So I am leaving Harriet today. My fourth book of poems, The Endarkenment, was recently accepted for publication (by University of Pittsburgh Press), and I want to focus on revising the manuscript, and also developing some prose ideas.

In an earlier post, I spoke about participating in the National Poetry Slam in the early 90’s. Here I will talk about what I saw at the National Poetry Slam in August 2006 in Austin, Texas, when I returned as an observer. I was invited back to take part in a reading of old-timers and to be on a couple of panels. Because I hadn’t been in almost a decade and because I like Austin organizers (Mike Henry and company), I accepted the invite. On a personal level, it was good to return and see people I still had love for (such as the big and smiley Danny Solis, and the wild and wacky Matthew John Conley, and many others.) For people unfamiliar with slam, “the Nationals� is when teams from all over North America assemble in one place for a frenetic 4-day competition. There are “bouts� at venues throughout the town, and teams and poets get eliminated quickly, so there’s lots of excitement and tension. The poets are stuck in this catch-22—they are taking serious a competition that was designed (by Marc Smith) to make fun of serious poetry competitions.

On the train ride from Munich to Berlin, (6 hour ride). Matthea Harvey, Ron Winkler and I (along with some help from Kevin Young and Uljana Wolf intermittenly) discuss a rough draft translation of a poem of Ron`s into English. We go through it line by line, phrase by phrase, discussing many little details, like the different implications of "fact" and "data", and trying to figure out of there is an expression in English for a boy whose ears stick, something more elegant than Dumbo. It is fascinating to look at all the choices that get made, and how you sometimes need to deviate from the literal to get to a poem´s essence.

The 4 poets we are touring with are all doing very well career-wise in Germany. Steffen Popp has a well recieved novel and a book of poems. Uljana Wolf just won a big award that resulted in her doing readings all over the country, and Ron Winkler has two books out and has won several prizes. Jan Wagner is doing good stuff too.

I am hoping that this tour is just the beginning of a longer relationship. Ron will be in the US in November; his poems are being used in a musical performance at Zankel Hall (Carnegie Hall). I am hoping that some of these poets will have work appear in US literary journals. We US poets need to hear and read the work of young poets from around the globe. We need to be exposed to different poetic traditions and different ways of approaching a poem.

This is totally a poetic wet dream, but imagine a young poets convention somewhere on Earth where 10 poets under 40 from every country assemble for a week to share work. I hope it happens quick: my days of being under 40 are severely numbered, I turn 40 in 10 days.

Tonight we will have our final reading in Berlin, at the Literaturhaus. The next night, Saturday, Derek Walcott is reading outdoors as part of some huge week-long, city-wide poetry festival.

On the third day of a short, week-long tour through Germany with poets Kevin Young, Christian Hawkey, and Matthea Harvey. Matthea's husband (and editor of Jubilat) Rob Caspar is also with us, as well as 4 young German poets (between 27 and 36) who have translated our poems.

Our typical day has been: wake up and have a huge German breakfast (deli meats, rolls, many forms of jam, hard boiled eggs, fruit), then take a train (from Berlin to Leipzig, then Leipzig to Munich, tomorrow it is Munich back to Berlin), check into new hotel, have a nice lunch and explore the city a little, go to the reading around 7, then go out to a big dinner with the people who organized the event.

The Munich reading was in the Lyrik Kabinett. There were about 40 people in attendance. We read sitting down at a table on a stage, with microphones. 4 or 5 people would sit at the table at a time. 2 US poets and 2 or 3 German translators, with a break in the middle.

It's been so energizing hanging out with this group of nine poets, in so many different contexts. We have talked a LOT of poetry, some politics, some music. We've also played chess and poker on the train, laughed a ton. It's nice to hear people's poems on consecutive nights. With each new listen, I hear more and more. I still have some jetlag and am sleeping in pieces. Our hosts have been so kind. I am blown away by the physical spaces that the writing organizations inhabit. The Berlin Literaturhaus is a huge mansion, with offices, a lovely garden, and an exquisite restaurant where regular stylish people (with $) go for a nice meal. It is on a whole other level than anything that I have experienced in the US. It's like the Morgan Library in New York.

Jumping around, last night in Leipzig we met some students of one of the very few creative writing workshops in Germany. There is a lot of doubt about the worthiness of such an endeavor, but the students seem to be really happy there; they get to go for free, and it is an honor to be selected (20 people selected out of 600 applicants).

Tonight we ate at a place called Cohn's, a Jewish deli in Munich. We have been earting lots of schnitzel and rump steak, but other things too, like giant stalks of white aspragus (which are in season), with thin slices of ham and a butter sauce. Delicious.

More soon from Berlin. xo

I just arrived in Berlin. I will be blogging from Germany for the next week. I am embarking on a three city tour with three other American poets, Matthea Harvey, Kevin Young, and Christian Hawkey. We are doing readings to support an anthology that just came out in Germany and Austria, Schwerkraft, edited by Ron Winkler.

What has happened so far: got a late start leaving my house, massive traffic jam on the way to JFK, on one of those buses from Grand Central. Just made the plane, then we sat on the tarmac for three hours. Fun talking with Kevin and Matthea. The flight was 11 hours, with the three hours on the tarmac. No sleep for me. Lots of Earl Grey tea. Did edit my new poetry manuscript, The Endarkenment. I like editing on planes when everyone else is sleeping. No big problems with the person next to me over personal space or arm rest. Did drop a slice of pizza in JFK. Had eaten half while waiting to pay. It was soo good. Tried to play it off, but I was bummed. That is a hard thing to play off. We have a get together in a few hours with our hosts. Staying in the Hotel Bogota. My room is very dorm-like. Wondering if there is a Pablo Escobar suite. Having a hard time typing--keyboard is different--z and y are switched, plus I cut my fingernails too quickly and too short and have a very tender index finger on my right hand--that is a crucial finger for my primitive typing. Decided against taking a and am just trying to power through till tonight. In Prenzlauerberg now, one of the coolest neighborhoods anywhere. I love Berlin, was here last year with my wife, (she has a name: Christine Caballero). Tomorrow we go to Leipzig. Anyone want me to bring back some German pretzel bread?

This post is building off the discussion on Emily’s thread.

I lived in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2003, and there was a lot happening there with Latino writers too. (LA is kind of cut off from the rest of the nation in some ways in terms of literature.) I’m thinking of Luis Alfaro (who after poetry got into playwriting and won a MacArthur genius grant), and Michele Serros (who is now writing non-fiction, How To Be A Latina Role Model), and Dennis Cruz (a Bukowski-esque spirit with the power to both terrify and move), and Alicia Vogl Saenz (who has exquisite diction and elegant imagery), and the dark humor of Richard Garcia (The Flying Garcias on Pitt Press). There’s an arts organization in East LA called Self-Help Graphics.

I’m thinking about Rachel’s recent post and the intersection between experience and art. Some of the most powerful poems I know seem to be, if not drenched in, then at least tinged with experience and have that born-out-of-necessity feel. These poems, a number of which might be called “confessional�, seem to have something at stake emotionally, but for this sort of poem to work, there needs to be something happening on the artistic end as well, something sonically, or metaphorically, or syntactically, that pushes the poem beyond a mere transcription of experience. Even Carolyn Forche’s poem, “The Colonel�, which seems to embrace journalistic techniques (delivered in a block of prose, told in very straightforward, methodical language), has a metaphorical leap at the end as some of the severed ears “caught this scrap of his voice�.

A few weeks ago Patricia talked about her coming up through the slam in Chicago, how that is where she emerged wholly as a writer and performer. That a writer of her caliber could emerge from the slam community is a testimony to the possibilities of that community. The slam was not my first artist home, but it was an important early one.

Here’s a new ad campaign by Home Depot. Scene opens on a suburban woman in khaki shorts and a summer hat, the sun hitting her muddy calves, making them sparkle as she walks through a manicured backyard: “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it-- A sort of walking miracle, my skin bright as a Home Depot lampshade.� Male Voice Over: “Come to Home Depot and get lampshades that will make you glow in the dark.�

Here’s a commercial idea for Victoria’s Secret. A woman walks down a crowded New York City street in her underwear, bare foot and black sunglasses, her footsteps literally smoldering in her wake, as all sorts of men watch her in awe, as a sexy female voiceover speaks: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer. Beware. Beware. Out of the ash. I rise with my red hair. And I eat men like air.� Then a handsome man in a business suit, with a freshly plucked rose, stands in her path, and she walks right through him, disintegrating him. Male voiceover comes in as the screen fills with smoke: “Victoria’s Secret—it will bring out the man eater in you.�

I know poets, such as Robert Desnos, have worked in advertising before, but that should be a choice that each poet makes.

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Last year C.K. Williams was talking to a class of mine at Sarah Lawrence, and he lifted the galleys of his Collected Poems and said that he was “holding his life’s work�, as he gripped the five-hundred or so pages in his hands, almost like a baby. It was poignant—this smart, passionate, insightful human had focused his energy, had given the best parts of his life to a brick of paper. (I am reminded of Merwin’s line: “I who have always believed too much in words.�) Williams does not leave a skyscraper in his wake, rather 500-plus pages of poems, read by relatively few of his fellow citizens. Despite a small readership, he (and other poets) should be afforded the same copyright protections as musicians, film makers, fiction writers, painters, etc. We are not sub-artists.

My wife and I had a baby girl six months ago, and, in terms of motherhood and parenting, all I can say is wow, and more wow. I never knew how hard child rearing is; can you say tired squared? I am so overwhelmed (and inspired!) with only one; I have no idea how people do it, (like Rachel with two and one more on the way). Even though we’re in an era where many fathers change diapers and do daddy day care, mothers still do the heavy lifting, carrying the species forward.

I have to think that we overlook mothers in this country; I was in Guatemala 15 years ago in a small town, and I stumbled upon a statue of a pregnant woman, and it was so appropriate (and sadly disorienting) to see the heroics of the every day celebrated. Are there any large, public statues celebrating motherhood in this country? There are, of course, many tall buildings and several monuments that seem to be indirect testimonies to the most rudimentary element of fatherhood.

I saw the headline “Illegal Migrants Dissect Details of Senate Deal� in the New York Times over the weekend, and I wondered if they had a linguistic policy change, as I didn’t remember seeing that phrase “Illegal Migrant� in a headline before, so I did searches of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Fox News websites to see which phrases they used most often. The phrases I searched were “undocumented workers�, “undocumented migrants�, “illegal migrants�, “illegal immigrants�, and “illegal aliens�.

Kenny’s post about a readership existing solely in the academy made me think about a ridership. I usually resist decrees about what is and isn’t a poem, who is and isn’t a poet etc. But if I had a rule, it might be that every person who claims the title poet must have at least one poem that they could sit down and read to a stranger on a public bus and forge some kind of connection. I’d call it the public bus rule. You could have nine hundred other poems that are elusive, difficult etc., but you'd need at least one poem that engages a regular person on a single listen.

This is the most whimsical thing I've seen in a while, and seems to capture the Czech spirit.

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I could be wrong, but I wonder if this sort of theater would be up Kenneth's alley. It's a site-speciifc, conceptual piece, where a German director hires an American actor to act like a farmer on an actual farm, as real farmers watch.

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If anyone will be in New York over the next couple months, this exhibit at the Grolier Club on miniature books looks off-beat and charming.

When I was in my senior year of college, I was dating the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and I found myself wanting to address their execution in a poem. I had passionate feelings about her, and the execution of her grandparents. The intensity of my feelings was actually a barrier to accessing something authentic. I quickly found how difficult it is to write a poem when you enter into the experience with a preconceived notion of what the poem should be. The poem kept coming out “that was wrong�, or “the government sucks�—I couldn’t move beyond that. What I lacked was an entry point. What I also lacked was an open-ness to letting the poem become whatever it needed to be. After a few months of banging my head into the blank page, which was beginning to feel like a brick wall (funny, how something so seemingly light can become so hard and solid), I started doing research about the Rosenbergs, reading about their case. Eventually an entry point revealed itself—instead of talking about the Rosenbergs in general terms, as historical icons, I decided to make them personal, three-dimensional. I ended up writing a love poem of sorts, centered on an imagined last kiss, the night before their execution, the last time they would rub their noses together. I don’t know whether they had such a moment in real life, but for the poem’s sake that kiss good-bye needed to happen.

This is a video of a poet named Derrick Brown. The video isn't the greatest, but it gives a sense of his work, which walks an elegant line between music and poetry.

Here's an introduction I wrote about David Lerner for a new anthology called The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (edited by Mark Eleveld). Lerner is a poet few people have heard of; his top dozen poems or so are outstanding. After the introduction, I've pasted one of his poems.

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Victor Hernandez Cruz and Thomas Lux kick things off with a wonderful, spirited reading. It’s inspiring to see two poets in their late 50’s/early 60’s still writing with imagination and fire.
Cruz is an old school Nuyorican (with Miguel Pinero and company in the late 60’s) who should be more in the loop somehow—for instance, getting good gig$ at the 92nd Street Y and being included in PSA events.

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This is an interview I conducted several years ago with Joanna Fuhrman via e-mail about her poem “In the Basement of the Museum of Potential Urges", which appears in her book Ugh, Ugh Ocean (Hanging Loose Press). The poem appears below, followed by specific questions about the poem.

After reading Kwame's entry about his first poem, I decided to dive into that pool.

Waving the Flag

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A few months ago I asked some of my students: what are you doing to honor the poet inside you? Now I will turn a version of the question towards myself.

It seems like now is the time when we disclose how we do or don’t know our fellow bloggers, so here goes:

The first time I read with Patricia was September, 1993, a venue called the Women’s Building in the Mission District (San Francisco). It was the semi-finals of the National Poetry Slam. We actually read back-to-back as our teams were competing against one another, though I don’t think I registered on Patricia’s radar; she was the reigning national champion, and her team was about to win it all. (One odd detail about that reading was that right before it started, some local guy got stabbed on the street and ran into the lobby, seeking refuge, collapsing in a red heap.) In the years since, Patricia and I have read together a number of times, including twice in the past three months, and we have many people in common. We’ve also overlapped in several anthologies.

It is good to see Kenny and Kwame agree to exchange ideas and try to understand one another better. I am looking forward to what comes out of that. They very well may be aesthetically on opposite sides of something, but there are more than two sides. The very idea of two sides makes it sound like a football field, with the mainstream poets kicking off, wearing expensive, tweed, heavily logo-ed uniforms, with acceptance letters from The New Yorker for numbers, and ribbons from all the prizes they have won pinned to their shoulders, and pennyloafer cleats. On the other side of the field, the experimental poets, line up to receive the kick-off, wearing organic jerseys, with the letters of their names stitched into playful anagrams, and number signs where the numbers should be, with flowers from the avant garden painted on their helmets, only agreeing to play because they keep hoping after the first touchdown the scoreboard might read N+7.

After a fierce game of speed Scrabble, my friend Len recently asked me what contemporary Caucasian poets wrote about the subject of race. I came up with C.K. Williams and Sean Thomas Dougherty, but not much beyond that. It got me wondering. Does anyone know any Caucasian poets that have addressed the subject of race in an interesting manner? Even just a poem or two. I guess I'm asking because we live in a country that hasn't owned up to its history; there still hasn't been a formal apology for slavery, and all the xenophobia surrounding the Southern border, with plans to build a fence to the moon, so suddenly every Latino is suspect. I can think of many African-American poets, for instance, who have addressed the subject of race in their poems, but not many Causasians. I guess I think race (and racism) are national issues, applying to people of all backgrounds. But maybe there are poems by Caucasian poets that I'm just not thinking of. I think I remember a poem about Diallo by Greg Fuchs. Probably something by Jim Daniels. I know Whitman addressed race directly, but he's obviously not a contemporary poet.

I’m re-reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency for a class and I’m wondering how important of a poet he is. It’s hard to imagine poets like Amy Gerstler, Elain Equi, David Trinidad, and many others without O’Hara coming first. It seems like he ripped something open in terms of content by writing poems that celebrate pop culture and movies (and also dismiss the stuffiness of the poetry world). Look at the opening lines of To The Film Industry In Crisis.

I don’t go to church, so poetry readings are the closest thing I have to a communal spiritual experience. I think something happens when we come together and honor one another with our attention and break breath. I sometimes define poetry as “chiseled breathing�, but maybe for the purpose of metaphor, the better word is “leavened�. Poetry is leavened breathing.

Last night there was a book party for Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect, New and Selected Poems (Coffeehouse) at the Cue Art Foundation in Chelsea. Opening up for Equi was a musical duo including a theremin player. A theremin is an instrument that gets played without being touched. You move your hand near the instrument, and it picks up on your electromagnetic energy and produces sound, a sound that made me think of outer space movies. My friend Amber whispered that it was more like an opera singer. Ethereal and strange, it was the perfect opening act for Equi, a smart, quirky, inventive, darkly funny poet who doesn’t fit neatly into any of the boxes in the highly factionalized American poetry landscape. (I love when poets complicate our tendency to categorize.)

Reading Kwame’s confession a couple days ago concerning Whitman made me think of my own meandering path towards the Jolly Big Fellow. When I was in my early twenties, I resisted Old Graybeard, because I didn’t find the wild imagery on a line-by-line basis that I coveted in those days. In fact, I found Old Graybeard kind of boring; I couldn’t figure out what all the hoopla was about—the language seemed too direct and bloated, the sentiments too over-the-top and obvious. Little did I know then that the limitations were inside me, and not the text. Five years ago I returned to Song of Myself and was sliced up into little pieces. Suddenly I was able to see the bigger picture, the democracy of his vision, how the scope of the project was extremely imaginative, that he was using the self as a poetic vehicle, creating a persona who shared his name, expanding way beyond himself.

Overheard yesterday in a coffee shop:

“I see you cut off all your hair.�
“Yeah.�
“What, you got sick of it?�
“No, I donated it to Locks of Love. They’ll make it into a wig for a cancer patient.�

I had long hair once—my junior year of college I had dreads. My hair was kind of curly, and I never brushed it, and it just evolved into dreads organically, meaning I didn’t have to sit in front of a mirror and twist them or anything, which in my mind back then seemed to be false dreads—weren’t they a symbol of looseness, a hands-off approach to life, I thought. So my dreads took care of themselves. At least for a while.

Bought a copy of Crux, The Letters of James Dickey, the other day at a very good used bookstore, Alias on Sawtelle in West LA, and stumbled upon this bizarrism. According to the book, in 1971, Gordon Lish proposed that a well-known photographer take pictures of the “top ten US poets�, and then James Dickey would write a paragraph response to each, stating why he was a superior poet. Lish suggested among others: Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, J.V. Cunningham, (someone should have told him to change his name away from junior varsity), Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, Alan Dugan, and Howard Nemerov. James Dickey wrote back to Lish’s proposal:

One cool thing about being a poet in Los Angeles, (a strange positive that perhaps came from being in the shadow of Hollywood, faraway from the power brokers of the literary world), was that when I met other literary writers I was genuinely excited, and there was a lot of space for unconventional things to happen organically. For instance, in 1999, I was hosting an event at Beyond Baroque to raise money to take six high school poets to a teen poetry festival in New Mexico, and one of the featured readers, an actor/writer named Sarah Koskoff, performed Plath’s Daddy. She didn’t just read the poem; she embodied it. Fiction writer Aimee Bender happened to be in the audience and came up with the idea of organizing a Dead Poets Slam, featuring Los Angeles stage actors and performers who would embody the work of dead poets. A couple weeks later, I was in Aimee’s living room, with several UC-Irvine grads (Genevieve and Alice Sebold—pre-Lovely Bones), mapping out potential teams; we finally decided on the Natural Deaths vs. the Unnatural Deaths. We rifled through sprawled anthologies, looking for dead poets to bring back to life. I can’t imagine an event like that happening, in the same small, funky way, in any other American city.

I am about to fly back to New York from Los Angeles. I lived in LA in the late 90’s, early 00’s, and it is a city that many people around the country love to hate. I’d get on a public bus in Seattle and strike up a conversation with the driver, and then mention Los Angeles, and it was like I’d pushed the venom button in the back of his neck. Los Angeles does have its drawbacks: the traffic, the sense of alienation that results from driving everywhere in mental thought bubbles, the Hollywood narcissism (“I’m a writer.� “Oh, what studio do you work for?�). But there are joys to be found too. Here are 5 recommendations.

It’s interesting to read the recent posts by Kwame and Kenny talking about first books and prizes (or the lack thereof). It makes me wonder what percentage of first books published each year are attached to contests. I’m glad that Kenny pointed out that a number of first books do get published each year outside the mainstream. (Is “mainpuddle� more appropriate?)

Last summer I was a part of a poet/animator collaboration organized by poet Pat Payne, in conjunction with NewTown Pasadena. I was paired with an animator, Nick Fox-Gieg. We met once over tea in the Lower East Side and had a rambling discussion that kept swirling back to religion; perhaps this is why he selected my poem The Foxhole Manifesto to work with. When I was very pleased with what Nick came up with. He just sent me the final draft, so I will share it here. He has a bunch of other excellent stuff online on youtube.

The Spanish word for bird, pajaro, is much more accurate. Is there any word in English that is less appropriate than bird, rhyming with turd, weighed down by its er sound, its muddy consonants? Bird sounds like something that would fall down from the sky, not flitter upwards. Pajaro, with its three quick, airy vowel sounds is a superior word. One’s lips must flutter just to say it.

For years, I've nodded my head when Lorca’s name came up in poetry circles, but the truth is I am much more familiar with his plays, specifically Blood Wedding, and his essay on duende than his poems. But now I am venturing in. Here are some thoughts on his poem Song of the Barren Orange Tree.

Yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, Bush was quoting as saying, “We don’t believe in timetables.� This made a tree of questions grow in my mind.

This is an animated video of the song Christobel by Joan As Police Woman. Joan is a wonderful musician who lives in New York. I'm a huge fan of hers. Every now and then she performs with poets. We might do a show together in early May at the Bowery Poetry Club. If you want to see more of her stuff go here, where there's a live concert.

Someone asked me about the books that appear on my syllabus. For one class this semester, (I teach two), it was easy: I let the students pick half the list.

Scudder Middleton, Lenora Speyer, Gladys Cromwell: these are some of the names that dominate the Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1919, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite—(no relation to David Lehman, though the idea of the collection is the same).

I am sitting here in a rocking chair, on the porch of a blog cabin, overlooking a sloping field of snow. I am now officially a contributing writer for Harriet. What this means specifically is that I’ve been given the keys to a cabin on the Poetry Foundation’s sprawling estate. I’m supposed to come up here and hang out a few times a month. I haven’t met Harriet yet, but her place sure is swell: refurbished floorboards with wide, red oak planks, a sofa made out of books, and a series of gigantic enlarged fingerprints in fancy frames on the wall. “Harriet, are those your snowflakes?� I whisper towards the ceiling. Harriet does not reply. Perhaps I will hide in the closet and see if I can catch a glimpse of her.