March 2015 - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
March 2015
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume ccv • number 6
CONTENTS
March 2015
POEMS
michael derrick hudson 515
End of Days Advice from an
Ex-zombie
Russians
martha silano
518
Song of Weights and Measurements
tony hoagland
520
Bible Study
austin smith
522
Factory Town
miller oberman
524
On Trans
aram saroyan
526 The Clock in Literature
Paradise
Film Noir
jessica fjeld
532
Political Theory
Poem on a National Holiday
julie maclean
534
Footfall
kevin prufer
536
Black Woods
michelle y. burke
537
Diameter
Intensity as Violist
Discipline the Child
adam vines
Lures
540
john hennessy
541
Netflix Green Man
Convenience Store Aquinas
john kinsella
544 Native Cut Wood Deflects Colonial
Hunger
charlie bondhus
545
Sunday in the Panopticon
The Satyr Proffered
rosebud ben-oni
Somewhere Thuban Is Fading
548
jillian weise
550
Future Biometrics
Biohack Manifesto
abigail deutsch
556 After the Disaster
Twenty-Two
richard o. moore
558
d e l e t e 8
d e l e t e 12
terese svoboda
Hairy Stream
560
laura kasischke
561
Two Men & a Truck
The Wall
cathy park hong
566
Notorious
Morning Sun
ko c h , unfinished
kate farrell
571
Alla Rampa: Odyssey of an
Unfinished Poem
kenneth koch
575 “Monday, July 10 . ..”
At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa
c omment
tom sleigh
587 Six Trees and Two White Dogs ... Doves?
contributors
609
Editor
Art Director
Managing Editor
Assistant Editor
Editorial Assistant
Consulting Editor
Design
don share
fred sasaki
sarah dodson
lindsay garbutt
holly amos
christina pugh
alexander knowlton
cover art by lui shtini
“Homer,” 2011
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Poetry • March 2015 • Volume 205 • Number 6
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POEMS
michael derrick hudson
End of Days Advice from an Ex-zombie
To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops
and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I
get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along
ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds
when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!
Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit
of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over
the busted glass and merchandise of America . .. But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities
separating what’s being alive from
who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that.
Next learn how to want one thing over and over,
night after night. Most of you
are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough
into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand
by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch
at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.
mi chae l derrick hudson
51 5
Russians
For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly
unhygienic sky. You’d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box
technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’d say
I tug at God’s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers
of a coward. You’d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox
could never rumple the sheets of Paris! You’d jot down
my ugly shoes, my idiotic jokes, reproach
my skies for lacking splendor, bleached
by electric lights and the haze of a dying atmosphere ... What else could I do, Marina? You and your comrades
vanished long ago, exiled, shot, or pensioned
off by the End of History. So I inch through your legacy
with my groundling’s fears, my glut,
my botched American upbringing: I can’t imagine your
heartbreaks, but you’d never comprehend
how life for me arrived precanceled. Tonight, Marina,
the mercury streetlights will make us
ghastly: you can see only Venus from here, a drunken
queen’s pearl dissolving into the crescent moon’s
516O
P O E TRY
tipped-over goblet. Or perhaps I just fucked that up too.
mi chae l derrick hudson
51 7
martha silano
Song of Weights and Measurements
For there is a dram.
For there is a farthing.
A bushel for your thoughts.
A hand for your withered heights.
For I have jouled along attempting
to quire and wisp.
For I have sized up a mountain’s meters,
come down jiffy by shake to the tune
of leagues and stones.
For once I was your peckish darling.
For once there was the measure
of what an ox could plow
in a single morning.
For once the fother, the reed, the palm.
For one megalithic year I fixed my gaze
on the smiling meniscus, against the gray wall
of graduated cylinder.
For once I measured ten out of ten
on the scale of pain.
For I knew that soon I’d kiss good-bye
the bovate, the hide and hundredweight.
For in each pinch of salt, a whisper of doubt,
for in each medieval moment, emotion,
like an unruly cough syrup bottle,
uncapped. For though I dutifully swallowed
518 O
P O E TRY
my banana doses, ascended, from welcome
to lanthorn, three barleycorns at a time,
I could not tackle the trudging, trenchant cart.
For now I am forty rods from your chain and bolt.
For now I am my six-sacked self.
martha si lano
51 9
tony hoagland
Bible Study
Who would have imagined that I would have to go
a million miles away from the place where I was born
to find people who would love me?
And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?
In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate
if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine;
if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist.
You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said.
Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little
scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch
the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis
over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth
gray sea.
Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer.
My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper.
Hard to believe that death is just around the corner.
What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny?
I was on the road for so long by myself,
I took to reading motel Bibles just for company.
Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep,
still feeling the motion of the car inside my body,
I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone.
And God said, You are worth more to me
than one hundred sparrows.
And when I read that, I wept.
And God said, Whom have I blessed more than I have blessed you?
And I looked at the mini bar
and the bad abstract hotel art on the wall
and the dark TV set watching like a deacon.
520O
P O E TRY
And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.
tony hoagland
52 1
austin smith
Factory Town
The factory stands on the train
of your town’s wedding gown,
dirtying it and smoking
unfiltered cigarettes. Embarrassed,
the clouds rush to cover up
the track marks of the stars.
On your way home from the factory
-run theater, it’s too dark to say
hello to the pale-faced people
plummeting past you and your son.
Who knows what bright things
they conceal in their black coats
now that they’ve rationed the rations.
Home before curfew, the iodine
tablets fume in the bedtime
glass of water your son requests.
He sips it as if it were hot tea
while you read to him yet again
that ancient story you three
loved. You stumble over the new
language, but even it is becoming
beautiful. You close the book,
kiss his forehead, stand the flashlight
upright by the fuming glass
and stumble to your bed in the dark.
Your son will wake in the night
and turn on the flashlight
522O
P O E TRY
so he can see the water
that he will turn into urine
that you will carry in an armful
of sheets down to the river,
that gray, dappled,
broken thing running
through the dying trees
like an app
-aloosa spooked by gunfire.
austin smith
52 3
miller oberman
On Trans
The process of through is ongoing.
The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall
down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning.
We were just going. I was just leaving,
which is to say, coming
elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words
move through my limbs, lungs,
mouth, as I appear to sit
peacefully at your hearth
transubstantiating some wine.
It was a rough red,
it was one of those nights we were not
forced by circumstances
to drink wine out of mugs.
Circumstances being, in those cases, no one had been
transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough to wash dishes.
I brought armfuls of wood
from the splitting stump.
Many of them, because it was cold, went right on top
of their recent ancestors.
It was an ice night.
They transpired visibly,
resin to spark,
bark to smoke, wood to ash.
I was
transgendering and drinking the rough red at roughly
the same rate
and everyone who looked, saw.
The translucence of flames
beat against the air
against our skins.
This can be done with
or without clothes on.
This can be done with
or without wine or whiskey
but never without water:
evaporation is also ongoing.
Most visibly in this case
in the form of wisps of steam rising from the just washed hair
of a form at the fire whose beauty was
in the earth’s
turning, that night and many nights,
transcendent.
524O
P O E TRY
I felt heat changing me.
The word for this is
transdesire, but in extreme cases
we call it transdire
or when this heat becomes your maker we say
transire, or when it happens
in front of a hearth:
transfire.
miller oberman
52 5
aram saroyan
The Clock in Literature
“Would you mind
If I headed up early?”
Says the husband
To his young wife.
“Follow when you like.”
Later that evening
The beautiful face
And exquisite limbs
Will rise from the table
Of the Southern inn
Having been spied
By the antihero
Across the room
Reading an indifferent book.
Oh, quick — Let a storm kill the light!
But you might as well say it
To a wall.
We can’t change
A single
Silver setting, or
Even by one day
Reduce
The bright full moon.
The clock in literature
Holds that moon.
“I know I can’t say
A single thing to stop you,”
Says the old man at table
To the suddenly risen girl.
526O
P O E TRY
“But sleep on it, will you?”
Not now — Not ever.
The clock in literature
Holds the ancient rune.
“I wonder if I might
Have a word with you,”
Says the antihero
To the lissome
Dark-eyed angel.
aram saroyan
52 7
Paradise
Look
the moon.
Nuts look like wood
but taste good.
528 O
P O E TRY
Film Noir
He was too excited to fall asleep.
The little dog wouldn’t stop barking.
He took out his gun.
He took out his handkerchief.
He took out his notebook.
He drank his coffee and left a dime.
He walked into the room.
He took her in his arms.
She let him in and walked out of the room.
He ran down the escalator.
He left the motor running.
He waited in the rain.
He needed something to tell the police.
He went down unconscious.
The blood drained from his face.
His eyes melted into a smile.
He dialed and waited, looking around.
He took off his hat in the elevator.
He rang the doorbell and waited.
He poured the cereal and added milk.
He opened the refrigerator and looked in.
He turned the page and continued reading.
He shut the door and switched the light on.
He looked up at a plane in the sky.
He put three pennies one on top of another.
He squeezed onto the elevator.
He took out his key.
He helped her into her coat.
He crossed the room and picked up the phone.
He drove on through the heavy rain.
He whistled for a cab.
He turned the corner and bumped into her.
aram saroyan
52 9
She gradually surrendered to his kiss.
He drove past the wrought-iron gates.
He lit a cigarette and waited.
He lied to the police.
He threw the dice and won.
He folded the newspaper and crossed his legs.
He sat down in the lobby.
He tied his shoes and stood up.
He put on his hat but didn’t get up.
He thought about her until he fell asleep.
He said “Goodbye” and hung up.
He threw the dice and lost.
He dialed and waited for her to answer.
He left some money for her.
He looked for her door number.
The police arrived late.
He walked into her building.
He let her do the explaining.
He gave up hope and begged.
He locked his car and walked.
She gave him that look of hers.
He put a finger to his lips.
He wiped his mouth and left.
He slapped her across the face hard.
He lit a cigarette in the dark.
The police wouldn’t understand.
Her little dog slept.
Her voice had an edge to it.
Her hands were wonderful when she touched him.
His mind might be playing tricks on him.
The low hills reminded him of her.
There was no way to cut his losses.
530O
P O E TRY
He needed a shave and a haircut.
The coffee did nothing for him.
She was somewhere else when he called.
Pain stabbed him as he reached toward the glove compartment.
He needed a little time in the desert.
He decided to head for the beach and then thought better.
He needed about $5,000.
He ran out of Luckies and crumpled the pack.
He left his hat on in the car.
Maybe he was ready to die.
He checked his wallet pocket.
All of his friends had disappeared.
He remembered her naked body.
He had almost no savings.
He was at least ten pounds overweight.
He realized he was in love with her.
aram saroyan
53 1
jessica fjeld
Political Theory
In a famous painting of a founding father
and the back end of a horse
it’s the horse butt that’s properly lit
groomed out
smooth
an immortal peach
Who can say what it means about revolution
that the horse’s tail emerges as though it had no bones in it
no chunky mechanics of the living
And the horse is not well muscled
but has been living in the rich grass
swollen like a birthday balloon
532O
P O E TRY
Poem on a National Holiday
How is it satisfied
I asked
clapping my hands violently
and waving
in fear that I would miss the parade
I might have lost my sight
without noticing
Gone on imagining
I saw the same linked-up rooms I moved through
Or some cool gray space
where a silence could be made
I wanted a little animal
to climb inside it cleanly
I was asking to be left alone
but in answer the sun shone brighter
j essica fj eld
53 3
julie maclean
Footfall
I used to live on the chalk
where clay gives way
to the Roman road
en route to an Iron Age fort
Laid a bivvy bag
off the track squinting
into the night bling for meteors
and space junk Hiked for days
dodging sarn and tor
Woke to dew on blade of plantain
shoved aside by the
nose of a blind mole
Once I flew a homemade kite
with the boy who had the wrong smell
He tried to kiss me on Gallows Barrow
So how could I leave
my homeland webbed by
common path and famine row
where blackberries dared
to bleed over my teeth
When I’d loved nothing more
than swinging over worn stiles
chasing primrose trails
wiping sap of bluebell from my sleeve
On the road my legs seem
less reckless now
more tools of philosophy
And what of this is true?
534O
P O E TRY
The boy, the kite, the blood
of berry, how I can tell
a simple lie that weaves the yarn
of my country back into my story
The bit about philosophy
j ulie maclean
53 5
kevin prufer
Black Woods
Do you know where our child has gone?
I’m sorry. Do you know what has become
of him? I’m sorry. [
.] Is he hiding
in a closet? No. Is he crouched among
the shoes? No. [
.] Should we look
in the closets? He’s not in the closets. [
.]
Should we check the empty boxes? He’s not
in the empty boxes. It’s very cold out. [
.]
Probably he’s hiding behind the couch.
Come out, come out! I will count to ten.
One, two, three — He’s not behind the couch.
[
.] It’s very cold out. [
.] Probably
he’s playing a trick. It isn’t a trick. He’s probably
hiding above the ceiling tiles. Hello up there!
He’s not in the ceiling. [
.] It’s very cold out.
[
.] Did he go out? No. Was he wearing
a jacket? No. Was he wearing boots
and a hat? [
.] It’s just black woods
out there. [
.] Did you give him your jacket?
[
.] Did you offer him your jacket? [
.]
Maybe he’s in disguise. Disguise? In your hat
and jacket. Disguised? [
.] Disguised
as you. [
.] Did he climb through your window?
Listen to yourself. Did he step inside you?
Listen to yourself. Is he trapped inside you?
Let go of me. Is it black woods in there?
536O
P O E TRY
michelle y. burke
Diameter
You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her.
Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’s
missing.
You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather
pumps.
What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British
Museum?
Your friend says she believes there’s more pain than beauty in the
world.
When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the
year.
The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved
symmetry.
On the plane, the man next to you read a geometry book, the lesson
on finding the circumference of a circle.
On circumference: you can calculate the way around if you know
the way across.
You try across with your friend. You try around.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, she says. But after K. died, I thought I
might go after her.
In case I’m wrong. In case she’s somewhere. Waiting.
michelle y. burk e
53 7
Intensity as Violist
That she was not pretty she knew.
The flowers delivered into her hands post-concert by the young girl,
pretty, would be acknowledged only. To display was to invite
comparison.
Skilled at withholding, she withheld; it was a kind of giving. As
when meditation is a kind of action,
a way of leaning into music the way one leans into winter wind, the
way a mule leans into a harness,
the way a lover leans into the point of deepest penetration.
After a ship’s prow cuts the water, the water rushes back twice as
hard.
538 O
P O E TRY
Discipline the Child
Quilt voice into flat prairie land.
Swell stature into argument.
Carve wrongdoing into wood chips, easily digestible.
Engage in preemptive fork removal.
Do not be implicit.
Silence, a coiled threat.
What’s in your holster?
Separate the child from the chaff. I mean, spoon the cream off the top.
What do you mean you don’t have a holster?
Keep the curds. Discard the whey.
michelle y. burk e
53 9
adam vines
Lures
For Scott Harris
Last summer’s fishing failures dangled from trees:
a Rapala and Jitterbug a stand
of privet paid for, half-ounce jigs with rubber skirts
and jelly worms with wide-gap hooks on ten-pound test
we tithed with overzealous casts at bass.
Then off we’d go (our stringers bare) to find
a yard to cut, a truck to wash, so we could fill
the tackle box we shared again. Today
is 12/12/12, the Mayan end, and I,
a country boy in Brooklyn for the week,
will hail a cab for the first time and think
of cows unnerved by fish we missed
and shouts of “shit” that followed, and dawns to dusks
and always back with you, my childhood friend.
Our girls will never know that pond’s deep hole
a baseball diamond now fills — the city leaders’ bright
idea — or how their fathers sitting in the bleachers
on Saturdays a couple decades later
can almost feel the stinging nettle against
their thighs, the lunker largemouth sweeping the bed
with her tail while plastic lizards jerk and drag
across the third base line, or how when we
untrain our ears to baseballs cracking bats
and bitchy parents, called strikes and alike,
we hear the peepers sounding off in oaks
on down the way, our mothers’ and fathers’ voices
calling us home not too far behind or ahead.
540O
P O E TRY
john hennessy
Netflix Green Man
Netflix the Green Man and any screen
becomes a vineyard. Episodes cluster
and climb, trellis narrative. Between
the corn and lichen, creepers muster
nine lives. They grow, divide, and splice,
steal scenes by running fox grape, bittersweet,
return on any handheld device
as moonseed, woodbine, dodder, buckwheat — false buckwheat — note, though star- and heart-shaped.
He trucks some mascot for our kids, glad-hands
a sidekick dressed to burrow, root, and take
them through their lessons rattling dad’s
bouzouki nerves, mom’s percussive bones.
Return, that ritual button, pressed like wine
in HD, when end credits jolt. Stop time,
we’re keyed up. Eternal return? Eternal jones.
j ohn hennessy
54 1
Convenience Store Aquinas
7-Eleven’s a misnomer, like “mindbody” problem. They never close. The hyphen’s
a dash of form. Sure, this mind-body’s
a machine, if you want, plowing across town
to the steak house. American Spirit. Give us
the yellow pack. No matches? This dollar
fifty-nine Santa lighter, too. Big Grab bag
of Doritos. No, the “engine” is not
separate — it’s part of the machine. Sure, paper’s
good, container for recycling. Rain’s no problem.
I eat the Doritos, smoke up — one for you?
The chips are part of my machine — matter inside matter — smoke fires my lungs,
gives me that slap of pleasure in my
tailbone, maybe stimulates a thought.
I’m prime matter informed by the soul.
No, I didn’t just slip the word in there:
that’s a spade — it digs through bullshit.
Lean close, under the awning, cover up,
you want a light. The mist can’t decide
if it’s rain or fog. Streetlight moons, clouds
around the neon signs. Pink as the steak
we’re heading for. The comfort of a red leather
banquette. No, your engine exists as part of
542O
P O E TRY
and powers its machine; separated, both are just
scrap, bunch of gears, rusty sprockets.
An unlit oven. Unbaked potatoes. Sour cream
inside a cow, chives growing mostly underground.
“Engine” is a bad analogy. I’m one thing,
not two, no intermediaries. I don’t
have a body, I am one. A hollow
one at the moment. What’ll it be?
Filet mignon? Slab of prime rib, don’t trim
the fat? Twelve oz. T-bone, two inches thick?
No, I’ll wait until after I eat for another,
but you go right ahead. Here’s a light.
j ohn hennessy
54 3
john kinsella
Native Cut Wood Deflects Colonial Hunger
Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart.
The guilt of cut wood? Its smell, its bloody show?
And that colorist’s jam envy, the lust for ropes
of raspberry. Fence-posts sturdy and hardy
and doused in creosote: to stand alone
in Termitesville. The sweetness turns rust.
And burnt offerings unless dried right through —
say for a year on the pile. Hot as hell to fire.
Nothing comes cost-free, we hear — those layers
of its dozen years a demonstration in history
as accumulation. Collective survey of occupation:
the real corps de ballet, the shrubby scenery,
bulldozed on roadsides. Ring a Ring o’ Roses.
All those brandings. Emblem of our town
that would miss no more than our rates.
“High turnover” region. Think raspberry
jam on white damper, think coals of fires.
The meager shade for sheep and cattle
and the denial of “unproductive” animals.
Nuisances. Saw deep into rough bark,
showered in pollen. Unholy fires
at the end of winter; and all that premonition,
all those seeds with snow in their bellies,
snow that can’t fall from this faraway sky.
So overwhelmingly familiar to me.
No Old Country raspberry homesickness.
Just an inkling of anthocyanin pigments.
Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart.
544O
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charlie bondhus
Sunday in the Panopticon
I was sitting in Old Town Square
with tourists and birds and I was reading
Foucault, how “he who is subjected
to a field of visibility . .. becomes
the principle of his own subjection”
and all around me the beautiful
Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first
day of spring like perennially
visible inmates in the opening credits
of a prison porno. The sun reflected off
the glass and my table was an inscrutable
tower of light from which I peered, invisibly,
at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr
across the stones, traveling, it seemed, to something
vaguely ridiculous and charmingly anachronistic:
cuff link shopping, or brunch with the duchess.
The coffee had made me jittery and I was beginning
to sweat from both sun and desire. I considered
moving to the outer edge of the circled tables, so the boys
could see me as I could see them, but then the 600-year-old
orloj sounded the hour and the twelve apostles
and skeletal death spun around and I was afraid
to leave my tower. I didn’t want to be visible
in the way those small dancing figures were visible and
as much as I wanted a handsome companion, I feared my foot
getting caught in a sewer grate or my spoon
falling from my saucer and clattering on the pavement,
startling the birds into a ruckus. An errant ball
of sweat fell from my chin and onto the page. I looked
down to where it had landed on the word “reciprocal”
which made me think how looking is always reducible to twos —
two eyes, two parties, two possible outcomes, and how
those who watch from the panopticon’s black pupil may,
in any case, not even exist.
c harlie bondhus
54 5
The Satyr Proffered
These grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.
— John Berryman
grapes, rough-touched and round, stonecarved, to be squeezed into the fundaments
of rock wine. She imagines it would be cold,
not sought for its smoothness,
and likely full of grit
if not refined with care.
The satyr laughs carelessly
for one caught in stone.
The cracked edges of his mouth spill grit
as he leers after the loss of his fundaments
which fall along the smooth,
cold
torso plane, exhibiting immaculate coolness
at this literal loss of face. Carefully,
she strokes his head, as if smoothing
the fetlocks handcrafted from stone.
Her affection is unforced, a fundamental
attraction to those beautiful, gritty
things made lovely by decay, their gritted
teeth so much more interesting than the art gallery’s cold
geometrics, which appear fundamental
but fail to consider the careless
chaos spinning at the stone
center of all smooth
creations. And those grapes! Their unsmooth
surface mirrors the messy passion flushing the gritdusted cheek, the hideous mouth of crumbling stone.
What heat from the Dionysian’s cold,
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brittle fruit! The obliteration of all care
if she could only perform the fundamental
act of eating. She thinks about wilderness, fun, mental
liberation, dancing her soles smooth,
pleasure as pervasive as care
is now, her feet a frenzied blur on the gritty
forest floor, shaking and pummeling out the cold
as she prances over starlit stones.
She does not care who sees her, as she grips the stone
grapes, feels the smooth, crumbling cold
enter her hand, fingers embracing a thing more fundamental than
earth, bone, grit.
charlie bondhus
54 7
rosebud ben-oni
Somewhere Thuban Is Fading
For Carolina Ebeid
We enrolled at barbizon
Knowing full well
We’d never look like
What was promised
Cue carol of the bells
Cue a demo on the casio
And the security of two-way
Escalators setting the speed
Those early mornings
In our mall school
The store’s silver grills
Some mannequins left
Half-clothed
We’d taunt them
With our imagined summers
In london paris rome
We weren’t please and thank you
Walking with books on our heads
No we were going to devastate
Greek shipping heirs
At every port of call
Yet when our bus broke down
And we trudged the shoulder
Of highways
Single file
Dodging cigarette butt and horn
We shook off those mornings
Studied
Their defenseless
Indifference
The blinding surface
The quality of electric
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Without being alive
We knew that there
In only hot pants
The ideal form
Plastic
Most would take a bullet for
While at 16
We were already trash-talking
Our prayers never went beyond
The second floor
Light-years away
From the last word
That distant somewhere
Where a boat loses course
The north star forsaking
Its name to another
rosebud ben- oni
54 9
jillian weise
Future Biometrics
The body that used to
contain your daughter
we found it
behind the fence
It was in a red coat
It was collected
Is she saved
Is she in the system
You’re lucky
we have other bodies
to put your daughter in
Come on down
to the station
55 0O
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Biohack Manifesto
It is terrible to be trapped at def con
with not even Ray Kurzweil’s
daughter to gaze upon
I know some of you wish
I would go wherever
my people go, the factory,
physical therapy, a telethon
No! says my mentor
Not this. This is too angry
This is too much about
Not that. Not that
I like to hack, sometimes,
the Hebrew Bible
I don’t think my mentor hacks
the Bible b/c it has too much
lame deaf blind circumcised in it
Not that. Not that in poetry
Didn’t we already have
Judd Woe? He was so good to us
so good and sad and sorry
The great thing about Judd Woe
is that now we don’t have to
keep looking for a disabled poet
We got him
Everybody together now: We got him
Thank yhwh he’s a man
I am so relieved, aren’t you?
j illian weise
551
I am so cock blocked, aren’t you?
Here I am at the cobbler
Please, please can you make
all my high heels into wedges
Here I am at Wal-Mart
Please, please, can you make
your children stop following me
Here I am at Advanced Prosthetics
Please, please, can you
change my settings
this is not poetry, they said
Be happy with what we give you
We got you
Insurance: You are allowed ten socks/year
Insurance: You are not allowed to walk in oceans
Insurance: If you had fought for us, if you
had lost your leg for us, for freedom, then
we would cover the leg that walks in oceans
and why is it always a poem is a walk?
A poem is like a walk
A poem is like going on a walk
A walk is like a poem
55 2O
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I was walking the other day and a poem tripped me
Don’t leave
Don’t I have any other ideas
Be a man, mortality, zip it
Call in the aubades
I wish I would read an aubade
Is it morning yet? This manifesto
is so so long. Too angry
Who you bangin’ on my door?
judy grahn
Thank yhwh. It was getting hot in here
Ray Kurzweil’s daughter is in Hawaii
I was about to give up
Yes
Yes
I know
I am trying to walk the treadmill
My leg beeps at 3 mph
This is the conference for hackers
Can somebody hack me
Can somebody change my settings
Yes
Yes
I know
j illian weise
553
jenny holzer
So glad you could make it
Come in, judy is here
What do y’all do with all the men in our heads
Yes
Yes
It is terrible
My people are just trying to get born
like please don’t test us
we are going to fail
and the test comes back
and says your baby is fucked
judy, jenny, I have been your student faithfully
I have kissed some ass, tho, hoping
if they like me enough — what
if they like me enough — why
judy, do you need a coaster?
Thy cup runneth over
The glass slipper, amenities
The manifesto must go on
biohack it
cut all of it my mentor says
This is not poetry
My mentor says: A poem is a walk
Get well soon, I pray for you
55 4O
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Must go Poem about coed
virility aging dahlias
Recurrent word to describe beauty
hacked from the Hebrew Bible: Ruddy
Don’t leave In the morning
I will vacuum this up Scansion, feet
I am sorry if you offended me
Role of disabled artist:
Always be sorry
j illian weise
555
abigail deutsch
After the Disaster
New York City, 2001
One night, not long after the disaster,
as our train was passing Astor,
the car door opened with a shudder
and a girl came flying down the aisle,
hair that looked to be all feathers
and a half-moon smile
making open air of our small car.
The crowd ignored her or they muttered
“Hey, excuse me” as they passed her
when the train had paused at Rector.
The specter crowed “Excuse me,” swiftly
turned, and ran back up the corridor,
then stopped for me.
We dove under the river.
She took my head between her fingers,
squeezing till the birds began to stir.
And then from out my eyes and ears
a flock came forth — I couldn’t think or hear
or breathe or see within that feather-world
so silently I thanked her.
Such things were common after the disaster.
55 6O
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Twenty-Two
Moissac, France
I walked to the baker’s
and thought about the bread.
And at the corner store
the butter. Four kinds of butter!
I bought them in order
of saltiness. I studied slang
in secret. I said little.
And my students were
so beautiful
I couldn’t teach a thing.
Instead I made them sing.
Twenty-two. Nothing to do.
New York had vanished,
Connecticut, too.
My students grew hair
and got haircuts, grew hair
and got haircuts, and sang.
I’d lie in bed and masturbate
and wonder why I’d come,
and come and come again
and then rise for some bread and a run.
Does the village persist? It must.
Right now, someone hums “Nowhere Man”
and thinks of that shy teacher from — Manhattan? New Orleans? Bel Air?
And she brushes her lengthening hair.
abigai l deutsch
557
richard o. moore
d e l e t e 8
Have you said your sermon this morning? the road it travels is dusty
and wide and goes round and round and round the mountain to say it
is obvious is to say it is crowded with refugees you and the others on
the road no destination in sight you are alive though boring at times
and the smell of you is instant nausea you breathe white breath in the
early morning air indeed you may have a flair for going round and
round with a skip and a jump at the most unexpected moments wasn’t
that you on a music box dancing in perfect porcelain? a quake threw
you from your shelf but round the mountain you must go suppose for
once you went up the mountain? would that be a different direction
or just more tiring? would it disturb the order of the ten thousand of
ten thousand things? do you care? do you know whose sermon this is?
it’s a habit you’ll have for life although things do slow down fall into
themselves and leave the world to silence and to aha? gotcha? you’re it
for now but it won’t be long before another sucker comes this way and
you can hide under the desk with the rest of us : look : sky and sea are
an undifferentiated gray even the birds disappear but forecast faith in
a word and the osprey is there again hanging head-down in the wind
it’s plain that being unsure gives you your daily terror you even lift a
prayer for it bells ring and you know it is the buoy off Saunders Reef
the red light assures you the buoy is still there that no Debussy bells
have come to dismantle your ears you’re safe in being where you are not
that you’ve got a warranty for life no matter what the salesman said you
signed up for Metaphysics 1 cost a bundle left you high and dry : how
dare you take all hope away? well in the first place it crash-landed years
ago you’ve been standing there imagining greaves breastplate helmet
with plumes the whole she-bang but don’t weep today for what you did
then there’s a lot to learn about letting go and you won’t hear a clang
of armor when you do in your most invincible day you were a larva
underfoot you lived by chance shape-shifting you are a fortunate one
without a shell no plane overhead gun to your head you are accidentally
free in the full terror of being who you are but tell me now this once
and forever have you built your language out of the things you love?
55 8 O
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d e l e t e 1 2
Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will
likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will
take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without
the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth
do you open it for more than medication? I should know I know that
I should know : we’ve watched centuries erode the fortress drain the
moat the poet’s clumsy beast has reached its home and prey we wither
in the gridlock of our power only the guns remain and are in use
pure accident is beauty to be glimpsed your trembling only further
clouds your sight I in my home you in your other place harmonize
the fading anthem of an age the cracked bell of our liberty keeps time
a penny for the corpse you left behind keep on recycling all that you
have heard before call it a double bind much like the dead bolt that
locked the door that keeps you safe and sane : ho — hum — harry
who? oh that’s just a phrase found in a time capsule capped and sealed
and shot up in the air : no I cannot tell you where it fell to earth that
page was torn out years ago it’s chance that we have a fragment of that
language left : do your archaeology before a mirror the canyons and
the barren plains are clear but where to dig for a ruined golden age a
fiction we were served with breakfast flakes say have you forgot this
day of sanity? No problem the heavy key was thrown away as soon as
the door was closed and locked you’re safe : some day the asylum may
be torn down to make way for a palace of the mad it does not follow
that anything will change : choose your executioner by lot almost
everyone is trained and competent there are different schools of
course check out degrees fees can become an issue of your choice and
some may be in service or abroad as usual nothing’s simple it’s all a
part of the grand unraveling that must take place before the new line
can be introduced : prepare now don’t be shocked when the music
starts the year’s fashions may feature pins and nails.
richard o. moore
559
terese svoboda
Hairy Stream
You could hike over it, the you
without a problem, its mountain
viewed from the closet
coats are found in, your constant
Yes / No a hee-haw, a mule alert
that’s pasture-perfect,
a coronary at the last corner.
Nobody’s framing you for the chintzcovered wall to cover the leak.
Besides, you like leaks, you’re inside
the view as if hibernating
or crazy, you try not to erupt.
Hypothesize the rest,
the languor and freshet,
the crags, the serrated parade.
So — heights? What about the hairy stream,
the pushed-up bushes saying Pet me?
You got a problem with that?
Cascade is what you call it
a voice off the hanger, the blouse
cast in a corner or animate.
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laura kasischke
Two Men & a Truck
Once, I was as large
as any living creature could be.
I could lift the world and carry it
from my breast to its bath.
When I looked down from the sky
you could see the love in my eye:
“Oh, tiny world, if anything
ever happened to you, I would die.”
And I said, “No!” to the hand. Snatched
the pebble from the mouth, fished it out
and told the world it would choke!
Warned the world over & over! “Do
you hear me? Do you want to choke?!”
But how was the world to know
what the truth might be? Perhaps
they grant you special powers, these
choking stones. Maybe
they change the child into a god, all-swallowing.
For, clearly, there were other gods.
The world could see
that I, too, was at the mercy of something.
Sure, I could point to the sky
laura k asischk e
561
and say its name, but I couldn’t make it change.
Some days it was blue, true, but others
were ruined by its gray:
“I’m sorry, little world —
no picnic, no parade, no swimming pool today . .. ”
And the skinned knee in spite of me.
And why else would there be
such terror in the way she screamed, and the horn honking,
and the squealing wheels, and, afterward, her cold
sweat against my cheek?
Ah, she wants us to live forever.
It’s her weakness . .. Now I see!
But, once, I was larger
than any other being —
larger, perhaps, than any being
had any right to be.
Because, of course, eventually, the world
grew larger, and larger, until it could lift
me up and put me down anywhere
it pleased. Until, finally, I would need
its help to move the bird bath, the bookshelf, the filing cabinet. “And
could you put my desk by the window, sweetie?”
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A truck, two men, one of them my son, and
everything I ever owned, and they
didn’t even want to stop for lunch.
Even the freezer. Even the piano.
(“You can have it if you can move it.”)
But, once, I swear, I was . .. And now
this trunk in the attic to prove it:
These shoes in the palm of my hand?
You used to wear them on your feet.
This blanket the size of a hand towel?
I used to wrap it around you sleeping
in my arms like this. See? This
is how small the world used to be when
everything else in the world was me.
laura k asischk e
563
The Wall
One night from the other side
of a motel wall made of nothing but
sawdust and pink stuff, I
listened as a man cried
to someone on the telephone
that all he wanted
to do before he died
was to come home.
“I want to come home!”
That night a man cried
until I was ankle-deep in sleep,
and then up to my neck, wading
like a swimmer
or like a suicide
through the waves
of him crying
and into the deep
as icebergs cracked into halves,
as jellyfish, like thoughts, were
passed secretly between people.
And the seaweed, like
the sinuous soft green hair
of certain beauty queens,
washed up by the sea.
Except that we
were in Utah, and one of us
was weeping
while the other one
was sleeping, with
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nothing but a thin, dry
wall between us.
laura k asischk e
565
cathy park hong
Notorious
After Paul Chan
Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum?
You in heaven, na, be happy.
You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink
snuggly over your Bluto belly,
& this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji.
Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns,
you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die,
now faput. Dead. Why so chee?
Ayaya, you in heaven for white people.
Wrong ear-sucking heaven.
Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit,
you smell wet dog?
Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble:
“No Hennessy just seltzer, please,”
before they sing your hits a capella.
Shataa, Baagad Bullya,
very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi.
Silly as a cricket in pubes.
Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar.
A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun
and swatting away chweetie pie cupids,
looms Fatmouth God,
frowning like rotten turbot.
But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens,
so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky
melts to Op Art swirls
of Cherry Coke red, burning upup
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white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt
& black cell phone towers.
This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh
& video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis.
But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis?
Where is 2Packi?
c athy park hong
567
Morning Sun
Raised on a cozy diet of conditional love,
I learned to emoji from teevee.
Now I’m hounded by gripes before my time.
Twisted in my genome is this thorn,
and all I see are feuds,
even swans got boxing gloves for heads.
— Ah Ketty-San, why so mori? Maybe you need upgrade
of person?
History shat on every household.
Cop cruisers wand their infrared along bludgeoned homes,
demanding boys to spread your cheeks,
lift your sac —
Now, here’s an alcopop to dull that throb,
hide your ugly feelings.
I want to love, yes, yet afraid to love
since I will be slapped, yet
what’s this itch? A fire ant burning to a warring,
boiling froth of lust: Slap me, harder,
slap me again!
— Ketty-San, so Sado Masakumi, so much
Sodami Hari Kuri.
I sorry.
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ko c h , unfinished
To Kenneth Koch, 1925–2002
kate farrell
Alla Rampa: Odyssey of an Unfinished Poem
In July 1978, Kenneth Koch sent me his new poem “At the Ramp,
ovvero Alla Rampa” — or “Alla Rampa” as he referred to it in the
letter that accompanied it. After living together for several years in
New York and elsewhere, Kenneth and I and my two children (the
“babies” mentioned mid-letter) had spent that spring in Rome, where
he was teaching Italian schoolchildren to write poetry. In June, I’d
returned with the kids to New York for a trial separation which later
that summer became permanent. The poem — addressed to me or to
the reader through me — is set in Rome and moves between metaphysical questions and the prior night’s post-concert dinner at the
Ristorante Alla Rampa.
Rediscovering “Alla Rampa” in my files a few years ago, I was
struck by what a good poem it was — however unfinished. The
Rome-drenched verve and charm of the letter that arrived with it was
another surprise, bringing the moment of the poem’s writing to life.
The letter begins with a qualm about the poem, fills in factual
details, and ends with a question about wording. The concert, he
writes, took place in the Pincio Gardens above the Spanish Steps; the
restaurant was at the foot of “the ramp” between the steps and the gardens. The pianist Frederic Rzewski, a friend of our friend Francesco
Pellizzi, performed in the concert and was at the restaurant afterward, as were Julian Beck and Judith Malina, founders of The Living
Theater. Marcello Panni, who with his wife Jeanne planned the evening, is the composer with whom Kenneth later wrote two operas.
There’s also a recap of a day of sightseeing with his visiting daughter
Katherine, just graduated from Berkeley, and her friend Callie. The
rollicking look of the typing in both poem and letter, produced by
the faulty shift key of his travel-battered Olivetti, adds to the sense of
a Kochian time capsule.
•
In the late poem “To the Roman Forum,” about the night his daughter Katherine was born in Rome, Kenneth visits the Forum to ponder
the event “at the twenty-five-espresso mark” of excitement. During
k ate farrell
571
our stay, the city’s beauty and brio could up the mark even on uneventful days — as could sitting at his desk writing poetry. Our sublet
on the Via dei Coronari had a pretty rooftop view and an airy loft
where he could write without disturbance. His lines in “Seasons on
Earth” — Each midday found me
Ecstatically in the present tense,
Writing.
— weren’t about that time but could have been. At some point during the day, and usually again after dinner, he’d read me what he’d
been writing. That spring, it was often “To Marina,” a long love
poem that took years to write — note the word endlessness in the remark about it in his letter. Nearly as interesting to me as hearing the
various versions were the ancillary philosophical conversations about
the themes that wove through it — time, love, loss, poetry — themes
“Alla Rampa” takes up more directly. The latter starts off at his writing desk, with musings about the poetic truth he is “always looking
for,” before moving to the Ristorante Alla Rampa and wider reflections and ruminations.
•
The letter containing “Alla Rampa” was delayed in the mail, and the
arrival of the poem just as we were breaking up muted the pleasure
of reading it. I filed it away for my upcoming move, and I don’t think
we ever discussed it. Luckily our friendship and collaborations continued: I remained his writing assistant for years afterward and we
coauthored two books about reading and writing poetry.
Paul Celan’s idea of a poem as “a message in a bottle” seems to me
especially apropos of “At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa.” Not just
a matter of how it showed up, redolent of another time, but of its
letter-like tone, the vivid sense it gives of Kenneth at his Olivetti, the
present-tense allegro of the endless search intact.
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kenneth koch
Monday, July 10
Dear Kate,
Here’s the poem, announced in my last letter. I decided to type
it up and send it more or less as is. I am not sure it’s all as good as
it should be nor as clear as it should be. It certainly is less harrowing to read my poems to you out loud. To pass from poem to letter,
Frederic is Frederic Rzewski, Francesco’s friend, and what happened
was that Jeanne and Marcello suggested I meet them at a concert of
contemporary music in the gardens of the Villa Medici in the Pincio
Gardenspart near the top of the Spanish Steps, and this concert included Frederic playing the piano, very beautifully, I thought. The
restaurant Alla Rampa is one I’d never seen before, very pleasant,
right at the bottom of a stairway or ramp that leads down from the
top of the Sp. Steps. Though I hadn’t seen them at the concert, Julian
Beck and Judith Malina must have been there, since they appeared
with Frederic at the restaurant afterwards. I did manage at last to buy
dinner for the Pannis. I did some work on the Marina poem (endlessness!) and I think I actually now have the kind of tone I want at
the end. I will send it as soon as I can. Katherine and Callie went to
Florence today. Their presence gave me the pleasant obligation to
do some touring — we did a rather thorough trip through the Forum
and the Palatine, and saw many churches (including Santa Maria in
Trastevere, Romanesque, with nice mosaics over the altar) and palaces (including Palazzo Farnese courtyard only, 11–12 am Sundays).
Today I received an envelope full of mail you sent me on July 5. Did
you write to me between your second letter (June 30) and then? If
so, I haven’t gotten the letter yet. The July 5 one got here very fast.
How was babies’ departure? Long Island? Thanks for the mail. It had
some odd contents, including my being selected as writer of the year
by St. Edward High School in Lakewood, Ohio, and they want me
to answer the question “What do you believe is the greatest challenge facing any young person today aspiring to become a writer?”
Since it is a Catholic school, maybe you will know what they mean by
“challenge” (?) I have a feeling it’s not the same thing as a difficulty.
k enneth koch
575
I guess it would be a challenge to try to express God’s word using avant-garde techniques, but that would only face some, not all,
young persons. There was also a letter from a young poet who sent
me a Variations of his own on my Variations on a Theme by William
Carlos Williams, which (his) includes these lines: “Yesterday we
took a walk through the park / and I murdered you.” Thank you for
depositing my checks. In the poem (Alla Rampa) would it be better (forgive me, I can’t help it) if in the last line pass were change?
And in the second-to-last line is it clear that what’s meant is “present
awareness”? I mean, it’s not supposed to mean that “he” knows that
awareness of the feeling will be permanently blotted out but that it
may come and go in his consciousness. This is what I’m not sure is
clear, and I’m not sure changing pass to change makes it clear, either.
I’ve been reading the poem over, somewhat bug-eyed, and can no
longer make very clear distinctions. As I said, well, as I said, it’s better to have you here to read my poems to et pour mille autres raisons.
Love,
Kenneth
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At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa
To Kate
Reading my own work to get some new inspiration
I found someone who resembled me who had gone away.
He had just gone a moment ago, in fact,
Since what I was reading was something I had just written.
Yes, now that this exists in time, I thought,
It is no longer the truth I am always looking for,
Since it has all those familiar characteristics —
Eyes, mouth and ears — of something that has individual existence,
Not something totally penetrated and found and lost,
So I’ll have to go on writing though I’m aware that it’s hopeless.
Last night Frederic at the piano, or Federico as Jeanne calls him,
Was very, very good, very strong and effective,
Playing some new pieces which Marcello didn’t especially like.
I remember each moment of the evening in a separated way
And I remember them all together in a massed kind of way.
I remember thinking of the present and the past and the future
Last night during dinner after the concert and speaking
To Marcello about the future and to Julian Beck about the future
and the past.
I remember slightly wondering if I was at the center
And when life’s principal events were going to happen —
I mean when I would have the sense that they were happening,
For many of them have happened for me long ago,
And at least a part of one, or two, must have been happening last night.
I was flickeringly, intermittently aware of my having been
Quite happy while Frederic played the piano, at least at certain
moments,
And I was quite happy at dinner, though that may have been mainly
a relief
From not feeling nervous and lonely as I had earlier,
Although I suppose, all the same, that kind of happiness counts.
58 0O
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But, being aware of this problem, I was wondering when there’d be
some real happiness
And what that happiness would be. The life cycle makes it all rather
peculiar.
I intermittently was aware of that, too, of the life cycle,
I mean of my getting constantly older, yet always filled with
expectation.
Death, I never think about death — just that I have less time
To be nervous and thinking about nervousness
And happy and thinking about happiness as I was last night.
And when will I pierce this veil that lies shining above the restaurant
Alla Rampa, where we all ate dinner? and when will some rhetoric
like this work
And really accomplish something and let me be the person in the poem
Whom I found, just earlier, fleeting away? Um, I don’t think you
want to be that person —
He’s less conscious than the one who is speaking now. Oh, then
what have we lost
By our existence in time? There’s a grand question —
I should have asked Julian and Marcello. E difficile rispondere,
Marcello would have said, and Julian might have said, Well
We lost our theatre, the one at Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue,
And I would have said, viciously, Ah, you both know what I mean —
What have we lost, really? And the restaurant Alla Rampa would
have exploded,
And from far above in the sky I’d have seen Federico playing
A last sonata about this fact. I did think while I heard him playing
I’d like him to play the story of my life, and I knew this remark
Was intended for no one but you, and I felt bad (not just for this
reason) that you weren’t there.
There’s a theme for you, something that is happening, I’m
Absent from you, you are absent, thinking about what should be
k enneth koch
581
happening
In your life. I, you say, live in the moment, and you don’t mind,
But you can’t do that yourself. I would say I am always thinking
About the moment, not that I live in it — or else everyone does.
I think about it for god knows what para-neurotic reason
But it’s true that I think the answer is always there,
Although it never turns out to be. Che passa? What are you feeling
in that unimaginable
Place which is not with me? It’s true if you had been at the concert
I’d have been wondering about how you were feeling instead of how
I was feeling myself.
I return to my theme: the discrepancy between thought and
experience
And this big plant, the body, in the middle of it all
Which has to get a lot of water and a lot of sun.
Perhaps it is the only thing that matters. But the other part keeps
intruding
Just as the body is reputed to do. I think I am often trying
To “include” the future so it won’t bother me, and this is exhausting.
I wrote letters today to Bologna Stockholm and Hamburg
Marcello said, about possible concerts in nineteen eighty and nineteen seventy-nine. And Julian said
It’s the first time we’ve actually had a place of our own to live in
In seventeen years. I said, My God, how did you stand it? He said,
I don’t know
And meanwhile the stars above Ristorante Alla Rampa had not come
out
Though the night was light-blue and pleasant, a little bit cool,
And we started to walk home but Frederic was interrupted by an
admirer
Who wanted to tell him something about his playing
And I thought it will take us a long time to get home — then,
This thought is idiotically egocentric, I am characteristically always
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thinking
And telling other people about how I feel, about my slightest anxieties
And my slightest interests. Ah, it is probably too late to change that
completely.
In a way it seems good in my poetry and may help to explain that
character
I am always looking for, who is gone, naturally, always, because
something has changed.
Now, this person — I had better sum up — this one who is always
different
Is also, since he is I myself, always the same.
He went last night to the restaurant and he wrote the poem
In which there was someone who was not quite completely himself.
He is writing this poem, and thinking, Oh, you’re not going to like me
Because I talk about changing so much and don’t stay on the subject
Of how much I love you and how I care so much more about this
Than about everything in the restaurant magnified to infinity, and
the whole sky
And all the music, and he knows that the awareness of this feeling
Will pass, but the feeling — well, I don’t think that ever will, unless
I die.
K.K.
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Acknowledgments
Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation would like to thank the
Kenneth Koch Literary Estate for permission to publish Kenneth
Koch’s unfinished poem “At the Ramp, ovvero Alla Rampa” and his
letter to Kate Farrell. We appreciate the time and thought Kenneth
Koch’s literary executors Karen Koch, Jordan Davis, and Ron Padgett
gave to this project. We also thank Katherine Koch and David Shapiro
for their generous help and advice.
The poems cited by Kate Farrell in her introductory note are
“To the Roman Forum” and “To Marina” from The Collected Poems
of Kenneth Koch (2005) and “Seasons on Earth” from On the Edge:
Collected Long Poems by Kenneth Koch (2007), both published by
Alfred A. Knopf.
The photograph on page 570 was taken by Katherine Koch
in August 1978. The photograph on this page is of Kenneth Koch
and Katherine Koch on Palatine Hill, taken by Caroline “Callie”
Hancock, 1978.
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COMMENT
tom sleigh
Six Trees and Two White Dogs . .. Doves?
What I have to say about my trip meanders the way the Tigris and
Euphrates meander and, like those rivers in flood, is sometimes
murky in intention, balked in its conclusions, and flows where it
has to flow. In Iraq, where the customs and conventions were often
operating invisibly, or easily misinterpreted to be the same as mine,
I suppose I gave up on telling a straightforward story. Instead, one
night in a helicopter, what I felt in the air, so different from what
was happening on the ground, made me realize that when you take
an oath to tell the truth, you’re not telling that truth either to the
judge or to the courtroom. Perhaps the point of the oath is to try
to surround yourself with a lightness and solitude from which you
can speak the truth, adding whatever light and shade you can so as
to make “the how” implicate “the why.” After all, the judge and the
members of the court weren’t riding in the helicopter, so a realistic
description won’t mean anything to anyone unless you add that light
and shade which only you, as the witness, could perceive.
But even then, in the helicopter roar, the truth may be hard to hear,
even in your own ears.
•
The container housing unit, known as a CHU, is a white prefab box
that contains a sink, toilet, bed, one small window, a heater/AC unit,
and not much else: maybe a TV set, a towel rack, and a particle board
dresser. When you first enter it, it’s about as hospitable as a prison
cell in a substation jail. But after getting used to the white walls, white
floor, white ceiling, the fluorescent light fixtures, also white, though
glazed to cut the glare, the CHU is a triumph of Army functionality.
For the first week of my stay in Iraq, I lived in two CHUs, one
at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center (BDSC, pronounced
“Bedsy”) next to the Baghdad Airport, the other next to the airport in the southern oil port of Basrah where a former British base
is now home to the US Consulate. Both BDSC and Basrah utilize
hundreds of CHUs for living quarters and CHU-housed services.
A barbershop advertised two different “looks”: the battering ram of
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the shaved head, favored by most of the security contractors; and the
rams-wool curls and long sideburns of Liberace, a look that many of
the younger Iraqi men seemed to favor. There was a CHU-housed
PX where you could buy booze and other food and drug sundries,
somewhat randomly arranged on metal shelving. And on one shelf in
the back, there were souvenir T-shirts and hoodies. Because Iraq in
December was about 20 degrees colder than my southern California
fantasy of it, I bought a hoodie for $15, a whitish gray color with
the US seal on it. The insignia over my heart was of a cross-eyed
American eagle who had the stunned look of a cartoon character
who’s been hit over the head with a hammer, though of course the
spark-like stars wheeling above the eagle are meant to represent the
original thirteen states.
BDSC also had its own enormous gym in an air-hanger-sized
Quonset hut where my friend, Christopher Merrill, who heads
the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and
I worked out on the elliptical machines the afternoon we flew in
from Jordan. Chris flies all over the globe with US poets and fiction
writers to conduct writing workshops in places as various as Juba in
South Sudan and refugee camps in Kenya, where we’d first worked
together. Now, we’d be traveling to universities all over the country to talk with Iraqi writers, professors, and students. The heads
of the English departments at the Iraqi universities we were to visit
had asked us to talk about literature and creative writing workshops,
which many of the professors seemed interested in learning how to
teach, and in turn we were curious about the situation of contemporary Iraqi literature. As we pumped the machines’ handles, I told
Chris that I was a little nervous about how violent the country had
grown in the past few months. Chris nodded and told me about the
orientation his State Department host had given him to Juba: “The
guy told me there were a lot of poisonous snakes, like black mambas, and that I should try to keep from getting bit, because there’s no
anti-venom serum in the whole country. He called them ‘cigarette
snakes’ — you have just enough time to smoke a cigarette before you
die.” We laughed, and for the rest of the trip, whenever I began to be
anxious, I thought “cigarette snake” and settled down.
•
The next morning we flew south to Basrah in a Dash 8, an eager little
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commuter plane with a fifty-seat capacity. The loadmaster — which
is Embassy Air speak for the steward — wore wraparounds and a reflective orange and yellow caution vest. “File across the airstrip single
file,” he told us, “avoid the propellers, and climb the stairs into the
Dash one pair of feet on the stairs at a time.” The only addition to the
safety announcement was the loadmaster warning us that the plane
might shoot off decoy flares, and that the explosion we would hear
was the sound of the flares deploying. If a heat-seeking, infra-red
guided missile was fired at the Dash, the automatic sensors would
release the flares, either in clusters or one by one, in the hope that
the flare’s heat signature, many times hotter than the engine, would
decoy the IR missile away from us and after the flare. On an earlier
flight to Baghdad, Chris had experienced the release of these flares:
“The explosion,” he said, “was really loud, loud enough to hurt your
ears, and absolutely terrifying.”
The plane began to taxi down the runway, and Chris and I fell
silent as the rattle and roar of the Dash ascending filled the cabin.
Shamash the sun god, the god of justice who lays bare
the righteous and the wicked when he floods the world
with light came walking down
the muddy-looking Tigris
into Basrah where gas flares from the refineries burning all
night long
faded into the Dash 8’s prop
whirring just beyond the window.
So much gas was burning off into the air the plane
was descending through
that a skin of light kept rippling over the city’s cinder block and
rebar
tilting up at the plane’s belly swooping down.
In my book I read how the Deluge made the dikes give way.
The gods crouched like dogs with their tails between their legs,
terrified at the storm-demons they themselves let loose.
At the end of six days and nights, Utnapishtim and his wife
send out a raven that never returns.
The ark runs aground on a mountaintop just above the storm
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589
waters
that have beaten the world flat into mud and clay.
And Utnapishtim and his wife offer the gods sweet cane, myrtle,
cedar,
and the gods smell the savor,
the gods smell the sweet savor,
the gods hover like flies over the sweetness.
— Going to Basrah
The plane leveled off at cruising altitude, and through the pitted glass
I saw the Tigris winding through Baghdad, the city hazy in the morning light. As we flew south, the Euphrates and Tigris, which almost
meet in Baghdad, again diverged into widely meandering beds before
coming together outside of Basrah in a river called the Shatt al-Arab
that empties into the Persian Gulf. Field on field of green wheat and
barley surrounded small isolated farmsteads nestled inside groves
of date palms. Underneath us, I watched the shadow of the Dash
ripple across the vast green plain between the Tigris and Euphrates.
Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers,” and here and
there you could see long, straight irrigation canals, and artificial reservoirs divided up by dikes, watering the fields. I was astonished to
actually be seeing what I had known since grade school as “the cradle
of civilization.” I remember reading about cuneiform writing, and
thinking that it looked like the marks that a flock of crows’ feet would
leave in our muddy garden if it froze solid overnight.
As we began to see the outskirts of Basrah, I thought of the great
Ziggurat of Ur, and how, twenty-five years ago — and a year or so
before the first Gulf War broke out — I’d come across a cuneiform
tablet in the Louvre from around 2000 BC. Translated into French,
it described the destruction of Ur. I copied it out on the back of an
envelope and took it home, where it sat on my desk for months while
I read the odes of Horace. And then one day, I found it on my desk,
and thought that if I could treat it like an Horatian ode I might be able
to do something with it in English. So via a French translation of an
ancient Akkadian original, and utilizing a meter that I’d come across
in Horace, I translated a poem into English that I called “Lamentation
on Ur.” I hadn’t meant the poem to have overt political overtones — I thought of it as a general comment on the destruction and fragility
of civilized life:
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Like molten bronze and iron shed blood
pools. Our country’s dead
melt into the earth
as grease melts in the sun, men whose
helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated
by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond
help, they lie still as a gazelle
exhausted in a trap,
muzzle in the dust. In home
after home, empty doorways frame the absence
of mothers and fathers who vanished
in the flames remorselessly
spreading claiming even
frightened children who lay quiet
in their mother’s arms, now borne into
oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea
by the surging current.
May the great barred gate
of blackest night again swing shut
on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,
may this disaster too be torn out of mind.
— From New York American Spell, 2001
But then the Gulf War came along, and suddenly the poem was taken
up as an anti-war poem: current events had transformed what I
thought of as a general statement into a topical, political statement.
Now, after two US-Iraq wars, and a decade of trade sanctions between them, I found myself looking down on the brown and green
alluvial plain of southern Iraq — a place which had figured in my mind
for over forty years as a kind of shadow world that had haunted me as
not only the cradle of civilization, but the crucible that gave shape to
the bogeyman of the “Islamo-fascist.” US policy in the Middle East
was like a moral migraine that kept flaring up in the imagination of
the American body politic — from the first Gulf War in 1990, which
I’d demonstrated against, and watched the police stand by while my
fellow demonstrators were beaten up by skinheads; to the Iraq War
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59 1
in 2003, which I also demonstrated against, though this time I was
appalled by a group of younger male demonstrators who were itching
for a confrontation with the police and stormed a police barricade
while the cops radioed for backup that luckily never arrived, or all
of us would very likely have had our heads bashed in; to the subsequent disastrous occupation that ended in 2011; until 2014, in which
sectarian violence had escalated back to the levels of 2008 and alQaeda had made a huge comeback in Anbar Province. In the past
quarter century, it’s no exaggeration to say that two generations of
Americans grew up either ignoring, deploring, or approving of our
involvement in Iraq. But whatever one’s position toward the wars,
I’d arrived at my opinions with virtually no idea of what our bombardments had done during either war, and with almost no sense of
day-to-day Iraqi cultural life, except for the image of the head-chopping, suicide bombing al-Qaeda/ISIS fighter who wants a reversion
back to a seventh-century caliphate.
I remember teaching a class of undergraduates at Dartmouth
College in which a young Iraqi woman, who had lived through the
bombardments of Desert Storm, sat among us. The students had no
idea that she was from Iraq, nor did I, until she wrote a paper about
surviving the bombing. I asked her before class if I could use her
paper as part of the discussion, and whether she would mind talking about the bombardment that she had lived through. She agreed,
a slight girl wearing a beige head scarf, with perfectly plucked and
absolutely symmetrical eyebrows. She was very soft-spoken and
her command of English was perfect, though more formal than the
English most of the students spoke.
We were reading the Iliad, and were talking about the anatomical
particularity with which Homer describes the wounding and death
of the individual heroes. I asked them to think about the only war
that they knew at that time, the first Gulf War, and to discuss their
sense of whether or not, given the images of backs and lungs and
livers and bellies pierced through by spearheads, it was possible to
justify the slaughter of war, including the civilians killed as “collateral
damage.” Almost the entire class, women and men, said that it was
possible to justify the slaughter, based on American interests abroad,
on overcoming dictators for democracy, and on the hope that a better life could come out of battle. I then asked them what they would
say to someone who had actually lived through the bombardments
to achieve these worthy goals — and that this someone was here,
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sitting among them, as one of their fellow classmates? How would
they explain to their classmate the necessity of the bombs? Silence
fell on the room. Everyone looked deeply uncomfortable: I realized
that I’d betrayed them, as well as the young Iraqi woman, who sat
very still in her seat, though I hadn’t meant to. I’d assumed that there
would be at least some opposition to the “just war” thesis, and I was
disconcerted when I realized that not one of them had moral qualms,
or at least qualms that they were willing to express. And then one boy
said, “I guess if I were that person, I’d think that most of what I just
said was pretty stupid.” And when I asked the Iraqi student to talk
about her experience, she said something like, “We sat in our house
with the lights off. The bombs went on for a long time, and when
they stopped, all of us were so tired, we went to sleep.” She plucked
her head scarf a little farther over her hair, fell silent — and then the
class ended.
•
I proved myself to be inept at putting on my bulletproof vest, attaching this to that in all the wrong places, before figuring out how to
velcro the waist panels tightly around my stomach so that they were
under the vest, not over it, and adjusting and readjusting the shoulder straps to make sure they were tight. I didn’t look very military:
in fact, I looked like I was wearing a bib, a sort of Baby Rambo. By
contrast, in his Irish conspirator’s raincoat, his shirt buttoned all the
way to the top button, his black trousers and worn-at-heel, split-toed
shoes, Chris projected, despite the flak jacket, a timeless, jazz musician hipness.
Now that I was strapped into my vest, it felt fairly lightweight,
around eight pounds — thick enough, according to the specs, to give
reasonable protection against handguns. But when you consider that
a bullet fired from a military-style weapon is the equivalent of a fivepound sledgehammer smashing into you at forty-five miles per hour,
serious bruising and broken ribs are pretty much guaranteed. I put
on my helmet and snapped the chin snap fast, but I had to keep pushing it back from sliding down over my eyes. Rather than protected,
I looked — and felt — like a gargantuan infant.
We were going to the University of Basrah from the consulate
compound near the Basrah Airport. In front of our armored vehicle — a Chevy Suburban SUV reinforced with steel plating — a beefy, but
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terminally polite security contractor dressed in khakis, a brown knit
shirt, a gray windbreaker, lightweight hikers, and sporting a buzz
cut, gave us a briefing: “Once you’re inside the vehicle, please stay
away from the doors. We’ll let you in and out. If we take fire, or if I
give you the signal to get down, I’d appreciate it if you could get
on the bottom of the vehicle. I’ll climb in back with you and cover
you. Once we get to our destination, you can leave your armor and
helmets in the vehicle. Then we’ll open the doors, and we’ll proceed
single file to our destination. Everything clear?” His low-key manner
and his faintly smiling friendliness was fairly typical of the manner of
most of the security contractors. For such large men, they had the gift
of disappearing into the background — they didn’t talk much to the
people they were guarding: in the twelve or so missions that Chris
and I were on, never once was there more than a few words of conversation between us and the driver and his partner riding shotgun.
A good thing, I suppose, since that meant they were concentrating on
the cars around them, and whether they might be a threat. Many of
these men had served with elite units in the military, like the Navy
SEALs, and I met one contractor who had been in Iraq since he came
there as a soldier in 2003. The big draw was the money: while the
ordinary sergeant was making around $2,500 a month, security contractors were making between $15,000–$22,500 per month.
We passed through the consulate checkpoint, manned on the consulate side by security contractors, but on the Basrah side by the Iraqi
Army. One Iraqi soldier was dressed in fatigues and wore a purple
beret, his automatic weapon pointing at us as he nodded a greeting to
our driver. We sped out on the highway, and Chris and I got our first
real look at Basrah.
My only coordinates for Basrah were Douglas Fairbanks’s silent
movie from 1924 and, more recently, the Alexander Korda spectacle
of 1940, both entitled The Thief of Bagdad. Basrah is the city where,
in the Korda film, the deposed prince and his companion, the thief,
flee the treacherous, power-hungry Grand Vizier. Minarets and
spires, flying carpets and horses, a huge genie, a giant spider guarding
the magic jewel of an All-Seeing Eye that shows you the entire world,
a happy ending in which the prince marries the Sultan of Basrah’s
daughter, the Grand Vizier gets punished, and everyone lives happily
ever after. I was going to write that the Basrah of the movies and the
Basrah I was seeing from the SUV had nothing in common — but
the All-Seeing Eye was like a more sophisticated version of drone
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surveillance, the Grand Vizier was either Saddam Hussein or George
W. Bush, depending on your point of view, the giant spider could
be military hardware, and the genie — well, the genie imprisoned in
his lamp but furious to get out could refer to a whole range of psychic, societal, and spiritual pressures threatening to tear the country
apart. And if you were looking for Technicolor spectacle, natural gas,
burning off from the refinery stacks, flared and rippled all across the
horizon. At night the city, ringed by oil fields, can look like it’s on fire.
The outskirts were a hodgepodge of two- or three-story cinder
block apartments, often left unpainted or undressed in either brick
or stucco. Unpaved streets, no central sewer system, large puddles
of waste water floating soggy flotillas of trash. But I also got a sense
of thriving commercial activity from the shop windows, their large,
bright signs painted in the graceful calligraphic swoops of Arabic script.
•
We turned off the highway and drove down a suburban street with
three-story apartment buildings on either side as well as private
homes behind head-high walls. This part of the city looked to be
much better off — cars parked along the street looked in good repair.
Our convoy paused at a steel gate. The Iraqi guards threw back the
black-painted steel stanchions, and we passed into the entrance of
the University of Basrah. One of the Iraqi security guards, a musclebound man wearing a tight polo shirt under his black jacket and a gold
chain around his neck so that he looked a lot like Sylvester Stallone,
waited on the steps while our guards established a five-point perimeter around our SUV, two in the rear, two in front, and one at the
center of the hood, facing outward toward the surprised-looking students milling about outside in a small courtyard.
The SUV doors were opened by one of the security contractors.
The students couldn’t help but gawk as we walked through the halls
and into a large seminar room where we shook hands with the male
professors, but were careful not to shake hands with the women unless they initiated it. For a non-believer and a male to touch a woman
who is a stranger could be seen as a violation of the hadiths — sayings
of the Prophet that govern dress and social conduct among more formal or devout Muslims.
Because our trip coincided with Ashura, the day that Shia Muslims
all over the world commemorate the death of the Prophet’s grandson,
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Husayn ibn Alī, pictures of him were everywhere: silk screens fluttered from streetlights and were plastered on walls. In many shops
hung little framed portraits. He was depicted as having a lush black
beard and shoulder-length hair. His rugged good looks exude the
glamour of a Bollywood movie star. Most significantly, he was strung
up on banners along the pilgrimage route to the Iraqi city of Karbala,
the place where Husayn died in battle in 680 CE. The battle was
fought over who would be the leader of the Muslim world. The divisions among the original followers of Islam would open up, after
Husayn’s death, into the doctrinal, political, and economic differences that almost fourteen-hundred years later currently separate
Sunni from Shia.
Since the American troop withdrawal in 2011, Ashura had sparked
off even more sectarian murder than usual: car bombs, suicide bombers, exploding roadside IEDs, Sunni gunmen executing Shia, and
vice versa. The pilgrim trail, with its comfort station tents providing
food and drink, and sometimes a place to sleep, made easy targets for
Sunni radicals who, inspired by Osama bin Laden, thought of themselves as the Iraqi al-Qaeda.
Before I came to Iraq, the media image I had of al-Qaeda was of
Osama bin Laden waging jihad like some kind of evil supervillain.
But here, al-Qaeda was far more ambiguous. It was a mainly Sunni
movement, fueled in part by anger about having been pushed out
of power by the Shia once Saddam fell. But it also included foreign
fighters from all over the Middle East, and even the US. They were
all waging jihad in order to establish a worldwide caliphate. At least,
that was the lofty sounding ideal. But the opposing militias, such as
the Mahdi Army, organized at the behest of the Shia Imam, Muqtada
al-Sadr, were equally extreme. As Saddam Hatif Hatim al-Jabouri, a
college student in a city near Basrah, said in an oral history, Voices
From Iraq: A People’s History, 2003–2009, that I’d read on the plane
to Iraq:
The biggest issue was females on campus. People involved with
the Mahdi Army tended to believe that having females in school
was against Islam.... There were beatings and kidnappings
targeting women just because they wanted to go to school.... Sometimes these enforcers would check people’s cell phones
for pictures. If you were a guy and you had a picture of a woman
on your phone, for example, they might rough you up or take
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your phone. This kind of crap.... Someone from these enforcers would . .. haul you off to one of the party offices, where you
would be questioned and lectured about religion and society
from these goons. It was not just beatings and lectures they
doled out, however. Some people who defied these zealots
wound up dead. Look, it was the same religious bullshit that
al-Qaeda in Iraq and its followers imposed on Sunni areas. The
exact same thing, only one group did it in the name of Shi’ites
and the other in the name of Sunnis.
•
The boys in the room were dressed in jeans and button-down shirts,
most of them sporting the Liberace look, their long sideburns
razored sharp while the top was allowed to flourish, though nothing as extravagant as an actual pompadour. The girls all wore head
scarves and, to my great surprise, especially after what I’d read in the
oral history, there were as many, if not more girls in all the classes we
would visit. It looked as if times had changed, though whether or not
there were jobs waiting for these young women, I didn’t know. But
in our travels we met as many female professors as male. Of course,
if the conservatives among the Shia and Sunnis had their way, the
universities would quickly be purged of women.
We tried to tailor our meetings to the participants. If we were
speaking mainly to professors, we asked them about the cultural situation. If there was a mix of students and professors, we spent most
of the session talking about creative writing. But one consistent
fact about all our meetings: there was always lots of laughter, often
sparked off when Chris and I, in an effort to understand the sometimes thick accents, had asked the professors and students to speak
loudly and slowly. One or the other of us would say, enunciating
loudly and slowly ourselves, “Our ears are old ears, and we don’t
hear as well as when we were younger because we spent too much
time listening to loud rock music.”
From that moment forward, the room relaxed. Education in Iraq
is extremely formal, and a professor expects, and receives, a certain
deferential treatment. But the workshops worked best when the
professors joined the students in trying the exercises: one particular
department head read his poem with such theatrical brilliance, in
which he’d developed the metaphor of love as a kind of net, and done
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so with a sophisticated and playful sense of humor, that the whole
room was transfixed and burst into loud and sustained applause. But
mainly what we heard from the professors was heartbreakingly articulated by the head of the department at Basrah. He spoke a flawless
English, with just the faintest British accent. “For years and years I
have longed to visit the places in England and America that my study
of literature has made real for me. But now, at my age, I do not think
that this will ever happen.” Looking grave, he clasped his hands, and
stared down at the table, while the other professors quietly nodded
their heads.
When I asked him to say more, he shrugged: “First we lived
through ten years of war with Iran. This was followed by another ten
years of war and occupation by the United States. And now the violence today.... More than anything, we need contact with the outside
world: our cultural isolation under Saddam was extreme. We need
exposure to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things.”
When Chris asked about censorship, one of the women writers replied, “There is no official censorship, but everyone is aware
that there are red lines that are dangerous to cross. Religion and
sex — those are still difficult subjects, and even more difficult to talk
about from a woman’s point of view.”
But despite all that, the picture we got of literary life in Iraq — and
particularly in Basrah from the head of the Writers’ Union — was
one of tremendous vitality. In his rumpled sport coat, his tie askew
under his unbuttoned collar, he spoke quickly and decisively about
Iraq’s literary movements during the past twenty years and finished
up by saying: “In Basrah alone, we have three major literary festivals,
many new literary magazines, both print and online, and more and
more published books. What we need most of all is to have our literature read beyond the borders of Iraq. The years of Saddam put an
end to open artistic expression in our country. When I was a young
man, I was put into prison with my colleagues here” — he nodded to
three other members of the union — “for a year. We were accused
of ‘subversive activities.’ But now there is a huge amount of activity
among younger writers, and I’m very hopeful for the future. After
all, I started out in prison, and now I’m head of the Writers’ Union!”
Throwing his arms in the air, he laughed uproariously, as did everybody at the table.
Such hopefulness was infectious, and the students had their share
of such high spirits. As an example of this younger generation’s
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confidence, one female student challenged a professor’s love
of Shakespeare, saying that when she read The Merchant of Venice it
hadn’t seemed in the least believable. Chris and I made some wellmeant remarks about naturalism not always being the most effective
way to make a statement, when we were politely interrupted by the
professor, a burly fellow dressed in a black leather jacket, looking
very “James Dean” in comparison to the suits and tweed of the older
professors. He had gotten his degree in Shakespearean performance
at the University of Leeds, and said that his specialty was the differences between Shakespeare’s plays onstage and on the screen. In a
history lesson that the young woman, as well Chris and I, quickly realized was generational insider knowledge, he told the young woman,
“Look, what you read wasn’t really Shakespeare, but a Ba’athist
translation in which Shylock had been reduced to a completely antiSemitic stereotype. It wasn’t translated into verse, it wasn’t even a
play — it was written as if it were a story. What you read was Saddam
propaganda, not Shakespeare.” In other words, Shylock was depicted
as a proto-Israeli — a figure to be denigrated and despised.
These little insights happened over and over. In another workshop,
a student had written about her grandfather’s garden in which there
were, as I heard the phrase in her somewhat thick accent, “six trees
and two white dogs.” I began to talk about how much I liked the
repetition of the detail about the trees and dogs — but Chris and Dale
Lawton, our Basrah consulate contact who had set up our meeting,
interrupted me sotto voce, almost hissing, when I persisted in my
folly, “Doves, not dogs!” I was a little surprised by their insistence,
but thinking my ears had betrayed me, I said, “Yes, doves, of course!
Doves, not dogs!” Afterward, on our way to the SUV, Dale said, with
an apologetic smile, “Sorry to have interrupted like that, but dogs are
considered unclean by most Muslims. Dogs would have a completely
different meaning for them than they would for us. They’d find it
disgusting to even think of letting their dogs sleep with them, or
come in the house, for that matter.” And in all the traveling we’d do
in Iraq, I’d see only one dog on the muddy outskirts of Basrah, and it
was obviously a stray.
But our education in dogs didn’t stop there. Another student
wrote about a dog named Rocky that he liked to play with as a child,
until one hot summer day his father put Rocky on the roof of their
house. And poor Rocky, since this was the first time it had ever happened, and because there wasn’t any shade, or so Chris and I assumed,
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poor Rocky jumped off the roof into the garden, and looked to have
died from his fall because of the blood that came out of his mouth.
But he got up after a few moments, and began to play again in the
garden. When Chris and I talked about the story, we focused on
the dog as a kind of subtle metaphor for the troubled relationship
between the boy and his father. But as soon as we said that, a student raised a hand, and said that far from being a metaphor, it was
simply what was done with dogs in Iraq in the summertime. They
were put on the roof under a little shade, and with some water, and
no one thought anything of it. About this cultural difference Chris
remarked that what was customary for an Iraqi was, for writers, their
material. And so we learned about such subtleties as how dogs were
treated — surely a detail that Flaubert or Proust, both sticklers for
such things, would have loved.
But no matter how off the mark Chris and I sometimes were in
our comments, the students’ concentration, and self-delight in the
process of writing, went far beyond anything I could have imagined.
It was as if Wordsworth, or Dickens, or Hardy — who came up again
and again as a focus of study — had climbed down off their pedestals and were rubbing shoulders with the students. As places to write
about, the Lake district, London, or Wessex had nothing on Basrah,
Baghdad, or Erbil. And as the ones guiding them, our enthusiasm
for what they wrote, and our way of pointing out how some detail — dogs? doves? — could create certain interesting emotional effects,
added to the feeling that someone was really listening to them.
Writing workshops were like a magnifying glass held up to their daily
lives, providing us more grain and texture than I ever could have
thought possible.
•
In one of our Baghdad workshops, a young woman wearing a red
blouse, a black and white head scarf, with a round face and large black
eyes, and with just a hint of mascara on the lashes, stood up to read
her poem. The way we generally conducted workshops, Chris would
talk about writing as an artistic and academic discipline, and I would
set up the assignment: a very simple one based on Joe Brainard’s
poem I Remember. I asked the students to shut their eyes, accompanied by much embarrassed giggling, but as the exercise went on, the
room grew quiet, until there wasn’t a sound, nobody was moving,
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everybody was deep inside their own reveries. I asked them to think
back to their childhood homes, to remember their bedroom, to tell
us what the room looked like, what the day was like, to perhaps think
about a favorite toy or game. I asked them to remember what the
weather was like, what their parents were doing. And then I would
ask them to imagine that Chris and I were from another planet, from
Mars, say — which, in a way, we were — and that what was familiar
to them might be completely unknown to us. I told them to go wherever the memories took them, that gritting your teeth and trying too
hard wouldn’t help, that you were letting the sights and sounds lead
you where they would, and all you needed to do was to get out of the
way and go where they took you. As new memories occurred to them,
I asked them to repeat I remember for each new memory, I remember,
I remember . .. and then I asked them to change I remember to I don’t
want to remember.
As soon as I said this, we could always sense a major shift in their
inner weather — you could see it in how they would hunker down,
or the lines around their eyes would clench a little tighter, or furrows
would suddenly come into their foreheads. This physical change
happened every time we did the exercise. It was as if the war, and
the postwar killing, rose up irresistibly in the students’ minds. We
had cautioned them that painful memories, as well as pleasant ones,
were part of a writer’s material. But what was most impressive about
the students was how they didn’t shy away from the hard facts. Did
writing in English afford them a little distance, a sort of protective
shield? Or maybe it was the novelty, or release that came, in writing
about their own lives? In any case, many wrote about the pervasive
violence, sometimes directly, but more often as an undercurrent:
violence, after all, was one of the defining characteristics of their
generation. For such difficult material, they wrote with a poise and
depth of understanding that almost never happens among students in
the US. Most of them were in their twenties, and had never known
a time when their countrymen weren’t at war, either with the US or
with each other. I can’t imagine them ever telling us in casual conversation some of the things they wrote.
The young woman, whose name I think was Mariam, stood very
straight in front of her classmates, and read to us with a unselfconscious, quiet dignity. Her pronunciation was excellent so I have
a good memory of what she wrote. She said that she was woken
near dawn by her older brother in her bedroom, who had bent
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down to gently kiss her on the cheek, and to ask her if she wanted
anything special from the market. And when she looked up at him,
to tell him “No,” he said to her, very gently, that this would be
the last time she’d be seeing him. But she was so sleepy, she didn’t
quite take in what he meant, and a moment later he was gone. Later
that morning, she wrote, she was in the kitchen having breakfast
with her mother. And then their neighbor came in and gave them
the news. She wrote that as she heard the news, she felt herself get
smaller and disappear: she had no hands, no face, no body to feel
with. There was no kitchen, no mother, no her. The neighbor, she
wrote, told them about the “car accident.” She wrote how she remembers her brother’s words coming back to her, how gentle he was
when he kissed her on the cheek, how he would always bring her
special things from the market. And then she sat down, completely
self-possessed, the sadness in her voice hanging in the room. No one
spoke for a while, as what she hadn’t said — didn’t need to say, since
everyone in her generation already understood — resonated for a few
moments. Chris and I looked at each other, but were slower in grasping what it was she’d left out. And then it dawned on us, too: her
brother had been a suicide bomber and blown himself up in the car.
•
For all the violence outside the T walls (twenty-foot high, reinforced
concrete blast walls), in my little white box of a CHU it was eerily calm. There’s a poem by Tomas Tranströmer in which he’s in
a motel room so anonymous that faces of his old patients begin to
push through the walls. The CHU was something like that, a refuge
from the violence, a deprivation chamber I was grateful to retreat to,
but also a little theater of the mind in which what happened during
the day came back to haunt me in the ammonia smell of disinfectant mixed with drying mud that exuded from my CHU. Mariam’s
face came back many times, and the face of her brother, though I
could never quite make out his face because it was always too close
to hers. I could see the shape of his head as he bent down to her ear,
but his body was lost in shadow. His gentleness and the violence
of his final act resisted my attempts to explain or understand. Of
course, I was imposing on his entire past the moment when he’d
pressed send, making that moment more significant than a thousand
other moments which, as he lived them, would have had their own
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weight and value. A back page newspaper photo of smoke pouring
up, a vague ghost-face pushing forward into the white walls of my
CHU — except for the glimpse Mariam had given me, that was all
I could see.
Meanwhile, inside my CHU, I tried to lead a radically simplified
life: no decorations, purely functional furniture, and not much of
it — and a gas mask against sarin and other forms of nerve gas, packed
neatly in a small cardboard box with a convenient black plastic handle. The warning read do not remove.
But after a while, staring up at the white ceiling, letting my
thoughts drift, I’d remember the daily body count — the bodies,
which had seemed so abstract back in the US, began to take on solidity and form. From the very first night in my CHU, I’d established
a routine (maybe more of an obsession) of going online to check on
that day’s violence. During the night and day it took me to reach
Iraq, twelve liquor stores, run mainly by Yazidi Kurds, had been shot
up in drive-bys from SUVs: nine customers and owners had been
killed. Although no official group stepped forward, conservative
Shia, whose version of Islam decrees death for drinking booze, were
probably the gunmen. Then on Sunday, forty-six more people were
killed, this time by Sunnis terrorizing mainly Shia neighborhoods:
the places they hit were crowded shopping areas, markets, and auto
repair shops. If the bombs had gone off in corresponding borough
neighborhoods, they would have been the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn,
Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, and the lower reaches of Fourth
Avenue’s garages in Gowanus.
Death and more death. Throughout my travels in Iraq, as a kind
of bedtime ritual just before I went to sleep, not a day went by that
I didn’t read about ordinary Iraqis being blown up, shot down, or
kidnapped, tortured, and dumped by the roadside.
•
All of our convoys followed the same pattern of tight security, except
for our visit to the University of Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan. With
the exception of Kirkuk, where the violence is as bad as any place
farther south, travel in Kurdistan felt relatively safe. While there
were the usual three vehicles in convoy, they were manned by Kurds,
not international contractors. Just before the road switchbacked
up the central massif to Suly, as the Kurds call it, we stopped at a
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roadside restaurant where we ate thick yogurt with oven-baked
bread — a luxury and freedom of movement unthinkable in Basrah
or Baghdad. Alongside us ran a snow-fed river that, on his last visit,
Chris had swum in to cool down after a run. The water ran swiftly beside the road, the ply of the central current ridging up into waves and
whirlpools in the hazy sun — so unlike the slow gray meander of the
Tigris through Baghdad, or the huge, silty marshes outside of Basrah.
The Kurdish language, suppressed for many years, now holds sway
over Arabic. The Kurds are intensely nationalistic, and Kurdish identity trumps sectarian loyalties. After the fall of Saddam, who made
numerous attempts at genocide against the Kurds, security has been
one of their prime concerns. Unlike the US occupiers, they learned
early that major reconstruction efforts are doomed to fail if security
can’t be guaranteed to companies interested in investing in the Kurds’
huge oil fields. As long as Kurdistan can keep from being torn apart
by the war in Syria, or co-opted by either the Turks to the north or
the Iranians to the east, not to mention their warring countrymen to
the south, they stand the best chance of any part of Iraq to offer their
citizens a decent life. (My visit took place a few months prior to the
rise of ISIS, before the Kurds and ISIS had gone to war, and at a time
when Kurdistan seemed to be a bastion of stability.)
This sense of hopefulness was palpable among the students. In one
workshop, several of them had just returned from Venice Beach and
were agog over Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. In fact, many of the students
had traveled abroad and didn’t seem nearly as culturally isolated.
Despite the fact that these students live in Kirkuk, one of the few
cities in Kurdistan still deeply embroiled in sectarian killing, their responses to the writing exercises were far more upbeat and not nearly
so fatalistic.
One of the teachers, a woman without a head scarf who was
Christian, told us how she had become friends with Harold Pinter.
“He would call me,” she said, “over Skype, and ask question after
question about our daily lives. We became good friends.” Pinter had
championed Kurdish human rights for years, especially when they
rebelled against Saddam during the first Gulf War. After encouraging the Kurds to rise up against Saddam, the US refused to support
them when Saddam cracked down with helicopter gunships strafing
columns of refugees escaping by foot, or riding on donkeys, trucks,
and tractors. But after Saddam fell in 2003, the Kurds aggressively
pursued their own self-governance, putting a high priority on security.
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In fact, the Erbil consulate compound looked like just another
suburban neighborhood. Though it was cold, on a windless day you
could lounge in the sun on the roof and look out over the entire city:
white stucco houses, yards full of orange trees, the oranges shining
among the leaves, and far off, the Zagros Mountains jutting up on the
horizon. And even though the security officer was concerned that a
twelve-story building, still under construction, overlooked the entire
consulate, in Baghdad it would be suicidal to allow such a tall building to share the compound wall. At a small consulate like Erbil, one
man with an RPG could destroy the compound in less than an hour.
And yet the consulate staff went about their business. The Kurdish
security guards even gave us clearance to go to an art opening at the
British Council. The opening was to celebrate a book of photographs
about Kurdish life. Chris and I stood in line with everyone else helping themselves to the abundance of local cheeses, baklava, and other
honeyed pastries.
•
Before my trip, I confess that I used to wince whenever I used the
term “creative writing.” It seems so treacly, and diminishing, and ludicrously inadequate. And it seemed like such an American approach
to the arts, particularly in comparison to how the Iraqi writers talked
about writing. In a meeting with what American educators might call
“gifted and talented” high school students, two of Iraq’s best known
writers — one a poet, the other a dramatist — spoke about the art as if
it were a form of existential inquiry leading to secular transcendence.
By contrast, our focus on exercises, on forming good writing habits
by trying to write every day, and our insistence on reading, seemed
a little lacking in mystery, if not downright square, in comparison to
what Naseer Hassan and Hamed al-Maliki were proposing as primary
qualities for being a writer: the Rilkean attributes of vision, inspiration, and the ability to express profound feeling.
When Chris and I traded views on books, or began to reminisce
about poets we’d admired and learned from, our conversations almost always took a technical turn. Chris, who’d studied with Joseph
Brodsky, once said to me, “You know, Brodsky had the habit of saying provocative things about poetry, things that you wouldn’t think
someone who came to English as a second language would pick
up on. I remember once in class he talked about how British poets
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often established the metrical norm for a poem in the first line, but
that American poets, if they had any kind of norm at all, tended to
establish it in the second line.” That Chris and I could be having this
somewhat arcane conversation about rhythm in poetry somehow
heartened me in the midst of the escalating violence. And yet Hamed
and Naseer had a point. Who cares if the metrical norm is established
in the first or second line, if the poem doesn’t lift off the page because
of the quality of the emotion?
I remember thinking at the time how the Polish poet and dissident
Aleksander Wat wrote in his memoir, My Century, that his years as
an editor, focusing on the minutiae of stylistic effects, had eventually
made him lose faith in literature as anything other than a series of
calculated rhetorical procedures. He had become so accustomed to
talking about literature as nothing but verbal effects that he
felt in charge only when I had taken hold of the actual end of
the thread and could see an entire work unravel into its components. And I gradually became cynical about what I considered
the spurious integrity and unity of a given work. He had come to think about literature in a somewhat similar way to
our American faith in workshops. Again, a stark contrast to our kitbag-of-techniques approach — it was enviable, our Iraqi counterparts’
faith in the primacy of the imagination.
I admit that Wat’s weariness with literature has beset me from time
to time, a kind of poetry gloom that overtakes me when certain values in poetry that I love are at times sacrificed to my role as a teacher.
Complexity of feeling, a style that embodies emotion (as opposed to
riding on top of it with lots of verbal pyrotechnics and rhetorical display), a sense of the deep past resonating behind a line, and the feeling that the poet, as Seamus Heaney once said, aspires to make poetry
an independent category of human consciousness, partaking of, but
not beholden to, politics, religion, psychology, or sociology — well,
it’s an ideal that I myself find hard to live up to. From time to time,
it’s difficult not to lose patience, not only with oneself, but all the
forces in the culture that want to instrumentalize our relations to art.
Or if that sounds too highfalutin’, call it the Facebookery of art,
the Gradgrindization of art, as Charles Dickens might put it. But the
meetings Chris and I had with Iraqi students, professors, and writers,
and the poems and stories that they wrote, began to restore the
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balance for me between the thread that unravels and how my Iraqi
counterparts spoke about literature.
This balance was something that Wat also rediscovered in the
silence of the Lubyanka prison, the worst of the many prisons and
camps he was condemned to during the Stalinist purges. And while
Wat’s historical situation was radically different from mine, not to
mention Hamed’s and Naseer’s, in Iraq I understood a little about
how Wat regained his love of literature:
When we go back to the twenty, fifty, or hundred greatest
works of world literature that we read as young people, we
cannot, nor do we wish to, be freed from the charms of that
initial reading. Still, we were prematurely exposed. What could
we have known of their roots in human life? Under conditions
like those in Lubyanka — cut off from the world, aware of the
vast roaring world outside, the deathly hush inside, where time
slows terribly while we continue to grow terribly old biologically — under those conditions we sought to recover our initial
freshness of perception, the way Adam saw when he saw that
“it was good.”
... In Lubyanka, to my joy, I rediscovered the sense of integrity — the whole that “precedes” the parts and is their soul.
I had fully recovered my ability to see things synthetically.
I don’t claim that my poetry gloom is either as profound, or as
extreme, as Wat’s disaffection. But my trip to Iraq shifted the frame,
not only on how I viewed Iraq, but about literature in general. In a
world so fraught with violence, Seamus Heaney’s idealism about the
place of poetry was no longer an abstraction, but as Keats would put
it, “proved upon our pulses.” And this sense of ground walked over,
as opposed to a flyover on TV, complicated my political feelings — in
fact, you could say that for the first time I actually had feelings, as opposed to convictions. For years, my political views about the country
were off-the-rack lefty, views that cost me nothing and were easy to
espouse. But during our trip, I had constant misgivings about being
mistaken for a cultural ambassador, which was almost inevitable, given the fact that the State Department was funding much of my trip.
But those misgivings forced me, not so much to come to terms with
them, as to understand how difficult it is to live out what Yeats once
said the purpose of all art was: to hold reality and justice in a single
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thought. Well, my hands weren’t clean. And to wish that they were
would mean not going to Iraq because, for one thing, I didn’t have
the money to afford the security I would want to buy: and if you were
buying security, your ideological purity was already compromised
because your privilege protected you from violence that ordinary
Iraqis risked every day.
On our way back from one mission in Baghdad, Chris and I
learned that a suicide bomber had gotten inside the Green Zone, or
what, since the US troop withdrawal in 2011, had been rechristened
the International Zone — the IZ, as the locals put it. That meant the
rest of the city qualified as the Red Zone. But the Red Zone, the IZ,
no matter — sure enough, a day later, the bomber blew himself up not
too far away from where we’d just conducted a workshop.
But such incidents, after the workshop with Mariam, now took
on a subtly different quality. I had begun to feel such rage about the
relentlessness of the killing, the zealotry that could inspire it, the
religious mania that seemed to brutalize people into killing other
ordinary Iraqis who most likely weren’t particularly religious, except
as a formal, societal, or familial instinct, and who had no doctrinal
grudge against anyone. Their only sin was to be in the wrong place
at the wrong time. But since Mariam’s story, written and read with
such understated feeling, my rage, and the comfort it gave me because of my certainty that it was justified, could never take hold of
me without also seeing the image of her brother, gently, very gently,
bending down to kiss his sister, to ask her if she needed anything at
the market, and whispering, again with the utmost gentleness, that
this would be the last time he would ever see her.
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c o n t r i bu to r s
rosebud ben-oni * is the author of Solecism (Virtual Artists
Collective, 2013). She is also an editorial advisor for VIDA: Women
in Literary Arts.
charlie bondhus’s * second poetry book, All the Heat We Could
Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), won the Publishing Triangle’s 2014
Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.
michelle y. burke* is the author of the chapbook Horse Loquela
(Red Mountain Review/Alabama School of Fine Arts, 2007).
abigail deutsch is a recipient of the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize
for Criticism and was a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy
Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She lives in New York.
kate farrell is the author of six books, two of them cowritten with
Kenneth Koch. Her most recent book is Time’s River: The Voyage of
Life in Art and Poetry (National Gallery of Art, 1999).
jessica fjeld * is the author of the chapbooks The Tide (Pilot Books,
2010) and On Animate Life: Its Profligacy, Organ Meats, Etc. (Poetry
Society of America, 2006). She lives in Boston.
john hennessy is the author of two collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press, 2013) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning
Point, 2007). He is poetry editor for The Common.
tony hoagland’s collection Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays was published last year by Graywolf Press. He
teaches at the University of Houston.
cathy park hong’s latest collection is Engine Empire (W.W.
Norton, 2012). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
michael derrick hudson * lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where
he works at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library.
laura kasischke’s most recent collection is The Infinitesimals
(Copper Canyon Press, 2014). She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
contributors
60 9
john kinsella’s most recent book of poetry is Jam Tree Gully
(W.W. Norton, 2011). He is a professor of literature and sustainability at Curtin University.
kenneth koch (1925–2002) wrote many books of poetry, fiction,
and nonfiction, as well as plays. His poetry is collected in two major
volumes from Alfred A. Knopf. Koch’s collected fiction and theater
works are from Coffee House Press.
julie maclean* is the author of Kiss of the Viking (Poetry Salzburg
Pamphlet Series, 2014) and When I Saw Jimi (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2013).
richard o. moore cofounded the first US listener-sponsored radio station, KPFA, and worked for years as a documentary filmmaker
and public television executive. His first book of poems is Writing
the Silences (University of California Press, 2010). At ninety-five, he
continues to write.
miller oberman’s translation “Old English Rune Poem” won
Poetry’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation in 2013.
kevin prufer is the author of six poetry collections, the most recent
of which are Churches (2014) and In a Beautiful Country (2011), both
from Four Way Books.
aram saroyan’s minimalist poems are currently on exhibit at the
Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. His new book, Still Night in L.A.,
a detective novel, will be published this fall by Three Rooms Press.
lui shtini * was born in Kavaje, Albania. He has worked in New
York since 2010. He is currently a resident artist at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program.
martha silano * has authored four books of poetry, including
Reckless Lovely (2014) and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (2011), both from Saturnalia Books.
tom sleigh’s new book, Station Zed, was published this year by
Graywolf Press. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College.
austin smith’s * first book of poems, Almanac (2013), was chosen
by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.
terese svoboda’s latest collection of poems is When the Next Big
War Blows Down the Valley: Selected & New (Anhinga Press, 2015).
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adam vines is editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, coauthor of According to Discretion (Unicorn Press, 2015), and author of The Coal
Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012).
jillian weise’s latest collection of poems, The Book of Goodbyes
(BOA Editions, 2013), won the 2013 James Laughlin Award. She
teaches at Clemson University.
* First appearance in Poetry.
contributors
61 1
mocp.org
Image Credit: Katja Stuke/Oliver Sieber, You and Me, 2014–15
What Remains
Barbara Diener, Pao Houa Her, Jon Rafman, Lieko Shiga
MAIN GALLERY | January 26—March 22
KATJA STUKE + OLIVER
SIEBER: YOU AND ME
UPSTAIRS GALLERY
2015 Book
Competitions
FIRST BOOK/JUDGE
Eileen Myles
OPEN BOOK/JUDGES
Lesle Lewis, Shane McCrae,
& Wendy Xu
ESSAY COLLECTION/JUDGE
Wayne Koestenbaum
WINNERS WILL RECEIVE
$1,000, publication,
and a standard royalty contract.
SUBMISSION PERIOD
January 1 – March 31, 2015
csupoetrycenter.com
WORKSHOPS IN POETRY,
FICTION, AND PLAYWRITING
JULY 21–AUGUST 2, 2015
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH
SEWANEE, TENNESSEE
Accepting applications through April 20
Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund,
supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, every participant
receives assistance. The Conference fee reflects but two-thirds of
the actual cost to attend. Additional funding is awarded to fellows
and scholars.
FACULTY &
READERS
Daniel Anderson
Richard Bausch
Tony Earley
B.H. Fairchild
Adrianne Harun
Andrew Hudgins
Randall Kenan
Maurice Manning
Charles Martin
Jill McCorkle
Alice McDermott
Erin McGraw
Dan O’Brien
Tim O’Brien
Wyatt Prunty
Mary Jo Salter
Christine Schutt
A.E. Stallings
Paula Vogel
Sidney Wade
Allen Wier
Steve Yarbrough
VISITORS &
LECTURERS
Julie Barer
Paul Bone
Georges and Anne
Borchardt
Valerie Borchardt
Michelle Brower
MaryKatherine
Callaway
Polly Carl
Barbara Epler
Gary Fisketjon
Mary Flinn
Emily Forland
Rob Griffith
Gail Hochman
931.598.1654 | [email protected]
sewaneewriters.org
Roger Hodge
Mike Levine
David Lynn
Matthew McAdam
Max Gordon
Moore
Speer Morgan
Kathy Pories
Elisabeth Schmitz
Don Share
Charise Castro
Smith
Anna Stein
Philip Terzian
N.S. Thompson
Liz Van Hoose
Michael Wiegers
Amy Williams
Robert Wilson
David Yezzi
Renée Zuckerbrot
NEW FROM PENGUIN
Carrie Fountain
INSTANT WINNER
In this moving exploration of
spirituality and the domestic from
the prize-winning poet, wry, supple
poems take the form of prayers
and meditations chronicling the
existential shifts brought on by
parenthood, spiritual searching, and
the experience of selfhood.
Penguin Poets • 96 pp. • 978-0-14-312663-8 • $20.00
Joanna Klink
EXCERPTS FROM A
SECRET PROPHECY
Offering a meditation on being
alone, the poems in Klink’s new
collection depict a self fighting out
of isolation toward connection with
other people and a vanishing world.
“Its perceptiveness is simultaneously
elemental and sublime.”—Terrance
Hayes.
Patricia Lockwood
MOTHERLAND
FATHERLAND
HOMELANDSEXUALS
“[Lockwood] has written a book at
once angrier, and more fun, more
attuned to our time and more bizarre,
than most poetry can ever get.”—The
New York Times.
Penguin Poets • 80 pp. • 978-0-14-312652-2 • $20.00
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Penguin Poets • 80 pp. • 978-0-14-312687-4 • $20.00
Michael Robbins
THE SECOND SEX
The thirty-six new, strange, and
exuberant poems presented here
carry over the music, attitude,
hilarity, and vulgarity of Robbins’s
acclaimed first collection, Alien vs.
Predator, while working in deeper
autobiographical and political veins.
Mary Oliver
BLUE HORSES
In this stunning collection, Oliver
returns to the imagery that has
defined her life’s work, describing
with wonder the everyday, unaffected
beauty of nature. “A lyric collection
to be treasured.”—The New York
Journal of Books.
Penguin Press • 96 pp. • 978-1-59420-479-1 • $24.95
Penguin Poets • 64 pp. • 978-0-14-312664-5 • $18.00
Terrance Hayes
HOW TO BE DRAWN
This daring fifth collection from
the National Book Award-winning
author of Lighthead explores how we
see and are seen, and how the self is
drawn by and to the paradoxes of the
mind, body, and soul.
Penguin Poets • 112 pp. • 978-0-14-312688-1 • $20.00
Rose McLarney
ITS DAY BEING GONE
“A beautiful book, and a haunting one
too. McLarney makes things matter.
Her poems make you feel very deeply
connected—under the skin, in the
bone—and therefore more acutely
alive.”—Robert Wrigley.
Penguin Poets • 112 pp. • 978-0-14-312657-7 • $20.00
National Poetry Series Winner
PENGUIN GROUP (USA)
www.penguin.com/academic
Academic Marketing Department 375 Hudson St. New York, NY 10014
2015 — 29th Year
New York State
Summer Writers Institute
June 29 - July 10 (session one)
July 13 - July 24 (session two)
TEACHING FACULTY
PoETrY
FrANk BIdArT • HENrI CoLE • CAroLYN ForCHé
CAmPBELL mCGrATH • PEG BoYErs
FICTIoN
AmY HEmPEL • rICk moodY • PAUL HArdING
C rIsTINA G ArCIA • V ICTorIA r EdEL
J oANNA s CoTT • H owArd N ormAN
m ArY G AITskILL • C L AIrE m EssUd
E LIzABETH B ENEdICT • A dAm B rAVEr
NoN-FICTIoN
PHILLIP LoPATE • JAmEs mILLEr
VIsITING FACULTY
rUssELL BANks • JoYCE CAroL oATEs
roBErT PINskY • mArILYNNE roBINsoN
JorIE GrAHAm • LoUIsE GLüCk
mICHAEL oNdAATJE • JAmAICA kINCAId
HoNor moorE • CArL dENNIs
FrANCINE ProsE • CHAsE TwICHELL
CHArLEs sImIC • Tom HEALY
JANE sHorE • CArYL PHILLIPs
For more information and to apply, please visit:
www.skidmore.edu/summerwriters
NYSSWI • Skidmore College • Saratoga Springs, NY
Coming soon from
Wake Forest University Press
From Elsewhere: Ciaran Carson
Renditions of
poems by
Jean Follain.
March 2015
978-1-930630-70-3
$14.95 paperback
Carson’s high-wire act of translation has never
been more stunningly displayed.
The Boys of Bluehill:
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Rich with insight
and mystery, these
deft poems tease
and beguile.
April 2015
978-1-930630-72-7
$13.95 paperback
“Her poems see things anew, in a rinsed
and dreamstruck light.” Seamus Heaney
Dedicated to
Irish poetry
wfupress.wfu.edu
336.758.5448
[email protected]
B ROW S E OV E R O N E
HUNDRED YEARS OF
P O E T RY A N D B E C O M E
A S U B S C R I B E R AT
P O E T RY M A G A Z I N E . O R G
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG
Winner of the 2014 National Magazine Award
for General Excellence in the category
of Literature, Science, and Politics.
“Consistently excellent.”
— Jeremy Noel-Tod, Editor
The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry
Freckled, 2014 by Lilli Carré
Itself
Rae Armantrout
“She is a poet who in the short
lines of her brief, fragmented verse
has given us a lot of possibilities, all
of them charged with language that
aims to contain multitudes.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, Boston Review
Mr. West
Sarah Blake
“Mr. West transforms the poet’s
fascination with the rapper into
an amazing group of poems that
explores what she knows or can
find out about West, alongside her
own life. . . . It is a study in nuance
and it is strangely moving.”
—Evie Shockley
Heliopause
Heather Christle
“Smart, grave, tender, and fiercely
alive, these poems vibrate with the
hushed power of just-before-thestorm: magnetic, charged, eerily clear.”
—Lisa Olstein
These projects are supported in part
by an award from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Order from your favorite bookseller or call 800-421-1561
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Save 30% when you use discount code W301 on your web order
March_2015_Events_full_page_Ad_v2 1/12/15 8:55 AM Page 1
T HE POETRY FOUN DATION PRE SE NT S
March
Events
Poetry &
Dance
Reading
The Open
Door Readings
Ian Spencer Bell: Geography Solos
Wednesday, March 11, 7:00 PM
Robert Adamson
Thursday, March 12, 7:00 PM
University of Illinois at Chicago’s
Andrea Witzke Slot &
Columbia College’s David Trinidad
Tuesday, March 17, 7:00 PM
Poetry
on Stage
August Wilson: From Poet to Playwright
Wednesday, March 25, 7:00 PM
POE T RY FOUN DAT ION
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL
(312) 787-7070
www.poetryfoundation.org