It has gotten harder and harder to write well about Iraq and the current administration. One feels helpless, and furious. One jeers not to weep or become apathetic. But none of these responses makes for good poetry. Politics tends toward sloganeering, solutioneering, and declarations of right and wrong; good poems generally require ambivalence and irresolution.

One of the poets I’ve been reading a lot of recently, though—Frederick Seidel—solves the problem by writing the way he always has, attacking pieties and simultaneously declaring his own culpability. Seidel’s poet-persona seems half-crazed, quite dire. The first poem in his 2006 book, Ooga-Booga, “Kill Poem,�? seems like one of the best things written in at least the last 25 years. Here’s a piece of it:

Joseph Torra

Taxes (a year’s worth of receipts to sort out and tally up), poems I’m trying to write, a day-long gig up in North Jersey, Maisie’s 15 month checkup, laziness because it’s finally spring: My excuses for not posting for over a week. I read though, and particularly liked Joseph Torra’s new “autobiographical novel,�? Call Me Waiter, just out from Pressed Wafer, a Boston-based small press run by the poet-editor-impresario Bill Corbett. Pressed Wafer publishes limited-edition broadsides and postcards and chapbooks of prose and poetry, which you can order directly by writing to 9 Columbus Square, Boston, MA 02116. I make a yearly donation to the press and get everything Corbett publishes; it’s a great deal for a lot of very good, handsomely-designed stuff coming at you in the mail all the time.

At 133 pages, Call Me Waiter is small for a novel, but no chapbook in scope. It’s an account of 20 years spent working as a bartender and waiter. Torra, who’s also a poet, writes wonderfully about work. Ron Silliman called one of his previous novels, Gas Station, “an extraordinary document…[Torra] has a real eye, not simply a literary one.�? There are two kinds of writers, those who want to imitate literature, and those who want to imitate life, and the second kind are better, and Torra’s in the second category.

Flying from San Francisco to London over the weekend, I found myself sitting next to a woman whose accent sounded more British than American, so I assumed she was a Brit going home, but no, Randi Cathinka Neverdal was a Norwegian doing her doctorate thesis on small press literary publishing in the U.S. What serendipity! "I'm a poet," I admitted to Cathinka without shame. We talked.

I recently read the journalist Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The much bruited hook is how did two American Jewish lesbians survive in Vichy France during WWII. The answer is that they were protected by the collaborator Bernard Fay, about whom they may not have known much in terms of his responsibility for the suffering and deaths of a number of people—but people choose not to know what they don’t want to know. There's also a bit on Stein's and Toklas' possibly S&M-ish sexual relationship which doesn't turn out to be very interesting (as sex lives of other people generally, and disappointingly, do not.) I think Malcolm tries to dislike Stein and to like Toklas, and fails on both counts.

A few years ago I read Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about books on Sylvia Plath. In both books, the Plath and the Stein, there is more interest in Malcolm’s journey in trying to understand her subject than there is in what she finds out. Both are popularized metabiography, both are good smart easy reads. Those concerned about “I�? in poems might be interested in Malcolm.

I was trying to read my 14-month old daughter a Grimm's Fairy Tale this morning, but poets of her generation are narratively-challenged, so I post it here instead.

The Bride-Choosing

And he did so, and lived contentedly and happily with her all his life long.

I would have picked the first sister: Better in bed.

What a delight to see on Poetry Daily yesterday that Knopf has put out a Selected Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford. I have about eight copies of Lunch Poems, and a Meditations in an Emergency, and a Poems Retrieved, and two copies of the Collected, but it is certainly time for a new Selected, and Ford seems like a great person to have edited it. The Collected is often too much, and reading a new Selected O’Hara should be like seeing a museum show of your favorite artist, hung in an all new way by a passionate curator.

O’Hara reminds me every time I read him how dull taxonomies and endless discussions of poetry camps really are. Nothing against criticism, intellectuality, theory, scholarship, etcetera. I’m all for those things. I’m also for remembering that art’s a primary experience—you and the poem and pleasure.

Well, this is it, the last entry in a movimiento here on Harriet, in which I featured every Wednesday (25 Wednesdays to be exact) books that excited me, intrigued me, renewed my faith in poetry. The honor of the send-off goes to poet Alessandra Lynch, for her second collection of poems selected by James Richardson to be part of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series.

-----------------
1. Write for skimmers
2. Write for peckers
3. Filter, impose, trespass
4. Include a link to the Code
5. Think hyper
6. Think branding
7. Think icon
8. Tell your visitor where to go

"How to Write for the Internet"
in Human Resources
by Rachel Zolf
Coach House Books, 2007
-----------------

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the "New American Poets"'s political commitments, or lack of same.

Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me�? (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.

John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions�? (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

-----------------
"A new weapon in the war against explosions:
EXPLOSIONS! Hearing aids may explode!"

from "Watch for Exploding Cells"
in Fake Math
by Ryan Fitzpatrick
Snare Books, 2007
-----------------

-----------------
"juicy baby
rubber fist
red jawbreaker
gluts opera-mouthed
palate heaves
lip popper
sloppy baby
gurgle slick
gloam limpid"

"Ballgag"
in Thumbscrews
by Natalie Zina Walschots
Snare Books, 2007
-----------------

It’s tempting to invoke the phrase “Oedipus complex�? in discussing this book by debut poet James Allen Hall; Mother (with a capital M), mythic figure, source of many glorious beginnings (and a few tragic endings), and indeed the defining lens to the worlds of the imagination and reality, is an unavoidable muse, an inescapable word uttered as an expression of wonder, a declamation of fear, and as the point of reference for things beautiful and dreadful. But Hall’s Mother moves beyond the son’s eye and takes shape as an independent body with agency and history outside male desire. She exists, with and without him:

-----------------
"Bad abba the endgame. In-
seminal doomdom alert:
pueblo naturans or
else. But the breadcrumbs are gone, and the
story goes on, and how
haply an ending no
nextwise has shown us, nor known."

from "Tale"
in Yesno
by Dennis Lee
Anansi Press, 2007
-----------------

(The “e�? at the end, the UDP website explains, comes from Kafka- or K-Presse, a small German publishing house.)

First of all, isn’t this like the best name for a press? This art & publishing collective was founded in 1993 by “a couple of college kids who wanted to put together a zine, without really knowing what that is.�? Fifteen years later, this humble do-it-yourself-Xeroxed-project-beginning matured into a reputable and cutting-edge enterprise that publishes poetry by undiscovered voices, lost works, translations and artist’s books. It also produces chapbooks, broadsides, a magazine and a newspaper. And each and every publication contains a “handmade element�? that “calls attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.�? This is indeed a refreshing approach that answers to the mass market product (and sometimes uninspired content) coming out of the large New York houses.

Here’s an unusual double-duty entry: both a special Thank You to my favorite poetry bookstore Open Books in Seattle, where I stand around and gab for hours about all-things poetic while browsing the fabulous shelves (over 9,000 titles and counting!—indeed the poetry reader’s paradise), and a special Friday Shout Out to its co-proprietor, poet J.W. Marshall—John, to you and me—whose debut book of poems, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize, was just released. Poetry poetry everywhere, indeed.

My new new book (after my recent essay collection, Orpheus in the Bronx), Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, is just out from the new and small but quite excellent Counterpath Press, who have published books by Laynie Browne, Brian Henry, and Andrew Joron, among others.

Marjorie Perloff writes of the book that "Like the best of museum curators, Reginald Shepherd has trusted his own poet’s eye and ear in assembling poems by twenty-three of our best (mostly younger) poets—poets not usually linked, belonging, as they do, to different schools and movements. From Rosmarie Waldrop’s ironic prose poems ('I gave up stress for distress') to Cole Swensen’s elegant ekphrastic prose, from C. S. Giscombe’s minimalist geographies to Susan Stewart’s resonant mythic landscapes, the dominant impression—rare today—produced by this lyric assemblage is that of quality—the sure hand of those who have mastered their craft and can therefore Make It New. This is a truly exciting and memorable anthology!"

Charles Altieri writes that “All the anthologies of contemporary poetry I know are far too generous. They seem incapable of excluding almost anyone who has gained any reputation, and then they have to compensate for their breadth by such scanty selections there is no possibility of depth. Not so with Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms. Shepherd had the courage to select 23 poets—spanning two generations—then offer them enough space to provide statements on their aesthetics, display their range (including selections from long poems and uncollected texts). This anthology treats poets not just as makers of objects but as thinkers with visible and engaging projects, who bring lyric consciousness into almost every domain of active life. . . . Here 'lyric' can have its fullest meaning only if there are many more than one postmodernism, as Shepherd elaborates in his brilliant and concise introduction.�?

I am grateful to them both for these generous and eloquent endorsements.

Arktoi Books is an exciting new imprint of Red Hen Press. The brainchild of beloved poet Eloise Klein Healey this series, which publishes both prose and poetry, highlights the very best writing by lesbian authors. Officially launching this year, the first title is by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield.

It means “Sleepy Hollow�? in Old Dutch. Yes, that Sleepy Hollow, as in the place Mr. Washington Irving put on the literary map, though for the past twenty years, the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center has been working hard to build on that legacy. The vision of poet and founder Margo Stever has indeed blossomed into an extraordinary place for the arts. Only a train ride away from Grand Central in Manhattan, the center is itself the (currently under construction) Philipse Manor railroad station. One of the HVWC’s defining projects is this small press imprint that publishes the work of emerging poets. A number of the authors in this series, like Dina Ben-Lev, Rachel Loden, David Tucker and Sean Nevin, have gone on to publish full-length books. Most likely the same journey awaits the recent chapbook competition winner Stephanie Lenox.

This small but noble venture begins in 1991 in Connecticut, with hand-printed limited-edition broadsides of original works by writers established and emerging. Two years later it goes on hiatus as the press relocates and regroups, reappearing last year in New York City. This time around, the press produces attractive little chapbooks under its three imprints: Fabula Rasa (with a focus on folklore), Funny Bones (works of light verse and humor), and Body Language, a series highlighting works that engage issues of gender and sexuality. Title one of this third imprint is the poetry chapbook written by Achy Obejas.

Just want to recommend an extraordinary poet, Tonino Guerra—his book Abandoned Places (Guernica, 1999), translated by the American fiction writer Adria Bernardi. Guerra was born in 1920; he’s probably best known as a screenwriter who has collaborated Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky and others. He writes poems in the montanari dialect of the region of his birth, Santarcangelo di Romagna, in the Apennine mountains of Italy. Abandoned Places is a kind of narrative in short lyrics of a place and time that’s gone. Instead of being all nostalgia and sentimentality, which you might expect, these poems are full of humor, harshness, loveliness, startling imagery, political consciousness and humanity.

Reginald was blogging a few weeks ago about what’s lost in translation; perhaps poetry with narrative and strong imagery translates best, though any sonic sense has to be pretty much gone. There’s double trouble with Guerra.

Rick Barot is one of the most elegant, graceful poets I have come across. And I have anticipated the release of his new book after having taught The Darker Fall many times over the years since its first release in 2002. I have always admired his attention to rhythm, to the line, and to the precision of his language. Barot’s carefully chiseled stanzas give the distinct impression that he’s sculpting, or carving out of wood a marvelous artifact, not wooden at all, but startling and expressive. Perhaps this is why a number of the poems in this new collection are in dialogue with artistic media: literature, film, painting, and even performance art.

The classroom next to my office has been booming all morning in Russian, a language I don't speak at all: I recognize it when the students respond to the teacher, in unison, by shouting "Spasibo!," though the other frequent shoutouts wouldn't be phonologically possible in any of the (too few) languages I read: one of them sounds like "Ktonk!" and the other like "Adgno!"

The din not only made me wish I had a true gift for learning foreign languages (especially for learning ones relatively remote from English), rather than just for scrounging up facts about them (you can see new features of English-language poetry, for example, if you learn about aspect, a.k.a. the distinction between completed and ongoing action). It also made me take another look at the enormous new anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, out now from Dalkey Archive, whose facing-page versions remind me of how much I'm missing-- while making available, to my mild surprise, a number of poems that seem to work in English. Examples below the fold...

My fifth month of weekly shout outs comes to a close today (only one more month before I too sign off the PF blog—how I’ll miss thee, Harriet!), so I decided to do something different: instead of reaching over to my personal poetry bookshelf or to the review copies pile, I skipped over to my local neighborhood bookstore to browse the literature stacks and I came across the following volume by a name not unfamiliar to me—I hear he’s one of the illustrious poet graduates from Queens College. My interest was further piqued by the subtitle: “Letters to the Islamic Republic.�? As I leafed through the collection, the critical tone against an oppressive religious government and its constant assaults on freedom of expression emanated loud and clear. Ah, politics and poetry: my favorite artistic combination. I offer two pieces, the second an excerpt from a longer poem:

As a young gay man growing up closeted in a Mexican household, I had to find my queer role models in books. In high school I heard that Federico García Lorca was gay, and that so was Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, and Walt Whitman. Though their works weren’t necessarily queer—I really had to read into them sometimes—knowing that the literature was the artistry of a gay man was enough. I had yet to discover John Rechy, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Arturo Islas (my gay Chicano role models, none of them taught at my high school) but I did come across during my senior year, the verse by the Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933).

I warned you about it last month, and now it's happened: this week I think I did more writing than reading, and in the rush of finishing up other sorts of prose about poets and poetry, I plumb ran out of new poetry-related discoveries of the sort that one would blog. I hope to bring back a few from what looks to be a very crowded AWP, but at least I've recovered enough to use the blog for what I've decided (in a literary context) fits blogs best: ideas & connections too unlicked to make confident essays, too chatty or too critical for poems, and too personal or spontaneous to become reviews. More Scots, Scotland, and Scottish poets again, and the telephonic origins of "Hello!"-- plus previews of upcoming interests-- as usual, below the fold.

My first book of prose, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, is just out in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, and I have to share the news. This is a project on which I’ve been working for several years, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s finally come to fruition. I got my advance copies about a week ago and have been cradling the book in my arms as if it were my baby. Which it is.

Noted poet and critic James Longenbach generously writes on the back of the book that “Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift—the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings.�? I’m grateful to him for the wonderful endorsement.

Winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Gregory Pardlo’s Totem, is (as its title declares) a literary version of an emblem representing, in this case, the ancestry that inspires the poet’s verse. But the ancestry in question extends beyond the homes of the poet’s childhood and moves into the intellectual and spiritual communities of his adult education and curiosity. Reflection and observation merge frequently, set in motion by the most incidental of activities that become significant suddenly.

There’s been plenty of talk and balk on Harriet regarding translations, and as a translator and teacher of literary translation, as someone who’s first language is not English, I’ve decided to finally speak up but through the introduction of one of the best translation projects I have come across to date: Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s collaborative English version of Federico García Lorca’s conflicted love letter to our beloved New York City.

At the end of my previous post, in which I listed and briefly discussed some of my favorite books of poetry published in 2007, I promised or threatened that there were more lists to come. I truly do love lists, and once I started making them I found it hard to stop. So here are a couple of other lists pertaining to books of poetry published in 2007, this time sans commentary, for reasons that will become obvious if you look beneath the fold.

We knew that the continuing malaise among independent bookstores (despite success stories in North Carolina, in Minnesota, and elsewhere) has long spelled trouble for literary fiction, which relies on in-store events, loyal customers, and local buzz to move the books that never become bestsellers. Now comes word via an expert in the field that the decline of the independent bookstore evens spells trouble for well-written porn.

Fiction of all kinds-- even the kinds you might think have a built-in, durable market-- is on its way, I suspect, to the status that American poetry already occupies: you can devote your life and your spare time to it, you can find steady work and even a rewarding career track by doing something connected to it, but almost nobody will make a living through being paid, directly, to write books of it. Some consequences-- and some news from Scotland (the kind that stays news) below.

When I came across this book of poems, I was struck by its use of the surreal: “The password is still bird, folded wings unfurling against the damp sides of your mouth.�? Jenny Browne crafts her language into imagery that gestures toward optical illusion, where the vehicle and the tenor can switch places without warning. Look closely and it’s exactly what it seems, and what it doesn’t seem. And in this book of curious metaphors, everything is subject to transformation: a troubled marriage, a bout of insomnia, the man who gives bad directions in downtown San Antonio.

I almost titled this post “Everybody’s Doing It, Why Can’t I?�? (after the Cranberries' first album), since it seems de rigueur to compile year-end lists of various kinds (ten best Britney Spears meltdowns, ten worst George W. Bush malapropisms, etc.). I actually love lists but, as usual, I decided to jump on the bandwagon after it had not only already left for another town but probably already left that town in turn. (What is a bandwagon, anyway?)

I was very distracted last year by travel and especially illness (including illness while traveling), which culminated in my recent colon cancer surgery and my starting chemotherapy. So there was a lot of reading and writing that I meant to do but didn’t get to. I also live very far from any literary scene (which I sometimes think is a good thing), and so I just miss a lot. And I’m poor, so I don’t have a lot of money to buy books of poetry.

All that said, what follows is a list of some of the poetry books published in 2007 I did read that mattered the most to me. It’s not a “best poetry books of 2007�? list (I’ve hardly read enough of last year’s poetry books to make such a judgment). It’s not even a list of all the poetry books published last year that I enjoyed.

I’m sure there are other books published last year that I would have enjoyed or even been impressed by that I just didn’t hear about. For that matter, I have a lot of poetry books, from last year and before, and from a wide range of writers, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet, and might well love when I finally do.

But enough preliminaries. Let’s get this party started.

As some of you know, I write-- indeed, I promise various editors that I will write-- reviews and essays about other people's poetry with an almost depressing frequency. When I started trying to do that sort of thing I would visit this wonderful bookshop, pick up an armload of poetry books, and try to review them. At this point I'm lucky enough to get books in the mail-- lots of books, though surely not as many books as Douglas gets records, more books of some interest than I can review under a byline or at any length.

And as a few of you know, my spouse runs this neat blog, which offers posts from authors and journalists on many a Tuesday through Friday and the occasional Sunday, and, on many a Monday, a roundup of links and brief descriptions of material that couldn't be covered at length.

I'm going to emulate it, and her, and try to do justice to cool things that came in the mail. Discussed below: the mind-body split, Joyelle McSweeney, Jenny Browne, Stephen Oliver, Kevin Carollo, a couple of litmags, rock and roll, and the mysteries of made-up words...

That’s me at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week in Harrisburg doing a woman-and-goat-and-baby version of Picasso’s famous Man-With-a-Lamb sculpture. I love that there’s a road somewhere in Pennsylvania called Lick Run. I’m not sure that I love that I’ve become the kind of person who pays to get pictures taken of her with her human baby and a baby goat. I refuse to admit I also got the same picture put on a tee-shirt. Anyway, that’s Maisie the day before her first birthday in her Baby Loves Disco legwarmers. She does not in fact have a cataract on her left eye; the guy who took the picture simply didn’t fix her red-eye right, despite his perfectly functional digital camera and computer. Good old American don’t-know-how but charge you for it anyway.

This is the kind of blog post in which I try to make everything I mention into a symptom of something called America.

I’m in San Francisco for the National Book Critics Circle board meeting, and the award finalists for the six categories will be announced tonight at City Lights Bookstore (I’ll post the poetry finalists as soon as the party’s over), so it seemed appropriate that I highlight a title from City Lights Press.

Additionally, the media has been inundated with snapshots and portraits (flattering and unflattering) of the potential presidential candidates, all of whom have been fielding questions and criticisms regarding certain charged topics such as the economy, the war, and, yet again, “illegal immigration.�? How fitting that this book by Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera take its position, politically and poetically, fiercely and unapologetically, with its collection of “undocuments.�?

“The eye will feed itself a myth,�? writes James Hoch in this unsettling yet gorgeous second collection of poems that explores the darker stories of art, literature, and the grating newspaper headlines that stop the reader’s breath. And then there is the underbelly of the more familiar happenings, like planting a tree outside a hospital, crossing a nondescript bridge by car, and attending the high school prom:

I’ve been making extensive cross-country flights this past month, from NYC to Seattle, from NYC to San Francisco (twice), and from NYC to Ontario, California on my way to the U.S.-México border, and each time I carried a book on board to keep me grounded (pun intended) during these lengthy, gravity-defying plane rides. Well, on one occasion, I had a copy of Jenny Boully’s new book of essays under my arm and as I made my way down the aisle a woman sitting in an exit row leaned over and asked, “Is that a poetry book?�?

I’m trying to get my blog momentum back, but it’s not going to be easy: I’m currently in residence at Vermont College of Fine Arts up in snowy Montpelier. Yesterday it was ten degrees below zero, this morning it felt warmer: three below. And while I was up here I finished editing my forthcoming book of stories, Men without Bliss, and reading nominated books for the National Book Critics Circle (finalists for the award will be announced next week in San Francisco!), and of course, my teaching duties: poetry workshop, poetry lecture, poetry chit-chat.

Happy New Year!

During this holiday season of merriment and celebration, as those of us who are more fortunate do our gift-giving and eating and partying, indeed feed our bodies with spiritual and social nourishment, I look to the artists for perspective. I was pleased to discover A New Hunger. The polyglot poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar closes her third full-length book of poems with the following piece, which I have formally adopted as my bedtime prayer:

Is there any moment more fulfilling and celebratory in a writer’s life than the book party? I have hosted one of my own, but have attended nearly a half-dozen and have found all of them superbly festive. I love that moment when a room full of family and friends raises their glasses in officious honor of a dear friend or relative having achieved the ultimate in creation, the birth of a vision into its final form. There is always a toast at a book party, sometimes ill-timed either too early or too late, yet wonderfully obligatory and replete with adoration and awe. It occurs to me that what this forum needs is a definitive list of “Book Party�? Do’s & Don’ts.

Here in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, bordering the expanse of that fabled northern land called Canada, I was awestruck by sunrise, the first sunrise after the solstice!

UTTERANCE

as crescendo filled the branchings
flickering the quilled exchanges
until one particular melody exhausted
silence and called out spontaneous
response:
abyssal the flame hatches

That’s from the Irish poet Trevor Joyce’s new book What’s in Store—a three-hundred-plus-page veritable bodega. (I discovered it through my favorite blog here, entry for Dec. 13.) There are translations and reworkings of: “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,�? “Anonymous Love Songs from the Irish,�? the Chinese poets Ruan Ji and Lu Zhaolin, as well as maybe half a dozen other sources. There are also short lyrics addressed to friends and loved ones. In light of all the Harriettalk about constraints and sonnets, one of the endnotes provides a tonic to too much purely formal ambition:

As a few of us choose go on break from HARRIET (I’m off to the homeland to see my carnal, Texaco Alex), I’d like to end the year with this shout out because Montoya dedicated it “To Rigoberto De Michoacán.�?

It’s “joda,�? with a strong J, as in “joder,�? as in“chingar,�? as in “twenty years of struggle,�? as in “twenty years of fighting back.�? This collection, commemorating two decades worth of work by Chicano poet José Montoya, one of the writers who pioneered the use of Caló and code-switching in American poetry, was published in 1992 by Chusma House Publications. It includes a portfolio with representations of Pachucas y Pachucos, Cholas y Cholos, Chicanas y Chicanos and other images reflecting a vato’s worldview. “I chose to include ’em,�? Montoya explains in his preface, “because they were done in el mismo espíritu that the poems were written in.�? One of his watercolors graces the cover.

Sometimes simplicity’s the thing, though that doesn’t mean the ideas or motivations behind the poem are simple. I came across this beautiful debut on one of my visits back to Arizona State (Josh Rathkamp’s yet another graduate of that writing program—go Sun Devils!), and I was pleased to discover this distinct voice that has much to say about young relationships, first heartbreaks and early encounters with the untamable, unpredictable world of adulthood.

Here’s an unusual little book from my shelf. I say unusual because it’s the winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize for a book whose author is of Italian descent. The prize includes an honorarium, publication, and the promise that the winning manuscript will be published in a bilingual edition, face to face with its Italian translation. It certainly is an honorable gesture, this effort to preserve the legacy of the Italian language, but also to recognize that Italian American literature is part of Italy’s cultural lineage.

Sarah Browning is the founder of D.C. Poets Against the War and the director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Her activist furor is a birthright, having been born into an activist family—a sensibility she is passing on to the next generation through her example as an artist, an organizer and an important citizen poet voice speaking out on the injustices being committed by our current government’s misadministration.

A celebrated scholar of Spanish and Latin American literature, Aurora de Albornoz also published eleven books of poetry during her lifetime. She’s an innovative poet who incorporated prose poems, collage, and other modernistic techniques into her verse. Her writing is situated within the poetry about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and “la Generación de los ’50,�? one of many important periods in which the national literature flourished during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Her body of work is an important contribution to world letters because, among other achievements, it gives voice to the experience of los exiliados, or Spanish exiles—one of the prominent women poets in a group dominated by men.

Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) died at the age of 62 in his home state of Kansas (after an extended stay in San Francisco), leaving behind a notable legacy of verse that has influenced a number of young writers experimenting with language and form. Besides eight poetry books (many of them shamefully out of print) he also produced five cookbooks on American regional cooking since he maintained a second career as a chef and caterer. The Shrubberies was published posthumously in 2001 with Flood Editions, “pruned�? from a 229-page, 300-poem manuscript by Johnson’s literary executor, Peter O’Leary.

Last week I attended a New York City book party in celebration of the release of Stephen Cramer’s second book of poems. It took place in the quirky Telephone Bar & Grill on 2nd Avenue, just south of St. Mark’s. Those familiar film crew trailers were parked along the avenue and East Village dwellers simply went about their evening as the business of leisure & literature proceeded unencumbered. I mention this because in Cramer’s new book there are plenty of odes & homages to those New York moments that make of this city, among many other things, a center for inspiration & creativity.

Javier O. Huerta’s debut, Some Clarifications y otros poemas received the Chicano/ Latino Literary Prize from the University of California at Irvine. I’m not sure it could have been a contender in any other competition (except possibly for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) because half the poems in this collection are in Spanish or use Spanish in key moments within the poem in ways that not even the context can illuminate the meaning for non-Spanish speakers. It’s a book without apologies in terms of audience: You have to know Spanish and be familiar with elements of the Chicano/Mexicano culture, no matter who you are, to fully appreciate the book. The following prose poem is a more accessible piece for non-Spanish speakers:

I never took a creative nonfiction writing class, yet I wrote a memoir and now teach creative nonfiction (or, more specifically, memoir writing) at Queens College and for the Vermont College of Fine Arts. It’s actually my favorite writing genre to teach because the stories I come across are rarely disappointing—people are passionate about their pasts, and they have somehow come to terms with this avenue for expression. It’s not poetry with its demand for compression, it’s not fiction with its propensity for fabrication, it is memoir—flawed memory and the interpretation of truth.

I, as probably several of my fellow-bloggers here, published my first book as the result of a contest. In fact, the manuscript had been making the rounds for years, ever a finalist, never a bride. By the time it did win, and the $1000 check arrived, I had probably spent--who knows--twice? that on entry fees, copying, and postage. But what to do? It seemed the only way to publish a first book.

That appears to be changing...

Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 received the National Book Award in 2004. Eight previous collections have been just as well received and widely recognized for the intensity of their spirit—a Jean Valentine poem faces the broken world without fear and not without hope. So it is with much enthusiasm that I shine the spotlight on the most recent book by one of the most beloved poets of our times:

In his introduction to this book by Bill Knott, which includes 16 collages (apart from the one gracing the cover) by poet/artist Star Black, Mark Doty writes: “Knott builds out of fragments; he erases himself. How appropriate that these poems should be accompanied by a suite of collages, in which bits and pieces both make a new whole and remain, distinctly bits and pieces. Star Black’s evocative work here draws upon the vocabulary of surrealism, but like Knott himself she turns those strange juxtapositions and eruptions of dreaming to her own uses.�?

Whiting Award winner Paul Guest’s second volume of poetry is the recipient of the 4th annual Prairie Schooner Book Prize. And Notes for My Body Double is a book full of gems within gems—lines and images that make each poem glitter and sparkle, even when the sentiment pushing the language forward is sullen or dark.

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska quickly claimed a slot on the one shelf I reserve for my special books. I keep View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (published with Harcourt Brace) right between the selected volumes of Akhmatova and Cavafy. Here you will also find Baudelaire, Célan, Tagore, García Lorca, Vallejo and Neruda. With the exception of these last three (I read them in the original Spanish, my native tongue), I read the rest in translation.

Originally published with Beacon Press in 1995 (with this book cover), Chicana writer and El Paso native Pat Mora’s fourth book of poems was reprinted this fall through the University of Arizona Press. I’m hoping that it will also reprint the follow-up volume, published in 1997, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, which included a handful of glorious color photographs of religious pieces from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just as this second project is an examination of the influence of Catholicism in the colonized Southwest, Agua Santa: Holy Water, is a look at the presence of pre and post-Columbian culture and mythology, which continues to thrive in the literary imagination of Chicana letters.

Believe it or not, it’s a coincidence that this particular book cover made my Shout Out feature on Halloween. This is cult poet Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s fifth volume of poems. Though she was on faculty at Arizona State University while I was attending their MFA program, regretfully I never studied with her, but I read everything she publishes because she’s brilliant, she’s bitchin’, she’s Beckian.

I was second-guessing including this entry/ anecdote on Elizabeth Bishop, but Alicia’s entry inspired me to go ahead and do it.

As the second winner of The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize hits the bookstore shelves (future shout out, y’all) I am reminded of one of Montoya’s early champions, poet Lee Herrick, founder and editor of In the Grove, where Montoya’s first published poems appeared. Sadly, Montoya’s only book the ice worker sings was published posthumously in 1999, a year after his premature death at the age of 31. Since then, a collective effort by writers of all stripes has kept his memory and art alive. Hence the memorial poetry prize spearheaded by Letras Latinas of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, hence the following poem in Herrick’s debut collection of poetry:

At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.�? He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!�? Steadman figures, “Pure shit.�?

Dear Steve,

The coincidence of adolescence and the Norton's Anthology has ruined many a productive citizen, I think. I have sometimes heard the opposite claimed -- that teaching poetry in an academic setting ruins poetry, not adulthood, for kids. But I don't remember teachers shredding poems. I do remember leafing through classroom anthologies and being stopped cold by, oh, the usual suspects: Prufrock, The Snow Man, God's Grandeur, Batter My Heart .... Chestnuts all! Adolescents aren't totally original (which is why they don't blow us out of the water with their poems, despite their overflow of feeling), and neither was I.

I love the idea of your new book, The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence, because I certainly feel my poetic identity crystallized at "sixteen or seventeen" (to borrow the Muldoonism you identify). And I think your thesis, that modern adolescence and modern poetry intersect at the desire to resist closure/identity and maintain possibility, is right on. Do you think poetry without romance is sustainable? Or to put it another way, what does grown-up poetry look like by contrast?

I just received my copy of Priscilla Sneff’s debut poetry collection O Woolly City published with Tupelo Press, the same press that graciously picked up my second collection Other Fugitives and Other Strangers. As many poets know, these two titles were two of about five left in publication limbo after the downfall of our original publisher Zoo Press.

Ah, to go back to the mornings of innocence, and to the afternoons of transgression:

This is my favorite Leroy V. Quintana book. Published in 1996 by Bilingual Press, it includes a flattering introduction by the late Robert Creeley, who says of Quintana: “This deeply gifted poet grasps the common terms of any life we either have or might think to have, shyly, proudly, painfully.�?

Recently I judged North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award and after reading and re-reading the finalist entries, I chose the one that demonstrated a maturity of craft and an honesty of emotion.

If I had to pinpoint the moment when I stopped feeling lonely as a poet, it would have to be the day I picked up Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses at the St. Mark’s Bookshop five years or so ago. Perhaps I am reminded of it because, looking back at my previous three posts, I