House In the World

I’m looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.

There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.

Australia's leading poet Les Murray is one of the globe's finest, and he knows it. So much so, a request to blurb a collection of poems by the poet J.K. Murphy becomes an opportunity for him to flaunt his clout. Apparently, Les Murray's wife is an aspiring author, a social historian to be precise. Like a good husband, Murray thought he'd lend a hand to his wife's publishing career. Nothing shameful about that, I guess.

It's the birthday of the poet Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880, a member of the distinguished biracial Grimké family, some members of which were important in the abolitionist movement and active in civil rights into the twentieth century.

Her father Archibald Grimké, a Harvard Law School graduate, served as the Vice-President of the NAACP and her mother Sarah Stanley was a white woman from a Boston middle-class family. The Stanley’s opposed Sarah’s interracial marriage. Soon after her birth, Angelina’s parents divorced. Angelina lived with her mother until she was seven years old, then was sent to live with her father. She never saw her mother again.

It happened during the meeting of the National Book Award committee that gave the poetry prize to Marianne Moore. While waiting for Peter Viereck, the last of the judges, delayed by a snowstorm, to arrive, the other five (Winfield Townley Scott, Selden Rodman, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, and William Cole) passed the time looking at photographs of previous meetings of National Book Award judges. Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in one of these. On seeing the photo, Stevens remarked, “Who’s the coon?” (The meeting, it should be noted, took place after lunch, which for the poet had probably begun with two healthy martinis and continued with a fine bottle of wine.) Noticing the reaction of the group to his question, he asked, “I know you don’t like to hear people call a lady a coon, but who is it?”

-- Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens – The Later Years (1923-1954). New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988. (Pgs. 388-389)

What is it about celebrity poets that rile “serious” writers of poetry? With each new collection of poems by an actor or music recording star, envy mounts as does the high levels of indifference by poets and critics, alike. Such books of poetry are roundly dismissed and ignored by the literati, yet inevitably become bestsellers owing to the legions of adoring fans that seem to have an interminable appetite for mediocre verse. Rest assured, such books do not attract prize committees and are rarely reviewed outside of Publishers Weekly or Booklist. One would think, also, given the stratospheric mega-sales, these books would appear on the poetryfoundations.org bestseller lists. Alas, there too, ignored.

While Professor Stanley Fish argues the lack of relative worth of the Humanities over at the NYTIMES, I thought I would visit a few of my local, online rare books websites to gauge the fair market value of Poetry (Ruth Lilly, notwithstanding), that is, how much hard cash do works of poetry command in the dangerous, clandestine world of literary intrigue, secular humanism, and covert antiquarian operations.

Wallace Stevens's art collection and furniture has the distinction of being the most expensive purchase at abebooks.com at a whopping $1.7 million dollars, which itself is followed by Petrarch's 15th century opera at $400K.

While the below represents a personal wish list, if anyone wants to send me an early birthday gift . . . .

Journal Entry - Saturday, Jan 12th:
Bennington, VT

At the graduation ceremonies this evening, Frank Bidart began his address with this emphatic warning: "The history of taste is not the history of art." Although he was speaking to the 25th graduating class of the Bennington Writing Seminars, who endured the loss of its founder Liam Rector last summer, his words echoed through me like one of Moses’ stone tablets.

One of my great treasures last year was the discovery of Japanese photographer Miwa Yanagi’s Elevator Girls series, which upon first viewing felt like large stills from an early Hype Williams video. I was able to catch Miwa Yanagi’s exhibition at The Chelsea Museum the day after The Poets House Annual Walk across Brooklyn Bridge. Elevator girls in Japan are hostesses who greet shoppers in department stores.

Is there any moment more fulfilling and celebratory in a writer’s life than the book party? I have hosted one of my own, but have attended nearly a half-dozen and have found all of them superbly festive. I love that moment when a room full of family and friends raises their glasses in officious honor of a dear friend or relative having achieved the ultimate in creation, the birth of a vision into its final form. There is always a toast at a book party, sometimes ill-timed either too early or too late, yet wonderfully obligatory and replete with adoration and awe. It occurs to me that what this forum needs is a definitive list of “Book Party” Do’s & Don’ts.

Congratulations to poets Nikki Giovanni, Gregory Pardlo, and Tracy K. Smith. They are finalists for the first annual Essence Literary Award in the category of Poetry. Their books are: Acolytes by Nikki Giovanni; Totem by Gregory Pardlo; and Duende by Tracy K. Smith. All three books are exceptional, and I urge you to read them.

Essence Magazine, founded in the late 1960s, a fashion, lifestyle and entertainment magazine originally geared towards African American women, the first of its kind to do so, has long supported and featured African American writers in its pages and through its annual fiction-writing contest. The Essence Literary Awards comes at an important time, in which, educators, politicians, and parents should stress the importance of literacy, as all indicators and federal reports suggest reading is promptly becoming an obsolete activity of American life.

Occasionally, I like to visit the Asian American Writers' Workshop website and when possible attend one of its literary events in New York City. One of the great joys of the contemporary arts in the United States of the past three decades is the emergence of organizations whose aim is to promote and celebrate the richness of the American experience as represented in the creative visions of its diverse inhabitants, many with great legacies, histories, and needless to say, complex stories of survival, determination, and acculturation.

I love year-ending "What's In & What's Out" lists for the upcoming year. They are authoritative, self-generating, biased, and goofy. I thought I'd get a head-start on the pundits. The list kept going, so I'll post over a few days. I hope you enjoy. With consultation from some friends, here is the start of a provocative list, sure to test the province of good taste, augury, and judgment.

If this is not entertaining, check out the Luther Vandross Estate Auction.

December 4, 2007 - 8:43am
When I moved to Vermont, I knew I was signing up for long winters, which was fine by me, because I knew the cold, hard days and nights would be ameliorated by crackling fires, books, and scotch. Even still, I longed for the balmy, humid Decembers of New Orleans. Weatherwise, relocation to the north was terribly dramatic, to say, the least. Vermont is home to a host of poets; clearly, each state can claim a fair share amount of versifiers, yet, here we breed like new trees. The little state with the many poets inside it -- all with the glow of fires painting their faces, a wondrous, wide-eyed look of the darkness of mankind and the equally warmth of humanity's spirit waiting to find expression in words.

Debit: As an Accounting major at Temple University, enrolling in an Introduction to Poetry course was an indulgence beyond rationale for many of my friends and family.

Credit: Of course I had “electives” but it was general knowledge that one used those “free” courses, not to enrich and round out one’s education and become a human being of intellectual breadth, but to minor and specialize even further within the School of Business in some field as Marketing or Economics, or that other academic magnet Pre-Law.

Debit: No one had any notion as to how studying Poetry would prepare me to take the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam, a future event we seemed to obsess over as much as we did our final exam in creating Financial Statements for Mergers & Acquisitions, which I doubt any of us would ever have the occasion to do.

So many strands/strains of the old country and other people’s cultural traditions inform the arts of the Americas, even if we do not readily acknowledge them. Klezmer, Blue-grass, Deep soul, southern Gospel, the Blues: these musical styles embed in me, and I’d be so lucky to exact poems that are their equivalents in spirit and expression.

I am often asked after a poetry reading, maybe too frequently, by some earnest undergraduate, if I listen to music while composing a poem, because, well, my poems sound so rhythmic, “even on the page,” a dubious observation, at best, in my opinion. It’s like saying water is liquid. Probably the query of music listening is 2nd only to “creative process.” (Then, third would be: “What hip-hop artists are you listening to these days.” I wonder if my buddy Billy Collins is posed that question.)

I admire David Mason’s article “The Limits of the Literary Movement” in the December ’07 issue of AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle. Mr. Mason rightly calls our attention to the injustice of off-handedly lumping poets according to whatever school of poetics they practice or are historically associated.

I, like him, have shuddered at the indiscriminate and uncritical dismissal or celebration of writers by those vaguely familiar with the poet’s work or the tenets of the school or movement under question.

At one end of the school yard, the classically prepped-out New Formalists get teased for their suspenders, bow-ties, and hoop skirts; the ever unpopular nerdy L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are taunted by everyone for their pen-holders and corduroy jackets; the Elliptical poets swoon in black leather mini-skirts and lace-up boots; while the deceased or aging Beats, like the big brother who keeps getting left back in school, remain somehow cool in beret, ascot, and Gauloise in hand and are feted everywhere for their perennial defiance and adolescent petulance. Distinction gets lost when we brusquely assign writers to their corner of the schoolyard.

Today was one sensuous experience after another. After a NY Knicks basketball game in Madison Square Garden, (my first and they won against the Chicago Bulls!) I visited the Whitney Museum to absorb more of the great Kara Walker, whose 3rd floor exhibit “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” seemed very much a retrospective of her last decade’s work. Kara’s work compellingly revisits (revises?) antebellum narratives of American slavery, desire, freedom, violence, repressed sexual and racial mores and attitudes which underlie conversations and beliefs around black womanhood, race relations, art, representation, and history.

Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The distinguished man on the right is Charles Henry Rowell, one of the deans of American letters. Do not let the John Lennon glasses fool you; he's an old-style, southern aristocrat with a passionate love for African-American visual and literary art. This is evidenced by his 30 year tenure as the founding editor of Callaloo, "the premier journal of art, literature and culture of the African Diaspora, which publishes original works by and critical studies of black writers worldwide. The journal offers a rich mixture of fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays, cultural studies, interviews, photography, and visual art."

What follows below was received in my Inbox this morning. The anonymous senders threatened to pelt my four year old son with potatoes if I did not post their manifesto. I love my son, so here goes:

If I drive 30 minutes north of my home, answer all the correct questions about citizenship, provide all the proper papers, and am cleared to proceed across the border, I will effectively land in another country, Canada! And if, per chance, I have some poems in my brown leather satchel, suddenly, my poems become international. Just that simple, I could shrug off my saline consciousness.

Confession #4,080: I am a podcast junkie. A near-brutal, weekly commute last year forced me to seek alternatives to NPR’s apple-pie programming. Don’t get me wrong: I wish I had Scott Simon’s intelligent, bubbly voice, and who does not wish to be interviewed by Terry Gross, if only for the opportunity to elicit her infectious, on-air laughter with a sly, smart joke, to fall into her sweet, joyful, amused giggle that corrals us, all of us, into one wholesome tribe of clever Americans. One summer, while driving across country, in less friendly, unfamiliar terrain, NPR proved to be a welcomed sign of intelligent life. So, my beef? It’s just that, while Top 40 music can make one dumb, NPR tends to render its listeners immensely smug, “informed,” and homey.