1: ON PUBLISHING MY FIRST BOOK OF POEMS IN THIRTY YEARS Well, thirty-one years, to be precise. I brought out my first book, Theories of Rain and Other Poems, in 1975 with SUN, a literary press that I had started that year. I knew nothing about sending books out for review, and mailed or handed copies to friends or to a few poets whom I admired. Through various small press distributors (or through giving away a lot of copies), I was able to take the book into a second printing a year or two later. Theories got three or four reviews in small press journals, I think, and some nice letters from people who had liked it. The book represented about ten years of trying to learn how to write poetry, and I was happy enough with it. From there I went full tilt into publishing books, bringing out about 35 titles before I closed up SUN in 1985. (I also now and then published a literary magazine of the same name, but the press activity was much more gratifying. I would labor intensively on a 250-page issue of the magazine, get it out, and people would say, “Gee, this is great. When is the next issue coming out?”) Books seemed more permanent, and that is where I put my energy. Of course, I still had to make a living, even though SUN flourished and won grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. I never did figure how to write a salary line into my endeavors as a publisher. My wife Phyllis worked full-time (and helped out plenty on the work of the press) and I taught freelance for poets-in-the-schools programs, especially the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and also taught as an adjunct at colleges and, as a visiting writer, for two years at the University of Texas at Austin. Later I worked for five years with old people. My career summation used to go: “I’ve worked in elementary schools with little kids, in junior high for three years, in high school, in colleges, and for five years with old folks. The only population groups that I haven’t served are the unborn and the dead, and there must be ways for a poet to get to them!” All in all, it seemed as if we were doing okay financially, so why should I burden the press with my own needs? After Theories of Rain I kept on writing poems and occasionally publishing them, but it was other writers’ words that I wanted to see in print. Everybody knows how hard it is to find a publisher, and I was burning to see the best work by the best poets I knew get between covers. I thought that I knew enough first-rate writers to keep SUN going as long as it could last. I adopted a policy of “solicited work only” to insure that I wouldn’t be bombarded by manuscripts that I had no time to investigate, but hopeful authors sent them anyway. What had begun to happen, I realized, was that I was burying myself as a poet in the work of putting out books by other writers. From the editorial point of view, SUN was pretty much a one-horse operation, although I did have a steady stream of helpers supplied to me by a wing of the New York State Council on the Arts, mostly smart young aspiring women writers who pushed the operation forward with dedication, skill, and good humor. These were the days of working closely with professional typesetters and graphic designers—an endless back-and-forth of corrections to proofs and the making of “boards”: the cut-and-paste days. It was drawn-out process that gobbled up enormous amounts of time, though there was nothing like the thrill of tearing open the package from the printer with the first finished copies of a new book. I didn’t have a computer until the last couple of years of SUN’s existence, a Kaypro (remember “the writer’s computer”?), and once I got it I began to keyboard manuscripts myself, which saved money but took up even more time. By the time SUN was eight years old or so, those who congratulated me—“Wow, the books look great! You’re publishing terrific stuff! Gee, you’re getting all those grants!”—would often hear my standard response, and I am not a dour person: “Yes, the press is going great guns. I started life as a poet and I’m ending it as an accountant!” Grants had to be filed and then reported on, budgets had to be drawn up. Orders had to be packed and mailed. Books had to be kept. As the press grew, there seemed to be tons of paperwork where once the only paper work I had before me involved the reading and editing of manuscripts. By then I began to realize that I was becoming a member of an elite comprised of poets who had started presses and who suddenly didn’t seem to write poems any more. I wasn’t so happy about this development, but in 1985 I had the opportunity to publish a little hardcover chapbook of 26 pages of poetry. A editor friend in the world of “big” publishing, Ian Gonzalez, was involved in a program for young people in publishing at the Cooper Union. The previous year he had asked me if I knew anybody who had a manuscript that they could “do.” The course offered these neophytes an opportunity to create a book from start to finish, something that they could rarely do on the job, and I was happy to recommend a friend whose poetry admired. The second time that Ian came to me, I not so modestly suggested another poet who needed a new book—me. Pretty soon out came For Steve Royal and Other Poems. (The bulk of the poems in it are also in Where X Marks the Spot.) But the Steve Royal book had no ISBN and no distribution. This book, too, I gave away to friends until I only had a few copies left for myself. Thus I am fudging slightly when I say that I haven’t published a book of poems in 31 years, but this is a book that precious few saw, produced in maybe an edition of 300 copies. Another bolt of lightning hit in 1985, but of the horrifying kind. My wife, who had been ailing since the fall of 1983, suddenly became very ill and had to be hospitalized twice. For a time her recovery was in doubt, and as a consequence I had to take a tough-minded look at what I had been doing and the amount of money that I had been bringing in. She had carried the full financial load while I, in comparison, was making peanuts. What if she didn’t recover? What if she were too ill to work? As luck would have it, she did recover. and found a new job about six months later. But I had made the decision to close down the press and find full-time work. I continued to do freelance teaching, and would do so for the next year as I job-hunted and worked to find other publishers for the seven books that were in various stages of production. I also had to dispose of the thousands of back-stocked books that were in storage at my printing plant. The press had no income any more, and I couldn’t afford the monthly warehousing fees. With the cooperation of my wonderful writers, who took a lot of the stock off my hands for a pittance, I was eventually able to clear out the back stock. I also found publishers for all the books that were in preparation, and while these arrangements didn’t bring in very much money, I was proud that none of the authors would be left high and dry. 2: ON PUBLISHING MY FIRST BOOK OF POEMS IN THIRTY YEARS The year 1985-1986 was filled with humiliating interviews with headhunters and potential employers. Nobody knew which slot to fit me in. “Well, you’re a teacher and a writer and an editor and a publisher. What is it you do?” I made the connection for them: everything that I did had to do with writing or teaching. One sympathetic executive wracked his brain to try to help me. We sat in his office at six one evening, long after we both should have gone home, as he lamented, “There’s something that I’ve got to be able to find for you!” I felt even sorrier for him! I was offered a whole lot of nothing, including a job with a major publisher as a copy editor—no regular salary, no benefits. Finally it was teaching that saved me. I had been teaching poetry workshops in an elementary school, and after deciding that teaching was my strong suit and that I’d better go after a job in the classroom, I told the principal and the head of the language arts department about my dilemma. Bless them, they immediately offered me a spot for the fall of 1986 at their school. (I also had an interview at a prestigious private school in Manhattan. They dragged on and on over the decision, really jerking my chain. When I finally pressed them, and pressed them hard, for a decision, I was told that my devotion to SUN was such that they thought my publishing activities would get in the way of my teaching, even though I told them that I was almost finished with closing down the press!) In my new job I taught sixth grade English, did the yearbook (including much of the photography), and attended the numerous workshops required by the New York City Board of Education for new teachers. I also caught about six colds during the year, the dues-paying aspect of entering the classroom germ pits. I was exhausted, and wasn’t scribbling very much in my notebook. The money wasn’t great, but it did offer a few thousand dollars more that what I had been making as a freelancer, and I did have a health plan of my own. Then another bolt from the blue split my head open. The principal who had hired me was told that he had one weekend in October to clear out his desk. He and other acting interim principals in the school district had sued the local board for not having appointed them principals in a timely fashion. The acting interims lost, and one of my best friends and supporters at the school was gone. Later on in the year, the new principal told me that she was going to issue me my “separation papers” (a wonderful phrase!). It was clear that she was going to give my job to somebody else, and I had no protection because as yet I had no teaching license. “Oh, Mr. Zavatsky,” she said, “you have a very good education and you’re well qualified. You’ll find something right away.” Though I didn’t believe her, I took six credits towards my teaching certificate that summer. Lo and behind, there one Sunday in the education employment section of the New York Times, I put my finger on an ad that I could hardly believe. It described a teaching position in the high school at Trinity School, a college preparatory school that was founded in 1709 in the choir loft of the famous Trinity Church. The school needed an English teacher and someone who could advise the school literary magazine. I leaped up as if I had beheld a rainbow in the sky, feeling that the job write-up had my name all over it, and that if I couldn’t land this one, I might as well jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. The chair of the English Department, Jane Mallison, remembered that we had encountered one another some years earlier at the long-gone Salter’s Book Center up near Columbia, and that we had talked for two hours. She had just moved to Manhattan, which is perhaps why that conversation remained memorable for her. This recollection didn’t hurt my chances, and that fall I began teaching at Trinity. This fall I go back for my twentieth year there. But, of course, I had to learn a new curriculum for three classes and grade lots and lots of student papers. After years of being on my own as a freelance teacher, however, I loved having a home, especially a home like Trinity, with its high-powered, wonderful colleagues and extraordinary, hard-working, bright students. Pretty soon Jane suggested that, if I wanted, I could offer a creative writing workshop—and did I ever! While I continued to write poetry whenever I could, the demands of teaching took me over, and every time I’d think about trying to pull together a manuscript of poems, it didn’t seem to me that I had enough work or enough good work. I hadn’t left the ground of poetry unplowed, however. Around the time that Theories of Rain appeared, I embarked on two projects with my friend Ron Padgett, two of whose extraordinary books I was lucky to publish with SUN—Toujours l’amour (1976) and Triangles in the Afternoon (1979). Ron and I translated The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, which came out in 1977. Also in 1977 we published our co-edited compendium of writing ideas and other schemes for creativity, The Whole Word Catalogue 2, which came out of our teaching work with children. Later in the ‘70s I teamed up with poet-translator Zack Rogow to work on poems by André Breton. Earthlight: Poems of André Breton was published in 1993 and that year won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. Translation kept me sharp, I knew. It fed my own work, and I could take whatever skills I had learned as a poet and apply them to the work of foreign poets. Here and there my poems made their way into a few anthologies, and while I was sending work out in a desultory fashion, I didn’t feel like much of a poet. In fact, I felt like something of fraud, not having published a new book of poems since 1975. I was a little embarrassed to offer new acquaintances a copy of Theories of Rain, with the picture of me on the back with hair down to my shoulders. (By the ‘80s my hair was dwindling. Today there isn’t much of it left.) Yes, I knew about George Oppen, and that he went 20 years without publishing a book of poems, but after all, he was George Oppen, and I was . . . who? One of these friends, a distinguished writer, said to me, “This book has three times the number of good poems that most new books of poetry have in them. Why don’t you look for a major publisher?” I said to him, “You know, I don’t want to wait five more years to see if anybody wants to publish this book.” I hoped he was right about the quality of the manuscript, and sent it to my friends at Hanging Loose Press. I knew that if they liked the manuscript, which I was now calling Where X Marks the Spot, they would tell me in pretty short order and publish the book in a year. That year was this one, 2006. 3: ON PUBLISHING MY FIRST BOOK OF POEMS IN THIRTY YEARS But life doesn’t always conspire to allow us to write all the poems that we want. Everybody has to work a job. Lots of people’s marriages fall apart (mine did), and still they manage to be extraordinarily productive and bang out books every couple of years. I don’t know how they do it. I read a lot of these books and find one or two poems in them that move me. Maybe I could have done the same thing. It seems to be a good literary strategy. At least the name recognition continues, and perhaps if I had been able to do it, I wouldn’t be writing this essay, trying to explain where I’ve been all of these years. There are other factors that hindered me from writing poems or from publishing very much, and I want to spend the last part of this essay outlining them. Perhaps I’ll rile up some people with what I want to say, but this account would be useless if I didn’t go further. I “grew up” as a poet in the New York School, first at Columbia, where students like David Shapiro (who published his first book of poems, January, at the age of seventeen) matriculated and where Kenneth Koch taught. Not long afterwards I began going down to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where I took a workshop and ended up teaching two of them myself there in the mid-seventies. I found the scene there enormously attractive. Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett were already big guns, Tom Clark was still around, Anne Waldman was making her reputation, and there was a sense of camaraderie unlike anything I had ever experienced except among jazz musicians. Everybody’s hair was getting longer by the day. We all thought we knew who was writing the best poetry, why it was superior, and that we were at the heart of the action. In the late sixties most graduate programs in creative writing hadn’t yet gotten off the ground, and here was the best of it, we thought—for free! I was devouring anything that I could find by Kenneth Koch (I took two courses with him at Columbia), John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara (who had been killed in the summer of 1966, and whom I never met), James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, as well as slightly older and younger poets who made the Poetry Project scene. Allen Ginsberg was beginning to make his presence felt at the Project. I read a lot of people, though, and was also excited about the work of Robert Bly and the poets gathered around his magazines, The Fifties and The Sixties. Bly was also opening the doors to French, Spanish, and Scandinavian poets via his and the translations of others. I also spent the end of the sixties at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, studying with Stanley Kunitz and Adrienne Rich in the M.F.A. writing program. In 1973 I went into therapy with a psychologist whom I was to work with, on and off, for thirty years. There’s no doubt in my mind that as I probed my own life-issues and tried to mend the holes in my own personality that had led me to seek help, it pushed me to scrutinize what I was doing as a poet. At some point I began to question the New York School esthetic or, rather, to examine what that esthetic permitted and didn’t permit in writing. I noticed, for example, that certain “subject matter” (always a taboo idea to me and my friends) was off limits. It was considered “corny” to write about things. What was foremost was to work with language. If your language was alive enough, content would be dragged along in its wake. It was verboten to write about death, suffering, loss, breakdown, disappointment in love, and even about love itself (except in a flip way). These subjects were reserved for the Confessional Poets (Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, etc.), whose self-serving melodramas, we felt, may have supplied them with plenty to write about, but at what cost to themselves? The tonal emphasis was on a wiseguy, comic stance that certainly was delightful given the darkness and misery that seemed, for most poets, to be stock-in-trade. Kenneth Koch was extraordinarily funny, and opened me up to my own sense of humor, something that had not made much of an appearance in my writing before I encountered him. Koch would become most famous after publishing his book about teaching children how to write poetry, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (1970). But was the kingdom of poetry divided up into wishes, lies, and dreams? Wasn’t there room for grief, terror, darkness? Was poetry essentially the stuff of fantasy? As I came to grips with my own psyche, I had to confront what I felt—what I really felt—about my parents, my friends, the women in my life, my education, the Catholic Church, and an armada of dreams that didn’t exactly leave me whistling when I woke up from them. How could I fashion that material into poems? What about my life, the stories that I told, the things that had happened to me, that had exalted or wounded me? Kenneth wasn’t working this ground, it seemed to me, nor was John Ashbery, whose work dazzled me but left me feeling inadequate to it. Frank O’Hara’s poems I loved, but even he skated only on the edges of his personal darkness. James Schuyler (whose first book, Freely Espousing, I would reprint with SUN in 1979) had by then brought out The Crystal Lithium (1972) and Hymn to Life (1974), books in which he opened himself in extraordinary ways to the reader, making him, for me, the true Confessional Poet of the New York School. If my struggles weren’t the same as Jimmy’s, he certainly provided a powerful model for telling the truth in poetry that I could use. My friend and first poetry teacher Harvey Shapiro introduced me to Charles Reznikoff, a charming old man who had been mostly been publishing his own books at his own expense for years. What struck me about Reznikoff’s work was its storytelling. New York School poetry wasn’t about telling stories, which were considered old-fashioned. But isn’t this what most of our experience resolves itself into—the stories we tell to ourselves and to others, the stories we, in fact, become? Reznikoff could offer the anecdote of a New York street moment or tackle the Holocaust in a book-length poem. As I explored his work, I saw that I too could tell the stories that I was carrying around within me. More and more I wanted others to experience what I had felt, and the story is the vehicle by which feeling is transmitted from person to person, writer to reader. Harvey Shapiro’s own work also offered me a model of how to do this, and I would find it in William Carlos Williams and in the work of poets like Cesare Pavese, whose book Hard Labor had been magnificently translated by William Arrowsmith. My friend Phillip Lopate was writing stunning poems (before he turned to the personal essay and longer forms), and the two books that I published by him—The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open (1972) and The Daily Round (1976) inspired me as well. My focus on poetry as a vessel for feeling was sharpened by the arrival of the Language poets, as they came to be called. One of the most notable of them, before that label was affixed, was a friend of mine, and in my “fun with words” period we would collaborate through the mail, sending each other sheets of paper on which words had been randomly typed. My tendency was to “connect the dots,” to find ways that the words cohered into some kind of image or image-pattern. The sheets were returned to me with the connections obliterated. After this had gone on for a while, I wrote my friend to say, “What’s the story? I draw things together and you tear them apart.” “That’s the way it’s going to be,” he wrote back to me. I ended the collaboration (and the friendship). I realized that I wanted to use language to make connections, not to destroy them. I had a little ways to go to understand the next steps in this process: that I wanted words to connect to what I had experienced and that I wanted readers to feel what I had experienced. This couldn’t be done through techniques of fragmentation. I wanted readers to understand and to feel my poems, not to turn away from them puzzled or feeling stupid. That’s what I began to try to do in my poetry—touch the reader. It took me years of struggle to come to grips with my feeling-life, and I hope that the results are on display in Where X Marks the Spot. Now for some comments about books that I’ve been reading and rereading, most of them by friends. The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 by Charles Reznikoff. Edited by Seamus Cooney (Boston: Black Sparrow Books, David R. Godine, Publisher, 2005). The majority of the titles issued by the Black Sparrow Press have now been acquired by David R. Godine, Publisher, and while I am very happy to see the reissue of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975, I am a little annoyed at the treatment that Reznikoff has received—or failed to receive—in this volume. Like the original edition of this book from Black Sparrow, there is no critical introduction to Reznikoff’s work to present this still-ignored and still virtually unknown poet to a readership. Indeed, in the Godine reissue we learn more about its editor, Seamus Cooney, than we do from the all-too-brief biography of Reznikoff shoehorned onto the back of the book. Yes, Cooney has prepared a Reznikoff chronology, but we want to know why this work is important. David Godine should have found a reputable scholar—why not Seamus Cooney himself?—or a poet who could have written a first-rate essay about Reznikoff. (My money would have been on Harvey Shapiro, who is quoted on the back jacket.) As it stands we have 445 pages of poetry and have only outline-knowledge of its author, who in my opinion will come to be ranked as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Yes, we also learn about Reznikoff from his poems, but that’s not my point. Reznikoff shares the fate that Williams still suffers—that his are not what I call “degree of difficulty” poems, and that it is precisely this “degree of difficulty” that scholars want in order to exercise their brains and obtain tenure. But Reznikoff hands poetry right back to the people that he focuses on in his work, not to the professors. A few changes and additions to the original volume that this publisher has made, though, I do applaud. First of all, this reissue unifies the pagination of the two original Black Sparrow volumes, which continued to be split into two sets of page numbers even after they were collected in one volume. This will make it a lot easier for scholars to refer to Reznikoff’s shorter poems, all of which are included here. Second, the 12-page chronology is useful enough (as least for academics) without being particularly illuminating. Finally, the book reprints an important little pamphlet of Reznikoff’s thoughts about poetry that Black Sparrow originally published as First there Is the Need (Sparrow 52, January 1977), jottings that were evidently used as notes when the poet was interviewed by L.S. Dembo. Reznikoff’s first two slim volumes contain some wonderful Imagist-influenced poems: My work done, I lean on the window-sill, By 1920, in his third book, Reznikoff picks up steam, beginning to write longer narratives that will eventually, in later books, form the bedrock of what he did best—tell stories in free verse: She sat by the window opening into the airshaft, There’s a novel packed into these 10 lines: the not-so-young bride-to-be contemplating her future as a woman (the symbolic moon); the telling connection between her “pinned-on” smile and her hairpins; the pathos of “If he would have her, she would marry whatever he was.” With one word—“slashed” (not “marked” or “lined”) Reznikoff shows us that the old man groom-to-be has been treated cruelly by life; he is a wounded creature. Here is another little masterpiece: Their boarder had come to America before his wife and children. The long line derives both from Whitman (though Reznikoff seems to have thought Whitman too effusive) and from prose writing (Reznikoff also wrote novels and histories.) In any case, there are dozens of poems of such clarity and power in this big book. Not all of us are masters of metaphor, upon which Reznikoff does not unduly depend. What he has mastered is the story, the poetic anecdote that wraps a life (and life itself) into it, taking us back to the first poems and to the reasons why they were written—to communicate human experience. That virtually all of these stories come directly from the streets and tenements of New York City also makes Reznikoff one of the great poets of New York City. This man walked miles throughout the boroughs every day until late in his long life, and no doubt he had his notebook in his pocket. I am not such a devotee of Reznikoff’s Bible-derived stories, which I find wooden and better in the original. But his Jewish street wisdom, his keen eye for the New York City detail, his appetite for the telling narrative arc, all of these gifts are to be treasured. I mentioned that Reznikoff in his work gives poetry back to ordinary people. He also gives poets an opportunity to write clearly and deeply about what they have seen and experienced by providing models for how to do it in poem after poem. Godine has announced that it will bring out, in January 2007, Reznikoff’s Holocaust, the long poem which, using stories from the Nuremberg War Trials and the Adolf Eichmann trial, documents that catastrophe. Its reappearance will be another event worth celebrating, so let me lift my hat to this publisher for soon bringing to us one of the most important long poems of our time. Maybe it will have an introduction by Seamus Cooney. ● The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems by Harvey Shapiro (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). Another poet at the top of my list is my first poetry workshop teacher and longtime friend, Harvey Shapiro, who has just published his Sights Along the Harbor: New and Selected Poems. Harvey has published 12 books of poetry (I brought out Lauds and then Lauds and Nightsounds with SUN) and is one of the premier poets of New York City, the heir of his poet-friends Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen. (Harvey also knew another of the famous “Objectivist” group, Louis Zukofsky.) At 82 years of age, he is still in top form, as one of the new poems in this collection testifies: Desk It takes a lifetime of work to achieve such a luminous clarity, and to see one’s life in the desk, cluttered or cleared, that one used for reading and for the making of poems every day. New York is an endless object of observation and speculation for Shapiro, who served career-long as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and who for several years edited the Book Review at the Times as well: Through the Boroughs Here, too, is a wonderful taste for and sensitivity to nature in a gorgeous poem that invokes Whitman: Musical Shuttle Shapiro likewise is one of the most important poets to experience and write about World War Two. Many readers know the superb anthology that he edited for the Library of America a couple of years ago called Poets of World War Two. There you can see him in his flight clothes standing next to the blister of the B-25 where he did business as a radio-gunner. Harvey’s war poems are threaded through his books, in most concentrated form in Battle Report (1966). In the title poem of that collection he draws on the more formal rhetoric that he worked in his first two books, but here without the rhyme and meter. The poem ends: I turn my rubber face to the blue square There is a poet of eros here, too, in charged sexual poems notable for their candor. From “Cynthia”: When I take off your red sweatpants, And there is a very funny stand-up New York (Borscht Belt?) comedian in Shapiro, too. Here’s the first section of “New York Notes”: Caught on a side street I haven’t touched on Shapiro’s many Jewish-inspired poems—laments, historical probings, comic takes, ruminations on the Holocaust and on his family. So be it. Harvey Shapiro is a poet of great breadth and depth whose new book deserves to be picked up and read thoroughly, whether you live in Brooklyn or in Boise, Idaho. ● Somebody Stand Up and Sing by Hugh Seidman (Kalamazoo, Michigan: New Issues/Western Michigan University, 2005). Winner of the 2004 Green Rose Prize. Hugh Seidman is another longtime friend. We first met at Columbia University. He had studied with Louis Zukofsky at Brooklyn Polytechnic High School. After undergraduate studies in science, Seidman had taken Harvey Shapiro’s poetry workshop the semester before I did, and was a year ahead of me at the School of the Arts Writing Program at Columbia. Hugh’s first book, Collecting Evidence, won the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize, the first manuscript picked by Stanley Kunitz when he took over the series from W.H. Auden. i>Collecting Evidence is one of the best books of postwar American poetry, distinguished by Seidman’s powerful long poem of unrequited love called “The Modes of Vallejo Street.” Excerpts from it can be found in his Selected Poems: 1965-1995 (Miami University Press, 1995). (Someone ought to republish i>Collecting Evidence so that we could reencounter the complete text of that poem, and all the other wonderful poems in the book.) This is a challenging poetry that repays close and frequent reading. Seidman is not out to entertain us, but to make us feel as deeply as he does. His writing can be intensely political Flesh gorging on oxygen. “True Tunes” offers portraits of women done in telegraphic style. This is from the part of the poem called “Venus: 1 Train” (the West Side subway local): Gold tiny heart locket. This is the power of the list in the eye of a poet who spares neither himself nor the world around him in order to bring us the truth. There is eros and tenderness here, too, and plenty of anthropological information—Williams’ idea of getting “the news from poems.” In “200 in Hell” we get another kind of vision: Sometimes the devil “He’s not a bad guy / Once you know him,” is the poet’s parting irony in this poem about deals that we all make with the devil. Some of the poems burrow into themselves, and we find Seidman writing formal haikus and even tankas. These too are dense and telegraphic, but well worth unpacking. I am reminded of one of Pound’s pronouncements (or one he borrowed from another poet, who found it in a German-Italian dictionary) “dichtung = condensare.” “Poetry = to condense.” We are (to borrow Lorine Niedecker’s word) in the “condensery” here, where the wine of poetry is pressed. The poem that I take the most delight in, of the many delights that illuminate this big and lavishly produced book, is the very first in the collection: Gail Ah, criticism! I am only scratching the surface of this wonderful book, one the strongest of Seidman’s six volumes. Find the long poem called “12 Views of Freetown, 1 View of Bumbuna,” about African warfare. Read the tender and deeply moving poems that this poet has written about his parents in their failing old age, and about his wife. This is a big world of poetry, compressed, made cunningly by a master poet. ● A Hurricane Is by Angelo Verga (New York: Jane Street Press, 2003; second edition, 2005. www.janestreet.com/press ). It’s difficult to think of Angelo Verga without being reminded of the tremendous energy and intelligence that he puts at the service of poetry in New York City. He curates over 200 readings and literary events a year at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, one of the prime poetry hubs—and jazz clubs—of the Big Apple (www.corneliastreetcafe.com.) Verga’s new collection, 33 New York City Poems is gorgeous to look at as well as to read: a cut-out cover through which one can view a color map of Brooklyn. In addition, his first big collection, A Hurricane Is, has been reissued (with an introductory note by yours truly). Here is another topflight singer of the “music of the streets,” to hark back to Harvey Shapiro’s phrase, who notes the “fire-dark rubble, rich with wildflowers” on “Brook Avenue, The Bronx.” There is plenty of darkness in Verga’s poetry, but a lot of humor as well. He works with found material, sometimes taking it apart and talking back to what he has come upon, be it an airplane that’s crashed into a Florida bath and tennis club or an advertisement for “Fatal Thatch Buildup” on one’s lawn. “Body in New Jersey Not Missing Woman’s” is neither of two missing women because, as the police relate, “the head/ Don’t fit the neck.” “Ways to Fuck Up Your Dad” relates the slashing of a cabby by young girls, “2 kids, lipstick, slim, tank tops / . . . / The girls didn’t have tits yet worth speaking of.” The devastating portrait in “Junkie” turns out to be “this / sad, this girl, very thin, who / is my daughter.” The son in “Saying Goodbye to the Vampire” is transported From the group home in Grimace Park These poems are permeated by political concerns and a focus on working-class people. (Verga worked for many years for the U. S. Postal Service.). He notices bits of news that most poets miss: “The bombs have writing on them, / Like Christmas cards:/ TO Saddam / FROM the Bronx, / with Love,” in “Desert Storm.” The title poem of Hurricane features a long nightmarish surrealist tour of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here! The 33 New York City Poems opens with a 360-degree panorama of “The Ferry Terminal on Staten Island, Sunday Afternoon”: There’s a toothless gnome “A Short History of New York City” ends by telling us that the Big Apple is “A great town: great to be good-looking and rich in / A tough place: tough to be broke, homeless, or alone / Easy to catch a cab here, or no worse than Babylon or Rome.” Lately Verga has been writing wonderful “Muse” poems to a new woman in his life. I think the first of them appears in this book, and here it is, entire: Muse and I Are in One of those Trendy New A few more books by New York poet friends of mine to round out the week. Before I get to them let me offer a correction. In yesterday’s entry I put Hugh Seidman in the wrong school. He studied with Louis Zukofsky at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now known as the Polytechnic University. It was founded in 1854, and is the nation’s second oldest private engineering university. ● Calls from the Outside World by Robert Hershon (Brooklyn, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2006. www.hangingloosepress.com). Here is another poet whom I’m happy to call my friend, a bear of a man who wraps his arms around life and poetry with plenty of feeling and plenty of laughter. Hershon is one of the funniest, wittiest poets that I know, and he’s also one of those rare ones who can hit you right in the heart. We met years ago when New York City was rife with small press book fairs, and I’m. proud that Hershon and his associates at Hanging Loose Press brought out my new book. Hanging Loose the magazine and Hanging Loose the press are 40 years old this year. Hooray! Look at the press Web site. And to celebrate, let’s look into Bob’s 12th book of poems. These poems seem effortless, which only proves that lots of hard work has gone into making them. Hershon’s verse-lines seem to float and to coil around each other, taking you delightedly where you don’t know you’re going to go until you’re there, smack in the middle of the comédie humaine. I want to use words like “gusto” and joie de vivre to characterize his work, too. Nothing is lost on this poet, as this poem testifies: Olives The poem is about how poets (and olives) see the world—differently than most people, metaphorically perhaps (the olive as eye). It is also a delicious marital dance, with its back-and-forth’s and visions and revisions. (Donna is the poet Donna Brook, Bob’s wife.) That Hershon is to be “carved upon” by someone named “Dr. Fowler” is too funny to be true, but it probably is true. In Hershon’s world we meet men in chicken suits, men in gray suits at lunch who, caught in a sunbeam, seem divine (“Messiah on Varick Street”), a “Pressure-Sensitive” label over a urinal which reads, “By reading this you have licked my balls” (“A Pressure-Sensitive Label”) and Hershon’s hilarious meditation on it. The killer job is here, too, as in “My Passage Through Grub Street”: What luck, Marcella, to hook on as an editor Many of these poems are addressed to friends, a lot of them poets (whose identities I am not a liberty to disclose), and this too tells you about Hershon’s zest for relationship. He talks to them (and to us) in a poetry-voice that is natural, easy, and fluid, without losing the poetry. But as I mentioned, nothing slips past his gaze, be it the waiter who “passes through the swinging / doors into the black kitchen / where a perpetual cigarette smolders / in a tin ashtray just for him” (“The Deuce by the Coat Rack”) or the maitre d’s comment in “Illusions of Paradise”: Crystal will be your server This is exquisite word-play, but only if you can remember that Silver was the Lone Ranger’s white horse! Hershon is a master of memory. In “A Short History of World War II” he speculates that he “will never / be acknowledged as the true / inventor of the Woody Woodpecker / laugh” and in “Ross Bagdasarian” recalls how that co-author (with none other than William Saroyan) of Rosemary Clooney’s hit recording “Come on-a My House” “changed/ his name to David Seville and founded the Chipmunks.” Now who were the Chipmunks? you are probably asking yourself. I know, but I’m not about to tell you that, either! Even what he barely remembers (a couple of phrases of Yiddish), Hershon is able to parlay into a first-rate poem in “Everybody in New York,” and uses even what is overheard: “The conversation consisting of / thud and fuck you / Something heavy hits the all / A picture shifts / Fuck you, she shouts, fuck you.” (“Neighbors”) Neighborhoods that have disappeared (“The Sun Never Sets on Sunset Park”) lead to some Brooklyn archaeology: When the anthropologists come Oh, there are simply too many wonderful poems in this book for me to quote all of them. The last and longest one in the book, “Grover Cleveland High School, Class of ’53,” is the touching, affectionate knockout punch that is so juicy and funny that I won’t ruin it by quoting bits and pieces of it here. You’ll simply have to grab Calls from the Outside World and listen to it from start to finish. ● Walt’s Last Stand by Kip Zegers (Kanona, New York: Foothills Publishing, 2005; Foothills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona, NY 14856. www.foothillspublishing.com. ) There’s a marvelous prose text that Kip Zegers has appended to his new book of poems, Walt’s Last Stand, and there’s nothing to stop us from reading it before we walk into the poems. In it he talks about teaching, which he has done at one of the best New York City high schools for over twenty years. The book begins with an epigraph from George Oppen, and Oppen has served as one of Zegers’ poetic guides. “I found in Oppen,” he tells us, “a book of wisdom, a sense of poetry, of writing as a thing-to-do, as something one might be moved to pass on.” Kip’s method is that of infinite patience, at least as he describes it here: waiting, listening, giving out the assignments, watching, listening: And, in school, we begin a year. We will see what these new students can make of where they are. There is a girl in Creative Writing who will never, not in the two semesters, show interest in any writing but Romantic Fiction. There is a girl who, after a semester of flailing and blustering, says, “Wait a minute, this is scary, writing is hard.” There is the boy for whom writing is a dead end, month after month, until suddenly the story of a love affair begins to leak into his notebook. What he writes is fiction, has point of view and style, and a teacher can tell from what is said in class that the stories are also true, and brave. There is the girl who begins with boring poems and then suddenly shocks and inspires the class. There is the student who discovers Pablo Neruda, and whose writing—already brilliant—takes off. There is the boy full of pain he cannot begin to handle or speak of, and his writing is empty. There is the girl who appears by accident of scheduling and enters poetry cautiously, then writes about a death and has begun the dance with words. There is the boy finding in the surfaces of his right hand, its cuts and calluses, the story of his life. And there is the teacher working on his own time at his own poems. This is something that I plan to read to my own students in creative writing next month, when we too will begin, across town from Kip. As if this passage of prose weren’t enough of a beautiful poem in itself, Zegers devotes a third of this book to poems about his students. I haven’t seen anything like this before in American poetry, not the breadth or depth of it. This one sets the stage: Arrival It is the kids that Zegers keeps in his eye, who “lean back smiling, giddy, / and exhausted. Then they rise, doors open on a city / that does not even look at them except to stare.” (“Go”) “’I am here,’ is what the young say in poems / and the faces they hold up to view,” he tells us in “Faces.” The girl with the notebook on the subway, “the white page untouched, being touched / with an urgency words begin to shape / in darkness beneath Lexington / as the lit train passes through”—how many times have we New Yorkers seen this on our commute? But there are also the ones that can’t be accounted for:
Finally there is the faith that the students whose names Zegers doesn’t yet know “will emerge like riddles, like potholes,// like felonies, like fresh flowers,/ like new music I will have to hear and hear and hear.” (“I Will Know It”) The other sections of Walt’s Last Stand bring us touching and beautifully made poems of family and Zegers’ hometown of Chicago, all as praiseworthy as the school poems, but I want to end with the title poem: Walt’s Last Stand The poem and the teacher can only walk up to the student and offer themselves. Poetry means nothing unless it communicates, unless it is picked up in that trust. Kip Zegers makes sure every time that his poems will do that. ● Inventing Difficulty: Poems by Jessica Greenbaum (Eugene, Oregon: Silverfish Review Press, 2000; Silverfish Review Press, P.O. Box 3541, Eugene, OR 97403. www.silverfishreviewpress.com ) Winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award. I love the title of this terrific first book. Isn’t that what we do by writing poems, inventing for ourselves the difficulty of getting down on paper what is important to us, of putting it all together? Of course, that’s what we do in life, too, and the notion is that the creation of obstacles, even those that we throw in our own path, enlarges us, strengthens us, liberates us during and after we have passed through those difficulties. That is one of Jessica’s themes, perhaps, as are the vicissitudes of love that take us through a failed romance, into a marriage, and into the birth of a child. And let me quickly note here that she was a student of mine in the late seventies at the University of Texas. We have remained friends ever since. There are so many dazzling moments in Inventing Difficulty that I simply want to stack up some of them to show what a passel of gifts Greenbaum offers us from line to line. In the title poem she writes that “Perhaps a songwriter’s // responsible for wind’s attachment to leaves, for the inseparable lyrics to earthly beauty we’ve memorized/ before birth and come here with, already on our lips.” Wow! “It’s simple / inventing difficulty. With any five lines on the white page / of morning, I can fashion a skeleton of my world: a woman/ fishing,” she tells us near the end of it, and that life “keeps her inventing both path / and obstacle toward a reunion with happiness.” Isn’t that what we’re working toward, fishing for—some degree of happiness, some quota of bliss? That bliss is under a cloud in the next poem, “The Yellow Star that Goes with Me,” whose title tells it all in a denatured pantoum whose repetitions of thirst, train, cold, shower, and crammed-in passengers evoke much more than morning rush hour in Manhattan. Sometimes there is a wish that all the complexity of city life could be wiped away (“We Want the Hurricane”), and the next poems record, wistfully, a broken love affair. “With Gulliver in Brooklyn” begins: In the end I’ve had the life I own, “Brooklyn Aubade” gives us a glorious panorama of the Brooklyn waterfront (from the Navy Yard side), offering a kind of consolation for the one who is gone but remembered. On the “7:46” train back to the Long Island where she was born and grew up, the poet meets her shadow, “an easy stereotype from an alkie bar: / the dangling cigarette and surrounding / firemen, her face shiny as a scar,” a bleach-blonde forty-something “all menthol / and James Cain”: “she was also from these stops—from the family / who lived more poorly, / whose American flag waves / like a keep-out sign above their doorway.” “Back in the Cemetery” where she once took her lover’s picture, I like the playfulness of Greenbaum’s “a, b, c, d, e,” an essay on the first five letters of the alphabet that begins, “If the alphabet is the skeleton for our body/ of experience, how great the burden on // a, already hunched over with all / it carries and anticipates, always // about to announce b, / whose bones, like the whale boat’s / whale-shaped ones, bear stowaways, / then push a belly up to c, / who calls ahead with open mouth / then dashes into echo. . . .” This playfulness and the meticulousness of her description remind me of another Brooklyn poet, Marianne Moore, without Moore’s occasional fussiness. It is a great pleasure simply to follow Jessica Greenbaum’s eye as it picks out and picks up things. Two of the great rewards of this book are the longish poems called “Blown-Away-Roof” and “After Rereading ‘Notes of a Native Son,’” in which she spies on her neighbors to our delight. The last three poems in the book bring us to motherhood, and let me quote the final poem in its entirety. Its opening is staggering: Conversation about Life, After Life I am ready for Jessica Greenbaum’s next book. I hope she is getting ready to give it to us. ● A Sail to Great Island by Alan Feldman (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress ). Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. I first met Alan Feldman in 1966 on the cover of his first book of poems, The Household, published in mimeograph by the Columbia Review Press. There is a skinny, bespectacled poet atop a flight of stone stairs in what resembles a fort-like structure in—where?—Riverside Park? Fort Tryon Park? I still have my copy, and I’m still friends with Alan, whom I met in one of the bookstores on the Upper West Side. In fact, next week I’m driving up to Massachusetts to see him and his wife, the painter Nan Hass Feldman. This is a poet whose work I’ve admired for years, and I was thrilled when I was able to bring out his book The Happy Genius (the reference is to Williams’ poem of the same name) with SUN in 1978. It won the Elliston Book Award that year for the best collection published by a small, nonprofit press in the United States. Alan sent me the manuscript of A Sail to Great Island, and I was happy to write the following blurb for it. I mean every word that I say, blurbismo aside: Feldman has been building extraordinary and deeply moving poems for some forty years now, and it’s high time a magnum of champagne was cracked across the bow of a new book with his name on it. Here is a master-maker who can offer us poems that dazzle us with their beauty as they ride us through the everyday real, or break our heart because they are so imaginative, so true. Alan Feldman is one of the best poets in America. The “little house” of his book-boat sets sail immediately in these pages, and “keeps turning / to look at things,” much as its owner does: Could someone invent a really complete camera, for just the time That’s exactly what Feldman does in these poems, and what he has always done. On the cover of The Happy Genius he is a little boy in a family snapshot, ecstatic as he and the rest of the family watch a home movie. I would like to say that all of Alan’s poems are home movies directed by somebody like Frank Capra, full of feeling and memory-images, but maybe better than Capra’s sentimentality. A poet has got to be in love with the world if he hopes to do it any degree of justice in his work, and Feldman’s poetry is a grand project of preservation. He saves what he loves. “Listening to Keats” is a case in point. Driving along, Alan is listening to tape of some “honey-tongued young British actor” reading Keats that his daughter has given him. The tape triggers memories of Feldman’s mother and her devotion to the British poet: my mother— Holding that wonderful juxtaposition of yesterday and today, the poem ends with Feldman feeling nearer to his daughter and his mother, “My mother, my daughter, and me, / passing trucks, going through the toll booths, // the dead Keats reading passionately, deathlessly.” Music and memory motivate a number of these poems, including “Pavane,” the next one, the subject being Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess played by the poet’s high school band. In Feldman’s hands the poem becomes an elegy for his friend and band-mate Sue Meyer, who died at seventeen during her freshman year in college: She must be a young favorite there in the world of the dead— Maybe the most beautiful poem about music in A Sail to Great Island is Feldman’s paean to the jazz pianist Bill Evans (an enthusiasm we both share): Bill Evans Plays Never Let Me Go That’s a Bill Evans poem I wish I’d written! Its clarity and simplicity are overpowering, and if one knows anything about Evans’ playing, it is all the more wrenching. Another standout poem in this book is “Contemporary American Poetry, which begins, “When her eye first gave her trouble, but when I did not yet know / this growth would spread through her brain, Mother sent me / Donald Hall’s ‘Kicking the Leaves,’ torn from the Times. . . .” Feldman improvises what he thinks his mother was saying by sending him Hall’s poem: I will soon be leaving you. When you hear about my death “How I resented this poem,” the poet tells us, “which moved me terribly. . . .” Feldman finds the poem again in the college anthology that he uses, “one that puts old enemies, like O’Hara and Lowell, together / in an academy of poetry of the world to come.” Now, older than the thirty he was when his mother sent him the poem, he understands that “The pleasure, if there is one, is knowing we have the dead / inside us, where they have to make peace, and never leave us.” Feldman gives us a sonnet sequence (he has been writing dozens of sonnets in recent years), sailing poems, a poem for his daughter’s marriage, a retrospective on the 20th century: “The year I was born the atomic bomb went off. / Here I’d just begun, and someone / found the switch to turn off the world.” I once thought that the best response of a critic would be to quote the entire book if he loved it, and that is my impulse, one that I will spare us both, dear reader. You’ll simply have to go out and find a copy of one of the best books of poetry published in 2004. It’s not that long ago. There should still be some around. ●●● Thanks to Nick Twemlow, who asked, and Emily White, who put it up for all to see. And, naturally, thanks to all of you who read it!—B.Z. |
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