is – or we are – pregnant. (She is [we are!] due in April.) So we both understood what he meant.
I should have mentioned this before: P. is not a normal-sized man. At just 20 inches tall, he’s a miniature version of a man. But he’s a miniature version of a very intimidating man – big chest, flannel shirts, blond stubble. If I saw him in a hard hat, I wouldn’t blink.
And he has sticky hands. One night in January, he followed me to a downtown Barnes and Noble and scaled the New Fiction shelf at the front of the store and crouched atop it for ten minutes until I walked over (oblivious to him). I picked up a copy of Maile Meloy’s new collection of short stories. As soon as I opened the book to the first story, he leapt, and landed with a foot on each opened page. Then he handed me a tiny Bic pen.
At first, I was reluctant to talk about P., but when I started to do so, I learned that he visits a lot of men in my situation. A few guys confirmed what I had already suspected – that P. – or Mr. P., as everyone seems to call him – is my conscience; or, rather, a sort of universal conscience for men with pregnant wives. (“P.” is for pregnant.) Some guys – ones who’d already had kids and hadn’t seen him for years, usually – even seemed to like him. “All he really wants to do is prepare you,” one said. But they also acknowledged that he can be really aggressive.
That night at Barnes and Noble, he started shouting: “I want you to make a list! One: a Dutailier Matrix Glider. Two: an Ergo organic baby tote. Three: a Diaper Genie.” On and on he went, listing ten or eleven products – baby products – he said I should have been thinking about buying – should have been saving for – before I looked for “another novel.” (Any book that’s not a how-to book about parenting is, to him, a novel.)
Two weeks ago, I was home alone, enjoying the last hours of a long academic vacation, re-reading Frank Conroy’s Stop Time, the writer’s classic memoir of his teen years, when I felt a rumble under one of the cushions. It was him. He pried Stop Time out of my hands and tossed it into the kitchen. Then he dangled a purple paperback called The Infant Sleep Solution in front of me. I had to lock him in the bathroom. I had a deadline. I told him I’d call the police.
Now I understand he was just trying to save me – to save me from Jean, Conroy’s stepfather, the “ne’er do well son of a collapsed aristocratic New Orleans family” at the center of Stop Time. Jean is a loafer who people seem to tolerate as long as they do only because of his con man good looks, which Conroy describes:
He was six feet tall, slim, and sported a black mustache. The bones of his face and head were extraordinarily delicate and well proportioned, just slightly smaller than life size, accentuating their fineness. A perfect Greek head, but without the Greek effeminacy. His features were French and masculine. Dark, almost black eyes, a thin humorous mouth.
Jean is still a young man when he marries Dagmar, Conroy’s mother. Dagmar is his third wife.
Just two things, aside from women, capture Jean’s imagination: conspiracy theories – he believes that “dentists refused to tell people not to eat sugar because in doing so they would put themselves out of business” and that “there was no such thing as heredity, everything started from zero when the sperm cell met the egg cell” – and the prospect of earning rental income. At eleven, Conroy is a captive (though already skeptical) audience when Jean talks about auto industry cabals or the dangers of white bread, and he and his sister and mother are at the mercy of Jean’s entrepreneurial whimsies: the family goes from New York to Florida, from Florida to New York, and then back to Florida, and back to New York, as Jean sniffs out ways of making money. It’s the life of an army brat, without the international stays.
And Jean is no colonel.
He is a real estate prospector! Their first trip to Florida – to Chula Vista, a housing development near Fort Lauderdale that was abandoned during the Depression and then resettled by a Wisconsin Socialist known as Doc – Jean and family build a house without any outside help and without the aid of an architectural plan. The completed structure looks like “one large room.”
He is a green grocer! Back in New York, Jean sets up a produce stand at the corner of 68th and Lexington, but quits just a few days in, conceding that fruit vendors in New York don’t in fact have “one of the sweetest deals around.” Next, he works as a night warden at the Southbury Training School, a Connecticut State Institution for the “feeble-minded.” A weekend post that requires little of him other than sitting in the kitchen, it’s as close as he can get to money for nothing without stealing.
This he does also, bilking money from checks sent from the estate of Conroy’s late father. (He is a thief!) He needs the money for when he moves the family back to Chula Vista to build a second house, this time with lumber scavenged from an abandoned barracks. Neither house is ever tenanted (or not that Conroy mentions, at least).
Scary, that Jean, eh?
Well, he is for me. He reminds me of visions I’ve had (in nightmares and in moments of professional panic) of myself in five or ten years. In these visions, I’m a comically misguided writer who makes quixotic professional decisions that seem designed to forestall, rather than generate, income: Here I am sinking four years into researching an un-contracted book on the history of jaywalking, or Vaseline! Here I am paying thousands of dollars to a web designer to create a blog covering the nut butter industry! And here I am as a literary species of deadbeat father, a man who, though his baby is in need of a new diaper, won’t put down his New Yorker.
That’s why I’ve sometimes wondered if I should have allowed Mr. P. to take Stop Time with him and pulp it, or whatever he was going to do. Well, of course I wouldn’t have wanted that. But I’m highly susceptible to influence – even to the influence of literary characters – and Jean is not a good influence for me.
In the last pages of Stop Time, Conroy writes of Jean’s unexpected transformation into a responsible father, working long hours as a taxi driver to support a baby daughter born to him and Dagmar. But with Conroy himself, Jean never really tried. The boy is just marital baggage, mildly threatening because of his precocious intelligence and moderately useful as an extra pair of hands to remove shingles, pump water, bag produce, or fetch milk. He’s not someone to love, boast about or laugh with or instruct. He’s someone for whom fatherhood– the idea of it and the day-to-day transactions it entails – never kindles any avidity. So I won’t be upset if he makes a swift exit from my memory before April.
And yet.
And yet I can’t help but wonder if Jean was doing something right, if there was some twisted wisdom in his abnegation of parental responsibility. I’m serious, though I’m sure this cracked thought wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park around the same time. If you include her biological parents, the wealthy uncle and aunt who adopt her, and another aunt who poses as her custodian, that novel’s heroine, Fanny, has five parents, none of whom take much interest in her life, and she blossoms in a solitude enforced by this neglect. In stark contrast with the over-indulged, histrionic cousins alongside whom she’s raised, Fanny is contemplative, staunch, serene.
She’s as successful at raising herself, as it were, as Conroy, who masters the yo-yo in Florida (he learns a trick called The Universe and executes fifty consecutive Loop-the-Loops) and reads novels during his days at as a student at Stuyvesant high school (he provides a seven line-long list of writers he read which includes Lawrence, Mailer, Zola, Dumas, Dreiser; he just avoided flunking out) and pursues one interest after another without anyone ever noticing. Later, he teaches himself to play the piano (and he would make his living as a jazz pianist for many years).
Both Fanny and Conroy seem to thrive on building their lives from scratch, and it’s hard to imagine how either of them would have developed under a more watchful parental gaze. Would Fanny, like her cousins, have fallen for buffoonish men? Could Conroy have possibly written this book, which deserves its reputation as a great memoir. (Trust me, read it, and then forgive me for not celebrating it enough. Its great virtue, aside from Conroy’s language, is its author’s utter lack of rancor.) Or one like it?
(You have to go beyond this book, which Conroy wrote in his 30’s, to appreciate the man’s life, which I know only through his often anthologized essay, “Think About It,” which describes his friendship with Justice William O. Douglas; an account of a former student of his at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he directed for 18 years, who described him as one of the “last great mentors,” and an interview he gave, wearing a floppy brown cardigan over a baby blue button-down shirt, for the 2002 documentary, The Stone Reader, in which he explains that, when you read a book you love “you feel that you are the brother of the author and the two of you are working together,” and he recalls trying to write at night after returning from piano gigs, with sweat dripping down his face. (Conroy died in 2005)).
As I write this, Mr. P. has joined me. He used a fingernail clipper to cut through the screen of my office window as I was absorbed in writing and he’s now climbing the leg of my desk. He must have sensed that I’ve been tumbling toward a preposterous question:
And what is the value of careful, attentive parenting anyway?
Now Mr. P is jumping on my keyboard. He’s shouting:
Aren’t there nine, or nineteen, or ninety-nine other Frank Conroy’s out there who did flunk out of Stuyvesant and never went on to Haverford College (as Conroy did) and are slaving away like Jean finally had to, driving a cab?
Of course there are. I’m sorry. I’m new at this.
*
Michael Rymer writes Odd Couples, a periodic Coldfront column that closely addresses two ostensibly different works of literature. He holds a B.A. in Comparitive Literature from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Nonficition Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, GOOD, and elsewhere. A a graduate of the Writers’ Institute at theCUNY Graduate Center, he lives in the Bronx. Find more at michaelrymer.com.
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Three Percent, the University of Rochester’s “translation-centric Web site,” has announced ten finalists for its 2010 Best Translated Book of Poetry Award. The judges — Brandon Holmquest, Jennifer Kronovet, Idra Novey, Kevin Prufer and Matthew Zapruder — have selected the following ten books:
Nicole Brossard, Selections.
Translated from the French by Guy Bennett, David
Dea, Barbara Godard, Pierre Joris, Robert Majzels,
Erin Moure, Jennifer Moxley, Lucille Nelson, Larry
Shouldice, Fred Wah, Lisa Weil, Anne-Marie Wheeler.
(Canada, University of California)René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland.
Translated from the French by Gustaf Sobin.
(France, Counterpath)Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another.
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.
(Palestine, FSG)Elena Fanailova, The Russian Version.
Translated from the Russian by
Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler.
(Russia, Ugly Duckling Presse)Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko.
Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.
(Japan, Action Books)Marcelijus Martinaitis, KB: The Suspect.
Translated from the Lithuanian by Laima Vince.
(Lithuania, White Pine)Heeduk Ra, Scale and Stairs.
Translated from the Korean by
Woo-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill.
(Korea, White Pine)Novica Tadic, Dark Things.
Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic.
(Serbia, BOA Editions)Liliana Ursu, Lightwall.
Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter.
(Romania, Zephyr Press)Wei Ying-wu, In Such Hard Times.
Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine.
(China, Copper Canyon)
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Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
by Randall Maggs
Brick Books 2008
Reviewed by Dan Magers
Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Canadian poet Randall Maggs is nearly 200 pages long. Whenever a volume of poetry defies the 40-80 page fiefdom, it is worth taking note. This one is about Terry Sawchuk, NHL’s greatest goalie. Maggs has an easy way with meter, and his interest in Irish poetry suggests he has given considerable thought to conceiving of lines of plain-spoken eloquence. Lines move in and out of meter with little interest in overall form or structure. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Here, the narrative drives the poems rather than the language itself. That is not to say that the lines are slack, but that they lack tension and torque. A typical passage reads:
He falls down twice on his way to the net. I sense
the crowd lean forward, ready to leap. What’s that about?
Is this what it all comes down to after Detroit, a little goalie show
for the fans? Waiting at center ice to take their shots, his team-mates
circle nervously, flipping snow at friends in the stands.
What wouldn’t they give to put one past me,
here in front of the home crowd.
The narrative will be familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the trajectory of our sports greats: childhood-marring family death (“and smiling, cocked / his head to make a final point (they said), / half rose, and then pitched forward on his face.”); constant touring (“Traveling east, the stubble fields gave way / to endless trees. Bored, I’d shouldered past the blast / between the cars”); glories of victory (“The gods lean out / below the smoky beams and cheer the circling / goalie hoisted high.”); greedy owners (“While Jack across the river/ signed a check and closed his door.”); constant physical pain (“Darkest night of his life, once the morphine / seeped away. He wept and prayed.”); all topped off with a generous helping of nostalgia (“’That one’s him in Detroit in ’52. What he did in the playoffs that year will never be done again.”).
The book does a lot of things right, using the poems the way a traditional biography might use chapters, giving us an anecdote, a reflection, a new prism in which we can uncover Sawchuk the man. It is well-researched, with a bibliography a journalist or academic would envy. The book seems to be written with a wider audience in mind than the average poetry book. There are even pictures, including a rather ghastly one of Sawchuk’s face that is somewhat well-known.
A few multi-page prose poems throughout the book are so successful, they inadvertently demonstrate the limits of the competent quasi-iambic narrative in the rest of the book. Simply put, the book is way too long, and the material is not enlivened by the use of verse. I struggled with the pervasive sense that my enjoyment of the book depended on me knowing each wing forward blasting shots at Sawchuk’s un-masked face. And yet, one knows where the book is headed with its combination of braggadocio and sentimentality. Individual lines, and even poems, do not stand out. The integrity of the work is in the book, not the lines, not the poems. In that sense, it is more like prose. While Night Work gleefully exceeds the regular poetry book length, the 200 pages of poetry do not exceed the emotional and thematic dynamic of the regular sports biography, whether found in prose or on ESPN Classic, begging the question, why not just write a prose bio? It is one medium clamoring after the virtues of another.
There are some exceptions. For example, the droll, Frederick Seidel-like mashup of plain-talk and metrical and rhythmical ingenuity:
And doubled up all night, my Christ,
what a life. Like Pompeii’s dead, my arse in the air,
bare. I don’t care.
A more sustained success can be found in the poem “Colour in this Country” which describes Sawchuk’s team watching its opponents (possibly amateur, as was typical of the era) coming out of the bar,
Talking together and joking, they passed
in front of our bus like young men at the front, their days
reduced to frivolity and disaster.
The poignant banality of this bunch, along with Sawchuk’s wearied and dispirited voice, joins into a meditation on the landscape they are living and playing in:
You sensed a sparing use
of colour in this country. You’d get a splotch of it here and there,
a memorable blouse in a lounge, a clock promoting rum,
the local team in its colours taking the ice.
The poem ends with a further removal, the just-described scene revealed as a memory:
My own mood was darkening.
Everything seemed to be splitting away.
In the photograph, all you could really see were shapes
curving darkly into a white that might have been
the page’s nothingness.
A shorter book of more of these moments would have greatly enhanced the work overall. That said, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems gets an extra star if you read the Wikipedia entry on Sawchuk. Two stars if you love narrative poetry. Hockey fans, take heed; Terry Sawchuk fans, go nuts.
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Sunday, February 14th, 2010
National Book Award-winning poet Lucille Clifton died yesterday at age 73 following a long battle with cancer, Baltimore Sun reports. Author of 11 poetry books and numerous books for children, Clifton wrote poems of compassion and social conscience. Her long list of accolades also includes an Emmy Award, the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize and two Pulitzer Prize nominations.
“Clifton’s work emphasizes endurance and strength through adversity,” reads a bio at The Poetry Foundation Web site. “Ronald Baughman suggested in his Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that Clifton’s ‘pride in being black and in being a woman helps her transform difficult circumstances into a qualified affirmation about the black urban world she portrays.’”
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
by Mahmoud Darwish (translation Fady Joudah)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy
Mahmoud Darwish has been Palestine’s de facto poet laureate for decades. A new posthumous collection of poems, If I Were Another, selected and translated by Fady Joudah, provides readers with a carefully chosen intellectual continuum of Darwish’s thought through the last 18 years of his life. As is evident in every line of every poem, Darwish was a poet who never stopped evolving, and his two near-death experiences (1984, 1999) become points of reference and reflection for greater art and landmark poetic accomplishment.
Joudah is an accomplished poet in his own right, and has already received acclaim for his translation of Darwish’s Butterfly’s Burden. In presenting these later works, which investigate the pain, anxiety and complexity of exile, Joudah has clearly taken pains to carry through the density of Darwish’s rolling, ever-changing lines. The result is a highly readable book of poetry, even for someone like me, with only an American-level understanding of the Palestinians’ struggle for a peaceful homeland.
If peace is stillness, then the reader of If I Were Another is made to see how it is impossible in Darwish’s world. There is constant flux, so much so that a reader might occasionally feel disoriented and disembodied. Every time Darwish seems to stand on something solid, some truth or moment, it is immediately overwhelmed, overcome and discarded. Darwish’s notions of self, his images of gardens, grass, animals, skies and oceans come from a fundamentally unique perspective embodied in mystery, fundamental sympathy and constant contradiction. In the love poem “Rita’s Winter,” for example, romantic passion – the urge to blend with another person – is matched with the omnipresent fact of individualism:
Rita sleeps in her body’s garden
the berries on the fence of her nails light up the salt
in my blood. I love you. Two birds slept under my hands…
The noble wheat wave slept on her slow breathing
a red rose slept in the hallway
a night that isn’t long slept
and the sea in front of my window slept to Rita’s cadence
rising and falling in the rays of her naked chest
so sleep, Rita, in the middle of me and you and don’t cover
the deep golden darkness between us
sleep with one hand around echo and the other
scattering the solitude of the forests
sleep between the pistachio shirt and the lemon seat
like a mare upon the banners of her wedding night…
The neighing has quieted
the beehives in our blood have died down, but was Rita
here, and were we together?
Romantic passion is all the more urgent when one recognizes that two bodies can never truly merge. Independence is central in Darwish, much as it is in Whitman: it is an essential stopping point, the only conception that allows for understanding of, or relationships with, others and the world. There are undeniable echoes of Whitman in the book-length poem “Mural,” one of the only great poems published so far this century. Like Whitman, Darwish identifies that things are defined by their contradictions:
I come from there. My here leaps
from my steps to my imagination…
I am who I was and who I will be,
the endless vast space makes me
and destroys me
Here cannot exist without there, light cannot exist without dark, life and death are two words for the same phenomenon. What remains is self: the single poet attempts speaking for all, and finds that his own profound limitation – his intrinsic smallness – might be what allows him to do so:
And the poet says: Take my poem if you want,
there’s nothing in it for me besides you,
take your “I.” I will complete exile
with the messages your hands have left for the doves.
Which one of us is “I” that I may become its other?
And later,
I found myself as present as a filled absence.
Whenever I searched for myself I found
the others. Whenever I searched for the others I found
only my stranger self in them,
so am I the one, the multitude?
Contradictions form a metaphysical whole, and allow for transcendent oppenness – ”I” am profoundly isolated, individual as any human, including “you,” and on these terms, you and I are one. Like Whitman (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then….I contradict myself; / I am large….I contain multitudes”), Darwish finds the impossible contradiction that the singular individual is component of a singular universe. The individual, through essential singularity, speaks to all-encompassing unity built upon the pairing of contradictions. Call the result yin yang, universe, self, even deity.
But Darwish expands upon the Whitman model with his unrelenting focus on the concept of exile both political and metaphysical. His obsession with contradiction presents exile in the metaphysical; life cannot exist without death, for example, so when one is alive, one is exiled from death – when one is dead, exiled from life. Darwish drives home with frightening diligence and accuracy how very little one knows about oneself or the directions one’s life will take. There is a constant movement in our lives; our level of control over it is minimal, and we are never capable of any sort of genuine “return.” This is undoubtedly an exile theme, raised to the level of the human condition:
There isn’t enough life to pull my end towards my beginning. The shepherds took my story and infiltrated the grass that grows over the beauty of ruins. They overcame forgetfulness with trumpets and radiant rhymed prose, then bequeathed me the hoarseness of memory on farewell’s stone and didn’t return…
(“Mural”)
But exile is meant literally as well. Darwish is very interested in the concept of naming, or labeling, a person or thing (“Mural” opens with a birth: “This is your name / a woman said / and disappeared in the spiraling corridor”). Yet to be named one thing is to be branded, and to not be named another thing; to be native of one country is to not be native to another – and to be exiled from a homeland can mean being stripped of whatever identity you thought that you had. Darwish obsessively navigates this balance: identities are in some sense accidental or arbitrary, but this does not make them meaningless. One name might be as good as another, and the same would be true of national identity, if not for the violent, corruptive forces that impose their will upon whole populations of individuals and make it harder and harder to try and live a life, let alone discover a self.
Where Whitman’s terrestrial expanse tended to account for the promise of the then-nubile United States, Darwish stretches around the globe. His references to the West are not antagonistic; he represents another culture, not an opposition culture. He is often political, but is not dependent on being pro-Palestinian or anti-Western. He comfortably references Sophocles, the Bible, the Koran, Saladin and more. He is not stuck in the modern conception of a juggernaut “West” with all other cultures in some degree of orbit:
And if this autumn is the final autumn, let us move away
from the sky of exile and from others’ trees. We grow a little older
and didn’t notice the wrinkles in the flute’s timbre…the road lengthened
and we didn’t admit we were on the marching path to Caesar. We
didn’t notice
the poem as it emptied its folk of their sentiments to widen its shores
and pitch our tent where the wars of Athens with Persia,
Iraq with Egypt, tossed us. We love the plow more than
we love the sword, we love the autumn air, we love the rain.(“We Will Choose Sophocles”)
There may be some subtle suggestion in Darwish’s frequent referencing of Rome, but poems like “We Will Choose Sophocles” show cross-cultural interest. The poet’s access to all cultures and none adds to the feeling of permanent exile:
Where is the road to anything? I see the unseen clearer than
a street no longer mine. Who am I after the stranger’s night?
I used to walk to the self along with others, and here I am
losing the self and others. My horse on the Atlantic coast disappeared
and my horse on the Mediterranean thrusts the Crusader’s spear in me.
Who am I after the stranger’s night? I cannot return
to my brothers near the palm tree of my ancient house, and I cannot
come down
to the bottom of my pit. O the unseen! There is no heart for love…no
heart for love in which I can dwell after the stranger’s night…(“Eleven Planets and the End of the Andalusian Scene, part vii: Who Am I After the Stranger’s Night?”)
This confusion of constant exile manifests itself in the construction of Darwish’s poems. Nearly all are at least several pages long (often much longer), cyclical and self-referencing. Each poem’s structure draws out of the reader what Darwish intends to communicate: confusion that is at turns blissful, and at turns devastating. In Part 1 of Exile, titled “Tuesday and the Weather is Clear,” he writes:
I walk lightly and grow older by ten minutes,
by twenty, sixty, I walk and life diminishes
in me gently as a slight cough does.
I think: what if I lingered, what
if I stopped? Would I stop time?
Would I bewilder death? I mock the notion
and ask myself: Where do you walk to
composed like an ostrich? I walk
as if life is about to amend its shortcomings.
And I don’t look behind, for I can’t return
to anything, and I can’t masquerade as another.
Repetition, refrain, rhetorical question and (in many other cases) sprawling lines sychronize with the notion that space and time are fused, immeasurable, mutating. One is always in a state of exile. At many points in If I Were Another, the setting becomes a nothingness which is only an extension of the speaker and his present company, who could be a friend, father, Death, or another self. “Dense Fog Over the Bridge” shows Darwish’s constant identity crisis in which he is all other people, not himself, himself again, no one, everyone, and on:
I said: Don’t bet on the realistic,
you won’t find the thing alive like its image
waiting for you. Time domesticates
even the mountains, which become higher, or lower
than what you knew them to be,
so where does the bridge take us?
He said: Have we been that long on this road?
I said: Is the fog that dense on the bridge: how
many years have you resembled me?
He said: How many years have you been me?
I said: I don’t remember.
He said: I remember only the road.
The flux of existence is ceaseless, personal, and universal. One thing remains fixed in Darwish’s centerless world and that is poetry. Darwish seems to say that, for right or wrong, poetry is the song we instill in life. Passively waiting for inspiration from the world is pointless. One must actively push to imbue life with value; if doing so is delusional, it presents our greatest delusion:
If the canary doesn’t sing,
my friend,
blame only yourself.
If the canary doesn’t sing
to you, my friend,
then sing to it…sing to it.(“Tuesday and the Weather is Clear”)
Where other recent translations of “Mural” have comes across as strained, even claustrophobic, Joudah’s translation allows private access to the fluidity and expanse of one the great artistic minds of the modern era. Mahmoud Darwish’s late poetry, spilling over with hard beauty and visceral philosophy, is essential.
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Monday, February 8th, 2010
Interview by John Deming
Your poems are full of still lifes that also seem to contain action or motion – still, dark rooms that wait to be lighted, tire tracks in snow that “leave the driveway.” How does the tension between pause and the perpetual passage of time inform your poetry?
The passage of time is an essential and unavoidable subject for poetry—at least on some level—since a poem itself must be experienced temporally for it to have its meaning(s). Without time, a poem’s just a collection of symbols organized in a certain shape on the page. It’s moving through those symbols in their order that lets us read the poem. Yet, when we’re done reading, the poem is exactly as it was when we started it—though it’s changed, and will continue to change upon further readings, for each of us personally. Thus, poems themselves—or at least our experiences of them—are both still and in motion.
I think what draws me repeatedly to the particular kinds of scenes you describe above is this sort of paradox—the stillness and motion concurrently at work in our apprehension of a poem and of the world. In this way I’m in agreement with Cleanth Brooks about the essentialness of paradox to poetry—though I didn’t know that until I read Cleanth Brooks, quite a while after I started writing poetry with any seriousness.
Your poems contain philosophical conceptions, but also carefully rendered images and sometimes, scenes; often as in “Walking Through the House with a Candle,” an “idea” is enacted in the action of the poem (“The bay window reflects my light / back into this shifting space, // of which I am for the moment / so indisputably the center.”). Is it difficult to create poems that contain ideas without letting the ideas overwhelm whatever else is being enacted in a poem?
What you describe is what I tend to like in many of the writers whose work I admire, so I’m flattered by your description of my work. Thank you.
I guess I’m not very interested in poems that operate as something close to pure philosophy—at that point, why not just read philosophy? But at the same time, poetry is a poor medium for conveying pure images—photography is much more effective. (And, while I’m at it, I’m not particularly interested in straight narrative poetry—which, unlike fiction, is so often grounded in the idea that an experience matters because it’s true in a narrow, literal way.)
What I often love most about poetry is its capacity to give the reader an image or a scene and, at the same time, allow the reader access to a mind at work interacting with (or inside) that image or scene. I guess I buy into the Rilkean notion that if you look hard enough at something it will give up some essential thing about itself. In many of the poems in The Book of Props, the speaker is seeking that sort of connection or experience with the world around him.
There is a light touch in these poems, an ear for measure reminiscent of poets like William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Robert Creeley. Could you describe your revision process, and in particular, how you negotiate line breaks?
I can’t say how much I appreciate being called “reminiscent of” Williams, H.D., and Creeley—thanks again.
I’m an obsessive reviser—I work on poems for weeks and months after I finish a first draft. The image I have when I think about revision is that of a slide puzzle—that little plastic toy with letters or images on little tiles that you can slide around until you get a word or picture or whatever. Sometimes you get a corner done, but then to get the whole puzzle finished you have to take that corner apart before you can put it back together again. When I’m revising, I feel like the poem in front of me is one of those slide puzzles. I keep shifting words and phrases around, changing a letter here, a line break there, until the whole thing finally feels set.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I also record myself reading my poems out loud: I record, walk away for a while, then come back and listen. Often the wrong word choice or the wrong piece of rhythm in the language immediately jumps out at me.
In terms of line breaks particularly, I like the idea that the line operates as an independent unit of thought—as does the stanza, as does, potentially, the poetic section, etc. And all these units cut across the thinking conveyed by the poem’s sentences. It’s these multiple units interacting with each other that give us much of a poem’s multiplicity and surprise, that allow a sentence as it unfolds to complicate itself across a line break.
Sleep comes up often in The Book of Props and in your first book, Only the Senses Sleep. What about sleep appeals to you as a subject for poetry?
I’m not sure, exactly. I don’t personally like sleeping all that much. I find it boring—I’d rather be up and about.
So maybe that’s it. I’m interested in the way sleep removes us from the sensory world—disconnects us from our thinking in time, and thus makes us vulnerable. It seems to me that we know ourselves best not when we turn inward but when we turn outward—when we interact with the world around us. From early on in my reading I was attracted to Georg Trakl’s “emotive landscapes” for this reason, and I like the Socratic notion that we don’t really know what we know until we put it into action—into language—in conversation with those around us. Sleep, in contrast, unlatches us from the world so that we swing, disconnected, beneath it—and that’s both a wonderfully calm and, at the same time, vulnerable place to be.
Do you tend to remember your dreams?
I had a wonderful poetry professor, Stuart Friebert, who insisted that his students keep dream diaries. Very quickly I remembered just about every dream I had. (I was amazed at how soon I had trained myself to hook my dreams as I was waking up and reel them into consciousness.)
But I also found that I wasn’t all that interested in writing about my dreams. They almost never seemed particularly interesting for me as material for poetry. Consequently, I haven’t kept a dream diary since I was in college. These days, I guess I remember my dreams just like anyone else—which is to say: sometimes.
In a short article in The Washington Post, you wrote that “Nude Asleep in the Tub” was on some level inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife bathing. Could you describe the relationship between poetry and painting?
For me, some paintings—or photographs, for that matter, or simply spaces in the world—present an image that feels freighted in a way I don’t yet understand. Writing the poem is generally an attempt to figure out what “meaning” is buried there.
With those Bonnard paintings, my initial discovery was that looking at them made me feel like I was inside the bather’s thoughts in that contained space—of the painting, of the bathroom held inside it—which so effectively appeared to be filled with watery light. (Perhaps it was the light’s lambency that made the room feel like it reflected the flickering movements of thought.)
Later, I realized I felt similarly when I was in the room with my girlfriend while she was in the bathtub—and that strange spacial entanglement felt to be a particularly strong representation of domestic intimacy. But those paintings were moving and meaningful to me before I drew those later, more personal connections.
The Book of Props contains a section called “What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse).” Explain what you mean by “film in verse”; what drew you to the concept?
As I see it, that subtitle can be read one of two ways: “notes in verse for a film” or “notes for a film in verse.” I guess I like that both of those possibilities are there.
More than anything, in that sequence of 23 poems, I was trying to play with narrative while still writing poems that were clearly lyrics. I’d been trying to write some fiction and failing miserably, but the impulse toward narrative was still in me, and this project was an outgrowth of that. Also, my friend, Brian Barker, who’s a wonderful poet, had said to me one night that my poems always seemed to be about an individual sitting by himself just to the side of some sort of action—and he wondered if I could write poems in which people interacted with each other more directly.
Thus, the film conceit gave me a way to introduce many of the things I can’t stay away from in my poems—light, space, image, stillness—while still self-consciously writing poems that were more social than my previous work. And I also got to play with building a narrative through-line while writing lyrics that attended to image and scene. Perhaps, now that I look back on it, the film conceit was like a set of training wheels as I tried out new types of poems.
Was it important to tell a story, or to create characters whose stories are ambiguous, or are any person’s story? Do the characters’ names have any particular significance?
Yes, the desire to tell a story was important—and in my mind there’s a definite and complete narrative down there beneath the surface of these lyrics. (I think of the “notes for a film in verse” sequence as Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” enacted across lyric poems.)
Regarding the names: The two male characters—Clarence and Andy—are based very loosely on people I knew. I didn’t want either of them to feel particularly literary, so I gave them names that didn’t have famous antecedents in literature (at least that I could think of). In contrast, Justine—as the object of both Clarence’s and Andy’s affection—is intended to possess an aura of “specialness” that I thought I could intimate by giving her a literary name. “Justine” seemed a good choice, since my character Justine also strives to be virtuous, doesn’t manage to be wholly so, and is a touch naïve about the effect she has on the men around her. Those men, though, aren’t roguish, cruel, or unduly lascivious, so the reference to Sade is clearly there and, at the same time, a little ironic. (It also isn’t lost on me that “Justine” echoes my partner’s name—Jeanne—though I wasn’t consciously thinking about that when I wrote the poems.)
In what ways does life in the Midwest inform your writing?
I’m from the Midwest—that is, if you consider Cincinnati the Midwest, which folks on the East Coast surely do and folks in Kansas City mostly don’t. I think that growing up in a city that’s been in decline more or less since the Civil War—with all the history and dilapidation that entails—informs my work in that I’m often drawn to a kind of decaying urban environment that Cincinnati has in spades.
But I also traveled a lot when I was growing up. Between the time I was in grade school and when I went to grad school my dad lived in Houston (Texas), Anchorage (Alaska), on Long Island, in D.C., and in Tampa (Florida)—and I visited him a lot. Also, when I was five my parents and I lived in Rome, Italy, for a year; most of my first memories, in fact, are in Rome.
So I’ve always had one foot planted in the Midwest and the other relatively unplanted. As such, I feel both at home and a little out of place in a sleepy Midwestern city such as Kansas City.
In the Post piece, you mention that you used to live in New York. Is this New York City? If so, could you describe any difference in the way that the Midwest informs your writing and the ways that New York City informed your writing?
I lived in Brooklyn between college (in Ohio) and graduate school (in Houston), during which time I worked as a paralegal in the Appeals Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I also spent a lot of time in New York when I was growing up—my grandparents lived in Ridgewood, Queens, where we visited many summers, and later on, as I mentioned above, my dad lived out on Long Island, in Hampton Bays. To this day I feel very at home in New York.
But in my mind, much of what informs The Book of Props—the sense of dislocation that hovers beneath the book—has more to do, I think, with moving from big cities (New York and Houston) to the small, rural Missouri town of Warrensburg, where I teach. I felt absolutely derailed and isolated there, and I lasted for all of ten months before I moved into Kansas City and started commuting out to work.
Now that I live in KC—in relatively urbanized Midtown—I don’t think the things that spark my imagination are all that different from those that excited me when I lived in Brooklyn. While Kansas City surely isn’t New York, it still has more in common with New York than it does with rural Warrensburg, just fifty-five miles down the highway.
When did you first begin writing poems, and why?
I guess I started writing poems in high school. I had an outstanding English teacher who sometimes brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and that showed me that poetry was a living, breathing art. Many of the poems (terrible poems!) I wrote in high school I wrote for the same reason lots of young people write poems: I was heartbroken and wanted to give dignity to that emotion.
When I went to college, I knew I wanted to go somewhere I could study creative writing, though I wasn’t sure what that would mean. I ended up at Oberlin College where I studied writing, history, and literature. My writing skills, coupled with a research project on the post-Soviet mafia, got me the paralegal job at the D.A.’s office, thus taking me to New York.
But, as far as I’m concerned, it was when I was in New York, working 9 to 5, that I first felt like I was maybe, just maybe, a poet. I didn’t have any assignments or classes to push me, and yet I was writing more than I ever had before. I was also reading a ton of poetry, and I felt like my work was developing on its own. It wasn’t long before I was looking to get away from a steady workweek schedule and go to grad school so I could have more time and space to write.
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[This interview took place via e-mail in January 2010]
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Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
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Read John Deming’s review of The Book of Props here and Scott Hightower’s review of Only the Senses Sleep here.
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Sunday, February 7th, 2010
After keeping them in his private archive for 45 years, photographer Len Steckler is selling previously unseen shots of Marilyn Monroe lounging around a New York City apartment with the poet Carl Sandburg, NY Post reports.
In the photos, taken nine months before Monroe’s death, the actress and fashion icon is 35-years old. Sandburg is 83. According to the Post, Steckler said, “As we know, Marilyn loved older men; she loved intellectuals — and Carl was very parental with her … It was a lovely thing to see.”
He also said that after the shoot, the three of them drank Jack Daniel’s.
Four single images and two triptychs are priced between $1,999 -$3,999.
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
by Mark Bibbins
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Stephen Burt
In the whirligig monologues and post-rock lyric throughout his first book, Sky Lounge (2003), Mark Bibbins sent kids with high hopes and low dreams into a glittering, punishing, shimmering dusk-to-dawn city. The kids in this second book are almost grown up, trying with very mixed success to make, and to understand, their remixed lives. The “I” and the “you” here sound almost self-assured, almost confident, but never quite: they face autonomy with all the demands of youth unmet, and since those demands are so great – sex, love, civic solidarity, promises kept – they may never be met, or not all at once. “Whatever you say sounds better with your thigh / against mine and caught in the camera-phones / of our undoing,” Bibbins writes in “There Is No You Are Everywhere,” which is either a poem of betrayal admitted, a breakup opus, or a regretful ode to averted risk: “you’re too burnt to burn,” he complains, to a lover more risk-averse than he, “or admit we wanted to try what feels almost new.”
Like Sky Lounge, The Dance is a book of subcultural scenes – “white kids giving / mad props to zombies, Jersey studs / with waxed eyebrows and brilliant / buffed nails” – but it’s also a book about feeling fake, urbane and inauthentic, too old for the makeup and too raw for anything else: “another false copy of me returns.” The real appears only through negatives, glimpses, outlines: “the best way to see a thing,” Bibbins says in a fine long poem called “The Devil You Don’t,” is to
catch
the edge of light
that burnsaround its opposite, that
which it would otherwise
obscure.
The slipperiness, the unstable pronoun reference and the constantly changing scenes, that in another poet would point to a theory of language or comprise a postmodern Everyman in Bibbins are signs of a worried, anxious, too-cool-to-stay-cool personality: one who has learned to cherish, perhaps too much so, his power to offer scruples, to change his mind. “I’m not acting coy,” he protests; “I’m just terrified / of some rhetorical you.” But in Bibbins’s city every “you” is rhetorical, and rhetoric – verbal flourish, conscious construction – is not a block to strong emotion but a condition for its expression. Almost every scene and every figure seems both made-up and real, staged and genuine, disturbingly rickety and yet lovely enough that we wish it could stick around. (The devil “adores / the show, the high // tech of it, the low.”) When “an actual naked human stands / on a pedestal on the street” on West Broadway, Bibbins says, “you… don’t stop because you figure // it’s only art,” but Bibbins stopped; otherwise he could not have written the poem. He does not stop for long, though; his language keeps going, almost helplessly churning or burning through whatever phrases he finds: “I grew into a stuffed animal who wanted / only to insert itself into the fossil record…. When / it burns you move away // is good enough advice.”
For all its anxieties, The Dance is still (like Sky Lounge) an exhilarating New York book, even an I Love New York Book. It fizzes and sparkles against the sunlit buildings like O’Hara’s love poems to Vincent Warren:
They’ve hired skywriters
to compose clouds in a sky
off-color but clear; such
clever hats the chimneyswear; so furiously they twirl.
If you hear something sour in that sparkle, something disappointed in that final iamb, so do I: the lover and his love don’t fit the poem, don’t fit the sky, can’t keep up the twirl. Rural areas give other poets ways to think about nonhuman nature, about what grows and thrives outside and beyond us, but they usually give Bibbins reasons to think about why “we” are artificial, unruly citizens, neither hardy nor solitary, and urban to the core: “a picnic in early autumn” becomes “a perfect time to resent / vegetarians, fuel-efficiency, / and ideas,” while geese overhead set “a kind of gray / fire down at our heads.” He tries, in other poems, to visit the ocean, the desert, even Germany, but he still feels like a poet of city life.
When Bibbins does not remind you of O’Hara, he might remind you of D. A. Powell: one poem is literally a collaboration with Powell (it begins “I used to have the shampoo / by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so”), and others could be. Like Powell, he makes the urbane and colloquial collide with the High Romantic; like Powell, he is inescapably sexy and unmistakably gay, and like Powell he is fond of square brackets and white space: “I want him to kiss me and another way of saying so // [he left a spark on my lip].” Sometimes Bibbins seems too fond of white space: the pages that look like erasures or ancient fragments, with two or three words to a line (“[crawl to // an end / an edge] // defer suffering // without proof”) may not play to his strengths. Even there, though, a racy, divine youth presides: “mercury / in a dirty hat // we see / ourself // but aren’t curious per se.”
Mercury presides over the whole book (as he presided over Sky Lounge): he is the god of quick changes, of youth, of speed, of thieves, of translation, of commerce and of the cities (built around marketplaces) where commerce accretes the connections it also destroys. Bibbins’s “devil” (who also rides a skateboard) is Mercury in Judeo-Christian drag; the beautiful youth who might know everything, the young man who is always running (but not always running away), makes a fit sponsor for Bibbins’s electric lines, and he sees himself, still, parties, in crowds:
Kids roll hash into
their cigarettes and spotlights
turn the smoke pink
in the trees. If he’d hada childhood, he’d have spent it
running under sprinklers
to cool his smoldering skin.
“He” is the devil, the “abominable fancy” identified earlier in the same poem with Bush-era politicians (“the president who is not the president / trapped in a red room”). But “he” in the passage above is also the poet, always observing, and on fire, like it or not.
Those poems full of white space, their margins all over the place, look at first like failed attempts at philosophical, cod-Greek texts, but at their best they are worldlier, and more personal, and less idea-driven, than their format suggests. One of the best white-space sequences reinvigorates that hoary amateur genre, the breakup poem: “Forcefield [Ardor]” reads, in part,
take the couch
the stove you’ve seen
and even touched me somewhere near
I want more city to kiss you in
[you say]….you can leave your hand
on the empty
chair between us
Bibbins can sound almost helplessly hip, a poet who cannot help but represent his generation (which is no longer the youngest one to publish poems): a prose page entitled “Suicides of the 90s” alludes to Reagan and Bush in terms undergrads today won’t understand (“Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years”). Another poem asks, “Why shouldn’t he let someone / else fuck him to the mixtape / I made?” That such phrases will sound dated soon, that they will need footnotes in 30 years, makes no case against them, no more than against Lunch Poems, or against “The Rape of the Lock.” Bibbins does not write an entirely new kind of poetry (it is a very rare poet who does): he writes a kind perhaps 15 years old, old enough to have prompted reductions to absurdity (as in some of the poetry now called Flarf) and worthy counterrevolutions (as in some of the poets published by Flood). Yet it is a kind that still works, whenever (as here) it takes an interest not only in words on the loose, on bits of culture in the wind, but in people who mean those words or cherish those bits, who watch their city as they watch and love and often lose one another, caught up or caught out amid the mercurial fun.
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