Rachel Zucker

Kenneth Goldsmith Ain’t No High-Paid Publicist

Wow Kenneth, you make your readings sound really unpleasant.
I love readings. Although maybe I wouldn’t love yours? But I think I would.
Sometimes, during a reading, I just sit and write. All that swirling language inspires me or perhaps, more accurately, occupies one part of my brain and allows another to be open to making poems. I’ve written a lot of poems at readings. Sometimes I really, really listen. Sometimes I admire the reader’s clothes or style (Cathy Wagner is HOT! Arielle Greenberg has this totally compelling reading thing she does: like a stance or a tone or a kind of come-hither thing, I can’t explain it) or drunkenness or craziness. Sometimes I give myself over to the pleasure of being entertained. Sometimes I sit and indulge in petty jealousy or in a kind of “well at least I don’t do THAT!” kind of thinking.
And readings are social events for me. Maybe what I’m saying is that I don’t get out enough, but readings are where I see poets I know well or a little and run into old friends. Of course I’d often rather just stay home and watch TV, but almost every time I go to a reading I’m glad I made the effort. The relative silence around a human voice—I imagine it is why some people like to go to church.

05.09.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

The Real Life

I’ve been wanting to finish a post I started writing months ago about description in poetry and writing about real life and Mark Doty and my students and observation and the difference between writing about real life and Confessional poetry, but I couldn’t because I’ve been too busy living my real life. This is not an excuse. This is a list of 30 things I’ve done since April 16th instead of blogging.
1. Sifting through myfonts.com to find the perfect text ornament to use on the section divider pages of my third book (4 + hours).
2. Read newish poems (sort of a weird poetic journalism I’ve fallen into) including a long, sexy-pregnant poem as part of a faculty poetry reading at Fordham (part of the Poets Out Loud Series). Terese Svoboda, Mark Svenvold, and Janet Kaplan also read. Reading the poem before my students and colleagues felt pleasurably naughty which made up for the fact that the reading was poorly attended (ostensibly due to the flood conditions in NY). (2+ hours)

05.02.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rachel Zucker

View of My Desk with Encroaching Crib

05.01.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

Everything I know about teaching I learned from West Side Soccer

Yesterday my husband attended the certification training for assistant coaches for the U8 (under eight) division of West Side Soccer League (a division of the American Youth Soccer Organization). I was a U6 referee last Fall but I’m too damn big to fit into the yellow and black striped shirt let alone waddle up and down the field, so hubby has to meet our volunteer commitments this Spring. Here is one of the jewels he brought home from the meeting:

04.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rachel Zucker

What I Learned at the High School

1. Location, location, location. As soon as I entered the building I reverted to a 16 year old state. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was about to get in trouble for something. When my cell phone vibrated in my bag I thought, “oh no, it will be confiscated,” and walking through the halls hugely pregnant made me feel I’d brought shame upon myself or at least done very, very poorly in Sex Ed.
2. Listening to poems is easy and good. What a wonderful thing to sit in a room full of people and listen to poems. A simply delightful way to spend an hour. Interested students, teachers and staff, chosen by lottery, sat along the back of the stage. There were about 25 of us and one by one we went up to the podium, briefly explained why we loved this poem or chose this poem, read the poem and sat down. Aside from one row of too-smooth jocky-looking guys and a few very tired looking students sprinkled about, everyone seemed to be listening most of the time. I thought, “even if the students never hear this many poems again, they’ve heard these” and felt happy.
3. The audience knows who’s cool. You could feel it, as a reader reached the podium, if the kid (or teacher) was adored or respected or lusted after by others. It wasn’t always the student I would have expected (from their looks or deportment) that the audience responded to, but the way the energy in the auditorium fluctuated in response to each reader (before the reader began) was very clear. Depending on who was at the podium the audience hushed or rustled, held their breath or slouched. Poems that were not so gripping were afforded more respect if the reader was beloved.
4. Anyone, cool or not, commands attention when reading an Allen Ginsberg poem.
5. Students like to hear poems that “teachers don’t like.”
6. Students like to hear the poem “America” by Allen Ginsberg.
7. Students like to hear “Building Nicole’s Mama” by Patricia Smith.
8. Students will mouth the words along with the reader as they listen in rapt attention and then finally burst into thunderous applause if the director of athletics gets up and says, “if you could only see how beautiful my wife is when she reads this to my daughters,” and then reads Goodnight Moon.

04.12.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Rachel Zucker

A Few Good Poems

Tomorrow morning I’m going to visit Fieldston, the high school I attended. I was graciously invited by poet Michael Morse who is also a teacher at Fieldston (See Verse Daily for one of Michael’s excellent poems.) Michael asked me to participate in a National Poetry Month assembly at the school where students and teachers will read short lyric poems and briefly explain why they chose a particular poem.
Here is my short list:
“God’s World,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“You Begin,” by Margaret Atwood
“Spelling,” by Magaret Atwood
“It’s Late Here How Light is Late Once You’ve Fallen,” by Katie Ford
Probably my favorite single (shortish) poem is “A Man Meets a Woman on the Street” by Randall Jarrell but it’s a bit too long and I can’t read that without choking up.
It’s interesting that these are the poems I am considering reading at the assembly. If I were going to sit down and read one of my favorite books it wouldn’t be one of the books in which these poems appear (except perhaps Katie Ford’s book, Deposition). Millay, Atwood, and Jarrell are not poets I routinely recommend to students. On the other hand, I can’t imagine reading a selection from Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, David Antin, Brenda Hillman, Wayne Koestenbaum, D.A. Powell or many of the other books that have been vitally important to me. I’m more likely to find a selection from James Schuyler, Alice Notley, David Trinidad, or Jorie Graham, but even these did not make the final list of candidates for assembly. I think it is fair to say that just as there are great songs you really DON’T want to hear when you’re in labor, there are favorite poems not right for some circumstances and less favorite poems that perfectly fit the time and place. Audience matters.

04.11.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

The Cockroach in the Corner

Jeffrey and others,
I love the idea of figuring out—in part as a way of exploring what invisible or less visible lines connect us—where our sensibilities overlap and which poets we all hold dear. Harryette Mullen is a damn good choice! Who else? David Antin?
This raises the question of whether the poets we might have in common are “crossover” poets (and what that would mean) or whether we all have somewhat eclectic tastes and are bound to overlap somewhere.
And, Jeffrey, since you asked, the secret to my slam success is this: always read a poem with at least one blowjob in it. Perhaps that makes me a whore: I did win over $40 of slam money with those blowjob poems. Unfortunately, I also attracted a few local fans. At the end of my senior year I did a very Ivory Tower reading hosted by one of Yale’s residential colleges. I read with a talented, soft-spoken, frightened-looking undergrad named Carrie Iverson (where is she now?). In the middle of Carrie’s reading one of my slam fans, a man in his fifties with a gravelly voice so low in pitch it seemed to cause him to stammer, showed up. I’d never seen him outside the Daily Café (which used to be on the corner of Park and Elm and was where the smaller slams were held). This man (I remember his name but won’t use it here) stood up in the middle of Carrie’s reading, walked behind her, and started stamping and dragging his foot along the floor in the back corner of the room. Carrie continued reading but haltingly, looking up uneasily every few seconds. Indeed, everyone was uneasy, and no one knew what to do. After a few minutes of stomping and muttering, my fan turned toward the audience and said, rather proudly, “did you see that?” He looked around dramatically, “That… that was the biggest… the biggest roach I’ve ever seen.”

04.11.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Rachel Zucker

Pink Elephant with Corn and Pickle?

Kenneth, Kwame, Patricia and Jeffrey,
I’m glad Kenneth pointed out that we do not know each other. Perhaps this is obvious, but it seems to me that the fact that we’re from different communities is no coincidence. I imagine the Poetry Foundation asked us in part because as a group we are “diverse.” So, I’m thinking now about what I “represent:” White, female, New York, MFA from Iowa, under 40, Jewish, “emerging” (my third book is coming out in the fall). Is this me? Yes. Do I resent being chosen in part because I represent these elements? Not really. Do I consider myself interchangeable with other white East Coast female Iowa grads or do I imagine that we would all write similar posts? I hope I’m not interchangable; I think we’d write different posts!
Still, there is no denying that I am, to a large extent, defined (and confined) to the communities from which I come and to which I belong. It’s true I won two local slams in New Haven when I was a Yale undergrad, but I’m not a slam poet. (Unlike Patricia people have very low expectations of me as a reader. I have the pleasant experience of people being incredibly relieved when at readings I’m not deadly boring–most seem to expect, from my bio, that I am going to mumble and read obscure poems with lots of French in them.) I certainly didn’t buy them because of this, but most of the books on my shelves are written by white poets and many more than half are written by women. I pride myself for liking and responding to a wide range of poetries, and one of the best things about co-editing the anthology I’ve been posting about is that within the realms of gender and age the editorial process required me to read across lines of race, geography, sexual preference, style, educational background and class. This was a necessary beginning to what will certainly be a life-long education. I don’t know you, but I’m glad to be here.

04.08.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Rachel Zucker

It’s Easier to Talk About Sex

than money, but in honor of National Poetry Month, I’m going to do it: let’s talk about money.
For the past month or so I have spent almost every free hour writing emails and letters asking for permission to reprint poems in an anthology I am co-editing with Arielle Greenberg. In his post on this blog, “Book Talking,” Kwame Dawes writes, “Poets may not know this, but the anthology is not our friend.” Because I’ve been so busy doing the permissions work on this (my first) anthology, I haven’t had time to take issue with Kwame on this matter. I will now.

04.06.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rachel Zucker

Everything I know about poetry I learned from the movies

Well, not everything, but a lot. I especially like thinking about how movie structures and devices can translate into poetry writing. I haven’t been so interested in writing about movies or art but I like the idea of translating the structure of other arts into poetry.
Here’s a minor example: I just watched the movie half nelson. Just before the movie was over my husband said, “this is when they’re trying to figure out how to end the movie,” and then the music swelled and got louder. And then it was over. I thought, “huh, you don’t actually need to end the movie, just turn up the music.” So, assignment to self: end a poem without ending, just turn up the music.
Back to matzo balls…

04.02.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)