A Burning Patience

Holding pattern

2012-06-01T21:17:00.003-05:00

To those of you who come here from time to time, I haven't disappeared, just wrapped up with a few things going on in life right now. (No bad news.)

Also tangling with some minor glitches with Blogger's post editor. Where are the Vulcans when I need them?

Will be back shortly.
L.

Poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

2012-04-01T22:40:00.001-05:00

Poet Adrienne Rich died this past Tuesday at age 82, of complications of rheumatoid arthritis.

It will take me a long time to feel fully all that her life and work have meant to me. Her poetry and her prose have, over the years, profoundly shaped my ideas of what poetry can be and do in the world, of poetry as a source and sustenance of life, a voice and an act in the moving and making of history.

I first read her poetry in 1974, her book Diving into the Wreck which was her most recent one at the time; I found her book The Will to Change (the most recent one prior to Diving into the Wreck) shortly after that. It took me a little while to warm to her poems -- to begin to feel how the often internal landscapes of her poems connected in a living with with the world outside the poems, and with my own life and thought and heart.

Sometime a couple of years later I read her earlier book Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, and I found poem after poem of hers speaking to me in the most essential and organic way. From that time I've sought out and read whatever I could find by her. Each new book of her poems over the years has been a landmark for poetry, for my own life and writing, and for the lives and writing of most of the poets I know and many more I've never had the pleasure of knowing.

I found news of her death three days ago in poet Philip Metres' blog Behind the Lines, and I've carried books of hers with me each day since then, reading a little here and there through the day. Here are a few passages from what I've been reading of Adrienne Rich the past three days.

*

From Rich's essay "Poetry and the Forgotten Future," in her essay collection A Human Eye (published 2009 by W. W. Norton) -- Rich talked about Shelley's famous and often-quoted statement that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and then she continues:

Piously overquoted, mostly out of context, it's taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power -- in a vague, unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay "A Philosophic View of Reform," Shelley had written that "Poets and philosophers [italics mine] are the unacknowledged" etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft.

And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction among poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. [...]

[...] Shelley, in fact, saw powerful institutions, not original sin or "human nature," as the source of human misery. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the "struggle between Revolution and Oppression." His West Wind was the "trumpet of a prophecy," driving "dead thoughts... like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth."

He did not say, "Poets are the unacknowledge interior decorators of the world."

*

In 1997 Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts; she was one of 12 people chosen by the Clinton administration to receive the award that year. In her letter explaining why she was refusing the award, she said, in part, that "the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." Further on in the letter she said that "art -- in my case, the art of poetry -- means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power that holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

The quoted passages in the above paragraph are from Rich's article "Why I Refused the Medal for the Arts," in her prose collection Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (published 2001 by W. W. Norton). Rich wrote the piece for the Los Angeles Times Book Review; in the piece, she includes the text of her original letter refusing the award (quoted in the above paragraph), and then she writes further, expanding on her reasons for having refused the award. From the portion of the article that follows her letter:

Marxism has been declared dead. Yet the questions Marx raised are still alive and pulsing, however the language and the labels have been co-opted and abused. What is social wealth? How do the conditions of human labor infiltrate other social relationships? What would it require for people to live and work together in conditions of radical equality? How much inequality will we tolerate in the world's richest and most powerful nation? Why and how have these and similar questions become discredited in public discourse?

And what about art? Mistrusted, adored, pietized, condemned, dismissed as entertainment, commidified, auctioned at Sotheby's, purchased by investment-seeking celebrities, it dies into the "art object" of a thousand museum basements. It's also reborn hourly in prisons, women's shelters, small-town garages, community-college workshops, halfway houses, wherever someone picks up a pencil, a wood-burning tool, a copy of The Tempest, a tag-sale camera, a whittling knife, a stick of charcoal, a pawnshop horn, a video of Citizen Kane, whatever lets you know again that this deeply instinctual yet self-conscious language, this regenerative process, could help you save your life. "If there were no poetry on any day in the world," the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." [...]

[...] Art can never be totally legislated by any system, even those that reward obedience and send dissident artists to hard labor and death; nor can it, in our specifically compromised system, be really free. It may push up through cracked macadam, by the merest means, but it needs breathing space, cultivation, protection to fulfill itself. Just as people do. New artists, young and old, need education in their art, the tools of their craft, chances to study examples from the past and meet practitioners in the present, get the criticism and encouragement of mentors, learn that they are not alone. As the social compact withers, fewer and fewer people will be told Yes, you can do this; this also belongs to you. Like government, art needs the participation of the many in order not to become the property of the property of a powerful and narrowly self-interested few.

*

And her poetry.

Here are some lines from poem IV in Rich's poem sequence "Twenty-One Love Poems," in her book of poems The Dream of a Common Language (published 1978 by W. W. Norton):

I come home from you through the early light of spring
flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store.... [...]
[...] I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,
make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone
singing Here comes the sun.... I open the mail,
drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,
my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail
lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man
aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display
they keep my constantly awake with the pain...
Do whatever you can to survive.
You know, I think that men love wars...
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

*

On September 12, 2001, Adrienne Rich was scheduled to read here in Minneapolis, on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Classes had been cancelled after the events the day before. During the day on the 12th I called the university English department, and reached a recording confirming that classes were cancelled, and then saying that Rich's reading would go on that evening as scheduled.

The reading took place at the Ted Mann Concert Hall, a large modern building on the West Bank half of the campus, built on the cliffs above the Mississippi River. It was a mild fall evening, just after dark. I showed up for the reading and it was already a packed and highly charged room. I found a seat toward one side and settled in. I spotted a few people I knew in the crowd, though most were strangers. Word had really gotten out.

A professor from the English department came out to introduce Rich, and explained that Rich had been in Kansas City the day before (the 11th) when all flights were grounded, and that she had hired a driver, and they had driven 13 hours through the night so she could be in Minneapolis for the reading. Then Adrienne Rich came out to read. She talked about the events of the day before, she talked about the need to act to counter the hysterical military fever rhetoric that had suddenly swept over the media airwaves and cable lines. She read poems; I remember specifically she read her poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World." She read poems from two or three other recent books, and some poems from Fox, her newest book just out.

It was one of the great poetry readings I've been to in my life. I can't think of any better place to have been on that day, that evening, than in that room crowded with people, all of us reaching for the words and the actions to save the world from itself.

*

I never knew, or met, Adrienne Rich. I've known her only through her poetry and her other writing. I have friends who did know her as a friend; at least one person who knew her as a close friend for many years. I wouldn't pretend to feel the loss of her in the immediate and person way of someone who knew her. But I will miss her presence, her being in the world.

For many years I've had one of her poems on my wall, "The Observer," from her book Leaflets (published 1969 by W. W. Norton). Here are some lines from the poem:

Complete protected on all sides
by volcanoes
a woman, darkhaired, in stained jeans
sleeps in central Africa.
In her dreams, her notebooks, still
private as maiden diaries,
the mountain gorillas move through their life term;
their gentleness survives
observation. [...]
[...] When I lay me down to sleep
unsheltered by any natural guardians
from the panicky life-cycle of my tribe
I wake in the old cell-block
observing the daily executions,
rehearsing the laws
I cannot subscribe to,
envying the pale gorilla-scented dawn
she wakes into, the stream where she washes her hair,
the camera flash of her quiet
eye.

*

Thank you, Adrienne Rich, for the gift and example of your life and work.

A few paragraphs of Lorna Dee Cervantes

2012-03-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists, a book of (mostly) interviews, by Alex Stein, with poets, writers, musicians, etc., who are (at least mostly) real: Lorna Dee Cervantes, Pat Ament, Cecilia Vicuña, Joanne Greenberg, and Peter Grandbois, published 2009 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

I'm finding it fascinating. Stein approaches the people he's interviewing with a gentle self-effacing humility, allowing his own ignorance to awaken to the heart of the person he's talking with. The interviews are wonderfully free of the glibness and unspoken agendas so prevalent in much news media "reporting" these days.

I found out about the book when poet friend Lorna Dee Cervantes showed me a copy when we connected and talked for a while at the AWP conference in Chicago this year.

Here are a few paragraphs from Alex Stein's interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes in Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists. The short excerpt here doesn't begin to cover the amazing range of subjects Cervantes talks about in the interview; she also talks about her childhood and her first encounters with poetry, and her long in-depth research into the histories of the Jim Crow laws (both written and unwritten laws) in the United States in the 20th century -- and much else.

In the excerpt here, Cervantes has been talking about her experiences working for many years as a university professor, and the nature of life and work and thought in the academic world.

*

There is certainly a place for theory. I do believe, though, that one should not analyze one's own milieu. People should write critical work and do critical scholarship, but ideally in another language that is pretty near extinct. This is what I try to teach: that there must be a place for creative generation that is distinct from selection, distinct from revision, distinct from judgment. Camus said the whole purpose of art is to escape judgment. One should never analyze the generation of one's own work. Yet that is the chief project of these institutions of higher education. We live in an economy of goods and services. Forget Capitalism. Goods and services. Of which poetry supplies neither. That is why you can't look in the phone book and find it between plumbing and poultry. Call up somewhere and say, "I need a good poem." The institutions of higher education have gone into this corporate mode. Which has precipitated this crisis of legitimization. How many dissertations have got to be written about me before I can be considered legitimate? Is there a mathematical formula? Before people in authority respect me as an intellectual and think of me in that context? Before they validate me and listen to me and concur with me and change their minds on my account?

In my field, in the humanities, in this goods and services economy, we are working in this legitimization factory. And some of us are being put in the awkward position of trying to legitimize ourselves. These questions! These undermining questions. How are people going to see me? Where am I going to fit in? When I was selected for the Norton Anthology of Poetry, their staff was calling me over and over and saying, "We need a bio, we need a bio, we're not going to be able to include you if you don't send us a bio." They wrote these letters. But I didn't respond. And I was thinking, am I insane? Here is my opportunity. People would kill for this chance. But I still didn't do it. They ended up constructing one themselves.

What happens in some English departments is that instead of sticking to actual conditions and relations -- or, in other words, history -- it becomes about how smart you are. Who has the superior intellect? Who has the superior vision? Who is playing tennis with all the right people? I'm not talking ego. I'm saying look at the conditions of power. Look at the conditions and look at the relations. Soon everyone is fighting and in competition for the little crumbs of grants and little travel disbursements and they are spending all their time writing proposals. It becomes this thing where you have to assert yourself in the half-light, again, of what Kunitz called "the tyranny of the single idea." Identity politics. Multiculturalism. Political correctness. Who has the right interpretation? Is it modernity, or is it postmodernity? And postmodernism is not even a thing! It is not a movement, it is not an artistic style, it is not anything. It is not a noun. It is not a verb. It is a condition. A consciousness. And it is a gestalt consciousness. A gestalt is like one of those black and white drawings you find in a book of optical illusions. Sometimes you see a face and sometimes you see a vase. That's why I keep saying you have to dwell among actual conditions and relations.

Postmodernism is a gestalt consciousness. It comes from subjugated knowledges. This is what the United States was turning away from in the '60s. One of Foucault's big ideas is "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges." Back to the esoteric philosophies from the Far East. Back to Zen Buddhism. You can't say hippie is one thing. You can't say Chicana is one thing. You can't say Latina is one thing. Like, "How Chicana are you?" Right? Can you really answer that question? These are taxonomies. Hierarchies. And we are forced into this. "We're not going to be able to include you if you don't send us your bio." This is the mode of scholarship in the institutions of higher education right now.

*

In addition to the interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes, I've read also, so far, parts of the interviews with Cecilia Vicuña and Joanne Greenberg; the others look promising too. I recommend Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Authors by Alex Stein.

Petition against Amazon.com

2012-03-10T23:43:00.000-06:00

In the website of change.org is a petition against Amazon.com's predatory business practices which potentially threaten the survival of small press publishers, independent book distributors, and independent book stores. * The online petition is here.

In the page at the above link is a statement by Bryce Milligan, publisher of Wings Press, giving additional information and detail about the reasons for the petition, and examples of the economic and cultural damage Amazon's business practices are causing.

I've signed (electronically) the online petition. I encourage you to go there and sign it also.

Thanks also to poet Joseph Hutchison, in whose blog The Perpetual Bird I initially found Bryce Milligan's statement (reprinted) and a link to the online petition.

AWP in Chicago 2012

2012-03-04T21:14:00.008-06:00

I went to AWP in Chicago this past week. Here are some scattered moments from the past few days there.

By far the event I enjoyed the most was the keynote speech by Margaret Atwood on Thursday night. She talked, ostensibly, about the craft of writing, though she mostly told about her experience of learning to write by (mostly) teaching herself, by writing and reading as much as possible, at at time when that was the only path available to most people who wanted to write. Atwood's talk was infused with her dry, subtle, self-deprecating humor, often wickedly on the mark -- I found myself (as did many in the audience) breaking up laughing again and again as she spoke.

Atwood's talk took place in the Auditorium Theater, currently part of Roosevelt University in Chicago. The building is stunning to behold -- the interior of the theater is a vast space, with high arching ceiling, arched rows of lights, rustic country scenes painted on the side walls, and an arching panoramic painting above the stage depicting the progression of history through song. The seating sloped steeply from the back to the front (what's known these days as "stadium seating"). The auditorium was originally designed in the 1880's by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan; a theater staff member who gave some short history of the theater (before Atwood's talk) said the theater was "the building that made Louis Sullivan famous."

The theater was designed and built during the years just following the Haymarket riot of 1886 in Chicago, and the design of the theater was influenced by an insurgent movement for democracy that followed in the aftermath of the Haymarket events. The theater space was designed specifically to ensure that all seats in the room -- whether the cheapest or the most expensive -- have a clear line of sight to the stage, and a clear line of sound from the stage. (I sat on the ground floor about halfway up, far over to one side; the giant magnifying video screen above the stage was certainly a help, though I did in fact have a clear direct view of Atwood and the introductory speakers on the stage throughout the event.)

*

Other AWP events I particularly liked:

A Celebration of Tía Chucha Press, which commemorated 25 years of publishing by this great poetry publisher. Publisher Luis J. Rodríguez spoke for a few minutes about the press, then four poets who have been published by Tía Chucha read from their work: Diane Glancy, José Antonio Rodríguez, Luivette Resto, and Michael Warr. I especially liked Luivette Resto's poetry, and bought a book of hers at the AWP bookfair (see the list of books below).

American Poets Respond to Major Global Trauma. The panelists were poets Pamela Uschuk (who gave a short introduction and moderated), Francisco Alarcón (filling in for scheduled panelist Martín Espada, who was unable to attend), Richard Jackson, William Pitt Root, and Linda Hogan. Alarcón led the room in a ritual greeting and invocation of the four directions, growing out of Aztec traditions, and then he read a few of his poems. Jackson spoke about the war and genocide that occurred during the 1990's in Bosnia and other regions formerly part of Yugoslavia. William Pitt Root talked about the U.S. war against Afghanistan, and he read an excerpt from his poem "The Unbroken Diamond: Nightletter to the Mujahideen." (Pitt Root's poem can be found online in the website of the poetry magazine The Drunken Boat, here.)

I also attended a reading and discussion by poets Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine, and panels titled No Layoffs from This Condensery: Class and Labor in Poetry; The Need to Speak: Writing the Political Poem; and Things I Didn't Know I Loved: Staged Reading of a Play about Nazim Hikmet. ** I was particularly disappointed by the "Class and Labor" panel and the play about Hikmet. In the "Class and Labor" panel, it seemed to me, the panelists edged carefully around the ostensible subject, without actually touching it much. The play about Hikmet appeared to have been written, or at least performed, as a light comedy -- which struck me as an odd approach to a play about the life of a Communist poet who spent years in prison in Turkey for his political activities.

If you're not familiar with the poetry of Nazim Hikmet, a pretty good webpage about him is here. Selections of his work translated into English are available in print.

*

The AWP conference this year took place in Chicago at the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park, with overflow events at the Palmer House Hilton a few blocks away. The Hilton on Michigan Avenue (where the 2009 conference also took place) is a massive monument to glass chandeliers and gilded fixtures. Weather during the days of the conference ranged from 61 degrees and blue sky on Wednesday last week, to rain and gray overcast, to a touch of snow once or twice. My room was alternately chilly and drafty and hot and stuffy.

Apart from the official events, I had a chance to visit for a while with poet friend Lorna Dee Cervantes, who was at AWP in part to do a book signing of her most recent book of poems, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, published 2011 by Wings Press. (The page at the above link indicates that publication of the book has been delayed until 2011; the book is definitely available now, I have a copy myself, and Lorna was signing copies at the AWP bookfair.)

(Lorna Dee Cervantes has written a beautiful cover blurb for my next book, All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems, which is forthcoming from Red Dragonfly Press. ** Thanks, Lorna!)

I also talked a bit with Casey Hill at the New Pages table (first time we'd spoken face to face since sometime in the early 1980's at the Great Midwest Bookshow in Minneapolis); Bryce Milligan at Wings Press (mentioned above); Scott Douglass at the Main Street Rag table; John Crawford at West End Press; and I had a chance to talk briefly with poet Jules Nyquist, whom I'd met last year at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference. I also said a quick hello to poet friend Erika Wurth (in the page at the above link, scroll down till you come to Wurth's book), as we passed quickly in the hotel lobby on our way to events. I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two other people.

On Wednesday night the 29th I attended a party/reception hosted by the Poetry Foundation (the one associated with the nearly 100-year-old Poetry magazine published out of Chicago), where Lorna Dee Cervantes kindly introduced me to Richard Silberg, one of the editors of Poetry Flash in San Francisco. And last thing Saturday night the 3rd I attended a party/reception hosted by Split This Rock, the wonderful poetry activist organization based in Washington, D.C.

*

As I have previously at the AWP conferences I've attended, this year I was pretty sparing in the events I went to, just two or three a day. I spent a lot of time prowling the bookfair, partly looking for anything interesting that had just been published (or that had been around for a while but I hadn't known about it before). Usually toward evening my energies started to fade, and at some point I would retreat to my hotel room for the night, though this year I did go to a couple of evening events (Margaret Atwood's talk and the reading by Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Levine). I tended to get up early, which afforded a little quiet time in the mornings before the crowds started to show up. During most of the day the place was wall to wall people. Something like 10,000 people registered for the conference this year, according to one estimate I heard.

Here are the books and other reading matter I brought home from the AWP bookfair.

Their Backs to the Sea, poems and photographs by Margaret Randall, growing out of a trip Randall took to Rapa Nui (the island also known as Easter Island). Published 2009 by Wings Press.

My Nature is Hunger: New and Selected Poems 1989-2004 by Luis J. Rodríguez (Curbstone Press, 2005.) * Curbstone Press books are now distributed by Northwestern University Press. The N.U. Press webpage for the book is here.

Unfinished Portrait, poems by Luivette Resto (Tía Chucha Press, 2008). * Tía Chucha Press books are now distributed by Northwestern University Press. The N.U. Press webpage for the book is here.

Poet in Andalucía, poems by Nathalie Handal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

To See the Earth, poems by Philip Metres (Cleveland State University Press, 2008).

Elegies for New York Avenue, poems by Melanie Henderson (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2011).

300 Tang Poems, an anthology originally published in China in 1763 or 1764, translated by Geoffrey Waters, Michael Farman, and David Lunde (White Pine Press, 2011). (At the above link, the book is the first item listed in the page.) * I especially like this one -- it's one of the books I've spent the most time with since I found it the first day of the AWP conference. * This is a new translation of the book translated in the early 20th century by Burton Watson under the title The Jade Mountain, which was among a number of translations of classical Chinese poetry done during those years that exerted a large influence on the shaping of American poetry during those years and after.

Greatest Hits 1965-2000, poems by Albert Huffstickler (Pudding House Publications, 2001). This is one of the many titles in the "Greatest Hits" series published by Pudding House. According to the Pudding House website, the series has been taken over by Kattywompus Press. (I found the book at the Kattywompus Press table.) The Kattywompus Press page for the book is here; the page doesn't contain much information. The main page for Kattywompus Press is here. There's a "Contact Us" link in the page.

Split This Rock 2012 Chapbook (published as the Spring 2012 issue of Beloit Poetry Journal). In the Split This Rock blog, here, is a brief article announcing the collection, with a link to a Beloit Poetry Journal page to order a copy.

Apart from the above, I also got hold of several early (1970's) issues of American Poetry Review that APR was selling off for a dollar apiece;

And I found a bundle of several booklets -- reprints of literary texts (in whole, and selections) from past years, part of the City University of New York Poetics Document Initiative. The items I found are from the second series:

Selections from El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn edited by Margaret Randall
"Barcelona 1936" and Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive by Muriel Rukeyser
The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H.D. by Diane DiPrima
R.D.'s H.D. by Diane DiPrima (DiPrima talking about Robert Duncan's writings on H.D.)
Jack Spicer's Translation of Beowulf: Selections (Parts I and II)
Olson Memorial Lecture # 4 by Robert Duncan

A webpage for the above series of booklets is here.

Basho on writing poetry

2012-02-13T21:29:00.001-06:00

Here are a few paragraphs from "Learn from the Pine," a gathering of comments on writing poetry, written by or attributed to the poet Matsuo Basho, who lived in Japan from 1644 to 1694. These are quoted from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, edited by Robert Hass, published 1994 by Harper Collins.

The translation of the excerpts below is, as far as I can tell, by Robert Hass; at any rate, Hass doesn't indicate another translator for these.

*

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.

Don't follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.

The basis of art is change in the universe. What's still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace. [...]

[...] The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.

One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an object. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind.

Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.

When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment. [...]

[...] There are three elements of haikai. Its feeling can be called loneliness (sabi). This plays with refined dishes, but contents itself with humble fare. Its total effect can be called elegance. This lives in figured silks and elegant brocades, but does not forget a person clad in woven straw. Its langjuage can be called aesthetic madness. Language resides in untruth and ought to comport with truth. It is difficult to reside in truth and sport with untruth. These three elements do not exalt a humble person to heights. They put an exalted person in a low place.

The profit in haikai lies in making common speech right.

If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as a renga verse. Haikai, however, needs more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy.

*

The translation of Basho I've liked best is Backroads to Far Towns, translated by Cid Corman, published 2004 by White Pine Press. (At the above link, scroll down in the page until you come to the book.) The book is essentially a travel journal of Basho's wanderings in Japan, on foot, over a two-year period starting in 1689.

A wonderful exploration of Basho's life and work, and the work of various other Japanese poets, is Basho's Ghost by Sam Hamill, itself to some extent a journal of Hamill's travels and meetings with people in Japan sometime during the 1980's. The book was published 1989 by Broken Moon Press in Seattle; the last I knew it was was long out of print, though I've seen it turn up in a used book store once or twice over the years.

A few paragraphs from Gary Snyder

2012-01-30T20:10:00.000-06:00

I've been reading poet Gary Snyder's book The Practice of the Wild (published 1990 by Counterpoint in Berkeley, California -- in the page at the above link, scroll down till you come to the book), a collection of wide-ranging essays, thoughtful talk, meditative prose, on all manner of subjects related to wildness, wilderness, environment, the nature of life and culture and animal nature, and whatever else may be related.

Here are some paragraphs from the first piece in the book, "The Etiquette of Freedom," that have held my attention.

*

Do you really believe you are an animal? We are now taught this in school. It is a wonderful piece of information: I have been enjoying it all my life and I come back to it over and over again, as something to investigate and test. I grew up on a small farm with chickens, and with a second-growth forest right at the back fence, so I had the good fortune of seeing the human and animal in the same realm. But many people who have been hearing this since childhood have not absorbed the implications of it, perhaps feel remote from the nonhuman world, are not sure they are animals. That's understandable: other animals might feel they are something different than "just animals" too. But we must contemplate the shared ground of our common biological being before emphasizing the differences.

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting -- all universal responses of this mammal body. They can be seen throughout the class. The body does not require the intercession of of some conscious intellect to make it breath, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. Sensation and perception do not exactly come from outside, and the unremitting thought and image-flow are not exactly inside. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than "you" can keep track of -- thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out (and sometimes making expansionistic plots), and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild. [...]

[...] It would be a mistake to think that human beings got "smarter" at some point and invented first language and then society. Language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. It is of a complexity that eludes our rational intellectual capacities. All attempts at scientific description of natural languages have fallen short of completeness, as the descriptive linguists readily confess, yes the child learns the mother tongue early and has virtually mastered it by six.

Language is learned in the house and in the fields, not at school. Without ever having been taught formal grammar we utter syntactically correct sentences, one after another, for all the waking hours of the years of our life. Without conscious device we constantly reach into the vast word-hoards in the depths of the wild unconscious. We cannot as individuals or even as a species take credit for this power. It came from someplace else: from the way clouds divide and mingle (and the arms of energy that coil first back and then forward), from the way the many flowerlets of a composite blossom divide and redivide, from the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbeds under present riverbeds of the Yukon River streaming out from the Yukon flats, from the wind in the pine needles, from the chuckles of grouse in the ceanothus bushes.

Language teaching in schools is a matter of corraling off a little of the language-behavior territory and cultivating a few favorite features -- culturally defined elite forms that will help you apply for a job or give you social credibility at a party. One might even learn how to produce the byzantine artifact known as the professional paper. There are many excellent reasons to master these things, but the power, the virtu, remains on the side of the wild.

*

Counterpoint Press has published much other worthwhile writing, including other work by Gary Snyder. The main page for the press is here.

If by any chance you're not familiar with Gary Snyder's poetry, the webpage about him in the Modern American Poetry website (at U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), here, is a good place to start.

Building the Barricade

2012-01-15T22:36:00.002-06:00

This past fall I read Building the Barricade by Anna Swir, book of poems translated from Polish by Piotr Florczyk (Calypso Editions, 2011; the book includes the original Polish poems in addition to the translations). Anna Swir (or Swirszczynska), who lived 1909-1984, took part in the anti-Nazi resistance in Poland during the Second World War; she was in Warsaw during the uprising by the underground in August 1944, and she volunteered as a nurse at an improvised field hospital. Most of the poems in Building the Barricade are from those experiences.

The poems in Building the Barricade (which which all of the quoted passages here are taken) are stark, spare, terse as military dispatches. Swir wrote the poems many years after the experiences from which they were written (the book was first published in Poland in 1974), though the poems still convey the hardened immediacy of the days and hours and moments Swir was writing about. The poems are absolutely free of ornament; they waste no time telling what they have to tell.

From the poem "Conversation through the Door," in which the speaker in the poem shows up at an apartment (during the street fighting throughout the city) to tell parents that their son, a soldier in the Resistance, is dying:

He opens the door,
doesn't unhook the chain.
Behind him his wife
trembles.

I say, your son asks for his mother
to come.
He says: his mother won't come.
Behind him his wife
trembles.

I say: the doctor let him
have wine.
He says: please wait.

He hands me a bottle through the door,
locks the door,
locks with the second key.

Behind the door
the wife begins to scream
as if she were in labor.

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place as the army of the Soviet Union was approaching Warsaw from the east, and the German army was retreating toward the west. Tens of thousands of residents of Warsaw died either during the fighting or from mass murder atrocities committed by the German Nazi military. At least 200,000 residents of Warsaw were forcibly evacuated by the German army as the army retreated, and were sent to forced labor camps, or to concentration camps to die. At least 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed during the war. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising took place in a city in flames.

Why am I so afraid
running down
this burning street.

There's no one here
except flames roaring skyhigh;
and that bang was not a bomb
only three floors collapsing.

Naked they dance, liberated,
waving their hands
from the window caves.
What a sin to spy
on naked flames,
what a sin to eavesdrop
on breathing fire.

(From the poem "I'm Afraid of Fire".)

Many of the poems seem, on the surface, to be simple reports of randomly observed incidents. In their very simplicity they reveal large stories that have repeated themselves throughout the city gripped in bloody battle, in which life becomes reduced to the barest extremes. In the poem "He Got Lucky," Swir writes about a man carrying some books; in an almost offhand act of harassment, a German soldier grabs the man's books and throws them down in the mud.

The old man picks up the books,
the soldier hits him in the face.
The old man falls,
the soldier kicks him and walks away.

The old man
lies in mud and blood.
Underneath, he feels
books.

Not all of the poems in Building the Barricade are bleak or hardened; in a few of the poems, Swir reaches beyond the evident despair and finds signs of life. Here and there a kind of raw lyricism emerges, a glow of warmth and an intimation of happiness, the possibility of a future. From the poem "First Madrigal," in which she writes of spending a night with a lover:

It was rich
like a coronation ceremony.
It was fleshy
like the stomach of a woman in labor
and spiritual
like a number.

It was only a moment of life,
though it wanted to be a conclusion.
By dying
it wanted to understand the mystery of the world.

That night of love
had ambitions.

I've written about Anna Swir's poetry previously in this blog, here. Every time I read her poems, I'm amazed by the power and and range she's able to find, in poems that seem to be almost impossibly pared down to the bone. Out of a century of fire and ashes, out of a nightmare of piled bodies and incinerated cities, Anna Swir's poems offer answers to impossible questions.

As a girl
I climbed from the attic window
onto the roof
in order to jump.

As a woman
I had lice.
They cracked
when I ironed my sweater.

I waited an hour
before a firing squad.
I went hungry
for six years.

Then, when I gave birth to a child,
they cut me open
without anesthesia.

Then I was killed
by lightning three times,
and I had to be resurrected three times
without anybody's help.

Now I am resting
after three resurrections.

The whisper of tiny-winged solitude

2011-12-10T22:34:00.000-06:00

I've just recently read All Graced in Green, a book of poems by Scott King, published this year by Thistlewords Press, an imprint of Red Dragonfly Press. (Scott King is the publisher of Red Dragonfly Press; he has used the imprint Thistlewords Press to publish a few books of his own work.) This is the largest and most varied collection of Scott's poems that I've seen: richly layered poems of nature and the life of the earth, poems of quiet warmth and friendship and intimacy with the people in his life.

I first met Scott in the early 1990's, and we've become friends in the years since. (By way of disclosure, Red Dragonfly Press has published three of my books of poems, and will be publishing another of mine in the near future.) I took great pleasure in reading All Graced in Green. If you're not familiar with Scott King's poetry, this book makes a good introduction to his work.

One of the qualities that I found running through many of the poems is a quiet patience, a careful listening, in observing the details of the living world. In addition to writing poetry and publishing it (by handset letterpress printing as well as computer typesetting), Scott has also studied environmental sciences, and has spent time doing scientific fieldwork, particularly around lakes and wetlands and other freshwater places. The steady attention that this scientific work requires makes itself evident in his poems.

Among the poems in the book are several series of related poems. Here's an excerpt from the poem "Lunar Eclipse," dated "Sayner, Wisconson, August 16, 1989," from a series of poems titled "Twelve Poems for Trout Lake Station":

Here knowledge began to make sense --
it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands.
Unpredictable events occurred daily. We
witnessed the deadly wink of the sundew,
its sticky eyelashes decorating fallen logs;
touched the tiny chemist scales of the twinflower
peacefully balancing thought and body
in pine woods penumbra, the almost shadow. [...]

[...] The moon dawned before us.
We tested our intuition against a theory of roadmaps,
finding our way to a fish dinner and a beer.
Gradually it changed, casting unearthly colors
onto the sides of buildings, onto the hoods of cars.
The moon entered the earth's shadow and changed,
like a lens being changed on a microscope.
We stood in the parking lot and looked up,
elated by our shadows, by the magnificent
umbra nibbling at the edge of the moon.
We brightened as our faces dimmed,
beer in hand, carefree of careers.

"...it was not the theory of a frog we held in our hands." I'd like to post that line, at least, on the wall in the departmental office of every MFA creative writing program in the United States, and would encourage every student to spend some time thinking about its implications for writing poems. It would be a bad idea for every member of Congress and every state legislator to spend some time thinking on it as well.

Another series of poems in the book is titled "Physiologus," and is made up of poems that describe and explore various plant and animal (mostly insect) species. Here again the detailed observation, not straining, finding the poetry that life can sometimes make of itself without exhaustive effort. From the poem "Northern Paper Wasp" (a species with the scientific name Polistes fuscatus):

Now comes the release
of a mid-winter thaw,
then, more surprising still,
a Co-op of wasps found
scattered on a sidewalk
like a handful of small caliber
rifle bullets. They are hibernating
northern paper wasps
knocked down from the roofline
by birds or a collapse of roof-ice,
the pale sun on red brick
not nearly enough to wake them.
I pick one up gently,
carefully hold it in my fingertips.
This warm-blooded grip stirs
the sleeping queen
to stretch out a yellow leg
as though it were spring.

Back home, I take up the book,
flip forward through unread pages --
sure enough -- the wasp
is waiting there as well,
the name and pronunciation:
po-LIST-eez fuss-CATE-us.
I say it over and over --
the Greek meaning
founder of a city, the Latin
black, for its smoke-colored wings.

One of the things I find Scott King's poems leading me to is the knowledge, a gentle (and urgent) reminder, that we human beings are, after all, creatures on this earth among all other creatures. We are not separate from this place. This has profound implications for us in our relations with each other. A wound to the earth is a wound to all of the life on the earth, including ourselves. I'm not dogmatically against any kind of technology; even the first fire built by a human being, in the most ancient times, had an impact on the environment. But we've gone far beyond that first fire, and we need to think consciously about the decisions we make, and the consequences they'll; we need to pay attention to the footprints we leave.

Like bells, these stones ring.
Rock outcroppings warm our bare feet.
In our hands we weigh
plain, dry stones, blue-gray.
They are worn down, dull
discs fallen from the spine
of an upright age.

Here is gooseberry and yellow tansy,
its aroma strong as railroad ties,
creeping bell flower
a blue sword in the stone.

Adapting to strange needs,
I wonder if it was your wish for me
to fashion an odd vision into words,
as it was mine to lead you here,
this love of waves breaking at my feet?

Our fingers, stained red, touch,
not blood, but a communion
of kisses and laughter,
the red the color of a cabin set deep
in dusky woods, intimate,
windows lit with mystery.

(From the poem "Brighton Beach -- July 29, 2001," in a poem sequence titled "Lake Superior Journal.")

Some of the poems in All Graced in Green touch more explicitly on the world of human action, offering quiet commentaries on the political and economic events that surround us and how they touch us. From the poem "McGrath, Ritsos -- Autumn, 1990" (written in remembrance of Communist poets Thomas McGrath and Yannis Ritsos):

After they departed, we saw starlight
for what it had always been
and marveled at each silken fiber,
like seed dispersed in the dark night.

Ritsos in a black boat
followed the moon across the Aegean,
while the sound of statues limping
through the hollow night was heard
In the neighborhoods of Greece.
McGrath stepped out a door
leaving footprints in the snow
as he followed the Red River north. [...]

[...] Red banners bleed in the blue sky.
The words thalassa and ouranos
take on a tinge of purple
like the color of the Scots thistle
picked to adorn a worker's table,
a reminder of hard times lived through,
the sugar ants rummaging
the sticky blooms into seed.

The Red River mentioned in the poem is the river the forms the border between North Dakota and Minnesota; it's one of a small number of rivers in the world that flows to the north. The lines in the last stanza about the Scots thistle are a reference to the long poem "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" by Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid.

Among the poems in All Graced in Green is an excerpt from "Wynnere and Wastoure," a fourteenth-century alliterative Middle English poem by an unknown author; three passages from the poem are rendered into more or less modern English by Scott King. The original poem (or at any rate the surviving text of it) is divided into several sections, or "fitts" (as they're called in the old text). Here are some lines from Scott's rendering of "Wastoure's Feast, from Fitt the Second":

And then a third course    I count beyond reason --
I who want no more than Martinmass meats myself
cooked with simple herbs, I who do without wild fowl
(but for the one hen the house was owed) --
but he, he must have birds    all sorts braised upon a spit
barnacle geese, bitterns,    long-billed snipe;
larks and linnets,    ladled with sugary glaze,
woodcock and woodpecker simmering and hot,
teal, titmice, terns    to take what they like,
rabbit stews,    sweet custards
decadent meat pies,    pastries aplenty,
diced meat with almond milk to stuff their stomachs
that cost more than a mark for every two men --
a cost that must surely sting    and stab at the guts.
Resounding so loudly, your trumpets anger me,
all the men in the streets must hear that blaring:
and then say to themselves, as they ride off together,
even Heaven's king's of no help to you.
Thus you are scorned. Thus you are disgraced.
You who fritter away on a feast    a ransom of silver.
As once I heard    off a herdsman's tongue:
"Better many a meal,    than one merrry night."

In the economic firestorm of these years, in the thump and rattle of foreign policy that grows out of the barrel of a gun (or the software of a drone aircraft), amid the blaring of the trumpets of imperial conquest, and the rampant excesses of financial schemers (who "fritter away on a feast a ransom of silver) -- can there be any question of the relevance of the above lines, even coming to us from several hundred years ago and across the sea?

(I found online a Middle English text of the poem, with a side-by-side glossary of the more difficult or unfamiliar words, here. I don't have sufficient knowledge of Middle English literature to comment on the accuracy of the text at the above link; the webpage appears to be part of a college or university library, though a link to a main menu page gave a "page not found" error mesage. But the above link to the specific webpage works, at least at the time of writing this; including the link here for anyone who's curious. I found other information about the original poem by Googling the phrase "wynnere and wastoure" with quote marks included.)

These are poems that can help to remind us of the limits of ambition, that there are other (and more useful) ethical values than seeking after the most recent version of the latest iGadget, that there are languages older than the ones that will fit in the space of a text message or a twitter. (Birds have in fact been twittering for some time, and they don't appear to feel the need to limit themselves to 140 syllables or whatever the current count is.) Some things that are worth saying take time to say, and in All Graced in Green Scott King has taken the time to say some of them. We should take time to listen.

I'll finish here with some lines from the poem "Belle Creek":

After a day's labor, thoughts
still spool in the short term
memory of the hours I stood working.
I hurry to shuck shoes
and hitch hip boots, fit
the full length of the fly rod
and wade the long grass and yellow clover
to the edge of Belle Creek.

I know there may be no worse
trout stream in the state.
But sometimes there's hope
in neglect. And I'm here
and nowhere else.
As I wade upstream, the carp
get smaller, more trout-like.
Silted, slow, the stockyards and fields
burden these waters.
Chasing rumors of rumors of fish,
I'll settle for the whisper
of tiny-winged solitude
and the midges building clouds
over sweet grass.

Among his various other projects, Scott King has for some time been translating poems by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos. Some of his translations are posted in his blog website HINTS: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos. Other of Scott's published books are listed in the Red Dragonfly Press website, here. One I've read and found fascinating is Rice County Odonata Journal, in which he gives an unhurried account of an ongoing project to find and identify species of dragonflies and related insects in Minnesota. ("Odonata" is a scientific classification that includes dragonflies, damselflies, and the like.)

The main page for Red Dragonfly Press is here.

Caput Nili

2011-11-30T21:38:00.000-06:00

One evening last June I read Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges by Lisa Gill (West End Press, 2011), a book-length series of poems, mingled with prose interludes, and with artwork by Kris Mills. The book is, more or less, an account by Gill of her attempt to find a medical diagnosis for whatever was causing her difficulty walking, and of her long and varied journey along the way through the infernal underworld of medical clinics and hospitals, and psychiatric treatment for bipolar disorder and whatever else doctors thought she might have.

Throughout the book the poems and prose mingle jittery desperation, quick humor, a quiet sense of self, and a keen perception of the leaky cracks that are everywhere in the implacable walls of modern bureaucracy. Gill repeats phrases and ideas from one poem to another, circling back through the same moments to reach for multiple perspectives. The poems move along like electrical current, not pausing to rest. The book kept pulling me along with it -- I read it in one sitting, something I've rarely done with any book.

The book is organized into four overall sections, and the individual poems in each section are numbered in sequence, without titles. The first poem (numbered 1:1) begins:

In 2003 I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.

I went to the ER and told them
my legs had been numb for five weeks.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges.

They told me to eat mandarin oranges
and then shrugged, as if legs didn't matter.

So I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.
Self-preservation is instinct.

And from the next poem (numbered 1:2):

You want to know where the shotgun came from?

It came from my knee--
this was a weapon birthed from patella and ligament,
hard-hitting myth born the day I decided
I would not leave a man's hands wrapped around my windpipe.

It took years to get around to defending myself,
it took less than a minute without oxygen

as if my head had been forced underwater in the River Styx
fish swimming by

a baptism into adrenaline
fast riddle of flesh
this time the answer was a leg.

In a note at the front of the book, Lisa Gill explains that the title, Caput Nili, is Latin for "head [i.e. the source] of the Nile." According to Gill, after the source of the Nile River was "discovered" by a European explorer in the mid-1800's, the phrase "caput Nili" came to refer more broadly to any sort of significant discovery. Caput Nili is, in part, about Gill's search for the injuries or traumas in her early life that may lie at the source of any or all of the illnesses or conditions affecting her body and psyche.

At some point as she was writing Caput Nili, Gill worked with several other women to create a one-woman performance piece from the work-in-progress. Much of the writing, especially of the poems, has the feel and movement of speech and performance. The writing is at times deeply personal and vulnerable, but it the voice that is speaking never retreats into isolation. The author is speaking to human beings, face to face. She means to tell us something we need to hear.

From the poem numbered 1:6:

I get tired of the onslaught.

One man threw a blanket over my head.
If he hadn't been shoving a knee into my crotch
and his tongue into my mouth, I would have gone to sleep.

It's so old, the harassment.

When I have insomnia, I can't count how many times
I've been followed or stalked or felt up or groped
or slapped or flashed or propositioned or catcalled
or had a gun pulled on me... no, I can count that.

Once.

Once a man pulled out a pistol
and began gesticulating at me.

I knew him and although I wasn't entirely sure
what he had in his hands, it looked like a .22 caliber
bluff.

He wanted to sleep with me.

The prose sections of Caput Nili are difficult to quote in brief passages -- much of the power throughout the book, both the poems and the prose, grows from the cumulative effect of repetition and revisiting, a kind of double and triple exposure sensation. The prose sections serve to flesh out the background of the poems and Gill's life in general. I'll quote a brief passage from the first prose section, titled "Say So":

The first seizure drug was like my third serious relationship.
It nearly killed me.
Things started off innocuously enough. The doctor said, "This pill will make it so you don't smell the images on TV anymore." Or that's what I heard. My sensory life was a bit out of whack. I had visual and auditory hallucinations and was plagued with smells that no one else could perceive. And I was suicidal.
I thought that pill would cure me.
Instead, after only a month, when I took a routine follow-up blood test, the result was that I got called into the neuro's office. He said, word for gregarious word, "Your body has quit producing white blood cells. You might die."
Ten years later, I asked my shrink for my chart. When I got it, that adverse reaction was summed up in one line: "Patient experienced Leukipenia on Tegretol."
It didn't say what I'd have said: The drug the patient was taking so she wouldn't off herself nearly killed her, the irony of which thrust her into such a profound despair that she didn't eat for two weeks, though she went ahead and took her iron pills on an empty stomach, because the blood test had also shown that she had become anemic, and she still, stubbornly, wanted to believe that pills would make things better.
Now I'd say my bone marrow was depressed, literally.

Much of the artwork by Kris Mills plays with classic works of art: a cubist Picasso woman eating from a can of mandarin oranges; an old-style pistol with a caption,"Ceci n'est pas une fusil"; the woman from Andrew Wyeth's painting "Christina's World," pulling herself by her hands across a flat surface marked into a grid of squares; an image (after a painting by Ingres) of a woman holding a shotgun up over her shoulder like a water jar. Lisa Gill also includes in the book a couple of MRI images of her own brain.

From the poem numbered 2:4:

Five weeks. My legs had been numb for
five weeks when I went to the ER.

I'd already been to my primary.
She took X-rays.

They were clean as something else going on
so she gave me a referral to a neurologist.

I called every neurologist in the phone book
trying to get an appointment.

I knew: crossing my kitchen
shouldn't feel like crossing the Rubicon

and I'd fallen
for the idea that someone might help me

this time. I knew:
I wasn't crazy.

The numbness was more stable
than anything in my life.

Caput Nili tells a remarkable odyssey, a hard and persistent struggle, a story and struggle that repeat, in countless variations, in the real lives of the billions of us who awaken and live in the world. The story Lisa Gill tells is a warning and a celebration; it is an offering to the bare bones of light.

From the poem numbered 3:12:

Six months later, when I'd recovered feeling
in my legs, I met with a new neurologist.

She hit me with a hammer.
Repeatedly.
One leg flew into the sky, the other did nothing.
Bipolar reflexes.
Neither response was normal.

She struck a tuning fork and put it to my shin.
I was supposed to say when I couldn't feel it.
Instead my whole body started trembling.

She raised her eyebrows
so I told her about the time a sitar concert
had made me hear laughter
every time I bent my neck down.
I told her I'd learned to keep my head up.

Without hesitating,
she slapped my MRI's onto the light screen.
I didn't know what I was looking at.
I didn't know anything but I could see polka dots.
I trembled again. [...]

[...] Then she flipped some more
stopped, pursed her lips, and said,
"Your corpus callosum is thinner than I'd like to see."

And she showed me the arc,
the strip of brain that connects the two hemispheres,
the strip of brain that should have been plump.

"So what does that mean?"

"That means you'll have trouble with memory."

"What kind of memory," I said, trying to be calm.
"Long term of short?"

"All memory."

Several places in Caput Nili, Gill includes short quotations from various writers: Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, John Hanning Speke. One quotation, by Martin H. Teicher, particularly struck me, in the context of all that Gill tells about in her book. Here is the quoted passage by Teicher as given in Caput Nili; Gill notes that the quotation is from Teicher's article "Scars That Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse," which appeared in Scientific American in 2002 (Gill's citation doesn't note which month):

"...Research reveals a strong link between physical, sexual, and emotional mistreatment of children and the development of psychiatric problems. But in the early 1990s researchers thought of the damage as basically a software problem amenable to reprogramming via therapy or simply erasable through the exhortation, Get over it.

[However] such abuse, it seems, induces a cascade of molecular and neurobiological effects that irreversibly alter neural development. ...We see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, because once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back."

Caput Nili is, partly, about the long journey toward recovery from trauma; it is also about the ongoing effort to survive and grow in a world that continues to create trauma on an ever greater horrific scale. The book presents no neat conclusions or simplistic answers; it asks essential questions, and shines light on them in the darkest places.

From a poem near the end of the book (numbered 4:12):

So yes, I wish I'd pressed charges.
I wish I'd reported the malpractice.
I wish I'd done anything
to stop any of the people who hurt me
from hurting one more woman,
so I am doing what I can do now:

I am sicking my skinny corpus callosum on the world.

Because what's horrific is not what happened to me,
it's that i'm not alone. [...]

[...] And I was not in the wrong place at the wrong time:

This is the wrong culture at the wrong time.

Poet Lisa Gill has written the right book at the right time.

Dale Jacobson memoir of Tom McGrath

2011-11-18T21:42:00.000-06:00

Poet friend Dale Jacobson has written a wonderful personal memoir of his long friendship with poet Tom McGrath. I've spent the past three evening reading it, entirely engrossed.

In addition to telling much of his and Tom's long and close knowing of each other -- Tom's kindness and generosity with those around him was renowned -- Dale also gives attention to the nature of poetry; the essential interwoven connections of poetry and politics; the bankruptcy of poetry and politics that frequently occurs in a hundred ways once they have been absorbed and corrupted by the literary-industrial-academic complex; questions about the nature of life and death and the universe; and various other things. And Dale gives a tender and moving account of the last year of Tom's life as his health declined.

Dale Jacobson's memoir of Thomas McGrath is posted in its entirety in Dale's blog, here.

I've written previously here (in this blog you're reading now) about the poetry of Thomas McGrath and the poetry of Dale Jacobson; see the two links at the top of this post, above.

The sound says that freedom exists

2011-10-23T00:14:00.003-05:00

Poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this year. Generally I don't give a great deal of attention to who the Nobel or other such awards are given to -- such prizes and prestige seem far from the details and routines of my life and the lives of people I know. I was interested to hear the news about Tranströmer, however. His poetry has been deeply important to me since I first read him, in translation, more than 35 years ago.

I first read Transtromer's poems in the book Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, a selection of three Swedish poets -- Harry Martinson (himself also a Nobel laureate), Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer -- chosen and translated by Robert Bly, published 1975 by Beacon Press; the book includes the original Swedish of the poems. I liked the work of all three of the poets; I found myself immediately drawn to Tranströmer's poems in particular.

I find in Tranströmer's poems a quiet introspective quality, whether the ostensible subject matter of the poems is things and events in the exterior world or entirely the happenings of inner life. Tranströmer worked for many years as a psychologist, and the nature of such work makes a steady background presence in his poems, and sometimes emerges more explicitly. His poems are the poems of someone who spends much time listening to the collective psyche, and asking questions about what it means to be a human being in the modern world.

From the poem "Track" ("Spår"), in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness (from which the quoted passages here are taken, unless otherwise noted):

2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

I live in a place (Minneapolis) known for cold winters; at the time of winter solstice here, the nights last about 15 and a half hours. Sweden, where Tranströmer has lived all his life, has a climate similar, if not identical, and is further north, and the winter nights are longer. Certainly I felt an affinity for the daily world that shows up in Tranströmer's poems when I first read his work. Minnesota and the surrounding region also has had a large history of immigration from the Scandinavian countries, and echoes persist here of the cultures of that part of the world. It was early spring when I first read Tranströmer's poems, and it continually struck me how the cool damp earth smell of the spring nights seemed to drift up from his poems as I read them.

There are stark winter days when the sea has links
to the mountain areas, hunched over in feathery grayness,
blue for a moment, then the waves for hours are like pale
lynxes, trying to get a grip on the gravelly shore. [...]

[...] (In the Far North the real lynx walks, with sharpened claws
and dream eyes. In the Far North where the day
lives in a pit night and day.

There the sole survivor sits by the furnace
of the Northern Lights, and listens to the music
coming from the men frozen to death.)

(From the poem "Sailor's Tale," "Skepparhistoria" in the original Swedish.)

Tranströmer's poems are not, for the most part, politically explicit in their content or subject matter, at least the the usual sense. But the realities of the world we live in are never far away, and the poems do move with evident conscience, even when the subject matter isn't obviously political in nature. I think, for instance, of some lines from his poem "Allegro" (the title is the same in Swedish):

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is green, lively and still.

The sound says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.

(The translation of the above lines is based on Robert Bly's translation, however I've changed the word order in a couple of the lines to something that seems to me closer to the original Swedish.)

Or, similarly, these lines from the poem "The Scattered Congregation" ("Den Skingrade Församlingen"):

1.
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.

2.
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.

3.
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.

The poem of Tranströmer's that spoke to me the most powerfully when I first read it was "After Someone's Death" ("Efter Någons Död"). The lines that follow here are more or less a hybrid of Bly's translation and a translation by Mary Hagen, a friend of many years who studied Swedish at the University of Minnesota. According to Robert Bly (in his comments in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness), Tranströmer wrote the poem after an uncle of his had died; it was also around the time of the assassination of John Kennedy, and (according to Bly) the two deaths became mingled as Tranströmer wrote the poem.

"One time there was a shock," writes Tranströmer, "that left after it a long, pale, shimmering comet's tail." He speaks in the poem of skiing slowly in winter sun, "through brush where a few leaves hang on."

They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Tomas Tranströmer's first book of poems, 17 Poems, was published in 1954. His first three books, published over a period of eight years, contained a total of 52 poems. "With many English and American poets," writes Robert Bly, "this is considered to be about six months' work. [...] The first seventeen poems were enough for him to be recognized by many critics as the finest poet of his generation." Tranströmer has continued to publish books of poems every few years; his books have tended to be small (not a large number of poems) by the typical standards of the publishing business in the United States.

I appreciated this approach when I first read Tranströmer; my own books of poems (the ones I've published so far, and most of the other completed manuscripts and works in progress) have mostly been of the length commonly called "chapbooks." I tend to avoid the term when I talk about books. My feeling is that a book of poems is full-length when it has enough poems in it.

Although I generally like Robert Bly's translations of Tranströmer, Bly seems to me now and then to stray a little further from the originals than I would prefer. For instance, in one of the passages quoted above, Tranströmer says (about leaves hanging on bushes in winter) "They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories./ The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold." Bly translates the second line simply as "Names swallowed by the cold." This turns the specific literal description of Tranströmer's original into a somewhat larger metaphorical statement. It's a subtle difference, though I might not have made the choice Bly made there. I've come across a few other such examples in Bly's translations.

There are other translations of Tranströmer I've liked; I think in particular of Baltics (Swedish title Östersjöar) translated a number of years ago by Samuel Charters, published 1975 by Oyez Publications (and which I don't have in front of me at the moment). I also somewhat like the translations by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg in the selection Windows & Stones (1972, U. of Pittsburgh Press), though at times they seem a bit timid to me. I have a similar feeling about the numerous translations that have been done by Robin Fulton.

Over time Transtromer's poems seem to me to have taken on a gradually greater transparent quality. Or maybe it's the world (both inner and outer world) he writes about in his poems that has become steadily more transparent. He writes about an apparently ordinary moment or scene, looking out a window, walking across a street, a bit of conversation, a painting or a piece of music, and I find a consistent sense that there is some large piece of closely related business going on below, deep within the earth, sometimes as a soft echo, and sometimes surfacing in great clarity.

From the poem "After a Long Dry Spell" (in the book The Half-Finished Heaven, another selection translated by Robert Bly, published 2001 by Graywolf Press; the book gives only the English translations, not the original Swedish):

Circles swam on the fjord's surface
and that is the only surface there is right now --
the rest is height and depth
to rise and to sink.

Two pine trunks
shoot up and continue in long hollow signal-drums.
Cities and the sun gone off.
In the high grass there is thunder.

It's all right to telephone the island that is a mirage.
It's all right to hear the gray voice.
To thunder iron ore is honey.
It's all right to live by your own code.

And this, from the poem "Street Crossing" (also in the selection The Half-Finished Heaven):

The street's massive life swirls around me;
it remembers nothing and desires nothing.
Far under the traffic, deep in the earth,
the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.

It seems to me that the street can see me.
Its eyesight is so poor the sun itself
is a gray ball of yarn in black space.
But for a second I am lit. It sees me.

Some additional biographical information about Tomas Tranströmer, and a fuller list of his works published in Swedish and in translation, is in the website of the Svenska Akademien, here. The webpage at this link is in English.

My thanks also to blogger Thekla, who has published several insightful blogposts about Tranströmer this month in her blog Chamber of Secrets. The above link is to the main page of her blog; the blogposts about Tranströmer are dated October 18, October 17, October 16, and October 6, 2011.

Chile 1973: another 9/11

2011-09-11T00:33:00.001-05:00

On September 11, 1973, the military of the United States took part in a terrorist action that resulted in the armed overthrow of the elected government of Chile. The military government headed by Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile with the aid of the U.S. government, and during the next decades the Pinochet regime murdered and disappeared untold thousands of people who were opposed to the regime or whom the Pinochet government found inconvenient for one reason or another.

In the website of the radio show "Democracy Now!," host Amy Goodman and co-host Juan Gonzalez interview Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who was in Santiago, Chile, on the day of the military coup; Dorfman at the time was a cultural adviser to Chilean president Salvador Allende. Allende died during the bombing of the presidential residence by planes supplied by the U.S. military. In the interview, Dorfman -- who spent part of his childhood in New York -- reflects on the events of September 11, 1973 in Chile, and also on the events of September 11, 2001, when he was in the United States, and the long aftermath of both.

The interview with Ariel Dorfman is here.

The Democracy Now! segment continues with a discussion of some of the other significant historical events that have also taken place on September 11 in various years in India, Guatemala, and at Attica prison in upstate New York. The additional discussion is here.

*

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died during the days following the coup in September 1973 -- he had been seriously ill with a brain tumor, and his death, at the very least, was hurried along by intentional medical neglect after the military government took power.

In the website of the Paris Review is a long interview with Neruda by Rita Guibert, from 1971. Neruda talks about all aspects of his life and work, his politics, the historical and political events in which he had taken part during his life (in particular the Civil War in Spain during the 1930's, and the presidential election campaign in Chile at the time which result in the election of Salvador Allende, whom Neruda supported); and much else.

The interview with Neruda is here.

I originally read the interview with Pablo Neruda many years ago (sometime in the mid-1970's) in the book Seven Voices, which gathers interviews Rita Guibert did with seven Latin American writers. The book appears to be out of print at present, though it may be out there if you go searching the used book websites, or ask your local used book store to do a book search.

Two other works I can recommend, also long out of print as far as I know, are Chilean Writers in Exile, edited by Fernando Alegría (published 1982 by The Crossing Press), a collection of stories and short novels by Chilean writers dealing with the 1973 coup and afterwards; and For Neruda, For Chile edited by Walter Lowenfels (published 1975 by Beacon Press), an anthology of poems written in tribute to Neruda and in response to the coup in Chile, by poets from several dozen countries around world.

And one other I really like is Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel García Márquez, published in English translation in 2010 by New York Review of Books. The book is an account (non-fiction, not a novel) of the experiences of Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin, who in 1982 entered Chile after living abroad in exile for several years, and spent two months secretly making a documentary film about the political coup and about political and economic conditions in Chile under the Pinochet regime. Márquez wrote the book after extensively interviewing Littin about his experience making the film. The publisher's webpage for the book is here.

*

On September 11, 2001, I was at work in the morning when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Sometime by mid-morning (around 10:00 or 10:30 Central time), our employer closed the office for the day -- office buildings in cities all over the United States were closing for the day -- and we left and went home.

I didn't go home immediately. I work in downtown Minneapolis. I walked a couple of blocks to the building of the local CBS T.V. station here. The station had a large T.V. in their window at street level, and a small crowd had gathered and was watching. I stopped and watched the news for a little while. It was there that I saw the video of one of the planes flying into one of the buildings. I remember one of the T.V. announcers (maybe Dan Rather) explaining, as the video played, that "this is actual video, not an animation." This comment struck me at the moment -- and again often in the days that followed -- as an interesting (and probably unintended) commentary on the nature of "news" reporting, what it has become in these years.

As I stood watching the T.V. news reports, a couple of dozen other people gathered around also watching, coming and going, I was suddenly reminded of all of those bad science fiction movies in the 1950's where Earth is being attacked by flying saucers.

Eventually I became aware that downtown was emptying of people, and I hopped on a bus and went home. After a little while I headed to a family member's house and hung out there for much of the day, checking out the news on various cable channels. As I sat and watched through the day, I began having the odd sensation that much in the news reports was becoming too scripted -- the way announcers kept saying "everything has changed, everything is different now." This has become an old long story in the years since. I could go on at length about this, but for the moment I'll just say (what should be obvious) that I've found it's a good idea not to take anything in a corporate new story as an established fact without checking into it further. What I heard that day in the news reports from CNN, NBC, CBS, etc., was the faint but unmistakeable beating of the drums of war.

*

A couple of other links to offer, also related to some or all of the above:

An interview with poet Martín Espada, in the website of the organization Solidarity, which describes itself as a "socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization." They've titled the interview "On 9/11 and the Politics of Language." (I can also highly recommend Espada's book of poems The Republic of Poetry published in 2006; I've written about Espada's book in this blog, here.) * The interview with Espada is here. (Thanks to poet Philip Metres in whose blog Behind the Lines I found the link to the interview.)

And, a talk given by writer in Arundhati Roy in September 2002, titled "Come September," in which she reflects on the events of the previous year, and more generally on the economic and political role of the United States in the world, and on various movements to resist the trends of corporate globalization. A transcript of her talk is here. (The page will come up as a pdf in the web browser.) * When I Googled for this item, I also saw some links to YouTube video of Roy's talk, though I haven't checked any of them.

*

The next day, September 12, 2011, poet Adrienne Rich was scheduled to read at the University of Minnesota. During the day I called the phone number listed for info about the reading, and reached a recording at the university English department office, informing callers (as had already been announced in the news) that all classes at the university had been cancelled for the day. The recording then said that the Adrienne Rich reading would go on as scheduled.

I went to the reading that night. It was the Ted Mann Concert Hall, a modern building on the West Bank campus (across the Mississippi River from the main campus on the east side). The building is well-designed for such events, with good accoustics and a good view of the stages in front. The reading was free, and a large crowd showed up, the place was packed.

As things got started, the person who was introducing Adrienne Rich explained that Rich had been in Kansas City the day before (the 11th) when all flights were grounded. So she hired a driver, and they drove for 13 hours through the night so she could make it to Minneapolis for the reading on the 12th.

Rich came out and read. The room was absolutely charged with the air of the events that had taken place the day before. She started by talking a little about this. Then she read poems. I don't remember, now, most of what she read -- I do remember that she read her long poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" from the book of the same name, among others. What I remember from that evening is that there, in that room, were gathered several hundred of us who wanted something other than the fanatical saber rattling that had been blaring out from corporate news media and government press conferences during the previous 24 hours.

She read for probably 45 minutes. Copies of her book Fox (just published at the time) were on a table in the lobby. I hung around for a little bit afterwards, talked with a couple of friends. I headed out into the mild fall night and caught a bus home.

Every year since 2001, when September comes it's become commonplace for news media people to ask whoever they're talking to "Where were you on September 11?"

When I think about that question, more often than not I remember, instead, being at Adrienne Rich's poetry reading on the evening of September 12. "Only these friends hold joyous here," wrote Robert Duncan, "where the world like great Sodom lies under fear." (The poem by Duncan is "This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom" in his book The Opening of the Field.)

Remembering back to that night, September 12, 2001, I can't think of anything else I would rather have been doing, or anywhere else I would rather have been.

John Howard Griffin

2011-09-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

A postscript to the Albuquerque Cultural Conference --

At the Albuquerque airport on the way back to Minneapolis, I ran into Bryce Milligan and we talked for a few minutes. As noted in the previous blogpost about the conference (at the above link), Bryce is the publisher of Wings Press. (See additional links below.)

Bryce mentioned that Wings Press is publishing a 50th anniversary edition of the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin.

If you're not familiar with the book, I definitely recommend it. I read it long ago, for a high school English class. The book is Griffin's real-life account of his experience in 1959 of having his Caucasian skin darkened (through medications and sun-lamp treatments), shaving his head, and then living the next several weeks as -- to all appearances -- an African-American man, traveling through the southern United States. He did this in coordination with Sepia magazine, which published Griffin's reports of his experiences in 1960; Griffin expanded the articles into the book Black Like Me, which was published in 1961.

The publication of Griffin's articles, and the book that followed, caused shock and awakening for many white Americans at the time, presenting the stark picture of Griffin's daily encounters with every manner of racism, including, at times, real danger to his life. Griffin was already an experienced and published writer at the time he wrote Black Like Me, and he reflects on his experiences with insight and sensitivity.

The Wings Press webpage for the book is here. According to the webpage, the official publication date for the new edition is October 1, 2011. The page includes short excerpts from reviews in many publications, and a full review of the book from the Washington Post in 2007.

Wings Press has also published several of John Howard Griffin's other books. The Wings Press webpage for Griffin is here.

The main page for Wings Press is here.

Albuquerque Cultural Conference (2011)

2011-09-03T22:37:00.004-05:00

Last weekend I attended the Albuquerque Cultural Conference, the third time I've been to the conference. (I previously attended in 2007, and wrote about it in this blog, here; and in 2008, and wrote about it in this blog here.) Once again it was a great experience.

The conference began with a reading/performance by 17 poets and musicians on Friday evening August 26; then panel discussions and presentations took place on Saturday and Sunday August 27 and 28. The Friday reading was at the Outpost Performance Space. The rest of the conference events were at the Harwood Art Center, where the conference has taken place each of the previous years.

The conference is organized not as a standard academic conference; each year of the conference, the content of the events has generally been politically conscious, with a strong emphasis on recovering and encouraging and making working-class people's culture, and on understanding the political and economic conditions of the world that often make such cultural work difficult. Organizers of the conference each year have included John Crawford, publisher of West End Press (and a longtime friend), and Leslie Fishburn Clark, with a cadre of energetic volunteers in the Albuquerque area and elsewhere.

I flew to Albuquerque on Thursday the 25th, to settle in and connect with people, and to have a little time to adjust to the altitude. (Albuquerque is more than 4000 feet higher than Minneapolis where I live.) I stayed at the Hotel Blue on the western edge of downtown Albuquerque, on Central Avenue (part of the famous old Route 66), about a mile from Harwood center. Several other conference participants stayed there too, and we had good conversation in the hotel breakfast room in the mornings before the conference got underway each day.

The poets and musicians who read in the Friday evening event were Bryce Milligan (who read poems and also sang and played guitar), Margaret Randall, Jessica Helen Lopez, Robert Bohm, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jason Yurcic, Cherríe Moraga, Mary Oishi with musician Zenobia (Oishi sang gospel and blues songs, accompanied by Zenobia who played piano and also sang); and, in the second half of the program, Michael Henson (who read poems and also sang and played guitar), Gerald McCarthy, Sasha Pimentel Chacon, Anya Achtenberg, Lisa Gill, Nasser M. Khan, Hakim Bellamy and Carlos Contreras. Poets Lisa Gill and Nasser Khan also served as emcees for the reading; they read short quotes from a variety of other writers each time they introduced the poets who were reading. Several of the poets (Jessica Helen Lopez, Jason Yurcic, Lisa Gill, Nasser Khan, Hakim Bellamy, and Carlos Contreras) have been active in the poetry slam and spoken word/performance scene in Albuquerque. Bellamy and Contreras finished the event with a joint reading in which they read in tandem, first one, then the other, sometimes reading together in unison.

Altogether I found the Friday reading just stunning. One great poem after another. The Outpost Performance Space is a comfortable and fairly intimate theater room, with good lighting and acoustics. It was a good spot to have the reading.

Most of the Saturday and Sunday events were panel discussions, more or less, though the atmosphere was mostly more relaxed than the words "panel discussion" usually suggest. The panels and other presentations were organized broadly around the themes of dealing with cultural trauma and responding effectively with resilience.

Among the conference events I found particularly compelling were a panel titled Cultures of Violence: The Conflict over the Border, Racism, and Homophobia, with panelists Mary Oishi, Roberto Rodriguez, Celia Herrera Rodriguez, and Kamala Platt, and moderator Margaret Randall, the first event on Saturday morning; a panel titled The Power of Literacy: Reading, Writing and Living as a Community, with panelists Melissa Jameson, Genevieve Garcia de Mueller, Rebecca Sherry, and Kati O'Donnell, with moderator Brian Hendrickson, the first panel on Sunday; and a panel a little later on Sunday titled Prison Writing and Performance, with panelists Carlos Contreras, Amanda Gardner, Michele Welsing, and Gerald McCarthy, with moderador Brent Pulsipher. I also really liked the presentation on Saturday by Cherríe Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodriguez, in which they showed an edited video of a performance of one of Moraga's theater works, dealing with violence against women and the possibilities of response and healing, as individuals and as a culture.

I found a number of the other conference events valuable too. A full llist of the panels and presenters is in the Albuquerque Cultural Conference website, here. In general, with all of the conference events, the discussion from the general gathering was lively and energetic once the panelists had finished their initial presentations.

What I usually find most important in events such as the conference are the chances to get to know the other people there, and to reconnect with friends who live scattered far and wide. Thursday after I got into town, lunch with longtime poet and writer friend Fred Whitehead. (The above link is to an article by Fred, "Beliefs and Ethics Reconsidered," in the website Community of Reason KC.) At the Friday reading, a chance to talk briefly with poet friend Lorna Dee Cervantes, who had to hurry back to San Francisco the next day for the wedding celebration of her younger brother. Longtime friends writer Margaret Randall and artist Barbara Byers. Writer Demetria Martinez. Poets Mike Henson and Robert Bohm. I was pleased to meet face to face with poet Gerald McCarthy, whose book Trouble Light I've written about in this blog, here. And longtime poet friend Anya Achtenberg -- because of our lives and schedules, in recent years Anya and I have tended to run into each other more often at out-of-town events such as the conference, even though we both live in Minneapolis.

Saturday evening after a conference dinner and a keynote talk by Michelle Hall Kells, there was another reading by about a dozen poets, again with a bit of music also. Some of the poets had also read in the Friday evening reading, and some hadn't. I unfortunately don't have a complete list of the people who read Saturday evening: poets and musicians included Bryce Milligan (Bryce is also the publisher of the excellent Wings Press), Fred Whitehead, Mike Henson, Jules Nyquist, Laura Fillmore, Anya Achtenberg, myself, Nasser Khan, Don McIver (who also emceed a panel on Sunday afternoon on spoken word and performance poetry), Robert Bohm, Gerald McCarthy, a woman named Ellen whose last name I unfortunately don't remember (if I can track it down I'll come back and edit this), and one or two other people. The reading went well, even with some palpable fatigue in the room after a day of fairly intense conference discussion.

On Friday morning Fred Whitehead, artist Laura Fillmore and I visited the New Mexico Holocaust and Intolerance Museum, on Central Avenue in Albuquerque on the west side of downtown. The museum, seen from the street, is a modest-looking place, basically a storefront at street level. Inside, the space is given over to carefully prepared exhibits dealing with many aspects of the Holocaust in Europe in the 20th century; also with the long systematic genocide perpetrated by the U.S. government against Native American people; and slavery in the United States, and the history of horrific medical atrocities and "experiments" conducted on various populations of African-American people in the United States, with various government and institutional support; also an exhibit on the genocides in the early 20th century by the government and military of Turkey against Armenian and Greek populations; and other material and information. Historical timelines. Photographs. Identification documents of people who died in the concentration camps. An exhibit of artwork by a young girl who died in Auschwitz. A map of the United States showing ancestral lands of Native American people and the reservations that are presently marked out across the country. An exhibit on the mass murder done by the U.S. government at Wounded Knee, and on the history of forced removal of Native American people from the land where they lived.

Such a place as the museum, and the information and exhibits it contains, often leaves me silent and numb. I did respond with some silence and numbness, though more than that, I found myself moved to thought. We should feel the horror that such exhibits bring to the forefront of our attention; more than that, we should understand that we may be in a position to act to help prevent such things from continuing or recurring. We talked for a few minutes with a man and woman who were staffing the museum, and the man (who introduced himself with his first name Michael) suggested that if we took away just one thing from the museum, it should be this: that the people who perpetrated the Holocaust, and the other terrible histories the museum's exhibits tell about, were ordinary people, ordinary human beings. They were not inhuman or superhuman monsters. They were affected, in ways that carried unspeakable consequences, by ideas that were present in the times and places in which they lived.

I take this to mean that we have a responsibility to act in any ways we can to oppose the actions and ideas that lead to such history as the museum illuminates. We can't allow ourselves to become silent, in a time and a world in which silence becomes complicity with those who would commit atrocities, and with those who would tolerate such actions, or who would look the other way. We are part of history, and history isn't over yet.

Very much of the discussion during the Cultural Conference, it seems to me, related to questions of how best to take part of the making and movement of history. As writers, artists, musicians, there is much we can do. When an attorney general speaks of "enhanced interrogation," and really means torturing human beings; when a senator speaks of "reforming entitlements," and really means making thousands more people homeless; when a president talks about the need to make "tough choices," and really means another 10,000 workers will lose their jobs in the near future; when a random government or corporate bureaucrat talks about the "terrorist threat," and really means that air force bombers are going to drop bombs on a village because an oil company wants the land for a pipeline; we have a responsibility to expose these words and actions for what they are, in any of the ways we know how, and to offer this exposure and reality to anyone who is willing to listen, even in cases where it may shatter some long-held illusions about the sort of society and culture and world we live in.

*

Sunday evening after the official conference events had finished, a handful of us gathered at the home of John Crawford in Albuquerque for a relaxed evening of more good talk. Each time I've been to Albuquerque it has rained once; as we sat talking in John's back yard, clouds mulled overhead and lightning ripped spectacularly in the distance in several directions, wind bristled the tree leaves, here and there a few sprinkles of rain; then, just as we were all standing up getting ready to leave, the rain really started coming down, not quite a cloudburst but steady with large drops. After about ten minutes it let up.

The days were warm during the weekend of the conference, the sky mostly clear and bright. The strong sharp light in the high desert, in the mountain altitudes. Each morning the sunrise a pale glow above the Sandias to the east of the city.

*

I took home a few books from the book tables at the conference:

Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes, published 2011 by Wings Press.

The Stories of Devil-Girl by Anya Achtenberg, a book of short interwoven prose works, part fiction, part autobiography, part memoir; published 2008 by Modern History Press (ordering information is available in Achtenberg's website, here).

Always Messing with them Boys, book of poems by Jessica Helen Lopez, published 2011 by West End Press.

A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness by Cherrie Moraga, a collection of essays, published 2011 by Duke University Press.

I also found, in a small used bookstore in Albuquerque, Freud by Other Means by Gene Frumkin, book of poems published 2002 by La Alameda Press.

*

Based on discussion at the end of the conference, it appears likely that there will be another Albuquerque Cultural Conference next year. I already want to go.

The main page of the Albuquerque Cultural Conference website is here. The Conference blog is here.

Poet Roy McBride

2011-08-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

Poet Roy McBride died July 29, a week ago today, of multiple health problems (some of which were effects of Alzheimer's disease), at age 67. Roy was for a large part of his life a huge presence and driving force in the local poetry scene here in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He published only a couple of books of poems that I know of -- one long out of print, and one (which I haven't seen) a letterpress limited edition. He was known mainly as an oral poet, a poet of great skill with improvisation and a quietly electrifying presence when he read poems to audiences. * (See the note regarding the CD and DVD of him below at the bottom of the article.)

I first heard Roy McBride read probably about 1976, at Walker Community Church in Minneapolis, a church that for decades has given over much of its space to community organizations and activities. Sometime around then Roy organized a poetry writing group at the Pillsbury-Waite community center in Minneapolis, and I began taking part. We met Wednesday evenings, more or less weekly, around eight or ten of us initially, and gradually a few more people began showing up sometimes. We would write and read our poems together, and from time to time we did group readings at various places around the community and the city at large.

Besides Roy, other participants I remember from that time are Jim Dochniak, Linda Bryant, Kevin O'Rourke, Ivory Giles, Ruth Magler, Dale Handeen, Steve Linsner (he was also involved with the local Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater; Heart of the Beast is still around and is one of the main organizers of the large May Day parade here each spring), and myself; around the time I began showing up, poets Etheridge Knight and Mary McAnally began participating. Sometime after that poet Mike Finley started coming, and poet Mary Karr (now the author of several bestseller memoirs, and still writing poetry). I'm sure I'm forgetting some people.

One sweltering hot Wednesday evening, sometime in July 1976, five of us (Roy, Kevin, Mary, Steve and I) got on a bus in south Minneapolis headed toward downtown at evening rush hour, and began reading poems to the bus riders. (Roy had talked to the driver about it ahead of time, so he wouldn't think a bunch of people were going crazy on his bus.) The bus was fortunately air-conditioned, a good thing on a July evening. People on the bus were agape and thrilled and spellbound. People's jaws dropped and their eyes widened like the moon. We took turns reading, whoever had a poem ready. People clapped, offered comments, a few people stayed on the bus two and three blocks past their regular stops to finish listening to our poems. It was joyful and giddy.

We rode the bus through downtown to the north end of the route, then rode back the other way, planning to do the same thing. Only it turned out it was the evening of the Aquatennial parade (Aquatennial is an annual summer event in Minneapolis, made up mainly of water sports on the lakes and a couple of parades), and the bus quickly became packed with talkative smiling people going downtown to the parade, and it was so noisy we couldn't hear ourselves talk. So the reading on the way back was a washout. Oh well. We got off the bus at the same place we'd gotten on, a half block from the community center, in time for the regular Wednesday evening gathering of the poetry group.

The group continued meeting for a year or so; eventually our energies and lives became somewhat dispersed, and the group more or less stopped of its own accord. A few years later Roy published a book of poems, Levi Strauss, You've Left Your Mark on the Ass of America and Other Poems of the Seventies (Animal Press, 1982), which has been out of print for decades. I still have the book, and I spent time with it again during the past couple of weeks, when I first heard that Roy was seriously ill, and then in the days after I heard the news of his death. All of the quoted passages below are from that book.

His poems often have a joyful audacity, socially and politically aware and keen-edged, poems of great tender compassion and vulnerability. Often his poems bring a kind of fearless humor mixed with the political seriousness and ecstatic vision. Here are some lines from the long title poem "Levi Strauss, You've Left Your Mark on the Ass of America":

The anguished scream
The anguished dream of America
The battles joined
The New York Mets vs The Chicago Seven
The Kansas City Chiefs vs the Minnesota Eight
Who can win these games
Who can make rules that will make a dream come true
American emerges as a giant wet dream
full of life
full of death
The Black Panthers stalk the New York Yankees
to Lincoln Center sponsored by Leonard Bernstein

* * *

Men are allegedly killing men
in front of billions of people
Men driving straight into death
fasten their seatbelts
so that their insurance policies
will cover them
with a green mantle of American dollars
Men are locking their most prized possessions
in highly tuned bombs
exploding them at midnight
Americans float band-aids
fifty miles square
over tiny villages
to hide where they've been

* * *

Americans from Sioux City Iowa are in the capitols
of Europe are in Japan are in South America
meeting people seeing things
Can't you see Americans
Trees in Iowa plot the death of America
Dandelions sprout in the suburbs
There is no way to stop this yellow menace
Crabgrass is out to overcome all law and order
Sparrows roost in the eaves of your cities
and will not be moved
Each night the fences that hide you from your neighbors
creep inches closer to where you are sleeping

Roy was African-American, born in 1943 in Magnolia, Arkansas, and lived his early years there. When he briefly described the town once, he said that when you would approach the town on the highway, coming up over the hill the first thing you would see was a large painted Confederate flag at the edge of town. His family moved north sometime in the years after the Second World War. Roy moved to Minneapolis in 1968, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul. For many of the years I knew him he worked for a living, at least in part, teaching poetry to kids in grade schools, through the local Poets in the Schools program and through other channels. He worked at a variety of other jobs too over the years.

Roy was physically large, moved with a slow calm, spoke in a relaxed even manner. His voice was fairly high, someone nasal, and tinged with a southern accent that lingered into his later years. He seemed somewhat quiet in conversations, not saying a great deal though always paying close attention. Other people who knew him better than I did have said similar things about him.

They have eyes like the sky.

He reaches into the pools of their eyes; the lakes, the rivers
flowing down Hennepin, up Seventh, on the Mall, in the IDS.

Lonely and scared day. Ice.
We are burning and do the love.
"Hi," he says, "How are you?"

Monuments grew downtown. Are growing. Dream money.
And those with no dreams are given housing. Housing grows
around the edges of the structures and the structures grow
towards the sky and birds of startled eyes flit in the shadows.

He prowls downtown picking up the girls from the small towns;
the farms, working in the offices, the stores, the waitresses,
students. Little white birds of love.

Wounded eyes of history. Light.
Touch in the shadow of the steel beams.
Bright eyes; fields of harvest, fields of flowers,
fields of wildness beside roads.
Dark adventure of morning. Alien landscape.
Creatures of herding anon. And none. And none. Touch. Touch.
Light.

(From the poem "MN City," written in 1976.)

Over the years Roy and various other friends organized further poetry writing and performing groups, in which I also took part. One met for a little while in 1981 at a used book store on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis. Another, a few years later, met for a while at May Day Books, then located in a neighborhood a little south and east of downtown; we informally named the group Poetry for the People, and again did a number of group readings around the city.

The Secretary of Defense
is known in some circles
as "The Casting Director."

For many years now
young traffic victims
and cardiac arrests
are shipped secretly
half-way around the world,
wardrobe people
stepping in the chest
of Richard Smith from Boston
to place a blood uniform
on the stiff body
of Jerry Jones from Topeka
who wilts under the hot sun
of Southeast Asia
for CBS news
a few hours later. [...]

[...] And when the son is missing
men from Washington
rush to the town,
to the hometown of the boy
to brief the family,
relatives and friends
and a history begins.
Old Silas says,
"Yep, I remember the day
Jimmy went into the Marines";
even though Jimmy served him
at Harder's Gas Station
two days before
he dived into the lake
never to see the surface again.

(From the poem "Vietnam -- from a Secret Document," written in 1970.)

Sometime during the early 1980's, Roy McBride collaborated with a local filmmaker and a local dance company, to make a short film titled "Shinder's to Shinder's", a kind of impressionistic and choreographed montage about one city block on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. (The film title referred to the two locations of a bookstore that stood at each end of the block -- the stores, which had been there for many years, sold a mix of cheap paperbacks, newspapers and magazines, and "adult" magazines.) Roy read/spoke/improvised a poem in the film, partly on camera, partly as voice-over; the film showed some documentary-style scenes of the street, and some scenes where dancers did choreographed moves and gestures of people hanging out on the street, asking for spare change, etc.

The film was shown downtown, outdoors at after dark, two weekends in a row, projected on a billboard on the roof of one of the corner bookstores, with large speakers so it was audible over the whole intersection even above the sound of busy Friday and Saturday night traffic. Large crowds gathered for each showing. It was excellent.

Some of Roy's poems are large, evocative of epic (if not literally booklength); others are brief and terse and keenly focused.

We, in shiny steel and chrome,
drive through
the littered streets
past the rotting
houses and stores.

"Ain't no work around here.
Everybody's on welfare.
Your daddy ain't changed.
Your mama's been sick.
You shoulda wrote her.
Boy, you show have changed.
How much you weigh now?"

Getting out of the car
a pool of blood glows
in the dirty snow.
"J.D. cut Willie last night,"
my uncle said.

(From the poem "Home," written in 1972.)

Some number of years ago, Roy and his wife Lucinda Anderson bought a farm in western Wisconsin, and they and their daughter Laci began living there during the summers; they lived in Minneapolis (sometimes house-sitting here) during the rest of the year. In recent years I didn't see or talk with Roy as much as I had in the time prior to that, as we each settled into our lives, though I would hear word of him fairly often through the general grapevine.

During the past year or so I heard news here and there that he might be having health problems, though it was mostly second- and third-hand and without much detail. Then this past month general word went out that he was in the hospital seriously ill. I was able to make it to the hospital to visit him briefly -- he recognized me as soon as I came into the room, though the rest of the conversation went in every possible direction, and he was in obvious pain at times. Lucinda was there and we talked for a little while. It was a good visit, even as difficult as it was to see a longtime friend in pain and struggling for life.

And as it turned out, it was the last time I saw Roy. He died four days later.

News of his death went like a wave through the local poetry world here -- people telling their stories and recollections of Roy, shaken at the news that he's gone. The family is talking about having a memorial for him, maybe in September, though no date or specific plans have been set yet. It sounds like there may also be a poetry gathering at some point in remembrance and celebration of Roy and his work -- nothing definite yet, and there is still much talk going about the idea. I'm guessing something will take shape eventually.

Because Roy McBride published few books and in small editions, his work is hard to find in print; however there is a good CD available of him reading his poems, and a DVD of him released within the past year or two.

The CD is Traffic, compiled from tapes originally recorded in about 1985; Roy reads his poems accompanied by Minneapolis musician Willie Murphy playing keyboard. Willie Murphy, who also produced the CD, is locally renowned the bandleader and keyboard player of Willie and the Bumblebees (later Willie and the Bees); among their memorable credits, they were the band on Bonnie Raitt's first album, which Willie also produced. The CD is available in Willie Murphy's website, here (in the row of CD's pictured in the page, it's the one furthest to the right.) The CD includes the printed text of the poems.

The DVD is A Poet Poets, produced by Mike Hazard. The DVD is available from Hazard's Center for International Education (the CIE) in St. Paul, here. I watched the DVD for the first time within the past couple of weeks, and I love it.

Many other excellent poetry videos are also available from the CIE; the main page of the website is here. Also in the main page, if you scroll down to the entry dated August 1, 2011, there's a brief item about Roy McBride with some additional details about his life.

I'll finish with a few more lines from one of his poems. Each time I read this one, I'm almost startled by the absolute raw openness, the undisguised tenderness and pain and simple honesty in the poem.

I am lost
in the shop
of Central Junior High
trying to finish
the electric motor
the other guys finished
in seventh grade.
Perhaps my mechanical ability
can only be found
in the mountains
of the moon [...]
[...] I was eighteen
before my first signs
appeared in the mirror.
That was three years
after I stopped dreaming
of muscles.
I would be ugly,
but I like
being beautiful more.
Your body
like a warm machine
encased in leather
moves through
the icy air
of Minnesota.
You are my dream
of love,
but I
am no good
with my hands.

(From the poem "Love Song for Debra Wiley," written in 1972.)

Remain here to imagine

2011-07-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

I recently re-read The Red Window, the first book of poems by Marianne Aweagon Broyles (West End Press, 2008). These are quiet poems of patient observation, poems of great compassion and presence. Broyles' poems resonate with a deep organic connection with the earth, and an instinctive feeling for the lives and realities of the people close to her and around her.

I first met Marianne in 2007 at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference that year, and we've met face to face a couple of times since, and have traded e-mails once or twice. She lives in Albuquerque, where she works as a psychiatric nurse. The biographical note in her book says that she spent her early childhood in Boston and Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and grew up in Tennessee; that she is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation; and that she graduated from Emory University.

A number of poems in The Red Window (from which all quoted passages here are taken) offer sharp portraits of people Broyles has met. Her poems reveal a keen sense for listening and hearing people, both their actual words and the heartbeat moving softly within the words. From the poem "Mohawk Horse Breaker":

His eyes shift focus from me
toward the ceiling
as he reaches for memory.
How do you break them? I ask.
Philip laughs. You just stay on.
When I was nine, I was breakin horses
with men who were twenty.
Then his eyes darken over --
stars covered by a bank of storm clouds --
as Philip leaves the moment
and returns where he lies now. He releases a sigh,
the same kind of sigh
exhausted Pintos must have
let go under his craggy weight.

All human activity takes place within the context of all other human activity -- within the context of history. All human activity is political, we act in this context of history. I find that in general poems speak to me with the greatest power and clarity when they are written with at least a basic awareness of this historical context.

Broyles' poem "American Revolution" begins with a dedication, "In honor of Popay (San Juan Pueblo), instigator of the Pueblo Revolt, 1680." At the beginning of the poem, Broyles explains that in the days leading up to the revolt, the Pueblo people used knots tied in a rope as a kind of code to pass clandestine message among themselves.

Each knot represented a day until the revolt.
The runners you sent knew, too, that what could
be counted, what could be seen and held,
could transcend language.

When the last knot was reached
the time arrived. Like night dissolving
for daybreak, human blood not
labeled Spanish or Pueblo melt
in the earth for liberation.
To abandon mines of prosperity,
to walk their land without fear.

Your people kept knowing they'd wake
in a different world.
Tell me, since your statue won't,
where did you wake?

One of the qualities I especially notice in Broyles' poems is how thoroughly she is immersed in what she is writing about.(I think, by comparison, of the many poems I've read over the years -- expecially those fueled by the various dominant aesthetics of university creative writing programs -- that seem to move in a contrary direction, seeming to put as much distance as possible between the poet and the poem, as though one were not related to the other.)

I hear this kind of immersion and intimacy in the following lines, from Broyles' poem "Shell Shakers (Never Stop Dancing)":

I use cans tonight instead of turtle shells, which John's father says
could be filled with ghosts.
I wonder what the cans held before -- tomato soup,
green beans, peaches, hominy, pickled beets?

John helps me lace the cans so they'll stay on my shins.
Then I'm ready.
My feet sweep/sweep/sweep/
lift/lift/lift. I concentrate to keep the rhythm
because it's been such a long time.

But the cans slip, begin to cut. I study feet ahead of me, who
move with strength, with certainty. Whose cans stay on their
shins, where they belong.
I try to concentrate on the burning wood, the hot sparks,
try to be tougher.
Finally I step out. John sees the shakers
down on my feet. I feel their heaviness.

He ties them tighter, tighter but they slip
over and over as if they really want to touch
this ground, full of rock and water and the shells of our ancestors
where it is always night and somewhere else
spirits like us form a great water serpent
and, no matter what, never stop dancing.

To be political, whether in a poem or in any other aspect of life, really is just to live with an awareness of what's going on around us, in the same room, in the same city or valley, on the same prairie or ocean shore, on the earth on which we walk. What happens somewhere else on the earth also happens here. The borders of countries are fictions, lines on a map, property deeds. We do not own the earth, we cannot buy it and sell it; it embraces us, gives us a home, waits in the greatest abiding.

Inside the Blue Window Bistro, diners
admire the bright decor and the patio -- a jungle
of flowers beaded by a drizzle.
There is little talk of the anniversary of
the bomb on Hiroshima sixty long years ago.
Rather, it is a happy and busy place here.
Regulars laugh, drink French-pressed coffee.

Then a small group enters, their silence out of place here.
A Japanese woman in a red kimono leads them
through an open door to the patio garden.
The rain has stopped. Its brief visit to the desert
is done. The clouds break and go their own way.
No one really notices the changing weather,
just like we don't notice the quiet gathering.

Except they all carry a single sunflower.

Running through all of Marianne Broyles' poems is an explicit sense of the power and importance of memory, of keeping memory alive, of speaking it out loud. The cultures that attempt to govern the world in our time attempt to persuade us to forget, to forget who we are and where we have come from, and so also to lose sight of where we are going, to lose sight of our own capacity (as individuals and as a collective) to make choices and act together. We are not just passive observers. History is not the personal property of those who would plunder and destroy the earth and all life on it. We are here and we are real.

I'll finish with some lines from the poem "Bettie Dunback Does Not Rest Here," which begins with the dedication, "For my great-great-grandmother, Bettie Dunback, who survived the Cherokee Removal, also known as 'The Trail of Tears,' as a young girl."

We leave a hanging basket of striped petunias
by her headstone for our own
who walked the Trail as a girl.
We know the flowers won't stay for long.
They will soon be an offering for the living
or moved from grave to grave.
I don't think Bettie would mind too much.
She's not here beneath this plot marked
by an obelisk engraved with vines
that climb away from this earth.

We remain here to imagine.

On the roads of exploded continents

2011-07-05T00:07:00.000-05:00

For some time I've wanted to write something here about poet Don Gordon, whose Collected Poems, edited by Fred Whitehead, was published in 2004 by University of Illinois Press. Gordon was one of the "Marsh Street Irregulars," a group of poets in Los Angeles in the 1950's and early 1960's who gathered poet Thomas McGrath, when McGrath lived in L.A. during those years. In a note on the back of the book, McGrath (quoted posthumously) calls Gordon "One of the very best of the revolutionary poets."

The Collected Poems gathers work from six collections published during Gordon's lifetime (he lived 1902-1989). The book also includes an in-depth essay by editor Fred Whitehead, giving an account of Gordon's life and a detailed discussion of his work. Gordon was born in Connecticut; his family moved to Los Angeles when he was ten years old, where he lived into his young adult years. He published six books of poems during his lifetime; three between 1943 and 1960, and three more between 1977 and the end of his life. Starting sometime in the late 1920's, he worked for many years in the film industry, reading novels for possible development into movies.

Don Gordon joined the Communist Party sometime around 1932, and he and his wife Henriette Gordon (known as Henrie) became involved in labor organizing and similar activities. In 1951, the screenwriter Martin Berkeley, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), named a large number of people in the movie business as Communists, Gordon among them. (In his essay, Whitehead cites the Los Angeles Times and HUAC hearing transcripts as the source of this information.) When Gordon was called before HUAC later that same year, he refused to cooperate or give information about anyone else. Shortly after that he was fired from his job at MGM, and found that he had been effectively blacklisted from the movie industry.

During the next years, Gordon eventually found work assisting doctors in a clinic for people with psychiatric problems, and he subsequently did various similar work in a couple of other such facilities. During this time he largely stopped writing poetry, resuming only later in his life; this apparently accounts for the gap of many years between his third and fourth books of poems.

In Don Gordon's poems I find a lyricism of astonishing directness, rising at times to a resonance that evokes the voices of Old Testament prophecy, often while maintaining the immediacy and urgency of news dispatches. These are poems of great gravity by a poet organically engaged with the world.

Now imminent on earth the enemy in tunics; hussars have taken the mainlands.
It is the lost season west of the red star but our years
Rumble on caissons -- subterrain, the single muscle, the manifold heart.

Berlin applauds the opera. The war below gives passwords
Through quiet doors -- the press turns urgently in oil.
Nights are alive ten paces under Brandenburg Gate: mornings rise
Beyond bayonets -- but the walls speak. They will break the bronze horses.

Herr Strauss relieves the capital: wine is taken in Vienna
Boldly by light, the howitzers drawn in the lair. Yet they remember
The Karl Marx -- the detonations still in ghostly Floridsdorf:
They build now, from their black case upward, on sturdier rock.

Hussars on Caesar's road but there are seven hills in Rome,
The guardsmen dream at intervals. They spread fire in the dark,
Knowing the jagged forum dead, seeing no god great in the empire.
They ferment in catacombs -- some will bear witness at the graves of giants.

(From the poem "Underground, 1935", in Gordon's Collected Poems, from which all quoted passages here are taken. The above poem was originally included in Gordon's book Statement, published in 1943.)

In many of his poems Gordon works at interweaving psychological insights into the actions of human beings with a larger depiction of the political events of the world. In his use of language, the emotional landscapes of human beings become political and historical landscapes as well. All human activity exists in a historical context.

The quality of nightmare is incomplete: on the roads
of exploded continents, real bones are moving
the prisoners like a tropism in the homeward direction.

The family is instructed to receive them calmly in surburban houses;
The public cry is raised at the sight of dislocations;
The protruding ribs, displayed for nine days, are buried in the archives.

The blue welts are the map of the region from which they came.
The kommandants touched off the final mines under the human relationship.
Dachau Belson Maidanek Cabanatuan hide in the wounded lights.

The enemy began as men; they receded to the time of the little horses;
They vanished with the lizards on the bare shore; the last glimpse
Was like the single cell, the uncolored jelly pulsing in the sea.

(From the poem "The Prisoners," originally included in Gordon's book Civilian Poems, published in 1946.)

In many poems Gordon begins with a description almost mythological in texture, which transforms into a sharp image of modern life, the muscular movement of history, as the poem progresses. I find this in some lines in the poem "The Hunted" (originally included in his book Displaced Persons, published in 1958):

The one who walks in the river is the constant man.
He hides his footprint from the dogs:
engraved like a leaf in the black stone,
the fossil is to amaze another time.

Shapeless, duly malignant, blind as a fog,
the epoch is a wild thing intent on the kill
before he gives it form: direction: heart.

The second constant is the border police;
they have business in the mountains.
Someone is always cutting the wire, the shadow
of thought is always at the edge of the forest.

He considered the meek, or said the earth was round;
he taught the young men in the cypress grove, or listed
the ape's ascending bone; he entered the dream
and saw the indelicate mother, or imagined continents,
or found laws in the lungs of the English weavers.

Reading the above lines, I mentally weigh them beside the assorted philosophical musings that stir in many of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke -- one poet who comes to mind. To my perceptions, Gordon's poems are iron hand tools in comparison to Rilke's porcelain relics. While I enjoy Rilke's work on occasion, and can appreciate the seriousness with which he embarked on his voyages into the realms of the spirit, I speculate, thinking about this, what sort of poet Rilke might have been, had he touched his hands to the earth a bit more firmly on from time to time.

Consider the following lines in the context of the news headlines on any given day in the past ten or twenty or fifty years.

When the war begins
It seems to have reasons;
An hour, a day, a week later,
No one can recall them.

The field of violence remains;
The demolition of children;
The life of the back wards.

Strategy arises in the ego of the king,
Tactic in the anxiety of the general.
Someone is always giving orders
Out of his secret depths.

The commander-in-chief, at the mercy
Of his childhood, prolongs the battle
To conquer his father and/or mother.

The officer with the recurrent dream
Takes his ship into the sea of mines
To relieve the guilt-ridden.

The squadron leader, who never made it
Among equals, wipes them out
With the huts of colored strangers.

(From the poem "History," originally included in Gordon's book On the Ward, published in 1977.)

I'm still amazed when I encounter, even now, poets who feel that politics is not a legitimate subject for poetry, that poetry should have no part of politics. One might as well say that poetry should have no relevance to life.

(As I sit here typing this, outside are the sporadic distant booms of bombs bursting in air, fireworks over the Mississippi River on the northern edge of downtown Minneapolis on a warm July night.)

Again, consider some lines from the poem "Statues" (originally included in Gordon's book Excavations, published in 1979):

Who occupied whole continents
Now sit on iron benches
In the plaza of a hundred lands.
The parts not missing in action
Want to explain themselves
To the young --

Who do not believe in the great valor
Of a year they have not seen:
Old wrecks are always speaking
Of enormous tides
To attract and skewer another generation.

The veins quiver in their temples,
They try to remember
The reason for the war;
Or if the victory was confused with defeat;
Or defeat with the music of triumph
In the smoke
Of the splintering forest of guns.

I didn't know Don Gordon personally, and never had the opportunity to meet him. I knew of him for quite a few years before I tracked down any of his books of poems, having heard of him from Tom McGrath (both directly from Tom, during the time I knew him a little, and also through the poems and published interviews where Tom mentions him), and from several friends who knew Tom better than I did. Fred Whitehead, who edited Gordon's Collected Poems and wrote the critical essay at the end of the book, has been a longtime friend. The network and friendship of left-wing political poets and writers and artists tends to be wide-flung and deeply rooted and tenacious, even in the face of the occasional ideological breaks that can occur. And history isn't over yet.

Tom McGrath told, once or twice in interviews, that at one point during the late 1950's he was thinking about writing a long poem -- he thought it might turn out to be 15 or 20 pages. He showed up at one of the regular gatherings of the cluster of poets who were gravitating toward each other (the "Marsh Street" crowd, mentioned above), and he mentioned his notion of a long poem, but said he didn't know how to get started on it. And, as Tom has told it, Don Gordon said, "Well, what you do is, you go home and you sit down and you write the first line." Simple enough advice.

So McGrath (again as he has told it) took Gordon's advice, sat down and wrote the line that came to him: "From here it is necessary to ship all bodies east." Readers familiar with it will recognize this as the first line of what became McGrath's booklength epic poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend. (Sections of the poem were published periodically over the years; by the early 1980's the complete poem was available in two volumes, from two separate publishers; in the late 1990's a definitive one-volume edition of Letter to an Imaginary Friend was published by Copper Canyon Press.)

I tell this to give a little of my own sense of the importance Don Gordon and Tom McGrath played in each other's lives as poets, and the long close friendship between them. I would like to have had the opportunity to have met Don Gordon. I'm grateful that his Collected Poems is now available.

Gordon's book is one of several that have been published as part of the American Poetry Recovery Series of U. of Illinois Press. I searched the press's website, but didn't find a specific list of the books included in the series, even though the website gives links to many other series published by the press. Other books in the series that I've seen and recommend include collections of poems by Edwin Rolfe (a close friend of Tom McGrath and Don Gordon), Joseph Kalar, Vincent Ferrini, and The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War edited by Cary Nelson.

I'll finish with lines from one more of Don Gordon's poems.

Born in the galaxy of despair,
It will come without a name
Unless it is the star of compassion,
Or tenderness,
One beast to another.

It has to fall a timeless distance:
We need eons to prepare for it
After this savage childhood.
The hostile eye, unable to bear
That incandescence,
Will close in the dark and the dying
Of the angry mind.

It will be in us and around us
Like air and water,
Like a great calm,
Like the embrace
Of the father and mother of the sun.

(From the poem "Light," originally included in Gordon's book "The Sea of Tranquility," published in 1989.)

Closing the Hotel Kitchen

2011-06-16T23:12:00.001-05:00

I recently finished reading Closing the Hotel Kitchen, book of poems by Robert Bohm, published this year by West End Press. Tough, hard, raw, spare poems growing in one way or another out of Bohm's experiences in the army during the war in Vietnam -- he was stationed at a military hospital in Germany, and for a year and a half saw close-up the horrific physical and psychic injuries of soldiers who had been in the war -- and also exploring his younger years in the New York area, and the devastating years of aftermath in his life and the world.

Here are some lines from the poem "Pieces after Listening to Tracy Sing":

I'd been drinking for days, ones pissing in a friend's bureau drawer
and another time waking up from a blackout while trying to yank
a clothesline off its pulleys
in the middle of the night in a back yard I didn't recognize.
The straight line I thought I was following
changed into angles untaught
in high school geometry. It was like
the girl Griselle who, in a story
Kathrine once told me, zigzagged
from a house behind a gate into a Bavarian forest where
she died, tracked by the Gestapo.
Hours after I recalled that, my father
and others found me lying on the floor. Orderlies
carried me down the stairs after the doc injected me
with a sleep that turned my eyelids into stale salami slices
on a sandwich even the starving wouldn't eat.
Another lifetime later, I arrived -- here. Look
At me with my snazzy bandoleer. And spit-shined smile.
I'm what every girlie needs: an emissary
from Herr Love's Ubermenschen Army.
She never said it directly, but Kathrine's whole body indicated
patience was the key. [...]

[...] And now mama's dead. As are
well, Dave is, and Elesio, and Kathrine's Griselle, and...
After the firelight, intestines, sliding from blown-open bellies
into groundholes, disappear like enormous parasites
in search of other hosts.
The puke-covered rock's where one whiner couldn't
hold his vision in. Stink
of piss- and shit-missed pants floats from fleshes
triumphantly disconnected from the ego's huntings. As one survivor
snakes through grass, his hand catches on something
thin and soggy. Leaves? He looks down: his fingernails, dragging
across a dead grunt's face, have pulled away
the skin as if peeling away soggy butcher's paper from pounds of ground veal
in a hotel kitchen
that should've been closed by the Board of Health but wasn't.

In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut says that Billy Pilgrim, the central character in the novel, has become "unstuck in time," this after having lived through the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war there. (Vonnegut was himself in Dresden as a prisoner of war when the city was firebombed by the American military.) The character, Billy Pilgrim, time-travels randomly from one moment to another in his life, back and forth through time, never sure where in his life he'll be next. This, it appears, is one of the ways he has "adjusted," learned to live with the unspeakable horrors he saw and experienced during the war.

Many of the poems in Closing the Hotel Kitchen have a similar quality of jump-cutting between moments and places: the speaker in the poem goes to sleep in an apartment in New York, or passes out drunk on a beach, and wakes up in a foxhole in Vietnam next to a dead soldier or is suddenly in the kitchen of his childhood home. Coming and going is one of the ways the human psyche may try to cope with what is presently called post-traumatic stress.

Robert Bohm's wife, Suman Kirloskar, is from India, and Bohm has spent much time in India himself. Many of the poems in the book, intermingled with prose passages, recount some of his travels there, and the gradual breakdown of his mind, the better to build itself back together. This from a prose passage titled "Calingute, 1970":

At the end of the main road that lead to the beach, an old hotel with window balconies from which you can gaze at the sea. Once a favorite refuge for vacationing administrators during the colonial period, it's long been in decline, an aged, storm-beaten artifact of a disappeared era. A place of ghosts now, the rooms smell of mildew and piss. Along the beach, there are a few other buildings -- rickety restaurants, ramshackle bars, tiny fruitjuice stands -- all more in synch than the hotel with the local architecture's simplicity and smallness of scale, which consists primarily of thatch-roofed huts and closet-sized vendors' booths. Is this what the old Vedic chant -- shantih, shantih, shantih -- meant to sum up: the tranquil beauty of the trivial and outmoded? Bushes and trees give birth to a psychosis of tropical color. In the midst of such sultry lushness one might expect to find a burgeoning renewal of the resort idea: modern postcolonial hotels and cottages, entertainment facilities, expensive dining spots. But instead there's the opposite of that: an anti-resort. Each shadow and sunlight expanse teems with hippie expatriates. Wandering nude on the beach, fucking in a dope daze in rundown bungalows, shitting in the shade of coconut trees, toking reefer or shooting horse wherever they want, most of them represent a new tourist group: the drop-out sons and daughters of America's suburbs. "If this is maya, I love maya," Agatha, one of the hippies, says, referring to the Hindu concept of life as illusion. Stoned, she eats a jackfruit -- stoned, her friend Ozzie listens to the sea. But their slow mind-ride through this beachy blissville of steamy light and playful ideas leads me not to answers but only to more questions. What the fuck am I supposed to make of it when the Upanishads say that in the midst of variety "there is no variety" or when they claim that the self "without being born nonetheless appears to be born"? If I don't know what all this means, how can I say I either love or don't love maya or that, when the jungle spider eats the dragonfly, I see nothing because the devouring is only a game of shadows in a shadowless void? So who are the real crazies, anyway, the ones whose good sense disguises a bland imagination or the ones whose non-sense is an atonal sax solo opening holes in a NY loft ceiling a few years after the great dying Coltrane proved to us that we are surrounded by melodies so there, so obvious, that we never hear them?

One poem after another, a startling snapshot, though that's suggests something too superficial -- more like photographs taken from within the moment being photographed, each moment a photograph of itself. In the modern world of relentless corporate news media blather, it can be healing, enlightening, just to touch ground and feel the rough skin of an actual piece of reality, even if it isn't a pretty postcard.

Near the railway station, yesterday's
tea-slurper, and ex-
rickshaw driver, tower sprawled
shawl-like on his shoulders, talks
about steel production, quotas, pace.
"What a way to die!" he rouses
the crowd while men and women
holler in agreement.
Then, another sound. In rigid unison, booted feet drum the ground
as the police, in riot gear, approach. They march
into the mob, swinging
lathis as if each banged skull is a temple gong ringing
with Vedic truth. The woman
with the four-fingered hand shrieks
as she throws a rock.
Above the street, a raven caws from a power line. Shrill
rickshaw horns cut through
meaning's densities. A child
reads a book at a bus stand while
only a half block away
a man with gashed brow slithers on his belly toward
a Hindi song blaring in a movie theater that isn't there anymore.

(From the poem "Two Days ... Shimoga".)

I first met Robert Bohm, more or less, a few years ago when he found this blog, and we've traded e-mails from time to time since then; it appears we have at least one or two mutual friends scattered around the country. We met face to face for the first time this past winter at the AWP conference in Washington, D.C., and had a chance to chat a bit while he was hanging out at the bookfair at the table of his publisher West End Press. I've enjoyed our occasional e-mails, and it was a pleasure to meet in person finally; I'd had Closing the Hotel Kitchen in hand shortly before we met last February, though at the time had only had a chance to read a little of it.

As I read the book, I kept wanting to have copies of it given out to everyone who listens to a sales pitch from a military recruiter. Copies should be handed out in every high school history class. Copies of Closing the Hotel Kitchen should be handed out in every fundamentalist church.

Four a.m. Mommy in her wheelchair
bumps and bangs into walls, wondering where she is.
Before I stumble in drunk from outside,
she gasps, has a heart attack, dies.
Sept 6 and hot; I stink of creosote
and in 3 hours have to go to work.
While she turns cold downstairs, I crawl into bed on the second floor.
When I wake, it's two lousy decades later
in a Yonkers motel.
I turn on the cassette: Gladys Knight & The Pips.
In the State Hospital, and empty room awaits
Mat's grandson, me.
"Chewed correctly," I write that morning in a notebook,
"the fat spider bursts, a sweet berry in your mouth."
"Yeah, sure!" someone quips in one
of my flights of imagination.

(From the poem "Paradise Boogaloo".)

The poems in Closing the Hotel Kitchen create, in stunning manner, the tactile visceral experience of life in the constant emergency room of the time in which we live. Word explosions lie in every page waiting to go off. Every poem an alarm clock jolting the world of shadows and murk to pieces. "Think," wrote poet Thomas McGrath, "in your dream of life,/ Into what you will awaken!"

I'll finish here with some lines from the poem "Endless War":

From one acre of rice paddies to another.
The freighter's boilers clank, drowning out
behind me
a dead grunt's hi to paradise.

Weeks later, waves crash, vomiting froth onto sand while the wind
bends palm trees and the mind
creaks.

Seated on the beach, I remove a curried fish
from the newspaper sheet in which it's wrapped
and eat it with my hands.

Under palm fronds thin men, talking among themselves,
walk home from manganese mines at day's end.
I sleep in an abandoned shed.
Before dawn, the macaw screeches.
I get up.

Later, the beach in first light.
Receding waves leave bits
of foam on the sand. Bubble'
by tiny bubble, they disappear.

I recommend Closing the Hotel Kitchen by Robert Bohm.

Perfect Dragonfly

2011-05-29T18:39:00.000-05:00

Red Dragonfly Press has published Perfect Dragonfly, an anthology of poems, compiled by publisher Scott King, drawn from the books and poem broadsides (well over 100 of them) that the press published over the past decade and a half.

Perfect Dragonfly includes the work of more than 60 poets, including Floyce Alexander, John Balaban, Marianne Boruch, Marjorie Buettner, Philip Dacey, Lyle Daggett, Robert Edwards, Louise Erdrich, Dave Etter, Larry Gavin, Jane Graham George, Sid Gershgoren, Albert Goldbarth, Vicki Graham, Linda Hasselstrom, Robert Hedin, Dale Jacobson, Maggie Jaffe, Diane Jarvenpa, Louis Jenkins, Jim Johnson, Athena Kildegaard, Dorianne Laux, James P. Lenfestey, Freya Manfred, David Martinson, Joseph Millar, E. Ethelbert Miller, Joe Paddock, Nancy Paddock, Roger Parish, John Calvin Rezmerski, Edith Rylander, Thomas R. Smith, David Steingass, Joyce Sutphen, Barton Sutter, Thom Tammaro, Mark Vinz, Michael Walsh, Drew Weis, Morgan Grayce Willow, Timothy Young, Marilyn Zuckerman... among many others.

Perfect Dragonfly also includes an informative Introduction by publisher Scott King, and a full bibliography of the poetry, prose, translations and other work the press has published since it became active in 1994.

By way of full disclosure, Red Dragonfly Press is the publisher of three of my books of poems, and will be bringing out another collection of mine, All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems, in the near future.

This past Wednesday, at Monkey See Monkey Read bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota (a little south of Minneapolis), I took part in a reading from the anthology with several other poets: Timothy Young, John Calvin Rezmerski, Larry Gavin, Drew Weis (all of whom have poems in the collection), as well as J.L. (Jenny) Conrad and Fereydoun Faryad, both of whom have been spending time this past month at Anderson Center for the Arts near Red Wing, Minnesota, where Red Dragonfly Press is located. It was a lively energetic reading, a lot of good poems, with a warm enthusiastic audience. A couple of other readings from the anthology have also taken place in this region in the past month.

The publisher's webpage for the book is here.

The deepest drum

2011-05-18T22:57:00.000-05:00

For some time now I've wanted to talk about Work Is Love Made Visible, a book of poems by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (West End Press, 2009). These are poems of raw spare power and tenderness, deeply rooted in the earth and in all of us who live and work on the earth.

One of the essential tasks of a poet, particularly in the times in which we live right now, is to break through the deadened nerveless language and thought and perception constantly scattered over the daily landscape by the machines of corporate and military bureaucracy. To remake and renew the ways we talk with each other, and the things we say. This is one of the things I found Mish doing again and again in her poems.

From the poem "collateral damage":

look. a small boy is picking up a stone, but it
is a stone made for throwing, not for skipping
he has forgotten how to play
he hurls the stone toward hidden enemies
and wipes away the water in his eye

see. this young woman should be
blossoming but hunger and fatigue have
nipped her budding
she is dirty, her feet blistered from
the miles between bombs and borders
who will light a candle for her
if she withers here in this bare soil

here in the devastated city,
the flower vendor has left the street corner
having no one to lean on, the fresh flowers sign
is swaying madly in the wind

What does it mean to live on the earth? What does it mean to feel the abiding pulse and rhythm of a time and a place? One of the reasons for staying in contact with the living earth around us, of which we are ourselves a living part, is so that we understand that our actions have consequences. As real as the cycles of seed and fallow, rain and drought, our actions will return and meet us, if we know how to pay attention.

gazing skyward, i scan for small metal trail markers
nailed into trees above snowline.
taking moment of silence, i contemplate the reckoning
that snowline is at least twenty feet above my head
and remember that the soaring arches of cathedrals
were designed to imitate the heavens

i place my foot firmly on the well-worn trail
and adjust my body's angle to the slope
my bended knee genuflects toward a white lupine
my meditation centers on all creation
i take my first step. all journeys begin this way.

my song of praise tunes itself to the wind organ
piping along the black edge where basalt meets blue sky
a child's laughter sounds a trumpet
the wind in the pines is the bone whistle's call
my footsteps in scree are a turtle shell rattle,
my heart the deepest drum.

(From the poem "program of worship: mount shasta wilderness sanctuary".)

Placed through the book are several photographs of Mish's family members in years past, richly evocative of the small towns in Oklahoma, and other places, where her family comes from. The poet's great-grandmother sitting on the ground with two young children in her lap, and an older boy, the poet's grandfather, standing nearby in the doorway of their plain wood house: Odell, Marshall County, Oklahoma, ca. 1918. The poet's mother and brother, standing together wearing overalls and hardhats, Seminole, Oklahoma, 1979. The poet's great-great-grandmother, in waitress uniform, standing in front of the Busy Bee Cafe, ca. 1938.

From the poem "Body Snatcher":

I walked by the mirror yesterday and gasped in recognition.
When did your face grow onto mine?
I imagine myself a Body Snatcher,
slowly forming into you in black and white hysteria,
each new line and gray hair sucking a moment of life out of the original.
I am both pleased and frightened by the transformation.
You are still so beautiful yet who will I be if I become you?
I fought so hard to avoid this inevitability.

When I was a child
there were two photographs I always confused,
one is black and white the other color, but otherwise
they seem to be of the same dark-haired big-eyed dreamer child.

Tell me again, momma
which one was me and which you?

Poems that search and probe, catching a story on the prairie breeze, reading signs in the blue line of the horizon. An epic is not just a story of warriors and kings, not just the fable of the idling gods on Olympus. To hold the soil in your hands; to wake up and go to work at 6 in the morning; to sing to a child in the softness of evening; to stand together shaking the gates of the temples of finance and industry, stubborn in our humanity; these also are the cloth of epic, the thread and weave of poetry.

In most of her pictures
my sister is standing by the door
because she's always leaving.
Sometimes she doesn't come back for a while [...]

[...] There are sightings,
as if she were a u.f.o.
She's been caught in Killeen,
married to a soldier,
found in Granger Falls,
waitressing at Denny's,
spotted in Odessa,
dancing at the Wild Cherry.
But mostly she returns
to where we grew up,
a mean withered blight of a town
where she can hide
in the homes of friends
who I never knew and
my mother finds trashy.

To appreciate my sister's sacrifice
it is necessary to understand
that where she goes is not the question;
the question is why she goes
and despite appearances to the contrary
I care why she goes because she goes in my stead.

(From the poem "My Sister's Sacrifice".)

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish edited Ain't Nobody That Can Sing Like Me: New Oklahoma Writing, a wonderful anthology of poetry and prose, published in 2010 by Mongrel Empire Press, of which Mish is the publisher. It includes the work of 78 writers and two visual artists who lived in Oklahoma at the time the anthology was compiled and published. The title is taken from a Woody Guthrie song. Lots of great writing in the collection. I recommend it. (After going to the above link, scroll down a little to the entry for the anthology.) The press has published other fine writing too -- go and check it out.

I'll finish here with lines from another of the poems in Mish's book Work Is Love Made Visible. The light over the land in the oncoming dusk, the call of the open road ahead, the tilt and pause in the quiet face of a friend sitting across the table, the vast maps of memory that stay with us like a wind: who among us, if we still have any life in our hearts, does not know and feel these things. Among the many reasons to read poems is the chance of recognition, of finding something of oneself. I found pieces of myself, like bright weeds springing up along the roadside, in the poems of Jeanetta Mish.

i look like a roadmap, he says,
intending, i suppose, to deflect
any unrealistic expectations of
the power of passing time on
a face i haven't touched in years
but he is forgetting
how i love a road trip
sometimes screaming down the freeway
at 2 am, the bass thumping in the speakers
like the pounding of my heart [...]

[...] i like to slide into
a roadhouse on the county line
have a beer, some barbecue and
a slowdance to the blues
then unfold my beloved roadmap
run my finger along a chosen course
imagine all the s-turns and heaves
glory in the forgotten lanes
and remember that the end
of one journey is the
beginning of another

(From the poem "mapping desire".)

Mysogyny in the poetry slam community

2011-03-26T21:53:00.000-05:00

Found an article online by poet Tatyana Brown, "On 'Asking for it': An Examination of Mysogyny in the Slam Community." It's in the poetry and literary criticism blog Radius, here. I found it interesting a provocative -- I encourage you to go have a look.

The above link is to the specific page with the article. There's much else in Radius worth checking out. The main page is here.

Fog & Woodsmoke

2011-03-14T19:24:00.000-05:00

In the mail today, a contributor copy of Fog & Woodsmoke: behind the image, an anthology of poems and a few short prose works, edited by Stephani Schaefer, just out from Lost Hills Books. Each of the poems and prose pieces in the anthology was written in response to one or more photographs from a group of five of them. (The photos, if I'm following correctly from the Introduction, were taken by the editor Stephani Schaefer.)

The collection includes poems (and prose-poems) by Andrei Guruianu, Rick Hilles, Judith Pacht, Donna Pucciani, Taylor Graham, Louis Jenkins, Nancy Paddock, Brigit Treux, Gordon Preston, Katy Brown, eric nystrom, Maya Khosla, Joyce Odam, Connie Wanek, Laura L. Hansen, Lyle Daggett, Alan Catlin, Susan Kelly DeWitt, Jan Chronister, Robert Walton, Natalia Andreivskikh, Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Kathy Kieth, Sally Allen McNall, Lisa J. Cihlar, Steve Troyanovich, Doris Lueth Stengel, Cleo Griffith, Tazuo Basho Yamaguchi, Lara Gularte, editor Stephani Schaefer, and Bruce Henricksen (publisher of Lost Hills Books);

and short prose writing by eric nystrom, James Babbs, Bruce Henricksen, Taylor Graham, Robert Walton, Rob Davidson, and Joshua Clark.

I originally got word of the anthology in-the-works from Issa's Untidy Hut, Don Wentworth's blog that he does in connection with the poetry magazine Lilliput Review, which he edits.

I first heard of Lost Hills Books sometime a year ago or more, when I came across another book they've published, From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, edited by Bruce Henricksen and Robert Johnson. I absolutely loved it. The publisher's webpage for the book is here.

Though I've only had brief time with Fog & Woodsmoke so far -- just having it in hand as of today -- it looks wonderful. I encourage you to check this one out.

Adrienne Rich interview online

2011-03-06T21:16:00.001-06:00

From an interview with poet Adrienne Rich, posted March 2, 2011 in the website of the Paris Review, in which she discusses in particular her most recent book of poems, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (published this year by W. W. Norton):

"Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voices ruling ethos--its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be indirect, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it's not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks."

I've read Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, and really liked it.

The full interview is here.

Thanks to Al Markowitz, host of the Blue Collar Holler blog (of which I'm also a blog member), where I found the link to the interview.

And the machines are burning

2011-03-02T22:17:00.001-06:00

In the mail this week came Walking Through a River of Fire: One Hundred Years of Triangle Factory Fire Poems, edited by Julia Stein, with an introduction by Jack Hirshman, published this year by CC Marimbo, a small press publisher in Berkeley, CA. (As of this writing, the publisher doesn't yet have a page or listing for the book; details and ordering information are in Julia Stein's blog California Writer, here.) This is a deeply important collection of strong poems with great historical relevance.

March 25 this year will mark the 100th anniversary of the fire that occurred in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York, in which 146 workers died. The garment factory was one of the many infamous sweatshop workplaces common during that time (and which persist to this day, particularly in the clothing industry and other industries notorious for low wages and long work hours and terrible working conditions.)

Factors that contributed to the horrific loss of life included a locked door to a stairwell (the fire started on the upper floors of a ten-story building), a fire escape that collapsed, oily floors that caused the fire to spread quickly; the factory owners kept the doors locked (supposedly to keep workers from leaving work early or stealing). Fire department ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Many of the workers who died leaped from the top floors, rather than be burned alive in the fire. The majority of those who died were women. Most were in their 20's or younger; many were in their teenage years.

Workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had made attempts to organize a union. The employers responded with standard tactics of intimidation, firing suspected union organizers and sympathizers, calling in the police to beat picketing workers into submission.

Walking Through a River of Fire gathers 21 poems by nine poets from over the past century: Morris Rosenfeld, Dana Burnet, Chris Llewellyn, Mary Fell, Hilton Obenzinger, Carol Tarlen, Ruth Daigon, Alice Rogoff, and Julia Stein. Some of the poems are sharp and accusatory. Some incarnate in the voices of survivors of the fire. Some speak with the tenderest compassion for the dead and the living. Some report the events, coolly, accurately, while burning with a barely contained rage.

From the poem "Sisters in the Flames" by Carol Tarlen (written originally in 1996):

Greenhorn
bent over your machine
your hair a mess of red curls
like flames I said
my words extinguished
by the wailing motors
we never spoke
together we sewed
fine linen shirtwaists
for fine ladies we worked
in our coarse gowns and
muslin aprons 12 hours
in dark dank rooms
nine floors above the street
our fingers worked
the soft cloth
our coarse hands
fed the machines [...]

[...] Sister
of the flames
take my hand
I will hold you in the cradle
of my billowing skirt
in the ache of my shoulders
in the center of my palm
our sisters already dance
on the sidewalk nine
floors below the fire
is leaping through my hair
the air will lick our thighs
Sister together now fly
the sky is an unlocked door
and the machines are burning.

Several of the poems return to the list of names of the workers who died in the fire, the names become a kind of drumbeat, the poems moving between funeral dirge and public denunciation. From the poem "Triangle Shirtwaist Company, March 25, 1911" by Hilton Obenzinger (written originally in 1989):

The crowd is howling at the girls holding onto the ledges.
It's quitting time and the sun is dropping behind the smoke
but we stay and stare and not thinking reach up with our hands.
I know at home my papa welcomes the end of the Sabbath
chants Havadalah to separate the rest of the week
and he sprinkles the wine on a platter and sets a match to it,
and the quick flame marks the end, the dividing line.
Now the girls in flames plunge to the sidewalk,
Celia Weintraub, Rose Glantz, Julia Aberstein,
Lucia Maltese or Surka Brenman
they are the ones who draw the line
between those who work
and those who own the value of it.

Very soon the first is out--maybe 15 minutes.
The crowd grows as the news spreads.
Then the survivors and the relatives and the friends
all at once lunge for the building.
The fire chief comes down and talks to reporters
In the drifting smoke, I saw bodies burned to bare bone
skeletons bending over sewing machines.
The fire itself was brought swiftly under control.
It was not difficult to extinguish,
from a professional point of view.
Only the furniture
the dress goods
and the employees
were destroyed.
The crowd does not howl but is silent
as it rushes the building again.
The cops beat back the crowd with their clubs.

The earliest poem in the anthology is "Memorial to Triangle Fire Victims," written by Morris Rosenfeld in 1911 in the immediate aftermath of the fire. In a footnote, editor Julia Stein notes that the poem was originally published in Jewish Daily Forward, and was reprinted and translated in The Triangle Fire by Leon Stein (Carroll & Graf, 1962). She further notes that "Jewish Forward printed the poem down the full length of its front page in 1911."

From "Memorial to Triangle Fire Victims" by Morris Rosenfeld:

Neither battle nor fiendish pogrom
Fills this great city with sorrow;
Nor does the earth shudder or lightning render the heavens,
No clouds darken, no cannon's roar shatters the air.
Only hell's fire engulfs these slave stalls
And Mammon devours our sons and daughters.
Wrapt in scarlet flames, they drop to death from his maw
And death receives them all.
Sisters mine, oh my sisters, brethren
Hear my sorrow:
See where the dead are hidden in dark corners,
Where life is choked from those who labor. [...]

[...] There will come a time
When your time will end, you golden princes. Meanwhile,
Let this haunt your consciences:
Let the burning building, our daughters in flame
Be the nightmare that destroys your sleep,
The poison that embitters your lives,
The horror that kills your joy.
And in the midst of celebrations for your children,
May you be struck blind with fear over the Memory of this red avalanche
Until time erases you.

The fire and its aftermath led, in time, to a major overhaul of work safety and fire safety laws, in New York and elsewhere in the United States. Much of this came as a result of a surge in efforts by labor unions and other workers' organizations to press legislators to take action. A good website about the Triangle fire is here, in the website of Cornell University. It includes a history of the fire and subsequent events, contemporary news reports about the fire, accounts by survivors, a list of the names of the identified victims, additional detail on work safety laws and other outcomes in the years after the fire, general historical background, resources for researching further, and much other information.

The poems this collection bring a startling clarity and immediacy to the events of that day long ago, the heartbeat and breath and voice and presence of the people -- who were real, as each of us is -- who died that day, and who lived to tell the story.

I listened to the rattle of light bulbs
looked through dirty windows   no light creaked through
At night in the quiet between heart beats
I could hear tomorrow coming
The same    always the same except Sunday
strutting down Delancey with the girls
high-heels    new hats    fresh shirtwaists
The whole day belonged to us

Now I sleep with windows wide open
but the room still smells of smoke
and a taste that lasts a lifetime
Nights spent wandering from room to room
emptying my pocket book    putting things back
stroking the cat    remembering    remembering
if I forget their names how will I know them
Miriam Nussbaum    Tessie Bianco    Lily Koch

We were garment girls    greenhorns
quick to learn    quick to make friends
and at Coney Island the gypsy told us
we'd had a lot of trouble but we'd be rich and happy
Close your eyes and point to any girl here
and her story will be mine

(From the poem "Bessie Gabrilowich, survivor," by Ruth Daigon, originally written in 2001.)