The scene this weekend at the last of the remaining Borders bookstores to close was more like a memorial service than a funeral. Shoppers reminisced fondly about their beloved bookseller rather than grieve its loss.
Amid upbeat jazz music and large red-and-yellow signs announcing the “Final Days” of the Borders store in Queens in New York City, customers snagged deals on used chairs and coffee machines. At a Borders in Cincinnati, readers were eager to grab book titles for up to 90 percent off. And signs at a Borders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, implored shoppers to haggle: “No Reasonable Offer Refused.”

The high-profile closeout is expected to shake things up in the brick-and-mortar world:

[Borders is] a victim of a shift in the industry brought on by customers who’d much rather read their favorite titles on an electronic book or tablet computer than turn the page on a paperback. The chain’s demise is expected to have wide-reaching effects on everyone from authors and publishers who will have to find new ways to market their work to competitors like Barnes & Noble that will benefit from losing a big rival.
“The absence of Borders is going to be felt across the industry,” said Michael Norris, a Simba Information senior trade analyst. “The loss of the `showroom’ effect of bookstores is not going to be replaced anytime soon.”

Already nostalgic for those coffee-smelling, shelf-browsing, expensive-chocolate-bar-by-the-register impulse-buying days of yore? Never fear–at least fourteen locations will be taken over by Books-A-Million, and Berjaya Books will retain $15.8 million of Borders intellectual property in Malaysia. For more information, read the full article here.

Reflecting on those words summons up broken friendships and rocky kinships. It wasn’t unusual then (and it’s not unusual now) to have some of my best moments marred by racist encounters overlooked or unseen by others as if they didn’t happen. Such moments often inspired arguments with my first husband, an activist and civil rights worker, as if his whiteness and my blackness had come into conflict. Many of the scenes we made in the 60s were predominantly white. Often, I was the only thing black in the room. Insults, when they came, were often tacit—all in a searing look or tone of voice, and directed only at me. I quickly learned that if I erupted into curses or threatened violence, I would be the one who looked paranoid or racist. That, insofar as anyone else could see or hear, nothing had happened—thus the insult was compounded, because those to whom I voiced my complaints didn’t have the problem and did not understand what had made me so angry.

On a recent visit to Oxford, Mississippi, I went to lunch with a two-man camera crew at a local hot spot, legendary for its authentic Southern cuisine. The occasion was a blues festival at which I was presenting my blues-toned poetry. The joint was crowded. My associates were young white filmmakers well into their 30s, one from California, the other from France. We were seated in a booth with old-fashioned red leather seats. They sat together, backs toward the door, and girl watched. I sat across from them, facing the entrance, and examined a menu exotic to my tastes. We placed our orders and shared toasts. As we began to enjoy our drinks, a handsome young white couple, also in their 30s, brushed by our table. I happened to look up and catch that young man’s eyes. They were blackened with a virulent hatred that challenged my presence and would have lynched me on the spot, were the adage true. Thunderstruck, I turned to my companions.

“Did you see that!?,” I asked, upset.

They grinned and giggled boyishly. I had interrupted them mid ogle, their eyes were fastened on the lady’s bottom and then her breasts as the couple was seated two tables over.

“Uh-oh, Wanda, what are you talking about? Huh?”

Suddenly, I heard an old poet’s words and realized it didn’t happen to them. It wasn’t their problem. What had just happened had happened to me. That look of pure-dee race hatred, centuries deep, had been reserved specifically for me and my kind. My companions might have understood, had I taken the time to explain, assuming I could find my tongue. Had I done so, I would have probably spoiled our lunch and our good time in the process.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

That kind of nothing—or cultural clash—had long become the stuff of my writings. I have made an art of taking those painful moments and transforming them into essays, poems and stories. When teaching students of color, I preach the transformation of that base hatred into art as a writer. Still, I would prefer my life without it; yet, I often wonder what the world would be like if there were no racism, no radical differences in sex preference, or abilities to think—if we all snake-danced to the same conga drum, spoke the same patois and believed in Damballa. What in hell would I write about then?

I’ve tried to maintain as perfect as possible a mirror of Benjamin’s project. Major figures and themes in his book have been updated in mine: his Baron Haussmann is my Robert Moses; his Baudelaire is my Robert Mapplethorpe (my Mapplethorpe chapter begins with the citation “Mapplethorpe was the 1970s leather-clad equivalent of the great dandies and decadents of the nineteenth century — Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, Baudelaire”); his arcades are my World’s Fairs (1939 and 1964 — mimicking the historical trajectory of NYC during the twentieth century, which arcs from the utopian to the corrupt & from the local to the global), but to name a few. While I began with the identical set of Benjamin’s convolutes, over the course of time, only a few remain relevant. Many of them — for example, “The Barricades” or “Marx” — have been replaced by or updated for NYC in the twentieth century: “Excitement, Restlessness, Fame, Ambition” or “Shopping, Mall, Consumerism” are two new convolutes (see below for a complete list of my convolutes). Naturally, the flavor of my book is different than the original. New York in the twentieth century has a much glossier surface. In fact, it’s all about surface: a city without history just coming into its own, beaming with optimism and jazz, Harlem, Madison Avenue, Andy Warhol, The New York Schools (music, art, dance and poetry), the skyscrapers, the influx of immigrant populations and so forth. It’s a far cry from the dark psychological recesses and fervent socio-political battles of Paris in the nineteenth century.

This is an exercise that is as much about reading as it is about writing. In fact, it’s a book that proposes reading as writing. While many other authors could have written Benjamin’s book, why is it that his is so successful, so endlessly fascinating? It’s about what he chooses. In lesser hands, such a work would’ve been dreary, dull, tedious, pedantic and loquacious. Instead, we have a book that is arguably one the most readable works ever written, yet very few words were actually written by Benjamin himself; it’s an act of conceptual writing where what one chooses — one’s taste — either makes or breaks the book. While there was much Benjaminian gloss and “voice” in his book, I take it to the next level: nowhere is a single word of my own present — not a thought, not a commentary, nor a sentiment — instead, reflecting contemporary concerns, my task is merely appropriative.

In the end I want this to be neither reference nor history book: it can only be literature. What it should do is to poetically illustrate the Sisyphean impossibility of attempting to read through and describe the magnitude and complexity of the New York City in the twentieth century, as dictated by the subjective way one person reads through this particular mass of literature. As such, the book — in an ontological sense — will fail: Can a megapolis such as this truly be described? Absolutely not. Can history really be written objectively? No. Yet art cannot fail. What emerges instead is a compendium of fleeting impressions as dictated by one’s whim and curiosity, while engaged in the act of reading and note-taking. And so, it’s a unique work of art; one that anyone could do. But if you were to read through the corpus of literature written on NYC in the twentieth century, you would clearly come up with a completely different book. How you would navigate through this thicket of information is entirely unique.

My research thus far has been limited to university and neighborhood public libraries containing books with a general focus on my subject. I have also been scouring second-hand bookshops for out-of-print titles, while also unearthing the occasional magazine article from yellowed journals. This is a book-based project; thus I have avoided web-based research. Digging through shelves of books, stumbling across page-bound treasures, and unearthing analog documents from the period the way Benjamin did seems an appropriate way to honor his unassailable methodology and spirit.

——

Convolutes

As of today, these are the convolutes I’m working with. I’m only half way through — the book will be done when it hits the exact length of Benjamin’s — so they will continue to evolve radically according to the primary materials I have to work with.

Abstraction
Advertising, Signage
Alcohol, Bar, Drugs, Prohibition
Amnesia, Rootlessness
Ancient, Primitive, SciFi
Apocalypse
Architecture
Art
Body, Hygiene, Pleasure, AIDS
Bohemia
Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge
Building as City
Captial of the 20th Century
Celebrity
Chronicle, Mundane
City as Sentence
Class, Social Unrest, Politics
Classicism
Coney Island
Cosmic, Celestial
Crowds, Congestion, Traffic, Density, Speed
Danger, Seedy, Crime
Death, Decay, Obsolesence, Downfall
Depeletion
Depopulated
Description
Détournement
Documentary
Dream, Sleep, Night Unreal City
Empire
Empire State Building, Chrysler, WTC
Eternal Return
Fame, Ambition, Excitement, Restlessness
Fashion
Flaneur, Idleness, Boredom, Perambulation
Food
Garbage, Dirt, Trash, Waste
Gentrification
Global, World City
Graffiti
Grid, Map. Cartography
Harlem
Image
Interior
Invisible, Unreal, Ghost
Labor, Work
Language, Speech
Light, Lighting, Color, Air
Literature
Logic, Reason
Loneliness, Singularity
Luxury
Manners, Customs, Mundane, Routine
Mapplethorpe
Media
Memory, Nostalgia
Money, Stk Exch, Economics, Wealth, Market
Movement, Mobility
Museum, Spa
Myth
Names, Ethnicity
Nature
Neighborhood, Strucuture
Old New York
Palimpsest
Paris, Europe, Old World
Photography, Reproduction
Politics, Leftism
Poverty, Squalor, Abuse
Power, Narcissism
Prison, Punishment
Progress (Theory of)
Psychogeography
Psychology
Purity
Real Estate
Reinvention, Invention
Religion
Robert Moses
Scale, Magnitude, Proportion
Sex, Romance
Shopping, Mall, Consumerism
Signage, Semiotic, Symbolic
Simulacra
Skyline (Panorama)
Smell
Social
Soho
Sound, Noise
Spectacle
Speed, Nervousness, Iron, Fire
Statue of Liberty
Steam, Plumbing
Streets, Street Names, Names
Suburbs
Surreal
Technology
TimesSq, Bway, Gamb, Prost, Night, Prohibition
Underground
Unrealized NY
Unrest, Radical
Violence
Voyeur, Window, Mirror
Water, Plumbing
Weather, Air Conditioning, Atmosphere
World’s Fair 1939
World’s Fair 1964
Writing

I have had this book sitting on my shelf for a long time now, having purchased it but never reading it.  Jeff Mcdaniel reminded me of it.  I found it and read it last night.  It’s incredible.  I am a bad, bad poet for not reading it sooner, especially since I am standing here in your living room, eating your lasagna and watching your television.

That is all.  Over and out.

So, poets: how do printed copies of your books end up in libraries? Do they end up in libraries?

What’s even going to happen to libraries? There have been plenty of stories lately about how libraries are changing, and that some—like this one in Newport Beach, California—might soon stop housing books, because a “transition toward an all-electronic library is being nudged along by budget cuts.” See also this story about how libraries soon may cease to exist altogether because they “make no sense in the future.”

For the moment, brick-and-mortar libraries continue to exist, and are still great places to get actual printed-on-paper-and-bound books. So it might be of interest that an organization “founded by current and former public library employees” called Hey Small Press! now exists too, and that their mission is to promote “independent publishers to public libraries all over the United States” with the aim of encouraging “libraries to acquire small and independent press books.” You can read all about how they plan to go about achieving that excellent goal on their site. If you are a librarian, for instance, they will explain to you that “Adult literacy and library membership are at all-time highs” and that “Despite all the doom and gloom, books are doing just fine,” and finally that “Small presses are producing amazing books that we know your patrons will love.” If you are a small press publisher, they will tell you how to “introduce your press to us and let us know what books you have in the works.” And if you are a reader, they will invite you to “Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a list of upcoming titles from presses all over the country. Then, with list in hand, head to your nearest public library.”

Regardless of your thoughts on what Nicholson Baker calls “the assault on paper,” or your optimism or pessimism regarding the future of the book, you can still enjoy the decadence (or not!!!) of your chosen art form secure in the knowledge that smart, committed people are out there cultivating love for good books and working hard to get more of them on library shelves. Just thought you should know.

I’ve been reading essays by Carlos Bulosan, published in On Becoming Filipino (Temple University Press, 1995), which is an excellent collection of his poetry, stories, essays, and correspondence, edited by the preeminent Filipino American and postcolonial scholar E. San Juan, Jr. From these essays, particularly, “I Am Not A Laughing Man,” I know Bulosan was hustling as a writer seeking publication, and seeking to get paid handsomely for publication:

A literary agent in New York wrote me about trying to write a text for Normal Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” one of the FOUR FREEDOMS which he was illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post and the Treasury Department. I rented another room and wrote the article in two hours….

Five days later I received a telegram that the Saturday Evening Post bought my article for nearly a thousand dollars. Then I was really mad. Why didn’t somebody tell me that it was easy to make money in America? Why did everybody let me suffer and starve? I was not only mad with myself, but with everyone around me.

I love this. I love the entire essay, and I hella love Bulosan’s anger. He’s totally right. Why suffer, why prolong poverty? The son of poor dispossessed farmers, he came from the northern part of the Philippines (Binalonan, Pangasinan, to be exact) to our West Coast, landed in Seattle in 1930, at the age of 17. At that time, the Philippines was still as colony of the USA, so he wouldn’t have technically been an “expatriate.” He was a colonial subject.

We know so much about his generation of young Filipino men, agricultural and cannery laborers, objects of racial and class violence, because of his monumental book, America is in the Heart, originally published in 1943 by Harcourt Brace. This is Asian American Studies 101. Today, he is iconic, mythic, sainted, our working class hero. He is the foundation of the Filipino American literary canon.

In many cases, he is portrayed in opposition to the Western canon. This is a historic falsehood.

Here’s E. San Juan, Jr.:

Long forgotten since his brief success in the 1940s, Bulosan was rediscovered in the 1960s by a generation of Filipino American youth radicalized by the antiwar and civil rights struggles.

I would argue that in this post 1960′s reconstruction of Bulosan, his literary ambitions have been conveniently deemphasized. He has been divorced from American poetry. But before I lapse into full-on history lesson, let me stop with that and move on. I confess that America is in the Heart is not my favorite work of his. It’s certainly his most ubiquitous, but it is melodramatic, sentimental in tone, which I believe undermines his radicalism. The poem, “If You Want to Know What We Are,” (included in On Becoming Filipino) is the poem to which I always return. It’s fierce, it sings, it’s a solidly structured poem, and like another one of his poems, “I Want the Wide American Earth,” it invokes and echoes Walt Whitman. In fact, in America is in the Heart, Bulosan writes of aspiring to Whitman, wanting also to sing America.

If you want to know where else Bulosan sought and found publication, check out Poetry magazine, where he was first published in February 1936 as “Carl” Bulosan. This is important evidence. Now, not having a copy of America is in the Heart with me at the moment, I will tell you what author Luis Francia has told me —  in the book, Bulosan does indeed name Harriet Monroe as having accepted his poems for Poetry magazine.

On the opposite side of the Philippine socioeconomic spectrum is Jose Garcia Villa, son of a wealthy landowner, University of the Philippines educated, Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, and whom I briefly mentioned in my previous blog post here (see Doveglion). You will also find him within the pages of Poetry magazine, and in the above Gotham Book Mart photo taken in November 1948 (there’s WH Auden,  Tennessee Williams, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, you get the picture). I am pretty thrilled to find two of his books reviewed in Poetry magazine (February 1943 and February 1959). His work is cleanly picked apart for its limitations and “failures.” Here’s Ned O’Gorman in 1959:

It is perhaps true to say that Jose Garcia Villa’s vision and understanding are considerable. But his poetry is unachieved. In the end it is a failure. The artifact shatters under close study. For Mr. Villa has not yet found a language that can contain a vision so immense and theological.

Understanding and vision are not enough. It is not enough for a poet to say superb things about the world, to have the world practically in his hands. The core of vision, the act of understanding need, before rime and reason, the proper language. The flaw that holds his poetry from heights is a flaw in language. […] If the vision were meager, if the poet were just another poet, the matter would not concern me so.

Others can tell me whether you think Villa is objectified or culturally misunderstood in this review. I don’t think the review is mean spirited at all. I happen to think it’s actually complimentary; O’Gorman concludes his review of by emphasizing Villa’s potential: “For if ever there is a poet, he is one.” This is tall praise; Villa is no hack.

In Filipino American circles, I don’t know whether folks really know what to do with his poems. He is sometimes (frequently?) lumped into the nebulous category of “experimental,” which is too often erroneously thought of as not relevant to the API experience, a judgment I think is short sighted. And because in API literary circles, we emphasize Edith Sitwell’s problematic praise of Villa as “some kind of magic iguana” — see Tim Yu’s paper, “Asian/American Modernisms: José Garcia Villa’s Transnational Poetics” — I am pleased to see Villa’s work read so closely, and thought about critically.

I confess that I have mythologized Bulosan and Villa, these two pioneering Filipino American poetry figures, precisely because I need them to be larger than life, as our heroes usually are. And considering a particular sector of my community’s ambivalence towards “academic,” “awarded” poetry written ambitiously, crafted meticulously, widely published, and recognized by “mainstream” literary bodies, I look to the work and presence of Villa and Bulosan, affixed and invested in American letters, as role models of Arriving. Belonging. Crafting. Hustling. Publishing. Here.

And with that, I am out.

Peace. Paalam.

I was thrilled to see Jeffrey McDaniel throw some love at Diane Seuss. Here’s a link to an interview I conducted with her last fall over at Critical Mass. I found out about her book visiting Poetry Daily–don’t forget to toss a few bucks in that direction, by the way, during their National Poetry Month fund drive! I do, year after year. They’re a reliable source of information about recent titles, featuring poems that have moved me to purchase a number of books.

Every once in a while though, word of mouth also works. That’s how I found out about William Billiter’s poetry debut, a National Poetry Series title (selected by Hilda Raz) just out from the University of Georgia Press. And that’s how I will bid adieu to my beloved Harriet, with a few positive words about the exceptional Stutter.

The spacing within the lines is the characteristic that gives this book both definition and texture. Though the book jacket claims the poems are “spaced to stutter” I argue that the poems are spaced to sustain the reader’s attention over subject matter, places and language that the eye would otherwise gloss over, not because they are not interesting but because we read poetry (despite the caesura, despite the line or stanza break) too quickly. I attempted to read the poems by ignoring the spaces but the spaces could not be ignored–it’s impossible to erase them mentally and the lines sometimes came across syntactically clunky without them. That’s how I determined that these spaces are not gimmick but necessity. Therefore, I surrendered to them and took my time reading in ways I had not since José García Villa’s unique comma poems.

Billiter’s canvas is a landscape with porch swings, grackles, rural roads too familiar with car accidents, and citizens with names like Uncle Ersel and Gethsemane. The town mentioned prominently is Shinbone (with a reference to taking the mail-train to Mobile, Alabama), though the imagination and knowledge of the young speaker (who spends much of his time dreaming and exploring with pals Willy, Stinky and Soup) takes him as far as Tierra del Fuego, the Red Sea, to the image of a Persian girl lifting her veil. Formative moments do happen here, significant to a young man who accesses emotion and understanding through the objects of his everyday:

Pallbearers

I got dizzy         when the sirens come,
had to sit a spell.         They were bleeding pretty
badly. A finger twitched         in the ditch. A man
come along and put          it in a little
brown bag like it         was lunch or something.
They pulled a sheet         over the kid’s
head. He wasn’t         moving no
more. Sunlight          twinkled glass
in the road. It hurt          my eyes.
The kid’s mother kept         on wailing
and bleeding. Somebody         shouted for something.
Wild canaries lit         on the barbed wire.
They didn’t sing.         I tried
to think about nothing         and leaned back
in the dry weeds. A couple         ants tugged at
the corpse of a June bug,          drug it away.

The heartbreaking scenes are many in Stutter: poems like “D,” in which a young man makes a troubling admission to a young woman in her casket; in “Maybe Stink,” a young man, Cassandra-like, makes enigmatic pronouncements (“Widows will pin         black lace into their          hair,/ caesuras disguised          as prayer hidden in their         blouses.”); and in “Lucinda’s Hands,” about a pair of lovers suffering the strain of their labors, stuns when one says to the other:

If I         unfasten your          hands
from mine,         Lucinda, our         fingers
dried piles of pine         needles, will         you
rub your wrists         together like two         dead
sticks? Will you          breathe a little         light
into this         bonfire begging to         ignite?
Won’t you         blow away         the dark
ash          that surrounds         us?

There is no pretense in Billiter’s affinity for the working-class experience. Additionally, what’s refreshing is that his sensibility is not channeled through romantic or nostalgic notions for a rural past. This small town is inhabited by big lives and are thusly acknowledged (repeatedly) when Billiter reconstructs the marvelous shapes of this world in his poetry. From the poem “First Adultery”:

Afterwards,          they lay listening         to the bullfrogs
the low         moan of owl          near the edge of the field,
leaves          of corn whispering         secrets among the furrows.

But now I’ve had occasion to take a long look at the Library of America version of Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, with all the poems she published in her lifetime, judicious culls from the posthumous haul, and most of her published prose– more than we got in the old blue-green collection– and you know what? none of the posthumously published verse is as good as “The Armadillo” or “Song for the Rainy Season” or “Poem” or “The End of March,” and none of the new-to-most-people, not-previously-collected prose is as good as the best letters or “The U.S.A. School of Writing,” but they can be amazing anyway.

For example, the indirect bitterness and the very cautious observations in “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” which looks finished to me (Bishop may have had political reasons never to print it); and “Keaton,” which is obviously unfinished as a poem but has plenty of complete and resonant lines, among them “I will be good; I will be good” (shades of Aiken’s Senlin!) and “If the machinery goes I will repair it./ If it goes again I will repair it again.”

And “Apartment in Leme,” whose opening is a rehearsal for “North Haven”; and “Brasil, 1959,” whose “fairy palace small, impractical” is the missing imaginative link between “Jeronimo’s House” and “Song for the Rainy Season.” And my favorite surprise this year (I mean that it surprised me), “Salem Willows,” whose rotating carousel inspires the girl who rides the animals, but not the animals themselves: “It was as if that music,/ coarse, mechanical, loud,/ discouraged them from trying.” The animals are like the maidens on Keats’s urn, but the child is like the maidens too; as long as they go round and round, they don’t have to grow up. (I was happy to see, as I composed this post, that Gillian White singled out the same few poems.)

You can see in these poems– some of which sound hesitant, “unfinished,” in just the way that Bishop’s most finished poems (“Filling Station,” say, or “Poem”) sound “unfinished”– what it is to seek lack of finish as an aesthetic effect: what it means, and how hard Bishop worked, to fashion the poem that sounds made-up on the spot (by a very careful speaker), the poem whose speaker revises in the direction of accuracy as you read or hear it. How different that is from a really unfinished poem.

And speaking of finish: when you read an assortment of drafts from a poet like Bishop, meticulous almost to a fault, you can not only see how good “not good enough” was; you can also see the difference between a finished line, sentence or stanzas, and a wholly finished poem. There are plenty of the former, if not many of the latter, in the unpublished/ posthumous/ Poe-Jukebox material selected for that Library of America book.

There’s also terrific, heretofore hard-to-find prose, some from short reviews some from a long essay about the then-less-than-half-built new city of Brasilia. There’s Bishop’s gift for bitterly terse irony, shown in just a few poems (“Pink Dog”) but audible in her treatment of Brasilia and its declaredly left-wing architect, Oscar Niemeyer, whose “solution to practical problems… seems to have been… put them underneath, or underground, like a lazy housewife shoving household gear out of sight.”

It’s audible too when she reviews a staid memoir by the translator and critic Wallace Fowlie, comparing his recollection of Boston’s swan boats in his youth to her own, from hers: “one of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother’s finger when she offered it a peanut. I remember the hole in the black kid glove and a drop of blood. I do not want to set myself up as a model of facing the sterner realities of swan boat rides in order to discredit Mr. Fowlie’s idealization– but there is remarkably little of blood, sweat, or tears in Mr. Fowlie’s book.”

There’s also more prose (not put in the blue-green book) about Bishop’s early model and mentor Marianne Moore, prose that says much about Bishop’s working methods, as well as about her taste: “how does Miss Moore reconcile pleasure with the fatigue and drudgery that must go into writing?” There are period bits, what must have been virtually house style for Bishop but could strike us as fastidiously odd: “I should like to add a few complaints about this Viking Reader, complaints that really amount to why isn’t there more of it?” And there is her note that “young students and poets” whom she has met in the 1970s don’t really know Auden; they “seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces… One reason for this may be that Auden… has been, or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems over-familiar, old hat.”

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to the author of “The Bight.” By the time I got more than halfway through this volume I was almost pushed out of whatever else I wanted to do: why write, I felt, when I can read these? I feel that way more intensely about this book than about Bishop’s earlier collections, because this one puts the verse and the prose together, so that if you’re too tired to appreciate the former entirely, the latter waits for you right there.

I had thought tonight that I might write some sort of polite answer to Kenneth Goldsmith’s point about the endless proliferation, sometime in the near future, of procedurally generated, recombinant digital books. I had thought that I might; now I think I just have.

Elisa’s Hunger by Carolina Monsiváis (Mouthfeel Press). I picked up this chapbook in El Paso, where I read with Carolina, and Eduardo C. Corral. In the spirit of my previous posts regarding women of color publishing women of color, let me shout out Carolina for her lovely poetry, and the “Borderland English/Spanish Publisher,” Mouthfeel Press’s co-editor Maria Miranda Maloney.

Uluhaimalama by Mahealani Perez-Wendt (Kuleana Oiwi Press). This is the same press which gave us Brandy Nālani McDougall’s The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani P’akai. As with McDougall’s poems, I first came upon Perez-Wendt’s poems in Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim 2009 (Salt Publishing), edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

Tonto’s Revenge by Adam Aitken (Tinfish Press). This is the next chapbook in the Tinfish retro chapbook series. From Susan Schultz’s blog: “You want to shout Fuck Tourism,” Aitken writes, “but that would be nostalgic.” Right?! This is a theme in Pacific poetry that cuts deep into my own concerns.

Running the Dusk by Christian Campbell (Peepal Tree Press). This one’s on its way to me from the UK (both the author and the press are UK-based), courtesy of the author. I am reminded of other English-language writers of color in various places on the globe. This had come up on a Filipinos in Diaspora panel I’d spoken on some years ago, about the hard work of connecting with a readership of other English-language writers of color, especially those of us in the USA. I want to think the internet is making it easier, but then again, perhaps the internet is making us seem farther away from one another.

Through the Stonecutter’s Window by Indigo Moor (Northwestern University Press). This is the inaugural winner of the Cave Canem Prize, and I was glad to read with him last week at the Lyrics & Dirges series, co-curated by Sharon Coleman, at Pegasus Books in Downtown Berkeley. I haven’t cracked this one yet (too much to read right now!) but am intrigued by something he said during his reading. There is one section of his book dedicated to ekphrastic poetry, meditating upon a single painting.

So those are some books and chapbooks I’ve added to my reading list. Here are some happenings (both physical and virtual):

Craig Santos Perez’s excellent essay, “The Poetics of Mapping Diaspora, Navigating Culture, and Being From,” has been rolled out in six parts over at Doveglion.com. It’s been wonderful, witnessing this one unfold, beginning with invisibility and immobilization, and the real intergenerational psychic pain of these, into the opposite of invisibility and immobilization. I always have hope, as poetry can be a vehicle for this movement and assertion of presence in a world that erases, renames, appropriates, seeks to drive a people to oblivion.

Poet David Keali’i has written a poetic response to Perez’s essay, and this response is soon forthcoming at Doveglion as well. “What is a Doveglion?” you ask. It’s Jose Garcia Villa’s pen name, a contraction of dove, eagle, and lion, as well as a poem by e.e. cummings, written for Villa, who described Doveglion as a “strange country with no boundaries,” as “land itself is not a real country.” Certainly for ex-pats, definitions of “land,” “home,” and “nationality,” are things with which many struggle.

Next month is APIA Heritage Month, and I have co-organized and will be hosting Literary Night at Oakland Asian Cultural Center, featuring Jason Bayani, Vanessa Huang, Robert Ricardo Reese, and Margaret Rhee (who also has a chapbook forthcoming from Tinfish Press). There are more things I will be doing for APIA Heritage Month (online and in the real world), but for now, I shall leave you all with this OACC e-flier:

The book continues to wow. Here are some things I scribbled in the margins: “a female Frank Stanford”; “love the lapses in decorum”; “stunning, violent imagination”; “diction is alive, lots of movement and surprise”; “Eleanor Lerman won this prize years ago and somehow that makes sense”; “a broken person trying to pull it together with one hand and tear it apart with the other”.

Here is a poem of Seuss’, Song in my Heart, that appears on the Poetry Foundation website:

Song in my heart

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,

battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom

of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky

in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,

raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy house

slippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.

God to make him reasonable as he gets out

the straight razor to slice the hair off his face,

using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone

knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,

like God is a terrible simile for me but like

God with his mirror, I use it.

I love the specificity of diction of this poem, which allows the author to play to my senses, to create distinct visual images in my brain. I also love how this poem builds and turns. The first line is seemingly playful: pee on a toilet seat, but as the images accumulate, the effect changes. By line three, we have three things that the speaker is taking responsibility for: pee on a seat (stakes low and playful); the car battery dead (stakes a little higher, potential personal neglect); a dead canary, a songbird, in its cage (stakes much higher, definite personal neglect). The poem is psychologically interesting: speaker is taking responsibility for the facts of her environment, but is also not so responsible as a human being. We have been playfully lured into a poem that is not so playful.

Then god appears via an extended simile that makes up over half the poem. This is not god up in the clouds; this is a tactile, detailed (flawed) deity—we see him, disheveled, potentially dangerous, holding “a straight razor” with the intention to “slice”. Yes, it’s just hair that he wants to slice “off his face”, but it’s still ominous.

Then there is the gorgeous mirror image, where God lifts out of the mundane human realm into which Seuss has placed him and is suddenly grand again, using the Black Sea as a mirror. This image is intoxicating, both as a visual image and also as an intellectual concept, but the poem quickly ricochets back into playfulness with the line “when everyone knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror”. This line is funny for its surprise: the line before gets subverted; a mirror that’s painted black would not function as a mirror; and yet everyone does not know that the Black Sea is a terrible mirror, which adds to the comedy.

I admire the authorial control that whips us through the last several lines, each line making us re-frame the poem. Ultimately the way the speaker is both accountable and neglectful mirrors the way the speaker is both serious and joking. By the end, the reader is unsettled, not sure what to believe. The speaker is undoubtedly unreliable; we probably wouldn’t want to live with her, but we do want to keep listening to her. And the paradox is that while she hints at danger and neglect in her real life, she is attentive and alert in her poems.

The MFA writing workshop is only part critical feedback, and those enrolled in the Rutgers-Newark program know that I’m big on citizenship–on reading poetry books and reporting back with recommendations and reviews, on sharing the book-love online. Poets have to talk about the work of other poets. It’s like that in the literary community at large. Rare is the fiction writer who reads and appreciates poetry. At multi-genre readings I see them politely zoning out when the poets stand at the podium. When I teach multi-genre workshops or literature classes, I trust the poets in the room will know how to navigate fiction because our literary education since high school is mostly the study of the novel or the short story. Fiction writers on the other hand, never have to study or consider a single poem if they don’t want to. They faintly remember that experience from that other era they were exposed to poetry–elementary school. Okay, so I’m being a bit harsh, but this is National Poetry Month and it’s my poetry party and I can cry if I want to.

I frequently ask my students what they are reading. I don’t care what it is as long as they’re reading, and they can tell me they’re reading graphic novels or memoirs or how-to manuals or field guides to New Jersey flora and fauna. One never knows what shape the next muse will take. I like to recommend books and poems, but I also talk about documentaries (thank you Netflix!), I also talk about art exhibitions at the NYC museums (thank you Whitney, thank you Guggenheim), and I most definitely I talk about the profession, demystifying everything from the cover letter to the blurb.

In the past, I used to resist that last activity since my belief was that these young poeple were in the MFA program to become better poets, not to become self-promoting professionals, but I found a happy medium: I simply answer their questions. If it’s something they need to know I will provide a thorough answer, if it’s not worth a discussion I will keep my response succinct. That I learned at the podium, during the dreaded Q&A session.

And so, in the spirit of sharing, I asked my students to recommend a book to Harriet readers, to highlight a recent title since it’s part of their responsibility as a poet of today to be reading poets of today. I promised my students I’d put their names in lights, but the best I could do is bold. (Holla back, kids!–they cringe when I try to be hip…)

Anna Moschovakis
You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake
Coffee House Press
Rec by Armin Tolentino

Evoking an old logic exercise, Anna uses this title poem as a springboard to confront the challenges of overpopulation and diminishing resources.  If posed with the scenario of four people, two canoes, a tent, and axes, Anna makes it clear how our civilization would proceed: wage war and support over-consumption.  This book is a fascinating tangle of logic twists and contradictions, the same power-structure that allows us as a culture to support a system that deprives its weakest the canoes necessary to survive a night on the lake.

*

Kathryn Kysar
Pretend the World
Holy Cow! Press
Rec by Marina Carreira

Balancing the  delicate acts of loving and grieving, Kathryn Kysar microscopes the world of modern woman/motherhood. Kysar’s ability to politicize parenting and gender offer a gripping but blunt way of seeing the lives we create, the wars we wage, the things we consume, and the connections we make without overbearing sentimentality or righteousness. Pretend the World is  a searing testament to being a mother in a world filled with monsters.

*

Nick Flynn
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands
Graywolf Press
Rec by Paula Neves

Venturing from the personal to the political, these heartbreaking poems chronicle everything from absent fathers, to an indifferent God, to the brutality at Abu Ghraib. Their lyrical integument both covers and cracks to reveal personal fragmentation and general inhumanity, and one’s inextricable relation to the other. Flynn’s vision is, thankfully not entirely bleak. After the cruelty, “First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.” Long after reading, these poems still shine.

*

Rachel Richardson
Copperhead
Carnegie Mellon U Press
Rec by Sarah Grossman

We should care about Rachel Richardson’s first book Copperhead because it shows us that the past is a place full of longing. Richardson’s poems live in the rich and traumatic histories of the American South, and Richardson knows that these histories ache to be told, unwound, and made in this present.

*

Srikanth Reddy
Voyager
U of California Press
Rec by Roberto Santiago

Challenging and inspiring, this is a book of poetry I could revisit multiple times and feel as if I am truly discovering something new with each reading. Voyager is divided into four unique parts situated on very different lands conveyed through the employment of distinct languages, strikeouts and a variety of experimental forms. In addition to the traditional book format, Voyager is also available for digital download.

*

Raúl Zurita
Song For His Disappeared Love
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky
Action Books
Rec by Chris Caruso

Zurita’s latest book translated into English builds on his belief that the poet is a channel for those who suffered under the Pinochet regime in Chile, and cannot speak for themselves.  Mixing lyrical and confessional approaches, unknown “I’s” expel the horrors of a dictatorship through remembrance of disappeared lovers.  Zurita shows a path through which scars and trauma are able to heal.

I’m borrowing poet Pat Mora’s favorite expression, and riffing from Javier Huerta’s list entry, although my list will be shorter and I’ll also add a few words of praise about these, my favorites books. Wish Huerta had done the same… ouch! (Much love, Javi, you know I think you’re mad-cool, mi osito de peduche, my laughing robot.)

I keep hundreds of poetry books in my office for my students — it’s a lending library although I’ve lost count how many times the books become de facto gifts because the students don’t return them. It’s all good. I’ve got more books to buy, and the shelf needs to make room for them. There are a few books, however, that I won’t lend (but I highly encourage my students to get their own copies!), and these I keep in my personal library at home. I reach for them whenever I want to revisit those moments when poetry inspired me or made me feel proud to be part of this community of artists.

The following list could have moved in a number of directions, but I decided to write about books and poets I hadn’t written about on Harriet (otherwise I would have including such titles as Leroy V. Quintana’s My Hair Turning Gray Among Strangers, Laura Jensen’s Bad Boats, and Ronald Johnson’s The Shrubberies.) Also, of course García Lorca, of course Cavafy, of course Bishop. But I wanted to keep my recommendations more contemporary:

The Orchard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly (Boa Editions, Ltd., 2004)

When I recommend this title, I always suggest the following: in one sitting, read the last lines to every poem in the book. Kelly is extraordinary, and the fierce way she closes each poem is like getting startled each time by a gavel banging behind your back. One of my favorite poem endings: “Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow.”

The Salt Ecstasies, James L. White (Graywolf Press, 1982, 2010)

White wrote some of the most beautiful love poems, though his work (and his story) was also full of pain and grief. When he used the word “love” (why are we so afraid to write that word?) it was always sustained by glorious imagery: “I love you like weathering wood / in a room of empty pianos.”; “Good love is like this. / Even the smell of baked bread won’t make it better, / this being out of myself for awhile.”

Winter Stars, Larry Levis (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)

If Kelly is the muse of closings, Levis is the muse of openings. Sometimes it’s a single line, others it’s a stanza, but Levis grabs the reader from the get-go — how quickly one makes the commitment to the entire poem: “There are places where the eye can starve, / But not here.”; “Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy.”

Emplumada, Lorna Dee Cervantes (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1981)

Each time I read this book I discover another wondrous layer. The last time I was intrigued by its bestiary, its animal stirrings unsettling the air: starfish clustering are “little martyrs, soldiers, artless suicides / In lifelong liberation from the sea”; spiders “have beautiful women / drawn on their bodies”; and geese “hum / as they go. They have yet / to reach their song.”

Sonnets from the Puerto Rican, Jack Agüeros (Hanging Loose Press, 1996)

East Harlem native Agüeros was a man of many trades — playwright, translator, and in the 1970s he was director of El Museo del Barrio. He was also a chronicler who drew from the imagery of his beloved NYC. His account of the 1990 Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx remains one of my favorite sonnet sequences: “I feel pensive and old like the cannon on top of the round brick jail on Governors Island.”

Piedra de Sol/ Sunstone, Octavio Paz (translated by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions Edition, 1991)

This is a single cyclical sentence, a book-length syllabic poem that reads like a prayer or an inventory of everything beautiful and terrible about the world: “canta la soledad en su corola / pétalos de cristal es cada hora.”

The Monarchs, Alison Hawthorne Deming (Louisiana State U Press, 1997)

Since the monarch butterfly is the symbol of my homeland Michoacán, México, and Deming is a poet whose love of the natural world I greatly admire, this was a winning combination. Her breathtaking language takes me home whenever I’m feeling nostalgic: “It’s beautiful to think that trees have consciousness, / can feel their wood thicken, and, as the sun migrates / south, how the limbs redirect their reaching, / effortless and slow, their movement visible only in the form.”

Rooms Are Never Finished, Agha Shahid Ali (Norton, 2002)

Published shortly after his death, this incredible book by the poet who popularized the ghazal in this country, brims with glory at every (page) turn: “O beating night, what could have reined the sky / in? Come to the window: panes plot the earth / apart. In the moon’s crush, the cobalt stars / shed light —”

Whereas mainstream feminists fight for the right to access birth control and safe abortions, populations of marginalized women must fight for the right to reproduce. Think of compulsory sterilization programs which have taken away this right from poor women, third world women, native women.

These poems assert the right to maintain control over what comes and goes in and out of their own bodies.

So then one lens through which I read these poems — to think about indigenous women and reproductive rights, sovereignty over the body, as analogous to sovereignty over land and islands.

In “How to Use a Condom,” Revilla reframes manufacturers’ package instructions as violence:

TEAR HERE.

This reads a lot differently when we think of women who do not have control over what/who enters them.

The very act of intercourse with prophylaxis is framed as politically loaded:

Reproduction is not the problem.
Reproduction is the problem,
Making children based on an image.
We gotta stop.

I have to ask myself, what image is this? And what has “gotta stop?”

In “Make Rice,” the act of washing and sifting uncooked rice grains in one’s hands elaborates upon the previous poem, “Catch,” a visual poem depicting either insemination or prevention:

but I never lose a piece of rice,
because that
could be my daughter.

How else to ensure that the people live on, but to keep having babies. So then, reproduction, and asserting the choice to reproduce, as political resistance.

Without further ado–

tunaluna, alurista

Zero Hour and other documentary poems, Ernesto Cardenal

A Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Starsdown, Jasper Bernes

And the Stars were Shining, Josh Ashberry

After All, William Mathews

The Good Thief, Marie Howe

On Carbon-Dating Hunger, Anthony Seidman

Situations, Signs, Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian

Natural Histories, Leslie Ullman

La Carreta Made a U-turn, Tato Laviera

Undocumented Love/Amor Indocumentado, Jose Antonio Burciaga

The Place Within, Pope John Paul II

Borders, Pat Mora

Maritn & Meditations on the South Valley, Jimmy Santiago Baca

Que Linda la Brisa, Benjamin Saenz and Jimmy Santiago Baca with photographs by James Drake

Then, Suddenly, Lyn Emmanuel

Dear Jack, Scott  Inguito

Late Wife, Claudia Emerson

The Darkness around Us is Deep, William Stafford

Frail Craft, Jessica Fisher

Field-Russia, Gennady Aygi

Furious Lullaby, Oliver de la Paz

Interior with Sudden Joy, Brenda Shaughnessy

Life Studies, Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

Poems Across the Pavement, Luis J. Rodriguez

Diwata, Barbara Jane Reyes

The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly

Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Walking Theory, Steven Vincent

The Intelligence of Clouds, Stanley Moss

Praise, Robert Hass

Post Meridian, Mary Ruefle

Slow Work through Sand, Leslie Ullman

Ariel, Sylvia Plath

Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream, Juan  Felipe Herrera

A la suerte de tus brazos, Joel Servin Ortega

Imagenes los Juegos, Miguel Angel Zapata

Silencios, Ivan Trejo

La musa lunatica/ The Lunatic Muse, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez

The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Robert Bly

Sands of the Well, Denise Levertov

What We Carry, Dorianne Laux

Sonnets and Salsa, Carmen Tafolla

Aun/ Still Another Day, Pablo Neruda

Dreams by No One’s  Daughter,  Leslie Ullman

Palabras de Mediodia/ Noon Words, Lucha Corpi

Imago, Joseph O. Legaspi

Indian Trains, Erika Wurth

Gravities of Center, Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes

American Jesus, Richard Vargas

Metamorphosis of the Serpent God, Robert L. Giron

The Unicorn Poem & Flowers and Songs of Sorrow,  E.A. Mares

My Kill Adore Him, Paul Martinez Pompa

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, Lorna Dee  Cervantez

Las Bicicletas de Boulder, Jose T. Espinosa Jacome

Cantos, Alfred Arteaga

This Many Miles from Desire, Lee  Herrick

The Laughter of Doves, Frances Marie Trevino

Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes, Francisco X. Alarcon

La Materia del Silencio, Cesar Baez, Gabriela Aguirre, Jose Andrade

The Computer is Down, Evangelina Vigil-Pinon

La Frontera: Un Cuerpo, Gabriela Aguirre Sanchez

East of the Freeway, raulsalinas

Estampida de poeminimos, Efrain Huerta

The Lost Country of Sight, Neil Aitken

From the Other Side of Night: New and Selected, Francisco X. Alarcon

Exiles of Desire, Juan Felipe Herrera

A contracorriente, Marco Antonio Campos/Book  I: As life was, Jimmy Santiago Baca

The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans Rae Dalven

Bestiary, Lourdes Vazquez

Bent to the Earth, Blas Manuel De Luna

La Cicatriz del  Naipe, Jose Jaime Ruiz

Oasis, Jose Luis Parada

For colored boys who speak softly, yosimar reyes

from Sand Creek, Simon J. Ortiz

Thirty an’ Seen a Lot, Evangelina Vigil

De Amor Oscuro/ Of Dark Love, Francisco X. Alarcon

Poemas Plagiados, Esteban Peicovich

The Heart’s Traffic, Ching-In Chen

Poeta en San Francisco, Barbara  Jane Reyes

El Reverso Exacto del Texto, Margarita-Sayak Valencia Triana

Whispering to Fool the Wind, Alberto Rios

Chants, Pat Mora

La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge, Alicia Gaspar de Alba

The Seven Ages, Louise Gluck

boomerang, Brenda Cardenas

The Concrete River, Luis J.  Rodriguez

The Country between Us, Carolyn Forche

Emotoma,  Minerva Reynosa

Trench Town Rock, Kamau Brathwaite

Sol-Edades, Marco Antonio  Dominguez

Artemis in  Echo Park, Eloise Klein Healy

Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove

Out of this World, Joseph Somoza

A Book Called Rats, Miguel Murphy

Delights & Shadows, Ted Kooser

Ten to One, Bob Perelman

The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson

The Lichtenberg Figures, Ben  Lerner

Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy

Asylum, Quan Barry

Oblique Prayers, Denise Levertov

Breathing the Water, Denise Levertov

Nights and Day, James Merrill

City of a Hundred Fires, Richard Blanco

The Other Man was Me: A Voyage to the New World, Rafael Campo

Spinach Days, Robert Philips

For the Sleepwalkers, Edward Hirsh

Breakdown Lane, Robert Philips

Dark and Perfect Angels, Benjamin Alire Saenz

La Costumbre Heroicamente Insana de Hablar Solo, Armando Alanis Pulido

Mixturao and Other Poems, Tato Laviera

Dark Thirthy, santee frazier

Celso, Leo  Romero

Solstice, emmy perez

Los ojos ya deshechos, Luis Aguilar

La entranable constumbre o El libro de Felipe, Luis Aguilar

The Outer Bands, Gabriel Gomez

Puerta de Sol, Francisco Aragon

Selected poetry, Cecilio Garcia-Camarillo

Et tu . . . Raza?, alurista

Elegies in Blue, Benjamin Alire Saenz

Z eros, alurista

The Smoking Mirror, Naomi Helena Quinones

Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, Rigoberto Gonzalez

The Date Fruit Elegies, John Olivares Espinoza

How to Undress a Cop, Sarah Cortez

Somewhere between Houston and El Paso, Carolina Monsivais

My Own True Name: New and Selected Poems for Young Adults, Pat Mora

A Semblance: Selected and New Poems 1975-2007, Laura Moriarty

Cascadia, Brenda Hillman

The Woman who Fell from the Sky, Joy Harjo

Picture Palace, Stephanie Young

The World Doesn’t End, Charles Simic

Names Above Houses, Oliver de la Paz

What I’m On, Luis Humberto Valadez

Poemas & Antipoemas, Nicanor Parra

AmerIcan, Tato Laviera

Deshuesadero, Roman Lujan

Caja de Pandero, Sergio Wulschner

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry

Sunstone/Piedra de Sol, Octavio Paz

The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayorga, Kevin Gonzalez

Revenge of the “Illegal Alien”, Cesar A. Preciado-Cruz (teolol)

Unending Blues, Charles Simic

My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected  Poems, Alfonsina Storni

The Poems, Howard McCord

Poemas Escogidos, Al Qing

Plummet, Chris Nealon

The Joyous Age, Christopher Nealon

The Buried Sea: New and Selected, Rane Arroyo

In Formation: 20 Years of Joda, Jose Montoya

Tarde o Temprano: Poemas 1958-2000, Jose Emilio Pacheco

Teeth, Aracelis Girmay

Familia, Elisa A.  Garza

They Say that I am Two, Marcos McPeek Villatoro

Suck on the Marrow, Camille T. Dungy

The Dream  Songs, John Berryman

Drive: The First  Quartet, Lorna Dee Cervantes

Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, Francisco  X. Alarcon

187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border, Juan Felipe Herrera

from Unincorporated Territory [hacha], Craig Santos Perez

Frozen Accident, Alfred Arteaga

My Father Was a Toltec and selected poems, Ana Castillo

Why I Kick at Night, Ron Drummond

How the World Changed, Amit K. Ghosh

OBRAS, Xavier Villaurrutia

Bad Alchemy, Dionisio D. Martinez

Poems by Son, Trinidad Sanchez, Jr./ Poesias del Padre, Trinidad Vasquez Sanchez

Communion, Pat Mora

Feral, Jane McAdams

from Unincorporated Territory [saina], Craig Santos Perez

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, Camille T. Dungy

floricanto en aztlan, alurista

Calendar of Dust, Benjamin Alire Saenz

Dreaming the End of War, Benjamin Alire Saenz

Pity the Drowned Horses, Sheryl Luna

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine

the iceworker sings and other poems, Andres Montoya

Paper Pavilion,  Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Business of Fancydancing, Sherman Alexie

Prayer to Spider Woman/ Rezo a la Mujer Arana, Renato Rosaldo

Inspired by Daisy Fried’s “Questions I Don’t Understand,” I have decided to write the first (and probably only) installment of a series I will call “Metaphors I Don’t Understand.”

Sometimes, when I meet new people, they ask a bunch of questions, including “What do you do?” and “Are you married?” and “Got any kids?” (Does this happen everywhere? Is it the Midwest? Is it me? Anyway.) Sometimes when I answer that I’m a writer, and that I’m married but don’t have kids, they say something like “Oh, but that’s great, because your books are like your kids!”

And mostly because it’s not worth getting into it with people who are just trying to be friendly, I agree and say “Yep, it’s great! Thanks!”

But your books aren’t really like your kids at all. They’re not a substitute for kids, nor are they even comparable, of course, in their means of creation or subsequent care. But even if you don’t take the comparison literally, kids are not a satisfying metaphor, either, for all kinds of reasons. Theoretically, books outlive you like kids do (one hopes, barring tragedy), but your kids eventually die, too. No matter how bright or gloomy your view of the Future of Literature, you can’t dispute that even though your books might eventually “die,” they’re not one hundred percent guaranteed to do so, like human children are. In any event, for a while I was trying to think of a better comparison, but I couldn’t come up with one.

Then, while reading Christian Hawkey’s outstanding cross-genre book Ventrakl last fall, a replacement metaphor fell into my lap: Books are vaguely like your kids, but they are almost exactly like your ghosts. As Hawkey writes, “Books—of the living or the dead—are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material.”

So there you have it: a much better metaphor. Unlike kids, books don’t grow or change as they “age;” they remain the same. They might not go on forever being visible to everyone, but they might “haunt” a few who end up being your readers/ghost-spotters (“hang[ing] around shelves,” being “passed on to friends, or sold to used bookstores” as Kenneth Goldsmith describes). Also, if a book is your “kid,” then that makes you its “parent,” which suggests at least a degree of control, whereas I feel very little power over what happens (or does not) to my books after the initial celebratory flurry that accompanies their “release.” Unlike a baby, a book instantly goes where—and does what—it wants. And sure, the book’s “freedom” is limited in that it is playing out the script I’ve written for it, but as for how it’s going to be perceived when I’m not there? No telling. But the uncertainty is exciting; that release is a relief and a thrill: Who will see this? Where will it go? And I imagine the “release” of a kid (when it learns to drive, starts hanging with questionable friends, goes to college, etc.) is potentially more fraught with a negative kind of anxiety. Since your book is always already dead—already a ghost—you don’t have to fret over it dying, but can immediately begin to fantasize about whose house it will sneak into, whom it will speak to, whom it will keep from sleeping at night.

What do you think, Harriet bloggers and readers? Are your books your ghosts? Do you think of them as your kids? Do you think of yourself in relation to your books in any kind of figurative way at all?

I hope this contest will destigmatize our world of poetry. Will make it feel less untouchable, more approachable. So many times I’ve been asked by this very demo how to get published, like I KNOW how to get published (I too have a Crucifixion-sized nail in the wall where all the rejection notes from publications have been stabbed onto), but I see their yearning to get closer to the literary world. Because I too yearn for it, like we all do, no matter what echelon we hail from. Poetry is the party we should all be dancing at- sweating our Beyonces off and grinding on each other’s openness. Fuck chaperons. Spike the punch. Punch the lights out. Get dark and dirty and REAL. I want books like Blood Dazzler in the baby pillow arms of every Buzznet babe.

They’re playing our song, Patricia (it’s a Prince song, of course). Let’s get on the dance floor and show these budding newsters how we drop it like it’s some metaphor about heat that gets us published in the Paris Review.

“Well I guess I wish they could be both. Is that possible? I want to think that there is a way to be timely that is actually what being “timeless” means. To write “news that stays news”. When I think of the “timeless” poems that I return to over and over again — Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Basho, Issa, Sappho mostly — I think what works in them is the sense that they are real human beings writing with absolute focus on what it means to be alive — and for them, that can only mean right then. The names of the emperors or their friends who are ministers have become meaningless, but not their close observations of the world around them. I think it is that intense, close-up look at the timely aspect of their lives that makes them timeless to us now. As I’m saying this it seems to be the least original idea I’ve had in a long time, but still…. And the caveat is that the poem can’t MERELY be timely — like an extended inside joke about Ke$ha that doesn’t also offer the reader (or a potential future reader) something beyond the surface. A much less ancient example is the Romantics. Shelley’s verse plays (ugh!) and his philosophizing aren’t interesting to me, but he’s one of my favorites because of the other things he does, particularly in his beautiful EVENING, PONTE AL MARE, PISA poem “The sun is set, the swallows are asleep, the bats are flitting fast through grey air. The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep and evening’s breath, wandering here and there over the quivering surface of the stream, wakes not one ripple from its summer dream…. etc.” And Clare. There’s nothing about his experience of rural England that applies now to me or even to English people anymore, but some of those poems are timeless if anything is. So that’s my predictable and not that original idea: that only a very timely poem can become timeless. And that, yes, that’s what I want my poems to do.”

I smiled when I got his response because I think that is what his poems do.

A few weeks ago I spent a week at Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts. Among other books, I read Matt Rohrer’s new book, Destroyer and Preserver.

Destroyer and Preserver brought me into its world. Virginia disappeared and I was in Brooklyn or in Paris or wherever the poems took place. And it wasn’t so much a description of place but, rather, a feeling of taking place or happening, that I was with a human being as time passed.

Last week, when Deborah Landau, director of NYU’s creative writing program introduced Rohrer at a reading, she said that his book was “good company.” I agree. Reading it was pleasurable. The language was engaging and surprising and there were some exciting formal experiments. What I liked the most, though, was the sense I had that I was with Rohrer, that the world he describes is “real,” that he is a likeable speaker, pleasant to be around—that’s how I feel when I read James Schuyler. I don’t mean to suggest that Rohrer’s poems don’t ask important questions—they do. “Like given/ the choice to do something/ stupid or sit in a chair/ everyone leaps up/ with their eyes ablaze…” he writes in “Wu Wei.” Part of what I find moving about lines like these in the midst of these poems is that I really, truly believe they are the thoughts and words of real people and not a performance. Of course, I know that all poetry is a performance, but I think the realness of these poems has to do with aiming for a poetry that is timely, with not being afraid to write quickly (as I know Rohrer is willing to do), with being yourself in the poems. The book broke something open for me and I started to work in a different way. It gave me permission to be timely and not worry about the rest. Whether my new poems will last (even in my own estimation) remains to be seen (“only time will tell”?) but I am grateful for Rohrer’s response to my question and for his book and the permission it gave me.

I first arrived at Brandy Nālani McDougall’s poems in Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim 2009 (Salt Publishing), edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Not a conventional “anthology,” this aesthetically diverse volume consists of four chapbook-length selections of poems by four poets — dg nanouk okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Māhealani Perez-Wendt, and McDougall — and I think that was a smart curatorial decision. Altogether, what Hedge got me thinking was this: what is indigenous poetics? What do indigenous voices sound like, and how are these indigenous poets’ concerns articulated in these bodies of poems?

McDougall’s “Return to the Kula House,” from Effigies, are contained within her full-length collection, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani P’akai, published by the Hawai’i-based Kuleana ‘Ōiwi Press’s Wayne Kaumualii Westlake Monograph Series. The mission of this independent press, which was founded in 1998, is to provide a venue for Kanaka Maoli literary, scholarly, and artistic expression.

McDougall pulls us into these lush, verdant pictures and stories of the islands. In her articulation and rearticulation of the islands’ creation, and in her concern with myth and mythic time, she asserts the people’s rightful belonging to the place; they have been there longer than memory. But from the start and throughout these beautiful poems, we are made aware of an undeniable invading presence. From her opening poem, “Pō:”

Before the land was tamed by history,
the oceanside resorts and pineapple plantations,
before the cane knife’s rust, the dark time of sickness,
the coming of cannons, the bitter waters drunk,
before the metallic salt of blood, the rain emptied
into rivers, the winds carved valleys and mountains,
before the earth spurted fire, birthed islands …

The land has been of the people for longer than anyone can remember. There’s evidence of this in “The Petroglyphs at Olowalu,” as the ocean has carved tunnels and caves, so the people have also carved images of themselves into rock. By contrast, the “highway to Lāhaina, newly paved / and lined in paint,” is another kind of man-made carving into the land. Still, here, she returns, affirming her memory, seeking guidance. “Tracing the lines those before me began — / their words I ask for,” she will presumably continue what those before her have begun. We can read the poems in this collection as such.

The land, the deities, and the body exist in reciprocity:

Out of her head,
Out of her breast,
Out of her mouth,
Out of her eyes,
Out of her skin,
Out of her breath,

Came the gods who lived
off the length of her body,
offering their piko in return

But if this reciprocity is so, then the violation of the land is a violation of the body. Her speaker finds kinship with Tehura, a naked Tahitian woman of Gauguin’s paintings. In “Tehura,” McDougall inserts her own voice into Gauguin’s journal writings, in which he describes an “immobile, naked” native woman, “so tremendously beautiful,” “completely naked, waiting for love.” This is the native, framed within the European’s gaze, rewritten to suit his desires. “[I]n your face I see my own,” McDougall writes to Tehura,” rebuking Gauguin, “I know / this is not who we are, not Why or How….” The direct address contrasts Gauguin’s visual and written depictions of Tehura; it is a plea for Tehura’s, and her own, humanity.

What the 19th century Gauguin depicted as that prone, objectified island native, McDougall also aggressively addresses in contemporary times, in “Natives Wanted,” which she has written in callous, loaded, rapid fire, infomercial language. Presenting a litany of stereotypes:

Have you contracted foreign diseases
and are now facing cultural extinction?
Do you consistently reject the teachings
of missionaries and settlers?

And

Do you still wear traditional attire
(i.e. loincloths, feathers, animal skins
or fur, bark cloth, leaves, etc.)
and/or pierce and/or tattoo and/or scar
any part of your body?

And

Do you now or have you ever
practiced human sacrifice and/or eaten
your enemies (or your friends/family)?

She concludes:

If you can answer “yes” to 3 or more of the above
questions, then you are an ideal subject of study
for anthropologists, archaeologists, pharmaceutical
companies, natural historians, museum curators,
colonial writers, missionaries and tourists.

All are indicted, even those who claim benevolence and good intention. This is satisfying. The poem’s post-script disclaimer, stating side effects (diabetes, alcoholism, severe depression, et al), not guaranteeing compensation, is also satisfying, because it’s absolutely unadorned and historically factual. McDougall’s stripped down language, and matter-of-fact tone, presents us with a family suffering from these side effects in present-day stark living circumstances, in the clipped lines of “What a Young, Single Makuahine Feeds You:”

spam casserole,
spam and corn,
spam and green beans,
spam sandwiches,
vienna sausages,
portuguese sausages,
pork and beans,
onions and rice,
cold corned beef,
raw onions and poi,

By the end of this poem, not only do we have a full understanding of the cheap, processed food this broken family must eat to survive (barely), we come to find out from where these come:

from Uncle –
no matter
which Uncle –
you eat whatever
Uncle brings.

“Uncle,” of course, is a euphemism, what the children must call any man who comes into this single mother’s life. (Note also that the prevalence of these canned goods is a legacy of the US military presence on the islands, and has radically shortened the life expectancy of the native people.)

Let me not end this write-up with unresolvable hopelessness. Against erasure, despite laws outlawing use of the native Hawaiian language, there are individual acts of persistence which are so meaningful and restoring. In the sonnet series, “Ka ‘Ōlelo,” because “English could never replace / the land’s unfolding song, nor the ocean’s / ancient oli,” the speaker and her grandfather together relearn their native language. I’m not surprised to learn that English-only laws lasted in the state until 1986 (certainly, this theme of mean-spirited English-only legislation is very relevant in this country today). Even lamenting what words have been lost, and therefore what knowledge has been lost, the two slowly reacclimate themselves to speaking “each old word learned.” And with “each old word learned,” birth and rebirth,

as the ‘ape shoot, whose delicate shoots
shoot forth their young sprouts, and spread, and bring forth
in their birth, many branches find their roots
in the dark, wet, ‘ōlelo the earth bore.

Ironically, they are learning from a language CD, and I really appreciate that she’s inverted the stereotype of the native grandparent being the sage disseminator of cultural knowledge. There’s something to be learned here about survival, something practical, in the further irony — the poet’s act of reclaiming what English had outlawed, via the English sonnet form.

So I went back to The Voyage of the Dawntreader, to refresh my memory:

And all in a hurry, for fear her mind would change, she said the words (nothing will induce me to tell you what they were). Then she waited for something to happen.

As nothing happened she began looking at the pictures. And all at once she saw the very last thing she expected—a picture of a third-class carriage in a train, with two schoolgirls sitting in it. She knew them at once. They were Marjorie Preston and Anne Featherstone. . . .

‘Shall I see anything of you this term?’ said Anne, ‘or are you still going to be all taken up with Lucy Pevensie.’

‘Don’t know what you mean by taken up,’ said Marjorie.

‘Oh yes, you do,’ said Anne. ‘You were crazy about her last term.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Marjorie. ‘I’ve got more sense than that. Not a bad little kid in her way. But I was getting pretty tired of her before the end of term.’

‘Well, you jolly well won’t have the chance any other term!’ shouted Lucy. ‘Two-faced little beast.’ But the sound of her own voice at once reminded her that she was talking to a picture and that the real Marjorie was far away in another world.

‘Well,’ said Lucy to herself, ‘I did think better of her than that. And I did all sorts of things for her last term, and I stuck to her when not many other girls would. And she knows it too. And to Anne Featherstone of all people! I wonder are all my friends the same? There are lots of other pictures. No. I won’t look at any more. I won’t, I won’t’—and with a great effort she turned over the page; but not before a large angry tear had splashed on it.

I’m not sure why this scene shocked me so—the real, everyday world violently intruding on the fantasy one? There is a loss of innocence in it, certainly—her friendship with Marjorie will never be the same, even if Marjorie’s behavior toward her is unchanged. And there is a wrongness here, too, as Lucy is eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for her ears. Perhaps Marjorie is only saying these hurtful things to curry favor with Anne, and doesn’t mean them at all.

The conversations that go on in cyberspace are subject to this kind of magical eavesdropping. We writers are all sometimes tempted, I think, to “Google” ourselves. We justify it, perhaps, as keeping up with reviews of a new book, etc. But surely we stumble on things not meant for our ears. Likewise, we may be aware others are eavesdropping on us. Is it possible to have a candid discussion about a living writer on the web, for instance, without fear that that very writer may be reading over our shoulders? (I have lately been relishing the privacy and intimacy of letters.) The internet, with its “pages” and moving pictures, its Book of Faces, its overheard conversations, is strangely like Lucy’s magic book, full of enchantment and temptation.

But in some ways, that book was very different too. I had forgotten that part of its magic was you couldn’t turn back to a previous page. Only the right-hand pages turned. The left-hand pages were closed forever.

From the mists of that era, from those stealthy assaults, I remember many books of poetry. Books by Amado Nervo, Alfonso Reyes, Renato Leduc, Gilberto Owen, Heruta and Tablada, and by American poets, like General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, by the great Vachel Lindsay. But it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional Mexico City mornings that shine—or shone—with a red and green radiance ringed by noise, on a bench in the Alameda, with no money and the whole day ahead of me, in fact my whole life ahead of me. After Camus, everything changed.

It’s worth noting that The American Table is pretty poet-friendly in terms of the cost of making these meals. There is nothing too expensive or exotic, and generally the recipes don’t call for that many ingredients. Johnson also makes suggestions on how to use excess food leftover from cooking. After his “My Mashed Potatoes,” he writes: “Vitamins aside, this makes quite the most possible of an already good thing. It probably is a sin to waste anything as good as these peelings. In fact, even when you prepare other potato dishes remember they can be cooked as they come from the peeler in large strips to make an excellent appetizer. They can also be prepared from baking peel (about five minutes), or boiled peel (about 20 minutes).”

He said: “I did not make a switch to poetry from architecture; poetry has always been a divining force in my life.

“My poems started off nostalgic, as I missed Hyderabad, but I would soon be inspired more by whom I met, and by what I read about the world.”

His five collections in Urdu have garnered him international recognition, awards and symposia invitations but remained inaccessible to his own family, who didn’t grow up with the language. After forty years of publishing only in Urdu, Alikhan is releasing his first English-language book Reflections at the age of 86.

He said: “For many years I wrote the occasional English poem. In fact, in the late 1960s/early 70s I dabbled with a bit of English songwriting, which may have been the catalyst. And in the mid-70s I presented a weekly programme on Radio Oxford for Asian listeners called abrang, which means multi colours.

“I published Reflections because I wanted to reach out to poets who may not have been brought up with Urdu, and also to my own immediate family.”

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

But most of the article is devoted to instances of celebrity marginalia, and insistence on these examples’ historical importance. Unfortunately, the more interesting, speculative questions are left aside, namely those posed by the quote above: what will marginalia of the future look like, and what means, if any, do we have to preserve it? These questions, already hotly debated in library science circles, are left unexplored.

Ginsberg finally published his seminal poem “Howl” in October 1956, while still pleading for money from Kerouac, who delivered, knowing all too well fame is one thing and cash another. With his increased success, Kerouac withdrew more and more from society into the comfort of his Memere, and alcohol. By 1959 he grew drunk and abusive, while Ginsberg was cheerleading the cause of “The Beat Generation.” Mentally exhausted and spiritually discouraged, Kerouac hated the “lionized manure” surrounding him, proclaiming, “I’m not a Messiah. I’m an artist.” By 1960 the fissure between the two widened, the letters grew less frequent, and in the book’s final correspondence dated October 1963, Ginsberg asks Kerouac, “Will you love me ever?”

Via The Best American Poetry, John Ashbery reads his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Promontory” from Illuminations. Originally published in 1886, Norton will release Ashbery’s translation in May, though not with his above comments about scholars’ endless attempts to track Rimbaud through Scarborough just because he mentions it in the poem. “He could have just read about it like the rest of us have, at one point or another.”

(More of Ashbery’s Rimbaud translations will appear in the April issue of Poetry, along with an essay by M. Ashbery about his work)

On Thursday, February 24, at 6pm, Poetry magazine, the Poetry Foundation, the Columbia College Poetry Program, and the Center for Book and Paper Arts present: Performance Poetry in the Age of Language + Reception, featuring Edwin Torres. After the reading, the Center for Book and Paper Arts will host a reception for guests, where a selection of Torres’s visual text work will be on display, including his new book, Yes Thing No Thing.

Poetry wrote to Torres for a few words about his new book, and the interrelationship between word and image in his work. Here are a few of his thoughts on the matter, with glimpses of Yes Thing No Thing:

I know every book is a chapter in the writer’s life, and this one captures where my crossroads met at a time of great transition—leaving the city I grew up in, the urban nature, speed and vortex of a million flickering lights at once…replacing that with isolation, trees, endless sky and stars, a million pulsing lights. The graphic vocabulary in this book emerged from a wish to refrain from a global surface speed and rather construct from an interior minimal ground—a wish to listen more than be heard. The white space, the time implied, the geometric nature in the pages, the mantra-like repetitions, the language forged out of missing letters…there’s a slowing down compared to my previous books. Maybe a confidence in the words to let them just be, free in their world to meet the reader’s primal emptiness, a blank page we can all share, to create a symbiotic readership with the world we are all in. I think the pieces in this book have a sort of grounded fluidity that embraces the journey, the nomad I’ve always championed. Perhaps this destination is oceanic whereas previous ones have been more earth-bound. Showing the skeletal structures of the page is a way towards transparency for me, lowering the curtain behind the wizard. As a designer, I love showing support mechanisms juxtaposed with the organic uncontrolled—the balance of our personal dynamics at odds with our humanity. As I was creating the book I felt I had a chance here to quietly comment on a world out of control. The things that have run out of words, the yes and the no, how language filters through nature when words fail. So you see, I have no answer for this book’s ultimate challenge. No thing. A finite id…grateful to be caught.

About Edwin Torres
Multimedia pioneer Edwin Torres has been presenting his energetic blend of poetry, performance, music, dance and visual art since the late eighties. Born at New York City’s infamous Nuyorican Poets Café, as midwifed by the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, he has published and performed extensively in the US and abroad, and has given lectures and workshops at numerous universities, including Bard and Naropa University.

The 22-title collection includes 1 of the first books ever printed in English, “Polychronicon,” a 15th century volume of universal history. It also includes a first edition of “Poems,” the first book ever published by poet John Keats, and a theological study by St. Thomas Aquinas that is now the oldest book at Emory’s rare books and manuscripts library.

The collection also includes rare editions of works by Emily Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens.

The donation comes from Ohio businessman and book collector Stuart Rose, an Emory alumnus.

Poetry magazine recently received this welcome dispatch from Chicago Review, with links to PDFs of knockouts from their latest number. From CR editor, V. Joshua Adams:

Readers of Harriet may be interested in two essays on contemporary poetry from the latest issue of Chicago Review (55:3—4). In “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry,” Peter O’Leary extols the virtues of a vatic approach in a poetry world “filled with allergies to the spirit.” His essay begins with a discussion of the noteworthy magazine apex of the M, and praises apocalyptic tendencies in the work of Joseph Donahue and Pam Rehm. Meanwhile, Keith Tuma’s “After the Bubble” takes aim at the silence of poets (of all kinds) on the relation between their world and that of the university. Tuma looks to Stephen Rodefer and Kent Johnson as two potential alternatives to a pervasive “aesthetic of courtesy” that prevents contemporary poetry from giving an accurate account of itself.

These essays are part of a feature of ten essays dedicated to the work of critic Robert von Hallberg. The introduction to the feature is available online, too.

These poems made me consider the relationship between sincere, naive and clarity. There is something crystalline about the minimal, the concrete, the conceptual. When this poetic gesture is subsumed into a lyric sensibility however, something happens. What is that something, precisely?

This leads to a discussion of simplicity, which may or may not be problematic. Are Saroyan’s poems really so simple? What leads us to believe that there’s a simplicity there? Is it size? Is it a certain sweetness of tone? Anyway, if there is a simplicity there, it may reflect on our own tendency to privilege complex thought, sez LH:

these days of over-thinking, of poetry becoming, not just about the wrapper, as Kenny Goldsmith says, but about the thinking, make me long for the clarity and the simplicity of these minimalist poems. It’s so hard to have a line like “incomprehensible birds” these days. Everything has to be sticky with thought, with layers and strands of thinking packed in like the densest, purest truffle.