Updated: Perennial Post: Who'll Receive the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?

UPDATE:

ABSURDITY (A short Nobel Prize in Literature play*)

Swedish Academy Guy 1: Ngugi should get it.
SA Guy 2: Ko Un. Very good poet, I hear. I don't read...Korean?
SA Guy 3: Um, is Philip Roth dead?
SA Guy 4: That Brazilian guy...what is his name? You know. Guys?
SA Woman: Any women???
Quorum: Dylan!!!

*In memory of playwright, activist and provocateur Dario Fo (1922-2016), 1997 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

***

Can Xue (Bellelettrista.com)

Another year, another year of speculation: who will win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose announcement has now been pushed back to next week? (The same thing happened 11 years ago.) Almost every year that I've blogged here, I've devoted longish columns to forecasting about this most widely known, recognized and publicly exalted (and execrated, in some quarters) of literary prizes, and more often than not, I've been wrong about the possible winners, though I have at times tossed out names of people who did go on to win. Cast a wide enough net and you will catch something.

Some of the potential honorees who appeared in my first J's Theater wish list back in 2005 are no longer with us. Assia Djébar, Carlos Fuentes and E. L. Doctorow (the latter two my former teachers), to name a few, have departed for that distant library in the heavens. (Still others I pointed to in subsequent posts, like Andrée Chedid, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Mahasveta Devi, also have passed since that initial post 1l years ago.) One writer I did state ought to win, Harold Pinter, received the prize that year, though I can't say I singled him out. (I was and remain a fan of his work.) While I have frequently mentioned Patrick Modiano as a fascinating case study (of a writer who essentially writes the same book over and over) to my students, I did not think he'd slip past far more inventive and compelling French writers like Yves Bonnefoy or Michel Tournier (both of whom died earlier this year). Remaining on the French tip, I still am baffled by J. G. M. LeClézio's win in 2008.

Prior Nobel posts: 2005 - (2005 discussion of Pinter) - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 (1) - 2009 (2) - 2010 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015.

In any case, as many critics, I included, have noted, the prize--which is the result of ideologically tinged choices by a relatively tiny committee of Europeans but has global ramifications--has in recent years increasingly turned towards European literature, with roughly 11 honorees out of the last 15 either born or based on that continent. Additionally, only 4 of the 15 have been women. The imbalance is not only one of region and gender but of genre: only one writer working primarily as a poet, Tomas Tranströmer, has been awarded, and the same is true in terms of drama: since 2000 only dramatist Harold Pinter has received the award. (Elfriede Jelinek writes both fiction and plays, but I believe she received the award based on her novels.) Last year's winner, Svetlana Alexeievich, practices a form of creative nonfiction that had not been highlighted among prior winners, though a few past laureates, including former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and philosopher Henri Bergson have been recognized for nonfiction prose. I also don't think an openly gay or queer writer has won in some time, but I could be wrong. That appears to be a blind spot among the Nobel judges.

(And as I have pointed out many times in the past, quite a few of the greatest writers were completely overlooked by the Nobel committee. That is going to continue to happen with a prize going to only one writer per year, most of whom are European and male, and which overlooks work by women, work that is very formally innovative, politically complicated, and work not regularly translated into major European languages. One writer about whom I'll post soon, Elena Ferrante, strikes me as potentially falling in this category, not just because of the controversies that have swirled around her "identity," but also because her dazzling, profound work is also so popular, within and outside Italy.)

So: instead of a long argument about the history of the award, a rundown of good or bad prior choices, and so on, here's a short list of people I think are deserving. I should point out that I tweeted thoughts to Shigekuni about his Nobel Prize list, and we have some overlap. I also found Two Lines Press's conversation, arranged in betting fashion, intriguing, though I wish they'd gone a bit deeper with their praise and critiques. I admire a number of the writers they include, some of whom make my list. A third and superb run-down of the global greats appears at The Birdcage. One thing that I think should occur is more double prizes, or even a triple prize, as sometimes occur in the Chemistry and Physics categories. Some of the writers listed below are getting up there in age, so rather than dragging things out, honor several in one swoop, and be done with it!

(I should point out that Ladbroke's list is out, and as usual, it includes some of the usual suspects and some idiosyncratic choices. These are the folks the bettors think might win. At the top is Haruki Murakami, a writer whose work I'm quite fond of, but who should not be selected over any of the people listed below. Yet again, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are high on the list. Others who appear include John Banville, Jon Fosse (I read him for the first time a few years ago and was charmed), Peter Handke (politics may doom him again), Peter Nadas (he wrote a giant novel, which always impresses people), Amos Oz (I'm a fan), A. B. Yehoshua (also a fan of his), Adam Zagejewski (beloved by comp lit people), Juan Marsé (hmm), Kjell Askildsen (never read him but I know he's controversial), and Doris Kareva (never read her). Note that other than Murakami, Adonis (in second place at 6/1 odds), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (fourth at 10/1 odds), Oz and Nadas, all of the other writers are...European! Do scroll down for some of the interesting choices below.)

Frankétienne (Allison Shelley for
The New York Times)

Anyways, here's my list:

‡. Adonis - One of the major poets in contemporary Arabic literature, enchantingly lyrical and formally daring, he'd be a timely pick, and probably should have received the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

‡. John Ashbery  - Perhaps the most influential living English-language poet, 89 years old and still writing and publishing.

‡. Tahar ben Jelloun - Prolific, intense, and a major living North African and Francophone fiction writer.

‡. Can Xue - She has been labeled by male critics as crazy, but this self-taught genius is a lodestar in Chinese-language literature. Her chances of winning the prize right now are probably low, however, because of the recent award to Mo Yan and a prior one in 2000 to Gao Xiangjin. From what I can tell based on the translations of the work of all three, Can is the best and most aesthetically daring of these three.
`
‡. Juan Goytisolo - Among living Spanish-language writers, he is a pathblazer, and his trilogy, which includes Count Julian, is a landmark in Hispanophone literature. One of my favorites of his works is a much more modest but highly inventive and entertaining work, The Garden of Secrets. He's openly gay and has harshly criticized European colonialism, so he may never win.

‡. Nuruddin Farah - One of the most important writers of East Africa, an author of influential, engaging and beautiful novels, Farah would be a great choice.

‡. Frankétienne - Haiti's powerhouse, a master artist in Caribbean and African Diasporic literature, this author has left his mark in numerous genres, and should have won the Nobel Prize over some of the lackluster picks of recent years. He has predicted his death will come in 2020, so get on it, Swedish Academy!

‡. Patricia Grace - Grace has deeply enriched New Zealand and Maori literature, Grace is the author of numerous highly praised novels, collections of short stories, and children's books. She received the 2008 Neustadt International Prize.

‡. Wilson Harris - Guyanese-British, utterly original, prolific, and now 95 or so. One of my heroes and one of the greats.

‡. Kim Hyesoon - I cannot read Korean, but I am highly persuaded by poet Don Mee Choi's excellent translations of Kim's work. No writer from Korea has ever won the award, so Kim would be  a positive first.

‡. Ismael Kadaré - An Albanian writer, and thus a European, though Albania remains figuratively and literally on the margins of Europe. I have read only one of his novels and it was as good as the novels I've read by any of the last 10 laureates, and outrageously funny.

‡. Laszlo Krasznahorkai - As European fiction writers go he is in a category of his own. His Seiobo There Below is, like past laureate J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello an innovation on the novel form deserving the highest praise. I believe his health is stellar, but I think it should go to several others who are older and more frail first. But very deserving.

‡. Abdellatif Laâbi -This Moroccan poet's oeuvre ranks among the finest in contemporary Francophone and North African literature.

‡. Antonio Lobo Antunes - I have long been a fan of his, but I cannot ever forget how my Azorean teacher, guiding me through Portuguese conversation, dismissed him as a writer who needed "the dictatorship" and "war" to have something to write about. She was much more positive about other Portuguese writers like Jorge de Sena, Fernando Namora, and of course, José Saramago, who received the Nobel Prize.

‡. Friederike Mayröcker / Alexander Kluge - German-language writers haven't had to suffer long droughts in recent years, but these two are so original they deserve some kind of major honor. Mayröcker is an Austrian poet and playwright, while Kluge is a German fiction writer, philosopher and filmmaker. Their work looks like no one else's. Both are up there in years, so give it to both of the if one is even in the running.

‡. Cormac McCarthy - His prose is singular, his scope is narrow, and his work is most certainly not of an "idealistic" nature, which was Alfred Nobel's charge for the prize, but when McCarthy is on, he is really on. I should note that I am rereading The Road with my graduate seminar now, and it is even more moving than my first reading of it. Blood Meridian is one of the greatest and most disturbing American novels of the last 50 years too.

‡. Nicanor Parra - He is 102. (102!!!) His poems are scrumptious morsels that make you go Wow. He is a pioneer of "anti-poems." His oeuvre is considerable, inventive, and impressive. He should have received the Nobel Prize two decades ago.

‡. Adélia Prado - One of Brazil's leading poets, highly readable, a poet of daily life, desire, the soul laid bare, prolific, and the recipient of many national awards. Very consistent and consistently very good.

‡. Ngugi wa Thiong'o - A pioneering, politically engaged and prodigious writer who has transformed the landscape of African literature. An excellent choice.

‡. Ko Un - Again, I don't read Korean, but his name has popped up for years as a potential winner. He's a poet so that would be a plus no matter what.

‡. Jay Wright - If there were a prize solely for originality and daring, or for lyric excellence, Wright would have won it long ago. He is one of the main predecessors to poets like Nathaniel Mackey. He's 81....

‡. Raúl Zurita - One of the leading Latin American poets, highly original, compelling ironic and strange, and quite prolific. He also wrote against the Chilean dictatorship while living under it.

Poem: Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez
(courtesy of AALBC.com)

Earlier this semester, as part of my undergraduate literature class on The Black Arts Movement, I taught a number of poems by Sonia Sanchez (1934-), about whom I've written on here before, and among the many that moved me again, after having not looked at them in many years, was this one, "blues," from the landmark Black Fire anthology that LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal edited in 1968. In it Sanchez demonstrates the gifts that have made her one of the most important poets of that group as well as major poet today; the skillful handling in manner almost so subtle as to seem effortless of poetic music and rhythm, her grasp of irony and humor, the ability to shift registers, and the ability to make the personal resonate beyond herself. Likeher sister poets in the Black Arts Movement she made the male "warriors" did not forget there would be no revolution--or any of them--without women, and she often did so, as critic and poet Cherise Pollard points out in a wonderful article on the Black Arts Movement, with a deft, subversive hand and eye. The poem opens with a statement of real blues, and by the end, as the blues often do, has turned those challenges, that pain, inside out. As she was turned (inside) out, bringing out another aspect of the blues. Several students have called her poetry a revelation. I feel the same way about her. Great in so many ways.

blues

in the night
in the half hour
negro dreams
i hear voices knocking at the door
i see walls dripping screams up
and down the halls.
                 won't someone open
the door for me? won't some
one schedule my sleep
and don't ask no questions?
noise.
      like when he took me to his
home away from home place
and i died the long sought after
death he'd planned for me.
                        (yeah. bessie
he put in the bacon and it overflowed
                                  the pot)
and two days later
when i was talking
i started to grin.
as everyone knows
i'm still grinning.

Copyright © Sonia Sanchez, from Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. 1968.

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni
(www.afropoets.net)

Ah, Nikki Giovanni (1943-). When I was in junior high and starting high school she was my favorite poet. There was something about the directness of her address, the humorous way she dealt with frustration and rage (though she wasn't always so funny), her articulation of power in the face of marginalization, her truthfulness about what it meant and means to be young and black and living in the US (and she was at least a generation or two older than me, but everything she wrote spoke immediately to me), her sophisticated use of vernacular, all of it made her a poet I could not get enough of. There were other poets I adulated at this age, but alongside nearly all of them, Giovanni held pride of place until I turned 16 or so, and then I drifted away from her work.

I used to be able to recite "Nikki-Rosa," "Ego-Tripping," and some of her other poems by memory. Now I can only summon a few lines. But I have been fortunate to be able to teach her work in the intervening years, to junior high and high school students, and then to college students, and I marvel at how readily they take to her, how powerfully her work continues to resonate.  Among literary scholars, though, she doesn't make the same impact. I sometimes think it's because she's considered not especially profound or interesting or innovative, that she's read as too simple and not worthy of research beyond work on the Black Arts Movement. That may be just my misreading, but I would be hard-pressed to recall any discussion of I've had with folks teaching poetry and poetics, except those working specifically in African American literature, or with other creative writers, over the last 10 years, in which her name arose.

That is, outside of the moment when the tragic events at Virginia Tech thrust her back into public view. Yet this year at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago, her public conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis--which I couldn't attend because I was teaching at that hour--reportedly was packed.  Among the creative writing community she still is a draw. That results not only from her poetry, which speaks for itself, but from her work as a teacher, consciousness-raiser, and mentor, especially to younger writers. She has taught at Virginia Tech since 1987, where she is now Distinguished Professor, and has received many awards for her poetry, which can be found in more than two dozen collections. She also has published essays, children's book, and recorded her work on vinyl and CD.

Here are two early poems by Giovanni that capture some of what I described above. Both are also about being a poet and writing poetry, which is to say, about art, artists and their power.  As a young poet who saw the need for and participated in a social and cultural revolution, she was aware, even when expressing her doubts, that what she was doing had some value. Poetry does make things happen, pace W. H. Auden (whose poem in which this formulation, more carefully and fully stated, I probably should select for tomorrow), though not in the ways that poets might imagine and that others dismiss. What is clear is that good poems do survive, and their work continues long after they were written and for that we should always be thankful. So thank you to Giovanni, and here are two of her poems. Enjoy.

kidnap poem

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

My Poem

i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won't stop
the revolution

i have been robbed
it looked like they knew
that i was to be hit
they took my tv
my two rings
my piece of african print
and my two guns
if they take my life
it won't stop
the revolution

my phone is tapped
my mail is opened
they've caused me to turn
on all my old friends
and all my new lovers
if i hate all black
people
and all negroes
it won't stop
the revolution

if i never write
another poem
or short story
if i flunk out
of grad school
if my car is reclaimed
and my record player
won't play
and if i never see
a peaceful day
or do a meaningful
black thing
it won't stop
the revolution

the revolution
is in the streets
and if i stay on 
the fifth floor
it will go on
if i never do
anything
it will go on

Copyright © Nikki Giovanni, "kidnap poem" and "My Poem," from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996. All rights reserved.

Poems + Translations: Ana Cristina César

Ana Cristina César (from http://tomzine24.wordpress.com)

Several years ago I came across the poetry of Ana Cristina César (1952-1983), and was immediately struck by how different they looked and sounded in Portuguese, to much of the Brazilian poetry I had been reading. Or they looked different primarily because I did not yet have a context for them. As I read more and studied up on César, I learned that there were, in fact, a number of poets (Cacaso, Chacal, Francisco Alvim and Paulo Leminski, among others) with whom and with whose work hers was in conversation, though that did not diminish the singular quality of her poems for me. I also learned that she was and is still considered one of the most important Brazilian poets of the 1970s era.  A native of São Paulo, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, studied and spent time in London, and later resided in Brasília. What I was detecting in the Portuguese was a poetry that, whether written in verse or prose, often unfolds like a conversation or dialogues, the intimacy enhanced and mitigated by Cesar's quiet, often irreverent, sometimes quite dark humor; a wide range of references, allusions and irony; and above all by her attentiveness to the power and limits of eros.  A queer, feminist poet, César produced poetry that represents a critique, in important ways, of the traditions, in Brazilian and more globally, of poetry as it has developed.  Sometimes her poetry doesn't look like poetry at all; it approximates what another poet I've am drawn to, Nicanor Parra, has called anti-poetry.  At the very least it raises the question of what is poetic, what is literary, and who has the power to designate it as such. American literature and culture was particularly important to her at one stage in her life, and one her strangest little poems comprises nothing more than an index of names of figures she considered significant to her life and art. It is, appropriately, titled "Index of Proper Names" ("Index onomástica"); I include it below.

As the dates above suggest, hers was a brief life, though she began publishing her poetry in childhood, and by the time she was in her 20s, she had gained public notice as an avant-garde pioneer, ranking among the best of the Poetas marginas (Marginal Poets). She was also queer, and her work espoused a discernible feminism. Her fame inside and outside Brazil has steadily grown since her death, by suicide, at the age of 31. During her lifetime she published several collections, including the acclaimed Luvas de pelica (Kid Gloves, 1980), and A teus pés (At Your Feet, 1982), as well as the prose work Literatura não é documentação (Literature Is Not Documentation), on the politics of documentary filmmaking.  I have translated a number of her poems, and featured a rough translation of one (with a companion poem by another Brazilian poet favorite of mine, Leminski), on this blog back in 2010.  Although there is a fine British selection of her poems, Intimate Diary, translated by Cecilia McCullough, Patricia E. Page, and David Treece (Boulevard Books, 1997), I don't believe an American one exists. A fellow translator told me the other day, however, that a very famous American poet is now translating Cesar, so her translations will probably appear in book form before any of mine do. At least I have this blog.

Here then are "First Lesson" and "Index of Proper Names," both of which I translated from a bilingual Spanish-Portuguese anthology of her work entitled Álbum de Retazos: Antología Critica Bilinguë, Ana Cristina César, edited by Luciana Di Leone; Florencia Garramuño; and Ana Carolina Puente, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003. The first is overtly about poetry of a particular kind, the second about literature more broadly. Both press at the very limits of what lyric poetry is; are they--especially the second--even poems as we usually know them? Also it's Poem in Your Pocket Day; both of these poems are short enough to carry around in a pocket or your memory, whichever's easier.

FIRST LESSON

The genres of poetry are: lyric, satirical, didactic,
    epic, light.
The lyric genre comprises lyricism.
Lyricism is the translation of a subjective feeling, sincere
    and personal.
It is the language of the heart, of love.
Lyricism is also so named because in other times
    sentimental verses were declaimed to the sound of

    the lyre.
Lyricism can be:
a) Elegiac, when it treats sad matters, almost always death.
b) Bucolic, when verse about rustic subjects.
c) Erotic, when verse about love.
Elegiac lyricism comprises the elegy, the dirge, the

    threnody, the epitaph, and the epicedium, or funeral

    oath.
Elegy is poetry which treats dolesome topics.
The dirge is poetry in homage to a dead person.
It was declaimed beside a bonfire on which the corpse was
    incinerated.
Threnody is a poetry which reveals the heart's sorrows.
Epitaph is a short verse form engraved on tombstones.
Epicedium is a poetry which relates to the life
    of a dead person.
I look for a long while at a poem's body
until I lose sight of whatever is not body
and feel, separated between my teeth,
a filament of blood
on my gums

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Alvim, Francisco
Augusto, Eudoro
Bandeira, Manuel
Bishop, Elizabeth
Buarque, Helô
Carneiro, Angela
Dickinson, Emily
Drabik, Grazyna
Drummond, Carlos
Freitas F°, Armando
Holiday, Billie
Joyce, James
Kleinman, Mary
Mansfield, Catherine
Meireles, Cecilia
Melim, Angela
Mendes, Murilo
Muricy, Katia
Paz, Octavio
Pedrosa, Vera
Rhys, Jean
Stein, Gertrude
Whitman, Walt

All poems, Copyright © Ana Cristina César, 2006, 2012; Translations by John Keene, 2010, 2012. All rights reserved.

Poem: Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

Do students read Denise Levertov (1923-1997) in high school or college these days? Do high school teachers or college professors teach her work?  I never hear anyone mention her name, and it's a shame. It was in junior high that I first read a poem of hers, though I don't remember which; I made a faint impression, but an impression it did make. I decided to learn more about her when I started coming across books of hers from the 1960s and 1970s at used bookstores in Boston, and became curious about her poems, how they worked, why they worked--because compared to other poets I was reading a lot of then, they seemed deceptively understated, quiet, sometimes even casual, shorn of metaphor and allusion, often given to descriptions of objects, scenes, people, places--and then about her, her life, her relationship with the poets closely and loosely grouped about the Black Mountain school and her political stances, especially during the Vietnam War.

She wrote a number of poems about her opposition to this conflict and against war in general, especially in the volume The Sorrow Dance (1967) and The Freeing of the Dust (1975) and her progressive views on many different topics are evident in her poetry. Yet it is the poetry itself, limpid and lucid, proceeding often as if she were speaking but carefully shaped, full of internal music, that testifies to her importance in American letters.  Levertov was born in the United Kingdom, however; her father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who converted to Christianity, and her mother was Welsh. She served as a nurse during World War II, and came to the US only in 1948, a year after marrying an American writer, Mitchell Goodman. From then on, through her affiliation with the Black Mountain writers, on to her final works, which include more personal and sometimes overtly confessional lyrics, she published regularly and to considerable recognition, while taking stands on behalf of women's liberation and civil rights, and teaching and mentoring younger writers, including at Stanford University from 1981 to 1994.

Here's one of her poems, "To the Reader," which gives a sense of how effortlessly profound she can be. At first, she contrasts the experience of the reader with an almost generic scene occurring somewhere in nature (which of course could be and is, ironically, a scene in this book), which quickly becomes much more specific and memorable with that "saffron" (note too the subtle, but effective music here, born of deftly deployed prosody, consonance and rhyme), and then in the second stanza, she shifts to a more ambigious scene--where is it taking place, described as it is with evocative lyric precision--"lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian"--and then, only in the final paragraph, do we get a metaphor, the sea turning the pages of its waves, like the reader of the book, the final repetition both mirroring the action of the reader and the sea, while also inverting the action through personification so that it's the sea's "dark pages" that now have agency, turning the pages, of life and time; the natural world is set into motion by the work of art, this poem. Of course analogically these shifts are akin to what reading offers, what a good book, a great poem, can do: leaps of all kinds are possible, not just between stanzas, but between words, images, metaphors, or, as is the case here, metonyms and images, activating the world and life itself. I do hope readers turn to her from time to time; there is much to gain from doing so, and much to love.

TO THE READER

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

Copyright © Denise Levertov, "To the Reader," from The Jacob's Ladder, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. All rights reserved.

Poem: Martha Collins

Today's poem is by a poet I've never featured before, but this poem, and this poet's work, have intrigued me, not least because of one rhetorical device (of the many) she uses so well: repetition. In several of the poems by Martha Collins (1940-) that I've read, repetition serves as the means for what might in music be called motivic variation, at least if I'm grasping the concept right.

She will introduce a word, a phrase, an idea, and then repeat it with variations in its placement, context, meaning, function. In one of her better known poems, "Lines," she spins from that word's many meanings a complex little poem about composition, connections, relationships, the algebra of love. In many poems she plays with the mechanics of syntax, semantics and spatiality, allowing her to make quite complex works with the seemingly simplest of tools--think Williams Carlos Williams's machine made of words, but with hidden, powerful gears.  It should hardly be surprising, then, that she has written books titled Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), and The Arrangement of Space (G. Smith Publisher, 1991).

The poem below operates a little differently, but as you read it you start to see how she can take an idea and draw all sorts of interesting things out of it, using, among her tools, repetition. This is not to say, however, that her focus is only on language; in her 2006 book-length poem, Blue Front (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press), she took on history directly, writing about a lynching that occurred in her father's hometown of Cairo, Illinois, bringing to bear her poetic skills to render unforgettable one of many too-forgotten, horrible moments in American history.

Martha Collins is a native of Omaha, Nebraska, and established  the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She currently is the Pauline Delaney Professor in Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She has published five books of poetry, and one chapbook, and has edited a book of critical essays on poet Louise Bogan, and translated two books of poetry from Vietnamese, The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1997), edited with Ba Chung Nguyen; and Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da (2005). Among her awards are the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Blue Front, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

SEVERAL THINGS

Several things could happen in this poem.
Plums could appear, on a pewter plate.
A dead red hare, hung by one foot.
A vase of flowers. Three shallots.

A man could sing, in a burgundy robe
with a gold belt tied in a square knot.
Someone could unite the knot.
A woman could toss a gold coin.

A stranger could say the next line,
I have been waiting for this,"
and offer a basket piled with apples
picked this morning, before the rain.

It could rain in this poem,
but if it rained, the man would continue
to sing as the burgundy silk fell
to the polished parquet floor.

It could snow in this poem:
remember how the hunter stamped his feet
before he leaned his gun in the corner
and hung his cap on the brass hook?

Perhaps the woman should open the ebony bench
and find the song her mother used to sing.
Listen: the woman is playing the song.
The man is singing the words.

Meanwhile the hunter is taking a warm bath
in the clean white tub with clawed legs.
Or has the hunter left? Are his boots
making tracks in the fallen snow?

When does the woman straighten the flowers?
Is that before the hunter observes
the tiny pattern on the vase?
Before the man begins to peel the shallots?

Now is the time for the woman
to slice the apples into a blue bowl.
A child could be watching the unbroken peel
spiral below the knife.

Last but not least, you could appear.
You could be the red-cheeked child,
the hunter, or the stranger.
You could stay for a late meal.

A Provencal recipe.
A bright red hare, shot at dawn.
Shallots. Brandy. Pepper, salt.
An apple in the pan.

Copyright © Martha Collins, "Several Things," from The Catastrophe of Rainbows, Cleveland: Cleveland State University Press, 1985. All rights reserved.

Poem: Lorna Dee Cervantes

I was trying to figure out how to introduce the following poem, by Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954-), which I thought of when I read the hedging admission by the House Majority Whip, Eric Cantor (R-VA) that anti-Semitism and racism were (still) a problem in his (the Republican House) caucus.  Well, duh. (Yet does he realize how he's been part of the problem?) I read this poem many years ago and recall it every so often because of how it captures so much of what was surging through me back then, and what I still sometimes feel, beginning with her opening line, "In my land there are no distinctions." Yet she must qualify her utopian statement rather quickly by noting that despite this view, despite the fact that "there are no boundaries," there is a system that is trying to destroy her, there are people whose words and actions are killing her, people who do not want her be alive, that there "is a real enemy / who hates me," and that even some of the best and best-meaning people seem unwilling to do or say anything to stop this.

I also know that she wrote it when she was very young and yet it shows such nuance, such sophistication, then ends with a bang that I feel we shouldn't forget.  We are a country at war, sadly, without our selves, "our various selves," as Amiri Baraka once put it. At any rate, I was thinking of introductions when I came across this 2007 blog post by none other than Cervantes herself, from her blog Lorna Dice, in which she explains to a student named Emily her motivations, the writing of the poem, and what she thinks it means. (Can I just say, I love that with I can read Lorna Dee Cervantes' musings after a few seconds' search via DuckDuckGo. She actually has two other blogs: Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Mission Poetry Center--La Misión Poética)  Cervantes, for those who may not be familiar with her, is a Chicana/Native American (Chumash) poet long active in feminist, progressive, antiracist causes, and has been writing and fighting since the 1970s.

Her first, perhaps best known book, is the award-winning volume Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).  Ten years later she published her second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991), and has gone on to publish two more volumes, while also serving as editor or co-editor of journals and anthologies, teaching (for many year at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at University of California, Berkeley), and keeping the dream of a better world alive through her work in many communities.  Her blog is an extension of this; on it you see she not infrequently responds to young people who contact her about her work, theirs, life in general, the issues they're going through, and it represents yet another aspect of her longtime efforts to improve literacy among young people, especially young Latinos.

One thing I want to note about Cervantes' poetry, especially since I have called attention to her emphasis on social activism, is how much it summons vivid, sensuous details of the natural world, particularly flowers, details of the urban terrain, material aspects of the everyday world, to etch sharp pictures in the mind. In my mind, when I think of her poems, I often see them beginning with the naming of a plant whose blooms, colors, scent, grounds me immediately. She writes many other kinds of poems, but her work also makes clear that one doesn't have to surrender social concerns no matter what or how one is writing a poem.

Now, this famous poem, which seems especially fitting given the rhetoric that regular fills the airwaves and the numerous tragedies, arising out of sexism and misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, religious intolerance, and general disrespect for the humanity of others, for difference and pluralism, that have scarred the news of late. Do read her blog if you get a moment; she doesn't disappoint there or in her poems.

POEM FOR THE YOUNG WHITE MAN
WHO ASKED ME HOW I, AN INTELLIGENT,
WELL-READ PERSON, COULD BELIEVE IN
THE WAR BETWEEN THE RACES

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between the races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this,
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)
I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I cannot reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between the races.

but in this country
there is war.

Copyright © Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-read Person, Could Believe In The War Between The Races," from Emplumada, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Pulitzers Say No Go In Fiction

In the wake of today's announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, which in the Arts and Letters categories went to:

• Tracy K. Smith in poetry, for her collection Life on Mars;  
• Quiara Alegría Hudes in drama for her play Water by the Spoonful;
• John Lewis Gaddis in biography for his critical biography Geore F. Kennan: An American Life;
• Stephen Greenblatt in general nonfiction for his critical history and analysis Swerve: How the World Became Modern;
• Kevin Puts in music, for his opera Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts;
• and the late Manning Marable, in history, after it was moved from biography, for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention;

across the nets people have been noting the decision by the fiction jury, comprising Chair Susan Larson, former book editor at The Times-Picayune and, host of the show The Reading Life on WWNO-FM; Maureen Corrigan, critic in residence at Georgetown University and book critic of NPR's Fresh Air, and novelist and 1999 Pulitzer fiction recipient Michael Cunningham, not to award any of the three finalists the award this year. Who were the three finalists? Dennis Johnson, for Train Dreams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Northwestern University alumna Karen Russell, for Swamplandia! (New York: Alfred A. Knopf); and the late David Foster Wallace, for The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown and Company).

People online have put forward various reasons why none of these novels met the grade. Johnson's supposedly was a republication of an earlier book; Wallace's was posthumously assembled and hardly his strongest work (he was ignored by the Pulitzer committee while he was alive, it should be noted); and Russell's novel, named to top 10 and 25 lists by Publisher's Weekly and NPR...I don't know what happened. The committee (or whoever puts forward the finalists) ignored all of the US finalists and the winner of this yearly cycle's National Book Critics Circle Award. Edith Pearlman (who won for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories), Dana Spiotta (Stone Arabia), Teju Cole (whose Open City I have read and thought one of the best of the year), and Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot), a prior Pulitzer winner in 2002 for his novel Middlesex, were passed over. So too did the Pulitzer committee ignore all of this yearly cycle's National Book Award winners and finalists, who included winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones), Pearlman, Andrew Krivak (The Sojourn), Téa Obreht (whose The Tiger's Wife has received rapturous praise) and Julie Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic), who did receive this year's PEN Faulkner Award for this book.

(I should note that women of color have received more awards this literary award cycle, among them last year's National Book Awards for Fiction and Poetry, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and this year's Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and Drama, perhaps than ever before, a very good sign, not that you'd know this from the lack of attention these authors still generally receive.)

And I could list a raft of works of fiction, novels, short stories, novellas, published since last year's Pulitzer, that should have been seriously considered. So what gives? I don't know, but I also don't know why such an eccentric list emerged in the first place. If anything, given the alleged knock against Johnson's text (and he has received many of the highest literary honors, including the National Book Award for his 2007 novel Tree of Smoke) and the desire, perhaps, not to throw Wallace a posthumous honor, why not just give the prize to Russell, if she made the final trio?  This is, as others who've perused the net are quite aware, not the first time the Pulitzer jury, or the board overseeing the awards, has decided not to name a winner. In 1977 the fiction jury recommended prize go to Norman MacLean for A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (which Robert Redford in 1992 transformed into a beautiful but glacially slow film), but the Pulitzer board, which has sole discretion for awarding the prize, supposedly did not give it. In1974, the fiction jury unanimously recommended the prize go to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but the Pulitzer board apparently said nyet. And in 1971, none of the three novels, The three novels the Pulitzer committee put forth for consideration to the Pulitzer board, Eudora Welty's Losing Battles; Saul Bellow's seethingly racist Mr. Sammler's Planet; and Joyce Carol Oates's The Wheel of Love, were all rejected, thus no award. Bellow received the award in 1976 for Humboldt's Gift, a lesser but less offensive novel, while Welty received it in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter, when any collection of her short stories more obviously merited the honor. Oates has never received the prize, nor has MacLean or Pynchon.

Usually, it seems, there are politics operating behind the scenes, so who knows. Had the Pulitzer Board--which includes many luminaries quite familiar with literature, including classicist, philosopher and political scientist Danielle Allen (of the Institute for Advanced Studies); Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz (also a professor at MIT); author and Columbia J school dean Nicolas Lemann; and University of Pennsylvania historian of the US South and African American history Paul Hahn--felt that none of the selections were adequate, I wish they'd just have picked a book themselves--by Justin Torres (We the Animals), say, or Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow), or Amy Waldman (The Submission) or Kevin Brockmeier (The Illuminations), or Ann Patchett (State of Wonder), or P. Zamora Lindmark (Leche), or Donald Ray Pollack (The Devil All the Time), or any of the other writers listed above.

Of course some may say who cares? Yes, there have been criticisms that Pulitzer, particularly in the fiction category, usually honors a writer not for her or his best work but sometimes as a form of redress for having missed out on the best work (cf. Faulkner, Hemingway, Bellow, etc.). But recent Pulitzers in fiction have defied this. Is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao not Junot Díaz's masterpiece thus far? Was Middlesex not Jeffrey Eugenides's finest novel? Was The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, not perfectly realized? So that canard ought to be tossed out the window, at least as of recent winners (and nominees). But more importantly, the Pulitzer name, for the winners and finalists, does help draw recognition to literary fiction, and also helps sales, and there are few serious writers living in the US today--not a single person listed above, including the most successful ones--who could not benefit from a sales boost. Let's hope they find three finalists and a sure winner next year.

Poem: Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach

One of the poets I discovered while idly browsing one day in a bookstore in New York City was Ann Lauterbach (1942-).  The book was And for Example (Penguin, 1994). I found the poetry entrancingly difficult, which for me is a good sign. Each page drew me in like a magnet, and after I had read half the book in the store, I had to purchase it. I have been reading her work and going to see her read ever since. Among my favorite of her readings are ones she gave at the old Dia Center for the Arts space in Chelsea, which became one of my staples in the late 1990s, and which is where I first saw her perform her signing-thrumming, which I could not stop talking about; and at the Bowery Poetry Club, where I caught her reading "Litany," the very long and dream inducing poem by and with John Ashbery. "I fainted, honey."

A few falls ago, at the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Politics conference at the CUNY Graduate Center, I saw her read with Mei-Mei Berssenbruegge (another poet whose work I adore), and in her pre-reading comments, she explained, in crystalline language, what her aims had been, from book to book. It was the most revelatory thing, and I even wrote about it on this blog. A key, a golden one, she gave to her readers that day, and it has since made her work somewhat less hermetic, my reading of her work somewhat easier, but Lauterbach's poetry is nevertheless no less enchanting.  And it can be relatively straightforward and moving as well. She is the David and Ruth Schwab II Professor at Bard College, where she directs their MFA program.

Here is a two-part poem by Lauterbach, who is the author of 8 full collections and a book of critical essays. "New Brooms" is not strictly self-reflexive about poetry so much as it interrogates language itself, as its opening section makes clear. Readers of Seismosis will note how some of Lauterbach has seeped into my work; and she was a graduate professor of my collaborator, Chris Stackhouse. Influence!

NEW BROOMS

Of representation (frame)
from one to another (use)
between the articulation (space)
of language (tree)
of clarity by means of (intent)
of humans (speech)
on the contrary (response)
with itself, in its own density (earth)
for it is not (image)
from the first to the second (wave)
seizes upon (law)
within the other (us)
without those of (tradition)
point by point (nature)
of or to (the same)
and so on into a possible good
the waxed carnation's cribbed flounce
shade distinctly wound among new brooms
panache of the ever-tan September
And so what is said is at an angle
architectural
over the floor from which the soliloquy drafts
        upwards, as if restitution
             could be a chant surrounding disaster.
Bruise on the arm lingers in absentia.
Buzz saw in the alley.
Speech, oracle of intention, dissolves
into the sea's remission
as up through an imperfect net comes another exaltation.

    2.

Some here twitch along a heading, out
out, and came thou back along the periphery,
shroud tracked, foregathered,
tune integrating chorale
tautly drawn into rainspit, down
through the breaking mirror's reminiscent shield, bethou
said the maiden, bethou said the monk.
Not yet, said the bird, elongating distance,
high among pines and pale rock.
But had we spoken of the quarry?
Or were we in a room, video-taped, among dry towels
and the humid inquisition of the crowd?
We were in the crowd, "you and I" "he and she" and so
transpired over its edge into
bodily harm: an eye for a hand, some mantra of war.
The stipulating crew began to assert its origins
and what pale and what golden
shimmied into paradox, whittling the streets with monograms,
the walls with cool but generative dust.
The pictures came back from their instants.
A genetic stroke of luck is not to have this receptor.
Yet another instruction, one we still cannot read.

to Thomas Dumm

Copyright © Ann Lauterbach, "New Brooms," from If In Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000, New York: Penguin, 2000.

Poem: Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf (Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA)

A colleague, John B., mentioned today that I was posting much more, and it's true, though there are always 2-3 more things I'd like to post about than I manage to post here. A few weeks back, another colleague, Fran B., told me about Fred Wilson's show at Pace Galleries, and I went. It was really amazing, one of the most enjoyable art exhibits I've attended in a while. And Fred Wilson and his partner, artist Whitfield Lovell were there, in the gallery! So I want to blog about that. And I said I'd post a review of Red Tails--what was that, a year ago?--and I've wanted to write about Steve McQueen's Shame...and on and on.  Oh well. One of these days soon.

Today, it's a poem, by Mohja Kahf (1967-), whose wonderful little collection E-mails from Scheherezad (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003) I came across a few years ago. I don't get out that much, but I think it's a smart and provocative gathering of poems, and I rarely see it or her mentioned anywhere, so I thought I'd feature one of the poems, since that's one of the things I can do with this blog. (Can I just say that I wish English had diminutives like Spanish and Portuguese, because it's my natural instinct to use them frequently and affectionately when talking about things like, well, this blog.)

Who is Mohja Kahf? She was born in Damascus, Syria, and now is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She also is a pioneer in the field of Muslim American literature. The poem below gives a sense of some of the subjects Kahf's poetry addresses, though many of the poems, which range in length and form, directly address the experiences of Arab immigrants and Arab and Muslim Americans, especially women, in the US, and many are as seriously fiercesome in their tone as this one is wittily fiercesome. It's truly about poetry and poetics, about form and statement, about poetic effects and aims, about how any poem by this poet will initially be read but what she's--it, the poem is--really trying to do. Do read it. I think she, and it, succeed.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SONNET

So you think I play with the multiculture card
and sign up for affirmative action verse,
slide into print with poetry that's worse?
So you think I get excused from being good

by throwing in Third-World saffron and some veils?
Now is the summer of minority discontent
They have no Idea of Order in the West--
But I do not insist on difference. Difference pales 

beside the horrors facing our race
--the human one: hunger, HIV, genocide,
the unconscionable global marketplace
Where is the salve? We write. We recognize

--we must--each other in millennial glow
or we will die from what we do not know

That's all these smoke-and-mirror poems do
I came across the world to write for you

1998

Copyright © Mohja Kahf, "Affirmative Action Blues," from E-mails from Scheherezad, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003. All rights reserved.

Poem: Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen (from Reed College's website)

Since I'm going to be very busy the rest of this week (cf. the next post), I need to be more concise with these introductions, and so today I've selected a poem that requires the reader do a bit of the heavy lifting, though it really isn't that tough--though the poem is "heavy," in the sense that people of my father's (50s and 60s) generation used to use that term, which is to say, complex and profound. The poem is "Any Lit," and the poet is one of my favorites, Harryette Mullen (1953-). She once gave me and everyone else in the poetry workshop she was teaching an excellent bit of advice, which was: instead of waiting for the right time to write, to devote even a tiny sliver of each day towards writing a poem--or writing anything--and so by the end of every week, every month, every year, you'd have something before you. It's not always so easy to do, but it does work!

Harryette has published seven books of poetry, and I first learned about her work from members of the Dark Room Writers Collective, who had come across her second, highly innovative book, Trimmings (1991), which formally riffs off the work of an experimental predecessor, Gertrude Stein, suffusing Steinian language with even more play, eros and soul. Harryette was on her way, and the poem, a quintessential example of her work over the last few years, below demonstrates her playfulness, wit and humor, but also her rigor. It utilizes formal constraints but in a different way than rhetoricians urging a close study of Quintilian or Oulipo poets wielding n+7 techniques by combining many of the rules, which is to say, mechanisms of possibility, of the two. So there is the rhetorical device of the anaphora that launches each line, and the epistrophic repetition of the final word beginning with "m," with the constraint that the fourth word in each line has to possess the initial sound "u," as in "yew," followed by the words "beyond my." The regularity creates anticipation as you read and listen, since you have a sense of what's coming but you are continually surprised. Then there is the issue of these metaphorical comparisons in analogical relation, creating their own logic line by line, but then collectively creating a logic (or illogic), that feels like an apt figure for literature or, more specifically poetry. 

Okay, it sounds crazy, but look at what this poet does with it. I find it can't get her poems out of my head for a while after reading a few of them. You are a euchre beyond my Mah Jongg.... A great teacher as well as person, Harryette is a professor of English at UCLA, and in addition to her poetry has published important scholarly and critical works, and fiction. I would love to see what she might do with (and to) a novel!

ANY LIT

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone
You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia
You are a union beyond my meiosis
You are a unicycle beyond my migration
You are a univese beyond my mitochondria
You are a Eucharist beyond my myocardiagram
You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur
You are a eureka beyond my maitai
You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper
You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird
You are a unit beyond my mileage
You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind's eye
You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key
You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe
You are a Utah beyond my microcosm
You are a Uranus beyond my Miami
You are a youth beyond my mylar
You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia
You are a Ukrainian beyond my Maimonides
You are a Euclid beyond my miter box
You are a Univac beyond my minus sign
You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro
You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan
You are a U-boat beyond my mind-control
You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma
You are a eurethra beyond my Mysore
You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow
You are a ubiquity beyond my minority
You are a eunuch beyond my migraine
You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness
You are a urinal beyond my Midol
You are a uselesness beyond my myopia

Copyright © Harryette Mullen, "Any Lit," from Sleeping with the Dictionary, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. All rights reserved.

Poem: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes (www.everseradio.com)

I've been trying to avoid posting many of the obvious, well-known poems on poetry, but I'm going to break down and publish this one, by the great Marianne Moore (1887-1972), who not only was born and grew up in the suburban town (Kirkwood) right next to the one I grew up in (Webster Groves, the hometown also once upon a time of Jonathan Franzen, among others) right outside Saint Louis, but since baseball season has begun and she was a huge fan, I think it's especially appropriate to post her poem "Poetry" today. (Though there is no baseball in it. I am just looking for excuses. I love this poem.)

She is, as I need tell no one, among the most important American poets of the 20th century, a key figure in American Modernism and a correspondent of and peer to other figures from this era, including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens; a deft handler of syllabic and free verse; the winner of nearly every major US poetry prize of her day; and the mentor of many poets who came after, including Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. She even wrote liner notes for Muhammad Ali's album I Am the Greatest!. (At the risk of highlighting an aspect of her person that I have done with any other poet, I must mention her habitual outfit: a full black cape, with a tricorner hat. Those who know me know I aspire to be able to pull off the former, if not the latter.)

The following poem, "Poetry," is considered one of her best, and rightly so, in that it captures the esssence of her style and approach, her concerns as a poet, the movement of her mind, her particular mode of formal and metrical play, and the wit she deployed throughout her career. Her poems visually convey a feeling of fluidity which contrasts with her syllabic control, creating works of considerable complexity. Your eyes and ears are always moving through her poems at multiple speeds. Opening the poem with a disavowal, "I, too, dislike it," followed by the colloquialism "fiddle," is very Moore, but then she begins to delve more deeply into the fiddle, qualifying her appraisal, first through negation "with a perfect contempt for it," followed by an abstract commonplace, almost banal and sentimental in its simplicity, "a place for the genuine," that assumes complexity because of the prior qualifications.  And then she proceeds from there.

Lastly I must note that this is the 1919 version of this poem, which appeared in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse. Founded by Alfred Kreymbourg in 1915, the Others anthologies appeared for 4 years, and published the work of many of the major figures from this period, including Moore, Williams, Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, and Fenton Johnson.  Moore subsequently revised and republished this poem over the next five decades, including an infamously radical 1967 truncation to just three lines (!), proving that even the greatest artists are not always the best judges of their work.

In the 1924 version, in addition to tinkering with the lineation, pruning away a few words (often a good thing) and changing others, so that "autocrats" becomes "poets," Moore felt the need to place her strange but apt poetic formulation "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" in quotes. This was not a direct quotation, though, but more like a signaling of her own discomfort with the line; yet where else in poetry (or literature, or art for that matter) can you find imaginary gardens with real toads? She was on to something powerful about the human imagination and language itself, as poetry always is.

POETRY

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
                beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
                one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
       Hands that can grasp, eyes
       that can dilate, hair that can rise
            if it must, these things are important not be-
                    cause a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them
                but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to
                become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us – that we
       do not admire what
       we cannot understand. The bat,
            holding on upside down or in quest of some-
                    thing to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,
                a tireless wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a
                horse that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician – case after case
        could be cited did
        one wish it; nor is it valid
            to discriminate against "business documents
                    and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important.
                One must make a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half
                     poets,
                the result is not poetry,
    nor till the autocrats among us can be
        "literalists of
        the imagination" – above
            insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
                in them, shall we have
    it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                in defiance of their opinion –
        the raw material of poetry in
     all its rawness, and
     that which is on the other hand,
        genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Poem: Emily Dickinson

Have I ever posted a poem by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a poet I mention in the post prior to this one, and one of the best and most original to ever have been born on US soil? Of course I have, how could I not? I did so back in 2007, for Earth Day, and again in 2009, when blogging about "snow" poems. Dickinson's oeuvre contains poems about so many different topics, written in such an inventive, allusive manner, that you could (someone probably has) designate each day for several years to a given theme, and then find a poem of hers to illuminate--since illustrate doesn't begin to capture what her poetry does--it.

Among her several poems specifically mentioning poetry, there is this gem, that I recommend reading aloud to get its full savor.  It's meaning is self-explanatory, and anyone who loves reading (and anyone who, as some of my recent posts have shown, who's studying the neuroscientific effects of imaginative writing) knows what's the Belle of Amherst is saying deep in her or his heart: there really are few vehicles out there capable of carrying us away, as well as deep inside ourselves, as poems and other forms of literature can and often do.

XCIX: THERE IS NO FRIGATE LIKE A BOOK

THERE is no frigate like a book 
  To take us lands away, 
Nor any coursers like a page 
  Of prancing poetry. 
  
This traverse may the poorest take         5
  Without oppress of toll; 
How frugal is the chariot 
  That bears a human soul!

Copyright © Emily Dickinson, "There is no frigate like a book," from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, with an introduction by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1924, published by Bartleby.com, 2000.

Poem: Tess Gallagher

I've never blogged a poem by Tess Gallagher (1943-), a poet whose work I know of but have not much read, but when I came across the poem below, "I Stop Writing the Poem," I knew I had to post it, since it's a poem about writing poems that's also a poem about grief, relationships, gender, socialization. It's a poem about the lives the poem's lyric speaker has led, that Gallagher has led, that millions of women lead (with the "poem" being whatever it is they are doing that they stop doing to undertake a more mundane but important task, for someone else, and for, as we come to see, themselves), that many women poets lead.

And yet it's also a poem that in its powerful simplicity, ordinariness and universality readers of any background can connect to. In its brevity and prosody, it is also memorable; you could probably memorize this poem in a few hours if you tried, which was, once upon a time, the mark of an effective short poem. Gallagher notes in her pre-reading remarks in the audio clip below that she wrote the poem after the death of her third husband, the iconic fiction writer and poet Raymond Carver (1938-1988), and once you know this, it takes on a deeper richness, the words unfolding like a consolation the speaker utters to herself to keep going, yet you need not know anything about her life to draw something profound from the poem.

Gallagher is the author of some 11 books of poetry, three collections of short fiction, and three other works of prose. She has taught at many colleges and universities, including Bucknell University and Whitman College, and has received many honors for her work.

I STOP WRITING THE POEM

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

Copyright © Tess Gallagher, "I Stop Writing the Poem," from Moon Crossing Bridge, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1992.

Happy Women's History Month

March 1, 2012 marks the beginning of Women's History Month, and just as I believe on a daily basis if we are talking about and exploring and writing history, thinking about our society and how it functions and might improve, we cannot but focus on the history and contributions of women, without whom none of us would be here, and without whom this world would fall apart immediately.  In my LGBTQ class, one of the first documents we looked at was "The Woman Identified Woman," by RADICALESBIANS, formerly the Gay Lavender Menace, one of several groups that splintered off from the Gay Liberation Front.

Released on May Day (May 1), 1970 (and eschewing the parodic tone of Valerie Solanas's 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto while sacrificing none of that or similar documents' political acuity) and distributed to attendees of the National Organization for Women-sponsored Second Annual Conference to Unite Women, and then published in Come Out!'s 4th issue, it is very much an artifact of its time and moment, down to its rhetoric, but like similar documents it set the stage for countless theoretical, biopolitical and political, cultural and aesthetic interventions to follow. As it did for me when I first came across it, the text resounded for many of my students, across genders, and become of the documents that they circled back to in our in-class discussions and in their response papers. Its insights are ones, however, that I think still don't pervade the public consciousness, despite the many decades of LGBT and later queer (and queered, and as E. Patrick Johnson and others coined, "quare") studies.

Here, in tribute, are two quotes, the opening paragraph, and the closing.

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society – perhaps then, but certainly later – cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society–the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her – in which case she cannot accept herself – and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women – because we are all women.

And:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that through struggling, an incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

Copyright © RADICALESBIANS, 1970, 2011, from the Queer Rhetoric Project. All rights reserved.

Poem: Jean Valentine

If the winter quarter is akin to a mine, I am deep down in it, so very deep  that I have only a memory of what the surface air, the light, the faces up above look like. A mine of fiction, student fiction--and the grade is a steep one. Often when I am making my way through thick tunnels of prose I think of poetry, hear it, long for it, and today I thought of a poet, and of a poem, that has stuck with me since I first read it, back in 1995, when a graduate school classmate introduced me to this poet's work after we had concluded a class teaching 7th and 8th graders how to write poetry. I had never read or even heard of this poet, or the book, Home.Deep.Blue (Alice James Books, 1989) and my classmate might have been reading it for class, for her workshop, for pleasure. Perhaps she was showing the book to some of the students, though I know we didn't read this poem to them in class. I do remember flipping through the book, and the poet's name engrave itself on my mind: Jean Valentine (1934-). And I stopped at this poem: "Everything Starts with a Letter."

In my mind the title became and becomes still the slightly different "Everything Begins With a Letter." But Valentine knows what she's doing, with her starting rather than beginning. Like so much of her poetry, for which she has received many awards, including the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry, for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, from which I have copied this poem, "Everything Starts With a Letter" provides only a glimpse, brief as a flash and as bright, into a life, a memory, a psyche, the life and memory and psyche of the speaker, this lyric voice, so full of drama...but we only get a glimpse, as if through a small hole in a boarded-up window, or a keyhole, and we must construct the rest of the story on our own, of the speaker's relation to "Juliana," who makes appearances in other poems in the volume, whose memory raises a mirror, harsh though its reflection be, to the speaker herself. The poem immediately called and calls to mind poems by Julia de Burgos, Arthur Rimbaud, Jaime Gil de Biedma, among others. But it is very much Valentine's own--her own way of entering the lyric dreams poetry alone can create, full of mystery and compelling, especially in the second stanza, which when I read or recall it always makes me want to know and hear more....  As I said, it has remained a little treasure I carry with me up through today. So here it is:

EVERYTHING STARTS WITH A LETTER

Everything starts with a letter,
even in dreams and in the movies . . . Take
J. Juliana, on a summer afternoon,
in a white silk blouse, and a pale blue-flowered skirt,
--her shoes? blue? but high and narrow heels,
because she asks Sam to carry the plate of Triscuits
into the garden, because she can't manage
the brick path in her heels.
"Oh could you? I can't manage the path in these heels."

J is the letter my name begins with,
O is the letter for the moon,
and my rage shines in my throat like the moon!
Her phoniness, O my double, your and
my phoniness . . .
Now what shall we do?
For this is how women begin to shoot,
we begin with our own feet, men empty their hearts, oh
the false self will do much worse than that,
to get away . . .

Copyright © Jean Valentine, from Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Photo: The Kiss

V-J Day in Times Square © Alfred Eisenstaedt (Life, 1945)

Marissa Gaeta (left) kisses fellow US naval officer Citlalic Snell Photograph: MC2 Joshua Mann/AFP/Getty Images

Irene On the Way + What Obama's Read(ing) + Gawker's 50 Worst States

Lower Manhattan, from Hoboken, or The Calm before the Storm

Irene, if I recall correctly from my long-ago high school Greek classes, means "peace." This imminent, ironically named Hurricane Irene, which has already slammed Puerto Rico, DR, Haiti, and the Bahamas, is now hurtling northwards towards the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and weather forecasters expect it to tear into coastal New Jersey and the densely populated New York metro area beginning Saturday evening through Sunday morning. I try not to take storms of this sort too lightly, but I've observed more than once that over the years, the New York-area meteorologists and news reporters in general have tended to overplay them, predicting typhoons and cyclones when what's shown up are, well, bad but not world-ending calamities. If the tenor of the brouhaha is at all credible, all living along the Eastern seaboard should be on trains, planes, buses or in cars to Montana.

New York City's emperor, Mike Bloomberg, began talking about mandatory evacuations from the city's low-lying coastal areas and all its islands yesterday, with similar calls coming from Long Island's two county executives, and New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, has ordered the MTA trains to stop running tomorrow at noon, the first time there's been such a pre-storm related shutdown in the system's history. (We kept saying that the subway trains ran no matter what the weather problems, but of late that has not been the case. What happened? No one has answers.) The Port Authority is shutting down all the local airports and the PATH trains by midday tomorrow, and New Jersey Transit trains and the light-rail will also be on ice.  Hospitals, eldercare centers, and many other facilities are being evacuated, but not, it seems, Rikers Island, which seems particularly cruel under the circumstances. Here in New Jersey, our Youtube performer masquerading as a governor, Chris Christie, has told people to flee the shore, which apparently is in the direct path of the storm and be nothing more than exposed rock, coral, hulls, siding, syringes, and empty water bottles by the time this storm has passed through, and Jersey City's colorful mayor, Jerramiah Healey, after mulling whether to say something today or tomorrow, has decided to issue a voluntary evacuation order from neighborhoods too close to the Hudson River, New York Harbor, the Hackensack River, or Newark Bay, i.e., anywhere downtown or on the Newark side of Jersey City. We thankfully are not in a flood plain or zone, though if we were, I have yet to see where we're supposed to go (the nearest shelter is at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, in the low-lying, marshy Meadowlands, but maybe they know something I don't). I haven't heard any mention at all of nearby Bayonne, which is in the direct path of the storm (the various evacuation maps leave blank all other municipalities, so New York City's left LI and NJ blank, while Jersey City's stops at the borders with Secaucus, etc.). Do the Bayonnaise not count? Nearly all of Hoboken's waterfront sits fairly low, so it could be a ghosttown come midday tomorrow. And a very pretty, expensive little ghosttown it will be.

NY JET Nick Mangold, signing autographs in Bryant Park today

The local Gay Pride celebration has been moved to...October. The Jets-Giants preseason game will take place on Monday instead of Sunday. Several music festivals are being postponed or canceled outright. No Dave Matthews, no The Roots. (I've seen the latter, live, years ago, in a moshpit in Charlottesville.) I didn't go to the store to but rather to my daily redoubt, the library, but C did go to one on the Jersey side of the river and said that it was a madhouse. No surprise there; people have been whipped up into a frenzy of shopping for provisions, essentials, and things they didn't realize they needed, like Fritos. I guess if Irene does pan out, we can say we were prepared. If it doesn't, the economy gets a needed, though temporary, boost. And all who could afford to will have extra canned goods--and lots of plastic water bottles. Now, what about all the people who cannot afford to evacuate and what about all those prisoners at Rikers?

--

It's no surprise our president is a reader, because he's a damned good writer. Given how much Barack Obama has had to deal with since before taking office, though, I'm amazed he reads anything that isn't a Congressional bill or a précis of one; a PDB; a Blackberry SMS text; snippets of whatever his staff culls from social media sites, newspapers, and so forth; and mash notes from some billionaire or corporation. But he does read books. Not a University of Chicago Law School prof-level any more, but nevertheless an impressive amount, at least compared to most people out there, I'd imagine, who do not have to read books as part of their job, and who have very busy full-time jobs that include dealing with lots of crazy people and quite a few very demanding billionaires and corporations. Recently I came across this list of books that President Obama has read since 2008.

Several things immediately struck me: there is only one book by a woman, and only two by writers of color. Not good. Not good not just because his reading really ought be diverse, but because there are lots of excellent books by women, by people of color, by women of color, by all kinds of people, that he could be reading, and which might even give him a bit of a wake-up call and a reminder of who voted for him. (Lots of women and people of color!)  There's a book by Tom Friedman, as ridiculous a member of the punditocracy as exists (he's the very, very, very wealthy person who suggested the US invade Iraq to show them, or someone, something, in response to 9/11. Real brainiac.) That is not good, unless it's to assist him in his cultivation of negative capability. But I think Barack Obama has demonstrated that he has more than enough negative capability, and deeply grasps the concept.

Also, there's only one book of poetry. This president could stand to read some more poetry. Like, by Langston Hughes and June Jordan and his inaugural poet and a whole lot of other poets, living and only living in print. Hell, given what he's dealing with, John Milton's Paradise Lost wouldn't be a bad place to start. And it's an enjoyable, if long, read too. A so-so novel by formalist poet Brad Leithauser ain't gonna cut it. There're no books about science or technology, especially the net. There are far too few books about economics, and zero about the causes of the economic meltdown. Many are the very good books about that damned economic collapse which most of us are still living through. Someone near the president should gently and firmly pass one to him.

And he doesn't seem to be taking many pointers from the books on or bios of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yes, John Adams was a remarkable person, but not such a good president. (His son was remarkable too, but even worse in that office. He was quite good as a Congressperson, though.) But then it seems the ghost of Herbert Clark Hoover, also a remarkable person and a terrible economic steward, hovers over this administration for various reasons, so perhaps those biographies have gone down like the fiction (Franzen, Mitchell, etc.).

Today I came across this list of books he's taken on his current vacation: "The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell, a series of crime stories; Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just, a novel set in Obama's hometown of Chicago; Cutting for Stone, a novel by Abraham Verghese; To the End of the Land, a novel by David Grossman; and The Warmth of Other Suns...by Isabel Wilkerson." Somewhat better, though still mostly men. He is planning to read Wilkerson's superb book on the Great Migration, which is a very good thing. At least one person each has recommended the Grossman and Verghese books to me. Now, more poetry (someone on his staff could go through my April Poetry Foundation twitter feed for names of poets--I quoted over 150 contemporary and past ones, of all backgrounds), more books on science and technology, something on the people that caused the meltdown (hint, hint, Mr. President, they're giving you lots of money now), and some more books on US presidents who figured out how to turn things around for the better; i.e., nothing on James Buchanan, please!

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I meant to post a link to Gawker's descending ranking of our "Worst 50 States" a few weeks back, but better late than never.  I take some issues with some of their rankings, having lived in about 6 of these states and visited many others, but the writeups are often hilarious, and the comments sections on at least one brims with the kind of craziness that proves the Web can be both an amazing and dismaying reflection of who we are as a society. Just a few points: New York state should not be ranked as the least worst, by far. Also, New Jersey should not be in the top 5 worst. That is just pure New York chauvinism (Ernest has a better word about such things, but I'm not going to use it). As is often the case in some of these lists, people just don't know what to say about certain states at all--South Dakota, Missouri, etc.  I admit that I wouldn't know what to say about South Dakota, though I would know what to say about Missouri. But the puckish paragraphs on Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, Delaware, Alabama, Texas, FLORIDA!, and a few others are worth the rest of the entire effort.