Always glad to see August Kleinzahler, one of the best poets writing today, get some press. Reporters for mainstream papers who write about AK seem to like to ask Billy Collins for a quote about him. In the LA Times recently, BC remarked, on AK’s attacks on the poetry establishment: “All the vitriol…I don’t get it.”

Which makes me ask a question of my own:

Billy—No vitriol? I don’t get it.

Sacco and Vanzetti in handcuffs

I forget where online I found this, but I saved it in a computer file some months ago and only just came across it again. I suppose it wouldn't charm me so much if it weren't for who wrote it--it charms me and gives me a little twinge...

To babies we will their mothers’ love,
To youngsters we will the sun above.
To spooners who wont to tryst the night,
We give the moon and stars that shine so bright.
--Sacco and Vanzetti

This is a sad story.

We noticed the posters from the first day we were in Paris. "SOS Doudou Perdu!!!" they said in boldface block letters above a photo of a baby's lovey--a stuffed white dog with an enormous nose, cute eyes and blue ears. I took a picture of it but can't upload it; the computers at this Avenue Parmentier internet point won't take my memory card. The posters are full color printouts, with all the elegance of a lost-cat poster and all the pathos of a lost-dog poster.

We notice that the SOS Doudou Perdu posters keep disappearing and being reposted. For who could resist taking one home? French people like children. Not the way Romans like them, with extravagant, voluble bursts of enthusiasm, but by putting little playgrounds all over the place, and carousels and even trampolines in random squares and parks, and by giving everyone free health care and education through university level and a bonus to families that have three children or more. So I believe that many of those who stole the posters did so not only for aesthetic reasons--though that too--but because they fully intended to buy a new Doudou for the child and needed to take along the contact telephone number.

Not realizing that the child didn't want any Doudou, but the Doudou--the only Doudou.

Last time we were in Paris, in 2004, we were staying in the 20th Arrondisement near Place Gambetta, an upscaling neighborhood on the edge of one of the more multicultural areas of Paris. It was winter and you'd see African women in long traditional dresses and flipflops and their elder kids in flipflops and their younger kids in regular children's shoes and it wasn't clear if that was how the money stretched, or if the older kids and mom had been born/grew up in Africa and didn't like closed shoes while the younger ones were conforming to Western footwear.

New Year's Eve we planned ot go out and see what was going on. No specific plans; maybe down to Etoile for the fireworks, maybe not, but definitely out. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the hideous golden sculpted flame over top of the tunnel where Princess Di died, where to this day people leave notes in memory and dead flowers that wither and fray like autumn leaves all year round. There was a fancy schmancy street market nearby. Jim picked up a duck foie gras for our New Year's Eve dinner. He also impulse-bought a bottle of Chartreuse. Chartreuse is a spicy green 140 proof liqueur. It is not what makes Gervaise die in a sodden heap of rags under the tenement stairs in Zola's L'Assommoir (that's absinthe) but it might as well be.

A few hours before we left for Paris (we are here for a month), William Corbett's new book from Hanging Loose Press, Opening Day, came in the mail, so I stuck it in my carry-on bag. Our first full day here, we do something we like to do soon after we get off the plane and never again during a trip--walk out the Champs-Elysees from Concorde, sit in an overpriced cafe, and watch other tourists walk up and down in their brand-new Paris-bought outfits. Maisie napped in her stroller. I read Bill Corbett alternating with taking notes on fashions. All following poetry quotes are from Opening Day.

Fortune Cookie

Half moon over Fenway Park
over Vermont's sawtooth trees
one ear on the ballgame
open book on lap
moths lovetap the screen
the houses are empty
wine calms the jets,
mud settles; mind unclenches
unknots all who were here.
Living is hard: art easier!
Throw strikes! Walks always
come back to haunt you.

Fady Joudah

1. Your first book of poems, The Earth in the Attic, just came out from Yale University Press, the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, selected by Louise Gluck. How does that feel?

It feels great, a life well dreamt or a dream well lived. I hope the book is received well, I naturally think its themes of exile and witness to refugees and displaced people in the world are an unusual event in poetry. I hope I was up to the task aesthetically (though I feel good about that with Gluck backing me up, after all she is not received as a socially engaged poet; although I beg to differ). Exiles (as a step up, descendants of the refugee) and, more urgently, the displaced and refugees are world historical individuals, in Hegel’s phrase…a disclaimer: I am not a Hegel specialist: to my mind they define the horrors of the nation-state, which is still a new concept in the world: 40 million displaced people (not counting the homeless and “disenfranchised�? citizens of “stable�? states) is a number that can not be ignored. These are people who define the other face of the mirror, the dark side that does not reflect us, or so we think.

2. Your son Ziyad was born on March 27th, 2008. What are you thinking about?

Concerned that there’s too much violence in children’s movies, TV, video games and online? Maybe the problem is there’s not enough.

From The Annotated Mother Goose, eds. William S. Baring-Gould & Ceil Baring-Gould, Bramhall House, 1962:

“…in 1952 Geoffrey Handley-Taylor of Manchester, England, published a brief biography of the literature of nursery rhyme reform in which he wrote that:

“The average collection of 200 traditional nursery rhymes contains approximately 100 rhymes which personify all that is glorious and ideal for the child. Unfortunately, the remaining 100 rhymes harbour unsavoury elements. The incidents listed below occur in the average collection and may be accepted as a reasonably conservative estimate based on a general survey of this type of literature.

"8 allusions to murder (unclassified),
2 cases of choking to death,
1 case of death by devouring,
1 case of cutting a human being in half,
1 case of decapitation,
1 case of death by squeezing,
1 case of death by shrivelling,
1 case of death by starvation,
1 case of boiling to death,
1 case of death by hanging,
1 case of death by drowning,
4 cases of killing domestic animals,
1 case of body snatching,
21 cases of death (unclassified),
7 cases relating to the severing of limbs,
1 case of the desire to have a limb severed,
2 cases of self-inflicted injury,
4 cases relating to the breaking of limbs,
1 allusion to a bleeding heart,
1 case of devouring human flesh,
5 threats of death,
1 case of kidnapping,
12 cases of torment and cruelty to human beings and animals,
8 cases of whipping and lashing,
3 allusions to blood,
14 cases of stealing and general dishonesty,
15 allusions to maimed human beings and animals
1 allusion to undertakers,
2 allusions to graves,
23 cases of physical violence (unclassified),
1 case of lunacy,
16 allusions to misery and sorrow,
1 case of drunkenness,
4 cases of cursing,
1 allusion to marriage as a form of death,
1 case of scorning the blind,
1 case of scorning prayer,
9 cases of children being lost or abandoned,
2 cases of house burning,
9 allusions to poverty and want,
5 allusions to quarrelling,
2 cases of unlawful imprisonment,
2 cases of racial discrimination.

“Expressions of fear, weeping, moans of anguish, biting, pain and evidence of supreme selfishness may be found in almost every other page.�?

Cesare Pavese

Who knew Harriet was crawling with Cesare Pavese fans? But the Cesare Pavese poem-podcast Linh Dinh posted below, with Bertolucci’s pretty video, is not typical of what I think of as the great Pavese—the early poems. Don Share’s links in the comments section give a better idea. What I love about early Pavese is that unlike many 20th Century European poets, he generally didn’t use words like “existences,�? “soul,�? “escape,�? “supreme light,�? “torment�? and “the poor.�? Or he did so in the context of poem-stories about people (many of them poor), mysterious and matter-of-fact stories, very specific and very strange. He wrote, by the way, wonderfully about women—although I’m not going to talk about any of those poems in this post.

When I read Pavese, I try to read the Italian, at which I’m generally only semi-successful, alongside a pair of translations. So the Pavese I read isn’t Pavese but some negotiation between the two versions and the original: A fourth thing altogether.

I'm on a poetry listserve where some members object to posts having to do with politics. Many of us think that trying to separate poetry from politics is like trying to separate the yolk from the egg white with a fork without breaking the yolk. But eventually we reached a truce where those who wanted to post political messages would put the letters POL in the subject line so others could delete those messages unread.

POL

Certain members of my household (not Maisie) were jokily contemplating a Jeremiah Wright write-in vote, until this weekend. Now I just think Wright's a jerk.

I'm not mad at him for what he says. What's not pretty good politics is mere dumbass conspiracy stuff, who cares? Wright gets criticized as an extremist and for crazy paranoid theories, but nobody criticizes the Bush administration for being riddled with people who believe in the Rapture.

And I'm not mad at him for how he says it. Style's insignificant. Actions are significant.

Wright's a jerk for his very public airing of his opinions, including his opinions of Obama, right at this time. He seems to me like a father trying to undermine his son. I don't care whether the father is ideologically right or wrong; if your son is trying to do something he believes in, even if you don't believe in it, you don't ruin it for him. You don't intentionally cast your shadow into his spotlight.

Wright has a lot to answer for if McCain wins the election.

I didn’t have one of those blissed out pregnancies that some women do, but I did love my pre-natal yoga class. Besides the fact that it was good exercise and good relaxation, I got to go be pregnant with a bunch of other pregnant ladies. The first part of the class was spent saying how we felt, so the teacher could gear the class to what ailed us. One time everybody started saying what they refused to give up. The woman with tattoos wasn’t giving up sushi. The carpenter wasn’t giving up manicures. I refused to give up soft cheese. Camembert every day was my motto. (I also drank coffee and a glass of wine a day, and Maisie came out fine, of course.) Then we did the poses and vinyasas modified to accommodate our large bellies and got lots of energy and the kinks in our necks dekinked.

The only drawback of the class for me was that during the final relaxation, the teacher would read a poem. She’d let us commune with our fetuses, our third eyes and our narcissistic tendencies to our heart’s content for five minutes, and then, out with the poem, after which we were supposed to zone out again. Everyone else loved this part, but it drove me nuts. Prior to the poem I’d be going, “oh, no, here it comes.�? Then she’d read Rumi. And my brain would start up. “Is that a good poem?�? “Is that a good translation?�? “What about the syntax?�? “I wonder if you just switched those two words if it would work better.�? We were supposed to meditate on what the poem said, and so of course I’d get onto my little mental soap-box and start railing against people who think of poems as mini-philosophy lectures. It was even worse if she picked a poem I liked. One time she read something by Wendell Berry which seemed perfectly made, a poem of great clarity. I was pleased by it. And when I hear a poem I like, I want to sit up, square my shoulders and get to work, not lie there melting into the ground.

I never relaxed until I got out of the room of warm soothing colors, away from the gentle supportive voice of the yoga teacher, the mystical truths of the poet, down into the street and the everyday world of bitchy, blissful prose.

Saw Shine A Light, Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones movie, last night. In a theater! (Such things get an exclamation point when you’ve got a one-year-old: We! Went! On! A! Date! And! Saw! A! Movie!) And really this one should be seen in a theater because, I mean, if you want to see Keith Richards sweating, which I realized last night that I do, you might as well see it on a big screen. I realized two other things:

1. Poetry’s great tragedy is that it never has been and never will be as much fun as rock and roll. Until we admit that to ourselves, we, as artists, will be fundamentally unserious.

And

2. All I’ve really ever wanted out of life is to be a backup singer. One of a row of three, maybe a little overweight but game, in a fun sleazy dress, gesturing and harmonizing and moaning and dancing in place, maybe the one with the tambourine.

O’Hara said poetry should be as good as the movies, but really it should be as good as big movies about big rock and roll.

New Fish

Cat in Hat

Despite the fact that he was a leftie (cf. various Marxist analyses of Horton Hears a Who), I’m hating Dr. Seuss more and more each day, even as Maisie likes him more and more. All those damned monosyllables. But I’ve discovered that, while Jim is reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to Maisie out loud, it is possible to read certain adult poems to myself in the same room without being too distracted. One is Allen Ginsberg’s “America,�? his best poem, one of the best poems of the last century, and now officially awarded Honorary Mommypoem status.

“Bump, Bump, Bump, Did you ever ride a Wump?�? Jim will read.
And I’ll be reading (to myself): “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb�?
“We have a Wump with just one hump.�?
“I don’t feel good don’t bother me�?
“My hat is old. My teeth are gold. I have a bird I like to hold.�?
“America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.�?
“The moon was out and we saw some sheep…�?
“America when will you be angelic?�?
“We saw some sheep take a walk in their sleep�?
“When will you take off your clothes?�?
“I like to box. How I like to box. So, every day, I box a Gox.�?
“America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.�?
“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.�?
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.�?

I’ve noticed that on the east side of Central Park in New York, above the zoo but below the Met, there are two playgrounds, one of which is a mommy playground and the other of which is a nanny playground. To a Philadelphian, this seems pretty twisted, but I guess that’s what happens when you make up a whole city out of Midwesterners and new-minted Americans, without any real natives to speak of. It’s true there is at least one playground in Society Hill in Philly where the nannies and the moms both take kids but don’t seem to mingle very much. (However, a gay dad friend of mine who frequents it says actually there are three groups, the nannies, the pony-tails and the gay dads, and the gay dads, at least, are allowed to talk to anyone.) But all the playgrounds closest to me are much more egalitarian. The real class warfare is otherwise aligned. One of the playgrounds we take Maisie to regularly has a dog run behind a hurricane fence along one side. So we get to see lots of dogwalkers, and au pairs. They seem to hate each other.

I think dogwalkers see themselves as independent entrepreneurs and au pairs as badly-paid servants with only one night off per week. Au pairs, all of them European, know they’ll get to go along on the family vacation to Disney or the Outer Banks or the Jersey Shore. They’re taking a year off to see America on the cheap before going home to manage a hedge fund, and refuse to associate with the underclass of dogwalking dropouts. Of course both groups hate their charges. The funny thing is, the more dogwalkers hate dogs, the more they love kids, and the more au pairs hate kids, the more they love dogs, and the happier the dogs and kids are. It’s only dogs out with their owners who stand still in the street refusing to move. Only kids with Moms or Dads, or worse, both together, ever cry.

This is a parable about poets, poetry camps, revision and creative writing programs, but it’s too beautiful a day for me to tell you exactly how. I’m outta here.

“All kids do today is play video games,�? rants my neighbor Stace, out on her steps with her kid Little Stace. She’s bleeding from the bare space between her brows where she overplucks. “She can’t even jump rope, can you believe it?�? In Stace’s window is an O’Bama sign, the Irish-American Barack Obama one, with a shamrock as an apostrophe. “You’re learning today,�? she says to Little Stace. She has a length of clothesline. She makes me take one end. “I thought you were Italian-American,�? I say to Big Stace. We turn the rope for Little Stace, who, it’s true, can’t jump rope to save her life. “I just liked the sign,�? Big Stace says. They turn for me instead, but Little Stace can’t get the rope up high enough to go over my head; it keeps getting caught in my hair. Or maybe I just can’t jump rope anymore either. “I thought you were a Republican committeewoman,�? I say. “For local politics,�? Big Stace says.

We sit down on our rowhouse steps, Pennsylvania blue marble, two steps each. Little Stace fools around with a pack of Wolf Pack Bang Snaps she gets out of her Princess Pink Backpack-on-Wheels. They’re caps—gunpowder wads, chalky paper wrappers twisted around the explosive core like toffees. Three boxes for a buck in the Italian Market. Super Loud says the circus-colored package, with its graphic of a snow wolf trio with its mouth fanged open. Big Stace reads the business page of the Inquirer. “Our houses are losing value,�? she says. “I should sell and get out. But where would I go if I move?�? Little Stace throws caps to the sidewalk off her top step for maximum impact. Tiny crack-crack explosions. “New Jersey?�?

It has gotten harder and harder to write well about Iraq and the current administration. One feels helpless, and furious. One jeers not to weep or become apathetic. But none of these responses makes for good poetry. Politics tends toward sloganeering, solutioneering, and declarations of right and wrong; good poems generally require ambivalence and irresolution.

One of the poets I’ve been reading a lot of recently, though—Frederick Seidel—solves the problem by writing the way he always has, attacking pieties and simultaneously declaring his own culpability. Seidel’s poet-persona seems half-crazed, quite dire. The first poem in his 2006 book, Ooga-Booga, “Kill Poem,�? seems like one of the best things written in at least the last 25 years. Here’s a piece of it:

Snapshot from my neighborhood: A man walks by with a little girl. Tan skin, red lips, dark eyes, turquoise flowered sundress. Spring comes to Philly! She’s not his daughter, she’s his girlfriend’s daughter. He has white pants; you think you can see his legs through the fabric when the sun’s a certain way behind him but it’s an illusion. His hair dyed uniformly, color of a wild animal raised in domesticity since birth, glossy and of no use to itself. He talks to the ladies in Italian so American even I understand: A birthday party of his Nonna at Ristorante Villa di Roma, his father from Calabria, a small mountain village. He speaks Italian—elbow on knee, one loafer (white) propped on the step—because Serafina, the only Neapolitan for blocks, took one dark look at the bud-lipped girl, said “Italiana!�? The girl doesn’t know Italian, goes twirlingly down the street plucking the hem and straps of her turquoise dress to Serafina’s puny plum tree, stands under it, spies back to see if she can pull down some pretty purple leaves without Serafina noticing. But doesn’t dare.

Joseph Torra

Taxes (a year’s worth of receipts to sort out and tally up), poems I’m trying to write, a day-long gig up in North Jersey, Maisie’s 15 month checkup, laziness because it’s finally spring: My excuses for not posting for over a week. I read though, and particularly liked Joseph Torra’s new “autobiographical novel,�? Call Me Waiter, just out from Pressed Wafer, a Boston-based small press run by the poet-editor-impresario Bill Corbett. Pressed Wafer publishes limited-edition broadsides and postcards and chapbooks of prose and poetry, which you can order directly by writing to 9 Columbus Square, Boston, MA 02116. I make a yearly donation to the press and get everything Corbett publishes; it’s a great deal for a lot of very good, handsomely-designed stuff coming at you in the mail all the time.

At 133 pages, Call Me Waiter is small for a novel, but no chapbook in scope. It’s an account of 20 years spent working as a bartender and waiter. Torra, who’s also a poet, writes wonderfully about work. Ron Silliman called one of his previous novels, Gas Station, “an extraordinary document…[Torra] has a real eye, not simply a literary one.�? There are two kinds of writers, those who want to imitate literature, and those who want to imitate life, and the second kind are better, and Torra’s in the second category.

I’m on the couch reading the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review; Maisie’s on the floor with a whirlpool of kiddie books around her. She’s been “reading�? them for almost half an hour, pretty good attention-span for a 14 month old, but starts pulling some plastic off one of the book covers. I don’t care what happens to the book—it’s a cheapie having to do with bunnies and mommies that wash dishes, that probably fell off a truck somewhere and ended up at a South Philly junk stand where Jim bought it for a dollar—but I don’t want plastic to end up in her mouth. So I get up off the couch and she jumps like a criminal caught red handed, tries to hide the plastic, as if I’m some kind of Enforcer.

And it comes to me: I am the Enforcer! The Mother!

Technically I knew that—she came out of me, after all, and I do my best to feed, clothe, bathe, play with, comfort her, etcetera along with my husband, all day every day—and generally have a quite lovely time doing it. But it shocked me to be looked at as an authority figure. And it shocked me that it shocked me.

4000 U.S. military dead in Iraq.
1,191,216 Iraqi deaths (www.antiwar.com).

My prime of youth is but a froste of cares:
My feaste of joy, is but a dishe of payne:
My cropp of corne, is but a field of tares:
And all my good is but vaine hope of gaine:
The daye is gone, and yet I sawe no sonn:
And nowe I live, and nowe my life is donn

The springe is paste, and yet it hath not sprong
The frute is deade, and yet the leaves are greene
My youth is gone, and yet I am but yonge
I sawe the woorld, and yet I was not seene
My threed is cutt, and yet it was not sponn
And nowe I lyve, and nowe my life is donn.

I saught my death, and founde it in my wombe
I lookte for life, and sawe it was a shade.
I trode the earth and knewe it was my Tombe
And nowe I die, and nowe I am but made
The glasse is full, and nowe the glass is rune
And nowe I live, and nowe my life is donn

--Chidiock Tichborne, 1586

I recently read the journalist Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The much bruited hook is how did two American Jewish lesbians survive in Vichy France during WWII. The answer is that they were protected by the collaborator Bernard Fay, about whom they may not have known much in terms of his responsibility for the suffering and deaths of a number of people—but people choose not to know what they don’t want to know. There's also a bit on Stein's and Toklas' possibly S&M-ish sexual relationship which doesn't turn out to be very interesting (as sex lives of other people generally, and disappointingly, do not.) I think Malcolm tries to dislike Stein and to like Toklas, and fails on both counts.

A few years ago I read Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about books on Sylvia Plath. In both books, the Plath and the Stein, there is more interest in Malcolm’s journey in trying to understand her subject than there is in what she finds out. Both are popularized metabiography, both are good smart easy reads. Those concerned about “I�? in poems might be interested in Malcolm.

So, following Ange Mlinko’s suggestion in the comments section of my last post, here’s all I’m talking about regarding the difference between Truth and Clarity. (They sound like allergy medicines, don’t they?) Truth (to me) might go something like “Socialist democracy is the best form of government.�? And I’m always delighted to read good poems by people who hold that opinion (Anne Winters?) but most poems that merely want to tell me that Truth aren’t usually good poems. There are much better ways than poems to make arguments or deliver messages.

Clarity, meanwhile, is more like caffeine. Or a pair of glasses. (I rely on both.) See better, see with more energy, become awake. What does Truth have to do with a poem like (to pick one everybody knows) “The Red Wheelbarrow�?? What do we talk about when we talk about this poem?

Ada Limon likens poets to soothsayers. But poets seem to me no wiser or more visionary than anyone else—possibly the opposite is closer to the truth. Poems in general aren’t so much wise or fortune-telling things as they are (some of them; no generalization does justice to the art) providers of concise moments of clarity.

T.E. Hulme, in “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,�? which he gave to the Poets’ Club in London in 1908, said "I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way. The President [of the Club] told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort."

The Frame

From Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to Laputa, etc.," at the Grand Academy of Lagado :

"The first professor I saw was in a very large room, with forty pupils about him...Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas by his contrivance the most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study. He then led me to [a] frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was about twenty foot square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered on every square with paper pasted on them, and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions, but without any order....The pupils...took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the lads to read the several lines softly as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the engine was so contrived that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

"Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor, and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which however might be still improved and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and employing five hundred such frames..."

Does form need to support content? Or is it better when form does the opposite?

News item from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th Street

The circumstances of the shooting and the source of the weapon were under investigation, Graham said. Amtrak did not release the names of the officer and suspect. The officer’s injuries were not life-threatening, Graham said. The officer was taken to Hahnemann University Hospital and was in stable condition.

The news short is a form as surely as the sonnet. The news short generates mystery through compression, omission and conventions of tone, which take outlandish human events with an absolutely straight face. The best examples require the collaboration of a professional reporter and a very professional editor, neither of whom has observed the event. There is a tragedy in being shot in the foot, and probably an ugly story here. But tragedy and ugliness have been erased by newsification. The bizarre hilarity is not unlike Ashbery forcing surrealist comedy into the complicated traditional sestina form as in “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,�? where Popeye is the subject. Both are inspired deadpan mismatches of form and content—though in the case of “Woman wounds Amtrak officer at 30th St,�? one suspects that reporter and editor are not actually keeping a straight face, because neither ever has anything but a straight face.

I was trying to read my 14-month old daughter a Grimm's Fairy Tale this morning, but poets of her generation are narratively-challenged, so I post it here instead.

The Bride-Choosing

And he did so, and lived contentedly and happily with her all his life long.

I would have picked the first sister: Better in bed.

Frank O’Hara and Emily Dickinson both wrote a lot of minor work. O’Hara’s minor work is usually more fun, to me, than Dickinson’s, but either way, they are poets whose lesser poems are an integral part of their overall body of work. Everybody needs to write minor work. I read somewhere that the filthiest limericks were probably written by anthology-rank Victorian poets keeping their hand in for when the big stuff arrived. T.S. Eliot kept his hand in by writing Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His separation of light verse from the rest of his poetry makes major work like Four Quartets seem all the more oppressively sober. (As a semi-aside, imagine the glummest passages of "The Wasteland" without the tragicomic pub scene.) It’s hard to keep Cats in mind when reading “The Dry Salvages�? but Emily Dickinson’s outhouse poem, #1167 (“Alone and in a Circumstance/Reluctant to be told/A spider on my reticence/Assiduously Crawled…�?) seems of a piece with the lifework of the Amherst recluse. Same with O’Hara: His chat matters. Sure, the greatest hits are capital-G great—Dickinson’s #27 (“Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me�?), O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.�? But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.

What a delight to see on Poetry Daily yesterday that Knopf has put out a Selected Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford. I have about eight copies of Lunch Poems, and a Meditations in an Emergency, and a Poems Retrieved, and two copies of the Collected, but it is certainly time for a new Selected, and Ford seems like a great person to have edited it. The Collected is often too much, and reading a new Selected O’Hara should be like seeing a museum show of your favorite artist, hung in an all new way by a passionate curator.

O’Hara reminds me every time I read him how dull taxonomies and endless discussions of poetry camps really are. Nothing against criticism, intellectuality, theory, scholarship, etcetera. I’m all for those things. I’m also for remembering that art’s a primary experience—you and the poem and pleasure.

The cookbook A Tuscan in the Kitchen, by Pino Luongo, is distinguished by not giving measurements for the recipes, and by the stories Luongo tells in between the recipes. In a section of the book called “Grandpa’s Nets and Grandma’s Pots�? Luongo tells of his grandfather, a fisherman living in Orbetello during World War II:

My grandfather was a fisherman. His name was Ettore, but everyone called him “Bo,�? which is an exclamation in dialect that means “Beats me�? or “Don’t ask me�? or “How should I know?�? Like the rest of the family, he was anti-Fascist. During World War II, the Fascists put him in charge of all the civilians in Orbetello, and it was his responsibility to report anyone who did anything against the uniformed soldiers who occupied the town. They would say something like, “There is a man up in the hills. We are looking for him. Do you know where he is hiding?�? And my grandfather would shrug his shoulders and say, “Bo?�? So he was known as Bo Solimeno until the day he died.

After we read that, in Florence, Italy, in 2005, Jim and I spent the next two weeks rudely blurting “Bo!�? every time one of us asked the other one something. Luckily we did not try it out on anyone else; my friend Paola later told me ‘be careful who you say it to, it’s not polite.’ But we did listen to see if we could hear someone saying ‘Bo!’ on the street.

I stopped taking pictures on trips when I realized I could remember very little except what I took pictures of. But on our honeymoon in Rome in 2000, I had a couple of disposable cameras left over from our wedding. I took pictures of ragtop Fiat 500s:

Ape trucks:

And motorscooters with roofs, which I saw for the first time that trip:

Commenting on my post on Paradise Lost below, Bill Knott wrote

"…I used to listen via a walkperson to a tape of the
first couple books of PL as read by the British actor Anthony
Quayle,

but irritatingly he didn’t read the linebreaks which
made me usually snatch the earphones out in exasp."

Yes, why are actors so often lousy readers of poetry?

A month or so ago, Sophie Gee wrote approvingly in the New York Times Book Review about the movie adaptation of Beowulf and about Philip Pullman’s use of Paradise Lost for his His Dark Materials series. I haven’t seen the former or read the latter but think I’d probably like both. Gee calls both classic texts “virtually unreadable.�? I’ll grant Gee Beowulf since it’s effectively written in another language (though various translations and a performance by Benjamin Bagby are both pretty good ways to access the original)—but Paradise Lost?

Gee, an assistant professor at Princeton who specializes in the 18th Century and who has written a very fun-sounding novel called The Scandal of the Season, which tells the story behind Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,�? writes in the NYTBR that Paradise Lost is “in ‘normal’ English, but its blank verse is so densely learned, so syntactically complicated and philosophically obscure, that it’s almost never read outside of college courses.�? She also says Milton intended to make PL difficult because “he wanted reading to involve active intellectual labor as much as pleasure.�?

It’s true I’m the only person I know who has never taken a course in Milton and who has read Paradise Lost (two-plus times) for fun. (Anyone else out there? Could we start a support group? Maybe Christian Wiman? Here’s his essay on reading “Milton in Guatemala�? which also appears in his book of essays Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.) In any case, it's also true that Samuel Johnson’s mot on PL— “none ever wished it longer than it is�?—is apt enough. Still, whatever Milton’s intentions and Gee’s own reading difficulties, PL is a great read.

Some things I liked this week:

Terrance Hayes has two good poems in the January/February 2008 APR; you can read “Support the Troops�? here,
which I liked, and I liked even more “The Shepherd�? which is a surprising riff on James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,�? on sheep and on fathers. It’s hard to give a sense in an excerpt of the building of urgency via digression in this 50+ line poem, but here’s a chunk from the middle.

Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me
to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.
The rain left stripes on our faces. The news
of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.
The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;
how sheep go astray and are bruised.
My father sometimes burned upon the sofa
like a campfire and a dry whimper
broke from him…

I liked Charles Bernstein’s poem, "All the Whiskey in Heaven," in the March 3 issue of The Nation. (You have to be a Nation subscriber to read the whole poem, but you can see the first half of it, in any case.) He does very funny parodies and he sometimes does this strange and fascinating other thing, which is to write poems which are deliberately creakily-written, but which get to you anyway. It’s a little like watching a juggler who, in a display of fake clumsiness, sometimes almost drops a plate or two the more to impress you when he starts juggling the flaming sticks. This one is a sometimes not-quite-semi-rhyming-except-where-it-perfectly-rhymes Valentine’s Day ode. It’s half parody and half sincere, and the more interesting for being both.

(Research report: Couldn't find a picture of one with the legs stuck together. Most look like this now.)

One whole summer, I taught kids to dive at the Albany JCC. First the sitting dive: sit on the edge of the pool, feet in the gutter or hanging into the water, close to but not in the shallow end. Raise your arms up alongside your head, press your biceps against your ears. Tilt till you fall scalp first into the water. Invariably kids pick their heads up at the last minute, and sputter and splash. Eventually they go in cleanly, especially if I help them tuck over by putting one hand on the back of their head and one on their back. Once you’ve managed the sitting dive you progress to kneeling: Same thing but starts higher up, more a plunge. Your feet might scrape on the tile deck going in, but it’s nothing serious. This transitional dive helps nervous swimmers feel more secure before you try the standing dive: Stand, leaning till you fall, then you learn to swing your arms and push off. Eventually you can spring or jackknife or kick or twist however you want going in.

Mark Alexander Boyd (1563–1601) was a poet and soldier of fortune who wrote published two volumes of Latin verse, but is famous, if he is famous, for his only known poem in Scots. I post it today in honor of Valentine’s Day, which is my household’s only religious holiday. I also post, after the jump, the only Valentine poem I’ve ever written. Here's Boyd:

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,
Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

Twa gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,
Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,
And follows on a woman throw the fire,
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

I’ve spent almost six months in three trips in Italy in the last three years, once in Florence and twice in Rome. We get cheap apartments ($1200/month for two rooms in Rome; $1600 for six weeks for two rooms in Florence.) Each time I brought with me and read Kenneth Rexroth’s travelogue poem, “The Dragon and the Unicorn.�? It’s a couple hundred pages long, and describes his travels through Europe, including Italy. It’s tremendously entertaining—full of medium-short-lined reportage and crabby commentary on meals, meetings, scenery and artworks—except where it’s interspersed with passages of metaphysical and mystical speculation which I skip, because they sound too much like pot-fueled post-midnight undergrad party talk. Boring, if you aren’t stoned and 19.

Just want to recommend an extraordinary poet, Tonino Guerra—his book Abandoned Places (Guernica, 1999), translated by the American fiction writer Adria Bernardi. Guerra was born in 1920; he’s probably best known as a screenwriter who has collaborated Antonioni, Fellini, Tarkovsky and others. He writes poems in the montanari dialect of the region of his birth, Santarcangelo di Romagna, in the Apennine mountains of Italy. Abandoned Places is a kind of narrative in short lyrics of a place and time that’s gone. Instead of being all nostalgia and sentimentality, which you might expect, these poems are full of humor, harshness, loveliness, startling imagery, political consciousness and humanity.

Reginald was blogging a few weeks ago about what’s lost in translation; perhaps poetry with narrative and strong imagery translates best, though any sonic sense has to be pretty much gone. There’s double trouble with Guerra.

[I participated in the panel “A Celebration of Alicia Ostriker�? at AWP last weekend. Here’s what I said:]

Preparing for this panel, I tried to think of how to sum up my relationship to Alicia Ostriker’s writing—and realized I can’t do it. The work is too various—and I’m a lousy summer-upper. But reading and rereading poem after poem, I was struck by how often men enter into them. I was struck by how complex and various these men are. And to make a hideously blanket statement without backing it up, which I may regret, I thought how relatively seldom men do seem to show up in women’s poems, and how when they do, they tend not to have a great deal of nuance. So I picked out three poems that show three different sides of Ostriker—three poems that have been important to me. All of them involve men.

I’m proofreading this before posting by reading it out loud to my husband while he does yoga, at the same time that Maisie is grabbing at me and crawling all over me to get me to read her Dr. Seuss’ The Foot Book: “Up feet, down feet, here come clown feet!�?

Is there a goal more foolish in politics than unity, or a phrase more hateful than “in the spirit of bipartisanship?�? Why should we want unity with pro-lifers, war-and-torture-mongers, gay-hating religious nuts, etc.? We may have to put up with people who aren’t everything we want in order to get rid of the worst—but only put up with. I am voting for Obama since Kucinich and Edwards have dropped out, because we have to get rid of the savages that have been running this country, but I won’t do more than vote begrudgingly for a guy who, discussing his ideas for health care reform, announces that “the HMOS and insurance companies will have a seat at the table, but only a seat…�? (quoted from memory). That’s like letting murderers sit on their own jury.

Jim, upside down at this moment, says the best way to mishear The Foot Book while reading it to the baby for the 200th time this week is to substitute the word “cock�? for “foot�? or “feet.�? Silently, of course. “Small feet, big feet, here come pig feet!�?

But poetry isn’t politics. In poetry, people who hate your work, or who think you’re doing everything wrong; people whose ideas about poetry you think are meaningless, or whose work doesn’t interest you—are not the enemy.

I just read a poem in some journal, I forget where, in which there was a plumber who wasn’t just a plumber, he was also a dreamer, or something. Well, he certainly wasn’t fixing pipes. Plumbers in poems never have their hands in a toilet, have you noticed?

Toilets show up in poems often enough. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Memorial Day 1950�?:

…I hear the sewage singing
underneath my bright white toilet seat and know
that somewhere sometime it will reach the sea…

Lines which—and I mean this—this is a perfectly sincere moment in this blog entry—thrill me.

Here’s something I have tacked above my desk to which the question of language’s inadequacy is irrelevant. This is Willem DeKooning, from a talk he gave called “What Abstract Art Means to Me,�? at a symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 on the occasion of the show “Abstract Art in America.�?

About twenty-four years ago, I knew a man in Hoboken, a German who used to visit us in the Dutch Seaman’s Home. As far as he could remember, he was always hungry in Europe. He found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a few days old—all kinds of bread: French bread, German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek bread, American bread and particularly Russian black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very little money, and let it get good and hard and then he crumpled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of him, but found out many years later that one of the other fellows met him again around 86th street. He had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all that I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.

Some time ago, poetry expressed universal experiences; a little later it posed important questions and, even if it was about as radical as a lukewarm mug of Sleepytime tea, tended to take risks and transgress. Lately it’s a really good thing to attack the language. I’m all for attacks. But is there any more dreary cliché than the feeling that language is inadequate to describe experience?

That’s me at the Pennsylvania Farm Show last week in Harrisburg doing a woman-and-goat-and-baby version of Picasso’s famous Man-With-a-Lamb sculpture. I love that there’s a road somewhere in Pennsylvania called Lick Run. I’m not sure that I love that I’ve become the kind of person who pays to get pictures taken of her with her human baby and a baby goat. I refuse to admit I also got the same picture put on a tee-shirt. Anyway, that’s Maisie the day before her first birthday in her Baby Loves Disco legwarmers. She does not in fact have a cataract on her left eye; the guy who took the picture simply didn’t fix her red-eye right, despite his perfectly functional digital camera and computer. Good old American don’t-know-how but charge you for it anyway.

This is the kind of blog post in which I try to make everything I mention into a symptom of something called America.