A Burning Patience

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.)

Born of the rocks, of the sea spume

2011-02-27T23:01:00.000-06:00

I recently read Diwata, the most recent book of poems by Barbara Jane Reyes (published 2010 by BOA Editions. I found it a many-layered, profoundly moving work. Like Reyes's earlier book Poeta en San Francisco (which I've written about previously in this blog, here), Diwata weaves together multiple undercurrents of experience and perception, mingling creation stories from the biblical Genesis and from Philippine/Filipino tradition, together with moments from the history and politics of imperial colonization in the twentieth century.

The poems in Diwata (sometimes written in prose paragraphs on the page, sometimes in conventional lines and stanzas) move through conjurations of magic, spirit beings and power, animal beings mythical and real and some of each, historical and cultural detail, and tender invocations of love. According to the publisher's webpage for the book, "diwata is a Tagalog term meaning, 'muse.' Diwata is also a term for a mythical figure or being who resides in nature, and whom human communities must acknowledge, respect, and appease, in order to live safely, harmoniously, and prosperously in the world."

From a poem titled "Diwata" near the beginning of the book:

A woman's hands make find thread dance. With needles of carabao horn, of bamboo, she embroiders names into silk--serpent ulap scale luna fire lihim gem azul eye liwanag river mariposa light talà--when she weaves these words into the fabric of the sky, a charm against forgetting. With ink and thread she draws her own hands pero siempre esta manos desaparecen; she weaves enkanto contra palabras vaporosas, poemas contra vacía alma. And when her face begins to resemble the porcelain virgin's face, for this firelight causes much to appear, still she sings: o diwata, your words are our breath! O diwata, our words are our offering to you!

Running through the varying times and places in the poems, and the subtly shifting voices and perspectives, I feel a consistent essential thread of storytelling, bringing knowledge to light, knowledge often obscured by the fogs of long colonization (both beyond and within the borders of empire) but not entirely lost. This, for example, from the poem "Again, She Tells the First Story":

She who was born of the rocks fell in love with the one who was born of sea spume. There upon the rocks, they spread seeds and soil, and from these the bamboo sprouted. It rooted itself in those rocks, and some say lightning, some say a bird split this bamboo open.

Others say a great serpent ruled the sea, and set upon his crown, a gleaming stone upon which the skyfolk spilled dark earth. I do not know why they tried to bury the serpent, but because of this, he hissed and lashed at them. The sea was once sweet and cool as rainwater. In the north, a medicine woman told of her people's prayers for salt. Hot winds brought to them fragrances of the dead. After the waters receded, the shores became the color of clear crystals and blood.

Not all stories are mythology. Not all mythological stories are pure fiction. Literal truth runs through much story, in the same way that dreams and waking life make a kind of background for each other. In the world in which we live we often find ourselves forced to awaken to realities that it would be fatal to turn away from.

At midnight, the old men gather with oil lanterns aboard their fishing boats. This is when I feed. With rosaries in hand they stab the water with machetes. Their sons say, "Do not be foolish. There are no more mermaids here. It it the crocodiles who are stealing our brothers."

Crocodiles! Ridiculous!

Crocodiles are not slick. My dolphin skin withstands the men's machetes. But make no mistake; the old men give me many scars. [...]

[...] As for their sons, their bodies come slipping deep into my home. Hands and feet, bound. Salvaged bodies full of soldiers' bullets, blooming blood flowers in my water. I sing them to sleep in my garden. If the old men only knew what care I take, bedding the sleeping sons of fishermen, warming their bodies in blankets of mud.

(From the poem "Duyong I." I'm guessing, or maybe assuming, that "duyong" is a Tagalog word for the animal called, in English, "dugong," a sea mammal similar to a manatee.) In an endnote, Reyes explains that in the context of political conditions in the Philippines the word "salvage," as used in the poem, refers to assassination or "extrajudicial execution" (a phrase used by Amnesty International and similar organizations).

At times the poems rise to the level of almost pure incantation, with lines and phrases repeating and rounding back through each other in the manner of a pantoum and similar forms. Reyes shows a keen ear for such music; the repeating lines, when they occur, are not a mere mechanical device, but rather work toward an accumulating power through the poems.

she knows the stars, an ascension of pearls
she is mother, the deepest ocean
she weeps silver tears when the moon is full
leaf storm, rice terrace, color of midnight

she is mother, the deepest ocean
sunrise, black pearl, blood, and serpent
leaf storm, rice terrace, color of midnight
leaping, spinning, fingertips skyward

sunrise, black pearl, blood and serpent
with tobacco and fruit to appease the silence
leaping, spinning, fingertips skyward
she is a silver-winged bird in flight

with tobacco and fruit to appease the silence
the medicine woman prays for salt
she is a silver-winged bird in flight
she has marked her own flesh with thunder

In several of the poems the poet voice speaks as Eve, the first woman named in the book of Genesis. Invocation to being is an act that pulses through all of Diwata, a calling out to union with another that is both general and universal and also specific and intimate. I can hear Reyes's trust in her own voice at such moments in the poems. From the poem "Eve Speaks 2":

Come ashore, my winsome pilgrim, kiss the earth if you must. See how this collection of stolen bones becomes a wolf. Place your open hand there, and the delicate skin of your wrist supine, so that she may know your scent. Within salt circles, unlock this cage of skin with a hairpin. See the flesh burn away, until all that remains is the seashell. Place your ear gently against her heart, a memory of ocean. Take a lock of her hair; bind it with silk. Do not speak your intention. Bury it beneath your fragrant tree in this garden, and remember to taste the wind. Dear pilgrim, now there is cause for prayer, even for one who has forgotten the words.

In the face of the daily hammering madness of the world, the thousand cynical schemings in high places by those who persist in trying to suck the earth dry, under the weight of the alienation and numbing isolation that each of us encounters periodically in such a world, the poems in Diwata offer a quiet insistent countercurrent. The shadows of fear have not darkened the earth. It is still possible for us to be human beings with each other. There is a way through this.

Ever shall there be a we, a ceaseless, insistent we, the fiercest we, bound only to the knowledge of scars upon my flesh, and the segment of my spine which aches to sprout wings. Deep within lightless dovecotes, this we shall remember the lamentation of songbirds as it remembers the lingering warmth of your retreating form. Ever shall this we know how tender, your flesh at the throat, how you fecund black loam scent sates me.

Do not let the sun steal you from my side and set you wandering, for now we know red hibiscus blooms here in your city of constant sirens. Bring me your bones and your fire, and I will keep them safe.

(From the poem "Eve's Aubade.")

Some poems of mine online

2011-02-16T22:24:00.000-06:00

In Pemmican, here. (Once you've gone to the page at this link, click on the individual poem titles to read the poems.)

Some additional poems of mine are posted in the Pemmican site in an informal online chapbook, here.

Pemmican includes much wonderful work by other writers. The main page for the magazine is here. (Scroll down a little and click on the word "enter" to get to the index page.) I encourage you to go and read.

A couple of quotes

2011-02-11T23:51:00.002-06:00

Among the sea of books and literary magazines and other reading matter at the AWP bookfair, American Poetry Review was selling an assortment of copies of back issues of the magazine, for a dollar apiece. Most were from ca. 1980 or later, though there were a few from earlier; I came away with the September-October 1973 issue, Vol. 2 No. 5, featuring poet Yannis Ritsos on the cover page.

The issue was unusually full with poetry and other writing (essays, columns, book reviews, etc.) that offer an inkling to anyone (like myself) who doesn't remember, or wasn't aware, that there was a time, early on, when APR was at least somewhat politically and aesthetically relevant. The issue includes poems by Etheridge Knight; a translation of Yannis Ritsos's long poem "Romiosyne" (with a critical essay on the poem by William V. Spanos), and translations of several other poems by Ritsos; a three-page essay, published first thing in the issue, by Robert Coles, titled "Watergate Lightning," reflecting on the political scandal that was unfolding daily in the news media at the time; regular columns by Adrienne Rich (apparently, in this issue, the last installment of hers), Robert Bly, Diane Wakoski, Joyce Carol Oates, Clarence Major.

Not everything in the issue held my interest; I didn't spend much time with Richard Howard's essay/review about poet John Logan, or a long review (by Jerome Mazzaro) of Robert Lowell's Imitations.

In September 1973, roughly when the issue would have come out, the Vietnam War was still the ongoing event most affecting society and culture and politics in the United States, although the "mainstream" news media coverage of the war, and of the anti-war movement, had started to go to sleep. Earlier in 1973, members and supporters of the American Indian Movement had physically taken over and occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices at at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, as an act of protest and action against brutal and repressive U.S. government policies and practices in dealing with Native American people; police and F.B.I (and whoever else the government could find to send there) laid siege to the site, and a standoff ensued that lasted for weeks. Sometime during that year the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, who had once characterized anti-war protesters as "an effete corps of impudent snobs," resigned from office, and sometime after that pleaded "no contest" in Maryland to bribery and related charges, growing out of the time when he had been governor of the state.

And on September 11, 1973, the "other" 9/11, the U.S. military engaged in a series of terrorist acts, in collaboration with the military and political right-wing in Chile, to overthrow the elected government there; events of that day included the bombing of the Chilean presidential residence by planes supplied by the U.S., resulting in the death of President Salvador Allende. Poet Pablo Neruda, seriously ill with a brain tumor, died days later, at least in part from intentional medical neglect under the new military government. In the months and then years the followed, untold thousands of other people in Chile were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, because they opposed the government there, or because for whatever anomalous reason they posed an inconvenience for the government.

This for a little bit of context.

Here are excerpts from a couple of the essay columns in the APR issue.

First, from Adrienne Rich's column, titled "Caryatid;" Rich discusses several topics in the article, among them three recent books of poems by Robert Lowell: History (containing reworked poems from the second edition of Lowell's earlier book Notebook), For Lizzie and Harriet (containing a group of poems, previously published in Notebook, concerning Lowell's second marriage and his daughter), and The Dolphin (dealing with Lowell's love affair with his wife, his divorce, and remarriage); the above descriptions are roughly how Rich characterizes the books. Rich continues:

"I don't know why Lowell felt he wanted to go on revising and publishing old poems; why not let them stand and proceed on, since life itself goes on? Perhaps, as he says, "the composition was jumbled" in Notebook; but he chose, as a mature poet, to publish that jumbled composition, and it represents his poetic and human choices of that time. What does it mean to revise a poem? For every poet the process must be different; but it is surely closer to pruning a tree than retouching a photograph. However, the intention behind History is clearly to produce a major literary document encompassing the élite Western sensibility of which Lowell is a late representative; a work to stand in comparison with the great long poems of the past.

"The lesson of Notebook/History is that brilliant language, powerful images, are not enough, and that they can become unbelievably boring in the service of an encapsulated ego. I remember Notebook as a book whose language sometimes dazzled even though it often seemed intentionally to blur and evade meaning, even though Lowell's own rather pedantic notion of surrealism led to a kind of image-making out of the intellect rather than the unconscious. I remember saying to a friend that in poem after poem, at the moment when you thought Lowell was about to cut to the bone, he veered off, lost the thread, abandoned the poem he'd begun in a kind of verbal coitus interruptus. In History it strikes me that this is poetry constructed in phrases, each hacked-out, hewn, tooled, glazed or burnished with immense expertise...but one gets tired of these phrases, they hammer on after awhile with a fearful and draining monotony. It becomes a performance, a method, language divorced from its breathing, vibrating sources to become, as Lowell himself says, a marble figure. [...]

"[...] There's a kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work in these books, particularly the third, symptomatic of the dead-end destructiveness that masculine privilege has built for itself into all institutions, including poetry. I sense that the mind behind these poems knows -- being omnivorously well-read -- that 'someone has suffered' -- the Jews, Achilles, Sylvia Plath, his own wife -- but is incapable of a true identification with the sufferers which might illuminate their condition for us. The poet's need to dominate and objectify the characters in his poems leaves him in an appalling way invulnerable. And the poetry, for all its verbal talent and skill, remains emotionally shallow."

And, from Robert Bly's column, titled "The War Between Memory and Imagination":

"For about fifteen years, American poetry has been marvellously free from coercion by academic critics. Students have not been so fortunate. We have all known how evil the influence of the professional academic living in Ulro consciousness can be on students of literature. The graduate schools are full of living wrecks, unable to see anything personal in The Wasteland [sic], harboring lifelong rages against their teachers, living daily with a distrust of their own body perceptions, incapable of talking to an animal, unable to write prose except in the codified phrases of memory, feeling their spirit has been stripped as a tree of its bark, determined to get revenge, or sink into listlessness and sneers, and spend their lives in Kansas complaining of the poor quality of undergraduates.

"It seems to me that after years of freedom from it, poetry is about to come under that sort of pressure again. I believe Blake is right that there is a mental war going on always between the two principles of 'memory' and 'imagination.' Strangely, only those who put their lives on the side of imagination think there is a war. The academics, or those on the side of memory, are always saying that they see no conflict between their ideas and the ideas of the poets -- why must the poets be so rude, etc.? Why can't all of us who love poetry just live together and be kind to one another? I sympathize with their longing to see less rudeness, yet it is clear also that the professional academic is parasitical, and the eternal cry of the parasite of all nations and vegetable states is for less conflict so they can go on eating. [...]

"[...] Under the pressure of this longing, the gap between memory and imagination, between recording experience and experience itself, grows wider. The tape recorder appears in all fields. The earlier New Critical restraint on imaginative life -- ruling out political poetry, for example -- ended when the poets now about 45 refused, in the late Fifties, to follow the restraints any longer. Williams had hated it for years before that, and hated the critics' refusal to answer for their opinions. One of Blake's most firmly stated ideas that there are 'hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university' whose soul delight in life is to decrease intellectual war: "who would, if they could, forever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war." But 'Without contraries there is no progression.'

"The danger we face is that the academics in the U.S. will try to affect the flow of poetry itself, much as people who handle logs at a harbor eventually try to buy the forests. Academic critics for centuries have tried to affect the course of poetry, to buy up the forest, by overpraising poets of 'memory.' These poets are usually relatively tame and decorous. In the last decade, which were the American academics who triumphed Vallejo? The New Yorker, edited by an academic critic, Howard Moss, prints Borges, not Vallejo. The New York Review of Books triumphs Auden, the prototype of Blake's 'state poet,' or 'angel of mediocrity.' Blake insists there is an eternal war, more important than any of our personalities, between the state poet and the prophet, between the passive imagination and the active imagination, between memory and imagination, between the academic critic and the imaginative critic."

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I've selected excerpts here that are fairly blunt in tone and substance, because I think it's important to remember that poetry, and writing about poetry, doesn't necessarily have to be polite or obedient; we're not required to fill out the proper forms and wait for approval before we say what we want to say. There are, certainly, places in the world where it may not be safe to say what you want to say, where there might be reprisals; this though is because of the political and economic conditions of the world, and not something embedded in the innate nature of poetry. I read both of the articles while I was at AWP in Washington, and I found it valuable to read things that prodded me, a little, to remember what poetry is, and what it's not, and why I (and so many others of us) keep writing it, and reading it. I like, most of all, that what Rich and Bly say here remains alive and relevant and timely, even now nearly forty years after the articles were written.

To do something well

2011-02-09T20:24:00.004-06:00

One of the events I attended at AWP was a panel called "Hands On: A Conversation about DIY and Craft Culture in a Digital World." This touches on a range of things I've thought a great deal about throughout my life, and especially in the past 20 years or so.

When I write poems, I write them by hand, on paper, in a spiral-bound stenographer's notebook (the kind that measures roughly 6" x 9", with the spiral binding along the top. I've found it nicely compact and portable. Writing on paper has a number of advantages: I don't need electricity to write. (That's not altogether true -- at night I do need some source of light, which generally means electricity, although once or twice in the middle of the night I have in fact written by moonlight through the window.)

I can write in almost any environment: I've written poems in shopping malls, at the bus stop on a busy street, sitting on a park bench, sitting on a stone ledge a couple of hundred feet above the Mississippi River, alone in my apartment, at the library, at various of the dozen or more coffeehouses in the neighborhood. I worked a little on a poem during a couple of the panel events at AWP in Washington.

For many years I typed my poems (once I had finished handwritten versions), and whatever else I needed to type, with a portable manual typewriter. It's a bit noisier than a computer, and slightly more cumbersome to carry around (though I don't carry a computer around with me either), and it does have the disadvantage that if you make a typing mistake, you either have to use correction tape or liquid white-out, or -- if the mistake is more than a couple of letters, or an omitted word, etc. -- you have to retype the whole page.

In recent years I've typed my poems on my computer, using MS Word. Much easier to edit, if I make a mistake I don't have to retype the whole page. I have a (limited) choice of fonts. (I say "limited" -- years back I did typesetting for a living for a little while, and became familiar with hundreds of fonts and their variations.) MS Word is basically what you get when you take a typewriter and turn it into software. Typesetting is making software from one of the old linotype machines that printshops used to use.

I write most of my poems with irregular margins on both the left and right sides, and all things considered, it was easier to do the irregular margins with the manual typewriter (just move the carriage to the spot where you want to type, fine tuning with the spacebar if needed) than with MS Word.

With all of the (essential) talk about saving trees, I find it quietly ironic that when I type poems with MS Word, using the standard default formatting, it actually takes more paper to print the poems from MS Word than it did to type them on the manual typewriter. (On the typewriter I could get about 55 or 56 lines on a page, leaving margins at the top and bottom; with MS word, in standard formatting, I can get 45 lines on a page. I could, of course, tinker with the linespace formatting in MS Word, though as the space between lines shrinks the copy becomes harder to read.)

When I type poems on my computer, I can e-mail them to people. I can also send paper copies by paper mail. It takes longer, and costs a little money. (How much does internet service cost? How much does a computer cost?) Am I really in that much of a hurry to send someone something?

Paper doesn't crash. It can, of course, catch fire, be damaged by water, blow away in the wind. Though not usually without warning. I've sat typing at a computer that suddenly went dead. (Total crash, permanently dead.) On the other hand, never once when I've been writing in a paper notebook has it suddenly burst into flames.

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I'm not dogmatic about paper vs. computers. Each has its advantages. Each is a tool. (Here I am writing this in this blog. This blog is, among other things, a tool.)

The panelists at the DIY/Craft Culture panel handed out a (paper) handout, with (in addition to short bio notes about the panel members) a list of questions related in one way or another to the panel topic, and relevant quotes from a couple of other sources. Here's a little of what was in the handout:

Some questions

Why are there (still) books?
Why are there (still) handcrafted books?
What is a book (for)?
What does letterpress mean now that's similar/different from what it has meant in the past?
What advantages, if any, does a physically published book offer over its digital version?
In what ways is the digital book (re)defining the physical book's form/function?
What does the xeroxed 'zine have to say to the Copper Canyon broadside?
What are advantages/disadvantages of a micro print run?
What is ephemerality?
How are the digital and handcrafted/hardcopy distinct? At odds? Synonymous? Symbiotic?
What can theories and practices of craft offer us about teaching and learning in the 21st century?
How about reading and writing? Thinking? Living?

And, from an interview with Richard Sennett (by Suzanne Ramljak) in the October/November issue of American Craft magazine:

"The modern economy privileges pure profit, momentary transactions, and rapid fluidity. Part of craft's anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labor. It is not about quick transactions or easy victories. That slow tempo of craftwork, of taking the time you need to do something well, is profoundly stabilizing to individuals. When people are forced to do things quickly it becomes a type of triage. In the process of working very fast, we don't have the time for reflection and being self-critical. We tend to go into autopilot and mistakes increase. Self-critical faculties decrease with speed, and the brain does a better job of processing when it goes slowly than when it goes rapidly. The capitalist economy sacrifices the logic of craft, which results in poorly made objects and a degraded physical environment. This capitalist model of productivity then feeds back into the schools, so the very training of people becomes industrialized. The craft model of education -- slow, concentrated, repetitive -- is seen as dysfunctional and irrelevant in the modern world... Pedagogically, we teach people that the moment they learn to do something, they can move onto something else rather than dwell on that lesson. When musicians practice something over and over again, they get deeper into the music, expanding it from within, exploring problems, and so forth. Our pedagogy doesn't tend to do that. We go by the notion that once you've solved something, the actual experience of doing it is secondary. That whittles down attention. This is a terrible problem in the teaching of music in schools, where the length of time that children can practice becomes reduced. We disable the actual experience of repetition, and that eventually cuts down on our capacity to concentrate."

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At the heart of this whole discussion, for me, is the basic and obvious fact that we're not machines. We're animals. We're human beings, who live in (and as part of) the animal world, the plant world, the land and ocean and sky world, the sun and moon and stars world. We can (when we choose) use machines, but we're not the machines.

I self-published my first book of poems, The C.I.A. Plans the Invasion of Portugal, in 1976, in the spring and summer, while I was a student at the U. of Minnesota Experimental College. I had a limited budget, and did as much of the work myself as I knew how to do.

I typed the book pages on my typewriter. I typed one poem to a page; the book was going to be 5 and 1/2" by 8 and 1/2". On a manual typewriter, it's standard to insert two sheets at once, one to type on, and one as a "backing" sheet, to act as a slight pad or cushion so that the typewriter keys don't cut all the way through the first sheet. On the backing sheet, I measured and drew (with a dark marker) a 5 and 1/2" by 8 and 1/2" rectangle centered in the sheet. When the two sheets were inserted in the typewriter, the rectangle on the backing sheet showed through enough that I could use it as the guideline for keeping the poem text inside the page area.

I did the front cover type using Press Type -- I'm not sure if the stuff still exists -- pressing the letters onto the paper sheet by hand. (I was lazy and didn't bother to get the letters evenly spaced or in a straight line, which lent a nice, if inadvertent, graffiti-like effect to the cover lettering.)

I took the pages to a local printer who worked in the basement of his house. I knew of him through many friends who had had things printed there at one time or another. As I recall, it took a week or two for him to print and fold the pages and cover, 500 copies, a 32 page book (as I remember) including the cover, 14 poems. The print run on the book cover came up a little short, so I had to make another trip over there to pick up the rest of them.

The pages weren't collated or bound; I did that myself. I found an extra-long stapler that would reach from the edge of the page to the book spine. (I still have the stapler -- never know when I might need it again one day.) I collated every one of the 500 copies by hand, and stapled every one of them, two staples in the spine. I didn't know how to hand-sew books, and not sure if I would have attempted that, though might have, at least a few copies, if I'd known how. It took me at least a few days to collate and staple all of the books.

Altogether it cost me easily under $100.00 to self-publish the book, most of which (about $70.00) was for the printing and folding. That was in 1976 -- don't know offhand what it might cost these days, with the available minimum technology. I can imagine doing it for not a great deal more.

I gave away nearly all of the copies over the next couple of years. I'd been writing poems for just a few years at the time, and I doubt that I would republish any of the poems at this point, though over the years I've reworked a couple of them -- one basically a revised version, another more of a rewrite from scratch -- that I've included in later books.

I've you've never done anything like this -- making a book by hand, or partly by hand -- I encourage you to try it, at least once. The earth needs us, and we need each other, with our animal minds, with our friendship with trees, with our human bodies, with our living hearts, singing in the sun and rain, dancing in the moonlight.

AWP report

2011-02-07T23:47:00.000-06:00

I made it to AWP in Washington, D.C. this year. Here are some scattered and more or less random moments that stick out in my mind from the several days there.

I gather that quite a few people either didn't make it, because of flights cancelled because of the weather in the midwest (and then in the northeast), or arrived a day or so after the start of the conferenced, for the same reasons. I know specifically of several people in San Francisco and the surrounding area who didn't get there; on the first day (Thursday) there were empty tables at the bookfair, some of which eventually filled up by Friday. Various panels and other events were missing people, or had substitutes filling in at the last minute.

I had luck with my flights (and the blizzard missed Minneapolis), and got there and back without problems.

*

The events I found particularly worthwhile included Undivided: Poet as Public Citizen, sponsored by Split This Rock, an excellent panel featuring Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Toi Derricotte, and Mark Nowak, and emceed by Melissa Tuckey of Split This Rock. Each of the panelists talked about various ways in which politically conscious poetry, and poetry in general, has engaged with the larger world; each quoted from the work of other poets as examples of the relavance of poetry in people's lives. The event was in a large "ballroom," one panelist guessed maybe 250 people were in the audience (and the room looked large enough to have held at least twice that number).

Also, The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed, a tribute to Langston Hughes (also sponsored by Split This Rock), featuring panelists Sarah Browning, Derrick Weston Brown, Sonia Sanchez, and Jericho Brown. Each of the panelists read from Hughes's work, and talked about the importance of his poetry and other writing in the overall spectrum of literature in the United States, and in the culture beyond the literary world as such. (Langston Hughes once worked for a living as a busboy in the restaurant of what is now the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, where most of the AWP events took place; when he learned that poet Vachel Lindsay was staying in the hotel, he tracked down Lindsay and more or less physically pressed a manuscript of his poems into Lindsay's hands. According to one panelist, shortly after that a headline appeared in a local paper, "Busboy Poet Discovered in Washington." As the panelist pointed out, Hughes had already been writing for some time, and had published in a number of literary magazines; he wasn't so much "discovered," rather the corporate media of the time decided to take notice for a moment.) Panelist Sonia Sanchez spoke last, and read one of her own poems, a stunning thrilling song/chant/jazz/blue/wail of a poem that tore up the room and brought people cheering to their feet.

And, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Writings of Leonard Peltier, a panel featuring Ana Davis, Cassondra Vizenor, Sonny Vizenor, and Harvey Arden; author Peter Mathiessen was also scheduled on the panel but was unable to attend. * In 1975, a shootout took place at the Jumping Bull ranch on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, between FBI agents and some number of Native American people. Two FBI agents and one Native American man were killed during the shooting. Three members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were subsequently charges and tried in connection with the deaths of the FBI agents. Two were acquitted; in a separate trial, writer and AIM activist Leonard Peltier was convicted, and sentenced to two life sentences in prison. * Many issues were raised before and during the trial, and in the years since, concerning FBI and prosecution misconduct, and racist bias on the part of the judge. At present, Peltier has been in prison 35 years; he has serious medical problems, including prostate cancer and diabetes. * Panelists read from Peltier's writings, particularly his writings from the years he has been in prison, and talked a little about the history and current state of his legal case. * If you are not familiar with Leonard Peltier or the background of the trial and sentencing, I encourage you to check out the website of the Leonard Peltier Defence/Offense Committee, here; scroll down a little in the page for the relevant links in the left-hand column.

And, Poetry of Resistance: Poets Take on Reasonable Suspicion (Arizona SB 1070), a panel exploring poetic (and other) responses to the anti-immigrant laws enacted recently in Arizona, featuring panelists Francisco X. Alarcón, Carmen Calatayud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Abel Salas, and Hedy M. García Treviño. (There was also an off-site reading event the night before, of numerous poets reading poems in response to the Arizona anti-immigrant laws; I had hopes of making it to the reading, but wasn't able to pull it off. I heard afterwards that it was great.)

And, Hands On: A Conversation about DIY and Craft Culture in a Digital World; scheduled panelists included Mathias Svalina, Kathryn Bursick, Timothy Schaffert, Liz Ahl, Jennifer S. Flescher, and Betsy Wheeler. (One of the scheduled panelists wasn't able to make it, and another person substituted; unfortunately I don't quite recall who was missing, and who filled in. If you're reading this and you happen to know, feel free to put the information in the comment box and I'll make the correction here.) The panelists had all been involved with letterpress printing and publishing in one way or another, some had done handmade books; panelist Liz Ahl talked about having her writing students hand-sew books in order to experience the relatively slower and more thoughful work of doing this (compared with faster high-tech publishing). The panelists all raised questions and issues that I found highly useful, regarding why books still exist, why (specifically) handcrafted books still exist, what books are for, what ephemerality is, and other related topics. * I'll talk in more detail, in a separate blogpost in the near future, about some of the questions raised by the panel.

I also attended the panels The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com, Poets/Editors on Inclusivity and Race, and Camino Del Sol: 15 Years of Latina and Latino Writing.

*

I also visited an art exhibit, Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children's Paintings, that was on display in a room at the Marriott during the conference. I found the exhibit profoundly moving: paintings by children of Vietnam, depicting scenes of war and of peace, collected over the past 10 years by the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, paired by poems by American people, some of whom may not have been "professional" or full-time poets in the usual sense. The room where the paintings were on exhibit was in a somewhat out-of-the-way corner, and there were no more than four or five people in the room at any one time while I was in there; this made it possible to take in the images slowly, in the quiet of the room. They were paintings that strongly urged a reflective silence. (There was also an AWP panel in connection with the exhibit, which I didn't get to -- my energies were fading somewhat at the time, and I decided to give priority to seeing the actual exhibit.) * The exhibit was sponsored by the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, the Kent State School of Art Galleries, and the organization Soldier's Heart. * A website about the exhibit, with samples of the paintings and poems, is here.

*

I took the shuttle van in from the airport, and the van driver gave us a short historical tour on the way to the hotel, pointing out buildings, a civil war battleground, and other landmarks along the way. At one point we went past the infamous Watergate building. Weather was fairly mild during the conference; the temperature during the day stayed above freezing (up into the 40's a couple of days), it snowed briefly and lightly one night, and drizzled rain for a little while one day. (I call this "mild" -- when I flew to D.C. on Wednesday last week, the temperature here in Minneapolis in the morning was around zero, with 25 mph northwest wind.)

The Marriott Wardman is (according to the van driver) the largest hotel in Washington, D.C. The place was a freaking castle, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms hidden in back corners. I kept the floor map with me constantly -- even when I knew where I was, it was easy to take a wrong turn and get lost, even in the middle of the main lobby. The hotel was on a hill, more or less, with a steep walk down to street level, and a steeper climb back up. Some conference events were at the Omni Shoreham hotel a half block away. There were some places to eat nearby, though most weren't cheap. Washington, D.C., is an expensive city to live in -- the shuttle van driver said 70 percent of people who work in the city commute from outside the city (40 percent by Metro train or bus, the rest by car), because living in the city itself isn't affordable.

*

I was pleased to meet, face to face, poet bloggers Elisa Gabbert, Reb Livingston, and Kelli Russell Agodon, and to meet poet Sy Hoahwah, who I'd known of previously only through his poetry. I was also happy to connect (however briefly) face to face with poet friends Erika Wurth, Marianne Broyles, Gina Franco, Robert Bohm (our first face to face meeting), and Athena Kildegaard. I spent a little while hanging out at the West End Press table talking with publisher and friend John Crawford, and had a chance to talk briefly with M. Scott Douglass, publisher of Main Street Rag.

*

And I came home with the following items from the bookfair.

My Father's Love, Volume 2: The Legacy, a memior by longtime poet friend Sharon Doubiago, just out this year from Wild Ocean Press. (The publisher's webpage for Volume 1 of Sharon Doubiago's memoir is here.)

Amnesty Muse, book of poems by poet friend Doren Robbins, published this year by Lost Horse Press.

Spirit Birds They Told Me book of poems by Mary Oishi, published this year by West End Press. (As of this writing, the publisher doesn't yet have a specific page for Oishi's book, which is just out; the link above is to the publisher's main page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for contact info.)

Walking Backwards, book of poems by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, published 2010 by West End Press. Here again the link is to the main page of the publisher's website; scroll down to the bottom of the page for contact info.

Bone Key Elegies, book of poems by Diane Sellers, published 2009 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

New Poems by Tadeusz Rosewicz, translated from Polish by Bill Johnston, published 2007 by Archipelago Books.

One River, book of poems by Christina Pacosz, published 2001 by Pudding House Publications. (The publisher's website doesn't have a specific page for the book; contact info for the publisher can be found at the bottom of their submission guidelines page, here.)

The Poet and The Sea, poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated from Spanish by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney, published 2009 by White Pine Press.

The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor, edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden, published 2007 by No Tell Books.

I also came home with the exhibit catalog for the Speak Peace art exhibit, which contains a selection of the paintings and the accompanying poems. See the link in the paragraph (above) about the exhibit.

And, in addition to all of the above, American Poetry Review was selling back issues of APR for $1.00 each. Most were from 1980 or later, though a view were very early in the history of the magazine; I came away with the September/October 1973 issue (Vol. 2, No. 5). It gives a startling indication of how (relatively) politically and aesthetically relevant the magazine once was, and (by comparison) how much of a sleepy rut it has settled into over the decades. Poems by Etheridge Knight and Yannis Ritsos (and a photo of Ritsos on the front cover page); A. Poulin, Jr.'s translation of Rilke's Duino Elegies; essays/columns by Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Clarence Major, Joyce Carol Oates, among others; a review by Grace Schulman of Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck; an essay by Robert Coles on the Watergate political scandal (this would have been shortly after the Senate investigative hearings were broadcast live on network T.V. through the summer of 1973); and other work. * I'll say more about some of the items in the APR issue in a separate blogpost in the near future.

*

And that's probably enough for now. I paced myself pretty well during the conference days, though even with that I tended to fade toward evening, and retreated to my hotel room, where I dozed a little, and then stayed up reading, and writing.

High temperature here today was something like 9 degrees.

A couple of quotes (John Berger, Norman Minnick)

2011-01-25T20:09:00.000-06:00

From a couple of things I've been reading (or, in the first case, rereading) during the past week.

First, from "The Moment of Cubism," an essay by the British Marxist art critic John Berger, in his Selected Essays (published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, in 2003). The essay was originally written in 1969.

"The Cubist movement ended in France in 1914. With the war a new kind of suffering was born. Men were forced to face for the first time the full horror -- not of hell, or damnation, or a lost battle, or famine, or plague -- but the full horror of what stood in the way of their own progress. And they were forced to face this in terms of their own responsibility, not in terms of a simple confrontation as between clearly defined enemies.

The scale of the waste and the irrationality and the degree to which men could be persuaded and forced to deny their own interests led to the belief that there were incomparable and blind forces at work. But since these forces could no longer be accommodated by religion, and since there was no ritual by which they could be approached or appeased, each man had to live with them within himself, as best he could. Within him they destroyed his will and his confidence. [...]

[...] The new kind of suffering that was born in 1914 and has persisted in Western Europe until the present day is an inverted suffering. Men fought within themselves about the meaning of events, identity, hope. This was the negative possibility implicit in the new relation of the self to the world. The life they experienced became a chaos within them. They became lost within themselves.

Instead of apprehending (in however simple and direct a way) the processes which were rendering their own destinies identical with the world's, they submitted to the new condition passively. That is to say the world, which was nevertheless indivisibly part of them, reverted in their minds to being the old world which was separate from them and opposed them: it was as though they had been forced to devour God, heaven and hell and live forever with the fragments inside themselves. It was indeed a new and terrible form of suffering and it coincided with the widespread, deliberate use of false ideological propaganda as a weapon. Such propaganda preserves within people outdated structures of feeling and thinking whilst forcing new experiences upon them. It transforms them into puppets -- whilst most of the strain brought about by the transformation remains politically harmless as inevitably incoherent frustration. The only purpose of such propaganda is to make people deny and then abandon the selves which otherwise their own experience would create."

And this, by poet Norman Minnick, from his Introduction to the poetry anthology Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Norman Minnick (published 2010 by White Pine Press).

"A graduate student in a creative writing program said recently that we shouldn't read anyone before the previous generation of poets because their poems don't include cell phones and iPods and thus have nothing to say to the modern poet. Many young poets are looking only to poets of their own generation or teachers in their respective MFA programs, rather than, say, Li Po, Sappho, Mistral, or Machado. We are experiencing what I call 'American Idol Syndrome.' An aspiring singer tells the audience that her influences include Mariah Carey, Pink, or Hannah Montana rather than Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, or Kirsten Flagstad. [...]

[...] What's ignored is a deeper connection with the inner, or spiritual, life. Too many poets stay on the dry surface while volleying back and forth between the rational and the emotional. They do not honor the vertical energy that is necessary for a deeper, more soulful and spiritual life experience. Vertical awareness, then, must include sensation and intuition or imagination, 'a movement down,' as [Robert] Bly says, 'into earthly body, dirt, appetite, gross desire, death; and a movement toward sunlight, time, fulfillment, lily blossoms, purity, narcissus flowers, beauty, opening. ...' There is a desperate need for vertical awareness in poetry today. Our culture has become flatter and more superficial and horizontal than ever before. [...]

[...] The severe drought caused by Language poetry and the tedium and irony of the postmodernists are certainly contributing to the ruin. My father went into a bookstore and asked for a recommendation. The salesperson handed him a book by a young, "up-and-coming" poet. My father, one of the most well read people I know, said that he simply couldn't figure out what she was talking about in her poems. Neither could I. He said he got the feeling he wasn't welcome into 'the club.' What is in these poems for the reader? Who should poems be written for anyway? Pablo Neruda says, 'Poetry has lost its ties with the reader... It has to get him back... It has to walk in the darkness and encounter the heart of a man, the eyes of a woman, the stranger in the street, those who at twilight or in the middle of the starry night feel the need for at least one line of poetry.'"

(The work by Robert Bly that Minnick cites is Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, edited by Bly, published 1993 by Beacon Press; original edition 1971. The passage Minnick quotes from Bly is, I assume, from one of Bly's Introductions in the book, either the original introductions from the 1971 edition or possibly the new introduction Bly wrote for the 1993 edition. The work by Neruda that Minnick cites is Memoirs, translated by Hardie St. Martin, published 1974 by Penguin Books.)

The anthology Between Water and Song includes selections of poems by 15 poets, all born after 1960: Ruth Forman, Ilya Kaminsky, Malena Mörling, Kevin Goodan, Jay Leeming, Terrance Hayes, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Sherwin Bitsui, Maria Melendez, Valzhyna Mort, Eugene Gloria, Brian Turner, Joshua Poteat, Maurice Manning, and Chris Abani.

Clusters of new light

2010-12-29T22:00:00.000-06:00

A few months back I came across a copy of Gerald McCarthy's book of poems Trouble Light (West End Press, 2008) at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, when I was there for the AWP conference this year. McCarthy's first book of poems, War Story (The Crossing Press, 1977, long out of print), about his experiences in Vietnam during the war and back in the United States afterwards, spoke to me deeply when I read it years ago shortly after it came out. I hadn't realized he had a recent book out, and I was excited to find Trouble Light.

Gerald McCarthy was born in Endicott, New York. When he was 17 he joined the Marines and was sent to Vietnam, and after his time there he deserted the military. After he was released from military prison and civilian jail, he worked as a stonecutter, shoe factory worker, and as an anti-war activist. In the years after that he taught writing at Attica Prison, in migrant labor camps, jails and schools. He currently teaches writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

McCarthy's poems always feel to me full of sorrow, a great sadness at the struggle and suffering of human beings in the world. Not mired in sorrow, but rather carrying it as a kind of healing work. These are poems of a terrible clarity, an understanding that the chance for survival of life on the earth begins with telling the truth as well as one is able to.

From the poem "The wounded" in Trouble Light (from which all the quoted passages here are taken):

A group of wild turkeys
feeds on the juniper and bearberries
near the entrance to what the locals call
the other Arlington --
a hillside cemetery off the old King's Highway,
and that light is coming toward them.
If you listen you can hear
the soft clucking sounds they make.
Today in the glare of the supermarket light,
my son makes me look at lobsters
piled on one another in a plastic tank.
They don't move much in there, he says.
They're stunned, I tell him,
their claws taped up, waiting.
Outside in the late March dusk
a cold rain on stone, you think of them --
trapped in their tanks
or hospital beds.

McCarthy's poems are grounded in the snow and ash landscapes of old industrial towns, the weariness and longing of dusty light, the tired faces and canny intelligence of the people who live their lives laying the bricks of such places. ("This is not hell," said Lorca, "it is a street./This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.")

The Erie-Lackawanna trains are the ghosts
of summer nights.
A town of freight yards,
tanning factories, time clocks.
A town that smelled like leather.

I walk the ties through yards
and loading docks, remember
crawling between rails,
watching the headlights of sheriff cars.
If I listen I can almost hear the sirens,
glimpse the smudge of orange sky
beyond the smokestacks.

I push open the door to Ernie's Grill
on the North Side of town, the Italian side.
His hands stained brown from shoe dye,
John Robinsky cursed the heat, swore
the union would never get in.

It never did.
They quit making leather from cowhide.
They closed the factories,
laid off the workers.

Robinsky raised pigeons because it was
something he could do.
We used to watch them lift off
and carry those messages away.
Nobody answered, John.
No one heard anything
but that flapping of wings.

(From the poem "Note in a bottle.")

There are poems here of the deep quiet almost unspoken friendship that grows up between people who grind away doing the daily work of the world. A particular kind of insight can come to a person in the drive and monotony of assembly-line light (that light which manage somehow to be too glaring and too murky at the same time). Years ago I knew a woman who worked during the days sewing moccasins in a factory. In the evenings she struggled to be a musician. "What do you do," she wrote once, "when you run out of daydreams at ten in the morning?"

In Johnson City at Tri-City Beverage
in 1968, Sully and I
pulled quart bottles of ginger ale
two at a time from conveyor belts.

We stacked the wooden cases row on row
the pallets pushed against spinning metal rollers.
The first day a bottle slipped
exploding on the concrete floor,
I shook, startled at the sound.
The crew boss laughed and shook his head,
you never know, he said.

Down the line
the dispatcher called out --
two-five, four-five.
The bottles
clinked, slid toward us in wet rows.

We ate our lunch out in the open
straddling the stacks of empty pallets
in the company yard.

You don't have to be a genius, Sully said,
to see where this job leads.
Broke, spending our last dollars
in a factory bar, I knew
I had to leave some things behind -- the town,
the long days of work,
and Sully, gone half-crazy with his own years
there, alone, grinning in the half-light.

(From the poem "Station to station.")

At the moment of history in which we current live, the purported political and cultural leaders of the United States -- and corporate financiers standing behind them -- blythely trumpet the standard cliche rhetoric of empire and conquest, weeping (when necessary) the customary public tear over the sacrifice and loss of (American) sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, in the name of whatever product they're trying to sell this week. In his poetry Gerald McCarthy explores the meaning of genuine conscience actual morality, an engagement with real life that refuses the standard drum-and-bugle chatter.

Whenever I see piles of leftover snow
gray and muddied by the new spring,
whenever the first snowcaps
push up from the tufts of frozen earth,
and spring seems to pulse and then
fade, whenever the light lasts
too long -- stark and stretched out
like a line of smoke,
I think of you.

Twenty years ago
I drove all night through a Midwest snowstorm
in the old Ford pickup that bucked through the drifts
until I lost control of the wheel --
off the road and
over the edge.
And in those few moments before
the crash, I thought I knew
what pain and loss were, I thought
I knew what it was to drive
all night through a storm that did not end. [...]

[...] Today, looking down,
caught off guard by soft petals,
scattered, spread like clusters of new light,
I called your name, as if
in that harsh one syllable
I might find more than this
hollowed-out place in my side.

(From the poem "A small song for Luke.")

McCarthy's poems have an insistent tactical quality that hangs on, even when the ostensible subject or location of the poem roams far in the world. The poems in Trouble Light are a kind of journey, a kind of seeking, reaching for the stones and branches and streams and doorways of commonplace life, and an insistence on the value of this life.

From the poem "Spanish Steps":

And now it's just these friends
who've led you back
through crowds,
the march for pace
over, the streets closed off.
You walked all the way
to find the little chapel of San Silvestro
where nuns sang a capella the chants
of peace, the tiny wooden door
opening to take the change -- and later
the church of the Quattro Coronati,
and then the piazza,
the streets leading down again.
Those songs stay with you still,
hymns to a stillness, unheard
and sweet. [...]

[...] Pilgrims, your Italian friends say,
pilgrims who've come to see the barque,
Bemini's fountain beneath the rooms
where Keats and Severn stayed.
I lost my son here once you tell them,
he ran ahead of us, down into the crowds at night.
He was six years old then, panic hit.
And there below, at last
we saw him --
playing chess with older Roman boys
who'd gathered to watch him play.
It's like that really, the quick
sting of loss that comes
because you're honest and don't know how
to cover up. A death so sharp and quick
it takes your breath away, and infant son's death,
his hands so small they cling to your finger
holding on for life. You cannot
turn away.

We took our sons to Cumae,
to see the cave where Aeneas
asked the Sybil for advice,
we saw the sea beyond
the caves, and climbed the stairs.
How sad Montale said
memory at its fullest
has no one to hold it back.
And still this small hand reaches out
like foreign voices chanting songs of peace,
a view from shuttered songs along a river,
silver coins tossed into a moving stream.

An old secret promise

2010-11-11T21:28:00.000-06:00

This past Tuesday evening I went to hear poets Tim Young and Thomas Smith read from their work. It was, in part, a publication reading for recent books by each of the poets: Herds of Bears Surround Us by Timothy Young (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010), and The Foot of the Rainbow by Thomas R. Smith (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010). It was one of the great poetry readings I've been to in many years.

I've known Tim Young as a friend since sometime in the early 1980's. I've known Thomas less well perhaps, though we've been friendly acquaintances and poet colleagues for upwards of twenty years. The reading took place at The Loft, a literary center in downtown Minneapolis, in a large renovated warehouse space that also houses the Coffee Gallery, the offices of Milkweed Editions, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Whenever I've walked into the building (on a busy truck route on the northern edge of downtown Minneapolis), the first thing I notice is the pervasive smell of fresh-sawed wood, which seems never to have left the place since the renovation was done.

Maybe two dozen people showed up to hear the reading, a decent turnout for two poets not graced (or shrouded) with corporate grants and sponsorship. Lively excitement played around the room. Someone from the Loft staff made some brief remarks, and then Scott King, publisher of Red Dragonfly Press, introduced both of the readers. (By way of full disclosure, I should perhaps mention here that Red Dragonfly Press is also the publisher of several of my books of poems.) The reading itself took place in the Loft's main theater, bare brick walls and bare wood floors and free-standing chairs, well lit, with a podium and mike in front.

Tim Young read first, for a half hour or so, then Thomas Smith read, again for about a half hour; then, following the plan they'd devised, they took turns each reading one poem, a poem rodeo (as Tim called it), trading poems back and forth for 15 or 20 minutes to finish the evening. Tim's style of reading was fairly straight-from-the-hip, gritty and largely unsentimental though deeply felt. Thomas's manner was softer, quieter, reflective and touched with sadness. I felt both of them connecting warmly with the audience.

I'll quote a few passages from the poems of Tim and Thomas, to give some of the flavor of their work. All quoted passages here are from the two books noted above.

From the poem "Snow Has Fallen," by Tim Young:

I watch the chickadees flit
from stem to dead stem.
They pick at weed seeds
and sing against the cold.
A chickadee warrior
is the bravest of all.
He defends his kin
against any large thing.

He is steadfast -- courageous --
And in the worst winter he won't flee.
Gray, white and black, he's beauty
with only three tones of his color. [...]

[...] Even in a blizzard he finds a refuge.
He tucks himself in and waits
for what is impossible to defy,
to pass.

I've watched the gray day
arrive out of black dawn.
Snow begins again. The lawn's white.
The sky's white, and if it weren't for
the gray trees and chickadees,
I wouldn't know where earth stops
and sky begins.

And from "Darkness in the Rear View Mirror" by Thomas Smith:

New snow dusts its veil over the freeway.
Moist air diffuses the suburban glow.
Windshield wipers flap their wings, flightless birds.
A semi studded with carnival bulbs
flashes quickly behind, then showboats past.

Comforting shadows return, the dashboard
dials brighten, the rear view mirror lays
its black bar across the field of vision.
Ahead of me, safely distant, tail-lights
lantern a faint reddish trail to follow.

Many of the poems that both poets read were poems of the natural world, infused with the lakes and streams and fields of the northern plains, the far-reaching trees of the north woods, living creatures tiny and gargantuan. Poems also of deep human pain and want, of the great opening and sustaining of love.

Tim Young, from the poem "The Moment is Near":

Today, Ruth,
who's dying of cancer,
moved into Mary's house --
her hospice for the end. [...]

[...] The snow-field run-off plunges
beneath Mary's driveway bridge
and in minutes that water
will spill into the Big River.

Along the backwater
more than fifty eagles perch,
prepared for a long flight north.
As soon as the last black ice

dissolves on the lake
they'll fly to their high, stick-nests
in the mysterious white pine groves
we've only heard of.

And the moment is near.

And then Thomas Smith, from "A Rite of Spring," a short poem about a garden club sale held the Armory building in a small town:

Faces, fresh and airy as the flats of
geraniums and zinnias, a partial
reply to the song of Pete Seeger, ninety
years old last week. Maybe someday,
at least a little because of him, the armories
of this world "gone to flowers every one."

Tim Young talked a little about having worked for several years at the juvenile prison at Red Wing, Minnesota, helping inmate with learning life skills, moral judgement, and anger management. It can be easy to forget that these things have real weight in the world, quite apart from the psychological and sociological language the prison bureaucracy uses to talk about them. Tim mentioned that for about five years, most of the teenage boys he worked with were sex offenders, and had themselves been victims of abuse (sexual and otherwise). One of the sections of Tim's book is made up of poems coming out of his experience working at the prison. From the poem "An Inmate Weeps on His Math Test":

A week into his recidivist sentence,
something's moving inside him,
through his mind,
through the fisty muscle in his throat,
through his tear ducts,
then over his shivering lips.

I slide a box of tissues to him.
My work is to be nearby,
correct his tests, send my words
halfway across his table,
and wait.

I think of the elections of last week, the hysterical ignorance and repugnant cynical greed manifesting into precinct maps and vote counts, polyester jackets and prepared speeches, money changing hands in backrooms and cheerleader smiles for the cameras. Among the hordes of opportunist hacks and deal-cutting operatives abroad on the land, could any among them comprehend a moment of real human vulnerability such as is described in the lines above?

During the reading Thomas Smith mentioned, at one point, mentioned the elections, the frequent conversations he'd had in the past week where people kept talking about the election results. "The fact is," he said, with deep quiet sadness, "that as a result of the elections last week, people will die, around the world and here in this country."

From Thomas's poem "A Homemade World":

Many people salvage bricks
from their childhood homes.
They nail the old framed
prejudices above the fireplace.

They can't see out their windows
because they've recycled the smoked
glass of fear. Even their
books keep out light.

If you build with only
the things you've made your own,
a friendliness toward living
warms you like a patchwork quilt.

If you build your world-house
with toxic cast-offs, there's some
poison everywhere you turn.
And if you build your country

with bombs and oil instead of
wheat and schools -- you can't help it,
you'll just go on electing
Disaster as your president.

The poems and books of Tim Young and Thomas Smith include, among their many tunings and textures, moments and movements of grace and tenderness, intimacy and embracing light. I'll finish here with passages from one more poem from each poet. First, from Tim Young's poem "An Evening So Beautiful":

An evening so beautiful even the moon has envy.
She throws off her see-through gown
and so begins our love affair in the garden.

Where the rainbow faded at sunset
new stars emerge the way
lavender sprouts from the soil. [...]

[...] then our hearts spin, slowly,
in the shadow of a blooming catalpa.

Its white petals drop
like warm pearls from the lips
of our private goddess.

A wide-eyed doe, slender to her flank,
flicks her tail, flutters her lashes,
then bounds away with the grace of a swaying lily.

And Thomas Smith, from the poem "The Return," which begins with a quote from the Koran, "Unto Him all things return."

Burning clear with all
heat and strength befitting
the day of its longest dominion,
the sun, boiling from that
high nest of foliage,
lit a silver swath
of sparkling, dew-bent

grasses all the way down
the drenched slope.
So brilliant was that carpet
of light the sun unrolled
down the hill to our feet,
we stopped where we were
and sat a while in pure wonder.

And I remembered an old
secret promise, deemed
unwise to speak, though
who could deny it,
seeing these folk, humble
yet adorned, nodding together
on their way back to the sun?

And soon enough we got up
again and wandered on
into whatever we had to do
on that day, though not unchanged,
having accompanied a little distance
on the morning road of their return
those illuminated pilgrims.

***

Tim Young's website is here. Thomas Smith's website is here. The links in the first paragraph above go to the Red Dragonfly Press webpages for each of the books quoted from in this blogpost; the main page for the Red Dragonfly Press website is here. I invite you to go and look.

A few paragraphs from Bill Holm

2010-09-20T21:45:00.001-05:00

Found a few paragraphs I liked in "The Music of Failure," an essay by Bill Holm in his essay collection The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth (published in 2000 by Milkweed Editions).

The essay is in some respects the cornerstone of the collection; the book title is taken from a sentence in the essay. Holm, who lived 1943 to 2009, was originally from the town of Minneota, Minnesota (in the open prairie country in the southwestern part of the state), and after time away he moved back to the town and lived the later years of his life there. (No typo above -- the name of the town is spelled like the name of the state, but without the "s.") In "The Music of Failure" -- originally published in 1985 -- he explores some of the faulty notions of "success," and what sometimes has passed for failure in (particulary) the mainstream culture of the United States in the past three or four centuries; he poses questions about what kind of life is most worth living.

Near the beginning of the essay, Holm quotes, in full, section 19 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

With strong music I come, with my cornets and my drums,
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquered and slain persons.

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

I beat and pound for the dead,
I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them.

Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

Reading these lines, I wonder what the effect might be, on the individual people and on the society we live in, if the above passage were posted on the wall of every high school team locker room, in every military barracks, every office and factory and used car lot. What if schoolchildren started each day standing as a group and saying these lines?

In his essay, Holm goes on to talk about leaving his home town in the early years of the war in Vietnam; he talks about the peeling open of the underside of U.S. society and culture in those years at the shortcomings of national self-assurance began to reveal themselves: "...a president or two shot, an economy collapsed, a man whom every mother in American warned every child against accepting rides or candy from was in the flesh overwhelmingly elected president [Holm here refers to Richard Nixon], and then drummed into luxurious disgrace for doing the very things those mothers warned against. The water in American turned out to be poisoned. Cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago were invisible under air that necessitated warning notices in the newspaper. [...] Oil gurgled onto gulls' backs north of San Francisco. The war finally ended in disgrace, the secretary of state mired as deep in lies as Iago. America, the realized dream of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, seemed to have sunk into playing out a Shakespearean tragedy, or perhaps a black comedy."

"Yet," Holm continues, "as history brought us failure, it brought us no wisdom. [...] It was not 'good to fall,' not good to be 'sunk in the sea,' not good to be among the 'numberless unknown heroes.' We elected, in fact, a famous actor to whom failure was incomprehensible as history itself, a man who responded to visible failure around him by ignoring it and cracking hollow jokes."

And then, a few paragraphs further on:

"The first settlers of America imagined paradise, God's city made visible on earth. Grand rhetoric for a pregnancy, it was, like all births, bloodier and messier than anyone imagined at the moment of conception. English Puritans who came to build a just and godly order began by trying to exterminate Indian tribes. They tried to revise the English class system of rich landowners and poor yeomen by sharing a common bounty, but this lasted only until somebody realized that true profit lay in landowning, here as in England. The same settlers who declared with Proudhon that "property is theft" wound up working as real estate agents. Old European habits of success died hard.

"Hypocrisy is not unusual in human history; it is the order of the day. What has always been usual in the United States is the high-toned rhetoric that accompanied our behavior, our fine honing of the art of sweeping contradictions under the rug with our eternal blank optimism. But if we examined, without sentimentality, the failures and contradictions of our own history, it would damage beyond repair the power of that public rhetoric, would remove the arch-brick from the structure of the false self we have built for ourselves, in Minneota as elsewhere.

"I labored under the weight of that rhetoric as a boy, and when I am tired now, I labor under it still. It is the language of football, a successful high school life, and earnest striving and deliberate ignoring, money, false cheerfulness, mumbling about weather. Its music is composed by the radio, commercials for helpful banks and deodorants breathing out at you between stanzas [...] you are serenaded by tiny orchestras hidden hidden in elevators or in rafters above discount stores. It is the music of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It is not what Whitman had in mind by beating and pounding for the dead. True dead, unlike false dead, hear what we sing to them."

*

I had known of Bill Holm, and his writing, for many years, though I hadn't read anything of his until this past week. I'll keep reading him.

Bill Holm's website is still available on online, here.

The other September 11

2010-09-11T23:53:00.001-05:00

On this date in 1973 in Chile, a coup began in which the military overthrew the elected government of that country. The Chilean military did so with the military and financial aid of the U.S. government. Acts of terrorism committed that day included the bombing of the Chilean presidential palace by military aircraft, which (among other effects) resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende.

From 2003, an account and analysis of the events of those days by Roger Burbach, in the website of the magazine CounterPunch, here. Burbach was in Santiago, Chile, at the time of the coup, and witnessed many of the events first-hand. As he relates in his article, two of his friends were among the untold thousands who were killed by the military regime that seized power.

When I Googled "september 11, 1973" it brought up links to many other sources of information about the events of that day in Chile. I encourage you to go looking.

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On a related topic: I recently read Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel García Márquez (published 2010 by New York Review Books; originally published in Spanish sometime in the late 1980's). The book is an account (non-fiction, not a novel) of the experiences of Chilean documentary filmmaker Miguel Littin, when Littin returned clandestinely to Chile in 1985 (after 12 years in exile in Mexico and Spain) to make a film documenting political and economic conditions in Chile under the Pinochet regime.

García Márquez wrote the book after interviewing Littin about the two months he spent in Chile filming illegally, and the book is written in first-person from Littin's viewpoint. I found the narrative intensely gripping throughout -- it gives a vivid picture of the living conditions and political and psychological atmosphere Littin observed and encountered, and the constant danger he was in while he remained there doing the filming. I also found it useful in the insights it gives into how people will find ways to persist with political resistance even under the most brutally oppressive conditions.

The publisher's webpage for the book is here.

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"Bring to the cup of this new life
your old buried sorrows."

-- Pablo Neruda, from "Alturas de Macchu Picchu," my own translation.

So that they might become flames

2010-09-08T20:46:00.010-05:00

A little while back I came across Rain Inside, selected poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated from Arabic by Omnia Amin and Rick London (published 2009 by Curbstone Press). I wasn't familiar with Nasrallah's poetry previously. As I read his poems I found myself moving through a world of startling immediacy, a world in which literature and myth arises from plain speech, and commonplace objects rise toward life.

Nasrallah, who is Palestinian, was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1954. As a result of Israeli occupation, he and his parents were forced to go to the Al Wehdat refugee camp in Jordan, where he grew up; he spent the first 33 years of his life there. Through a United Nations relief agency he attended school, and later a teacher training college, and has worked as a teacher and a journalist. Since 1996 he has worked at Darat Al-Fanoun, an arts and cultural center in Jordan. He has written thirteen books of poems, also novels and literary criticism, and is also a painter and photographer.

Who are these songs for?
When they break the silence of the night
spreading warmth and life over the snow,
when they fall on the jasmine and carry it to water,
when they pass by a dim window, secretly embracing a lover,
when they spread over the grass, wrapped in clouds?
Who are these songs for
when they free the flowers
and the hidden flame of passion in women,
when they come to you with their flowers,
when they come to you with their secrets,
when they embrace the sun or a bouquet of flowers
or anything abandoned on the road?

(From the poem "Our Songs" in Rain Inside, from which all of the quoted passages are taken.)

Nasrallah's poems read as though all of his senses remaining perpetually open to the wonders and sorrow of the greatest and smallest things, the slightest passing moments. A river of humanity, of human experience, seems to flow through his poems, a river in which each of us mingles. The surge and jostle, as in the poems of Whitman, or Neruda, or Nazim Hikmet.

Flowers, songs, chants...
A memory from antiquity...
Saturday's dawning sun...
An orphan is late...
A widow comes by embracing another widow...
A singer...
Verses from the Qur'an...
A flute on the outskirts of a neglected village...
Ancient soldiers...
Battles, defeated ages...
Thirty wars announced by daylight...
Another thirty still hidden in their sheaths...
Little ones dressed up for a feast...
Horses filled with the joy of their riders...
A procession coming from far away...
Ululations reaching the sky, a commotion...
Men emerging from darkness...
from yesterday's newspapers, from the inkwell.

(From the poem "The Celebration." All ellipses are in the original.)

From time to time during the past twenty or thirty year, one poet or another will quote the remark by the twentieth century philsopher Theodor Adorno, to the effect that after the Holocaust lyric poetry is impossible. I haven't read Adorno's original statement, or any of his writings; poet Adrienne Rich (in her essay "Poetry and the Forgotten Future") says, among other things, that Adorno later retracted the statement. Clearly, poets haven't stopped writing; the evidence of history suggests, if anything, that writing poetry has become even more essential in the aftermath of the horrors of the past century; that the greater the struggles and difficulties of life in the world, the greater the need to speak out. Poetry has not (if it were necessary to say so) become impossible.

From the poem "Possibilities":

Maybe silence has grapes for a tongue
and flows inside us
and spreads us out like colored garments.

Maybe the dust under siege
in our flesh is a marble horizon
to which birds have long prayed --
but it has never responded.

Maybe fire's ancient sorrow is ashes
that torture it with our annihilation,
then leave it to moan.

Maybe when water yearned for fire
it invented waves
so one day they might become flames.

Rain Inside includes three sequences of short fragement-like poems, titled "The Chairs," "The Hours," and "Mirrors of Dust." Though it's difficult to convey the movement and interconnections of the poem groups, here are three sections from "The Hours," to give at least a little feel of them:

The hour of arrest

Usually, a solitary gazelle prepares songs for its young
and at dawn lullabies the question's wound.
But suddenly they cross the streets -- in great numbers --
and a woman asks:
What are they doing with those guns?
Have they come to arrest the mountains?

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The hour of execution

Silently, soldiers go round in the barracks
and famished dogs rush out.
There are the monotonous sounds of footsteps
in chains
and in darkness.
Silently, a knotted rope swings
in a rush of bullets and death.

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The twenty fifth hour

Nothing can catch it,
not advancing time or chains
or the security forces,
as it dwells in us a ravenous spring
in full view
in our light and tender songs.

You wake up in the morning. You walk outside, keeping in mind that walking outside may be illegal today, that waking up may be illegal. Maybe the bus is running today. Maybe the bus will be permitted to pass the police checkpoint. Maybe the people on the bus will be permitted to stay on the bus as it passes the police check point. Maybe the building at the end of the street will explode, maybe because of bombs dropped on it from the air, maybe because of bombs fired at is from the sea. Maybe the knock on the door is your neighbor. Maybe it's the police. You walk along the street. The people you see may be back on the same street tomorrow. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll be taken away to some place from which they won't return for a very long time. Maybe the people on the street will press on in the face of despair. Maybe they will pull together in an act of open resistance. Maybe you will join them. There are many things to consider, when considering the nature and circumstances of a life.

He silently browses through a book of clouds
and reads the heavy day,
then sears me with his gaze.
I say: life is running across the sky and the pavement,
as he hands me the daily paper.
Water blurs the lines
and burdens sleep.
He whispers: Never mind.
Here one becomes familiar with the look of sorrow on the faces,
the whirl of time,
the incantation of silence,
the closed roads.
When I stretched out my hand to him
he became perplexed.
He shook my hand with his left hand
and hid his tears, his pain,
his wooden arm.

(From the poem "Rain Inside," which includes a sub-title, "(To a man in front of the Scheherazade Cafe: passed by many ... but seen by few).")

Martín Espada interview

2010-08-13T20:56:00.004-05:00

Poet Martín Espada is interviewed by Wendy Vardaman in the website of Verse Wisconsin: Espada talks about his experiences as a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; the jobs he has had; his ideas about working-class poetry and politically explicit poetry; the importance of bringing poetry into the larger world, and of writing poetry that communicates, that says something useful; among much else. A great interview.

The interview is here. It also includes YouTube videos of Espada reading a couple of his poems.

The main page of Verse Wisconsin is here.

I've written about Martín Espada's book of poems The Republic of Poetry previously in this blog, here.

Martin Espada's website is here.

Poem in Poets for Living Waters

2010-06-23T18:32:00.003-05:00

A poem of mine, about the oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico, has been posted in Poets for Living Waters, here.

Other great poems in response to the oil eruption are posted there as well, and at present the website hosts (poets Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples) are continuing to accept more poem submissions for the site. Links to featured poems, and guidelines for submitting, are in the main page of Poets for Living Waters, here.

I urge you to go there and read. And my thanks to Amy and Heidi for the good work they're doing with this.

Open veins of fire

2010-06-07T19:18:00.005-05:00

Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes (TinFish Press, 2008) is a book of poems epic in conception and variation. Written alternately in English, Spanish and Tagalog, these are poems that confront and expose the long brutal history of imperial occupation and plunder of the world by the government of the United States and its corporate backers; poems that honor and celebrate the enduring struggles of the majority of people in the world in spite of, in the face of, every manner of imposed degradation and deprivation.

The book is organized in three sections, "orient," "dis orient," and "re orient," with short prologue and epilogue sections. Written on the page sometimes as prose paragraphs, sometimes in the linebreaks of poems, this is writing that constantly shifts perspective, moving through a landscape of viewpoints, speaking in a chorus of voices. I described the book as epic. It's the average length of a typical book of poems, not a massive volume to pick up; it's epic in every other sense. The great variation of the poems never wanders away from the book's central subject: the nature of life, and death, and love, in the heart of the beast of empire.

Many of Reyes's poems deal specifically with the history and present character of U.S. government and economic policy and relations with Asia and the people of that part of the world. She frequently probes into questions of how culture is defined, and by whom, and for what purposes; a number of the poems make reference to the portrayal of Asian people and places in American-made films. From a poem (untitled, in the conventional sense) that begins "dear love,":

remember the bamboo tiger cages in those goddamn movies. and napalm, sinister rain, deathly tangerine vapor veiling the islands, for simulation's nothing like the real thing. the real thing. military choppers of film script, steel demon birds, called away to quell real life dictatorship's farthest outposts of rebellion. who among us could've told the difference? they have mistaken my home for a hollywood set of your home.

(In the 1970's, during the filming of the movie Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, director Francis Ford Coppola made use of helicopters of the Philippines military to film the helicopter scenes. At one point filming was temporarily interrupted because the Philippines government called the helicopters away to aid in suppressing a real-life populist rebellion that was breaking out in the Philippines.)

At times the voice in the poems is clear and accusing, other times quiet and abidingly tender, and again coolly analytical, and yet again public and declamatory. Reyes's poems move with insistent rhythms and concentrated power that evoke the movement of the sea, the tectonic plates of the earth.

she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots spilling snakes' blood
virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree
one day's walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman's dinghy dimensions washes ashore
virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk
she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines
virgin of ocean voyage peril
she wills herself born
virgin of mud brick ruins; virgin of sandstorm echoes
she is saint of commonplaces; saint of badlands
virgin of jade, camphor, porcelain; virgin of barter for ghosts
penitents, earthdivers of forgotten names praying skyward
virgin of scars blossomed from open veins of fire

(From the poem "[galleon prayer], pilipinas to petatlán.")

Poems about the destruction and survival of the Philippines and Vietnam. Poems about corporatespeak and corporatemind that can conceive of most of the world as little more than an oil well, a silver mine, an undrafted army of low-wage labor, a brothel, a tourist picture postcard, a hotel on a sunny beach. Poems of soldiers returning from the latest imperial expedition, missing limbs and souls. Poems of love persisting in the face of everything. Poems of the constant and probing search for identity, not as a label or slogan but as an actual reality of who each of us is in relation to each other in the lives we live, which are in every sense political.

Between decreed days of honor,
you think of their faces, twisting,
blood clots in the brain. Today,
you pretend they are your heroes.

El valiente, el nómada.
La sangre, las venas, la ruptura.

Consider this procession:

Those missing pieces of themselves,
held up by will, metal stilts,
antiquated wheelchairs.
Quad-pod canes of they've got
adequate health insurance.
Amputation's romance, enacted
upon world stages. Videotaped. [...]

[...] Día de los muertos.

Those who fought with only scythes and sticks,
those who have held their innards in with a pot lid,
they are not present and accounted for here.

Sin ofrendas. Sin oración.
Desaparacido.

(From an untitled poem beginning "Aquí, in mi ciudad de sueños...")

Reyes doesn't translate the Spanish or Tagalog passages in Poeta en San Francisco into English. I don't know any Tagalog, and until I checked the publisher's webpage for the book (at the link above) I wasn't sure if it was Tagalog or possibly another language of the Philippines. Portions of some poems are in another writing, not familiar to me; Reyes includes transliterations of these into Roman alphabet, I would guess as a way of giving a sense of the sound of the passages. I appreciated the demand and invitation the poems offered, another act of changing perspective, a simple reminder that English is not, in fact, a language everyone chooses to speak.

In a world in which the life and well-being of the earth increasingly and inexorably depends on our capacity and desire to care for each other as human beings; where borders and languages, cultures and viewpoints, history and ideology, poetry and song, can be doorways and flowerings, not fences and walls; the poetry in Poeta en San Francisco is a star and an emblem, it is essential. To those who would destroy the earth for their insatiable gain, the poetry here is a warning: to those of us who would make the world live, the poetry calls our names.

you have angered the evil spirits of the machine, and they demand appeasement. this is why you have come, a man presenting himself as a voice, always suspecting the jungle's eyes are not human. if they are, capable of humanity, then they are the first men, wordless, taking possession of accursed inheritance. no, you wish for deliberate belief. you insist upon absolution and deliverance. and so it shall be.

(From the poem "[panambitan]".)

Gulf oil spill -- call for poems

2010-05-31T18:11:00.002-05:00

Poets Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples are seeking poems for Poets for Living Waters, a poetry action in response to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that began on April 20 this year.

Go to Poets for Living Waters, at the link above, for more details and the e-mail address to submit poems -- and to read the poems posted there now, by Nicole Cooley, Tara Betts, Fady Joudah, Philip Metres, Jeff Newbury, Alicia Ostriker, Carly Sachs, Evie Shockley, and others.

The earth needs our voices right now.

Rock a warm word secret

2010-05-08T18:33:00.003-05:00

Rock Candy by Jenifer Rae Vernon (published 2010 by West End Press) is one of the books of poems I brought home from AWP in Denver. I first encountered Jen Vernon at the Albuquerque Cultural Conference in 2007 -- I don't quite recall if we met formally, though I remember her from a couple of the conference sessions, and I heard her read some of her poems at one of the readings during the conference. I was excited to hear that West End was going to do a book of her poems. I found Rock Candy a powerful and moving book.

These are poems of plain spare language, spoken language, often the stories of friends and family members Vernon has told, retold, shaped into poetry. Vernon has a keen ear for the tough clipped rhythms and painful honesty of people telling what they must tell, no matter what the cost. From the poem "Rock Candy Ladies":

My women rock a warm word secret on their laps,
peaches in winter time, fur fresh and canned
Grandma Callie named her sixth born Del Monte,
after the soaked in heavy syrup half moon hunks

Sweet women mine, rough with the outside, but so tightly kind,
pin prick fine, Del Monte died at Christmas time
from asbestos pipe dust, sawing two to fit one to get the job done,
hot water bottle breaths in and out brittle up,
useless, like two crystal glasses
left with just leather lungs, nothing-to-be-done
my mamas lose their sons

And my mamas lose their daughters too, on Rainier Avenue
and around town when the men are at logging camps, or picking apples
in Wenatchee, they lose their girls to swung handbags and hips
they lose their girls to car salesmen, bankers, lawyers, cops
they lose their girls to fire
like Aunt Geraldine making her self into a burnt offering,
after too much working, bathrobe and cigarette ember, liquor
but angels rise white winged from flame, come in breathing cool

The world we live in affects us, the history that enacts every day in us and around us, the political ideas and actions that grow out of this history, in our constant movement in real time. A casual comment in a corporate board room can result in thousands of people losing their jobs and their homes. A massing of people in public streets, facing down the armies of corporate power, can turn into bloodshed and disaster or can lead to a transformation of the quality of life, to more or less food on the table. This connection between large public actions and close-up human consequences runs as a constant awareness through Jenifer Vernon's poems, sometimes as a kind of underlying ground rhythm, at other times as explicit content in the poems.

i went to a wedding in the high atlas mountains, and when the road ended
i met a boy tending sheep
we sat together, in crickets and silence

it gets lonesome, coming up in the country,
i remember pulling tansy ragwort, weeds the cows couldn't eat,
and being ecstatic to meet, soldiers in war paint,
trudging through swamp, looking for Fort Lewis, totally lost
i wonder if this shepherd kid, met some of them, too,
i wonder what, they chose to do

the shepherd and i talked with our faces, because we didn't share much language
he touched index finger to lip before he greeted me, and when i made to go
he placed his palm against his heart, reached in pocket, and gave me a favorite rock
said "i mean it" with his hands and eyes, like we learn to pledge allegiance
but there were no flags between us
just some sheep and crickets, a young boy's brown eyes

(From the poem "east-west.")

One of the pivotal poems in Rock Candy, the long poem "Elegy for Chastity," was (quoting from the Author's Note at the end of the book) "propelled by the murder of the author's childhood friend [...] and importantly, other women like her. It aims to give voice to a collective and an individual through poetic eulogy." The poem is a remarkable accomplishment, moving seamlessly between voices and viewpoints and pieces of an essential story, assembling a narrative with the skill and steadiness of someone used to making things by hand. Though difficult to give a sense of the overall movement of the poem without quoting it at great length, I want to give at least a short excerpt here, to give a little sense of the texture and movement of the poem:

We should have helped ease the load
provide basic needs
for canned peas, milk, hamburger
rent check, power, water
toothpaste, soap
laundry quarters
a modicum of order

So she could use that good head on her shoulders
to get him out of her ears, nose, holes
she could not pull him out of herself alone
she needed an exorcist
she needed time for mental order, she needed rest

His words rattle ramp inside her skull cave detonate
in her opened palms
before she can make a fist she's scared shitless
she raises them, begs help from Jesus,
but he's got to teach her something
she holds them out in front of chest
she struggles to out stretch
but he's stuck like a tick tock
beat starts stops, sets aftershocks
shrapnel wedges black bits in flesh, works out over years

Time's more than a glass covered plate screwed to wall
black pointer spun white face talk,
when did this start?

The bio note about Jenifer Rae Vernon in Rock Candy says that she was raised in Yelm, Washington, and in recent years has been a featured poet in clubs and performance spaces in the San Diego - Tijuana area. "I learned," she says in the bio note, "that plain old words can shine glorious if they are bowed and rearranged right -- and that sometimes the rhythm says more than the words themselves." Many of the poems in the book felt to me like they would work well as performances pieces; Vernon has made an effort to capture something of this quality on the page with careful choices of line breaks, and with frequent non-standard placement of commas, to emphasize the speech rhythm qualities of the poems. I found this highly effective and evocative of real individual human voices.

So many of us come from the places Jen Vernon tells about here. So many of us share these stories, whatever the specific details may be for each of us. This is a vital book of poems, demonstrating (in a world where, under current political and economic and historical conditions, we need to keep saying it) that we who work building the house of each day have useful and important things to say, even if our names aren't Bush or Cheney or Clinton, AIG or Citibank or Goldman Sachs. Saying these things together, hearing our words collectively, we become stronger and further affirm the value and meaning of our lives.

Among the poems in the book that moved me the most were a couple written about a friend of Vernon's who died of breast cancer. I'll finish here with some lines quoted from one of the poems, titled "flame":

i miss her when she wore flame
taffeta, to our parties in north park
when she danced like cindy lauper and didn't worry
about academic papers or hard lumps
of cancer

i miss her when her eyes talked tricks
from deathbed in climate controlled clinic
when she demanded green frosting cake and candles
for her husband's birthday and for what she named
her pre-funeral party

i miss her when we all had plenty of time
before the vultures got in line
to do their duty, tough guts
they can eat it, chemo
morphine, goldenseal
gallons of green tea,
baby you fought hard, tried

my bald winged
pallbearers
carry her please
to the otherside

May Day report from San Francisco

2010-05-01T22:33:00.002-05:00

In the weblog of poet Lorna Dee Cervantes: her eyewitness account of violent assaults by police and unlawful arrests participants in the May Day demonstration in San Francisco today, in which police specifically targeted Latino/a protesters. Lorna's account is here.

AWP report

2010-04-12T19:59:00.010-05:00

I went to AWP in Denver this year. The conference took place Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 8 through April 10. Here are a few of the highlights and random moments from the past few days there.

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The event that sticks out the most sharply for me is the reading/performance by poet Joy Harjo and guitarist Larry Mitchell, on Saturday afternoon during the conference. Harjo gave a stunning reading, often singing her poems, and sometimes playing sax as well, and danced through much of the reading. As she commented near the beginning of the reading, poetry and song and dance began together in the world, and they long for each other.

Harjo's reading was a stunning and transcendant experience. I heard her do a full reading once before, in Minneapolis in the early 1990's with the band Poetic Justice, and it was the same then. Listening to Harjo read, I feel the world reshaping itself around me, moving once again toward its true shape, the world in which we all live and move.

This is a strong statement to make about a poetry reading. If you've ever heard Joy Harjo read, you surely know what I'm talking about. If, by any chance, you're not familiar with Joy Harjo's poetry, you might start with A Map to the Next World (published 2001 by W. W. Norton), or her legendary early book She Had Some Horses (originally published 1983 by Thunder's Mouth Press; now also available from W. W. Norton.)

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Also deeply memorable was the Tribute to Mahmoud Darwish, a reading and discussion of Darwish's work featuring panelists Fady Joudah, Yusef Komunyakaa, Michael Collier and Khaled Mattawa. (Poet Marilyn Hacker, also scheduled on the panel, was unable to attend.) Mahmoud Darwish, who lived 1941 to 2008, was and is one of the great defining poets of the 20th century. A lot of his work has been translated into English, by various translators, and I've read whatever of his I've been able to get my hands on.

I've written about Mahmoud Darwish's poetry previously in this blog, here.

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Among the panels I attended, I particularly liked "Justice, Community, and the Republic of Poetry," featuring panelists Martín Espada, Tara Betts and David Mura: a moving and inspiring discussion of the potential for poetry to aid us in remaking our world into a place of greater humanity; and "Writing Sex: Implicit Censorship in Contemporary Poetry," which turned out to be essentially a reading (at 9:00 a.m. Friday morning) by poets Jan Beatty, Aaron Smith, Stacey Waite, Sharon Doubiago, and Dorianne Laux: alternately sublimely moving and joyfully hilarious in the intimacy and audacity of the poems and the poets.

A panel first thing Thursday morning, "About My Day Job: The Proliferation of Poetry by Any Available Means," was an enthusiastic discussion of the numerous ways poets make a living; of the people who spoke, both the panelists and audience members, most worked for a living outside of university English departments, and mostly outside of the academic world entirely. Panelists were Lola Haskins, Karen Head, Megan Volpert, and (by cell phone) Collin Kelley.

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I attended an off-site reading event, One Poem Festival, hosted by Momotombo Press and PALABRA, a reading by some two dozen poets, one poem each: Oscar Bermeo, Xánath Caraza, John Chávez, Mario Duarte, Juliana Aragón Fatula, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher...

...Diana Garcia, Liz Gonzalez, Tim Z. Hernández, Sheryl Luna, J. Michael Martinez, Michael Luis Medrano...

...Maria Melendez, Carolina Monsivais, Juan J. Morales, Kristin Naca, Emmy Pérez, Manuel Ramos...

...John Michael Rivera (who also MC'd the event), Carmen Gimenez Smith, Gloria Vando, Dan Vera, Rich Villar, Danny Solis, and Richard Blanco.

The poetry was great, from beginning to end.

The reading took place at the Dikeou Collection, an art gallery space on the fifth floor in an office building in downtown Denver, a couple of blocks from the hotel and convention center where the AWP-sponsored events were held; a smallish space (one of several small gallery rooms), folding chairs, art on the walls, a large pink inflated figure that had somewhat deflated and sprawled on the floor (someone said it was a rabbit, I couldn't quite tell). The room was quite warm when I came in, though the room temperature became more comfortable once people got settled and the reading began.

I was struck by how many poetry readings I've been to over the years in spaces such as that one, small, furnished by luck and love, persisting in spite of everything, charged with the creative energies of the poets (and in this also the artists whose work was on display) and by the enthusiasm and community of the people who had come to listen. After a couple of days of hotel ballrooms and convention center meeting rooms, I was again, briefly, in normal familiar surroundings, and I found it energizing and comforting.

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I also attended an AWP reading event, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, featuring brief readings by poets Cyrus Cassells, B.H. Fairchild, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Jean Valentine, Diane Wakoski, Gary Young, and Matthew Zapruder.

At a Writers in the Schools panel, "What Do Kids Want? Building Community in and around Schools," I had an opportunity to talk briefly with poet Sheryl Noethe (one of the panelists) for the first time in a couple of decades; the session was made up of passionate and thoughtful presentations on a vital topic. I was constantly aware, listening to the panelist talk, of how important the early encouragement of a few teachers was in leading me to begin writing poems so many years ago.

The last event I attended, late afternoon Saturday, was the panel "Memoir Form and Ethics in the Age of the Oprah Book Club," with panelists Glen Retief, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Thomas Larson, and Carolyn Forché; the panel was well-attended and the audience was alert and interested, even with the event taking place near the end of the three days of the conference, with fatigue becoming softly palpable in the room.

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I was pleased during the conference to meet, face to face for the first time, poets Ruth Ellen Kocher and Mary Biddinger. And also had a chance to have a good visit with poet friend Erika Wurth, whose book Indian Trains I've written about in this blog, here.

I found the (slightly) cheaper places to eat on 16th Street, a pedestrian mall a block from the hotel. The hotel where some of the conference events took place was a monument to formica fixtures. In the hotel lobby by the groups of stuffed polyester chairs were small tables made to look like sawed-off tree stumps. Several vases of flowers, perched on a table in the lobby, were supplied by a literary agency that is a major sponsor of AWP.

I had a room on the 12th floor with a nice view of mountains beyond downtown Denver. The weather was bright and cool and breezy all through the days of the conference, becoming gradually a little warmer by the weekend.

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A couple of times I dived into the bookfair, which took up a vast room on the second floor of the convention center. Here is a list of the books I came home with:

Rock Candy, poems by Jenifer Rae Vernon (published 2009 by West End Press).

Insides She Swallowed, poems by Sasha Pimentel Chacón (2010, West End Press).

Velroy and the Madischie Mafia, poems by Sy Hoahwah (2009, West End Press).

Split This Rock Chapbook, poetry anthology edited by John Rosenwald and Lee Sharkey, published Spring 2008 as Vol. 58, No. 3 of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, poems by Randall Horton (2009, Main Street Rag Publishing Company).

A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham (2009, Archipelago Books); subtitled "journals," the work appears on the pages partly as poetry or poem fragments, partly as prose poems or short prose fragments. A note on the cover flap says that this was Darwish's last book to come out in Arabic.

Finding the Way Home: Poems of Awakening and Transformation edited by Dennis Maloney (2010, White Pine Press); an anthology of work by poets of various time periods, from China, Japan, Latin America, Europe, and the present-day United States, drawn mostly from the many books White Pine has published over the course of nearly forty years.

Primera Página: Poetry from the Latino Heartland (2008, Scapegoat Press), an anthology of work by poet members of the Latino Writers Collective of Kansas City, Missouri.

Red Deer, poems by Floyce Alexander (1982, L'Epervier Press). I found this at another publisher's table at the bookfair, and unfortunately neglected to note down who the other publisher was.

And, four books of poems in the Pudding House Publications "Greatest Hits" series (each one titled simply "Greatest Hits"): the ones by Sharon Doubiago, Sheryl Noethe, Joe Napora, and David Chorlton.

My flight back to Minneapolis left in the evening on Sunday, so I had a few hours to spend in Denver after checking out of the hotel. I walked to the Tattered Cover bookstore at the end of the 16th Street mall, and found there a copy of Trouble Light, poems by Gerald McCarthy (2008, West End Press; see the link at the top of the book list above), which I also brought home with me.

*

The high altitude in Denver (around 4000 feet higher than where I live), combined with the generally high-charged days and evenings of the AWP frenzy, caused me to have odd hours of sleeping and waking during the conference, though I was able to adjust without much problem. I had pretty much no mind left by the time I got back to Minneapolis late last night, was doing much better this morning after good sleep.

Growing late here, so will leave this for now. Much reading and writing ahead.

Review of Sharon Doubiago memoir

2010-03-10T18:00:00.002-06:00

A great review of poet friend Sharon Doubiago's memoir, My Father's Love: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, Vol. 1, has been written and posted online by Antoinette Nora Claypoole, here.

The page at the link appears to be a blog page, though the blog itself doesn't appear to have a name at the top. The review author Claypoole has a webpage, here, with links to other writing of hers.

I've written about Sharon Doubiago's poetry previously in this blog, here.

Pure and waiting silence

2010-02-15T19:53:00.005-06:00

Last year at the AWP conference in Chicago, one of the books I came away with was Breach by Anne Haines, published 2008 by Finishing Line Press. I read it shortly after I got back, and have wanted for some time to talk about it. I was quite moved by many of the poems in the book.

These are mostly quiet poems, poems in which the poet (or poet voice) is sifting and sorting through the complications of life, coming to terms with relationships and encounters with people, seeking the underlying mysteries of the hidden worlds around us. From the poem "Fog, Provincetown":

Everyone I've loved, I've walked with once in fog.
That's literal truth, no poetry.
Yesterday I envied painters their necessity of light.
But I can love these nights and mornings,
the blank windows across the way
that ask almost nothing of me.
Closing in like this, the world is both conscribed and limitless:
intimate as sleeping breath, and pure blank distance.
This gray, this heartbreak day.
And then: almost imperceptible: a brightness.

Almost imperceptible brightness, and then a bike rattles by.
This world, it's all rhythm and noise:
a boat departing harbor (long, short short short),
the bang that woke me as construction
shook the house, the bed, me from fogged-in dreams,
the putter-chuff of a starting car.
All rhythm, noise, and dancing past the confines,
past this conscripted world.

Running through many of Haines's poems is a thoughtful self-awareness, a kind of active or engaging contemplation with the surfaces where the self meets whatever is "other." Always a trace of humor, the corner of a fleeting grin, even coming to grips with real pain.

One morning I wake with a stiff neck.
Nothing helps, not heat, not stretching.
All day I stumble clumsily, trying not
to turn my head, gasping with pain
at any sudden movement.
Feeding the cats, I lower myself
slowly to the bowls; folding laundry,
I am careful not to jostle.
And I think, how we arrange
our lives around our pain,
the care we take.

I step out into stars and snow,
but stiff and sore, I can't look up.
I take the evening star on faith,
its steady light slipping westward.
I don't need faith for the ice underfoot,
the crunch of the snow's crust,
the cold that numbs my feet.

The taste of my own blood
warms me. My breath
rises like the end
of a question,
like a story I'd tell.

(From the poem "Telling Stories, The Evening Star.")

What does it mean to walk with oneself in a room, to seek the being within oneself? Who is it we talk to when we think to ourselves? Anne Haines's poems often feel like conversations the poet is having with a part of herself, emerging and taking shape, passing through darkness and light. How many footsteps in a lifetime?

Bird crash into windows
mistaking them for sky
fall to the ground
and wander off stunned.

Windows can open like wings.
In the spring I raise them all
too early, I crave the clean
chill, the smell of snow.

Walking in the evening
I peer into every home.
Windows frame a still life dinner,
the blue glow of TV light.

We speak of exposures,
northern or southern.
At night our faces reflect
like ghosts floating on glass

until we draw the curtains,
erase dark ghosts from memory.

(From the poem "Windows.")

These are poems of finely worked discovery, alive in the surprise of moments of sudden perception. Life begins with bursting from the close calm of water into the stunned wonder of light. For most of us, the experience of this happens before we have learned to shape words, before we have any other experience for comparison, and the memory eludes us: but we carry it with us through our lives, however deeply buried or tremblingly close to the surface. Anne Haines writes of this wonder with a steady clarity, a brightness of being, that lingers on a living shore.

That moment of pure and waiting silence
knowing she was near, then O!
the breach, explosion into air, so close
I felt it in my bones like a great drum

struck. Then struck again. The dark
curve of her body toward us
as she crashed back into sea, mountain
of a whale, the mammalian world of her

all I knew just then, all I could take in.
I don't know if I breathed
until she breached again, and yet again,
great muscular mountain of a whale, sonic

boom of a whale, whole planet of a whale,
wrenching breath from us as we stood
gasping on the drifting boat.
And then the holy stillness.

(From the poem "O.")