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

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

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

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

This didn’t surprise us because the issues that VIDA are raising have long been of concern to us. The disparity is something I first noticed seven years ago when I commissioned Averill Curdy to write an essay wondering where all the women poetry critics were. Subsequent issues contained responses from well-known women poet-critics of another generation . The aim was to provoke a conversation, first of all, but more importantly to get more women writing in the back pages of the magazine. More recently, senior editor Don Share participated in a roundtable on gender and publishing sponsored by VIDA.

It’s taken a while, but a shift has occurred. As the VIDA stats themselves reveal, half of our reviewers are now women, and last year we actually reviewed more books by women than by men. Daisy Fried, Ange Mlinko, Abigail Deutsch, A. E. Stallings, Beverly Bie Brahic—all are and will continue to be regular reviewers for Poetry. We will also continue to feature long prose pieces by women poets like Anna Kamienska (April) and Susan Howe (September), as well as long poems by poets such as Carolyn Forche (February, April) and Averill Curdy (April).

Still, the poetry numbers are unequal, and troublesome to us. One difficulty is that we receive many more submissions from men: the last count, done last year, was 65% men and 35% women. Why this might be is a source of endless speculation around here—is Poetry thought of as partial to men? do fewer women poets submit their work to magazines in general?—but we don’t have any good answers.

Even with that ratio of submitters, though, our content is usually more equally distributed between women and men than the VIDA figures suggest—if you count the pages rather than simply the names. (For instance, from January through April of this year, we have sixty-six pages devoted to women’s poetry, seventy-six to men’s.) This is where the VIDA survey oversimplifies things somewhat, at least with respect to Poetry: We might have ten poems by ten men in one issue and one twenty-page poem by a woman. Who is getting more attention in that instance? The main point we’re trying to make is that we are very conscious of the distribution between men and women poets, but we think more in terms of space devoted to the work rather than simply a tally of names.

Still, it’s not equal, and it ought to be. The VIDA results seem to us a useful and necessary warning. For our part, we’re going to begin trying even harder.

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

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

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

Poetry magazine recently exchanged e-mails with January cover artist Genevieve Simms, about her work. She says,

Illustration from its beginnings has always been tied to a text. I find with my personal work I am often interested in finding ways to use illustration in place of text entirely. For example, I may have forgotten the words to a song that my grandmother used to sing to me, but I can still try to tell it in pictures since I can remember the gist of it. The attached images are some pieces where I look for new ways to relate words.

Per request, she kindly wrote a little text about each image (meant to replace text).

This image is part of a series from a free-form narrative project done with a friend and fellow illustrator Byron Eggenschwiler. The idea here was that one person would do a drawing, show the other person, then over the next week the other person would do a drawing in response to the first, and so on.

Though this one does have some words on it, the idea is that it becomes its own little story unto itself. What is so interesting to me about this particular way of working collaboratively, is that each person ends up with drawings that are unmistakably their own, yet there is still a loosely woven narrative tying both sets together. The story is also something that remains mysterious to the two makers, a process I would maybe compare to using a Ouija board. The resulting imagery serves as a strange and otherworldly window of communication.

This set of drawings makes an effort to map out a folk song in Russian that my grandmother would sing to me when I was a small child. My understanding of Russian is pretty weak, and my grandmother has passed on. The song is still a favorite, even though the words, sounds, and exact meanings are lost on me. What I do have left is an overall impression of the song, which I try to slowly map out through drawing. I use the word “map” because I feel like I am taking a central point, or origin, in the form of a single image or scene that I think I remember as true to the song, and then try to retrace my steps around that using memory as a guide.

IBS Magazine (International Beauty Saloon Magazine) is an ongoing experimental book project. Each issue attempts to link a wide range of exploratory images and writing loosely based around a central theme. These two images were created for the issue themed on the word “space.” The images work as an exercise in word/image relationships. I remember from a young age having strong visual imagery associated with certain words, and attempt to articulate some of that here.

15. Ginsberg’s Howl to Franco’s Ginsberg—D.A. Powell, Rob Epstein, and Jeffrey Friedman

“RE: A lot of the animation was being done in Thailand. The Thai animators kept sending these huge penises.

DP: Well, I wonder if that says something about the difference in cultures.

RE: Yes, they’re very generous people . . .”

14. This Is Your Brain on Poetry—Ange Mlinko and Ian McGilcrhist

“I am not impressed by the trend towards neuroscience in the modern novel—it seems to me bound up with a sense of inferiority, as though, despite the bravado, we accept that our realities are only playacting, while the scientists know what’s really going on. It reminds me a bit of colonial subjects in the bad old days, dressing like the Brits in order to be taken seriously. How it messed up the study of literature, all those university departments that had to prove they were doing something difficult and serious, a form of science! We badly need an antidote to this culture: we should not be concerned with proving ourselves clever, but rejoicing in doing something science could never do on its own, understanding and celebrating experience—otherwise known as life. Poets and all artists take the inside view: as I say in the book, the brain is just the view from the outside. It’s not more real . . .”

13. A Portrait of the Artist Engulfed in Flames—Emily Gould

“In the intervening years, during which I have mentioned Eileen Myles every time anyone has ever asked who my favorite writers are, I have come to the conclusion that Eileen Myles is somehow still not famous. Which: what the fuck? Eileen Myles has been working steadily for 30-plus years, and she has written several brilliant books—prose and poetry and some other stuff that blurs the already-blurry distinction between these types of writing. Maybe the problem is that people don’t know where in the bookstore to stick her, or that she has never been taken up by a mainstream publisher, not even one of the ‘quirky’ ones like Grove. Maybe the problem is her defiant approach to punctuation, her refusal—except when she is mimicking a voice—to ever employ question marks. Maybe it’s because she is never apologetic, especially for being rapaciously sexual and snobby/bitchy about other poets and artists . . .”

12. Are You Smeared with the Juice of Cherries?—Michael Robbins

“When Hass’s pintails and blue-winged teals are lined up in a row, the deftness of his observations almost rivals that of the haiku masters he has so memorably translated: in a restaurant’s tank, ‘coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters.’ But as the above verse suggests, Hass is also given to pedantic soothsaying, telling the reader how it is in tones that suggest he is just slightly winded from having jogged down the slopes of Parnassus. The poetry takes on the tenor of the lecture hall, the quality of prose statement: Of all the laws that bind us to the past, the names of things are stubbornest. Is this true? Is it even meaningful?”

11. The Voices of Katrina, Part II—Raymond McDaniel

“I was in Florida when Katrina lacerated the Gulf Coast and laid bare the chicanery of the Army Corps of Engineers and much of municipal New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi. I’m certain that my reactions were those of anyone familiar with the city and the region, those of anyone with friends and family there. When I returned to Michigan, however, I realized it was foolish to assume uniformity of reaction, because in conversation about the events, a co-worker said that he believed ‘those people knew what they were in for, and if they didn’t like the risk they should have moved’ . . .”

10. Art vs. Laundry—Stephen Burt

“More and more, this year—especially since our second child was born—I’ve come to feel that poetry just can’t be as important as most people who write about it now make it seem: that, as Elizabeth Bishop put it in another connection, ‘Art just isn’t worth that much.’ Sometimes I do not want to read—much less read about, write about, or even write—poetry, because it would take time away from more important things (such as accumulated laundry). More often I feel that I should not give poems the time that they (immoral creatures) seem to demand. If we are judged fairly, if we can ever be judged fairly, the verdict will rest much less on the spark in our line breaks or on the aptness of our adjectives than on whether we live as responsible people: whether we keep our promises, prepare acceptable lunches for our children, return the phone calls we get at odd hours from friends. We will be judged on whether we give other people what we owe them, and whether we can clean up after ourselves . . .”

9. The Great Scorer—John Wooden

“While I never stood on a bench and recited Grantland Rice, I did constantly inject ideas during practice that were ‘poetic.’ If I sensed lagging energy in a player—Bill Walton, perhaps?—I might quickly take him aside and sternly tell him to step it up: ‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail, Bill!’

On those occasions when I had to remind him to cut his hair or shave his beard before he could come into practice, he might offer the words of his own favorite poet: ‘Coach Wooden, “The times they are a-changin.”‘ Well, they weren’t a-changin’ for those who wanted to be members of the UCLA varsity basketball team . . . “

8. Charles Bukowski, Family Guy—Molly Young

“I opened Bukowski’s Living on Luck because the doodle on the cover was appealing, and I read it because there was a Young, Lafayette entry in the index. There was also, and more excitingly, a Young, Niki entry one millimeter below it. Niki is my mother, Nicole, and a letter dated May 1970 from Bukowski to Lafe includes the injunction to Stay in there Niki. What was my mother, aged 17, supposed to stay in?”

7. The Voices of Hurricane Katrina—Abe Louise Young

“Hurricane Katrina did not happen in a vacuum, in America’s imagination, to everyone, or in general. It happened in a particular geography, a history, an economy, and a field of race and power built to render certain people powerless. When a white person takes the voices of people of color for his own uses, without permission, in the aftermath of a racially charged national disaster, it is vulture work—worse than ventriloquism . . .”

6. This Land is Our Land—David Biespiel

“America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life . . .”

5. Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness—Tony Hoagland

“The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitur. Just look into any new magazine. The most frequently employed poetic mode is the angular juxtaposition of dissonant data, dictions, and tones, without defining relations between them. The poem of non-parallelism—how things, perceptions, thoughts, and words coexist without connecting—is the red wheelbarrow of Now . . .”

4. In a Relationship—Tao Lin

“Out of the poems in this essay I think I would most be interested in a psychology experiment—of which I would also like to be a participant—where one hundred people who have just been ‘dumped’ to emotionally devastating results in the past hour are forced to read this poem then interviewed about their experience, with accompanying brain-scans . . .”

3. Why Live Without Writing—Durs Grünbein

“There are three questions that a poet is always asked once he’s become reasonably well established, i.e., isn’t forever required to spell his name, and his CV is reduced to two or three worn phrases. Never mind the fact that these phrases come out of the platitudinous files of some press department. What matters is that he showed sufficient stamina in the pursuit of his solitary discipline, which might suggest pole vaulting and dashing sprints, but probably has most in common with the monotony of the marathon runner. Whichever, one day finds him standing under the open sky with a few curiosity seekers in front of him. The air is thick with old ideas, fantasies about the poet’s life unchanged since Homer’s day. I’ll bet you anything: they come out in the form of the same three questions. At the end of the reading, there’s not even any hesitation or throat clearing. It’s as if the questions were always there, a kind of diffuse curiosity, a residue of admiration tinged with skepticism and a little bumptiousness . . .”

2. Good Poems About Ugly Things—Molly Young

“Like that of Miller and Bukowski, Seidel’s style is one of incriminating self-exposure coupled with an exacting (and therefore imitable) aesthetic. But here’s a funny thing. Writing a poem about lust, pride, imprudence—about ordering a call girl or staying at ‘literally the most expensive hotel in the world’ or racing a bike at 200 mph—has a way of neutralizing the unpleasantness of that vice. To write a good poem about an ugly thing, as Seidel does often, is not to write an ugly poem . . .”

1. 24/7 Relentless Careerism—Jim Behrle

“Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you’d be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you’re probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one’s days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that’s not why any of us are here tonight. We’re here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice . . .”

The modern theater, however, tends to be a more prosaic affair, with the novelist’s concerns of motivation and rising complication privileged over juggling iambs or constructing showy similes. But while bards other than T.S. Eliot may be scarce on Broadway, the poetic fascination with theater has never really gone away.

Finding the place of poets’ theater in modern times is a bit more of a challenge (hint: try looking for it in the Bay Area) but it may be experiencing its moment if this anthology and recent festivals devoted to the form are any indication.

“I’m trying to find out what poets’ theater is,” [Durgin] says. “That’s why I commissioned this book.” One central idea, in his view, is that such work offers a way of extending the poet’s writing practice into another format. “These performances are an extrapolation of the written page; they don’t simply take direction from the page,” he explains.

In practice, that can entail work of dazzling abstraction, as in Carla Harryman’s Mirror Play, a piece for four performers that uses choral recitation and enigmatic snippets of conversation to create glittering, ephemeral symmetries. Or it might lead to riotous, inside-joke-riddled pieces such as Duncan’s The Origins of Old Son, which references poet Charles Olson’s reverence for Ezra Pound.

This weekend, even Poetry is getting in on the action in Chicago, also the home of Durgin and Kenning Editions:

To mark the 600-page book, which collects work by Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Barbara Guest and the bulk of the Bay Area’s avant-garde Language writing community, among many others, he’s partnered with the magazine Poetry to present a singular performance. Six local writers—Daniel Borzutzky, Duriel E. Harris, John Keene, Jacob Saenz, Leila Wilson and Tim Yu— will collaborate over this weekend to develop a performance inspired by the anthology. Their Sunday 5 performance at Oracle Theatre will follow a roundtable about the form.

In this week’s cover story, Eric Ziegenhagen discusses the work of Cynthia Krupat and Harry Ford, two designers he says defined an era of book design:

At best, the designer’s choices match the publisher’s choices and the poet’s own voice: the volumes become a consistent experience. On one hand, book design, like book titles themselves, can be seen solely as decorative or promotional, but occasionally designers truly collaborate.

This excellent essay got us thinking about the back issues of Poetry magazine we have here at the office, and the issues from the ’70s in particular. These issues featured a wide range of poets–A.R. Ammons, Margaret Atwood, Erica Jong, David Lehman, W.S. Merwin, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Jayanta Mahapatra, James Schuyler, and Denis Johnson, to name a few–and a similarly wide range of designs. So we put together this slide show of Poetry magazine covers from the ’70s in all of their orange, afro-ed glory. Enjoy!

Lynda Barry, author of, among other things, the comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the novel Cruddy, has written a wonderful “View From Here” feature for this month’s Poetry Magazine called “Poetry is a Dumb-Ass Spider.” And in a Poetry video, she sings Emily Dickinson, recites haiku, explains how poetry smells, and insists that memorizing poetry can keep you alive and well. Watch it here.

The Wall Street Journal finds the the fact that “flarf” appeared last year in Poetry magazine a sign that “Google-Inspired Verse Gains Respect.”

“Flarf is a hip, digital reaction to the kind of boring, genteel poetry” popular with everyday readers, says Marjorie Perloff, a poetry critic and professor emeritus of English at Stanford University. “You used to find it only in alternative spaces, but it has now moved into the art mainstream.”

Indeed.

I had some fun substituting “pipe fitter” for “poet” throughout Biespiel’s essay (“As go America’s pipe fitters, so goes American democracy”), because, really, shouldn’t everyone be more engaged? And I’m not sure I agree that civic participation, no matter how worthwhile it is in itself, will somehow make poets more viable. But I’m struck by the plaintive note that hums just beneath Biespiel’s argument: as much as it’s a rousing call to political action, his essay is also an eloquent statement of the anxiety of irrelevance . . .

And, in further Biespiel news, his essay’s comment thread continues to explore the connections between poetry and everyday engagement. This morning, Garrett Hongo weighed in:

Who would listen to anyone called “a poet” today? The name and the category has long been reviled by the American mainstream, surviving only as either sheer mockery or hyperbolic flattery of athletics–both quite detached from not only the contemporary marginal practice, but also the ancient communal and ritual one. It’s as though we poets have had to hide or mask that identity and, come to think of it, I do my best to do exactly that. I hate to admit I “teach poetry,” as it usually stops conversations cold. Katha Pollitt, as provocative and intelligent a crusader in public discourse as we have, seems to have ceased being a poet precisely when she acceded to being a columnist. There has only been one book of poems since she took that job 20 years ago at THE NATION, then elsewhere. I remember her stating publicly, in fact, on the stage of the 92nd St. Y Poetry Center, that what was wrong with contemporary poetry was “grand public statemtents” such as Czeslaw Milosz makes in “Dedication”–itself a poem of great civic consciousness–in which he asks, “What is a poetry that cannot save nations or a people?” Even our best poet-journalist, expert in civic discourse, seems contemptuous of poems that try to enter it.

From the fray:

“Biespiel makes an essential case for poets to act like full citizens, but doesn’t identify the source of the problem. Technological changes in the last 10 years have been so unprecedented it has been difficult for anyone, much less those given to the quieter, reflective arts, to grasp how truly historic it all is. The only credible media figures these days are satirists like Jon Stewart. There is no way to quiet the beast down, to slow the rhythms of our hyperactive national heart. American mass culture has reached a point where it cannot concentrate for more than 30 seconds, at the outside.

“You have to be a celebrity in order to penetrate American culture for more than a few minutes. Celebrity status is awarded mostly to the young and charismatic. Our older poets are from a different world, a world which ended in 2001. Most are just beginning to realize the difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. But look out. In about 5 years, we’re going to see these years as possibly the beginning of one of the greatest renaissance periods of creative endeavor since the 1920s. It’s just budding, new sprouts, and it is young – very, very young, but I have a lot of faith in this new generation of media savvy visual, musical, and traditional poets. They just haven’t been discovered yet.”

Read the rest here.

By luck, by love, by affinity Poetry magazine receives reams of poetry weekly. Earlier this year, Brian Teare of Albion Books had the (lovely) idea of sending us his latest titles, with broadsides(!). In honor of ink on paper we’ve put up scans of WREN/OMEN by Peter O’Learly and Hart Island by Stacy Szymaszek, with a few extra pics from Albion’s archives. After the jump, you’ll also learn firsthand about Albion’s process, past, and then some.

Albion Books

Founded in 2008, Albion Books is a one-man micropress specializing in limited edition poetry chapbooks, broadsides, and print ephemera as well as in hand-bound hardcover and limp-bound books. The press uses conserving natural resources and keeping production costs below $50 per project as formal constraints, while the goal remains to make as fine an object as possible within the given limits: 1) At least 80% of the paper for each project must come from “off-cuts” donated by or bought from other printers; 2) All letterpress printing is done on a shared 9” x 16” Chandler and Price platen press; and 3) All type is hand-set: no motor may be used on the press, and neither plates nor new type are made for a print run. Though each edition is kept small to enable production by one person, the final rule of the press is meant to encourage and sustain gift economy within the poetry community: at least 35% of each edition must be given away or bartered.

Basic thesis

Albion Books combines traditional fine press craft with digital publishing while also trying to reduce publishing waste; it’s also an experiment in encouraging gift and barter economies to further develop among poets and in the wider literary community.

The past

The press began almost by accident: in 2008 I wanted to make a chapbook and broadside to celebrate the publication of a book by my friend, the poet Jane Mead. I’d been taking book arts classes for  a year, so this was my first self-directed project, Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies. I enjoyed the challenge of the process so much that I decided to formalize the endeavor by planning a publishing season for the following year. In addition to ephemera to commemorate readings and publications, I put out four chapbook/broadside pairs in 2009: Psalm Project by Kerri Webster, Eirik Steinhoff’s translation of 14 sonnets by Petrarch, WREN/OMEN by Peter O’Leary, and from Hart Island by Stacy Szymaszek.

Where the chapbooks begin

Given that most publishing ventures waste as much paper as they use, I was really determined to waste as little as possible—starting with the fact that 80% of the paper I use in any edition consists of “off-cuts,” the paper left behind by the projects of other printers. Thus the design of the chapbooks is largely determined by the paper I can find, which is donated, bartered for, or bought.

I try to match a given project with the right text paper—thus I was really excited by the long sheets that I found while trying to figure out how best to set Stacy’s from Hart Island. In the best situation, typesetting, trim size, and binding style match the shape of the poem and its life on the page—and I take the author’s desires and vision for the text and its exterior presentation into account whenever possible.

It’s usually pretty easy to score the right cover weight stock, or to let whatever I’ve got on hand lead me into making a different book than I’d thought I would, as with Kerri’s Psalm Project.

However, I usually have a hard time with finding enough end sheets for an entire edition, and so that’s usually the 20% of the paper that I end up buying. Because the project has gotten some really wonderful and generous local support, I’m going to start using part of the colophon to give props to the presses that donate paper.

How the chapbook goes forward

Given that the size of the book is determined by the stock I find, the interior of the book is usually only typeset once I have the paper. This part is pretty traditional: I typeset it digitally and the galleys go through the usual back-and-forth with commentary by and suggestions from the author. Given the press’ engagement with and investment in traditional methods of bookmaking and publishing, I really to use digital scans of details from older books as part of the design element when possible and appropriate (as with the Petrarch).

Once the text and design are finalized, I go into the print shop (either the San Francisco Center for the book or at Mead Ranch in Napa, CA), where I set type for the cover and the broadside; I still don’t use photopolymer plates, both because of the waste involved and because setting in lead allows me to be a bit more improvisatory. I’ve got a stash of “nice” broadside paper set aside, so I decide what paper to use for the broadsides once I’ve set the type and figured out exactly how long the lines are when set in lead. I use a 9” x 16” Chandler & Price Platen Press (photo forthcoming) with a foot treadle, so the actual printing uses no electricity.

The final leg

I use a laser jet printer to print the interiors. I collate, fold, hand trim, and hand bind the entire edition. At the beginning, I made 35 books and broadsides per edition; now I generally make 55, and even those sell out quickly. The author receives 20 of these to distribute however they see fit. The rest sell for $15 a pair, though they can just as easily be bartered; buyers usually get in touch with me through the poets themselves, though I do also sell them at readings and to some library collections. And if I’ve produced off-cuts in the process of making the edition, I save the paper and try to use it in a future project of some kind.

The future

I’d like to make 6–8 chapbook/broadside pairs per year for the next five years. On the one hand, I think of editing the press as a very direct way to support the work of writers I admire; on the other, it’s also a statement about poetics and literary community, a way of trying to amplify already-existing conversations between, say, poetries in Chicago and New York and San Francisco, not to mention St. Louis and Tucson. Many of the chapbooks have emerged from my sitting in an audience and listening to a fantastic reading, though just as many are extensions of my being a passionate reader of the poet’s work. 2010 will see Albion Books from Laura Walker, Jane Miller, NS (Nathalie Stephens), and Lisa Fishman.

In his essay “Vermin: a Notebook”, the Australian poet John Kinsella writes that without acts of resistance, “the environment has no chance.”

This seems obvious enough.

The way things are going, the earth (or at the very least, life on it) is in danger of being irreparably damaged by humanity’s heedless gobbling of resources. Resistance and change need to happen. Everyone from Barack Obama to T. Boone Pickens agrees on that.

What no one quite agrees on is what form these acts of resistance should take. Should we chain ourselves to trees and squeal at passersby, or should we just use Flexcar once a week? Should we turn the living room lights off during the day or develop a bedroom bucket sewage system? Firebomb the coal plant or compost the coffee grounds? Let the free market take care of the polar bears or demand cap and trade?

For Kinsella, there’s one act of resistance that encompasses the full range of these possibilities, yet no one has talked much about it: Poetry.

“Poems,” Kinsella writes, “can stop bulldozers.”

A vegan pacifist currently living so off the grid no one is quite sure where he is, Kinsella believes that poetry is one of the most effective tools for political and ethical change. Not because it is simply a quick way to convey information through words (I think we can all agree that saying “Destroying the environment is wrong!” does not make for much of a poem nor does it do much to help the environment), but for precisely the reason most people don’t spend much time with poetry. Because it’s difficult. Because it resists easy interpretation. Poetry stops bulldozers because, Kinsella says, “the intricacies of language challenge, distract, and entangle the bulldozer.”

Here’s more:

No poem really knows a truth, but it has knowledge and offers ways of approaching truth. The use of language is precise, even when it gives a semblance of the unconscious, even when it is automatic writing. In the Surrealist sense, the conducting of automatic writing exercises was experimental textually and scientifically, and was as much about the act of recording the data of process as it was about the subject connecting with the unconscious. It was, at least, quasi-scientific.

And the pseudo- and quasi- interest me. The games of dismantling and rearranging, of exquisite corpse and chance, are all part of the science of a poem for me: they are just different systems of knowledge. That’s why an activist poetics can include the radically linguistically innovative, as well as the straight declaration (“logging the Tuart Forest is wrong”). Parataxis, conventional end-stopped lines and enjambment, narrative description, metaphor and metonymies, are all part of a process towards confronting hierarchies and imposed structures. We work from inside to open a view of the outside, but not one that destroys in the process.

Working from the inside to produce change on the outside. It’s a pretty radical idea, one that takes the concept of the personal being political to a different level. Not only what happens at home but also what happens in the mind–it’s all part of the world. While poets like Wendell Berry, Lisa Jarnot, and Gary Snyder have used poetry as a part of their environmental activism, few have put it at so central a position.

Is he on to something besides a fool’s errand?

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry.  And yet…This ignores the fact that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.”  In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.”  So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

“Poetry, that is, survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings?  Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself?  In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now.  But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.  The question of hope and vision remains timely.  There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world each day as I write this.  And this very week we note such landmarks as the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency – and the passing (at the age of 100) of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote, in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

The other editors have dropped by already, some in pairs, some individually, over the last few weeks to go over submissions. Leaving comments, yays, nays on each envelope. A very civil, democratic process among a spectrum of anarchists…as several hundred submissions per issue gets whittled down to about 40. The magazine and its website is an accurate foray into the very smart wit of its editor-in-chief. Each piece is published with a scan of the original handwritten draft next to it, every crossed t and scratched-out bit, right there, revealing how far the destination from the origin.

I’m set-up at his kitchen table; a pile of maybes in front, a pile of unopened virgins to the right, a plate of cheese and crackers with a short shot of straight whiskey to the left…and his 8-month old daughter seated across from me. She’s so calm, she’s never this calm, daddy says. Her piercing blue eyes, staring through me. I’m sure she senses my boy or maybe it’s my beard. But daddy puts his twist on and says, she’s probably commiserating.

The combo of editing, drowning rain, and family setting somehow gets me thinking of place as mess. Okay, not as in the house was a mess…I told Brendan I may mention this visit on the blog he immediately gave me more liquor and handed me his wallet. No, the house was as warm and inviting as you’d want for a sloppy wet pup.

I mean mess in writing. Leaving the signposts in the poem as you get towards your place. Whatever that blessed ending place is, which doesn’t reveal itself until after the poem’s conclusion, for me anyway…if ever. The settled place in the poem, a reflection of where I am when it arrived. And matching that to the world’s revolution, the reader’s internal mess, a confusion of mass. How many extra words or lines get us to the next line…as reader or writer. Seeing the original drafts of poems next to their published version, opens up just how far straying from the first thought makes for a second thought.

So long September. On this, the last day of the month, have a lasting look at Cathie Bleck’s “Transformations” above, also featured on the current cover of Poetry.  Inside, I see a hoof, a hand, and (blush) the distinct influence of Rockwell Kent.

In 2005, Winterhouse Studio redesigned Poetry and, while researching, principal William Drenttel found this Pegasus bookplate by Kent, which we cherish to this day.

Side by side the resemblance between Bleck’s and Kent’s style is striking. Look below for more of the same sort. For a full range of Bleck’s work on white clayboard, scratchboard, and paper, visit her website. For a backdoor to her inspirations, see her blog.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/09/transformations/feed/ 4 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/07/flarf-and-conceptual-writing-in-poetry-magazine/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/07/flarf-and-conceptual-writing-in-poetry-magazine/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:03:00 +0000 Kenneth Goldsmith http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=4018

An introduction to the 21st Century’s most controversial poetry movements.
From the July/August 2009 Issue of Poetry Magazine

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine . . .

READ THE REST HERE.

The Top Ten Most-Read Articles on poetryfoundation.org

Of all the articles on poetryfoundation.org, these received the most page views:

1. “Show Your Work” by Matthew Zapruder

2. “Going Negative” by Jason Guriel

3. “Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing it Wants” by Mary Ann Caws

4. “To Strive, To Seek, To Find, and Not to Yield” by Stephen Burt

5.  “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

6. “Let’s Face It, Nobody in Love is Original” by Jeremy Richards

7. “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

8. “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

9. “Born Digital” by Stephanie Strickland

10. “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

The Top Ten Most-Read Posts on Harriet

Of all the posts on Harriet, these received the most page views:

1. “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

2. “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

3. “I’ve never had a sad cup of coffee” by Nick Twemlow

4. “Plath as a Major Poet: A Thread from WOM-PO” by Annie Finch

5. “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

6. “A Few Harriet Statistics” by Catherine Halley

7. “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

8. “Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry” by Ada Limón

9. “John Updike’s Non-Poetry” by Eileen Myles

10. “No, You Shut Up!” by Travis Nichols

Margaret Rockwell Finch, 1961

working poet, entering and once winning the contests of the Poetry Society of America, whose meetings she brought me to as a teenager; typing drafts and final copies (with carbon copies!) on her portable typewriter; keeping green metal fileboxes recording submissions to magazines and contests.

Lately I realize how much of my own poetic destiny has been shaped by my relationship with her.  I grew up on stories that ended up making a larger story whose outlines I can only now perceive.  It was her mother, and her aunt, who believed in her as a poet from the beginning. When she enrolled in a class with John Malcolm Brinnin in the 1940s, she was told that her poetry was “too lacey and Millayish,” but she kept on her path undaunted, proud to be associated with Millay.  She met my father at a lecture by Auden, suspects him of possibly “disappearing” her Millay collection after an argument early in their marriage, and stopped showing him her poems after he told her he thought she should write like T.S. Eliot.

Maggie has always been stubborn about her poetry—and a good thing, too.  Just this afternoon I suggested she add a “the” to the first line of her new poem beginning “Standing at window.”  “Hmmmm …” she replied, and then told me that one of my sisters had suggested the same thing by email earlier in the day.  Her tone made it clear she was unlikely to change it.

My mother has been writing since the 1920s, when she was too young to write and her mother had to write her poems down for her.   But I published her first book for her, in the mid 1990s. Why hadn’t she taken her poetry further in terms of a career, I asked her years ago.  She answered that as the mother of  five children, she just hadn’t been able to maintain enough silence.

Maxine Kumin told me once, not too many years ago, that her mentoring energy now  is reserved not for younger poets, but for women poets not much younger than herself.  I understand this.

It’s mother’s day, and I’d like to pause to honor all the poetic foremothers whom we celebrate on the Wom-Po listserv—all the women through the centuries who managed to write, and sometimes to publish, in spite of everything.  And I’d like to honor all the poet-moms, to name another listserv—the contemporary poets who are also mothers and still struggling with many of the same issues of divided loyalties, divided poetic identity, and divided attention that made being a poet so tricky for my mother.  And most of all, I’d like to say Happy Mother’s Day to my first poetic influence, Margaret Rockwell Finch.

Margaret Rockwell Finch

THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF MAY

Grow maples in me this grow-maple day;

I lie in the long chair and wait your coming.

Spin from branches heavy with fruit of leaves

My sudden seeds, my one-wings, turning, turning!

Leap in the wind that understands the life:

Land on on my leg and do not slide;

Catch in the ready furrows of my hair—I say

I have no pride.

For in me all the broad and murmuring branches

Wait but to hear it spoken.

The porch, the chair, the gutter will not take you.

But I am open.

Heads of life, stretched to the shape of flight,

Plunge to my upturned palm, and with good reason:

My earth, my rain, my sun, my shade will grow you.

Let your season bring me into season.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/happy-mothers-day-to-foremothers-poet-moms-and-maggie/feed/ 11 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/is-that-a-poem-in-your-pocket/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/04/is-that-a-poem-in-your-pocket/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:19:09 +0000 Fred Sasaki http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=2151

Poetry staff was happy to see Ana Benaroya’s e-mail come over the transom with big, beautiful illustrations for us to consider for the cover of the magazine. (See November 2008 for her first appearance and April 2009 for her latest, “Crazy Head.”) After perusing her website we found several poetry illos in her pocket that made us fall crazy head over heels for her work. Click on for a few samples.

Illustration for "Weeping Beech Park," by Shelley Deutsch Benaroya

Judith Shklar introduced her book Ordinary Vices by saying, “It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day.” I suppose poets these days aren’t supposed to put their minds to grand tasks – you know, it’s more like write a poem every day for a month. But since it’s not only National Poetry Month but National Uh-Huh month, I thought I’d post something, you know, deep.

Montaigne, whom Shklar mentions in that introduction, was famous for his skeptical remark ‘Que sais-je?” (‘What do I know?’). He wasn’t a poet (though his best friend Étienne de la Boétie was), but like a poet, he was quite good at making big pronouncements. Take these, all nicely applicable to poets:

* Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.
* Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
* If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
* No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
* Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.
* Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.

What is it about the French that makes them able to come up with this stuff? In the April 2009 issue of Poetry – which is our annual translation issue - we’ve got a poem that seems to take up where Montaigne left off. It’s called “What I Know,” by Patrick Dubost, who has published more than twenty collections (including under the alias Armand Le Poete, a trickster alter ego) and several CDs. Trained as a musicologist and mathematician, he’s collaborated extensively with musicians, theater ensembles, and puppet theaters, and performs his sound poetry internationally. Here’s the poem in Fiona Sampson‘s translation:

1. I know that language is within the world and that, at the same time, the world is within language. I know we are at the border between language and the world.

2. I don’t like phrases such as “nothing new under the sun” or “it’s all been said already.” I know that at every moment we could affirm: “everything is always new under the sun” or “almost nothing has yet been said of what could be said.”

3. I know that there’s no true coherence except in apparent incoherence. Every object clothes itself in chaos. To take shape, every thought must manage its own vagueness.

4. Among the obvious: I know that every human activity consists, one way or another, of battling death.

5. I know that time is bound up with space. Time is the shadow of space. Space the shadow of time. I know that we live in the shadow of a shadow and that it returns to the light.

6. I know that I know nothing about love.

7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.

8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.

9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.

10. I know that thunder comes after lightning and sometimes, in my dreams, thunder precedes lightning. I know that to see its opposite simultaneously with every phenomenon you must widen your eyes.

11. I know that whoever finds himself loses himself a little.

12. I know that I love a woman enormously, but I don’t know which one.

13. I know that to talk is to walk a path with emptiness to the right and emptiness to the left. I know that nothing can grasp this path with two ends. I know that writing is talking in frozen time.

14. I know that the word “table” is like a thousand tables. That a phrase is like a thousand thousand phrases. And that thinking is a match for water sports.

15. I know that every authentic poet is in decay.

16. To read isn’t necessarily to analyze, is not necessarily “to understand.” At the swimming pool, we don’t ask the swimmer the composition of the water, the number and distribution of swimmers, or why he’s picked this date to go swimming. We don’t ask him to describe, in mid-crawl, the architecture or acoustics of the place, or to explain a bird trapped under its roof, or to do a better imitation of the progress of some Olympic seal. We don’t ask him to memorize opening hours or screw himself up by whistling from the bench throughout an entire race in butterfly stroke. No. Finally, we don’t ask him, before each dive, to bring up some secret meaning from the very bottom of the pool. No. We let swimmers swim. We let swimmers swim. And the swimming pools fill up.

17. I know that I live and think inside a storehouse of books. Some recent, new, remarkable books, but in the great majority books which are decayed, moldy, have turned to the lightest heaps of dust. Only their metal frames and some fine particles of knowledge remain, unusable. Light from a few windows crosses the storehouse unimpeded.

18. Having found some daguerreotypes on the floor of an attic—portraits eroded by time and light—I know that forgetting is something enormous, that forgetting is our highest destiny.

19. I know that God doesn’t exist. That’s written everywhere in the storehouse—it can be made out through the portholes, too. I know that after death there’s nothing but death.

20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.

21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.

-

As number three says, “Toute pensée, pour prendre corps, doit ménager sa part de flou.” Hey, good advice for poets!

On this date one hundred years ago… T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Edward Storer met in the Cafe Tour d’Eiffel off Tottenham Court Road in London and started up the School of Images! Later members included H.D. and Ezra Pound.. and Amy Lowell, who tried to take over the whole enterprise.
In honor of the occasion, I invite you to take an Imagism Quiz. Click here and see if you can correctly distinguish between some Imagist poems (no pun intended) and some parodies of them.
If you fail, you’ll need some remedial work; try clicking here to see “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, and better luck next century.

Image courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim, www.micro2macro.net

Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) … or not?

Poetry contributor Seth Abramson recently remarked on his blog “The Suburban Ecstasies” that
Traditional (i.e. fully-determined, fully-resolved, fully-bordered) narratives have been regarded [...] as being inherently more emotional (let us even say weighty, given Jason Guriel’s adjectival stylings, [in his notorious March 2009 Poetry essay]) than non-traditional narrative. The irony in this–in the continued near-religious belief, in short, in the adjective–is that, whatever Jason may personally feel, many poetry readers are not particularly invested in hearing the sound a rooster makes described in the thousandth way it has ever been described (never the same description twice, mind you). I just can’t attach any great emotion to a general movement I’ve seen over and over again in poetry, whether or not I’ve been specifically told in the past that a rooster’s “dark, corroded croak” is like “a grudging nail tugged out of stubborn wood” (Eric Ormsby). That’s beautiful–but is it truly powerful enough to overwrite all those intimate, hard-won, highly-personalized, highly-experiential associations I already have with the words “rooster” and “nail” and “wood”?
Annie and others have been talking about meter on recent Harriet threads… I thought it’d be a good time to bring up subject matter and raise questions about connotation and denotation in poetry.
Over to you guys!

If poetry aspires to the condition of music, then maybe translated poetry aspires to the condition of… world music? C.K. Williams, quoted above from an essay in the March 2009 issue of Poetry, surveys the world of his office and says:
“Here are some of the poets that are with me on my desk or the table next to it as I write this: two different translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poems; a book of translations of Giacomo Leopardi; a collection of Thomas Wyatt; another of Gerard Manley Hopkins; an anthology entitled New European Poets, which includes poems from every possible nook and cranny of Europe; a book of essays of Eugenio Montale, as well as his last book of poetry, It Depends, the astonishing singularity of which I only recently came to appreciate; Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies;’ a collection of Blake; Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire, in French; a book of translations of early Celtic poetry, with those magical strings of modifiers; a translation by Marilyn Hacker of a contemporary French poet, Guy Goffette, whose work I’m not familiar with, but which I plan to read soon; and several anthologies of English and American poetry.”
Doesn’t sound like he’s bragging with that list: my own desk (thanks for asking about it on another Harriet thread, Jason!) sounds suspiciously like Williams’s, and I’m sure yours does too. Greatness, much maligned this past week, has nothing to do with it! Au contraire! Williams finds the same small, still voice in all those books of translations… it’s what often gets called translatorese, a kind of Esperanto for the well-intentioned.
I’ve always thought it curious that during a kind of 16th-century Golden Age of Translation into English, poets would translate works from Latin and Greek for a readership that was far more likely to know the original languages of texts than we are today. And the effect could be dramatic – as Hannibal Hamlin from the Folger Shakespeare Library put it in a recent letter to the TLS, it was
“George Chapman’s Homer that sent Keats into raptures, and it was Arthur Golding’s Ovid that Ezra Pound called (extravagantly) ‘the most beautiful book in the language.’ Virgil was translated by Gavin Douglas and the Earl of Surrey, Plutarch by Thomas North, and the Greek and Roman lyric poets by almost everyone. This was also the age that produced the English Bibles of Tyndale, Coverdale, and the translators of the Geneva and the ‘Authorized’ Version, as well as the Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (among hundreds of others).”
Today, by contrast (according to Williams),
“there has been what surely has to be called a globalization of art, and a nearly instantaneous awareness, especially in the market-driven visual arts, of what is happening in other aesthetics. Whether this is all for the good, I’m not certain. While I was reading the anthology of contemporary European poetry I mentioned before, I was struck by how much its poems tended to sound alike: in most cases, I couldn’t really tell what country or language a poetry had come from until I checked. I thought at first that perhaps the almost universal commitment to free verse was the reason for this apparent homogenization, which is a rather distressing thought. It may have been instead because all the translators of the poems in the book were working in American English, and hadn’t sufficiently taken into account the subtleties of the original languages.”
Williams says that the current interest in literary translation has its roots in a search for new stylistic tricks “during the the late fifties and early sixties, when much of the poetry being written in America seemed to have become overly formalized, self-referential, stale, and, if I dare use the word, spiritually lifeless.”
The problem is that
“Styles are always striving to perfect themselves, by which I mean that styles have inherent in them the potential for enactments that no longer depend on anything but the demands of the style itself: neither matter, content, nor, in other words, world. Stylistically, art is always moving from the transparent to the opaque, from trying to make encompassing and as comprehensive as possible its relations with reality, to a state in which its formal dexterity comes to be its most essential requirement. When this happens, usually during the late moments of an artistic era, the execution of style becomes an end in itself, the end in itself: art becomes style displaying itself, preening, showing off. This is when an artistic style becomes decadent. Decadence in itself isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s unavoidable, and some of the very greatest art is created at the end of the innovation-decadence cycle. What happens then, though, is that some subtle line is crossed, and the gloriously decadent becomes the offensively empty, sterile, and, with no longer any portion of the quest of the artist’s blundering soul a part of it, produces work that is lifeless, stillborn.”
The first art works were apparently made in caves, where the artists had to illuminate darkness, and reaching out to others had severe limits. That world was at the farthest remove from what we now call the global. So… do we reach inward or outward? Can we do both?
Another thing I read in the TLS (how global of me!) was an essay by Jon Garvie that had this to say:
“Discussions of globalization share one similarity – an inability to decide what the term means. In the absence of definition, commentators rely on description. Globalization reveals its true nature in the credit crunch, or the growth of international civil society, or the Nepalese Maoists who mythologize their rebellions in the language of New York hip hop artists. It could denote American cultural and economic imperialism. Or, for the more hopeful, it is the rise of global values and human rights. These disagreements exist among those who give it credence. Another area of study devotes itself to denying that the term has any worth. However you approach it, globalization is a messy idea for an anxious world.”
In an anxious world – and what world isn’t anxious? – I don’t suppose any qualms will shake the noble resolve of poets to translate other poets, and there will always be readers who need translations. As Williams concludes:
“All over the world, if not every day then in every age, beautiful paintings and poems and pieces of music and buildings are generated: one can almost imagine little flaring lights on the surface of the earth, like those seen in photos from space, though they are much more sparse and scattered than the illuminating devices that bespeckle our globe. And then over time these embodiments of the beautiful are harvested, amassed, collected in books, in museums, in concert halls, to be distributed into the lives of individual human beings, to become crucial elements of their existence. Often, our experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will dare call our soul. For don’t those first stirrings of that eternally uncertain, barely grasped notion of something more than mere mind, mere thought, mere emotion, usually first come to us in the line of a poem, a passage of music, of the unreal yet more-than-real image in a painting? And isn’t it also the case after all that beauty is the one true thing we can count on in a world of insufferable uncertainty, of constant moral conflicts?”
Institutions like museums and magazines, and concepts like “beauty” and “eternity,” are under attack and sound pretty quaint these days – “shit on the curatorial,” as the manifesto says – but if you’re a cautious optimist like Garvie, you can hope for the best:
“Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be primarily national. Yet, at the same time, those who seek to disembarrass a country of its entanglements should be very slow and wary. It should not be a matter of tearing up roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a different direction. That practice of national horticulture now looks resurgent. Globalization brings connections, but no convergence towards consensus.”
The best, I was going to say, of both worlds, but we all know there’s only one.

There you’ll find a portfolio of Tony Fitzpatrick’s poems, visual poems that I suggest are different in character from the ones discussed on Jason’s thread. Fitzpatrick is both a poet and visual artist, so he certainly knows the difference between one medium and another. In my little introduction to the feature, I quote him on the watery subject of poems as image, particularly in the context of this work constituting a response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath; he says
“I’ve thought long and hard about how to make art about this holy place. I didn’t want to draw pictures of people trapped on rooftops, or struggling to stay above the water. The images from cable news seemed pornographic in their quest to wrap tragedy around the commercial breaks. So, for now, I’ve decided on words. . . . I’ve decided to draw poems.”
In one of his Harriet comments, Nico Vassilakis responds to Jason by protesting that
“In this world letters are vulnerable and can’t always stand on their own. Letters alone are typically unwanted things. They are in danger of being individual, of lacking community, of not forming into a word. Isolated.”
I imagine Fitzpatrick would agree. In his work, letters – formed into and made out of images – are repurposed to make a place for the unwanted, lost, and forgotten who still speak to us. I wonder what those who weighed in about Geof Huth’s selection will make of these very different pieces.

A couple of years ago a ton of press was given the discovery of a poem – no masterpiece – Robert Frost inscribed in the cover of a friend’s book back in 1918, though a scholar tells me you can find so-called “lost” poems by Frost scribbled in many an old book. Let’s face it, it’s fun and exciting to think you’ve turned up something that came from a famous hand. (When I was a curator, I was thrilled to discover handwritten lyrics to the song “American Pie” which Don McLean had written out himself to impress the influential Harvard English professor Harry Levin.) Unsurprisingly, there are more lost works attributed to Shakespeare than anyone else; anyone remember the fabulously awful ”Shall I Die? Shall I Fly?” There will always be an England, and there will always be “new” Shakespeare poems. But I digress.
Thank goodness, I say, for people who write in books. And this month in Poetry magazine we’re thrilled to present three newly-discovered poems by Langston Hughes, introduced by his editor and biographer, Arnold Rampersad. The poems were written in pencil on the endpapers of the poet’s copy of An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry and discovered by Penny Welbourne, a rare book cataloger at Yale University, where Hughes’s papers and personal library are housed.
Rampersad says: “The truth is that we cannot have too many poems by Langston Hughes.” These previously unpublished works, which echo his better-known poems, are very bitter, very harsh. As Rampersad puts it, “As a black writer facing racism on a daily basis, he had a remarkably precise sense of scale, as well as an inspired knowledge of the words and rhythms of speech that would best convey his messages to blacks and whites alike.” The poem, “You and your whole race” asks some of us to be ashamed that we
“have not the sense to care
Nor the manhood to stand up and say
I dare you to come one step nearer, evil world,
With your hands of greed seeking to touch my throat, I dare you to come one step nearer me,”
and ends:
“When you can say that
you will be free!”
You can read the poems here, and Rampersad’s essay here.
Enjoy them, and… keep your eyes peeled for lost verses! Maybe a nice Moleskine is best for your poetry, though.

The quote is from a “notebook piece” by Fanny Howe in the December issue of Poetry, which you can read here; another one will appear in March. In this first essay, she talks about how we form our relationships with the world. Are people… are poets… born, or are they made?
Here’s another excerpt:
Somewhere the scholar Franz Rosenzweig wrote that “the self has no relations, cannot enter into any, remains ever itself. Thus it is conscious of being eternal; its immortality amounts to an inability to die.”
But the self that I mean can choose many ways to extend its transit through the world, and even to escape it by suicide rather than to crawl along through ordinary time. The wonderful thing is that it can also overcome these choices and stay with childhood! The child poised on the threshold of a door in a desert is also the ghost going the other way; they are one action immortalized by a single position towards the world: not there.
In one of her notebooks a young French woman (Simone Weil) wrote, “One must believe in the reality of Time. Otherwise one is just dreaming. For years I have recognized this flaw in myself, the importance that it represents, and yet I have done nothing to get rid of it. What excuse could I be able to offer? Hasn’t it increased in me since the age of ten?”
To resist the reality of time is to resist leaving childhood behind. She called this resistance a flaw in herself, but is it? The self is not the soul, and it is the soul (coherence) that lives for nine years on earth in a potential state of liberty and harmony. Its openness to metamorphosis is usually sealed up during those early years until the self replaces the soul as the fist of survival.
In addition to her recent books of poetry and prose, Fanny has also adapted poems by two sisters who were Buchenwald survivors, Ilona and Henia Karmel (pictured above), who were 17 and 20 years old when they were sent to the Nazi labor camps from the ghetto in Krakow. The two women began to write poems on worksheets they stole from the factory where they were forced to work.
Below is a quatrain of videos of a reading Fanny Howe recently gave which includes some of the Karmel sisters’ work. Those poems and Fanny’s essay illuminate the question of where poems come from, and how people survive under duress.

You can read more of Ange’s meditative review of new books by Devin Johnston and Linda Gregg in the November issue of Poetry. What’s curious is how reverie, like poetry, can be denigrated as a kind of daydreaming. Reverie used to be associated with laziness: when I was a kid, parents were supposed to discourage kids from things like daydreaming, lest we become useless. My old man hated catching me at it, just as he did discovering that I intended to spend my life working at things connected to books in general and poetry in particular. His worry was that by letting my mind wander, I wouldn’t get anywhere. He was partially right. As the great Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh put it:
“A man (I am thinking of myself) innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life. Versing activity leads him away from the paths of conventional unhappiness… I suppose when I come to think of it, if I had a stronger character, I might have done well enough for myself. But there was some kink in me, put there by Verse.”
Kavanagh eventually arrives at this conclusion: “A true poet is selfish and implacable. A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not… I lost my messianic compulsion. I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose.”
Some of the recent threads here talk about how poets will be able to make a living in this new bad economy. Well, there never was a strong connection between poetry and making a living, as my old man well knew. Just now there’s not a lot of money in anything. But there is, there has to be, survival. And letting the mind wander is something we’ll need more of now as we re-imagine our financial futures, and perhaps even our political and social circumstances. As for poetry, no doubt something of it will not only survive but be – dare I (day)dream it? – immortal, and limitless (as in, you know, “language without limit”).
The Spanish have an expression… Pensar en la inmortalidad del cangrejo. It’s very poetical:
–¿En qué piensas?
–Nada, en la inmortalidad del cangrejo.
“What are you thinking about?” “Nothing. The immortality of the crab.”
Here’s a poem on the subject, attributed to Miguel de Unamuno:
Inmortalidad del cangrejo
El más profundo problema:
el de la inmortalidad
del cangrejo, que tiene alma,
Una almita de verdad …
Que si el cangrejo se muere
todo en su totalidad
con él nos morimos todos
por toda la eternidad
It says that the most profound – deepest – problem is the immortality of the crab,
which has a soul, a tiny soul: if it dies, then we all die with it, too, and for all eternity…
But I digress. My mind is wandering. Too much information… Gotta go read more poetry.

take from me / the great beliefs / because / it is written / they gathered together / again / so you taught us / to have a long life / some things / are beyond / the time is here / from the moment / be like / them
According to Geof Huth, who curated the special feature on visual poetry, curated by Geof Huth, in the November issue of Poetry, “aND often incorporates alien scripts into his work. These can be undecipherable writing systems of history, scripts unfamiliar to most people, and scripts invented by him or others. He uses these to allow us to see written language with new eyes, to appreciate its visual forms, and to face the process of searching for meaning in a foreign textscape. His “mi’kmaq book of the dead” combines seemingly recognizable characters with apparently pictographic ones, encouraging us to pick out a meaning we will never quite find on our own.”
So… would anyone like to let us know what they imagine the rest of the poem to mean?

So begins Carmine Starnino’s review essay – in the November issue of Poetry – which kicks off with a consideration of Eavan Boland’s work; it is she who is sitting at the window. Starnino continues:
“Being a woman,” Eavan Boland later explains in her memoir Object Lessons, “I had entered into a life for which poetry has no name.” No name because Ireland had no models for writing about being a mother, daughter, or wife. Here was a cause begging to be espoused. But championing the poetic merit of “wholly female” subjects is useless if a poet is still at the mercy of inherited doubts about what she can say about those subjects. Old styles, argues Boland, can’t be trusted for shifts of consciousness. After all, by clogging the psychological channels between self and style, convention doesn’t just trick us into seeing certain attitudes as trivial, it ensures we don’t catch on until too late. Boland’s dilemma, therefore, was intriguing: she had an open field, but not necessarily a free hand. Using existing forms to register what she felt as a woman meant tradition’s decorum police could—and did—quietly impose their own artificial perceptions. How, then, to speak for yourself? The answer was to reboot Irish poetry’s available modes.
Now let’s juxtapose this with Adam Kirsch’s essay in the same issue, the web version of which is entitled, “Literary Fame in the Time of Flame Wars.” Kirsch writes:
According to Hegel, “Self-consciousness exists…in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized.’” The infant wants only this, the king and the millionaire take roundabout paths to achieve it; but the writer alone seems able to obtain it immediately. Writers write in order to be recognized. To be recognized as good writers, yes—but that is not enough of a goal to explain the frenzy of literary competition. If writing were simply a skill, demonstrating that one possessed the skill, even in supreme measure, would be as technical and trivial an achievement as something in athletics. It is because writing is a communication of one’s mind and experience—one’s being—that it promises to gratify the original desire of spirit: to have one’s being confirmed by having it acknowledged by others. Writing makes others the mirror of the self.
And we can see Boland, and writers like her wanting just to be heard, struggling for confirmation and acknowledgment. But Kirsch asks how much of this is a good thing, and takes up the economic model of scarcity:
… there is not enough recognition to go around, so every human being’s just claim cannot be met. Beauty is the currency, as arbitrary as gold or paper, in which recognition is bought and sold. We grant great writers the dignity of having really been, the posthumous recognition that we call immortality, because they please us with their arrangements of words. Because of how well they wrote, we remember not just their works but their letters, travels, illnesses, aspirations—we feel with and for them. But we do this as irrationally as the peahen rewards the peacock with the biggest tail feathers, which have nothing intrinsically to do with reproductive fitness. If the scarcity of recognition is a symptom of the world’s fallenness, then literary ambition is a form of complicity with fallenness. In other words, it is a sin. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal; because there is not enough power, people do violence; because there is not enough recognition, they make art.
Agree or disagree, Kirsch’s conclusion is arresting:
When [the future] looks for traces of us, it will not turn to novels or poems, but to e-mails, blogs, and Facebook pages. Mind will treasure these evidences of its own past, and devote all its infinite resources to interpreting them. And because it is infinite, it will have more than enough attention to give to each of our lives. Even the least articulate of us will become the focus of a kind of ancestor cult, subject to the devoted meditation of innumerable intelligences. The first will be made last, and the last first. At last, the scarcity of recognition will give way to the plenitude that has always been the mark of the messianic age. If only we could be certain that this was the future we had in store, no poet would ever have to write another line.
Kirsch’s piece begins by looking at Keith Gessen’s infamous debut, All the Sad Young Literary Men, about which he says that “both writer and readers treated the book, properly, as an assertion of self, and the only question was whether that assertion ought to succeed—whether Gessen ought to become famous.” Starnino, by contrast, looking at Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s merfolkian epic, The Fifty Minute Mermaid, finds “the alternate reality of a woman trying to ‘take it all in.’” He says that her “frantic fabulating, with its deadpan exaggerations, suggests a desperate wish-fulfillment.”
So that woman by the window – who is she, really? Is she a poet, preparing for the task of taking it all in, to “make room in her heart” without having her heart burst? Is she going to turn not to poetry, but to the convenient comfort of bonding with her Facebook friends? Does she want to be famous?