The snow is deep on the ground.
Always the light falls
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

This is a good world.
The war has failed.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the snow waits where love is.

Only a few go mad.
The sky moves in its whiteness
Like the withered hand of an old king.
God shall not forget us.
Who made the sky knows of our love.

The snow is beautiful on the ground.
And always the lights of heaven glow
Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.

Why, I asked myself, am I doing another benefit fund-raiser? Hell yes, the cause was certainly worthy. Uncounted hundreds had died in the events and aftermaths of Katrina-Rita. But a poetry reading? They rarely covered honoraria for the poets, let alone the expenses of the organizers. What had possessed this man?

Beyond a great love for poetry and the spoken word, which extended itself backwards beyond The Beats, this midwestern poet was not only eager to establish himself and the kinds of poets he thought most worthy, but he was hell-bent to make his mark before dying. More than that, he had a 17-year-old son named Zach. He regretted that his life had not worked out according to dreams, but he wanted to, at minimum, leave some kind of legacy for Zach. The relief effort I was about to participate in on behalf of the city of New Orleans was the core part of that legacy.

The target of our benevolence was the volunteer-based Common Ground Relief (www.commongroundrelief.org). Described as a grassroots non-profit, it had sprung up on September 5, 2005 around a kitchen table immediately in Katrina’s wake. Less than a dozen ordinary residents of New Orleans had gone into their pockets, some with as little as ten dollars, to begin the first organization following the destruction. It had grown with the help of over ten thousand volunteers. But, as with too many well-intentioned groups, money was the perpetual difficulty.

It was also Tim’s primary difficulty, although he clutched his optimism deeply despite the obvious prognosis.

While visiting poets were treated to a tour of the work Common Ground had accomplished, and the places it had established: a crash house for single mothers, a community computer lab, a food and clothing distribution depot, etc., Tim sweated the sketchy details of the event. No word from Sean Penn or his people. That had been the name that had drawn many of the others to Tim’s project. Penn was supposed to be the main attraction. The rest of us were mainly African-American writers, poets and performance artists, with a couple of loose radicals tossed into the mix. For the performance, Tim had secured a space that would seat eighteen hundred. That night, a meager audience of two-hundred listeners rattled around in that cold auditorium. Word had come earlier from one of Tim’s legworkers: Penn could not be reached. The money we were supposed to have made on behalf of Common Ground had not materialized.

Walking the French Quarter the morning before my plane flight home, I wondered about Tim. His eyes and his desperation seemed bigger than his ability to overcome them. But it was not my problem. Yet.

As I was about to board my flight, Tim rushed up out of nowhere. He was asking the poets he had flown in to help him on various projects he had in mind. I could not say no and volunteered to help in any way I could. That became largely a matter of periodic consultations over the 18 months that followed. Tim would email or call me with an idea, and I would provide feedback and advice. Batting around ideas soon gave way to Tim’s updates on his battles with lymphoma, a pending transplant, and reports on his travels from medical center to medical center, hope to hope.

Last contact was in February 2008. Then, after a long while, all contact ceased.

“Memwars” is one of Tim’s funny words.

I listened for the inevitable as I busily worried the aftermath of my own private Katrinas.

Contact resumed in February of 2009. But this time, the email came from Wies van Leuken at Cornell University. It informed me that Tim had died on December 20th, 2008. But good news: the work that he had begun with Common Ground was now a DVD project continued by filmmaker Laki Vazakas, who apparently has an affinity for The Beats. Van Leuken asked for my brief contribution to Tim’s last project. Of course I said yes.

Being Archive

I throw

the Annie

Liebovitz

ticket

in &

then I

take it out.

In the morning, my man and I work in the kitchen. He writes about horse racing and I work on freelance projects for magazines. We make coffee and occasionally stare out the window trying to catch searched-for words, or comment on the sheer frenzy the small cardinal in the cherry tree seems to be working itself into. Then, in the afternoons we move to our own offices and work alone for the rest of the day. This is the concentrated work, usually the fiction or poetry work that requires me to read out loud to myself (my own frenzied cardinal moments). After a few weeks of this routine, I realized that we were simply following the light. Once the morning sun had moved to its afternoon place, we followed it to our afternoon rooms. I liked the idea of following the light, the turn of the world instructing our various locations.

For me, writing poetry is like that. Following the thread. The simple movement of the world, the continued tilt, the clink of sun shepherding me around. As we end National Poetry Month, I wish everyone a steady following of the light wherever it may be and wherever it may lead (even if it delivers, eventually, the necessary encounters with the dark).

After a week of rain and tornado warnings, the sun is back in the kitchen. I’ve been reading some of my favorite big-ticket poems lately (my own top twenty hits of all time). I like to think that returning to my favorite poems is like listening to great classic rock on the car’s radio when the good weather returns. I encourage this kind of behavior. Turn up your radio poems. Play them all spring and summer and rock out by the river. Sing along. Loud.

Then, when you get a little quiet time, push your singular self into the big, wild, sun-filled place of the brain, make a lot of unusual noises, and trust the world’s weird wheel. I’ll try and do the same.

Every performance implies a spotlight,

even if it means driving through the night to get there,

mouth wired open in a grimace

or grin…

These quotes and impressions out of context probably suggest the productions of a weary sophisticate but actually I read Alan’s poem as the product of a very precise writer who couldn’t write a bad line if he wanted to and yet is meanwhile very much a Rousseau-ian whose primordial state is childhood. I think much of his seeming surrealism:

THE CONSOLATION FOR PROPER BEHAVIOR IS

not manners, but one ventricle filled with spiders,

the other with M&M’s

is being performed for the tiny “New York” of a giggling child, either the poet himself or an actual kid for whom poetry is functioning as high entertainment. At heart I think AG’s poem is profound leisure. Though the poet is an informed and willing adult his bohemia or his purpose is to ever freshen the relay of generational exchange. The petit and the grand. Morts (of course) too. In the Gilbert poem one submits to adulthood, one idly watches teevee, one travels, performs the multitude of tasks that constitute one’s station in life. Yet an undercurrent – this recoiling from the absurdities of the flesh forms the bedrock of this poet’s allegiance to the rift between what we do and what we know. So the playground of the mind and the necessity of love are the only real consolations here. Kids like love songs and want to have fun and I think Alan Gilbert is working to maintain precisely that heaven. These are offbeat poems of pleasure and escape. Hear! Hear!

I’m always protesting that I’m not a passionate Bernadette Mayer reader. I was handed a tan pamphlet somewhere – I only regret that Harriet does not have comments because they might read this and remind me who they were – but whoever handed me this stapled version of B. Mayer’s 1964 ceremony latin said it was the first thing she published, or wrote or something like that and yet I think Bernadette Mayer once told me about something she wrote, a novel, when she was 19 and the date seems like this could be that, but is this a novel. It’s short. It must be excerpts from that, surely. It’s just too damn small to be what one would have stayed up all night writing when they were 19 and teaching themselves to write. This seems about 20 or 25 pages long. I’ve been leafing through it this week, a week in which I’ve been in Tucson, Austin and New Orleans. I  have so much to say about all these places and the great friends I’ve stayed with and even the readings I’ve given that were so much fun. And how many books I’ve sold which I’ve loved a lot. I have a blog I began (not Harriet but at eileenmyles.com) and kind of stopped in part because I had a feeling that I didn’t want to write about my book tour and yet there I was book touring. Why would I think there was something wrong with blogging about book touring. But now as poetry month ends and I’m blogging on Harriet, look, I have no shame writing about book touring. I’ve casually mentioned it. Mentioned my joy at selling stuff. Yet I’m writing about other poets’ work here and it feels awfully good. Bernadette’s book is faintly beige. Almost a passionless peach.

Whatever it is, the book, the poem, the novel rolls on. Sometimes a full prose-like looking page, some times quite poemy, or just three words do float in the upper left. That’s part of the Bernadette thing, a flowing experience. It isn’t quite a Stein float, yet it’s more streaming than most poetry. Kind of Olson-y, really. The words feel sort of appointed to be there, but not vatic, secular entirely even when in B’s case, she frequently uses the Bible and quotes from it happily. I’m thinking, I’m sure Bernadette Mayer was brought up catholic, but it’s quoted godlessly which is quite an accomplishment, so she’s probably godless like Voltaire if you know what I mean. Probably not even that passionate. But here’s the few words I’d like to think about:

Return of the parents dream.

Always pleasant, I am favored, prodigal.

These two lines seem very comfortable to me. It’s written for the self, by the self yet there’s a mythic quality to it. Is there an exalted first person that seems to be musing about a space you indeed occupy but you’re occupying it in the spirit of enjoying language that points and describes without really having so much body on it that it ever seems fleshy. In that sense I think it’s catholic writing. The subject is not bodily but the language is. What’s that word that means fat, or round. Orotose or something like that. It’s chubby thought. Also there’s a confidence in how the lines are placed next to each other that imply that they are building on one another but it’s a faux metonomy, or maybe that’s what metonomy means, a fauxness. Things next to each other are not necessarily related. One uses their closeness to imply relatedness.

I think the first line means “the dream in which the parents return”. And “[a]lways pleasant, I am favored, prodigal” builds on that obliquely but the story of the prodigal son is about the fact that he returned and subsequently is loved, despite the fact he left his family. Christianity poses here as an ultra-kind family. And in this larger picture returning parents don’t actually contribute or have any bearing on the prodigal-ness of the offspring.  I think Bernadette is using these biblical references to confer authority on her assemblage. But oddly, what feels most resolute and that’s the word I’d most use to describe Mayer’s writing – resoluteness, most resolute is the extra five syllables in the second line that surpass the first, and yet wrap around its meaning by means of this associativeness that seems true. Like Alain Badiou and others have  proposed, work that has versimilitude, that seems true often pleases people. They like it. The work moves with an assurance that ultimately goes well for all of us. What links Bernadette Mayer and Charles Olson is this air of confidence. As if truth were a direction, on a map, an outer verity which does sound like a place I think. Both these writers are New Englanders, after all. At heart.

I’m reading a poem by Paul Foster Johnson called ABRASIVE MACHINING

It goes:

aided your thought process

you self-styled outsiders

sharpening sticks against your enemies.

Some of us were driven into your arms.

Off-kilter and feline, you worked

under difficult conditions

putting out stapled affairs

that spread delight until forgotten.

Insofar as calling on the forces

of the universe to cancel elections

did not prevent a restaging

of the Eighteenth Brumaire

as late at January 2005 we were right.

You could only maneuver around it raggedly.

I’ve been experiencing enormous pleasure reading his poems lately. There was another one of them I planned to write about that contained the word ‘dolmen’ and the fact that I didn’t know what it meant – I just pictured something like a stupa in the desert, brown, opaque, pensive only added to what for me is the poem’s easy mystique. If that sounds like a critique it isn’t. Poetry of course uses indirect skills often. The immense excitement surrounding the overheard, the partially gotten. Those are our ill-gotten skills. Poetry is gossipy. You may be being gossipy alone, but that’s the energy. This one here, the poem above I think is about poetry. Or the world of it. Schools suck members in helplessly like an earthquake in a cartoon. Putting out “stapled affairs” sounds French. There’s an inference about these notes becoming book and the sort of person who would be involved in such endeavor. There’s a sneer here. And the stylishness of the sneer is drawing me in. And the poet writing is complicit too. He’s part of the herd. There’s a weariness, a pastness to the description. And it all takes place in the sweep of history. Doesn’t the 18^th Brumaire remind you of the French revolution – Thermidor, all those newly named months that captured time in a special way, however briefly, a fleeting exotic. Paul’s word choice manages anger, sadness, disappointment. All those things are coursing under these loosely tossed blankets. What moved him to write this could’ve been boredom at a reading perhaps. Sitting on a stool at the club. Like a dream that’s escaping, a poetry reading in full flight opens up all the files of a poet’s imagination while he or she is irritated and chagrinned: You used to be my friend. The poet is bored, hurt. Maybe even sex is involved:  “into your arms. /Off-kilter and feline, you worked…. That’s the poet moving his hips. Though as we know our minds have hips too. And failure is sexy. Look at the end. “Restaging…Brumaire…we were right…” and “we could only maneuver around it raggedly.” I think this poet’s loose gathering “ear” is open and closed and lands in a category of formalism I call sinewy – meaning he’s magnetic particles with minds of their own dropped casually on an ancient field by the Monsanto of his frustration.

Devil’s Lunch

A thorn is enough for him.

An apple made of iron.

The nipple of a girl who paces her home

wearing only a cotton slip.

An ear of a pig is enough.

The bug crawling between two empty dishes.

The child puffing into a dandelion.

The withered limbs of an old woman

on her deathbed.

The limbs of a young woman

waiting for her lover

with one hand on her breast

and the other on her lips.

What he eats for lunch

he vomits for dinner

into a rose bush,

or under a Christmas tree.

The title grounds us in the world of the poem. The devil exists, and he doesn’t just eat—phe eats the way we humans do, he is on our schedule, having that most human of meals: lunch. The first line is sharp and piercing; what would cut our tongues (a thorn) is food to the devil, and frighteningly—he doesn’t need much food to subsist. The second line tugs us in a new direction: an apple, a food we can relate to—but it’s not any old apple, it’s an apple made of iron, making our teeth hurt at the thought. Ristovic has lured us into a trap; he has gotten us readers to open our mouths and anticipate the taste of an apple. As our jaws ache with phantom pain, Ristovic feeds us something soft, something that might actually feel enjoyable in the mouth: a nipple. Not just any old nipple, but the nipple of a girl pacing her house, wearing only a cotton slip; Ristovic serves us this image in two bites; the second line of the sentence reframes the nipple—suddenly we see it protruding through a thin layer of fabric, making it more alluring and yet disturbing, when we remember that the nipple is not for the reader, but for the devil, and not to nibble, but to eat. Ristovic is taking something that might be considered beautiful, or erotic, and making it grotesque because of the context.

At this point, we begin to realize that while the poem is an inventory of what the devil eats for lunch, the poem is also being served to us readers, one image at a time. In line five, Ristovic serves the fourth course: the ear of a pig—yum, something we could theoretically eat, (our teeth could chew through it), but would probably never want to. Of course, we can’t help but tasting it, like a scrap of leather, in our mouths, for just a second. Ristovic has become the devil feeding us things we don’t want to eat. In the next line, he serves us something that we might typically find disgusting: a bug, in this instance, scavenging for human food; we imagine the devil picking the bug up and devouring it like a vitamin of black magic. Next we are served the image of a child, which is much larger than anything we have seen thus far—the devil’s appetite has expanded. He’s not just eating any old child, but one who is puffing into a dandelion, (presumably having just made a wish), a child in the realm of the imagination.

The next two items on the menu are not as crisp. They resonate, not for the visual image they create in the reader’s mind, but for the light they shine on the devil’s math. The devil does not differentiate between an old woman about to die and a young woman about to have sex; they are equal to him. The four-lined second stanza ending the poem is less than satisfying; the images are less specific, less arresting, and probably could be cut. Still, this poem serves as nice introduction to Aleksandar Ristovic’s work, as in this list format we can clearly see his disturbing and leaping imagination at work.

Is three, or I guess four. I’m thinking of three people approaching a lake. The poems are more like movements than poems. I guess when I say movements I mean a kind of wash of meaning. But not solid like prose – as I like to say going from the west coast to the east coast of the page. Not broken up like poetry or like the prose part of poetry:  the epigraph, the skinny blocks of italicized steals, the pastiche. Also the lists which are kind of the poems of prose in a standard book. So this is a wall of poetry made out of, I think, the poetic parts of prose. There’s tons of information in this book, which I like. I like a good quote which – was it Auden who said you judge a review by the quality of its quotations. Is a poem a success by this same standard. I’m thinking we are living in a poetic age Auden couldn’t or wouldn’t have wanted to imagine. I am actually a huge Auden fan but he was entirely a prig. I’ve never used that word before and I’m glad to do here. So a great quote from Benjamin, a list of jobs someone might have had and the hourly or daily rate they received for their labor – all these things shift together on Anna Moschavakis’s page. I think of prose poems for a moment too here. I’m appreciative that Baudelaire invented them AND did them so well but mostly a prose poem is a blah thing. I’ve heard a poet critic refer to a poem that probably didn’t please him in terms of its metrical performance – the actual poem was gentler and looser than that, but still a poem. And a good one at that. But the poet critic called it a prose poem and I thought is that a veiled way of him saying that simply isn’t a poem. A prose poem being a dumping ground instead. I am on unstable ground to be bringing all this up in reference to Anna’s work and yet I am here and mean to praise. In her hands the prose poem is pulled apart, left full of holes. I spoke with her at a reading one night and I told her how much I liked these poems. Why, she gleamed. I thought is that about me. A certain poet that I am surprises her in liking these? Why did I feel so complicit in her question to me. Her poem is of an unclear genre, though it is clearly a poem. It feels poem though it scrambles around the page, proclaiming and organizing itself quietly in an emphatic and softly authoritative and questioning voice. I liked that. I liked her subjects – labor, social questions, technology and the possibility of constructing humans, and of course gender. Questions of gender are all over the place. And I’ll end there. I was talking with my friends Sam and Amrit last night in Tucson. We said that a woman’s self was full of holes. In the case of a man the whole culture is busily at the task of completing him, making him whole. Propping up his masculinity. Its everyone’s job, apparently. I love Anna’s poems because she deploys the holes of womanness to talk of a wide panorama of things, the work it took to make these poems, mainly.

It’s been a year of many deaths and maybe all years are but the poetry world seems bent by loss right now. Leslie Scalapino this time last year. Akilah Oliver died last month. This month Paul Violi. I want to chime in on the surprising (because Paul seemed the most present therefore the most local of men in his radiant charm) accolades from all corners who knew Paul, who loved his work, who thought they were his. And he theirs. Paul was my first real poetry teacher. From him I learned who was who (in the poetry world), what the map was of its ‘schools’, and which poems of mine were bad and good though he wouldn’t say why. One of the things I appreciated about his decisive vagueness is that he forced you to figure it out. I’m looking at his first book (Waterworks) which I owned years ago but somehow lost. It was handed to me the other night at a reading in Brooklyn by Nathaniel Otting, a poet who is part of the tribe of Violi fans. In Waterworks I read this:

FOR THE EARL OF SURREY

The golfer smiles in his polo shirt, the little

man has beaten the bully, the housewife is

using a new detergent and the Californian squints

behind his new sunglasses; the man in the diner likes

his new bow tie and so does the doctor who saved

the injured cheerleader; the detective uses hair

tonic, the stout nurse is immaculate, the waitress

wants to date the truck driver; the grocer slices

a pound of baloney, the reporter asks him how it

feels; the teacher wears a wild shirt, the coach

tells the youngster to shape up or ship out, the old

lady asks him the time, the woman in curlers orders

a hamburger and yet I want to jump for joy

Let’s see. I learned from this that a poem can end without period. And yet why? Well because now the poet will be always leaping into the air and by using this trick you will sustain surprise – in a tiny way for the rest of your reading/writing life. The innovation is slight – the poem doesn’t stop. So the poet and his joy are always a part of everything – that surprising shift from them to us, from the specific general to the general personal, the driver “I.” Also there’s a massive number of semicolons here. I find that interesting because it means that the surface of poetry can be prose. It’s a copy-edited poem. Its surface is continuous with the surface of journalism. And its subject? The crowd. We are jump cutting through the world; the rhythm is constant and building. I often think a poem like an orgasm is a counting thing. It’s not this many, but an enumerative act so that if you succumb to the poem as is your whole being is counting with it and its end will blow you apart as the poet was when the line curiously was thrust onto his being by the – would syllogism be correct? I think so, by the syllogism that is churning the very poem forward with each cartoon Hummel proposition, like the surging collage of the dancers on Laff-In, or the collage of a single panel cartoon in the Sunday papers – it’s a collective procedure, a surging crowd whose existence would seem to erase the note-taking poet who instead takes all of the collective’s energy on in earnest and like a unlikely criminal – which Violi was – to know him was to be complicit in his kind impishness both in life and work – he throws the car into reverse ejects himself out his seat by this action and leaves the poem by entering it at last. Bye Paul.

In fact, I think many of the conceptual writers would agree that there is much poetry about nothing. As would the flarfistes. But I think we have a different notion of what nothing is. And what feelings are. How rare is it that one comes across a line of poetry that makes the hair on one’s neck stand on end? Or in the case of Vanessa Place, makes one want to burst into tears? Or upon hearing an entire reading of Kenny Goldsmith’s Traffic, want to rip one’s head off. That’s a visceral response.

What we respond to is very different, clearly. And when we respond. With conceptual writing, the poetry is about the idea behind the project, the realization of the project, the material gathered into the project, but more so, or as much as that, it’s about the discussion. The “thinkership,” as Goldsmith says, not the readership. The ideas behind conceptual writing—Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts, for example—can make the hair on my neck stand up as much as a great lyric poem, or a narrative poem; a line by Alice Notley, for instance, or Jorie Graham. But neither the intention of the poem, nor the craft of the poem, is enough to garner such an effect.

There are lovely poems out there filled with stunning images, gorgeous syllabic, gymnastic language, perfectly crafted, and yet, they leave me absolutely cold. There are poems out there filled with heartfelt sentiment, “true” emotions, reported from the poet’s depths that leave me absolutely cold.

Over on the CBC Canada Reads book talk the other day a poet said that contemporary poetry “terrified” her students. Wow, I thought, what is she reading? I want some of that. Because I don’t think there’s enough poetry out there terrifying us. Or making us feel, or think. Dale Smith, on the other hand, wants less of this terror. In his Slow Poetry Manifesto he asks, is this terror really serving us?  That’s a good question too. For my part, I guess it comes back to a question of thinking. Is the poem offering us a way to think about something? Does it wake us up? Because it seems to me, that’s one of poetry’s great tasks.

Soothe me okay, particularly after you’ve ruffled my feathers. But don’t smother me with niceness. Don’t insult me with simplicity. If I’m dying of cancer, don’t tell me it’s all going to be fine. Don’t tell me to relax and be positive. Tell me how I can think about what I’m facing. The world is a complicated place, and only becoming more complex, this is true on many levels, from material to technological to psychological, even how we learn…so yes, the writing I encounter better in some way have come to terms, or at least acknowledge the difficulty of coming to terms with what we’re facing.

So yes, when I come across a voice like Alice Notley, I do feel terror. But I feel terror because she is looking very directly at the world. In doing so she reminds me that I can to. And I might not even need to be soothed. I might in fact be stronger, more capable than I thought. When I read the narrator in an Anne Carson poem wiggling her ass before the man who spurned her, I feel more than a little empathetic, just as when I read about her thinking about Bronte while sitting with her aging mother I understand the complexity of simple human presence. When I read Darren Wershler’s Update I feel moved because he tells me something about the language I am using every day, because he folds literary history and play showing me the potential in what is now the benign, the daily, status update. It’s a quality of intellectual and emotional stimulation that does not leave me cold.

So what is this quality of writing precisely? Intelligence? Insight? Emotional intelligence? Bounce, as Goldsmith says? Lyric intelligence, as Jan Zwicky might say? What is this quality in the writing, and how do we get to it?

*

As Stephen Burt notes, there is a constant parade of questions and opportunities for discussion on Facebook or Twitter. Every time I come to my desk top now, I click open a browser and am transported into various poetry worlds: the Twitter world, the Facebook world, the world of my university, my fabulous students, my immediate poet peers, or here in the Harriet world…spaces populated for me in any case, largely by poets, or at least writers and artists who are colleagues, friends, people I admire, and want to talk to. I am enormously blessed, I know, but on the other hand, I worry about my practice. Why? Why, when there is so much poetry in my life, am I worried?

Well, that’s just it. Life is complicated. If you’re looking for doily making, contemporary poetry is no place for you. In order to write poetry one has to be immersed, and then pull back. Goldsmith talks about the “thinkership” as a group act, but I would argue that the work of conceptualists, the successful work, is extremely well considered. The projects, the great ones, all rely on decades of life experience and thinking on the part of the poets themselves–I am speaking here in particular of Vanessa Place, Christian Bok, Kenneth Goldsmith and Darren Wershler–each bringing vast quantities of information from other pursuits, other disciplines, to their conceptual projects. All good poetry is well considered, no? One needs to consider the conversation in order to add something to it, but one also needs to bring all of one’s thinking, everything one has, to the table.

So what does this look like for the contemporary poet facing the flood of poetry and data and news, etc? Goldsmith likes the idea of the filter. Okay, but it’s a matter of balance, surely. My ideal life would be half of the time in the center of everything, half in the middle of nowhere. This balance is increasingly difficult to manage; the middle of nowhere is harder to achieve, even in Canada, even on one’s own desktop, let alone one’s mind…

For me, the problem isn’t all this stimulation, or data, but as Goldsmith points out, it’s the processing. For me the question is where do I go to consider all of this? How can we gain any perspective on the material with so much instant publication and response? How big a desktop do I need in order to have all of this information, plus all of my own life experience and knowledge, open at once?  On the one hand, you want to access it all, but on the other hand, the kind of work that I admire has always been marked by extensive contemplation, a sustained level of inquiry. This is something that I associate with a more monastic existence. The poet laboring outside of the system so long in order to have something to contribute…

In order to write poetry I know I need to be immersed in my time. Up to the ears, immersed. I also know I need to leave noise of my time. So how to manage the deluge? What I’m learning is that I need to manage less dramatic, and more daily, or even momentary retreats. I need to be able to imagine a clear work space, even if I have no physical work space, or little mental clarity… It’s not only the technology of poetry that has shifted: the texture of my poetic inner life has shifted too. And as Goldsmith says, if you can’t manage this, it will be a difficult road ahead.

By Cooper Bennett Burt

I am not a toddler, I am a baby.
Why? I think I would rather be
a toddler, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Nathan
is starting a drawing. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a snack,” he
says. I snack; we snack. I look
up. He has pirates in it.
“Yes, it needed pirates there.”
“Oh.” I go and the minutes go by
and I drop in again. The drawing
is going on, and I go, and the minutes
go by. I drop in. The drawing is
finished. Where’s pirates?
All that’s left is just
letters. “It was too much,” Nathan says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a foodstuff: beans. I drop a handful
of beans. Pretty soon it is a whole
mess of beans, on the floor.
Then another bean. There should be
so much more, not of beans, of
words, of how very smeared with food I am,
and life. Days go by. It is even in
pants, I am a real baby. My lunch
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
pirates yet. It’s twelve smears of food, I call
it MMMMMMM. And one day in Nathan’s bedroom
I see Nathan’s drawing, called PIRATES.

Never been much for writing to music, though–since music is another attempt at language, it clashes with, and sometimes overwhelms, my words. But every year around Easter, prompted by my weepy annual ritual of watching the 1961 film “King of Kings,” I suddenly write a flurry of frighteningly religious stanzas, in which I repent and confess to everything short of electing George Bush for a second term. These purging poetics are inevitably accompanied and electrified by the movie’s holy, humongously dramatic theme song (it revs up just after the overture):

OK, so maybe it’s just a wildly overwrought, manipulative arrangement of musical notes that reminds me that I haven’t gone to church in awhile. But sometimes we all crave it, don’t we, something that makes us feel small and swept along, something that puts someone else in charge for a change, some weighted melody that gives us an excuse to cry and inspires sappy poems in which we forgive ourselves and everyone around us.

And we start over. Reminded of how profoundly a moment can move us, we start over.

Perhaps this accompanies the question of the poet’s body.  Where is he?

“He is in the thunder and lightning.  He is in the branches of the trees.” — Ghazal 2.b.

I think of typing up my second book, Incubation. And how it vanished.  That first version.  I pressed something: what? The computer whirred then stopped.  It broke. Renee Gladman wrote something along the lines of: “Dear Bhanu, not to worry.  We can publish your work the year after next.  It’s clear you will not be able to get it to us in time.”  I re-wrote the book – a new book – in a two week sitting.  Numb, the single mother of a kinetic four year old, and newly divorced/stunned: I’d come home from dropping my son at his preschool, close the door behind me, take off my clothes, lay my clothes over the arm of the sofa, walk through the house to the alcove with the table, strip it of its red tablecloth, wrap myself in the tablecloth, climb on a chair, get down the Maker’s Mark, and pour out a ritualistic tablespoon.  To drink.

Then write.

Write then go.

Did you write a book that vanished?  Did language return to you?  How? Where do words go when they are deleted?  Or disappear.  Do they recirculate? Are they wet?  Are they dead?  Can you communicate with language that has gone in the same way that it is possible to communicate with a person who is no longer there?  Is it possible to retrieve words that have been lost, to the processes of time, culture or fate?

Describe the pathway of touch – light touch – that allows them to return.  Return as vibration.  Not vibration.  At first, you cannot hear a thing.

The phonemes of Zong! that are the matter of the page.

Though it’s my aunts’ and mother’s stories of epic, colonial and daily life that persist, it’s only my grandfather’s Urdu, Farsi and Persian couplets that have a physical, written presence in his yellowing notebooks on a shelf in India, now Colorado, next to his orchard notes.  His list of the seeds and the year he bought them.  A pencil drawing of the space and its boundary lines.  A mathematics of the mango grove.  I want to give this notebook to Matias Viegener and David Burns for their Fallen Fruit project.

Or, on the other side of the family, Kapil Muni, my ancestor, chanting OM NAMAO SHIVAI a thousand years before Christ, off the coast of Bengal.  The flame set upon the waves of the sea in a boat of banana leaves and tiny roses tied in bundles with red string, the tendons of a plant that grows near the sea.  When I meditate, he sometimes meditates with me.  Does he?

A dialect.  Language 52.

Ghazal 3:

I touched the bark of an oak tree with my fingertips a thousand times or more on the way to school.  One day, a robin flew down out of the lowest branches and landed where I stood upon on my arm.  My shirt.  My dark green sleeve.  Its beak.  And sang.  Since that time, I have felt great sorrow, in early spring, to see a robin dead on the street. But joy when I see the blue eggs.  In the nest by the door.  In the garden. In the rain.

The risk of the ghazal, in English, is that, as above, it ends on a lyric note when, in reality, it should be torn from the body like a sob.  It should never be written down.  It should never be read aloud in a person’s ordinary speaking voice.  It is more like a scream than a song.  Lisa Robertson: “Form is improvisational.”  She said it at CCA, giving, as I recall, one of Trish Salah’s ghazals as an example, to a class of students that included Erin Morrill.  I had accompanied Erin to the class because I loved Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat but had never met her (Lisa R.) properly.  Similarly, I liked the example, but began to cough.  I coughed and coughed. I left the room.  In the bathroom, leaning over the sink, unable to catch my breath, choking, I threw up.  When I returned to the class, my face was streaked with mascara and Lisa Robertson asked me if I was okay.  I said yes. Then, outside, on the sidewalk, I met Dodie Bellamy and felt so weak I could not greet her like a normal person.  My arms were limp.  All I could think was: “I just barfed and now I am meeting the author of the BARF MANIFESTO.”

A ghazal is an Indian form.  An oral-aural form.  An 11th Century Arabic form. I am interested in what people understand themselves to be doing when they write one.  Don’t they know how dangerous it is?  How much further their hearts could break?

“You never belonged even to yourself though/as you abandoned me your cry was I’m for time,” wrote Ali.

He wrote it down.

Then went.

On the other hand, this shift, and the institutional basis upon which it has been founded, marks another distinction, between poetry as vocation and poetry as career. A career in poetry tends to include an array of extra-poetic concerns and in the most extreme cases (increasingly apparent among younger poets) uses poetry to further those concerns, uses poetry instrumentally, that is. This is the only way to explain why none of the invited poets seem to be writing much about poems, per se. (Though Rigoberto González just posted a review of Reginald Shepherd’s posthumous book, Red Clay Weather, this comes as an exception to the norm). In most blogs, poems might be mentioned in passing, but as something incidental to the more important matters of the business of poetry, and the businesses for which poetry has become a messenger. To cut to the chase, I keep wondering if poems of “Aubade’s” magnitude, its quiet magnificence and deep emotional core, will still be written in America.

The subtext of Larkin’s poem is work. The poem is also, more prominently, about regret over time wasted and, mostly, it is about the inevitability of death and both a gut and philosophical fear of that inevitability. How emotion and intellect combine is one of the marvels on the poem. A variation on the English Ode, at once meditative but propelled forward by a strong sense of dread, it reads like well-honed Keats. Its title, “Aubade,” means that it should be a celebration of dawn. It is anything but, as dawn in the poem signals one more day consumed, “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now[.]” The compression and abruptness of the opening line is like a knock on the head: “I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.”

The theme of work runs through Larkin’s oeuvre from the beginning; the sailors at work in “The North Ship,” those who failed at work (“Mr Bleaney,” “Toads Revisited”); the traveling merchant in the great poem “Lives.” There is even a poem, “At Grass,” about retired racehorses. In “Aubade” work opens and closes the poem and runs through the language of the central argument. “Aubade” doesn’t have an agenda, really, and the narrator also has no agenda and does not even admit to being a poet. We only know that he works, gets drunk, fears death. And the poem itself, even though it is scrupulously formal, doesn’t seem to know it is a poem at all. It behaves more like a black-gowned judge somberly handing down the ultimate sentence. The criminal, waking out of a fog of alcohol, is basically defenseless. The narrator of this poem is looking at the glare as surely as Ivan Ilyich did, except there is no resolution, no self-forgiving moment. His mind goes blank, and not at the life ineptly lived but the only real truth it has had to live by, “total emptiness for ever…nothing more true.”

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Even death itself works, unrestingly. Its proximity is measured as our work cycle is, by days: “a whole day nearer[.]” Larkin doesn’t mince words; there is no political background noise, no attitude, none of the palliatives of constructed optimisms; this is a selfish poem, the words of an insomniac with one thing on his mind, aware that he is merely torturing himself (“Arid interrogation”) but helpless to stop.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

“This is a special way of being afraid[,]” a “furnace-fear[,]” that suggests living Hell. As in other instances in Larkin, especially in his early poem “Church Going” where the church itself, “this accoutred frowsty barn,” is a synecdoche for the whole institution of belief and redemption, “Aubade” is less than charitable towards religion: “[r]eligion used to try, / That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die…”

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Morning presents the narrator with a dilemma: without the distraction of belief, without “[p]eople or drink[,]” what we know — it dawns on us — is unacceptable. The conclusion: “One side will have to go.”

This curious dictate hardens the syllogistic economy of the equation: either we know and accept what we know, or we don’t know (or sublimate what we do know) and don’t accept bodily death as final. One or the other.  “…what we know, / Have always known, know that we can’t escape, / Yet can’t accept.” The sentiment and the language recall the last lines of Beckett’s The Unnamable: “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Except, at this point the choice is dropped; work and its daily commonweal kick in — in a rather grim lyrical passage, work (call it life) is the real default mode. In this sense Larkin’s conclusion recalls the last stanza of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a poem that Larkin would have known well. The notion of “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster…”

Easter is huge in Greece — much more important than Christmas — and everyone here is gearing up for Holy Week. For Palm Sunday, though, we went to the Anglican Church, St. Paul’s. I suppose I want my children to hear some of the liturgy, the words and the hymns, I did growing up. Like Rigoberto, I was obsessed with death as a child, and church seemed to be the only place it was openly mentioned.

I am more enamored with doubt than with belief, but something always draws me back to the church of my childhood. And I feel that, even as we struggle to keep our wiggling children relatively undisruptive in the pew, there is a space there for attention, for listening.

Today as we listened to the Passion according to Matthew, I was struck anew with the scene where Pilate is about to pass sentence and wash his hands of the matter (here in the King James):

19 When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.

What is it that is so fascinating about this minor character (and historical figure), this tangential moment (inconsequential to the action, and yet which suggests a whole alternate narrative), this tantalizing dream? Somehow that she is a woman, in the shadowy wings of the drama, increases the fascination, at least to me.

Naturally, the Wife of Pilate has attracted numerous writers and poets over the centuries. I must say that I wasn’t previously familiar with this poem by Charlotte Brontë, but I was grateful for this opportunity to stumble upon it:

“Pilate’s Wife’s Dream”

Claudia Procula is revered as a saint in the Eastern Churches.

Some years ago, Tom Feelings completed the art for his book, Middle Passage. The book moved me in powerful ways. I wrote poems in response. It is impossible now to read Hayden’s poem and not imagine Feelings art as an echo of Hayden’s ambition of telling this story as an epic—the story of slave rebellions, the story of America’s complicity in the business of slavery, the horror of the passage.

In Hayden’s poem you see the way his work, in its commitment to the modernist impulse of using fragments of history, of song, of memory and of existing literature to create a work with epic ambition. Hayden takes Eliot’s allusion to Shakespeare’s the Tempest and plops it perfectly into this story of slavery and the Middle Passage. “Full fathom five thy father lies” is the lament of the white slaver in Hayden’s poem—the political implications are rich. Those eyes, those eyes:

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones
New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me
Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea

The thing is I cannot read Hayden without hearing Derek Walcott’s Another Live and Omeros. I cannot read Hayden with hearing the monumental ambition of Kamau Brathwaite’s own Middle Passage in his sequence The Arrivants. I cannot read Hayden without hearing Amime Cesaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land or his Le Tempete. I cannot read Hayden without hearing the verse of Edouard Glissant. It goes on and on. Hayden may have felt alone when he embarked on this poem—a beautiful work of intellectual cool and ideological forcefulness—but his work feels like a part of some larger chorus of voices now so many years later. He certainly is not alone.

I am reading Kevin Young’s Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, and by its structure, by its intent on filling the air with the many voices of those involved in the Middle Passage, it owes its presence and impact to Robert Hayden. I will look back at Elizabeth Alexander’s twenty-four Amistad poems that she said owed their existence to her archival research into the story of that important historical moment. Kevin Young speaks of his own research, the details he manages to dig up from original documents, and the way they give substance to the poems he has written. What Hayden did with the Cinque[z] story in his poem, represents an unearthing of significant proportions because of the time when he wrote the poem.

Hayden apparently did not want to be known as a Negro or Black Poet, but as an American poet. In this, he was in good company. Many people misunderstood this, clearly, and I have been privy to so many arguments on conference panels and in articles about the way Hayden fared during the Black Arts Movement. The problem Hayden faced, of course, was that he did as much as he could possibly do to undermine his wish. Instead of avoiding subject matter that would easily betray him he wrote homage poems to Frederick Douglas and other black figures in history. What he did was dig deep into the rich store of narratives of African American experience to produce poems. In fairness to Hayden, his aversion to being so easily labeled was a sophisticated one. For him, the poem “Middle Passage” is not a black poem, but an American poem. His Douglas poem is not a black poem, but an American poem. Anything that allows America off the hook on recognizing the Americanness of what Langston Hughes called “the darker brother” is fundamentally tragic and to be resisted.

Yet it is this desire to make of the narrative of the Middle Passage, not a black preoccupation that affects so fully the shape of the poem itself. Indeed, while often the poem is described as a pastiche of many voices of the key figures in the slave trade, the truth is that the poem is made up of a pastiche of the many white voices engaged in the slave trade. The passage detailing the complicity of the “nigger kings” in the trade is packed with what may in fact be truths, but in this telling, Hayden offers something that can sometimes seem an apology for the European role in the middle passage. “It was not us alone, those Africans were also complicit.” The passage smells of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

I

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one–King Anthracite we named him–
fetish face beneath French parasols
of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send
his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
and kill the sick and old and lead the young
in coffles to our factories.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,
for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested
from those black fields, and I’d be trading still
but for the fevers melting down my bones.

There is the conscience of regret, or perhaps something more, the curse of guilt on the slave trader at the end of this movement. In the next, Hayden produces a beautiful lyric that is brutal in its explicit description of the horrors of the enterprise:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;
plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

The poem does take us to the shores of America, to the story of the Amistad and to the very place where Tom Feelings’ book ends. It is as if neither of these two artists could bear to treat the next epic of history in the same poem. But where the echoing poets—the ones, one imagines, find themselves responding to Hayden directly or indirectly—try to find in their verse the voice of the enslaved, Hayden is interested in the voice of the enslaver. It is a fit and rewarding fascination.

But I would propose that Hayden’s race is an important part of this poem, and the way we will read the poem. Why should we not know that he is a black man? Why should that fact be less important than the metaphors he chooses to use or the allusions he decides to make? I am convinced that the emotional core of the poem, the very credibility of the poem lies in his blackness.

This, no doubt, might seem a radical and unsettling statement but it should not be confused with the suggestion that without his blackness as part of the poem, that the poem would not have power. Of course it would, but it would also not offer us certain possibilities of interpretation. The thing is, if we did not read the poem as one written by a black man, wouldn’t we read the poem as one written by a white man (or woman)? And if so, wouldn’t that offer some dimension and shape to the poem? Of course it would.

Hayden may not have wanted much of this to be a part of the reception to his poem but Hayden would have known that he could do nothing about that. Nothing whatsoever. He leaves us, though, with a powerful and troubling poem. It is an American poem, yes, but it is decidedly a Black poem.

The other day, she pointed out that Netflix is streaming Starting Out in the Evening, a slow-paced and well-acted (if not superbly written, and somewhat tackily scored) film that can be read as an elegy not just for a certain type of writer, but for an entire type of literacy and literary culture. You could watch it and have and number of discussions about technology, the future of the book, and the declining fate of people of letters. But that’s been covered so thoroughly elsewhere that I’m not in the mood. Instead, I want to use the movie to talk about something else: outfits!

The idea that fashion is purely frivolous or at odds with poetry seems absurd, since style as it pertains to clothes seems fairly relatable to style as it pertains to literature and its composition and exhibition. Both are forms of artifice. Both have rules to be followed and broken. Both engage strategically with the expectations of an audience. Both require an attention to detail and an intention to convey a particular mode of self-presentation. Both are subjectively created and subjectively received.

Plenty of authors dress up for public appearances, and Kate Durbin and Tim Jones-Yelvington take the potential for mask and performance to delightful lengths. And Kate Zambreno, for one, has written “that writers and artists and fashion mags actually have more of a history than one might think.” Weldon Kees, a poet I love above many others, earns my affection through his poetry, but he seals the deal with his natty style.

That said, I’m less interested in talking here about what people wear when they read, and more yearning to know what people wear when they write. In Starting Out in the Evening, the retired professor and elderly novelist Leonard Schiller, played by Frank Langella, is depicted as the kind of gentleman who will not sit down in front of his typewriter unless he is clad in a crisp buttondown shirt and tie, even though he’s essentially a hermit on whom virtually no other person besides his daughter lays eyes. Meanwhile, Heather Wolfe, the ambitious grad student attempting to write Schiller’s critical biography, played by Lauren Ambrose, is shown sitting down to work on her thesis in a charmingly fug rainbow-colored flower-patterned sweater jacket.

So what I want to know is: what do you wear when you write, and why? Do you write in your pajamas? Do you dress? Do you dress up? Do you have any talismanic pieces of clothing that you especially like to wear when writing? Do you dress differently to revise? How does your external appearance affect your internal state of mind and creativity?

I have no way of knowing what Kees wore when he was composing, clothing-wise, but I can at least be pretty sure he wore his signature mustache, attached as it was to his face. Speaking of faces, on Facebook, I asked people this same question, and got a lot of witty answers like “a look of consternation that borders on skepticism” and “warm laptop, no pants.” But I also got some legit ones, like from K. Lorraine Graham who said “I wear pants, at the very least. When I wrote Terminal Humming, I usually wore a suit or some other DC would-be politico-wonk uniform, because I was always writing on lunch break or in staff meetings. In the summer, I often wear a bikini to write,” and Charlotte Safavi who said “I always wear lipstick.” Jen Olsen, for the record, wears her jammiepants when she writes. Personally, I cannot get any serious writing done in my PJs, since I feel too relaxed and unprofessional.

If you haven’t got any particular items of clothing, do you have any rituals for when you write? I read somewhere that Kafka would get a glass of beer and two sausages and set them at his desk, the inside of which he had fitted with pointy spikes to keep him from getting up or fidgeting in his seat, so he could maintain a sustained focus on the work. Do any of you do anything like this?

For what it’s worth, I wear purple terry cloth wristbands—one with a peace sign patch and the other with a star—that I won at a game at a New Year’s Eve party for the turn of 2006 into 2007. I consider them lucky. I wear them when I’m working on something tricky. I’m wearing them now. That’s why this piece is so good-looking.

Unrelated p.s. Ada Limón, I like your metaphor of thinking of “books like towns” you’ve lived in. We went over the chapter on setting in Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing in one of my classes yesterday. In it, she has a prompt that says, “Write about a place you can’t return to,” which strikes me as being perfect, since that’s almost every place, potentially: physical spaces, ages, frames of mind—a lot of those are things you can only get back to by writing about them, and then, after that, by reading what you wrote.

Gillian Conoley’s prompt has stayed with me since she first posted the question about the poet’s palette. It merits a more creative approach to a response. Since my forthcoming book is called Black Blossoms I guess the answer is an easy one for me: my palette’s colors are dark, always have been–black, blood-red, bruised blue. The lens, painful, but my view of the world.

(dedicated to Steve Fellner, who’s really good at this)

A quick word search on Black Blossoms:  black magic, blackest mushrooms, turning black, black yawn, black dress, black flower, turned its black, blackbird, black weed, autobiography of red, red shirt, red lake, bloody bed, bloodied, plumes of blood, blood-shot mirrors, menstrual blood, in my blood, blue grave, blue hands, divide the sky, bruised his mother’s cheek…

*

Once a woman came up to me before a reading, all excited about having discovered a Latino poet she wanted to invite to her school, where so many young Latinos needed role models like me yadda yadda yadda, poetry is better than joining a gang yadda yadda yadda. I took to the podium, went at it with my series of mortician poems. At the end of the reading I was looking around for the woman to give her my contact information and the event’s host said to me, “I think you scared her away. She ran out of the room in the middle of that poem about the mortician banging the corpse.”

*

The first poem I remember writing was called “Cemetery Dog” because in high school we were forced to write poetry and my inspiration came from the neighbor’s German shepherd that howled at ambulance or police sirens. In our barrio that was every night. This was 1988. The first poem I wrote in college also featured a cemetery and I only remember the phrase “uproot the dead” because my poetry instructor kept going on and on about how cool it was. The last book I finished ends with a cemetery image (“each sad memory/ like a headstone in a cemetery where nothing remains buried”). Now that I think about it so does the book before that: “in the village without headstones,/ without history, without names and without ghosts.” Goddammit, I should move out or start paying rent to the groundskeeper.

*

Death is the answer to every question:

What do you write about?         I write about death!
What are you working on?         Another book about death!
What are you currently reading?     Death!
What do you want for lunch?     A death sandwich!

*

Blame el Día de los Muertos and its marigolds setting the graves on fire. Blame my abuelita and her wailing at my mother’s burial, each cry piercing another hole in my skin. When the night sweats came I thought it was my body dissolving into tears. Blame the peace in el panteón, the child running barefoot and leaving tiny footprints like petals on the soft soil. Blame the man who collected them in his broom made of twigs, and who offered them to me when he saw me weeping over a blue grave. Blame the unexpected embrace, the kiss behind the neck that reminded me how pretty things could blossom there among the grief.

*

I started wearing black in college because it was slimming. And I hung out with the Latino Goths though I never really considered myself a Goth because I couldn’t afford the make-up or the snappy haircuts. But I was allowed in because I wrote those poems about spiders and suicide. Whenever we went out to the club and everyone dressed up I was the designated photographer and it made me feel special anyway, locking my friends inside the box of the camera lens. It felt better than the time I was too chubby for the elf outfit during a Christmas recital in fifth grade. So the teacher asked me to show up in a green shirt. I was placed at the edge, behind all the cute little Mexican elves, and when parents took pictures I knew they were cutting me out of the frame. And then the teacher came up to each of us with the microphone and asked us what was our Christmas wish. And by the time she got to me I was so red-faced all I could think to say was, “I wish you all to hell.”

*

When will you stop writing about death?        When I die!

How does the mind work? I wonder, as I watch him. He is inwardly and outwardly focused, concentrating in a relaxed way. The poem moves through him and out of him into the world without being diminished. Having mastered the poem, it belongs to him and yet the poem is nothing tangible, has no physical substance. Perhaps it is written in or on or by his neurons, for watching him, he looks like he is reading his own mind or memory.

Remember the lines Romeo speaks to Juliet, “O that I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek!”? My feeling, if I strain to put it into words, is something like that, a longing to be—for my love to be—for his sense of my motherly presence in his life to be—like that poem inside him. O, to exist in my son’s mind and soul, repeated, cherished, let loose unto the world only to remain, undiminished, inside him as he is always, always inside me.

Kwame Dawes rightly directs us to define timely and timeless. All poems are rooted in a moment in time; some, as my friend Rachel Hadas would say, “float free of their occasion.” This, perhaps, is one of the aspects of greatness. News that stays news. How many of the slew of poems occasioned by 9-11, for instance, have earned a place in the anthologies, much less the canon? A few? Any? (Feel free to correct me here.)

Yet one of Thomas Hardy’s most anthologized poems, “The Convergence of the Twain,” is based on this “current event,” the sinking of the Titanic. The poem’s first appearance in print, published in “the program of the ‘Dramatic and Operatic Matinee in Aid of the ‘Titanic’ Disaster Fund,’” given at Covent Garden Theatre (Thomas Hardy A to Z, by Sarah Bird Wright), was just over a month after the event itself. Yet this piece is enshrined in anthologies, and has achieved an immortality denied the actual doomed vessel (as opposed to her eternal ghost.) Nor was this event merely a newspaper item to Hardy; his wife had lost two acquaintances in the tragedy.

Click here, to read the poem.

It is in one of Hardy’s nonce stanzas, this one consisting of rhymed tercets, with two short lines (trimeters) followed by a long one (hexameter). But as we read through the poem, this form becomes a startling embodiment of the poem’s theme: the two short lines, we realize, are arguably half lines, hemistiches, two twains that converge together to form the long line, the hexameter, a measure which has, in English, a certain finality to its heft. Wedding become welding.

The opposite of the timeless is the dated. But maybe what makes the timely timeless is just being really, really good. Also, perhaps what enabled Hardy to write such a fine poem so fast was that this event just happened to speak to Hardy’s own obsessions: the clash of the modern with the ancient (that Shape of Ice!), of the mechanized with nature, and of man’s deaf will with blind, inexorable fate.

For some reason, my mind went to Toni Cade Bambara who died some years ago. The thing is, I could not say that Toni and I were friends because we only met once, and exchanged emails briefly after that meeting. And yet, I knew she was my friend because of that meeting and because of what she did when we met.

It was long enough ago—sometime in 1993 or 1994—for me to know that I was an insecure writer, someone quite sure that I was a bit of an imposter in the game, and that I would never get over the uneasiness of always feeling deep awe and worthlessness around writers who seemed to be know their power and worth, who had great success and who seemed completely self-assured about what they were doing. Some were even my age, a few younger than me.

I know, too, that I was thinking a lot about this thing called “my career as a writer”. What did I need to do to make myself a real writer? I had a book published, but I could list all the handicaps that came with whatever success I had. In other words, I had managed to construct full-blown narratives of why whatever success I had was some kind of fluke or had come because of the mercy of others. I put it best in a poem I wrote referring to Derek Walcott:

I was jealous when at twenty, I found
a slim volume of poems you had written
before you reached sixteen. It has stitched in me
a strange sense of a lie, as if all this
will be revealed to be dust—as if I learned
to pretend one day, and have yet to be found out.

I clearly was not writing about what I felt like at twenty, but about what I felt like in my early thirties.

That is when I met Toni Cade Bambara. We were in Ottawa. I remember this only because I remember the museum with massive totem poles rising many stories high in the spacious glass building. We were at a conference. The kind of conference that made you feel as if you were, somehow, a forgettable speck in a sea of relevance.

I think I went to a session in which she was a presenter, and she talked with sharp wit, with laughter and liveliness. I am not sure how we were introduced or if we were introduced. Perhaps she heard me read or say something, but quite suddenly she said to me, “Come, let’s get out of here.”

I followed her like I would follow a favorite adventure filled aunt. She talked quickly and made jokes about the discussion, and she said she needed to get something real to eat and to clear her head. So we took off for a few hours, had a meal, chatted about so much and so little. She let me talk about my writing. She was interested in my background, in Ghana and Jamaica and the paths that led me to this conference.

She told me about her work. She did not make much of the fact that what I knew about her was mostly the headline stuff: that she was famous, well-published and capable of generating a serious fan following. I did not know her work very well. For her, all of that was just nonsense, really. She did not embarrass me about it. She was trying to make ends meet, living from day to day, hoping to write more, make more films, and to produce good work.

I will never forget how generous this dreadlocked, intense woman was about the stories she remembered about being engaged in the struggle for social justice and about how important it was to be that way. She let me know that she enjoyed what I had said and was encouraging to me about my writing.

The thing is, most of the time was spent just being two people trying to make sense of this business of being writers. It impressed me that she found it all a little ridiculous, this, despite her years in the business.

After several hours, we walked back to the conference, exchanged contact information and thanked each other for making a miserable and boring day come alive for a minute. Toni Cade Bambara did not forget me after that. She mentioned my name to some folks here and there, and with little fanfare, she opened these doors for me. It is telling that I can’t even trace back what specific doors she opened.

The best I could do in return was teach her work every time I taught African American literature, which was once, sometimes twice a year. And every time, I would say with pride, “She is the kindest, funniest woman in the world. I met her.”

Her real gift to me, however, was acceptance. That giddy, comfortable friendliness that she showed to me—that commanding reassurance, knowing that I may have been ill-at-ease. She said, “Come, let’s get out of here,” to a complete stranger who was a fellow writer. Her gesture gave me so much confidence, so much ease about where I was as a writer and that it was going to be alright.

In the grand scheme of things, I was a blip in her life. I would never register in any account of Toni Cade Bambara’s life. Why should I? But she registered in my life for what she gave me that day.

Toni died two years later. She had actually being ill when we met, but it had not come up. It was hard to know how to respond. I wanted to mourn, and did so, but quietly and privately, because I did not feel I had a right to do so. I remembered a few of her emails with fondness.

I don’t do what she did for me often enough. Sometimes I forget that I have earned enough success and understanding of the relative nature of that success to at least not be insecure about what I do. I forget that I am the one who should say to a younger writer, “Come, let’s get out of here and talk.” It is good to remember this.

Yes, Rigoberto, sometimes this is quite a lovely little familia.

Many thanks to everyone who answered, or wrote around, or entertained, Question #1 (In the 22nd century, what will the line look like, or do?) As promised, here are my imaginings around the question:

The line in the 22nd century will teeter and pierce and contain a fluidity and buoyancy and substance altogether unknowable but present maybe already in the air–– the line’s languid, fervent tentacles finding manifestation mainly by the virtual world and the real world having merged. There will be no more sense of two worlds, of going “online” or staying off. The whole troublesome feeling of being in public in one’s own living room will cease. Privacy may have a chance of coming back. The page will not die, far from it, the page will grow exponentially and become huge, porous, cellular, layered. Soft porous plant-like material, mattress sized. To experience the poem, the reader will fall back into the page and through its layers, eventually resting buoyantly at whatever place in the page gravity and one’s body weight sends one. The poem would be an even more bodily and sensorial experience, reaching the heart, ears, legs, toes, fingers, intellect, the whole corpus. The body would truly enter the poem, having entered the page. The lines of the poem would come in discrete units, like they do now, so that the reader still enjoys the duration of the time the poem takes. Where will the lines take me next, how will the poem find its full embodiment—the tumble of sounds– these durational pleasures/investigations of reading will persist. Great innovations of the line and page (Dickinson, Whitman, John Cage, Mallarme, Doctor Williams, Apollonaire, insert whoever else may come to mind here) will all be haunting the new line like reliable old beans. But because the line has traveled through this merging of worlds–– the virtual and real––it will carry new dimensional properties, new sensations of substance and atmospheric conditions. Poetry will still be a kind of listening, feeling, thinking. As ever, lines will be buoyant with their favorite companion, the unspoken.

Wanted to respond to Sina Queyras’ thoughtful response. I am not worried about what the line in the 22nd century will look like, only excited about what it might be, and how other working poets may perceive of it. And no no no no no not interested in those who may want to control such a thing—and definitely not interested in any “orderly march forward.” I much prefer a divine mess. And as many divine messes as possible. Hence the question to the wide range of poets currently posting. I ask this question mainly as an invitation to speculate and play, to imagine. Am puzzled by this sentence: “It would seem that if you’re defining poetry as occurring in 40 lines or less you have something very precise in mind.” I think someone else’s post (just read through them all and now can’t find it) had some concerns about the 40 line poem, but twasn’t moi.

I too liked that Christian Bok’s post came right on top of mine, a kind of answer already . . .

Here’s Question for Poetry #2: I have recently been re-reading Georg Trakl (and teaching Christian Hawkey’s wonderful Ventrakl to my graduate cross-genre workshop), paying special attention to the way Trakl uses color. Color is present in almost all Trakl poems, but a heavily fixed symbology or color system eludes the work. In Trakl, color seems to work just outside its (or our) expectations. Using a limited number of colors that appear sort of cycled through the work, Trakl’s poems seem saturated, embued, illuminated with color, but not in ways one might predict Here’s a sample from “Transfiguration,” translated by Daniel Simko:

By your feet
The graves of the dead open
When you lay your forehead into your silver hands.

The autumn moon
Lives silently on your mouth,
Drunk on poppy-juice, dark songs;

Blue flower
Quietly resounding in yellowed stone.

So here is question #2: What is your palette? What colors are most often present in your work? How does color act within in your poems?

But these things take time. The cycle of book writing itself is a slow roll. A book can take years to write, more years to get published, and finally just as long to be received. Once they’re published, they don’t disappear: they hang around shelves, are passed on to friends, or sold to used bookstores. How different this is, say, from the visual arts, where the art-going public is focused on what’s in front of them at the moment. Often people don’t remember individual shows (yet they do recall specific bodies of work). After an exhibition, visual art works disappear: into collections, into warehouses, into museum basements, back into studio storage, often never to be seen again. The slowness of writing is an occupational hazard, although it’s a pace that I suppose many writers prefer. There’s something far-ranging, even transcendent, about it; by placing the work and career outside of normative cultural modes, poets are freed from quick-paced cycles and seasonal fads & fancies, something that even visual artists are not immune to.

And yet, we now live in a moment of the bounce, where Google Alerts are triggered at the mere mention of an author’s name or work, or tweets can ricochet information about a book to thousands of followers in an instant. It’s certainly gratifying for authors — often working alone — to know minute-to-minute that someone out there is engaging with the work. And it can be addictive. I have a poet friend who has every type of search term and alert set up, not only for his name but also for the names of his books. Every morning, he harvests even the most minuscule mentions and PDFs them for his archive. He enacts what Andy Warhol said, when asked how he feels about his reviews: “I don’t read them. I just measure the column inches.” Like a marketer crunching his numbers, Warhol was obsessed with the quantification of taste, which, in Warhol’s case, often resulted in higher financial returns. And yet my poet friend is just like Warhol with a profit motive replaced by the ego. In this era of statistical obsession, writers can literally quantify their reception in terms of hits, retweets, “likes,” “followers,” and “friends.” Every day, he checks the number of his Twitter followers, angling on how to better drive traffic to his feed. The more followers he has, he argues, the more visibility he has as a poet, thus increasing his power base and name-recognition.

Now whether you feel this is a silly game — all of this for, really, no verifiable return whatsoever — or not, a significant change concerning a poet’s career and self-esteem is underway. So much so, that I’m beginning to suspect — definitely, in the case of my friend — that this cyber-steam is starting to become more important to him than his actual poetry. In fact, it’s crossed my mind that this may actually be his new literary production. While we saw this coming years ago, with writers obsessively checking their Amazon ranking and often trying to finagle it higher, we might have turned a corner where, in fact, for many people, the marketing, accounting, and management of their career has actually become their art. And who can forget Ron Silliman’s obsession with his blog’s stats — the millions of hits and users — something he loudly trumpeted for years?

The first glimpse of this was the controversial 3,785-page Issue 1 [PDF, 4mb] anthology, when a few years back, the poetry world awoke one Saturday morning to find that most of us had been included in an anthology of which we knew nothing about. How did we know this? We all received a Google Alert telling us of our inclusion. Rushing to find out what it was all about, we downloaded a massive PDF, searched for our name, and found that the poem attributed to us bore no resemblance to our work. Upon further investigation, we learned that our poem was, in fact, generated by a computer and randomly assigned to our name. The responses were numerous and varied: some were upset that they were included, others equally upset that they were omitted.

What was lacking, though, was any discussion about the poems themselves. But to discuss them would have been besides the point. As there really wasn’t much to discuss about the poems—in regard to everything else going on about this gesture, they seemed pretty irrelevant—we were forced to consider the conceptual apparatus that the anonymous authors had set into motion. With one gesture, they had swapped the focus from personally-forged content & meaning, to anonymously-generated context & distribution. Its as if Issue 1‘s creators were saying that in the age of Google Alerts, what is written has become secondary to how a literary work makes its way out into the world.

And they may have a point. In the new information landscape, it’s the re- gestures (the retweet, the reblog) that seem to carry the most weight. For example, the popular blog Boing Boing doesn’t create anything: they simply point at cool things. And the gesture of Boing Boing pointing at something always trumps the thing at which they are pointing, making us aware that the new power-base is in the filtering, distribution and management of information, not in the original creation of it. For example, If I tweet something that I know takes a long time to digest — say, a lengthy experimental abstract film — a minute later, I find that it’s been retweeted by dozens of people. Now while many may be familiar with that work, most aren’t. And most haven’t even engaged with it. But rather, it’s the name-check and the cool-factor of the information combined with the passion for sharing it, which creates a bounce. The citation, the act of moving that information, has more cache than the object to which its referring.

All of this is to point out the new quandary that writers — whose notions of literary production and reception were forged in the age of the slow roll — face in the age of the bounce. To construct a career based on the ephemerality of the meme is at once thrilling and terrifying. Embracing it is like jumping off a cliff and freefalling, throwing away the script that we’ve come to know so well. Yet it seems inevitable; it’s clearly the next move; it will happen. The question is how it will happen and how much human intervention will be necessary to successfully sustain it as a viable literary practice. If Issue 1 is any hint, then it’s clear that machines will need to play a much more central role in the discourse; although it was curated and collated by humans, what made it possible was the fact that a computer wrote all the poems and then they were distributed and propagated electronically.

But we’re not there yet. Even though many writers may derive works from those (Google searches, data-scraping, etc.), I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who doesn’t have their eye on the bigger picture; I can’t name a writer — even the most radical and “uncreative” — who would choose the model of a bouncy meme over the slow roll of literary history. But that too will soon be changing.

Our most common way of finding the timeless poem is to pull up all those poems from the past that we still read. We conclude that the fact that we are still reading then suggests that they may be timeless. That is, they are not constrained by time. Such poems, the thinking is, are so pure that that they manage to transcend the restrictions of culture, of historical moment, and of language, one assumes.

The quest for timelessness in poetry is essentially a platonic exercise. One must first presume a certain “isness” of a poem for this to work. The idea is that somewhere there exists a perfect poem—an ideal poem. The poet’s job is to try to achieve that essential poem, and when the poet does, she will have written the timeless poem.

We may not put it in those terms, but the very idea of a cannon with its list of great works of art that are a must read for anyone who might be serious about writing, grows out of this fundamental belief.

A friend poet of mine found it very exciting to discover in a book of poetry criticism, that someone had done a great deal of research into poetry traditions from around the world and had found that the qualities of a “good” poem were the same in all these traditions. For someone who had felt a little exercised by his students who claimed that he seemed not to be open to other poetic aesthetics (especially those of another culture), this was good news and an affirmation of his view that what he has known as great art was genuinely great art regardless of the culture trappings that may have given rise to that work. He also felt some relief that he did not have to feel bad about embracing certain poets for fear that he might be accused of xenophobia.

Essentially, he was encouraged by the confirmation of this platonic notion of an ideal poem. And this affirmation is critical because as a teacher of poetry, he is convinced that it is possible, I suspect, to teach people how to reach for such perfection and timelessness.

For my part, despite the assurances that this concept offers, I remain skeptical about what this ideal poem would look like. Must the timeless poem not have to deal with timeless subjects? After all, if the subject is not timeless, the poem cannot be timeless. Perhaps Billy Collins is on his way to timelessness when he eschews writing anything in his poem that would not puzzle some one in the 1950s. So he does not have computers in his poems, no i-Pads, not facebook, etc.

But all this distillation may produce a poetics that is bland and void of any genuine character. This is what I suspect. It seems to me that timelessness is a relative idea. For me timeless is related to longevity of relevance. I do think that while poems that manage to cross times and space have some great value, that quality is not the only one relevant to understanding the greatness of a poem. I also believe that the timely poem may be the one that dominates the writing process more than anything else. We write for our moment, for our generation, for our language. Eventually, all those things, like us, will be gone, and then what? Will our poems no longer be timely? Will they stand not chance of being timeless?

I don’t think so. I would suggest that we may actually miss the complex “timeliness” of many poems because we have lost much of the context for those poems. We read what we can into the poems and thus we continue to bolster those works, creating a context for those works to be read in our own image.

The quest for timelessness is a vanity, a pure vanity. It grows out of a desire to somehow defy death. It is arrogant because it grows out of a desire to be read by people long after we have left this earth. Finally, and most importantly, it is a quest for immortality, an old hunger in artists. The pleasure we get in the hope of a continued existence after we are gone is what drives out effort to write the poem that we hope will stay around. Sadly, such an effort is likely to generate, not great work, but quite mediocre and ordinary.

I have decided to stay focused on being present and writing for the present moment as fiercely and beautifully as I can. If I can find the richest pleasure in this—a pleasure that grows out of the pleasure others feel when I do this well—then I can be content as a writer.

I want my poems to be as good as I can make them. Timely or timeless doesn’t address that. I understand this to be a question about the journalistic content of poetry, or else a question about an individual writer’s relationship to current fashions in poetry. Of the latter, shrug. Of the former, this reminds me of magazine/newspaper editor questions: What’s your hook? Why this article, why now. And yet, isn’t there only one answer?

Clearly, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, is there a timeless poem that isn’t also timely, or a timely poem which, as long as it’s a good poem, isn’t a candidate for timelessness?

When Frank O’Hara has lunch with then-Leroi Jones in “Personal Poem” after admiring some construction workers’ silver hats, the two hipster poets both discover they like Herman Melville better than Henry James and prefer Don Allen to Lionel Trilling—thus helping to fix their personae—and also talk about Miles Davis getting clubbed by a cop, so that the poem, trivial in its tone and timely in cultural reference, is also big and about race and the 1950s. Timeless? Timely? You decide:

Or take Emily Dickinson: isn’t it true that even if she never ever referenced a single thing going on at the time outside the world of 280 Main Street in Amherst MA, there’s something distinctly 19th C. American in her strange relationship to matters of the spirit?

This is like the many different movie and BBC miniseries versions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Costume dramas all, for which clearly plenty of research was done into the look of the period. Yet who couldn’t tell immediately which one was from which decade of the 20th Century. Timely or timeless?

My tendency, watching any Pride and Predjudice, is to wonder, why do so many British actresses from whatever decade slouch? Do they not take ballet lessons as young girls?

My tendency with a poem is to wonder how I can get this word, that line break, this bit of syntax, that comma to get my poem to tilt until it almost crashes, then doesn’t.

Crash, I mean. Though maybe it would be more timely? timeless? for it to crash.

“Thanatos.” The young man who uttered the word didn’t know it had been years since I’d heard it or any variation on it. It immediately lanced me, because a number of recent deaths have been heavy on my heart, stomach, or haunting my thoughts. Particularly the poets + one. The youngster was referring to a variation on the name used for a character in a video game. But that name sent me reeling with frustration and leaking quickly concealed tears.

I only knew Leslie Scalapino’s work, had met her once, introduced myself, and had her autograph my copy of way. I had met Ai on two occasions in the ’90s, briefly when she visited Los Angeles for book events. She once appeared on The Poetry Connexion, a Pacifica literary radio program co-hosted by my husband Austin Straus and myself. Akilah Nayo Oliver lived and worked on the periphery of my circle of literary friends while still a resident of Los Angeles. She had offered her enthusiasm and her services, a dedicated woman at the word processor, when I put together a post-riot issue of High Performance magazine following the 1992 violence and verdict in the Rodney King Beating case. She left L.A. after the death of her son Oluchi at King/Drew hospital (known to us locals as “Killer King”). Akilah and I had met again, briefly, 3-4 years ago at Naropa University where she mightily enjoyed working and teaching. Our last contact was a little over two years ago, when she asked me via email to review A Toast in the House of Friends. That review never found a publisher.

More disturbing, because of the closer proximity to my life, were recent losses of three very dynamic individuals: The death of Australian poet and activist Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes from nursing home neglect, in a suburb of Sydney, was dramatically traumatizing. I moaned. This news came via email with photographs. It’s been several months now, but the cold horror of that transmission recurs quite often. I blot it out with images of me and Bobbi the night we cruised King’s Cross by limousine then stopped at William discotech and cleared the dance floor as we stomped-and-ponied to The Weather Girls’ shout It’s Raining Men. Hallelujah.

As I scanned the letter from award-winning poet and translator Stephen Kessler (Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda), he told me that I should know that F.A. had died. I yelled, and my loved-ones came running. I had just missed F.A. at California’s Petaluma Poetry Walk organized by Geri Digiorno last September. Leaving L.A. in the ’80s to become a permanent resident of Beatty, Oregon, F.A. Nettelbeck passed away January 20^th in Bend, Oregon. I had reviewed his finest book Bug Death for one of the last issues of Lee Hickman’s Bachy. F.A. had helped organize the 1981 Santa Cruz Poetry Festival, which is being revived by Daniel Yaryan (Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts), one of the new generation of poetry mavens. I agreed to join Yaryan & Company in 2012 as a tribute to the spirit of F.A. — if I’m still kickin’.

But seemingly worse was the death of Audrey Christian, longtime friend and runnin’ buddy. Our birthdays fell days apart, and the last time we smoked the dance floor was to Curtis Mayfield’s Ain’t Got Time. Unlike my friends in poetry, Audrey wasn’t a writer or an artist, so the joy she brought into the lives of those who knew her will have to suffice. Originally from Rodessa, Louisiana, Audrey was not a poet if poetry in laughter, a lovely level-hearted, hard-working soul who was the mother of five children, one adopted, and one grandchild. The woman was a joy, a great cook and what some would call a fine “Mami Wata.” We shared many a story, trial, and get-high-off-life out loud. Trapped in a poverty no one deserves, she handled it with grace and aplomb. Colon cancer would stop all of that. She was a heroine of mine — a true inspiration.

I’m thrilled to see some of my favorite people on Harriet — Ada, Barbara Jane, Bhanu, Alicia Stallings, Patricia S., among others (I’ll get to Kwame in a future post) — these are poets whose work and panache I admire. It also appears our paths cross more often than not, one way or another — the nature of the po-biz, I suppose.

Last year I reviewed Ada’s wonderful third book, Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Press) and I interviewed Barbara Jane on her fierce third book Diwata (Boa Editions, Ltd.). Patricia stopped by to say hello at the AWP bookfair in DC back in frozen February, and I just finished posting on Critical Mass an interview with the poet Jacqueline Jones LaMon, whose second book of poetry Last Seen (University of Wisconsin Press) is in partial dialogue with Bhanu Kapil’s haunting The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press). Since I’m using the recent Norton anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (edited by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley and Karen Van Dyck) in my graduate class at Rutgers-Newark, I was not surprised to see Alicia’s translations gracing the pages of this monumental project. I was particularly taken by her translations of the sonneteer Lorentzos Mavilis (1860-1912):

Lucky are the dead; the dead forget
The bitterness of life. So at the set
Of sun, when dusk comes on, you must not weep,
Be your grief for them however deep.

It’s an incredible community I belong to — can I gush for a few seconds? Since this is National Poetry Month, I believe we have permission to exercise some school spirit. Though it’s important to acknowledge that we belong to multiple communities, and that’s just fine. In fact, it’s necessary, otherwise we’d succumb to the claustrophobia. And, yet, it never ceases to amaze me how downright ignorant or clueless people can be about the existence of their peers. (Horse, let’s get high.)

When I call someone on this after they admit they don’t know a fellow writer that they should know, I always get the same feeble response, “But there are so many poets out there!” Really? Is that what we call self-centeredness and the deliberate act of remaining unread and uninformed? And I will acknowledge that as an executive board member of the NBCC I have to know who’s writing excellent work — and not just in poetry but also in five other genres. But, please. And adding insult to the injury, these are the same folks who expect others to know about their work. So, let me see if I understand how it works on Planet Sit-on-My-Ass…

One of the ways poets can interact with the poetry community is by writing about poetry. I’m about at the end of my rope pleading for people to write book reviews — it’s such a difficult task, apparently. So I appreciate the community of poet-bloggers and poet-Facebookers when they at least mention that such and such a book is out. I would appreciate them even more if they read it and offered some sort of critical response. Trust me, it’s a skill that can be learned.

I have a vested interested in encouraging more book reviewing, especially from members of my Latino community. One of our reliable outlets, The El Paso Times, will retire my column next year, after 10 years of service and approximately 200 reviews. I feel good about moving on since I want to turn to another one of my communities and do more reviewing online for Lambda Literary. I’ve also signed on to be a reviewer for the L.A. Review of Books, where I’ll be reviewing not only Latino titles but across the colorful spectrum.

The point is that we have to be good citizens and pay attention to our respective communities. Those on the outside don’t give a damn and shouldn’t be expected to. So if we don’t even know what’s going down in our own neighborhood, we might as well call it a day and stay home because ain’t nobody going to coax us out but each other.

Mavilis’s words stay with me: “Lucky are the dead; the dead forget / The bitterness of life.”

That is my first question. Please answer and I will too.

A.E. Stallings:  The Didactic.  I love your pleasures of the didactic. It’s nice to be reminded of the Didactic. Dante as the Didactic. But is the Didactic in “disquietude and disrepute”?  The word is didactic. Poetry is didactic.  It is at its most didactic when it pretends not to be didactic.  It’s very display is didactic.  Even when it strays far from the intentions of its author, it is didactic.  It has notions of its own, and has left us behind, for its own didactic.  And the whoever is speaking– didactic! I am being very didactic right now.  Schools are not the good kind of didactic because they swim around in their stasis of bureaucracy and belief that they are not didactic.  Perhaps in our distrust of authority we are afraid of the didactic.  But from where I am sitting, there is no way to get around it–– it just becomes another impossibly unwieldy aspect of poetry.  Along with all other elements and aspects of the art.