Orlando Watt's Recital of "Words" Excerpt

Many years, shortly after I first discovered YouTube, which probably would have been not long before I began blogging here, I had the idea to begin posting short clips of myself reading poems by other poets that I loved. Then clarity struck and I realized that this would mean that I'd have to film myself reading the poems, and my naturally shyness, technical ignorance and concern for violating unknown copyright strictures got the better of me, and that idea remained just that. Of course countless other people decided to do something similar, as well as recording their own poems specifically for a YouTube viewership, so I would have hardly been alone in this project. Not long after Seismosis, my collaboration with poet and artist Christopher Stackhouse, appeared, someone named Kinomode created a lovely short video, inspired by the book, that I deeply enjoyed. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, inspiration drawn from a pre-existing work is one of the finest tributes. When the Black Poets Speak Out movement, organized by Ebony Stewart and Amanda Johnson, began, I originally planned to contribute a video, but shyness overtook me, and so my support was with them, but in the realms of concept and affect.

Fast forward to recently, when I received a request for a list of YouTube URLs to videos of me reading or discussing my work. There aren't many, but I dutifully compiled what existed, and sent them along. (There is or was one on Vimeo, I think, pairing Chris and me as we read from Seismosis; I still had dreadlocks then, and over the years I periodically have encountered younger poets who found the recitation in unison thrilling. That was directly inspired by one of my dazzlingly smart former Northwestern undergraduate students, Tai Little, who wrote a senior thesis novella that included a double-columned passage that she invited classmates to perform live; it was thrilling to hear, and in fact embodied the disorientation she was aiming to convey in her narrative.) At any rate, in my YouTube search I came across something I had never seen before, which was someone reciting one of my poems, and I have to say, I love it.

I do not know the performer, a young man named Orlando Watt. But he takes my poem "Words," which appeared earlier this year on the Academy of American Poets Poetry Daily website, and brings it to life in his own distinctive way. I have read the poem a number of times, very differently from, but it was a delight to see and hear his take, using a brief excerpt of the poem as a monologue, perhaps for an audition. His accent and the way he paces the words and shifts the emphases got me to think about what I had written and how the music in my head transferred to and was transformable on the page. Now that I am posting the link to the video here, I also will post a note of thank you below the video itself. And maybe, if I can find the time and now that cellphones are much easier to handle than the older digital video cameras, post a few videos of myself reading poems--by others!

John Ashbery @ Poets House + Poem: Ashbery

He is 85 years old, and one of the most famous living American poets, a vital figure in mid-to-late 20th century experimental poetics, a central member of the literary coterie that came to be known as a New York School, the winner of every major US poetry prize including the Pulitzer Prize-National Book Award-National Book Critics Circle Award triad in 1975-76, a highly lauded translator of note and a former art critic, and the poet laureate of MTV. I am of course talking about John Ashbery (1927-), who read this past week at Poets House as part of their summer series and the River to River Festival. He had been scheduled to read earlier this year at Poets House, I believe, but had taken ill, and although I have seen Ashbery read many times, all over New York City, I decided under the circumstances that I ought not miss this appearance. Evidently quite a few other people did as well, and I had to join the overflow audience upstairs, to catch him on the TV monitor. And still people kept arriving! And yet Marjorie Perloff claims nobody likes or pays attention to poetry!

He was, once settled into his dovecoat downstairs and with a few sips of water, in fine form, and after Stephen Motika graciously introduced him, Ashbery read both from his most recently published book, 2009's Planisphere, and from his forthcoming one, Quick Questions. (I think I got the name right.) His poems were frequently hilarious. This is one aspect of Ashbery's poetry that I think often gets underplayed; he is one of the funniest poets writing, and his humor is not only droll and witty, but sometimes verges on verbal slapstick. Yes, there is that wistful tone, drenched in a kind of counternostalgia, that he can evoke (belatedness!), but there is also the highly comic in his work as well. He often is not that far either from Laurel and Hardy, whom he cited several times, or The Three Stooges, or Monty Python. Or the Firesign Theater, about which I knew and know nothing, but which Reggie H. told me Ashbery, and his partner, David Kermani (and Reggie too), were and are afficionados. It was initially warm downstairs, but cooled upstairs at least as Ashbery declaimed, and Poets House kindly provided sparkling wine and water afterwards, including to those who were waiting to get their book (for only one was allowed) signed. I got him to sign his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.

Innumerable are the Ashbery poems that I love, but here is one from one of his books that I have always found particularly beguiling, The Double Dream of Spring. It appeared a few years after he returned from his decade-long stay in France, and the poems, dreamlike in their logic (cf. Giorgio deChirico, whose painting inspired the title) but less syntactically disjunctive or overtly playful in their sentiments than his poems of the French years, marked a shift in Ashbery's work and to me pointed to a mastery of idiom that would reach its apogee in his poetry of the next decade and a half, including his most famous book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and the difficult but I think equally beautiful book, Houseboat Days, before he shifted into his next phase, which I call "overheard chatter," and which so many younger poets I knew first encountered and have found utterly baffling. Go back to the early poems, and then the ones of the 1970s, I always say--and then Ashbery begins to make a lot more--well, if not sense, at least impact.

Here are some photos from the event, and then, "For John Clare."

The overflow audience upstairs (there was a packed room downstairs too)

John Ashbery exiting the green room (Reggie H. at right)

The bard of Sodus on the screen

The line of people snaking up the stairwell waiting to get his autograph

Ashbery signing books

FOR JOHN CLARE

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Copyright © John Ashbery, "For John Clare," from The Double Dream of Spring, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. All rights reserved.

Borges' Birthday + Poem/Translation: Borges

Today would be the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the poet, fiction writer, essayist, and aesthete, who was without a doubt one of Argentina's and Latin America's greatest gifts to the world of arts and letters.  I tend to think of Borges as a fiction writer, since it was through the genre that I first encountered his work, and it was as an innovator in the short fictional form that his global reputation took hold, but he began his writing career in his native country and, I think it's fair to say, thought of himself primarily as a poet. He was a very good one, sometimes an exceptional one. As he wrote in his poem "Inscripcíon" (Inscription), in the posthumous collection "Los conjurados" (The conjured ones), "Escribir un poema es ensayar una magia menor" (To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic.)  I should note that Borges is one of those writers (like Wallace Stevens, for example) whose politics and personal beliefs I disagree with, but whose work I nevertheless have a great affinity for.  His poetry in particular has grown on me as I have gotten older.  In honor of Borges' birthday, I am posting a few links to articles on him, and one of his late poems that I love, as it captures the simplicity, rhetorical skill, and evocative power that at his best he would often pack into the shorter poems he wrote towards the end of his life.

The links:
Christian Science Monitor: "Jorge Luis Borges: What Made Him So Good?"
Guardian Online: "Jorge Luis Borges' Google doodle celebrates the master of magical realism"
El Clarín (One of Argentina's major newspapers): "Hoy Borges cumpliría 112 y se los festejan"

The poem:
"El cómplice" (The Accomplice), from La cifra (The Limit) (1981) needs little explanation. It is also simple enough for me to translate, and all the faults in the English are mine, but if you can read it aloud in the Spanish, you also will get more of Borges' original music, the repetition of the "c" sounds in the first line, for example, or the sustained grammatical and syntactic repetitions of the first four lines, which he reverses in the fifth, shifting the speaker's agency from response to the head of the sentence, after he has endured a series of trials, including hell/the inferno.

EL CÓMPLICE

Me crucifican y yo debo ser la cruz y los clavos.
Me tienden la copa y yo debo ser la cicuta.
Me engañan y y debo ser la mentira.
Me inciendan y yo debo ser el infierno.
Debo alabar y agradecer cada instante del tiempo.
Mi alimento es todas las cosas.
El peso preciso del universo, la humillación, el júbilo.
Debo justificar lo que hiere.
No importa mi ventura o mi desventura.
Soy el poeta.

THE ACCOMPLICE

They crucify me and I must be the cross and the nails.
They hand me the cup and I must be the hemlock.
They fool me and I must be the lie.
They set me on fire and I must be the inferno.
I have to praise and thank every instant of time.
Everything nourishes me.
The precise weight of the universe, humiliation, jubilation.
I must justify what wounds me.
My fortune or misfortune is of no importance.
I am the poet.

Copyright © Jorge Luis Borges, from La cifra (1981; Emece Editores, 1993). Translation © John Keene, 2011.

Brick City on Sundance + Poem: Manuel Bandeira

C and I have been watching Brick City the five-night Sundance Channel documentary series Forrest Whitaker, Mark Benjamin and Mark Levin, also its director, have produced about nearby Newark. At each episode's center is Newark's charismatic, determined young mayor, Cory Booker, who made his movie debut in 2005 in Marshall Curry's enthralling, Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, which chronicled his determined but unsuccessful run against longtime city head and now convicted felon Sharpe James and James' corrupt, municipal machine. Booker ran again in 2006 and defeated James's chosen successor, Ron Rice, and since then has worked tirelessly to improve the city and the lives of its residents. A great deal of his heroic effort, presented here in clips from 2008, is on display in Brick City; when he isn't fretting over how to plug holes in the city's budget or exhorting his police department to drive the crime rate even lower (murders, Newark's longtime bane, have fallen consistently) or addressing yet another negative article on the city he governs, Booker shows himself, to many residents' delight and his parents' pride and concern, to be the city's most diehard champion and booster, and, it must be said, a kind of quasi-coach, teacher and mentor to many of its denizens, going beyond parades and groundbreakings to play midnight basketball, ride sidesaddle with the police during bouts of insomnia, and cajole young people even to pursue their dreams.

But were Brick City the Booker show all the time it would certainly be engaging but hardly offer any real perspective into the city's ongoing problems. Instead, the filmmakers have selected some of the city's less famous residents, like couple Jayda, a sharp, charismatically gifted young woman and member of Bloods gang, and her sloe-eyed partner and expectant baby-daddy Creep, a Crip, who are struggling to maintain their relationship, take care of themselves and their two children, and imagine and experience new lives outside the prisonhouse of gang life, poverty and low expectations, and the penal system. Watching Jayda as she energizes the young women she works with has given me some hope about Newark's future, yet even this potential heroine, who is pregnant with her second child (and what will be Creep's as well), ends up finding herself on the wrong side of the law because of an old warrant she'd been avoiding. One of the realities the series underlines is this persisent, not always hidden trap, made of snap emotional responses we all feel combined with old and problematic, sometimes deadly ways of addressing problems, which ensnares so many of Newark's young people, including those like Jayda who are full of potential, and potential leaders. Instead of being able to enjoy their lives, so many of them are tagged early on and dragged quickly and inexorably down into a mire of drugs, failure, prison, and death.


Newark Police chief Garry McCarthy and Mayor Cory Booker (Photo, Sundancechannel.com)

Other residents of the city who make an appearance include principal and poet Ras Baraka, his Vice Principle Todd Warren, a grizzly bear of a man, and their crew at Newark's Central High School, which during the series moves into its strikingly new, $100 million complex, after some unfortunate and poorly defended delays; Newark's police chief, Bronx native Garry McCarthy, and others on his force, captured in strategy sessions and on the beat; and some ex-cons who've succeeded in turning their lives around but find current events tempting them to exact retribution that will return them to the very personal hells they've mostly escaped. The series has focused a lot more on the police than on City Hall, despite featuring Booker, and it's interesting to think about all of the corruption and sleaziness that came through in the earlier documentary, which preceded James's conviction, and the light touch with which the filmmakers have addressed such issues here. Instead, we are given more of a sense of what Newark's true challenges are, shorn mostly of any spectacle, and the tough conditions the majority of its residents face and endure, despite the best efforts of the new mayor, new police chief, and many of the city's indefatigable residents themselves, who are presented as subjects and authors of their own lives, and not the objects of beneficent but blind liberal concern.

A spectral presence here that I immediately associate with Newark, Ras Baraka's father, the renowned and notorious poet and author Amiri Baraka, has turned up once so far, to commemorate the 41st anniversary of Newark's uprising. In his brief appearance he manages to serve up some unvarnished old-style Marxism and denounce Booker as a "a white racist Negro," echoing of one of James's more outrageous criticisms of his opponent, that because of his upbringing and education (Stanford, Yale and Oxford Rhodes Scholarship) he wasn't really black or down (he is, yet some voters, despite all visual and other evidence, believed this). Despite this bitter burst of Barakatude, it's been fascinating to see Ras at the center of a film about Newark while his father, who played a key role not only in formulating a radical political and artistic agenda for Newark and black people in the late 1960s on through the 1980s, but also worked doggedly to elect Newark's first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, remains only a ghostly figure. Two episodes are now finished, and I'm already wondering if we'll see Amiri Baraka again. It almost feels like the documentary's almost missing something key if we don't.

◊◊◊

Earlier this summer I completed and sent off a translation of Brazilian writer and media personality Jean Wyllys's collection of stories, Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001). I've published a couple of the translated stories in literary journals and I hope the entire book is published at some point, preferably in a bilingual version, mainly because I enjoy Wyllys's grain-of-sand prose and because the stories as a whole offer a different image of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil's 3rd largest city and one of its major cultural capitals, than one usually encounters anywhere. To open the book Wyllys chose a poem, "Desencanto," that happens to be by one of Brazil's very important 20th century poets, Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968).

Originally I looked up translations of "Desencanto" and even considered using one (with credit to the original translator), since I'd initially intended only to translate Wyllys's prose as well as the introduction, by Bahian journalist Antônio Torres, but after reviewing what I could find in books and online I thought, I have to do this myself. I like the result, though there's a prosodic issue in the second stanza that's bothering me, so I still have to work on it. Nevertheless, for the first time in a while, here is the original, and an original translation, of a poem.

DESENCANTO

Eu faço versos como quem chora
de desalento... de desencanto...
Fecha o meu livro, se por agora
Não tens motivo nenhum de pranto.

Meu verso é sangue. Volúpia ardente...
Tristeza esparsa... remorso vão...
Dói-me nas veias. Amargo e quente
Cai, gota e gota, do coração.

E nestas versos de angústia rouca
Assim dos lábios a vida corre,
Deixando um acre sabor na boca.

--Eu faço versos como quem morre.

DISENCHANTMENT

I write these lines like one who cries
In discouragement...in disenchantment...
Shut my book, if, for the moment
You have no cause for tear-filled eyes.

My poetry is blood.  Burning ecstasy...
Scattered sadness... vain regret...
My veins ache from it, bitter and hot,
Drop by drop it tumbles from my heart.

And in these verses, anguished, raw
So runs life from between my lips,
Leaving a bitter taste in my jaws.

--I write these lines like one who dies.

Translation Copyright © John Keene, 2009.

Translation: Manuel Bandeira

Earlier this summer I completed a revised translation of Brazilian writer Jean Wyllys's collection of short stories, Aflitos (The Afflicted) (Editora Globo, 2009), and one of the last parts of the book that I translated was a poem that Wyllys uses as one of his epigrams to the book, "Desencanto," or "Disenchantment," by Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968), one of Brazil's most important 20th century poets.

DESENCANTO

Eu faço versos como quem chora
de desalento... de desencanto
Fecha o meu livro, se por agora
Não tens motivo nenhum de pranto.

Meu verso é sangue. Volúpia ardente...
Tristeza esparsa... remorso vão...
Dói-me nas veias. Amargo e quente
Cai, gota e gota, do coração.

E nestas versos de angústia rouca
Assim dos lábios a vida corre,
Deixando um acre sabor na boca.

--Eu faço versos como quem morre.

Copyright © Manuel Bandeira. All rights reserved.

Here's my translation:

I write these lines like one who cries,
In discouragement...in disenchantment...
Shut my book if, for the moment,
You have no cause for tear-filled eyes.

My poetry is blood. Burning ecstasy...
Scattered sadness... vain regret...
My veins ache from it, bitter, hot,
Drop by drop it falls from my heart.

And in these verses, anguished, raw
So runs life from between my lips.
Leaving a bitter taste in my jaws.

--I write these lines as one who dies.
Manuel Bandeira, Disenchantment

Copyright © John Keene, 2009. All rights reserved.

Poem: Herring Cove Beach, 1997

Since I'm in Provincetown for a few days, I thought I'd post an old poem I wrote based on my experiences there. It's unfinished, I suppose, but nevertheless, gives some flavor of the place, among other things.

Rooftop scene, Provincetown


HERRING COVE BEACH, 1997

If I wrote

    the bikinied couples fleeing the sun's
    stare, the fragrance of sex over-
    flowing the dune's copper cups,
    mysterious rote symphony of the sea,

would that make this a poem and not just a snapshot, even though it's barely enough to fashion a brief lyric? Perhaps there's grist for verse in the sand between my thighs, or the laughter braided with cries from the bathers a few feet away, or the relentless Atlantic, relentlessly churning lyrics of its own. Or you, lying supine and oblivious, your head bobbing to a House tape and the newspaper, on the immaculate white raft of your beach towel. Remembering when this was like yesterday, the first day, our beginning. The afternoon crawling before us, unaware, our chaperone. A starfish, wafflecone fragments and watermelon rinds, a dumped-ice river, used condoms, or the abandoned lifeguard stand that flickers in the blue and shifting distance. And then I am standing facing the horizon, the water, my shoulders gaining color and authority like our silent bond, you behind me, beside me, with me here, in the ocean's ancient, ever-moving shutter.

Copyright © John Keene, 1997, 2008. All rights reserved.

Trethewey Wins Pulitzer + Tragedy at VTech + Poem: Natasha Trethewey

I am so elated to type these words: Natasha Trethewey has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry!

She was honored for her brilliant recent volume, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which appeared last year to great acclaim (and was a past J's Theater Book of the Month pick as well). Natasha was a member of the Dark Room Collective many years ago, and was one of the first winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for her début collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), and she later published She is also the fourth Black poet to win the Prize for poetry, following in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I've known her for almost a decade and a half, and can say without hesitation that she's a terrific, gracious person who really deserves this extraordinary honor. I am so happy for and proud of her! Congratulations, Natasha!

One of the two runners-up in the category was poet Martín Espada, another poet I know and think the world of. Martín was one of the earliest readers at the Dark Room's reading series, and has mentored and taught quite a few younger poets. Congrats to Martín as well.

Also, Eisa Davis, another fellow Cave Canem writer, was a finalist in the Drama category for her play "Bulrusher"! Congratulations, Eisa!

And other winners include Ornette Coleman in the Music category (no, you did not read that wrong--someone other than a classical music composer received the Pulitzer in music!--they must be fuming in quite a few university music departments), for his recording Sound Grammar; Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker, who often challenges the middling conventional wis-zards on Sunday talk shows, received the Pulitzer in Commentary; and John Coltrane was honored nearly 40 years after his death with a posthumous citation for his "his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." I only wish his wife, Alice, who died not long ago, had lived to see this day.

Finally, I must note that as was predicted by some in the media, Cormac McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his most recent novel, The Road, which is the current pick of Oprah's Book Club. I haven't read it, but reader Kai did praise it strongly--at least up to its final scene (right, Kai?). I'll be getting to it one of these days soon.

***

I was busy with university business pretty much all day--we had on campus a very fine visiting poet, Josh Weiner, whom I'll write about soon--so I didn't get an opportunity to check the web or hear the full report from C on the horrific events that occurred today at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, where a gunmen went on a rampage and killed more than 30 people, including students, faculty and staff members, then killed himself.

Since I know only some of the particulars of the incident, I won't expatiate on the crime itself, except to say that my heart goes out to the families of the dead and injured, and to the Virginia Tech campus as a whole. Such events sadden me tremendously. Some reports are suggesting that this is the worst shooting and worst university mass-murder of all time. It certainly has to be one of the worst instances of a mass killing in the US outside of a war battle zone, outstripped only by the 9/11 suicide bombings and the Oklahoma City massacre. Such a senseless, horrible crime is almost too awful to register, much like the daily accounts of slaughter that reach us from cities across Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan, that we heard about in Rwanda, in East Timor, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Chechnya and Ingushetia....

When C and I lived in Virginia, we became aware of how easy it was and is to purchase guns there. I was and remain incredulous at the idea that anyone would need to purchase handguns right away, without a background check and waiting period, let alone 2 or 5 or 10 or 25 or 100 pistols and rifles and automatic rifles and machine guns and so on in one pop, unless she or he were outfitting a police force, or a military unit. Then, a few years ago, I believe that Virginia tightened its laws and limited the numbers of certain types of guns people could purchase per month, enraging a sizable number of fanatics, but I believe (though I could be wrong) that it's still the case that almost anyone can purchase an unlimited number of guns there at a gun show. Why? Again, what good can come from such a loophole?

As I said, my knowledge of the case is minimal, and I don't know where the murderer purchased his weaponry or why he went on this rampage, but given how easy it is to acquire guns in that state, and in particular, automatic weaponry, I wouldn't be surprised if after impulsively deciding that he was going to avenge some perceived hurt or humiliation he did some shopping there before his spree. Perhaps this will lead state legislators to tighten the laws further, but I'm not holding my breath. (There are already cries on the blogosphere that students, faculty and staff armed with concealed handguns could have prevented the crime. Personally, I find the prospect of anyone other than a policeperson walking around the university with weapons of any sort utterly terrifying.)

In the meantime, let's extend a moment of silence to those who were slain and to the survivors.

***

Back to a more positive note, here's a poem by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard:

THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

"Theories of Time and Space" from Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2006 by Natasha Trethewey. All rights reserved.

Reading at Woodland Pattern + Poem: Ethelbert Miller

(Okay, I hope that this blog reappears after I've posted this, because I've been forced over to the new Google Blogger (after having tried it once and lost my blog for several days), but here goes....)

Friday, I was on the road again, this time to Milwaukee, to read at the extraordinary Woodland Pattern Book Center with poet E. Ethelbert Miller. Despite the fact that it's closer to Chicago than St. Louis, I'd never been to Milwaukee before. After my Friday office hours and a number of other university-related duties, I hopped on the road and made the short, easy hour-and-thirty-minute drive. I'd also never read with Ethelbert, though back during my Dark Room Collective days the rest of the writing group and I had been his guests at the Ascension Reading Series. Chuck Stebelton, who runs the Myopic Poetry Series in Chicago and runs Woodland Pattern's poetry series, invited us up, and was an exemplary host, as was everyone affiliated with the bookstore, including Anne Kingsbury, who wined and dined us in royal fashion (c.f. chicken potpies with our initials in them!).

The store, from outside

Woodland Pattern which is the kind of bookstores that many writers, especially poets, dream about. In addition to one of the best poetry collections in the country, the store also has racks and cabinets full of rare chapbooks and broadsides, and an exhibition space that features shows of original book and visual art, and a friendly, staff that knows quite a bit about arts and letters. Many of them are writers themselves. An exhibit of multimedia artist Joel Lipman's stamp poetry pieces graced the walls of the room where we read, and the book center has an online site with information about his life and work.


One of the rooms, with the chapbook filled file bureau at the center of the photo (that's Ethelbert at right speaking with a former DC resident)

The reading was really enjoyable and energizing; I was especially pleased at the turnout and at the enthusiastic response, and it was also wonderful to meet local poets like Rick Ryan and Shelly Hall. Ethelbert, who read second, found a way to tie so many common strands in our quite different work together, including our tributes to recently deceased like Phebus Etienne, our joint love of baseball, and W's ongoing, senseless vanity war in Iraq. It was also a joy to sell some books!


Post-reading confab (I don't know the name of the guy on the left, but from l-r are Rick Ryan, Dante [who'd visited with the Chicago poets I know a few years ago], Ethelbert, and Anne Kingsbury)

I told the folks at Woodland Pattern that I'd be back one of these days, and I intend to return and browse at length.

Here's one of Ethelbert's love poems, tender, epigrammatic and bearing added layers of meaning through the reference to none other than Mr. Sun Ra:

SPACE IS THE PLACE

Love is the last planet in our solar
system. Your heart crying like the
rings of Saturn. How can we believe
in stars in this darkness? I watch
the sky for your return. Inside my
hands nothing but gravity.

Copyright © E. Ethelbert Miller, 2007.