September 2012 - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
September 2012
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume cc • number 5
CONTENTS
September 2012
POEMS
431Fado
jane hirshfield
Like Two Negative Numbers
Multiplied by Rain
My Weather
Things keep sorting themselves.
Like the Small Hole by the
Path-Side Something Lives in
joan hutton landis
436
The Plan
frederick seidel
437Snow
Mount Street Gardens
The State of New York
Oedipal Strivings
Victory Parade
What Next
john de stefano
446 From “Critical Opalescence
and the Blueness of the Sky”
billy collins
448 Report from the Subtropics
Cheerios
ange mlinko
450
The Grind
deborah paredez
452
The Gulf, 1987
Wife’s Disaster Manual
dana levin
454
My Sentence
Urgent Care
mary karr
458
Read These
Suicide’s Note: An Annual
john koethe
Book X
461
james longenbach
464
By the Same Author
Opus Posthumous
c omment
469 Austerity Measures: A Letter
a.e. stallings
from Greece
william logan
483
Going, Going
beverley bie brahic
493 No Fish Were Killed in the
Writing of These Poems
letters to the editor
499
contributors
503
back page
519
Editor
Senior Editor
Associate Editor
Managing Editor
Editorial Assistant
Reader
Art Direction
christian wiman
don share
fred sasaki
valerie jean johnson
lindsay garbutt
christina pugh
winterhouse studio
cover art by oded ezer
“Scribble Pegasus,” 2012
POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG
a publication of the
P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N
printed by cadmus professional communications, us
Poetry • September 2012 • Volume 200 • Number 5
Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation.
Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00
per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic;
$50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for
back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast,
FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces.
postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2012 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes
that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Indexed in “Access,” “Humanities International Complete,”
“Book Review Index,” “The Index of American Periodical Verse,” “Poem Finder,” and “Popular Periodical Index.”
Manuscripts cannot be returned and will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope,
or by international reply coupons and a self-addressed envelope from writers living abroad. Copying done for other
than personal or internal reference use without the expressed permission of the Poetry Foundation is prohibited.
Requests for special permission or bulk orders should be addressed to the Poetry Foundation. Available in braille
from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche
through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at jstor.org. Distributed
to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk.
POEMS
jane hirshfield
Fado
A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.
j ane hirshfield
431
Like Two Negative Numbers Multiplied by Rain
Lie down, you are horizontal.
Stand up, you are not.
I wanted my fate to be human.
Like a perfume
that does not choose the direction it travels,
that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept.
Yes, No, Or
— a day, a life, slips through them,
taking off the third skin,
taking off the fourth.
And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple,
an animal question, scuffing.
Old shoes, old roads —
the questions keep being new ones.
Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain
into oranges and olives.
432O
P O E TRY
My Weather
Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,
restless, stunned, relieved.
Does a tree also?
A mountain?
A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.
I hold these.
j ane hirshfield
433
Things keep sorting themselves.
Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,
milk know it’s milk?
No.
Something just goes and something remains.
Like a boardinghouse table:
men on one side, women on the other.
Nobody planned it.
Plaid shirts next to one another,
talking in accents from the Midwest.
Nobody plans to be a ghost.
Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen.
Soon enough, they’ll be the ones
to stumble Excuse me and quickly withdraw.
But they don’t know that.
No one can ever know that.
434O
P O E TRY
Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in
Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,
nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.
They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.
And in my streets — the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map —
they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,
and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,
in hours uncounted by the self-clock,
they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.
There too have been the hard extinctions,
missing birds once feasted on and feasting.
There too must be machines
like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.
A few escape. A mercy.
They leave behind
small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.
j ane hirshfield
435
joan hutton landis
The Plan
For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois
Remembering Ann
Whose beauty began
At the crown of her head
And ran to the deep underneath
Of her feet —
Never aware of her own élan.
Now, half mad with pain,
She crawls through her rooms,
Calling for doctors,
Falling,
Forgetting,
Consumed,
Trepanned.
Ever since the world began —
Star fall
Nightfall
Bomb fall
Downfall . ..
Read the scan:
Every woman and every man,
Once a flowered Palestine,
Falls blindly toward the Nakba —
Bald catastrophe,
Prescription —
According to the
Plan.
436O
P O E TRY
frederick seidel
Snow
Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.
frederick seide l
437
Mount Street Gardens
I’m talking about Mount Street.
Jackhammers give it the staggers.
They’re tearing up dear Mount Street.
It’s got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger’s.
I mean, this is Mount Street!
Scott’s restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish;
Purdey, the great shotgun maker — the street is complete
Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English.
Remember the old Mount Street,
The quiet that perfumed the air
Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet
As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair?
One used to stay at the Connaught
Till they closed it for a makeover.
One was distraught
To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over.
Designer grease
Will help guests slide right into the zone.
Prince Charles and his design police
Are tickled pink because it doesn’t threaten the throne.
I exaggerate for effect —
But isn’t it grand, the stink of the stank,
That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect
Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate
the taxi rank!
438 O
P O E TRY
Turn away from your life — away from the noise! — Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind.
Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are
serious joys:
Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind,
And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born.
Whenever I’m in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear
The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd’s horn.
I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.
frederick seide l
439
The State of New York
I like the part I play.
They’ve cast me as Pompeii
The day before the day.
It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way.
They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay,
Pompeii.
You’re a miracle in a whirlpool
In your blind date’s vagina
At your age. Nothin could be fina.
You eat off her bone china.
Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool,
You fool.
In the lifelong month of May,
Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave,
He’s his own fabulous slave.
He rides his superbike faster and faster to save
His master from the coming lava from China, every day,
But especially today, because it’s on its way.
Fred Astaire is about to explode
In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around
The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound
Of Vesuvia playing,
And the slopes of Vesuvia saying
Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode.
Freud had predicted Fred.
In The Future of an Illusion he said:
“Movies are, in other words, the future of God.”
Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current
American politics do. Breast augmentation as a deterrent
To too much government is odd.
440O
P O E TRY
Korean women in a shop on Madison give a pedicure to Pompeii.
Fred only knows that he’s not getting old.
Pompeii doesn’t know it’s the day before the day.
The governor of New York is legally blind, a metaphor for his state
of mind.
He ought to resign, but he hasn’t resigned.
Good riddance, goodbye. The bell has tolled.
frederick seide l
441
Oedipal Strivings
A dinosaur egg opens in a lab
And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam,
Already taller than a man,
And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran.
I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide.
He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried
To find, without success. Jews grab
The thing they love unless it’s ham,
And hold it tightly to them lest it die —
Or like my mother try
To find the ham they couldn’t hold.
A hot ham does get cold.
Grampa, monster of malevolence,
I’m told was actually a rare old-fashioned gentleman of courtly
benevolence.
At night the thing to do was drive to Pevely Dairy
And park and watch the fountain shooting up and changing colors.
The child sat in the back, finishing his ice-cream soda,
Sucking the straw in the empty glass as a noisy coda.
Sometimes on Sunday they drove to the Green Parrot.
There was the sideways-staring parrot to stare at.
The chickens running around were delicious fried, but nothing was
sanitary.
B.O. was the scourge of the age — and polio — and bathroom odors.
If you didn’t wash your hands,
It contributed — as did your glands!
His father always had gas for their cars from his royal rationing cards.
The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards.
The two of them took a trip and toured the dad’s wartime coal mine.
It was fun. It was fine.
442O
P O E TRY
The smell of rain about to fall,
A sudden coolness in the air,
Sweetness wider than the Mississippi at its muddy brownest.
I didn’t steal his crayon, Mrs. Marshall, honest!
It’s captain midnight . .. brought to you by ovaltine!
I travel backwards in a time machine
And step inside a boy who’s three feet tall.
How dare he have such curly hair!
A boy and his dog go rafting down the Mississippi River.
They have a message to deliver
To the gold-toothed king.
Sire, we have a message that we bring.
Little boy, approach the throne.
Ow! I hit my funny bone.
The British consul was paid extra because it was a hardship post.
The weather was Antarctica /equatorial extreme.
Surely summer was in error.
Winter was terror.
White snowflakes the size of dinosaur eggs
Versus humidity that walked across your face on housefly legs.
I loved both the most.
Radio made women dream
Of freedom from oppression and the daily nonsense.
Hairy tarantulas in boatloads of bananas made the lazy heat immense
In the heart. Blizzards didn’t stop my father’s big blue coal trucks so
why bother.
Why bother, father?
Billie Holiday was inside.
I thought I had gone to heaven and died.
frederick seide l
443
Victory Parade
My girlfriend is a miracle.
She’s so young but she’s so beautiful.
So is her new bikini trim,
A waxed-to-neatness center strip of quim.
Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for a while.
It makes me smile.
It makes me think of James Joyce.
You hear his Oirish voice.
It’s spring on Broadway, and in the center strip mall
The trees are all
Excited to be beginning.
My girlfriend’s amazing waxing keeps grinning.
It’s enough to distract
From the other drastic act
Of display today — Osama bin Laden is dead!
One shot to the chest and one to the head,
SEAL Team 6 far away from my bed
Above Broadway — in Abbottabad, Pakistan, instead.
Bullets beyond compare
Flew over there,
Flew through the air
To above and below the beard of hair,
A type of ordnance that exploded
Inside the guy and instantly downloaded
The brains out the nose. Our Vietnam
Is now radical Islam.
I tip my hat and heart to the lovely tiny lampshade
Above her parade.
444O
P O E TRY
What Next
So the sun is shining blindingly but I can sort of see.
It’s like looking at Mandela’s moral beauty.
The dying leaves are sizzling on the trees
In a shirtsleeves summer breeze.
But daylight saving is over.
And gaveling the courtroom to order with a four-leaf clover
Is over. And it’s altogether November.
And the Pellegrino bubbles rise to the surface and dismember.
frederick seide l
445
john de stefano
From “Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of the Sky”
Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing
in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallowbrown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle beandripping locust and the still so innocent fruit
trees — bare-boughed and newly blossoming — skinnily
shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my
“now” [in this pictured perfect] fouryear-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie
low. I remember hiding in the fort
too: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush
beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is hugely hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-fired
blue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small,
untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow.
•
446O
P O E TRY
Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing
apparently to those rumors of rescue
or reprisals. Absence only
emptied the mind. The fond heart felt
light — likewise lifted right and justly up
to praise the day as it was to high
heaven. You were a “find”: rare, roselipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long blackstockinged O like one of Schiele’s urewig
girls, flashing a shy semaphore —
spelling eloquently out the fword, tenderly revisiting its history.
Lust — like love lost — was the catalyst:
exquisitely expedient, unchanged.
j ohn de stefano
447
billy collins
Report from the Subtropics
For one thing, there’s no more snow
to watch from an evening window,
and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house
so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,
and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman
for her early dinner of wood.
No hexagrams of frost to study carefully
on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.
And there’s no black sweater to pull over my head
while I wait for the coffee to brew.
Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes — shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band
lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.
The sun never fails to arrive early
and refuses to leave the party
even after I go from room to room,
turning out all the lights, and making a face.
And the birds with those long white necks?
All they do is swivel their heads
to look at me as I walk past
as if they all knew my password
and the name of the city where I was born.
448 O
P O E TRY
Cheerios
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.
Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.
Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude’s older than Cheerios
the way they used to say
Why that’s as old as the hills,
only the hills are much older than Cheerios
or any American breakfast cereal,
and more noble and enduring are the hills,
I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.
bi lly collins
449
ange mlinko
The Grind
Three mini ciabattini for breakfast
where demand for persnickety bread
is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast
recalculation of my overhead,
which soars, and as you might expect
the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy
of myself in a sea-limned prospect,
on a terrace, with a lemon tree ...
Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late.
Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book.
Better never lose track of the date.
Oversleep, and you’re on the hook.
It’s the margin for error: shrinking.
It’s life ground down to recurrence.
It’s fewer books read for the thinking
the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance;
the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork.
Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue
which we nonetheless paid for, and look:
he gets more grooming than I do.
When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager
who ground gems on ham for her guests;
the queen who ground out two cups of flour
on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress;
I think of a “great rock-eating bird”
grinding out a sandy beach,
the foam said to be particulate matter
of minute crustaceans, each
450O
P O E TRY
brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite
to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes,
and plain living which might be
shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.
ange mlinko
4 51
deborah paredez
The Gulf, 1987
The day upturned, flooded with sunlight, not
a single cloud. I squint into the glare,
cautious even then of bright emptiness.
We sit under shade, Tía Lucia
showing me how white folks dine, the high life.
I am about to try my first oyster,
Tía spending her winnings from the slots
on a whole dozen, the glistening valves
wet and private as a cheek’s other side,
broken open before us. Don’t be shy.
Take it all in at once. Flesh and sea grit,
sweet meat and brine, a taste I must acquire.
In every split shell, the coast’s silhouette:
bodies floating in what was once their home.
452O
P O E TRY
Wife’s Disaster Manual
When the forsaken city starts to burn,
after the men and children have fled,
stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn
back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn
the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread
in the forsaken city starting to burn.
Don’t flinch. Don’t join in.
Resist the righteous scurry and instead
stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn
your thoughts away from escape: the iron
gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed.
When the forsaken city starts to burn,
surrender to your calling, show concern
for those who remain. Come to a dead
standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn
into something essential. Learn
the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead
when the forsaken city starts to burn.
Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.
deborah paredez
4 53
dana levin
My Sentence
— spring wind with its
train of spoons,
kidney-bean shaped
pools, Floridian
humus, cicadas with their
electric appliance hum, cricket
pulse of dusk under
the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s
finish, snow’s white
afterlife, death’s breath
finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl you
carved the word because you craved the world —
454O
P O E TRY
Urgent Care
Having to make eye contact
with the economy —
A ball cap that says
In Dog Years I’m Dead — “The moon
will turn blood red and then
disappear for awhile,” the tv enthused. Hunched
over an anatomy textbook, a student
traces a heart
over another heart — lunar eclipse.
In the bathroom, crayoned
graffiti:
fuck the ♥
•
He collected captcha, one seat over,
Mr. feverish Mange Denied:
like puzzling sabbath or
street pupas; we shared
some recent typos: I’m
mediated (his), my tiny bots
of stimulation, he
loved the smudged
and swoony words that proved him
human —
dana lev in
4 55
not a machine trying to infiltrate
the servers
of the New York Times, from which he launched
( gad shakes or hefty lama)
obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s
black disaster, he
lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio)
a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum,
some people
“from where I used to work,” so much info
(we both agreed), “The umbra,”
the tv explained, shadow
the earth was about to make —
•
... and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness ...
... firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened ...
... so benighted and hopelessly lost ...
... their eyes to the errors ...
moon lore, Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room,
hour two.
•
456O
P O E TRY
Urgent Care. That was pretty
multivalent. As in:
We really need you to take care of this.
We really need you
to care for this.
To care about this. We really need you
to peer through the clinic’s
storefront window, on alert
for the ballyhooed moon —
And there it was. Reddening
in its black sock, deep
in the middle of the hour, of someone’s
nutso-tinsel talk on splendor —
My fevered friend. Describing
the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads
fitting like a flash drive
into the port of a healer’s hands.
dana lev in
4 57
mary karr
Read These
The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom
where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love
before at last taking himself away. His head away. His
recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine
themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more
than instruments of his creation. Pawns.
Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us
studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.
Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down
from the high dive. The contest was seriousness
he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius
and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.
Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping
his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web.
He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider
and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread
and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back
and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came
to hate the court he held.
He was crowned with loneliness
and suffered for friendship, for fealty
of the noblest sort. The invisible crown
rounded his temples tighter than any turban,
more binding than a wedding band,
and he sat in his round tower
on the rounding earth.
Read these,
saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing
himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest
aspects of the human heart
with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable
as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.
458 O
P O E TRY
I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.
And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc
bag was an air-tight chamber
for the regal head — most serious relic,
breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.
mary k arr
4 59
Suicide’s Note: An Annual
I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus
though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown
between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters
and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that
I couldn’t
today name the gods
you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being
impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d
roast in Hell poor suffering
bastards like you, unable to bear the masks
of their own faces. With words you sought to shape
a world alternate to the one that dared
inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you
could not, could never
fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn
your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you
inherited. More than once you asked
that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera
I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief
in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your
death feel like failure to everybody who ever
loved you as if our collective cpr stopped
too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse
punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction
that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not
God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.
I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite
your best efforts you are every second
alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,
each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.
We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.
460O P O E TRY
john koethe
Book X
In the last book of The Republic Plato turns to poetry, implicitly
contrasts it with philosophy, and argues that it shouldn’t even exist in
the ideal city he’s meticulously constructed. His reasoning is liable to
strike us now as quaint: poets traffic in appearances, not essences, and
write of things they don’t know anything about, like military strategy
and battles; they portray heroic figures in the grip of powerful,
deranged emotions, to which their readers must inevitably succumb;
and there’s a metaphysical complaint: all art, including poetry, is
essentially mimetic, and representations are inherently inferior to
what they represent. You need to make some changes if you want to
know what’s going on. Poetry for Plato wasn’t what you’d probably
think of if you’re reading this, a marginalized enactment of experience and subjectivity in which the medium itself is half the point.
Nor was philosophy the systematic study of the possibility of meaning we’ve become accustomed to, but sought instead to penetrate
the veil of appearances, arriving at a vision of the good that shows
us how we ought to try to live. It’s been suggested that to understand him, think of movies and tv instead of poetry, for they’re what
occupy the space that poetry occupied in Athens. I agree, but then
the question ultimately becomes: Should how we try to live be
based on fantasies and feelings, or known facts and reason? And the
suspicion that the latter aren’t much fun shows just how troubling
the question really is.
Yet even in their late, attenuated forms philosophy and poetry pose a
problem, Plato’s problem. Write what you know: an admonition that
concedes the point that poets usually don’t. And what exactly does
one know, in the intended sense? I guess what’s meant is something
like a lived identity within a social world, and yet behind those
limited identities lies something larger, something commonplace and
ordinary, but at the same time utterly unique. Like the hedgehog, each
of us knows just one big thing, a thing philosophy can’t capture and
that poetry can at best remind us of or intimate, but can’t describe.
As it extends itself in time the individual life remains a captive of
its point of view, confined to what it knows, cut off from all those
j ohn koethe
4 61
others that resemble it in all respects but one. It’s what I know and
everything I know, it’s something that I know so thoroughly I can’t
imagine or describe it, though it fills my eyes. But there’s no need
for imagery or words: you know it too, for it lies floating in your
eyes. Would Plato even recognize a poetry of consciousness? And
what of consciousness itself? It’s sometimes said to have a history,
a recent one, and to have been unknown to Homer’s Greeks. But
that’s a fallacy, inferring how you feel from what you write; moreover, Bernard Williams showed that what they wrote shows that they
felt like us. And yet the poems of the articulated consciousness lay in
the blank, unwritten future, poised to spring from Hamlet’s mind,
not Oedipus’s; and their challenge to Book X was still to be imagined,
still to come.
“There’s the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back”
( J.L. Austin). I say these things because I want to, and sometimes even
think they’re true; but now I want to take them back. Knowledge is
factive, meaning one can’t know what isn’t true, and truth is simply
correspondence with the facts. What are the facts of consciousness?
They’re all analogies and metaphors, a feeling of existence but without reality’s defining contours, like a sense of something hesitating
on the brink of being said, or hiding in the shadows of an inner
room. They’re all appearances, but appearances of what? Something
that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain?
They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from
which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the thought
of something hiding underneath the surface a seductive spell. The
harder I try to pin them down the more elusive they become, as
gradually the shadows disappear, the words turn into syllables, the
face becomes anonymous and leaves me staring at a silver sheet of
glass. What starts out as self-scrutiny becomes a study in self-pity,
and instead of something tangible and true one winds up chasing
the chimeras of Book X: the fruitless quarrel between philosophy
and poetry, reason and unreason, and that tedious myth about the
soul, of what becomes of it at death, then of its journey and rebirth.
462O
P O E TRY
I’m tired, I’m far from home, I’m waiting in a chamber in a castle on
a mountaintop in Umbria (poets get to do this), seven hundred miles
from Athens as the crow flies, where perhaps “the sun still shines
upon the hills and has not yet set.” I write the way I do because I want
it to exist, but then the spell breaks and it dries up like a dream, leaving
me with just this smooth, unvariegated surface, which remains.
“His words made us ashamed, and we checked our tears. He walked
around, and when he said his legs were heavy he lay on his back as
he had been told to do, and the man who had given him the poison
touched his body, and after a while tested his feet and legs, pressed
hard upon his foot and asked him if he felt this, and Socrates said no.
Then he pressed his calves, and made his way up his body and showed
us that it was cold and stiff. He felt it himself and said that when the
cold reached his heart he would be gone. As his belly was getting cold
Socrates uncovered his head — he had covered it — and said — these
were his last words — ‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this
offering to him and do not forget.’ — ‘It shall be done,’ said Crito,
‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer. Shortly
afterwards Socrates made a movement; the man uncovered him and
his eyes were fixed. Seeing this Crito closed his mouth and his eyes.”
j ohn koethe
4 63
james longenbach
By the Same Author
Today, no matter if it rains,
It’s time to follow the path into the forest.
The same people will be walking the same dogs,
Or if not the same dogs, dogs that behave in similar fashions,
Some barking, some standing aloof.
The owners carry plastic bags.
But this is the forest, they complain, we must do as we like.
We must let the dogs run free,
We must follow their example,
The way we did when we were young.
Back then we slept, watched tv —
We were the dogs.
By the time the screen door slammed, we were gone.
Nobody really talks like that in the forest.
They’re proud of their dogs,
Proud especially of the ones who never bark.
They’re upset about the Norway maple, it’s everywhere,
Crowding out the hickories and oaks.
Did you know it takes a million seeds to make one tree?
Your chances of surviving in the forest,
Of replicating yourself, are slim.
Today, the smaller dogs are wearing raincoats,
The bigger ones are stiffing it out.
They’re tense, preoccupied,
Running in circles,
Getting tangled in the leash —
464O
P O E TRY
It’s hard remaining human in the forest.
To move the limbs of the body,
To speak intelligible words,
These things promise change.
j ames longenbach
4 65
Opus Posthumous
When I painted, everybody saw.
When I played piano, everybody heard.
I ate your raspberries.
The sign no trespassing applied to me.
Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house.
There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew
In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower.
I can undress by the window,
I can sleep in the barn.
The sky, which is cloudy,
Suits the earth to which it belongs.
466O
P O E TRY
COMMENT
a.e. stallings
Austerity Measures: Letter from Greece
“Seferis, Seferis. Do we have him? Is he one of ours?” (eínai se mas)
shouts the clerk to a colleague sipping a frappé at a desk across the
room. Fani Papageorgiou and I are negotiating the labyrinthine
bureaucracy of death at some lesser Ministry of the Underworld.
“George Seferis?” We confirm he has the right Seferis, and he finally
reads the coordinates off a faded Xerox taped to a metal closet behind
his desk: 12 /45.
We are not so lucky with the other Nobel Prize winner, Odysseus
Elytis. (“Try Alepoudelis,” Fani suggests, “Elytis was his pen name.”)
Yes, he’s in the family plot. Angelos Sikelianos?: 18/14.
For Kostis Palamas we are sent to the colleague, who opens
a wooden desk drawer and draws out a folder with famous graves
organized by profession (military, politics, literature, etc). The man’s
face is disfigured with what look to be severe burns — perhaps he’d
been transferred from a hotter area of hell. (“Everyone in Greece
is scarred, one way or another,” Fani whispers, echoing Seferis’s
famous line, “Everywhere I go, Greece wounds me.”) There is an old,
dusty computer on his desk, but evidently it is there for decoration
only: it looks like all the records are still held in crumbling, jaundiced
manila folders. Civil servants shuffle listlessly through papers in the
un-air-conditioned office, awaiting inane requests from the living.
The dead file no complaints.
Success! Coordinates in hand, we leave the mysterious office and
climb down the stairs (we dare not enter the ancient elevator, for
fear that there might be a power outage and we’d get stuck — necessitating different paperwork from the Ministry of Death altogether),
back across the square to the First Cemetery where the rest of the
class is waiting. (It is the last day of a week-long poetry seminar. The
students — mostly intrepid Americans who were not frightened off
at the dire predictions of our recent election — and I have decided to
take a field trip, withering heat notwithstanding.)
Along the square, the various businesses associated with death are
thriving, in stark contrast to the moribund and defunct businesses
in the rest of the city: florists, marble cutters, cafes that offer funeral
receptions of bitter coffee, strong brandy, koliva (a Persephonic
a.e. sta llings
4 69
Chex mix of wheat grains, nuts, and pomegranate arils), and, for the
family, fish soup. A spanking new undertakers’ office has opened,
all polished stone and glass and tasteful plantings. Suicides and
heart attacks are up all over the city. Austerity is good for death.
Not that the coordinates are that much help. We take a gander at
the chart on the wall of the cemetery gates, but it is hard to tell if the
sections are numbered according to any system or, as it appears, completely random. Once out in the heat among the tombs we lose our
way, and to get our bearings we have to constantly stop gravediggers,
marble cutters, or the cleaning ladies hired to sweep out family crypts.
It is poor Angelos Sikelianos (1884–1951) we track down first, in
a scandalously obscure and unkempt grave next to the cemetery wall.
The traffic from Vouliagmenis provides a constant, dull roar that one
doesn’t associate with eternal rest. He is puzzlingly unknown in the
English-speaking world. (His first wife was the movie-star beautiful American heiress, Eva Palmer. Their great-granddaughter is the
American poet Eleni Sikelianos, and he was a brother-in-law of
sorts to Isadora Duncan.) Though always in the running for a Nobel,
Sikelianos never won one. He died in Athens having survived the
occupation and famine of wwii and the bitter ensuing civil war, only
to accidentally drink disinfectant instead of his medication.
I read Sikelianos’s poem, “Yannis Keats,” which includes his visit
to the English poet’s tomb at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. It
seems appropriate enough to the surroundings, but as we wend our
way towards the coordinates of Palamas’s grave, it occurs to me that
perhaps I should have read Sikelianos’s rousing “To Palamas.”
Palamas’s grave would also have been impossible to find without the coordinates — again low, narrow, barely legible, shaded by
an ancient cypress tree and overgrown flowering shrubs. When
Palamas (1859–1943) died in Athens under the German occupation, huge crowds gathered at his funeral. Sikelianos had composed
some sonorous quatrains the night before (“Greece leans upon this
tomb”) — all sounding trumpets and drums of war and terrible flags
of freedom — rousing the mourners, perhaps one hundred thousand
strong, to an angry demonstration against the occupiers.
Palamas would no doubt have relished this. He was a pivotal poet,
known for vigorously promoting the demotic instead of the artificial “purified” language known as Katharevousa during the language
wars — for which stance he was temporarily removed as registrar
at the University of Athens. In some ways, he seems to have been
470O
P O E TRY
inspired by the vernacular of Byron, whom he idealized. (He coined
a word in Greek, Byronolatry) and for whom he had written an ode
defending him from European detractors — in the fifteen-syllable
meter of Greek folk songs. (Byron’s death was, of course, itself a
major political event in the life of modern Greece, perhaps even the
critical one.)
But the lines etched on Palamas’s grave appeared to be in iambic pentameter. Neither Fani nor I could make them out very well.
The letters were faded — we could make out laós and zeí kai basileúei
and chiliópsychos — the eternal or myriad-souled people live and
reign? — and I answered the class’s query with a vague statement that
the verses were somehow patriotic.
Seferis’s tomb was grander but still very simple, stark, even. There
we read his poem “Stratis Thalassinos among the Agapanthi.” It is a
poem of exile, as Seferis was a poet of exile, having been born near
Smyrna in what is now modern Turkey, at the dawn of the twentieth
century and the sunset of the Ottoman Empire. Stratis Thalassinos
(Soldier the Seaman) is an Odyssean figure, tossed to the ends of the
earth. When Seferis, who was openly critical of the Junta, died in
1971, his funeral too became an enormous, impromptu public protest,
and the crowds began to sing his poem “Denial,” which had been
set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and had become a popular song
played in Plaka jukeboxes before being banned. What began life as
a hermetic love poem had become, with its Rilke-esque closing line,
an anthem of defiance:
There in the secret cove,
When the noon sun seemed to halt,
I thirsted with my love,
But the water there was salt.
We wrote out her name
Upon the blinding sand,
Then — ah — the sea-breeze came
With its erasing hand.
So fiercely did we long
With spirit, heart, and strife,
To grasp at this life — wrong — And so we changed our life.
a.e. sta llings
4 71
Odysseus Elytis’s (1911–1996) family tomb was up on the higher
level, in the grander neighborhood of Heinrich Schliemann’s mausoleum (designed by the German architect, Ernst Ziller). A simple
plaque in bas relief had been added to the family tomb of the
prosperous Alepoudelides to remind people of the Nobel laureate’s
remains. He served in wwii on the Albanian front — one of his most
important poems is “Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second
Lieutenant of Albania” — and then, under the Junta, lived in exile in
Paris, as did many Greek intellectuals. (In Greece itself, many poets
on the left were imprisoned in “detention centers” on the islands.)
Later, when I returned home, I tried to find the lines of Palamas
to make better sense of them. It turned out not to be from a patriotic
poem at all (though from a series called “Fatherlands”), but from a
meditative sonnet on Athens:
Among the temples and groves of sacred olives,
And here among the crowds that slowly crawl
Like an inchworm on a flower, white and stark,
The everlasting throng of relics thrives
And reigns. The soul shines even through soil’s caul.
I feel it: Inside me, it grapples with the dark.
It’s a strange poem, a strange image: Athens ringed in light, the famous
virginal whiteness of Pentelic marble gleaming even from under the
ground, where implements of archeology unearth buried gods. The
dark file of the living creep over the brightness like a caterpillar; it is
the ruins that are most fully alive.
Here, the past refuses to stay buried. In the center of the cemetery,
near one of the churches, a side building announces on its window:
Office of Exhumation. Land is at a premium, and until very recently
cremation was illegal (the Orthodox church frowns on it — even now,
one must drive the corpse to Bulgaria to have it done), so unless one
is possessed of a family crypt, bones must be dug up after three years.
You can buy an ossuary in one of the nearby shops. Even the dead are
subject to eviction.
•
472O
P O E TRY
For living poets, the economic crisis of the past few years is perhaps
a reminder that even their relatively recent poetic forebears, as well
as their genetic ones, have seen worse: occupation, famine, civil war,
military dictatorship. Only poets under the age of forty were born
into the present democracy, dysfunctional as it is. (And in the gerontocracy of modern Greece, forty means a young, not just a younger,
poet — Kronos is still busy eating his children.)
“Crisis isn’t new to poetry; it’s only new to us,” Iana Boukova
explains. Iana is a Bulgarian poet who works and publishes in Greece.
This is back in April, at a poetic taverna lunch arranged by my
friend, the poet Adrianne Kalfopoulou. It is a bright blue afternoon
and despite the crisis, or perhaps because of it, there is a need to sit
outside under the sky and enjoy the time with friends. Though it is
Lent, no one at the table is fasting, so our fare includes roasted feta
cheese and village sausages.
Everyone agrees that there is an added sense of urgency. (“With
the crisis,” someone utters wryly, quoting the newspapers, “Greece
has reentered history.”) But the poets also agree that their calling is
to speak to the human condition, to what is timeless rather than to
current events. That is the job of journalists; it is the work of prose.
Poetry needs distance.
Katerina Iliopoulou, who studied chemistry and makes jewelry for
a living, adds her concern that during the crisis people want to make
poetry answer questions, whereas poetry “is rather the field of the
multiplication of questions.”
I say I have heard that the crisis has renewed people’s interest in
the arts — that the arts are thriving. Does anyone have anecdotal evidence of this?
Stamatis Polenakis, who writes plays as well as poetry, agrees that
the theatres are doing well. Someone points out that Athens has the
most theatres per capita of any other European city.
No one is sanguine on the subject of publishing, however.
Bookstores and publishing houses have been folding at an alarming
rate. The line between “official” publication and vanity publishing
is ambiguous, since poets are often expected to put up money or to
purchase most of their volumes.
As with every aspect of Greek society, it is the young who suffer,
with poetry being no more immune to the nepotistic patron-andclient system than the rest of society, and every bit as political.
(Many cultural positions, some of them for all intents and purposes
a.e. sta llings
473
argomisthos — a uniquely Greek word with no English equivalent,
meaning a salaried position without actual duties attached — have
long been in the gift of the ruling party.) Off the record, some younger
poets complain that poets in positions of power (almost exclusively
male) work only to cement their own place in the firmament. The
generation of the seventies (and eighties), as one younger scholar puts
it, is obsessed with replicating the generation of the thirties (to which
Seferis and Elytis belonged) and does little to champion the work of
the next generation. This is in stark contrast to, for instance, Palamas,
who tirelessly brought to public attention obscure older poets
as well as younger contemporaries such as Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos.
Perhaps the crisis and the outer world’s focus on Greece are changing some of that, emboldening the younger generation to initiate
their own readings, journals, prizes. Panayotis Ioannidis (born 1967)
has started a popular reading series that juxtaposes older, established
writers with young ones, alternating those readings with readings of
a foreign poet in the original and in translation. He also started a
campaign to “Write a Sonnet for Mavilis” in honor of the centenary
of the poet’s death. (Lorentzos Mavilis, 1860–1912, was Greek’s preeminent sonneteer; his last sonnet was found in the pocket of his
uniform when he was killed in the Balkan Wars. Now he is probably
best known in Athens for his eponymous square near the American
embassy.) Since modern Greek verse is almost exclusively free verse
and often in the surreal tradition and postmodern vein, this challenge
seems mischievously provocative.
Can charming sonnets answer the crisis? Stamatis Polenakis
(b. 1970) suggests not:
Gentlemen, don’t let anything,
anyone, deceive you:
we were not bankrupted today,
we have been bankrupt for a long time now.
Today it’s easy enough
for anyone to walk on water:
the empty bottles bob on the surface
without carrying any secret messages.
The sirens don’t sing, nor are they silent,
they merely stay motionless,
dumbstruck by the privatization
of the waves and no
474O
P O E TRY
poetry doesn’t suffice since the sea filled up
with trash and condoms.
Let him write as many sonnets as he wants about Faliro,
that Lorentzos Mavilis.
— Poetry Does Not Suffice
(Faliro, now a seaside suburb near Piraeus, was the subject of a rather
whimsical love poem by Mavilis involving an heiress with a newfangled automobile.)
Frustrated in some ways by the generation directly above them,
the younger poets seek out not their poetic fathers and mothers but
their poetic grandparents and great-grandparents. Panayotis lists
some of these poetic antecedents he thinks are particularly relevant:
Eleni Vakalo — a true modernist, a wonderful, pioneering poet,
and an extremely important art critic and art historian.
Nikos Engonopoulos — the less discussed (but arguably the
better poet) of our surrealist Dioskouroi (Andreas Empeirikos
being the other one).
Kostas Karyotakis — who has been termed the “major of the
minors,” and whose importance was buried under Seferis’s and
Elytis’s personalities (though we should really say “masked”
rather than “buried” in the case of Seferis, who arose partly
from that same climate).
Takis Papatsonis — a scandalously neglected modernist giant,
the first to use free verse in Greek. But he was a (devout)
Catholic, and he wrote in a language that was not “pure” demotic.
With the crisis, Panayotis says, “It’s time to choose our ancestors.”
•
The older generations have their own frustrations. I meet with a poet
I am translating. As with many Greeks, his forefathers hail from Asia
Minor, tossed here on the waves of misfortune. He himself grew up
in a village in Boeotia, for which he has little nostalgia (“freezing
in winter, boiling in summer; unpleasant all year round”). As with
a.e. sta llings
475
many Greeks he is embroiled in a never-ending lawsuit — this one
with his brother over some property in the village left to them by
their father. The legal system is a mess, the judges are “bribe eaters.”
His view of the current political situation is black: “It is bad,” he
says, “to be an honest man where felons rule.” It’s no wonder crime
is up, with youth unemployment close to 50%: “The idle man who
lives on empty hope and has no way to earn his living turns his mind
to crime.”
“We’re living in the age of iron,” he explains, over bitter coffee.
“By day, men work and grieve unceasingly; by night, they waste away
and die.”
A British ex-pat poet is concerned that the bailout is being jeopardized by the atmosphere of political uncertainty. He writes:
I must frankly confess, that unless union and order are established, all hopes of a loan will be vain; and all the assistance
which the Greeks could expect from abroad — an assistance neither trifling nor worthless — will be suspended or destroyed;
and, what is worse, the great powers of Europe ... will be persuaded that the Greeks are unable to govern themselves.
I wish something was heard of the arrival of part of the loan,
for there is a plentiful dearth of every thing at present.
The Greek poet I am translating should know an iron age when he
sees one, being Hesiod, and writing from the eighth century before
Christ. And the ex-pat poet is, of course, George Gordon Noel, aka
Lord Byron. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even
past.” That’s certainly true of Greece, where the punitive terms of
the bailout — the “austerity” (which, in Greek, is litotes, probably
better known to you as a rhetorical device whereby two negatives
connive to make a lukewarm positive) — eerily echo the crippling
terms of the initial loan on which the country was founded (and
nearly foundered), as well as the rhetoric about shiftless, spendthrift,
shady Mediterraneans who cannot be trusted with self-governance.
•
Verse, if not necessarily poetry, is everywhere. Verses are scrawled
on the sides of buildings: much graffiti rhymes and scans. The chants
of protestors during general strikes tend to be in the driving fifteen-
476O
P O E TRY
syllable meter of folk song — that is to say, ballad meter, with a
feminine ending. Greek rap, too, tends to the decapentasyllabic. It is
the pulse that comes up through the medieval Cretan romance, the
Erotokritos, the poem that many Greek poets, Seferis in particular,
have considered the essential document of modern Greek poetry.
Verse seems to be the natural public response to tragedy. On April 4
at 9:00 am, as people poured out of the Metro station on their way
to work, a seventy-seven-year-old Greek pensioner and retired
pharmacist shot himself in the head in front of the Greek parliament.
His widely-circulated suicide note declared:
The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my
survival . .. And since I cannot find justice, I cannot find another
means to react besides putting a decent end [to my life], before
I start searching the garbage for food and become a burden for
my child.
The rhetoric is incendiary. He conflates the current administration with the collaborationist government under Nazi occupation,
easily read by people as a comment on the government’s cooperation
with the demands of Merkel’s Germany. The suicide note concludes
with a call for Greeks to pick up machine guns. The image, too, of a
middle-class Greek who has lived through occupation, famine (during the unusually cold winter of 1941–42, perhaps as many as one
hundred thousand people died of starvation in the greater Athens
area alone), and the Junta years, picking through the garbage for food
(something that was a few years ago unheard of, and is increasingly
visible in the city), strikes a chord.
By the end of the day there are violent clashes with police in the
Square. The ancient cypress tree (which has itself survived countless riots, clouds of tear gas, and street battles) becomes a makeshift
shrine, surrounded by flower wreaths, banners, and letters. The
banners make much of the fact that in Greek, suicide (autoktonía)
rhymes with murder (dolophonía). Another asserts, “Austerity Kills.”
Some have a sort of Greek Anthology elegant simplicity:
May the earth lie lightly
And your sacrifice not be in vain.
Some quote others. A snatch of prose from Nikos Kazantzakis:
a.e. sta llings
477
There is in this world a secret law — if it did not exist, the
world would have been lost thousands of years ago, cruel and
inviolate; Evil always triumphs in the beginning, but in the end
is defeated.
Another quotes a poem (in rhymed quatrains) of Alekos Panagoulis
(1939–1976):
No more tears,
The graves have closed.
The first dead
Are the fertilizer of liberty.
(Fertilizer is accurate, but uglier in English than lipasma is in
Greek — perhaps something like “enrich the soil of liberty” would
have a better ring?)
Panagoulis is better known as a political figure than as a poet,
particularly for his attempted assassination of the dictator Georgios
Papadopoulos during the Junta, in 1968. He, too, lies somewhere in
the labyrinth of the First Cemetery.
It occurs to me later that the suicide occurred shortly before my
yoga class in the center of Athens — a class where we are exhorted as
part of our practice to tune out police sirens, car alarms, megaphoned
sloganeering, gloomy Communist anthems, the occasional stun grenade, the odd whiff of tear gas, and other evidence of strikes and
protests. The cleanup of the body was probably going on while we
were lying on our narrow mats in shavasana: corpse pose.
Poetry also enters the political rhetoric. After May’s fruitless
elections, as a caretaker government was sworn in, the previous
prime minister, Lucas Papademos, worried about an exit from the
Euro, said in an open letter that the sacrifices of the Greeks were not
“an empty shirt” (poukámiso adeianó). Crime writer Paul Johnston
was quick to point out (via Facebook) that this was an allusion to
Seferis’s poem “Helen.” In that poem, the Greeks learn after the
Trojan war that Helen was never in Troy, only a phantom of her
was. The real Helen was in Egypt all along. All that suffering, all that
destruction “for an empty blouse — for a Helen.”
On the floor of parliament, Cavafy is evidently the weapon of
choice. An exchange in July between Alexis Tsipras (the youthful
rising star, or angry young Turk, of Greek politics, head of Syriza,
478 O
P O E TRY
the Coalition of the Radical Left, whose recent success at the ballot
box sent shudders through the financial world) and Antonis Samaras
(current prime minister and head of the moderately right-wing New
Democracy party) went as follows. Tsipras:
Now your job is not to deconstruct Syriza’s platform and to
talk about its dangers. Now you are faced with harsh reality, not
with Syriza. And now, what will become of us without barbarians? as the poet said.
After calling Tsipras out on his casual paraphrase, Samaras retorts
with a carefully accurate quotation:
Since you like Cavafy, I will answer you with Cavafy: Tell Mr.
Fotopoulos [head of the powerful workers’ union of the Public
Power Corporation, dei] whom you worthily represent: “Bid
farewell to the Alexandria which you are losing.”
•
One of the things that seems to enrage the Northern Europeans about
Greece is what is perceived as a lack of proper contrition or gratitude
among the Greeks towards their rescuers. That the Greeks, for all
the austerity that is squeezing the life out of the country, continue
to enjoy what pleasures they can — for the price of a coffee you can
still sit out all day under brilliant skies at a sidewalk cafe, and for next
to nothing you can have a picnic at the beach — provokes the kind
of fury diligent ants reserve for hedonic grasshoppers. (Never mind
that the average Greek works very hard indeed and has no choice
but to pay his taxes, which are deducted directly out of his salary.
According to recent statistics from the oecd, in terms of actual hours,
Greeks are one of the hardest working peoples out of the thirty largest
economies, coming second only to the Koreans.) Even in suffering,
the Greeks refuse to be miserable.
Is that why there is a counter-intuitive flourishing of the arts — an
exuberance that seems to come out of the urgency of the economic
crisis when art realizes that it cannot be starved like the economy?
Even I find myself working at a feverish pace — not writing per se,
but reading intensely, translating furiously. The translations start
almost subconsciously. As I struggle with a poem that niggles in the
a.e. sta llings
4 79
mind in Greek, it starts to nacre itself into English, as with this poem
by Katerina Iliopoulou (b. 1967):
In the beam of the headlights she appeared
Crossing the road,
A small brown fox.
And again the next night
Flitting behind a bush.
And another time only her tail
Brushed the darkness.
And from then on
Her footprints padded across your sight,
Her warm furry body
Skittering between us.
Always in passing, never staying still.
“But who are you,” we ask her.
“I am,” she said, “what abounds.”
— The Fox
Perhaps at first it was the elusive fox — distant Mediterranean cousin
to Ted Hughes’s thought fox — that attracted. But it was the end that
stumped me, that teased. The poem ends on the verb perisseúei — a
verb formed from the Greek for “more.” What is left over? What is
extra? What is too much? What surfeits? Is superfluous? Overflows?
The possibilities multiply and kaleidoscope. It reminds me that it
is through poetry that I live life more abundantly. It is the opposite
of austerity.
•
The one thing people will ask you here if you are, as I am, clearly
a foreigner, is: Are you here permanently? Are you planning to go
back? We have small children and people think us mad to stay. Our
children’s future probably isn’t here. I can’t imagine them going to
Greek university, for instance. Just a couple of years ago we were
applying for jobs in the States in the face of what seemed the inevitable — that we would have to pull up stakes to make a living back
in America. My husband had had to leave his job, and we were a
one-income family to begin with. (News of the situation in Greece,
however, seemed to have escaped American academia — I was asked
48 0O
P O E TRY
in one job interview whether I would be able to give up my idyllic
life of leisure on the Greek islands to “do battle” at the office. I was
at a loss how to answer this, since my actual life in Athens involves
negotiating a baby stroller through street protests while dodging billows of tear gas.)
A deus ex machina in the form of generous grants suddenly
changed things. For the time being, at least, we can contemplate not
leaving. While living among the fallout of the crisis, we are somewhat insulated. Insulated, but not unaffected. The visible reminders
are everywhere: the shell of a fire-bombed government office gapes
two streets over; graffiti for the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn” has
started to deface the neighborhood, twisting the Greek meander into
a fascist symbol; around the corner a young man evicted from his
apartment lives on the sidewalk with all of his belongings under a
tarp, subsisting on food brought to him by neighbors. A few days
ago we turned on the television to hear a news item that some youths
in Neos Kosmos had gotten into a skirmish with police, resulting in
gunfire and the hurling of a grenade. This turns out to have happened
a couple of blocks away on our own street.
Still, though, still . .. Athens seems extraordinarily safe to me, and
there are many reasons to love our neighborhood — that it is a neighborhood, with a butcher, baker, and a candlemaker (in that order)
around the corner — where everyone knows our kids’ names and
to whom they belong, where the local square, for all its contentious
graffiti, has a view of the Acropolis and fills on summer evenings with
all the generations together: grandparents, adults, teenagers, children
zooming around on bikes (naturally sans helmets).
When I go to pay the rent on my office — a luxury suddenly possible because of the aforementioned grants — to the man across the
street who runs a driving school (like us, in his early forties and a
parent of small children), he says to me, “I always look at your husband’s face carefully when he leaves the house.” My husband, John
Psaropoulos, is a journalist — very busy, naturally, in recent months,
reporting for Al Jazeera, npr, the Daily Beast. “When your husband
is smiling, I think it is all going to be ok,” he says. “But when he is
frowning, I think, it’s time to head for the hills.” “Me too,” I laugh.
But he shakes his head at my lame joke. “You, you can always leave.
You can go to America. We Greeks are dying.”
For us, staying is a choice, as much as leaving would be a choice.
It is strange that we haven’t thought of it in that way before. You
a.e. sta llings
4 81
come here thinking it will be just for a couple of years, and a decade
passes. There is a Greek proverb: nothing is more permanent than the
temporary. One day, you realize you may never move back after all.
One day, you realize you are looking at the cemeteries, and at the
graves of poets, in a different way. The way a young girl, perhaps,
shyly glances at wedding dresses. You even have a nice little epitaph
in mind, a gem out of Propertius. (Though would Latin look out of
place in a Greek graveyard, you wonder?) Well, it’s where we’re all
headed, one way or another, with or without the coordinates.
48 2O
P O E TRY
william logan
Going , Going
The Complete Poems, by Philip Larkin, ed. by Archie Burnett.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $40.00.
Poems, by Philip Larkin, selected by Martin Amis.
Faber and Faber. £14.99.
One summer half a century ago, Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell
spent an afternoon on a bench in Kensington Gardens, talking about
contemporary poets. “Cal was for Plath that day, and Gunn — and
Larkin,” Jarrell’s wife later wrote. “Randall was for Larkin, Larkin,
and Larkin.” Philip Larkin has often had that effect on readers — of
immediate sympathy and half-crazed delight. I admit to my own
mixed feelings — when I read him I want to run out and press his
poems upon strangers, and I want to keep them entirely to myself.
The Complete Poems, with its four-hundred-page armament of
apparatus, offers as thorough an edition of Larkin’s poetry as any
reader will require. Those sated with the poems still have the poet’s
extranea — the two novels, the jazz reviews, the stray prose, and most
winningly (and losingly) the letters. There is even, for those who
have not lost the taste, some smutty schoolgirl fiction, a lumpish
biography, and a shelf of academic criticism. Yet Larkin for most
readers will always be the three mature books of poetry: The Less
Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows
(1974). Whatever his peculiar world was, it is contained there.
Larkin was a late bloomer. Perhaps his early ambitions as a poet
were derailed for a time by his desire to be a novelist. Critics have
said what can be said for Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947); but
nothing will save them from the rainy, dreary, slightly prim things
they are — they make Henry Green look like Tolstoy. Larkin was a far
more conventional poet before he quit writing fiction — and his moroseness, his paralytic sense of failure, his gloomy appraisal of man
(or of the man called Larkin) might in part be the good fortune of
sour grapes.
The early poems scarcely hint at the poet he would become. The
North Ship (1945) is a young man’s book (I’m tempted to say a young
william logan
4 83
Oxford grad’s — Larkin was twenty-two), full of moony disquietude,
with a long run of lovelorn poems and only the thin shiver of sensibility. Some of the verse could have been written by a provincial
duffer of 1915. Still, there are lines that don’t quite fit, lines that suggest something stirring beneath the dead leaves of Quiller-Couch’s
Oxford Book of English Verse. The poet who confesses to the “instantaneous grief of being alone” or describes himself as “Part invalid,
part baby, and part saint” sounds like a man wearing a suit two sizes
too small. You begin to hear the voice of that university librarian
who kept a stash of porn in his cupboard.
It might have been better for the poet had he waited. Few poets
since the Romantics have published good books in their twenties,
and even the Modernists were generally at least at the cusp of thirty
(Frost forty, Stevens over). Poetry, like mathematics, is a young
man’s game, critics used to say — but Shakespeare wrote his sonnets
in his later twenties or thirties, Browning was thirty when Dramatic
Lyrics appeared, Whitman thirty-six at the publication of Leaves of
Grass. There will always be outliers like Rimbaud and Auden; but
poetry has become more like fiction, needing the world to lend the
shape that form no longer can.
By the time he wrote The Less Deceived, Larkin had learned the
value of images redolent of the British hinterland — weedy pavements,
railway platforms, the trilby hat, the cheap ring made in Birmingham,
“docks where channel boats come sidling,” Hall’s Distemper billboards. His debts to Auden and Hardy began to be paid, instead of
merely being acknowledged. The sense of place became important
to a man everywhere ill at ease, one who could declare, “No, I have
never found / The place where I could say / This is my proper ground.”
Women confused Larkin, and sex more than women. (“I had grown
up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing,” he once admitted — sexual recreation is a telling
phrase.) His longing fought against his dread of dissolution or panic
over property rights (to be married was to be “confused / By law with
someone else,” an “instant claim / On everything I own / Down to my
name”). Was this wariness self-preservation, or mere selfishness? In
“Reasons for Attendance,” the speaker watches the flushed faces of
young couples at a dance — high in their high spirits, reveling in the
promise of sex. Even so,
48 4O
P O E TRY
Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.
Many of the poet’s unkind and even savage remarks about women
(the defaced poster of the girl in the bathing suit in “Sunny Prestatyn”
is symptomatic) seem more self-hatred than misogyny. Yet it was not
Larkin the misogynist who composed “Wedding-Wind.” Few male
poets have written so tenderly in the voice of a woman (Frost was
another). Though the imagery tends toward irritation and disillusion,
at the end it’s plain that the farmer’s bride has been borne off by a
preposterous happiness:
Shall I be let to sleep
Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?
Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?
Larkin is one of poetry’s great loners — consider Coleridge, who
seemed to hate being alone; or that broad-minded socialite Byron;
or Keats, so good at being a friend; or Auden, who couldn’t shut
up. (“Loneliness clarifies,” Larkin wrote.) Yet a surprising number
of Larkin’s poems are about happiness — he’s a poet of gloom sometimes struck into joy. Elizabeth Bishop had a terrible need to be loved,
and one loves her in spite of it; Larkin, a terrible desire not to be
loved, and one loves him because of it.
Hope always rides the razor of pessimism in Larkin’s poems, and
pessimism rarely denies itself the glint of hope — when he gives in
entirely to misery, as in “Going, Going,” he seems merely a crank.
His outright nastiness is usually directed at male louts, mostly businessmen or academics; but he suffered the prejudices of his day and
when that day was past liked to shock people with them. His antiSemitism is no worse than Eliot’s, or Pound’s, or Sylvia Plath’s; but it
is no better. He loved to provoke (perhaps his most quoted line was
“Books are a load of crap”) yet was bewildered when people didn’t
understand that he had been ironic, or writing in persona.
Readers were appalled by the poet’s Selected Letters (1992), where
the vile mess that was Larkin was on display; but that was the private
william logan
4 85
Larkin, full of bitter, nauseating remarks about blacks, Jews, women,
made often to his Colonel Blimpish schoolmates. The poetry made
something less petty out of pettiness. The absence of such malice
there, unless due to cowardice (if there’s a courage to conviction,
there can be cowardice, too), shows how little these things mattered
to the poems. Poetry, if it’s any good, transcends the life’s sorry particulars.
The last books, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, secure
the insecurities and perfect the imperfections that formed his style.
The Larkin that Larkin became doesn’t change — he just becomes
more fully himself. If that man is in part a fiction, the character bodied forth would have been at home in Dickens — the poems seem at
times the work of Mr. Crummles, at others that of Tulkinghorn. Yet
twentieth-century poetry would have been a lesser thing, a meaner
thing, without “Church Going,” “I Remember, I Remember,” “Mr
Bleaney,” “Toads Revisited,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” “Talking in
Bed,” “An Arundel Tomb,” “The Trees,” “Homage to a Government,”
“This Be The Verse,” and “Aubade” — and beyond these the quiet,
sometimes overlooked poems like “Faith Healing,” “At Grass,” “Sad
Steps,” and a score of others that say something right-angled about
the world, right-angled but true.
The main attraction of this scholarly edition is the massive gathering of Larkin’s unpublished work. Though most was assembled
piecemeal in the editions of Collected Poems (1988, 2003) and in
Early Poems and Juvenilia, edited by A.T. Tolley (2005), more than
fifty poems appear here for the first time. If there are scraps yet to be
discovered, they have eluded the exhaustive searches of the editor,
Archie Burnett.
Alas, Larkin wrote reams and reams of dull poems when young,
most no more interesting than a thousand miles of scrubland — all
are included here, with notes. The juvenilia make clear how stymied
Larkin was by Auden. Larkin was a less attractive and less promising
poet before the influence, but he couldn’t become a good poet until
he had shed Auden’s skin. He spent three or four years writing lines
like “these are twin headlights of a capitalist’s car: / this, the gaslight
of a trodden worker who would tread” or “The bank clerk reflects
that his pay isn’t large: / The professor’s had up on a serious charge.”
(Auden struck a lot of poets dumb. Many never recovered.) Probably
the older poet’s only lasting gift to his admirer was the blues song,
which Larkin turned to hilarious account in “Fuel Form Blues.”
48 6O
P O E TRY
You hear the later Larkin before he existed, hear him in “the cold
night / Drops veil on veil across the windy skies” or “Your name
breathed round the tealeaves and last bun.” Larkin possessed a steely
modesty, an imperious shyness (until middle age, he was afflicted
with a stammer). He survived Auden’s robust bullying by lowering
his voice, a voice without a sense of destiny, only a terror of fate.
Apart from stray lines and some smirking ribaldry (“After a particularly good game of rugger / A man called me a bugger / Merely because
in a loose scrum / I had my cock up his bum”), there’s little to like in
the unpublished work and less to love. Among that little, however, is
a brief elegy for his father:
Because there is no housing from the wind,
No health in winter, and no permanence
Except in the inclement grave,
Among the littering alien snow I crave
The gift of your courage and indifference.
— From To S.L.
The chill of indifference is enough to make the reader think
(perhaps the poet means only the indifference of the dead), then
think again.
Death was Larkin’s overwhelming subject (if not sex, or selfishness, or just plain misery) — he was tormented by it when young, and
when old wrote his last major poem about it, “Aubade.” In the ragand-bone shop of the unpublished work, there are scraps you wish
the poet had rescued:
An April Sunday brings the snow,
Making the blossom on the plum trees green,
Not white. An hour or two, and it will go.
Strange that I spend that hour moving between
Cupboard and cupboard, shifting the store
Of jam you made of fruit from these same trees:
Five loads — a hundred pounds or more — More than enough for all next summer’s teas,
Which now you will not sit and eat.
Behind the glass, under the cellophane,
william logan
4 87
Remains your final summer — sweet
And meaningless, and not to come again.
— An April Sunday brings the snow
Meaningless. There’s the final twist of the knife. The previous twist
is the quiet pun on “remains” — and the one before that the terrifying volta of “Which now you will not sit and eat.” The ending is one
small mortal wound after another. The poem was also for his father.
The tender side of Larkin, the side sometimes seen only when
displaced, is often revealed as slyly as in the last stanzas of an unpublished love poem:
The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.
Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself — no cost,
No past, no people else at all — Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?
— From When first we faced, and touching showed
How extraordinary that colonise seems (it’s not completely softened
by the tender-painful “gentle-sharp”). There was something brutish
in Larkin, even Larkin in love. The plain monosyllables, unadorned
with much resembling an image (compared to Larkin, Frost was a
spendthrift with metaphor), create the emotional waste in which
love arrives so cautiously. Yet love after drought is often scouring
and harsh. Larkin understood love’s annihilation — he’s one of the
few modern poets (Eliot is another) I can imagine as a Metaphysical.
Archie Burnett deserves a full measure of gratitude for the labors
necessary for this extraordinary edition. If such drudgery has a bit
of Larkin tedium to it, every good editor must be part Mr. Bleaney.
No other poet of Larkin’s generation has received such meticulous
and exhaustive treatment — and none of the Moderns even now,
48 8 O
P O E TRY
apart from Eliot in Christopher Ricks’s edition of the notebook
poems. Burnett has provided virtually all a finicky reader could
desire — all, and then more than all, for the notes and references and
dates pile up like Mr. Boffin’s mounds of dust in Our Mutual Friend.
If a critic has set down an idea about Larkin in an obscure article,
Burnett seems to know about it; and if Larkin happens to mention
Frinton or rood lofts or number plates in a poem, you can be sure
that Burnett will discover in which letter, or interview, or on what
street corner Larkin also referred to them. The notes are not merely
judicious; they are pertinent.
If I have minor quarrels with the edition, which gives us the most
accurate text we are likely to have, some are problems of design, beginning with the lack of a proper table of contents. The poems have
been cast in a smallish font and crowded onto the page. Among the
unpublished poems, so many lack titles that you can slip from one
poem to the next without noticing a break — a marginal device might
have stopped the eye. No running heads provide relevant page numbers in the notes, so you must hunt up the index, then thumb back
through the notes; and if while absorbed there you forget to hold
your place among the poems, you’re packed off to the index again
like an errant schoolboy. Running heads require no expense, merely
forethought.
Burnett has traced the drafts in fierce detail, recording variants
from late drafts or early published versions, correcting the text where
correction is required (Tolley’s edition of the juvenilia comes in for
devastating criticism), and boiling down the commentary. His notes
are a gallimaufry of delightful oddities. I knew that the “Bodies,”
where Mr. Bleaney worked, was a car manufacturing plant, but not
that the name was Larkin’s coinage, or that it mimicked a local convention in Coventry, his hometown, of calling a factory by the name
of whatever gizmo it happened to make. I knew that the “four aways”
were a bet on away games in the football pools, but not that the young
Larkin played the pools himself. I’m delighted to learn that “Wild
Oats” — about courting, or failing to court, a gorgeous English rose
and her plain girlfriend — was based on experience, and that the poet
really did keep two photographs of the beautiful one in his wallet. If
you want to make a pilgrimage to the lodgings where Larkin lived and
on which he based “Mr Bleaney,” Burnett will give you the address.
Still, perhaps a few things have been missed. Time tells the speaker
in “Send No Money” to wait for the things that happen in life (rather
william logan
4 89
than doing something about them); as he ages, he sees the “bestial
visor” — probably his own face in the mirror. How is it possible not
to think of James’s The Beast in the Jungle? Larkin christens a butler Starveling in “Livings,” but the note fails to mention the rude
mechanical of that name in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s misleading to call 1929 the “first year of the great economic slump” — the
American stock market recovered after the crash of late October
(the terrible long slide did not start until 1931). Britain’s economy
remained unaffected until 1930. Though the north of England was
badly affected, the south suffered only mildly and by the mid-thirties
became prosperous. Larkin’s poem “Livings (1)” is at best meant to
be premonitory.
Americans do not uniformly pronounce the noun “research” on the
first syllable, as the note to “Posterity” suggests — usage is mixed, as in
Britain. The title to “Sad Steps” comes from the opening of a sonnet
by Sidney, but the notes might have observed that Wordsworth long
ago made off with the whole line — Larkin’s borrowing secures him
in a tradition. (Burnett sees that the nonce-word “immensements”
in that poem is parodic, but he might have said that the whole passage is a devastating send-up of Romantic overwriting, like Shelley
on laughing gas.) American readers might be grateful to be told that
“French windows,” which appear in a number of Larkin’s early poems,
are what we call French doors. Richard Wilbur’s “The Death of
a Toad” would be a more relevant precursor for “The Mower”
than those proposed. The title of “Party Politics” is a pun, not on
“political party,” but on the common phrase for, well, a party’s politics.
The missing word in “Address to Life” is undoubtedly “balls” — why
not say so in the notes? There are false indentations in “Further
Afterdinner Remarks” and a typo (“noone” for “no one”), probably
by Larkin, left uncorrected in “You’ve only one life.”
The weakest aspect of the commentary is the sometimes farfetched
attempt to detect echoes of other poets in Larkin. Does “the fields
are sullen and muddy” (“The Ships at Mylae”) in any way derive
from Milton’s “Now that the fields are dank, the ways are mire” (followed, two lines later, by “a sullen day”)? Besides, shouldn’t that be
“and ways are mire”? What of Vernon Lee’s The Sentimental Traveller
instead: “it winds slowly through the Roman lowlands, sullen and
muddy under its willows, going to join the sullen, muddy Tiber”?
And does Larkin’s “Untiringly to change their hearts to stone”
(“Many famous feet have trod”) owe a thing to Yeats’s “Too long
49 0O P O E TRY
a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart”? The metaphor is a cliche.
Besides, Arthur Mainwaring’s “cold Courage turns your Hearts to
Stone” and John Clare’s “cold neglects have froze my heart to stone”
lie a lot closer to Larkin. The editor wastes a fair amount of space
on similarly trivial eavesdropping, but makes little effort to provide
parallels in Auden during Larkin’s Auden infatuation — that would
at least have been useful. (He remarks that Larkin was good at creating Auden’s atmosphere without being indebted to specific lines, yet
the reader might like to know, when the Auden fog descends, where
Auden used “O let” or “pistol cocked” or the sort of list so suggestive
in “The cycles hiss on the road.” And might the editor not have heard,
in the sorrow and emptiness of “Among the littering alien snow
I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference” the faint hint of
Keats’s “the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in
tears amid the alien corn”?
No reader new to Larkin should start here. Poems, selected by
Martin Amis, is friendlier and far shorter, with a highly personal, hairraising introduction. I disagree that Larkin is a “novelist’s poet” — the
descriptions Amis marshals would be contrived in a novel, at least any
novel not by Martin Amis. The selection of Larkin’s poems is somewhat tightfisted, The Less Deceived in particular being shortchanged:
among the missing are “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,”
“Wedding-Wind,” “Reasons for Attendance,” “Absences,” “Arrivals,
Departures,” and most pointedly “Born Yesterday,” a nativity poem
for Amis’s younger sister. I might drop a few poems Amis includes,
adding from other books “Home Is So Sad,” “Water,” “Sunny
Prestatyn,” “Sympathy in White Major,” and, from the uncollected
poems, “Femmes Damnées” and “Party Politics.”
Larkin’s range was not great; he rarely varied his tone; his metier
was the portrait, the meditative lyric, the grumble. Yet how many
poets could have written touching poems, as Larkin did, about
renting (“Mr Bleaney”), or retired racehorses (“At Grass”), or a vandalized holiday poster (“Sunny Prestatyn”), or salesmen (“Arrivals,
Departures”)? Or a poem in the voice of a ruined Victorian girl
(“Deceptions”), one very different from Hardy’s? Larkin was a misanthrope, but not in the way most people are — he merely found life
tedious with others in it. His poems are rarely uplifting, or uplifting
only after a lot of hemming and hawing and hedging his bets. For
all that, for all that he is vinegar’s version of Hardy, there are few
poets more a guilty pleasure, few who see life with the chill of the
william logan
491
born cynic, yet the nervous hope that love may, somewhere, just be
possible — if not, perhaps, for him. One of the curiosities of Larkin’s
poems is how cheerful they leave you — and it’s not the kind of cheer
to be mistaken for schadenfreude.
There’s something nasty in Larkin — yet appealingly, gratifyingly
nasty. Lowell and Plath made the private drama a full-blown fiveact barnstormer, with scenery chewing and piles of corpses. Larkin,
however, was perhaps the poet almost crushed by Freud. He’s just
some miserable pub-going off-in-a-corner sod who knows things
won’t get better and rather thinks he doesn’t deserve better — life’s
Osric, perhaps, or Cinna the poet, for what death is deserved except
the one most undeserved? It’s not Larkin’s misery in which one takes
pleasure, but the relief his misery offers vicariously. That brings his
poems, narrow and squeezed though they are (Larkin and sublimity are as much antonyms as Stoke-on-Trent and Paris), into relation
with Greek tragedy, because they offer the ghosts of pity and terror.
Larkin’s novels are hard going for such light things; the jazz
reviews seem finicky and small, as if he were an HO hobbyist or a
collector of moths; the other prose pieces are often lightly hostile,
those of a man who wishes he could be anywhere else. Yet Larkin’s
poems seem exactly right, expressing all that needs to be said, and in
a manner wholly his own, and neither swaggering, nor vain, nor full
of whizbangs and Roman candles. It’s the late triumph of the middle
voice — and in his mildness, his love of back lanes, his dependence
on character and characters, he’s a lot closer to Frost than is generally
admitted (both were rather unpleasant beneath the surface — and in
Larkin’s case on the surface). You don’t wish him a different sort of
poet because he was exactly the poet he could be; and in his flaws his
talents were perfected.
When we have shrugged off our prejudices about Larkin, as he
was never able to shrug them off about himself (who disliked Larkin
more than Larkin?), it may become apparent how central he was to
mid-century poetry, a man who saw himself as a ramshackle collection of defects, a man with a prefabricated sense of loss. Such poetry
can come after a devastating sea change like the Modernists, when it
seems that there’s nothing left for a poet to do.
49 2O
P O E TRY
beverley bie brahic
No Fish Were Killed in the Writing of These Poems
Collected Body, by Valzhyna Mort.
Copper Canyon Press. $16.00.
She folds her arms because in a house
of such uneven walls nobody
should be expected to learn handwriting.
The poems in Collected Body contain a lot of lines like these, and I’m
not sure what to make of them. On the one hand the exuberance of
the surrealist images and their puzzles of juxtaposition tantalize; on
the other, they quickly feel like too much of a good thing.
Mort’s thought is associative: her writing has a pleasant enough
randomness from image to image, motifs whose relationship to
a theme, hint of argument, or narrative, however, can be hard to
pin down, unless “the body” of the title suffices. I would say not.
In the lines quoted above, for instance, from “Unter den Linden”
(Valzhyna Mort grew up in Belarus and came to the us in 2005;
Collected Body — how does a body get collected? — is her second
American book and the first that she has composed in English), the
speaker is a girl whose chest one day “will fold into breasts”; “her
uncle limps, stutters, and winks”; there’s a hint of an extended family
that speaks to the reader’s techno-nostalgia for family soups, preferably cabbage, and villages without a cvs in sight. “Two lindens keep
the kitchen window busy,” the girl “holds her pen like a spoon. Her
pursed lips / frown at the horizon line” — nice conjunction of horizon line and lines of writing, and an ambition to grow up and be a
writer confirmed by the poem’s presence on the page. It’s a slice of
autobiography, a category into which other poems also fall.
One’s pleasure comes piecemeal, in evocative details, for instance,
that make domesticity palpable: dishes “bleached in sour cream,” and
“women constantly chopping vegetables.” Surrealism is up to its nearly
century-old tricks: objects come alive (“lipstick smiles at me,” “the
tower clock clears its throat”; colors are Fauvist (“a red oyster,” “pink
vomit”) with black accents, and there are not-so-startling juxtapositions: “lips repose like two seals / in a coastal mist of cigarette smoke.”
be v erley bie brahi c
493
Violence is predictable: there are recurring tropes of blood — “blood
like a dog-rose,” “dripping-on-the-floor blood”; wounds “darken,”
someone runs “from the man who lies / inside the ripped-open body
of a bathtub.” Bruising is endemic.
On the other hand, there’s at least one piece of excellent advice:
“Do not eat the fruit from your Family Tree.” And Mort’s sexuality
is refreshingly earthy, celebratory, and guilt-free. How not to like
reading about a woman who “moves through dog-rose and juniper
bushes, / her pussy clean and folded between her legs” (“Crossword”),
or one who is:
rough and indifferent toward her full breasts,
as if she were brushing a cat off the chair
for her old father to sit down.
....................................
It bothers her, what did he find there after all?
So she touches herself under the towel.
It is easy to find where he has been digging —
the dug-up spot is still soft.
— from Sylt I
If Mort’s book were a painting the canvas would be red and black
and expressionistic. The question is whether it makes enough use of
the mind’s shaping faculties; that is, whether there is an underlying
intellectual structure holding everything together and making individual poems add up to something bigger than their separate parts.
Cascading with images, poems can feel self-indulgent:
and the new day is at the town gates
like a trojan horse
that carries inside it the whole army of the sun
our men take it to the central square
their naked bodies like god’s index finger
— from Utopia
This is true even when one is chuffed by sheer proliferation and gusto:
— flowers are biting my back! —
you whisper:
49 4O
P O E TRY
the longer I look on the coins of your nipples
the clearer I see the Queen’s profile.
— from Jean-Paul Belmondo
The best parts of this book might be its prose sections, possibly
because prose syntax makes its own structural demands. The first,
“Aunt Anna,” nineteen pages long, describes a figure from childhood.
Here the imagery delightfully distinguishes Mort’s writing from similar projects in the naturalist-realist vein:
To see Aunt Anna you have to step back; you have to glimpse
a ghost slipping through the long narrow corridor of her
body — her face vanishes as abruptly as it appears.... Even to
the happiest of news, she shakes her head and weeps.... Aunt
Anna rediscovers the technique of breathing through a prayer,
when her breath sneaks in unnoticed, disguised among Catholic
rhythms.
And “Zhenya,” in the second prose portrait,
leans like an old village fence, almost kissing the ground, and
a shred of green cloth, scudded by the wind around the grazing, has finally caught hold of one of the boards and hangs on
it — Zhenya’s jacket.
These evoke Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, or Hélène
Cixous’s recent “fictions” of an Algerian girlhood, though Mort’s
writing is (as yet) narrower in scope. Too long to be called prose
poems, though they make use of poetic technique — sensual imagery,
repetition, sound — they make one hope that a full-length piece of
prose, not necessarily either fiction or nonfiction but some hybrid
beast, is in the works.
Janet’s Cottage, by D.H. Tracy.
St. Augustine’s Press. $24.00.
Wide-ranging in its interests, Janet’s Cottage has the technical accomplishment of a mature work, yet the poems never feel varnished and
mounted on a wall. It’s the live fish, flopping on the grass, just before
be v erley bie brahi c
495
the angler removes the hook. And it is D.H. Tracy’s first book and it
has won the New Criterion Poetry Prize.
Over a far down a transport drops
eight paratroops for practice, as if
a girl had plucked a dandelion gone to seed.
Neither gone to storm nor drought the day
takes its terrifying middle way,
terrifying to all but Janet, who commends
the tousling politesse of light and shadow, and pretends
the easel is the world and the world
the easel. Is it or is it not pretend?
The village houses, seen from the hills,
or even from the street, inch closer on such quiet days
to hamlets made for model trains
of matchboxes and of cotton wool, and of
a meticulous variety of love.
Enter from the east a model train,
as quiet as a cloud.
These lines from the fourth section of the title poem show the
poet’s management of syntax, his throwaway use of rhyme, and
other sound effects (for example, the soft popping plosives in the
first three lines, the sharp ts lower down), his ability to half-hide big
words, like “love,” and to understate all the work an adjective like
“meticulous” does. One might not notice these things. The lines also
show Tracy’s commitment to the human figure, her landscape and
objects, and to description: indeed, reading the whole poem — and
others — the obsessively-added small brushstrokes of description
might seem at times to lose the thread of a poem’s argument; this,
I think, is one of Tracy’s quirks, a sign of complexity rather than a flaw,
rough edges which keep poems from feeling either reductive or too
polished, allowing them — especially the long-lined quasi-narrative
poems — to sound like a particular voice, rather than the product of
a school.
“Janet’s Cottage” — the poem, but this is generally true — has a
mysterious point of view. We never really know where we are, though
we may suspect England from certain vocabulary items — coombs,
downs — nor who is describing the scene to us in such tender yet
somehow detached detail. The poem’s structure is as layered as
49 6O
P O E TRY
a painter painting himself painting a picture: the speaker can seem
far away looking down on a miniaturized landscape (putting one in
mind of Bishop’s “Poem”); yet we also seem to be inside the Janet
character looking out — and Janet is of course a metaphor. The spatial
layering pours over into enigmatic layers of time: is this a memory, a
dream, is it now? All of the above? Realism and fantasy are hard to
comb out. Questions are effectively used to evoke doubt about what
is happening, but also as a metaphor for skepticism itself, about the
scene, about life, about art: “Is it or is it not pretend?”
Though he clearly isn’t a dogmatic formalist, which is just as well
given his passion for detail, Tracy handles form and rhyme with brio.
A dramatic monologue, called “The Neighbor Discusses Parkinson’s,”
the casualness of the title already comic (the comedy heightens something darker), is in rhymed couplets:
The average age of onset: fifty-eight.
The actuarial tables propose a date
but I’ve already beaten odds.
...................................
Smile,
will you. Fatal and degenerative
differ in that one will let you live.
There’s a translation of Horace and a wittily playful, stuttering poem
to the tune of “Miss Lucy had a steamboat.” There are lists, like “To
England,” which starts off in England “To islands and the elements
in all their desperation,” and ties up in America with its “Quakers in
the Delaware Valley . .. / and East Anglians in New Haven who would
hang a boy for wanking.” Other poems — “One Connecticut,” for
instance — string together non-sequiturs:
The dinosaur prints cannot calibrate their novelty.
Reservoir three inches low.
.................................
A Greek girl I really loved has moved to Iowa.
be v erley bie brahi c
497
Such poems let the reader tease out what’s going on between the
lines and make this exercise seem worthwhile: there are “clarities of
incoherence” (Geoffrey Hill).
Janet’s Cottage has little overt personal history (and no good scouring the internet: you might end up, as I did, at a meeting of the League
of Women Voters in Norwalk, Connecticut) and makes scant use
of the first person — some of the poems in which Tracy does deploy
an “I” are, or might be, in someone else’s voice. Still, reading Janet’s
Cottage one feels oneself in the presence of a mind with the capacity
to shape poems from surprisingly diverse materials, preoccupations,
and dictions. Words are used sparely and precisely, as in “Vanitas:
Bells”: On the mountainside, a manzanita leaf
may enfold a squirrel skull,
and the campanile in the distance
may not be ringing; and the air is full
of that which bells break: of grief,
and the quartering harriers’ patience.
Or they run wilder, as in the loping, long-lined poems of which
“Janet’s Cottage” is an example. So absent a Wikipedia entry, one can
still ferret out clues about this discreet poet who ranges geographically from Sana’a to Moose Jaw (which, as it happens, is where this
reader’s father grew up) and lexically from “fuck-all” to “emergent,”
which is to say that the book itself constitutes a sly — and, ultimately,
very winning — portrait of its author.
49 8 O
P O E TRY
l e t t e r s to t h e e d i to r
Dear Editor,
Sven Birkerts’s essay on Emerson’s “The Poet” [April 2012] focuses
on the disconnect he senses between Emerson’s transcendental theory
and the practice of poetry today. This misalignment, Birkerts feels,
is due to the “culture of embarrassment” that has taken root in our
academic institutions, which shun the idea of the “soul” and “perfect
beauty” in art, replacing these terms or aims with an “arbitrariness”
that stems from the fact that we are constantly “on the run from the
anxious vibration of our living.” Birkerts says that Emerson’s text
feels “archaic” and somehow “remote” from modern poetic discourse,
which dismisses the “inward as a place for progress or gain.” Indeed,
Birkerts feels that “The Poet” seems so alien to a modern reader that
it might have come from “another world.”
While I can agree with Birkerts that self-transcendence through internal examination is on the wane, I still feel uncomfortable with how
much he distances Emerson’s essay. Even though Emerson uses the
“soul” to craft his argument, there is no doubt that, on a logical level,
the essay still works whether you choose to buy into its portrayal of
the poet or not. What makes Emerson so important to my own experience of poetry is the very feeling that Birkerts seems to long for,
a sense of “The Poet” transcending its time and coming to bear on
the present. I receive this sensation of relevancy through the clarity
of Emerson’s prose and the religious fervor of his argument, both of
which, I believe, can fully penetrate the secular age in which we live.
william s. skelly
athens, ohio
Sven Birkerts responds:
It is clear that Emerson’s “The Poet” still speaks across the years to
William Skelly, bringing news that is still news, and it speaks that
way to me, too. Part of my experience of reading the essay, however,
is feeling, or suffering, the tension of the gulf between what I want to
believe in my readerly being — the idealizations of art — and what I
letters
499
encounter in the culture of my time. I mean the large-scale, not total,
withering away of a felt secular connection to something that might
be called the transcendent. I have to say that I disagree with Skelly’s
assertion that “the essay still works whether you choose to buy into
its portrayal of the poet or not.” To me that portrayal is its essential substance, and it rests on a recognition of something that I — at
first hesitantly, but then more decisively — called soul. Remove that
saturation from the essay and there is little logical structure — the
logic of progression of Emerson’s prose equivalent of the “metermaking argument” proceeds directly from it. Under the literary spell
of that conception, I find the work resonant in the highest degree,
but when I look up from the page I feel as I might when wakened
from the compulsion of an urgent dream. But isn’t this the beauty — the point — of art, that it has the power to cancel distances that are
otherwise very real? That they are cancelled does not mean they do
not exist. I am grateful for Skelly’s engaged response.
Dear Editor,
Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Fear” [ June 2012] is one of the more satisfying reads I have had in a long time. It reminded me of Susan
Sontag — the conclusions are not as important as the path taken and
the many references given.
phil ward
montrose, colorado
Dear Editor,
Reading Tony Hoagland’s “There Is No Word” and Robin Ekiss’s
“The Death of Silence” in the same sitting offers a sort of wonder and
pleasure so rare I struggle to name it. Thank you for assembling the
July/August issue of Poetry so thoughtfully — and for knocking me, at
least momentarily, out of my screen-induced stupor.
bill diskin
charlotte, north carolina
500O P O E TRY
Dear Editor,
I read Steve Gehrke’s two wonderful poems [“Epilogue” and “The
New Self,” July/August 2012] stretched out on my bed with the ceiling fan churning and — through his Sylvia Plath-like devotion to
sound and sadness — forgot how goddamn hot North Carolina is in
the summer when there are no jobs, anywhere, to distract you from
it. Wonderful stuff. I’d love to see more of his poetry in your pages.
nick joseph
hickory, north carolina
Dear Editor,
I have been enjoying Poetry magazine for several years, although I
am not a poet myself and never had any formal training in writing or
interpreting poems. I try to read most of the poems in each issue and
understand the structure, rhythm, and messages the poets intended.
I recently received the July/August issue and have been enjoying it,
but I noticed something in “A Poem for S.,” by Jessica Greenbaum,
that puzzled me. The poem uses each letter of the alphabet in
order from A to Z as the first letter in each line, starting with the
title. However, there is no line beginning with the letter Y. Was that
Greenbaum’s original intent, or did a typo elude her or the proofreading? Obviously, this is not a big deal, but I am curious to know
for the sake of my continuing self-education.
geoff moorman
portland, oregon
Jessica Greenbaum responds:
Isn’t it sometimes Y? Oh, wrong rule. In Geoff Moorman’s selfeducation about poems — how they are shaped, what they omit and
what they mean — this is pretty straightforward. Cat burglar. But
seriously, because he was so kind as to read all twenty-five lines, let
me venture that I was happily toddling along down the page with the
kind of carelessness I usually reserve for the rest of my life, and was
so excited about “zarf ” that I fell out of step, something like skipping
letters
50 1
a toe-tap in a jig. Maybe some meaning can be found where the Y was
not. Perhaps that no systems are perfect, but still afford a coherent
whole? Or that we cannot find that out deliberately?
Dear Editor,
The editors of Choice Magazine Listening, a free audio magazine anthology for blind, visually impaired, and physically disabled adults,
wish to thank Poetry for being one of our best sources for outstanding
poetry and essays through the years. We pride ourselves on recording the finest contemporary writing for our special audience. Quite
often that includes selections from your fine magazine, whether
it’s “Great Depression Story” (Claudia Emerson, December 2006),
“The Great Scorer” (John Wooden, July/August 2010), or “Disorder
and Early Sorrow” (Michael Hofmann, July/August 2011), to name
a few recent examples. Choice Magazine Listening is celebrating its
fiftieth anniversary this year. As we embark on our next fifty years,
we look forward to including many more fine selections from Poetry.
pamela loeser
editor in chief, choice magazine listening
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail
to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We
regret that we cannot reply to every letter.
502O
P O E TRY
c o n t r i bu to r s
beverley bie brahic’s poetry collection White Sheets (Fitzhenry &
Whiteside and CB editions, 2012) is a finalist for the Forward Prize.
She has also translated Apollinaire’s The Little Auto (CB editions,
2012).
billy collins’s latest collection of poetry is Horoscopes for the Dead
(Random House, 2011). He is a recent recipient of Sewanee’s Aiken
Taylor Award for poetry.
john de stefano’s * poems in this issue come from his manuscript
“Critical Opalescence and the Blueness of the Sky.” He lives in Manhattan and makes a living as a translator.
paul durica is a graduate student at the University of Chicago and
the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell Tours and Reenactments.
oded ezer * is the founder of EzerFamily.com type foundry and
Oded Ezer Typography, which specializes in brand identity, typographic design, and Hebrew and Latin typeface design.
jane hirshfield is most recently the author of the book Come, Thief
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). In 2012 she was given the Donald Hall-Jane
Kenyon Award in American Poetry and elected a chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets.
mary karr’s last memoir is Lit (Harper Perennial, 2009). Her last
book of poems is Sinners Welcome (2004). She’s developing an hbo
series with Scott Rudin and a Showtime series with Jacob Epstein.
She teaches as Syracuse University.
john koethe’s new book, ROTC Kills, is out this month from Harp-
erCollins. His last book, Ninety-Fifth Street (HarperCollins, 2009),
won the Lenore Marshall Prize.
joan hutton landis taught for twenty-four years at the Curtis In-
stitute of Music, where she was chair of the Liberal Arts Department.
Her first book of poems is That Blue Repair (Penstroke Press, 2008).
dana levin’s most recent book, Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press,
2011), received year-end honors from the New Yorker, the San
Francisco Chronicle, Library Journal, and Coldfront.
contributors
50 3
william logan’s most recent book of poetry is Strange Flesh
(Penguin, 2008). A volume of new poems, Madame X, is out this fall.
james longenbach’s * most recent collection of poems is The Iron
Key (W.W. Norton, 2010). A new prose book, The Virtues of Poetry,
is forthcoming from Graywolf Press next year.
ange mlinko’s most recent book of poems is Shoulder Season (Coffee
House Press, 2010).
deborah paredez * is the author of This Side of Skin (Wings Press,
2002). She is an associate professor of English at the University of
Texas-Austin and co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization
for Latina/o poets.
frederick seidel’s new book of poems, Nice Weather (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux), is out this month.
a.e. stallings’s most recent book is a verse translation of Lucretius,
The Nature of Things (Penguin, 2007). She is a 2011 Guggenheim
fellow and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
* First appearance in Poetry.
504O
P O E TRY
News.
Poetry.
Two words that rarely come together. So when NPR
created “NewsPoet,” something original was born.
We ask poets to venture into the turmoil of our newsroom
in Washington, DC. There, they follow us and our
production process for the day. They attend editorial
meetings. They observe as story ideas are shared,
dissected, rejected, and accepted. And afterward, they
reflect on the stories of the day, they describe what they
saw in a poem, and they record it in their own voice.
All this, on a very short deadline… a news deadline. Not
the usual pace for a poet. But the results are stunning
reflections on news, on life, and on life in a newsroom.
NPR NewsPoets include Carmen Gimenez Smith, Robert
Pinsky, Paisley Rekdal, Tracy K. Smith, Craig Morgan
Teicher, Monica Youn, and Kevin Young.
You can read and listen to their readings of their
own poems at npr.org/newspoet.
Poetry
From ChiCago
In Time
Poets, Poems, and the Rest
C. K. Williams
“Williams is a poet of imaginative
composure amid real-world
disarray.”—Dan Chiasson,
New York Times
Cloth $27.50
Bewilderment
New Poems and Translations
David Ferry
“The best work of a master whose
major theme has always been human loneliness.”—Richard Wilbur
Paper $18.00
The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu
A Volume in Celebration
of Poetry’s Centennial
To celebrate the centennial of Poetry magazine, the magazine’s editors
have assembled this stunning collection—a book not of the best or
most familiar poems of the century, but one that uses Poetry’s long history and incomparable archives to reveal unexpected echoes and
conversations across time, surprising juxtapositions and enduring
themes, and, most of all, to show that poetry—and Poetry—remains a
vibrant, important part of today’s cultural landscape.
CloTh $20.00
The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu
POETRY ARCHIVE BLOGGERS REVIEWS OF READINGS
POETRY FOUNDATION NEWS BOOK ARTS FEATURES
AUDIO ON POETRY POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
ON CULTURE POETRY TOOL ESSAYS POETS NEWS
ARTICLES
BLOGGERS
EVENTS
CARTOONS
Q&A
PHOTOGRAPHS ARTICLES DISPATCHES BOOK PICKS
PUBLISHING NEWS AROUND THE WEB GUIDEBOOKS
POETRY ARCHIVE Q&A FOUNDATION NEWS EVENTS
POEMS POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG BIOGRAPHIES
POETRY MAGAZINE ARCHIVE
ESSAYS
FEATURE ARTICLES
AUDIO
ON POETS
ON POETRY
BLOGGERS
POEM OF THE DAY AROUND THE WEB GUIDEBOOKS
REVIEWS OF READINGS POETS BLOGGERS ARTICLES
POETRY BESTSELLER LIST PUBLISHING NEWS ESSAYS
BOOK PICKS POETRY TOOL AUDIO POETRY ARCHIVE
FOUNDATION NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS BIOGRAPHIES
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
DISPATCHES
CARTOONS
NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS AUDIO REVIEWS OF READINGS
AROUND THE WEB
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
POETRY MAGAZINE ARCHIVE BLOGGERS CARTOONS
AROUND THE WEB EVENTS AUDIO ESSAYS POETRY
ON POETS BOOK ARTS PHOTOGRAPHS DISPATCHES
BOOK PICKS PUBLISHING NEWS POETRY ARCHIVE
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG FOUNDATION NEWS
BIOGRAPHIES POETRY MAGAZINE ARCHIVE AUDIO
ON CULTURE POEM OF THE DAY
FEATURES Q&A
POETRY MAGAZINE ARCHIVE REVIEWS OF READINGS
BLOGGERS PHOTOGRAPHS POETRY BESTSELLER LIST
REVIEWS OF READINGS POETS BLOGGERS ARTICLES
PUBLISHING NEWS AUDIO POETRY FOUNDATION
Jan
Delr
POWERFUL POETRY WORKSHOPS
… with our extraordinary faculty poets …
B.H. Fairchild • Terrance Hayes • Jane Hirshfield
Laura Kasischke • Thomas Lux • Tony Hoagland
Tracy K. Smith • Lisa Russ Spaar
• Focus on your work • workshops • readings • craft talks •
panel discussion • annual gala • coffee house … and more!
Special Guest BILLY COLLINS
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001–2003
Visit our website and apply today:
www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org
Deadline: November 9, 2012
The Great American Poetry Show
www.tgaps.net
* Poetry is sound holier than silence.
* Poetry is the craft of writing which creates the
work of art called poem.
* Poetry uses pointed words to make a fatuously
petty point, a preeningly pithy point, or some
other pointy point pointedly in between.
* Poetry looks in the mirror and sees scantily-clad
imaginations frolicking in the seas of time.
* Poems are heart bombs exploding in the mind.
* Poets are paraphrasers paraphrasingly
paraphrasing the mysteriously mysterious
mystery of timelessly timeless time.
* Avant-garde poet-rebels are unruly artists in
revolt undermining and overthrowing the
literary status quo.
NEW FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS
“This indispensable
guide offers specific
examples of programs
that work well in
diverse and far-flung
communities. There is
no guide like this, and
it’s long overdue.”
—PEGGY SHUMAKER,
Alaska State Writer Laureate
BLUEPRINTS
Bringing Poetry into Communities
Edited by KATHARINE COLES
320 pp., paper | $8.95
With essayists—including Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Hass, and Patricia
Smith—describing how poets and artists have brought poetry into
different kinds of communities, and a “toolkit” loaded with experiencebased advice, tools, and strategies, Blueprints is a necessity for arts
organizers and those in the poetry community.
Purchase at www.UofUpress.com or at your local bookstore.
FREE E-BOOK can be downloaded at:
www.UofUpress.com or
www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/poetryinstitute.html
A copublication with the Poetry Foundation
Southwest Review
2012MortonMarr
PoetryPrize
First Place – $1,000
Second Place – $500
publication in Southwest Review
accompanies both prizes
• Opentowriterswhohavenotyetpublisheda
bookofpoetry.
• Submissionofnomorethansix,previously
unpublished,poemsina“traditional”form
(e.g.,sonnet,sestina,villanelle,rhymedstanzas,
blankverse,etal.).
• Poemsshouldbeprintedblankwithnameand
addressinformationonlyonacoversheetorletter.
• $5.00perpoementry/handlingfee.
• PostmarkeddeadlineforentryisSeptember30, 2012.
• Submissionswillnotbereturned.Allentrantswill
receiveacopyoftheissueinwhichthewinning
poemsappear.
• Mailentryto:TheMortonMarrPoetryPrize,
SouthwestReview,P.O.Box750374,Dallas,TX
75275-0374
www.smu.edu/southwestreview
poetryfoundation.org/harriet
HARRIET
POETRY NEWS THAT STAYS NEWS
Harriet is the Poetry Foundation’s news blog, dedicated to featuring
the vibrant poetry & poetics discussions from around the web.
Read Poetry
annual subscription: $35.00
poetry, po box 421141
palm coast, fl 32142-1141
1.800.327.6976
Notification of change of address should include
old address, new address, and e≠ective date of change.
Please allow six weeks for processing.
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
“electrical,
legendary, and
indispensable
– the most
exuberant, farranging poetry
gathering
America offers”
– Jane Hirshfield
Returning to
Newark, New Jersey
October 11 – 14, 2012
Poets reading will include:
Amiri Baraka
Eavan Boland
Henri Cole
Nikky Finney
Terrance Hayes
Juan Felipe Herrera
Jane Hirshfield
Fanny Howe
Kurtis Lamkin
Dorianne Laux
Philip Levine
Ada Limón
Thomas Lux
Gregory Orr
For more information,
including schedule, travel
and lodging, as well as to
subscribe to our Poetry
Friday blog, visit
www.DodgePoetry.org.
Patricia Smith
Arthur Sze
Natasha Trethewey
C.K. Williams
Raúl Zurita
Find a Poem.
Discover Poetry.
With the Poetry Foundation's POETRY mobile app,
you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and
contemporary poets with you wherever you go.
Get it for free at the App Store or
the Android Market. Find out more at:
poetryfoundation.org/mobile
Find
poems to fit
any mood.
Listen to
hundreds of
audio poems.
Read
Poetry magazine
on your iPad.
Adelphi University
congratulates
Kimberly Grey, M.F.A. ’09
upon receiving the
2012–2014 Wallace Stegner
Fellowship in Poetry.
adelphi.edu/mfa
The Yale Series of Younger Poets 2013 Competition
Yale University Press seeks one book length poetry manuscript to be published
in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Carl Phillips is the current YSYP judge.
Submissions for the 2013 Competition must be postmarked no earlier than
October 1, 2012, and no later than November 15, 2012. There is no application
form.
• Poets must be US citizens under forty years of age at the time they submit the
manuscript.
• Manuscripts must be a minimum of 48 numbered pages and a maximum of
64 numbered pages in length. Do not bind or staple pages.
• Manuscripts should begin with unnumbered frontmatter: a title page that
includes your book’s title, your name, address, telephone number, and e-mail
address; a table of contents; and (if applicable) a list of acknowledgements.
• Handwritten manuscripts will not be accepted.
Send your manuscript to: Yale Series of Younger Poets, P.O. Box 209040,
New Haven, CT 06520-9040. Include a check or money order for $20.00 made
out to Yale University Press. Do not send cash.
Manuscripts cannot be returned. If you wish receipt of your manuscript to be
acknowledged, please include a stamped, self-addressed postcard. If you wish to
be informed by April 2013 of the contest results, please include an email address
on your title page.
Yale university press
YaleBooks.com
p o e t ry f o u n dat i o n e v e n t s
POEMTIME
Wednesdays, 10:00am
The Poetry Foundation Library welcomes children ages
three to five to a weekly storytime event that introduces
poetry through interactive readings and games.
POETRY OFF THE SHELF: SONIA SANCHEZ
Thursday, September 13, 7:00pm
A founding member of the Black Arts Movement, an influential advocate of civil rights, and the author of more than
twenty books, Sanchez was recently named Philadelphia’s
first Poet Laureate. Co-sponsored with the Neighborhood
Writing Alliance.
HARRIET READING SERIES: JOANNE KYGER
Friday, September 14, 6:30pm
An influence among the Beats, the New York School and
the Language poets, Kyger received the 2008 PEN Oakland
Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Poetry.
all events are free
poetry foundation
• 61 west superior street • chicago
poetryfoundation . org / events
p o e t ry f o u n dat i o n e v e n t s
POETRY OFF THE SHELF:
LUCILLE CLIFTON TRIBUTE & BOOK LAUNCH
Thursday, September 20, 7:00pm
Michael S. Glaser, Li-Young Lee, Elise Paschen, Kevin
Young, and others celebrate Lucille Clifton and the publication of her posthumous Collected Poems. Co-sponsored
with BOA Editions.
POETRY & MUSIC: THE POET SANG
Saturday, September 22, 7:00pm
Sunday, September 23, 3:00pm
Poems by Blake, Sexton, Yeats, Ginsberg, and others are set
to music by Greg Brown, John Cale, Elvis Costello, Hanns
Eisler, Joni Mitchell, Kurt Weill, and Chicago musicians
Michael Greenberg, Jeff Kowalkowski, and Jenny Magnus.
Crooked Mouth and Jack The Dog perform.
POETRY OFF THE SHELF:
RED, WHITE, & BLUE — POETS ON POLITICS
Thursday, September 27, 7:00pm
Introduced and moderated by Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society of America, poets Suji Kwock
Kim, Li-Young Lee, and Khaled Mattawa explore the role
of politics in the literary landscape today. Co-sponsored
with the Poetry Society of America.
all events are free
poetry foundation
• 61 west superior street • chicago
poetryfoundation . org / events
POETRY
DISCUSSION GUIDE
Every month the Poetry Foundation
publishes a free discussion guide to
the current issue of Poetry magazine.
Visit our website for this month’s
guide, and to sign up for a half-price
student subscription.
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/DISCUSSIONGUIDES
back page
September 1990
On December 26, 1961, Nelson Algren wrote to his lifelong friend,
the journalist and author Herman Kogan (“Herm”):
J. Pat [ J. Patrick Lannan] is thinking of giving Poetry a fresh
shake and thinks I’m the right cat to shake it. It would pay $7,500
a year without being full time, but I doubt I ought to take it just
because it isn’t full time. My answer was Gwendolyn Brooks.
Algren declined and there is no evidence of Brooks being asked.
Brooks first appeared in this magazine in 1944. In the seventy-fifth
anniversary issue of Poetry, she reminisced:
I see myself at fourteen — when I first began to pound at the
gates of the magazine Poetry! It was a fourteen-year siege. But
the rejection slips gradually gentled ... and at last I was starred
in the cherished magazine that above all others poets have considered The Goal.
Six years after her first appearance in Poetry, Brooks was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Annie Allen, making her the first
African American to receive this honor. She received the Eunice
Tietjens prize from Poetry in 1950 and was the featured poet on
Poetry Day in 1990, joining a distinguished group that includes W.H.
Auden, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Lannan, whose foundation funds the annual Lannan Literary
Awards, organized the first Poetry Day in 1955. The evening featured Robert Frost reading before a sold-out audience of 1,600 at the
Blackstone Theater, followed by a private dinner and auction, which
netted the magazine almost $30,000. The next year brought Carl
Sandburg, who insisted the house lights be kept on so he could see his
audience. This year Lannan Literary Award recipient Seamus Heaney
will read at Poetry Day on October 18, the only writer to have been
asked back.
Paul Durica