I’m on the couch reading the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review; Maisie’s on the floor with a whirlpool of kiddie books around her. She’s been “reading” them for almost half an hour, pretty good attention-span for a 14 month old, but starts pulling some plastic off one of the book covers. I don’t care what happens to the book—it’s a cheapie having to do with bunnies and mommies that wash dishes, that probably fell off a truck somewhere and ended up at a South Philly junk stand where Jim bought it for a dollar—but I don’t want plastic to end up in her mouth. So I get up off the couch and she jumps like a criminal caught red handed, tries to hide the plastic, as if I’m some kind of Enforcer.

And it comes to me: I am the Enforcer! The Mother!

Technically I knew that—she came out of me, after all, and I do my best to feed, clothe, bathe, play with, comfort her, etcetera along with my husband, all day every day—and generally have a quite lovely time doing it. But it shocked me to be looked at as an authority figure. And it shocked me that it shocked me.

American readers are familiar with the Vietnam War poetry of Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa, etc., some may even have read former NVA Bao Ninh's novel, The Sorrows of War, but almost no one has read the war poetry of the South Vietnamese, on whose land much of the fighting took place, but that's not so unusual, is it? How many know what Iraqi and Afghan poets are writing? Among the best South Vietnamese poets of his generation is Tran Da Tu. He was born in Hai Duong, northern Vietnam in 1940. In 1954, during the partition of the country, he went to Saigon, where he became a journalist and prominent poet. During 1963, he was jailed by the Ngo Dinh Diem government for his dissident views, then imprisoned for 12 years by the Communists from 1976-1988, after the collapse of South Vietnam. His wife, the famous novelist and poet Nha Ca, the only South Vietnamese female writer among 10 black-listed as "cultural guerrillas" by the Communist regime, was also imprisoned from 1976-1977. In 1989, a year after Tran Da Tu was released from prison, the couple and their children received political asylum from the Swedish government, but later moved to the US and now live in Southern California. His war poetry reads as if it was written, well, right now. I translate four:

House In the World

I’m looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.

There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.

I woke up this morning thinking of the Irish. In midtown Manhattan the parade barreled through and people wore their green sweaters and talked about their heritage and well, drank some. Mainly, I thought of cultures that are inherently linked to poetry, where the legacy of poetry is something highly celebrated, is viewed as an essential commodity. Perhaps I’m dreaming that up (it’s easy to fantasize about other countries when you’re living in another, like admiring someone else’s meal). Also, today I was thinking of Yeats. Okay, while it may seem almost cliché to bring up Yeats (like bringing up Paz on Cinco de Mayo), I stare at this quote everyday on my desk:

Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

And so I thought I would. Bring him up, that is. Forgive me, my average-self. This quote is also on my refrigerator, and sometimes, on days when I need it; it’s in my pocket. Also, I think, the poem in its entirety is in my memory. I see it as an instigator.

Speaking of art & politics:

CAESAR
What man is that?
BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.
CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
CAESAR
What say'st thou to me now? Speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

It’s hard not to think of Caesar on the ides of March. All those knives, all those men of politics. However, I often find that it is not Caesar or Brutus that I think of the most, rather, it is the Soothsayer. The poor nameless fellow who wanders in to warn his dictator of the coming fall only to be shoved out of the way as men with important business to attend to go about their day. Mainly, I think, Hey, I’d like a soothsayer! Or an oracle. Or a Ouija board, a magic eight ball, even a good horoscope. Unlike Caesar (there’s really little comparison between he and I), I’d listen. Someone says, “Beware,” and I do, I pay attention.

Maybe the soothsayers of today are the poets: Poor, often nameless, often shoved aside, often shouting something that no one is listening to.

Does form need to support content? Or is it better when form does the opposite?

News item from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th Street

The circumstances of the shooting and the source of the weapon were under investigation, Graham said. Amtrak did not release the names of the officer and suspect. The officer’s injuries were not life-threatening, Graham said. The officer was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital and was in stable condition.

The news short is a form as surely as the sonnet. The news short generates mystery through compression, omission and conventions of tone, which take outlandish human events with an absolutely straight face. The best examples require the collaboration of a professional reporter and a very professional editor, neither of whom has observed the event. There is a tragedy in being shot in the foot, and probably an ugly story here. But tragedy and ugliness have been erased by newsification. The bizarre hilarity is not unlike Ashbery forcing surrealist comedy into the complicated traditional sestina form as in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” where Popeye is the subject. Both are inspired deadpan mismatches of form and content—though in the case of “Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th St,” one suspects that reporter and editor are not actually keeping a straight face, because neither ever has anything but a straight face.

Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote a lot of minor work. O’Hara’s minor work is usually more fun, to me, than Dickinson’s, but either way, they are poets whose lesser poems are an integral part of their overall body of work. Everybody needs to write minor work. I read somewhere that the filthiest limericks were probably written by anthology-rank Victorian poets keeping their hand in for when the big stuff arrived. T.S. Eliot kept his hand in by writing Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His separation of light verse from the rest of his poetry makes major work like Four Quartets seem all the more oppressively sober. (As a semi-aside, imagine the glummest passages of "The Wasteland" without the tragicomic pub scene.) It’s hard to keep Cats in mind when reading “The Dry Salvages” but Emily Dickinson’s outhouse poem, #1167 (“Alone and in a Circumstance/Reluctant to be told/A spider on my reticence/Assiduously Crawled…”) seems of a piece with the lifework of the Amherst recluse. Same with O’Hara: His chat matters. Sure, the greatest hits are capital-G great—Dickinson’s #27 (“Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me”), O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.

That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.

Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book's gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger's first book wasn't published until 1965, and Anne Waldman's (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don't think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive” or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative” anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

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.

I say this without the least bit of exaggeration: keep your eye on these two literary ventures because they’re going to impress you with the journeys they have embarked on and with the heights they’ll inevitably reach.

Mention of "The Sheep Child" here has called to mind all kinds of recollections from the Atlanta of my youth, in which, among literary circles at least, James Dickey loomed large. Everyone had a tale, either of generous encouragement, or booze-infused arrogance and aggression--sometimes both. I myself had witnessed his (probably inebriate) overbearing on a literary panel (he insisted on answering every question from the audience, even if specifically addressed to another panel member), but also treasure a letter he typed (how quaint typing now seems!), addressed "Dear Mr. Stallings," (sic) when my manuscript was a Yale finalist, encouraging me to keep at my work "for me, for poetry, and for Yale" as if he were Coach Dickey and I a quarterback...

A month or so ago, Sophie Gee wrote approvingly in the New York Times Book Review about the movie adaptation of Beowulf and about Philip Pullman’s use of Paradise Lost for his His Dark Materials series. I haven’t seen the former or read the latter but think I’d probably like both. Gee calls both classic texts “virtually unreadable.” I’ll grant Gee Beowulf since it’s effectively written in another language (though various translations and a performance by Benjamin Bagby are both pretty good ways to access the original)—but Paradise Lost?

Gee, an assistant professor at Princeton who specializes in the 18th Century and who has written a very fun-sounding novel called The Scandal of the Season, which tells the story behind Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” writes in the NYTBR that Paradise Lost is “in ‘normal’ English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read outside of college courses.” She also says Milton intended to make PL difficult because “he wanted reading to involve active intellectual labor as much as pleasure.”

It’s true I’m the only person I know who has never taken a course in Milton and who has read Paradise Lost (two-plus times) for fun. (Anyone else out there? Could we start a support group? Maybe Christian Wiman? Here’s his essay on reading “Milton in Guatemala” which also appears in his book of essays Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.) In any case, it's also true that Samuel Johnson’s mot on PL— “none ever wished it longer than it is”—is apt enough. Still, whatever Milton’s intentions and Gee’s own reading difficulties, PL is a great read.

It's taken me a while to post this piece, as I've been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?

Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy” occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,” much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant” poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,” after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants” have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.

In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry” were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.

I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.

This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call "the New American Poetries" out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between "progressive" art and "progressive" politics. I won't spoil the ending.

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:

Some things I liked this week:

Terrance Hayes has two good poems in the January/February 2008 APR; you can read “Support the Troops” here,
which I liked, and I liked even more “The Shepherd” which is a surprising riff on James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” on sheep and on fathers. It’s hard to give a sense in an excerpt of the building of urgency via digression in this 50+ line poem, but here’s a chunk from the middle.

Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me
to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.
The rain left stripes on our faces. The news
of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.
The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;
how sheep go astray and are bruised.
My father sometimes burned upon the sofa
like a campfire and a dry whimper
broke from him…

I liked Charles Bernstein’s poem, "All the Whiskey in Heaven," in the March 3 issue of The Nation. (You have to be a Nation subscriber to read the whole poem, but you can see the first half of it, in any case.) He does very funny parodies and he sometimes does this strange and fascinating other thing, which is to write poems which are deliberately creakily-written, but which get to you anyway. It’s a little like watching a juggler who, in a display of fake clumsiness, sometimes almost drops a plate or two the more to impress you when he starts juggling the flaming sticks. This one is a sometimes not-quite-semi-rhyming-except-where-it-perfectly-rhymes Valentine’s Day ode. It’s half parody and half sincere, and the more interesting for being both.

(Research report: Couldn't find a picture of one with the legs stuck together. Most look like this now.)

One whole summer, I taught kids to dive at the Albany JCC. First the sitting dive: sit on the edge of the pool, feet in the gutter or hanging into the water, close to but not in the shallow end. Raise your arms up alongside your head, press your biceps against your ears. Tilt till you fall scalp first into the water. Invariably kids pick their heads up at the last minute, and sputter and splash. Eventually they go in cleanly, especially if I help them tuck over by putting one hand on the back of their head and one on their back. Once you’ve managed the sitting dive you progress to kneeling: Same thing but starts higher up, more a plunge. Your feet might scrape on the tile deck going in, but it’s nothing serious. This transitional dive helps nervous swimmers feel more secure before you try the standing dive: Stand, leaning till you fall, then you learn to swing your arms and push off. Eventually you can spring or jackknife or kick or twist however you want going in.

(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.

I've been thinking about a post on Lear, but a couple of entries have pushed it to the fore... Steve's which mentions the ghazal, and Daisy's on Rexroth in Rome. And I have been thinking too about poet-painters and painter-poets. And it ties in as well with some of my recent entries on children's literature--Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss. One of the pleasures of having a small child is revisiting the literature of childhood in the presence of those fresh eyes and ears, remembering the intensity of childhood listening and reading, which is on a different, almost magical level, it seems to me, from adult reading--a complete lack of sense of divison from the narrative and the words, a total unity with it. The parent who takes the small amount of time required to memorize "The Owl and The Pussycat"--if it is not already lodged in the memory--so that it can be pulled out of a hat to calm or entertain or entrance, will never regret it.

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.

Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601) was a poet and soldier of fortune who wrote published two volumes of Latin verse, but is famous, if he is famous, for his only known poem in Scots. I post it today in honor of Valentine’s Day, which is my household’s only religious holiday. I also post, after the jump, the only Valentine poem I’ve ever written. Here's Boyd:

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,
Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

Twa gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,
Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throw the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

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.

I’ve spent almost six months in three trips in Italy in the last three years, once in Florence and twice in Rome. We get cheap apartments ($1200/month for two rooms in Rome; $1600 for six weeks for two rooms in Florence.) Each time I brought with me and read Kenneth Rexroth’s travelogue poem, “The Dragon and the Unicorn.” It’s a couple hundred pages long, and describes his travels through Europe, including Italy. It’s tremendously entertaining—full of medium-short-lined reportage and crabby commentary on meals, meetings, scenery and artworks—except where it’s interspersed with passages of metaphysical and mystical speculation which I skip, because they sound too much like pot-fueled post-midnight undergrad party talk. Boring, if you aren’t stoned and 19.

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.

I was prompted to write this entry by the citation of my blog entry "Orwellian Me" in article called "Blogging the AWP, Part Two," on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "*Footnoted from Academic Blogs" page. Author Jennifer Howard cited me discussing the shifting boundaries of "inside" and "outside" in the poetry worlds; noting my use of the phrase "post-avant," she asked for a definition, which I provided on the site. It occurred to me that it might be useful to do so in more expanded form here, especially since Don Share's most recent Harriet post notes that "Harriet readers frequently see calls for a definition of what, precisely, 'post-modern' and 'avant garde' poetry is." (And no, Peter Campion's uninformed dismissal doesn't cut it.)

The phrase "post-avant poetry," to my knowledge first coined by Joan Houlihan in a jocular mood, is bandied about quite a bit in the online poetry world (I’ve never seen it in print, an indication of how separate the two realms often are, though many people participate in both). It’s used with the assumption that "we all know what that is" but, like the phrases Don mentions in his post, the term is rarely defined. Here follows my attempt to do so, for whatever use it may be.

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.

Daisy's post with its reference to Dr. Seuss' The Foot Book reminds me of how important an influence Dr. Seuss is--acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously--to metrical poets of my generation. He gave us part of our ear for rhyme and our ear for rhythm. Sure, he is usually metrically quite regular, but the rhythms are highly varied--monosyllables and polysyllables, heavy and light nuggets of sound--as they are distributed over the metrical feet, in a breezily and distinctly American vernacular. All you need to do to appreciate Dr. Seuss's nimble prosody is to pick up any other contemporary book of children's verse. So much of it is so lackluster--full of clunky, predictable rhymes, barely scanning, and larded with filler. (Julia Donaldson, of Gruffalo fame, is a rare exception, though not quite in the same league.) When I try to read the books of plodding prosody to our toddler, he frowns a page or two in and announces, "The End."

Of course, Seuss is subversive too--what could be more subversive in a Puritan society than to announce to kids that "Fun is good"? We romanticize childhood to the extent that we shun adulthood, but being a child is also to be helpless and in the power of others (as anyone with a toddler can tell you, this is extremely frustrating!). Yet "A person's a person no matter how small."

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:

I've been reading part five of The Grand Piano, the serial self-mythologizing nostalgia 1970s scene report "collective autobiography" of ten poets and critics who lived in the Bay Area during the 1970s, participated in (some also directed) a reading series at the eponymous café, and later became known as Language Poets. Since one of the ten is one of my favorite living poets, I'd be following this series even if I had no interest in any of the other poets involved, nor in the way we think about literary history and literary scenes; since I do, and I do, I've been hooked.

Part five (whose keyword is "friendship," I think, unless it's "community"-- for each part there's a semi-secret noun to which all ten entries relate) confirms three senses I get whenever I read the prose Language Poets (or former Language Poets, or so-called Language Poets) write about their own endeavors:

1. It's about as useful to describe Language Poetry as if it were one thing with shared principles as to describe the Decadents of the 1890s, or the "school of Auden" in the 1930s, as if those groups of poets and poems were one thing. About as useful, but no more so.

2. All these writers (the ones whose poems I admire and the ones whose poems, not so much) thought constantly about how to get around, disable, or replace the constraints (notionally fixed reference, Gricean appropriateness, the authority or lack of authority we attribute to a given speaker) which enable most prose to make prose sense. But the degree to which those writers succeeded in doing so, and the degree to which they wanted to do so, do not indicate the depth, or subtlety, or interest, in the poems.

3. As with the deeply Christian, deeply undemocratic, or deeply democratic, poets of the past, we don't need to subscribe to the poets' principles in order to admire, enjoy, or learn from their poems; we should, though, try to learn what those principles are. Even if they seem, to us, self-contradictory, or implausible, or overtaken by events.

4. As with all other avant-garde movements in poetry (though perhaps not in the visual arts), no matter how often some of these writers (and, more shrilly, some of their interpreters) go on about the radical break (with something--- with what?) involved in modernism (whatever we take "modernism" to mean), their practice at its most interesting always links up with a literary past, one that goes back more than 150 years.

You're free to tell me that in saying something like that I haven't said anything about Language Poets, but only shown what I consider interesting. In response I refer you to Bob Perelman's entry in the new GP, in which he discusses Catullus' Odi et amo, lines that poets of apparently opposite tendencies seem to find ripe for translation, if not stuck in their heads. What poets, how, why? You know where to click...

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).

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.

I just read a poem in some journal, I forget where, in which there was a plumber who wasn’t just a plumber, he was also a dreamer, or something. Well, he certainly wasn’t fixing pipes. Plumbers in poems never have their hands in a toilet, have you noticed?

Toilets show up in poems often enough. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Memorial Day 1950”:

…I hear the sewage singing
underneath my bright white toilet seat and know
that somewhere sometime it will reach the sea…

Lines which—and I mean this—this is a perfectly sincere moment in this blog entry—thrill me.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is almost forgotten today, but he was an excellent poet (in the post World War II formalist mode so scorned today, especially by those who know nothing about it) and a brilliant thinker about poetry. (He was also photographer Diane Arbus's older brother.) His witty and formally exquisite poetry deserves to be better known.

The question of difficulty in poetry, what it is and why it is, is one that quite occupies me. From what I can tell, I'm not alone in this preoccupation. These excerpts from Nemerov's essay “The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry” (included in his long-out-of-print collection Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics, published by Rutgers University Press in 1972) eloquently and insightfully address that question.

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.

I live in a town where Byron is Big. There is a beautiful statue of him being embraced by Ellas (Greece) on the corner of a main thoroughfare. There is a street named after him in the center, on which he also has an eponymous hotel. Heck, there is a whole neighborhood named after him. There are even people named after him--Byron has become a Greek given name (Vyronas).

The only place where Byron is Bigger is possibly Missolonghi (a helluva a backwater to die in), where any establishment not named Liberty is probably named Byron.

Poetry is a kind of naming-- the Rilke of the Duino Elegies certainly thought so, and Wallace Stevens, in the wonderful late poem "Local Objects," said that he wanted to give the things in his poetry fresh names, "to keep them from perishing."

Naming is a kind of poetry too: or so the news around these parts suggests... examples, elaborations, partial dissents, a journey to A'Quonesia, and some rock music await below the fold.

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.

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.

Even across the gap between German and English, Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. I’m not sure if one can really be “influenced” by a writer as singular as Celan, but his work has been an important presence for me for many years. I have written about him twice on my blog, here and here. His intensity of vision, diction, and rhythm, and the inseparability of these things, trying to find new ways of saying to accommodate the previously unsaid or unsayable (especially what can be spoken in the face of the unspeakable enormity of the Holocaust), have made a deep impression on me.

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.”

Arts-oriented blogs like this one may resemble collections of essays and reviews-- written in haste, perhaps, and repented at leisure-- but they can also draw on other sorts of forms far older than HTML. One such form is the so-called diary-- not the book of daily entries Americans think of when they think of the term, so much as the periodic excerpts from journals or diaries by literary figures which have long run in some British literary magazines. These excerpts have the spontaneous feel of good blogging, and the further distinction of not requiring arguments-- they're not supposed to be about anything in particular, other than the moment-to-moment or week-to-week impressions the world gives their authors (and vice versa).

I think here in particular of the journal excerpts by the English poet R. F. Langley, whose poems are sometimes quite spiky and demanding but whose sinuous prose journals, viewable in many issues of PN Review, are also smart, and easier to follow: they show him, often enough, just walking around, reflecting on flora, reading, local architecture, food, telephones, familiar quotations... there's a published book of them now, which I'm not sure I even want to read cover to cover, because these prose paragraphs-- more a style of attention than anything that attention might generate for some later use-- work so well a page at a time, as brief encounters with the weather of the world-- encounters, one might say, with Helphenstine.

Who's Helphenstine? All told below the fold.

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the losses and gains of translating poetry in general. But, because I believe that generalities only have meaning when grounded in specifics, I wanted to talk about a few particular examples. Thus, for my next few posts I will be listing some poetic translations that have meant a lot to me.

Reginald's recent translation post has me thinking about translation again... as did my week-long marathon of getting in an application for an NEA translation grant (hope springs eternal!) And I had been meaning to write as well on some Greek women poets ever since Rigoberto's post on Aurora de Albornoz many weeks back.

Some poets do seem to gain or lose reputations in English based on how well they translate or how well they are served by translators. And it does seem to me that it is the contemporary Greek women poets whose work often "translates" better than their male contemporaries. Why?

“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 don’t read much poetry in translation; in fact, I tend to actively avoid it. As Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what is lost in translation.”

One of the problems with these calendar-year lists (not to mention grant and prize deadlines) is that it tends to give books published in the autumn or winter of the year rather short shrift. When asked about our end-of-year picks, I was still holding out hope that this book would have arrived, because I had a feeling in my heart of hearts that it was the one I wanted to choose. But I certainly couldn’t choose it without reading it through. Yes, I had seen plenty of the poems around in journals, and even a handful of them in process. It was a book I was excited to get my hands as soon as I learned it was coming out. But then it became something more urgent. For it is not just a terrific second book of poems, fulfilling the promise of a knock-out first book that had both nimbleness of formal execution and wildness of emotional landscape—it is also, bar a posthumous collection from manuscripts, a last book of poems. Maybe it is better to talk about it in January, that month of the two-faced god, a time when beginnings can look like endings, and endings like beginnings.

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:

Many a Christmas carol has been spoiled by slick, oversweetened arrangement, piped into a mall to stimulate more panic buying. Christmas poems, read in a quiet moment to ourselves, are harder (though not impossible of course) to commodify. They are something of an antidote. As a member of Muzak's marketing department remarked, quoted in a New Yorker article a year or two back, "Our biggest competitor is silence."

I actually had a couple of other posts brewing (or gestating, as Annie Finch put it), but the twin prompts of Ange's Malice of the Sonnet post and a timely reminder via Writer's Almanac, made me realize a short post on Edwin Arlington Robinson was in order today.