I like the name “Poets House” because—while probably intended to read as the possessive Poets’ House—the phrase instead asserts something rather nice about poets. Poets don’t just browse and carouse: they house. And maybe, someday, they’ll house me.

I took advantage of their generosity earlier this week, when I spent several hours exploring the new Battery Park City site of Poets House. The building, which hugs the Hudson River, hosts an extensive poetry library as well as events and exhibitions. With the help of staffers Jane Preston and Maggie Balistreri, I found some remarkable books, most of which seemed to concern themselves with food. (Perhaps these caught my eye because of the extraordinary hunger that afflicted me during my visit.)

I devoured a thick red paperback of poems by Robert DeNiro (“These poems are by Robert DeNiro, the painter,” the book clarifies, “not to be confused with Robert DeNiro, the actor, his son”), chewing on its sometimes questionable stanzas. In a poem called “Stella Artois,” DeNiro père writes that in a café,

Behind the greenish lion
One is next to the cinema
The cinema we cry in.

A book from the home of Stanley Kunitz, who co-founded Poets House in 1985, reveals seating arrangements and menus for private dinners. (According to the scrawl within, veal scallopini, rice, bread, salad, and something called “potato whip mixture etc.,” or perhaps “prune whip mixture etc.,” or even “prawn whip mixture etc.,” would fill the stomachs of writers Alastair Reid, Arthur A. Cohen, and other guests one February night in 1979.)

An early edition of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book provides Toklas’s recipes and reminiscences. She served “bass for Picasso” when the artist stopped by the apartment she shared with Gertrude Stein. She’d designed the fish with red mayonnaise, bits of egg, truffles, and fines herbes. “Picasso exclaimed at its beauty,” she reports. “But, said he, should it not rather have been made in honor of Matisse than of me.” Just what this signifies about the quality of the fish-art is left to the reader’s imagination.

The cooking section of the library features such titles as Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems.

My favorite by far, however, was John Keats’s Porridge: Favorite Recipes of American Poets. The title stems from a Browning couplet — “Who fished the murex up? / What porridge had John Keats?” — that must also have inspired Galway Kinnell’s poem “Oatmeal.” Unnerved by the glutinous swamp in his bowl, Kinnell invited long-dead John Keats to join him for breakfast, and enjoyed congenial conversation:

Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it–those were his words–”Oi ‘ad
a ‘eck of a toime,” he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.

So what can we learn from Porridge with John Keats?

It depends on whom you ask. John Hollander’s recipe for “Potage du Soir Carroll” instructs: “In 6 qts. of dew, simmer together: a good-sized shank of the afternoon, a peeled shadow, some exhaustion, and a bouquet garni of pillow, litany, oaten stop and, if available, sullen horn.” Robert Penn Warren recommends two ounces of Jack Daniels, four ounces of water, two ice cubes, and a half hour “in which to meditate on the goodness of God.”

I meditated on that concept over lunch. The menu was cucumbers, curiosity, and regret.

(Photo Credit: Thomas Sayers Ellis)

I’m good at getting lost. A few years ago, living in a French town so small even its residents had barely heard of it, I lost my way at least once a week. I was also known to lose the bakery, the drugstore, the school where I was teaching, and my colleagues at that school. Streets rayed out from the town center like the arms of a starfish–a crippled starfish whose limbs twisted and gnarled.

Walking in Washington, D.C.—the site of the Poetry Foundation’s new online tour—several weeks ago, I found myself transfixed by street names. Not because I was lost, though I was, but because those names follow particular patterns. First they run from A through Z (A Street, B Street, etc.). Then they run A-Z again, but with bisyllabic words (Euclid, Fairmont, Girard, Harvard). Then they run A-Z yet again, but with trisyllabic words (Allison, Buchanan, Crittenden, Decatur). Any street might change names farther west or east — but the changed name must obey the same rules determining the original one (so Allison turns into Albemarle, both trisyllabic words starting with “A”).

Whoever named D.C. streets attended to rules familiar to poets: syllable count, word order, alliteration. They wrote their city in a series of syllabic acrostics. Walking through Washington is like moving through a formal poem; like verse forms, the patterns prevent you from getting lost. Unless you’re me.

It’s hard not to feel a swell of grandeur, even if you’re lost, as you stroll those streets, pondering the history of acrostics: the important Hebrew prayer Ashrei comes to mind, as does the book of Jeremiah. More recent contributions include Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” which spells out the name of Alice Pleasance Liddell, and Robert Pinsky’s “ABC,” and Billy Collins’s “The Names.”

What I like particularly about D.C.’s acrostics is their flexibility: names change and multiply, yet only within bounds. If cities stood for poetic movements, D.C. would stand for an adaptive formalism. And my French village would argue—with the Frenchman’s passion for freedom—for vers libre, though after a time its confusions revealed their own patterns: the flustered request for directions, the questions as to where one was from, the amusement as to how one had managed to lose oneself, the Au revoir, mademoiselle! ringing out like a refrain.

I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues (briefly #1 on the blues charts!). Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

For my purposes as a classroom teacher, though, the poem is perfect: it’s a tight form that all students can duplicate and it has great use as a model for students writing autobiography (what are possible titles for their own plaques?), for understanding a novel they are studying (think of Holden: wearer of a red cap, mourner of a younger brother, savior of imaginary children, cleanser of the word “fuck”, etc.) or a historical or literary character outside of class.

Here is what a student named Alison did with a character from a graphic novel:

DC Comics: Harley Quinn’s Rap Sheet

Guilt-filled felon

Abandoner of her PhD

Rider of pogo sticks

Operator of deadly weapons

Speaker in a Queens accent

Singer of rusty songs

Recipient of second chances

Failure at redemption

Loud chewer of bubble gum

Juggler of dynamite

Baker of cream pies

Receiver of get-well roses

Mistress of obnoxious laughter

Schemer of punchlines

Resident of a fun house

Patient in a mad house

Occasional wearer of pink dresses and rollerskates

Masquerader behind a bubbly innocence

Poster girl for Gotham City psychopaths

___________________________________________________________

And here’s Marie’s poem about a friend of hers:

Former Taco Bell Employee

former champion eater of cheesy gordita crunches

former all-time most disgruntled Taco Bell employee

faker of vegetarianism and dire heart conditions

owner of an extensive dream catcher collection

stealer of debate team trophies,

snatcher of children’s scooters from neighboring front lawns

possessor of biggest glasses, curliest hair

burner down of junior high bathrooms

photographer of roadkill

heckler of pre-teens and other defenseless schmucks

putter of trash in mailboxes

flip offer of the school principal

do-er of all things people despise.

“I went as a Mexican,” Robert said, with no apparent remorse.

“What does that mean? I asked. How could you dress ‘as a Mexican’?”

“Simple,” he said. I wore dirty flannel clothes and carried around a Fisher-Price lawnmower. No one else in the class was laughing now, and it seemed that no one else shared his bigoted views.
I tried to salvage the discussion – talking about stereotypes as sort of super-imposed, one-size-fits-all costume, a simple-minded attempt at characterizing an entire people in a cheap two-dimensional manner. I even tried to indict Robert and people like him as posers, trying to assert a superiority over other people, people of whom they had very limited knowledge. I’d like to say I made a difference, that I made Robert see the light, but no such conversion took place that day.
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Even though Daphne graduated from high school over10 years ago, she remains one of my most memorable students for something she said outside of class. In fact, it was on graduation day. While wearing her cap and gown she came over to say, “Thank you for teaching a poem by a Mexican author. It made me feel like I could do something great.” The poem in question was “A Tree Within” by Octavio Paz and the class had occurred five years earlier in an 8th grade Language Arts class. Frankly I didn’t remember the poem leading to a particularly successful class discussion, nor do I remember Daphne as having been moved in any way by the poem. What was significant was the mere fact that we had read a poem in class by a Mexican author.

I had a similar experience in my own school life. I remember taking an Anglo-Irish Lit. class in grad school in which we read Yeats poems and the Joyce story “The Dead,” which features a scene set in Oughterard, County Galway, my father’s hometown. For the first time in my life, I was proud to be Irish-American. Suddenly, my white trash, Mick roots were cool and European. My father, himself a laborer, who also wore a uniform of flannel, who left school in the second grade to work, and who had never learned to read, had given me the cachet of cool. How I loved to hear the professor say that Joyce was the greatest writer of the century and that tiny Ireland, one-fifth the size of Illinois, had produced four Nobel laureates. “A litter better,” he’d add looking over the horizon line on his bi-focals, “than Illinois has done.”
* * *

What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Mexican”? As someone who has never traveled to Mexico, my first associations are artists, the Mexican authors I’ve read or painters I’ve admired at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago. “What image pops to mind when we hear the word “Irish?” I have spent much of my life assuming people picture drunkards and terrorists,

I have no illusions that we can eliminate stereotypes merely by presenting global voices to our students. But I think it is important that students have a chance to read great writers from other cultures, and that the powerful words of these writers can challenge our narrow world-view.
As the speaker of that Paz poem Daphne admired so much puts it, “There, within, inside my head/the tree speaks./Come closer – can you hear it?”

Have you ever felt represented by literature? When has literature challenged a stereotype you or someone you know has held?

The PEN World Voices conference in 2005, cited this disturbing statistic from an NEA study: “Out of the more than 10,000 works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999, only 300 were works in translation.

UNESCO figures showed that while 50 percent of all translations published worldwide are translated from English, only 6 percent are translated into English. “Clearly,” the report concludes, “in the dialogue with the world’s non-English-speaking majority, we are not very good listeners.”

More recent statistics are no more encouraging. The on-line journal Publishing Perspectives predicts that “literature in translation will [face] a drop off this year – as much as 10%.”  The same publication also found that while 117 independent presses published at least one work of fiction or poetry in translation in 2008, only be 95 such presses will translate a literary work in 2009.

Why does this matter — particularly to the United States? Speaking at that same PEN conference, Salman Rushdie put it this way: “It has perhaps never been more important for the world’s voices to be heard in America, never more important for the world’s ideas and dreams to be known and thought about and discussed, never more important for a global dialogue to be fostered. Yet one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it. The cold war is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread; all the more reason for getting together and seeing what bridges can be built. “

Or consider this excerpt from a poem called “Under this Same Sky” by Bangaladeshi poet Zia Hyder (translated by Naomi Shihab Nye and Bhabani Sengupta):

There’s an enormous comfort in knowing
we all live under this same sky,
whether in new York or Dhaka
we see the same sun and same moon.

This poem became the title poem for Nye’s beautiful collection of world poetry, Under this Same Sky.  What a small but potent first step it would be if all people recognized each other as co-inhabitants of our planet.  As Nye puts in the book’s final page:  “Don’t ever believe what anyone told you about not talking to strangers.  Talking and listening to ’strangers’ may be the most important thing you do in life.”

The Obama administration has promised to end an era of political and diplomatic isolation even as it oversees two wars. Has there ever been a better time to open our ears and our hearts to world literature? Is there any better way for every nation to appreciate the full humanity of all the world’s peoples than by sharing each other’s literature?

In the past year I’ve talked about poetry with a few hundred classroom teachers and heard one overwhelmingly common complaint.  Given the demands of required texts and standardized tests, there just isn’t enough time for poetry.

One teacher drew the analogy of designing a curriculum and furnishing a house: “You start with the big pieces — the sofa, the coffee table,” she told me, “not with the accent pieces.” Novels and plays are the serious works, she suggested — actual books that serve a vital function, substantial texts that might really require some heavy lifting. Poetry, by implication, is regarded as wall art, something exotic rather than essential — not something to plan a room (or a unit) around.

Perhaps this is why so many teachers told me that, while they thought poetry was important, they saved their poetry units for April and National Poetry Month. (And, as the literary magazine at every school where I’ve taught, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone trolling for submissions only to have colleagues say, “I don’t have anything now, but I’ll have some creative pieces in April.”)  This, too, carries the clear implication that poetry is an after-thought.

When and where poetry is taught is an expression of our values. If poetry is truly something we value, it should be kept in the foreground.  For my part, I start every school year with a simple poetry writing exercise that the ReadWriteThink website called The ABC’s of Poetry. Tom Romano, an Education professor in Ohio, tells me he starts every class he teaches with a poem. Foregrounding poetry not only asserts the value of poetry, it also keeps us alert to the ways in which poetry can enrich our daily classes and our daily lives.

Starting is often hardest – the first gesture determines so much of what follows. This is true for poems, for personal introductions, even for blog posts! It’s also true when thinking about the school day.

At my school, like so many others, the day officially commences with a student reading of the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a nice idea to have students read, but the readings – whether giggly or sober — are all delivered in the same sing-song manner, as I assume they are in every other school. I don’t mean to sounds critical of these students, but the point of the pledge is often not patriotic reflection but a means of bringing the school to order. The pledge functions like a judge’s gavel, a drawn out “sh,” a pre-hypnotic suggestion that promises we will eventually awaken and remember nothing.

Unlike many schools, my current school (a large suburban public school) only re-instated the pledge as a daily duty in 2002 after a group of veterans from the community insisted that, in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the pledge be recited every day. (Not to be outdone, a nearby public high school began each day with the recorded voice of John Wayne reading the pledge).

2001 was also the year then-poet-laureate, Billy Collins, launched his ambitious Poetry 180 project, so named because it provided one poem for every day of the school year – to be read over the PA system after daily announcements. His goal was “to encourage students and other learners to become members of the circle of readers for whom poetry is a vital source of pleasure.” I love the idea of waiting until the other announcements are over – all the clerical, bureaucratic business – before inviting the school to hear language that can be pleasurable – and inventive and imaginative. Such language conveys an important sub-text: Today will not be the same as every other day. Today you will be surprised. Today you will hear and learn new things. Today words matter.

At my last school, a university prep school, we had no PA system, but we tried the Poetry 180 Project anyway. I can take no credit for this initiative. A student, whom I’ll call John McDevitt (because that was his name!) took it upon himself to Xerox copies of all the poems in the Poetry 180 project and invited homeroom teachers to start their day with a poem. I don’t know how many teachers actually used the poems to open the day, and I certainly don’t know how to measure the success of the project, but I do know that we had fun reading the poems, sometimes parodying the poems, and that lines from some of the poems became running jokes or enduring refrains throughout the year.

Educational theorist Jerome Bruner talks of two different kinds of school language – the legal and the literary. The former, he says, is concerned with the world as it is, the latter the world as it might be. Starting the school day with a poem really might enliven us to the possibility of the world – or at least language – as it might be.

“The folklorist Vladimir Propp thought he was accomplishing something worthwhile by identifying in Russian folktales thirty-one functions and 151 elements, with a mathematical symbol assigned to each.” — Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge

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Asked why he continued to live in Vienna after the war, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said, “If you study malaria, you should live in the swamp.”

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“When you think about it, wire walking is very close to what religion is. ‘Religion’ is from the Latin ‘religare,’ which means to link something, people or places. And to know, before you take your first step on a wire, that you are going to do the last one — this is a kind of faith.” — Philippe Petit

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“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” — Archilochus

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“The Gradus ad Parnassum, much in use by schoolboys, provided epithetic and other phrases from classical Latin poets, with the long and short syllables all conveniently marked for metrical fit, so that the aspirant poet could assemble a poem from the Gradus as boys might assemble a structure from an old Erector set. The overall structure could be of his own making but the pieces were all there before he came along.” — Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

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“The moon’s surface has been shaped largely by impacts.” — Docent to schoolchildren at New York’s Rose Center for Earth and Space

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“Dreams and beasts are the two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature. All mystics use them. The are like comparative anatomy. They are our test objects.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“But I have read history! And none, to a man, believed himself doomed!” — Unidentified interlocutor in a dream

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Hor. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Ham. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

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“All reading begins in the revolt against narcissism: when a book stops reflecting your own prejudices, whether for or against what you ’see in it’ — & begins to say something closer to what it does say, the core of the reality in the ‘objective’ aspect of it takes shape & you start wrestling with an angel.” — Northrop Frye