Archive for August, 2007
Ange Mlinko
Stagecoach, Detached
Courtesy of the website wood s lot, I found this site by the trenchant name The Business of Emotions. “Americans now buy their emotions and experience them as they consume the goods and services to which they have been attached by artful emotional and neuro-marketers.” Shouldn’t every poet with ambitions to sell books — especially books predicated on sharing emotions and experience, from motherhood to depression — grapple with the question: Am I in the business of emotions?
***
Courtesy of an old college professor, I’m reading Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Seven Stories. (How lucky to have just a few people — a handful — in one’s life who can anticipate one’s literary tastes! And on any given day the mailbox may yield a little present.) Ask people to name their favorite Russian writer and usually it comes down to either Dostoevsky or Tolstoy; but for me it’s Gogol. Which Seven Stories descends from — there’s even a hand that detaches itself from a pianist and roams the streets. And (come to think of it) the Eiffel Tower also detaches itself from the ground, terrorizing Paris, and stomps across the countryside before committing suicide in Lake Constance.
(Doesn’t the prospect of the Eiffel Tower terrorizing haughty Paris fill you with immoderate glee?)
Rachel Zucker
Something Else to Do
A few months ago I tried to quit the blog. I emailed the po foundation honchos and my fellow bloggers to say I didn’t think I had it in me to blog more regularly, and I was tired of feeling so guilty about my erratic postings. Well, actually, this is what I said:
i feel really rotten that i’m the lamest blogger on the blog. i
cannot put my baby down without him screaming and i’ve been
cavilierly using my “free time” to: eat, sleep, pick up older
children from school, buy 15 brands of pacifier (none of which judah
will take) and try to get judah a passport. every single day i think
of a blog entry but i literally can’t write it down or type it.
(this is a rare moment when he’s sleeping in the sling and i have my
hands free)/
i meant to write this entry:
dear jeffrey, you were wondering how i can be a poet and a mom of
three kids? i can’t.
but i couldn’t even manage that much for the past 3 weeks.
i don’t want to quit but i do want to stop feeling like a flake. but
i am a flake.
crap.
Ange Mlinko
Why I Am Not a Poet-Mom
Kwame’s post (below) got me thinking about, of all things, motherhood. Because he brings up our cultural identities as something both constructed (a narrative) and a given (we can’t choose it), and because the one aspect of identity I’ve ever been asked to write about was — not my race, or my nationality, my parents’ immigration, or my gender, but my reproductive status. Will you, I was asked, review some new poetry books about Motherhood?
No, I said. For several reasons.
1) The commodification of pregnancy and motherhood irritates me, and it’s unclear how poetry books “about” the subjective experience of mothering aren’t merely an offshoot of this.
2) The commodification of poetry books — which includes, among the more “experimental” players, organizing collections around a theme: it’s good marketing.
“But we live in the real world,” you say. “We package the experience, but there’s real value inside.”
Kwame Dawes
Black Enough?
Warning: There is poetry somewhere in this blog, but you are going to have to dig deep to find it…
The things I am reading and the things I am writing and the things I am doing are all making me think about America and Americanness. Recently I was asked in a public forum what were my thoughts on Barak Obama’s dilemma with African Americans. The person quoted the often used statement (not sure who came up with it, and I am not entirely convinced that black folks did) that Obama is not “black enough.” The implication being that Obama is not black enough to have automatic access to the black vote. It reminded me of Steve Harvey’s retort to another often used phrase: “You musn’t vote for Obama just because he is black.” Harvey’s question: “So what, I must vote for you just because you are white?” Think about it. It is actually a profoundly insightful and clever retort, as that has to be the only available conclusion one could reach. In other words, it is going to be about race if you bring it up, and since you have brought it up, you have to be saying that you want me to vote for a white person because that person is not black. But I did not use Harvey’s retort to answer the question. Instead I offered a statement that sounded on the surface counter-intuitive and wrong. Obama’s problem is not that people suspect he is not black enough, but that people fear he is not American enough. And by people, I mean first and foremost, black people. In other words, the reticence that some blacks feel about Obama is actually a kind of xenophobia, the worst form of patriotism that seems unlikely for a people who have fought so hard to be accepted as Americans in their own country. Still, it is a peculiar brand of xenophobia because it is one that emerges out of a myth of African America survival and triumph that has very clear dimensions—a distinctive narrative that is perhaps one of the most admired features of the American Dream. African Americans are uncertain about Obama because he represents a breach of one strain of the American Dream.
Ange Mlinko
The Outernationale
Peter Gizzi’s The Outernationale is magnificent. It gives me what I need from poetry — a reminder to feel alive — even as it addresses a bleak civic landscape. The long, excellently palindromic “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures” sent me hunting for this quote:
Exiting from positivism — casting aside the possibility of art’s going back to the moment at which sensation becomes sign — is in practice exiting from the hope of art’s inhabiting a public, fully translatable world. And that — more than positivism or materialism per se — had been the utopian motor of modernism from Courbet and Manet to Seurat and even van Gogh. (There is no “even” about it in fact. Van Gogh believed in the material world, and art’s responsibility to retrieve the shock of it, and to translate the shock into a new and fully public language, as no one had ever believed before. He was the Prince Myshkin of positivism. That after his death he became the model of alienated individuality and the patron saint of visionaries, is I guess what simplicity gets for its pains.)
(T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea)
… But also the patron saint of coffee mugs and tote bags, which proves his success at finding a “public language” — after all, the Autobiographical Vincent wouldn’t be so popular if he had painted black and white squares, nor has Renoir’s relatively tranquil life kept him from being translated to kitsch just as frequently. Still, to be confronted by an actual Van Gogh, in the flesh, always brings with it a shiver of sensation. Gizzi may never be a “public poet” for all his pains (and the reasons for that are obvious from this article; Silliman’s rebuttal of it today is the last word on the subject) but he, too, remembers that a shiver of sensation is vital, it’s the first thing, before mere message or artful phrasing. “The moment at which sensation becomes sign” is Gizzi’s moment as much as Van Gogh’s.
Patricia Smith
It’s 1:31 a.m….
…and I’m exhausted. But I’m sitting in front of my laptop, bleary-eyed, listening to a muted Lightnin’ Hopkins and staring at the 17th line of a poem that I’ve been working on for four years.
This profession–this writing of measured and meaningful lines–is for crazy people. I can hear the warm, contented snoozing of my husband and granddaughter, and I long to join them in the sleep of the blissfully unaware, but there’s this–line. I could forget it for now, sleep on it, but I can’t help feeling that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. And after four years of nada breakthrough, I’m not about to doze off and miss the big moment.
I know that this line will complete the poem–finally–and that the poem has the potential to be a soul-shaker, a disturbance, a ripple in the cosmos. It’s like being on the verge of childbirth. It’s just that I’ve been in labor so long everyone’s lost interest. Before giving up on me an hour or so ago, the 12-year-old dismissed my delirium with an exasperated roll of her eyes and this oft-repeated phrase: “Oh, that poem. Grandma, it’s just a line.”
Just a line? They really don’t get it, do they? There’s absolutely no way to explain that nine words, tweaked mercilessly at least once a week for the past 1460 days, can feel so vital, so damned necessary, and not tomorrow, but right now. It’s like childbirth. You struggle and sweat to bring something into being. And once it’s there, out in the open air, you should feel relieved–but damned if you don’t miss the pain.
Patricia Smith
What I did over (the last week of) summer vacation…
Certainly couldn’t afford to, but this past week I decided to reread the poetry books I keep rereading. Trying to think of why I keep coming back to these volumes, I realized that I was thinking too much. Let’s just say riveting narrative, muscle, muscle, muscle, guts. Let’s say porch stories, inherent music. Let’s say I’m a creature of habit.
For the record (not in the order I crave them, but in the order I picked them up):
Sherry Fairchok, The Palace of Ashes
June Jordan, Haruko/Love Poems
Stephen Dobyns, Velocities
Rafael Campo, The Other Man was Me: A Voyage to the New World
Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly
Steve Davenport, Uncontainable Noise
Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter
Elizabeth Alexander, Venus Hottentot
Roger Fanning, The Island Itself
Jan Beatty, Boneshaker
Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World
Lydia Melvin, South of Here
Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks
Roger Bonair-Agard, Tarnish and Masquerade
Remica Bingham, Conversion
Douglas Goetsch, Nobody’s Hell
Kwame Dawes, Wisteria
Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance
Tony Gloeggler, One Wish Left
And what a week it was. I hope this list will pique your curiosity, spark a discussion, at the very least lead you to check out and discover a poet you didn’t know before. Questions and conversation welcome. Post your own can’t-resist list!
Happy summer perusing.
Seacrest. Out.
Ange Mlinko
Tourbillon
If you live in or around New York City, you know that it was in chaos yesterday after torrents brought three inches of rain in one hour down on its delicate mechanism, a nouveau riche’s Philippe Patek accidentally submerged. A tornado (tourbillon) even touched down in Brooklyn. When a waterspout on the Hudson moved in and shredded trees like a peppermill last year, it was only days after I gave birth in Sleepy Hollow (where it came ashore), and of course to my addled brain it seemed like an augur. A few weeks after that, a manatee was spotted, in the waters off our town where freshwater meets the saltwater Hudson, thousands of miles north of its natural habitat.
Ange Mlinko
Felicitous Words
“Poems are the impossibility of plainness rendered in plainest form.”—Susan Howe
Henry VIII bequeathed to his royal children a love of seeing bulls and bears “baited,” that is, penned up in a ring or chained to a stake and set upon by fierce dogs. The bulls—on occasion “wearied to death” for sport—seem to have been more or less anonymous, but the bears acquired names and personalities: Sackerson, Ned Whiting, George Stone, and Harry Hunks (the latter blinded to increase the fun).
That parenthesis might well have read “the latter named to increase the fun.” For it seems that the point of delectation was whetted by dignifying the creature with a human name.
Kwame Dawes
August Wilson
August Wilson’s monumental project, the Century Cycle of plays is soon to be released as a single publication—a beautifully (it seems to me) packaged production of all ten of the plays in the cycle. This is exciting news. I have been thinking a lot about August Wilson lately having spent most of this week at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I have been attending this festival every two years since the early nineties, and I have participated in the symposium attached to the festival since that time. The festival is usually a celebrity fest, a crowding of black film, television and stage celebrities in this tobacco enriched town, a week in which fans will gather around the marquee hotel of the festival (it is now The Marriott, but used to be Adams Mark) where the sport of star gazing/spotting takes place. And stars like to be gazed at, like to be spotted—they walk around as if they are looking for somebody, and they never make eye contact when talking to anyone while in the lobby. They all seem to have mastered that rude habit of looking around for someone more important while they are talking to you. They are always in a hurry, and when you do find out what they are hurrying to, you realize that they are not really in a hurry to do anything—they just do the hurry thing because it looks cooler to be rushing through a crowd to your waiting limo than it does to saunter along and casually step in. Some are not big enough stars to be panicked about people coming around. Most are stars who probably go to bed at night feeling like crap because not enough people seemed to realize who they were during the day.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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