2.  No.

3.  The sentence is a dark alley.  You know what happens in dark alleys.

4.  Something’s not right.

5.  Discuss.

6. No.

7.  What kind of person gets to the corridor then stops?  On the verge of research, a question, an interview.  Takes notes on the architecture, the crenallate of red roofs stretching over the East End, the cross-hatched window of Kamaldeep Bhui’s door. Then goes home.

8.  The recent honor killing in Turkey.  Discuss.

9.  No.

10.  The university department.  The conflation of the shadow blogs with the comment stream.  Uncles.  Cousins. The sex attackers in childhood, adulthood, and beyond. The killers on the verge of killing.  All my life I have looked into the eyes of serial killers and have developed a sixth sense when it comes to not being murdered.  You fucking cunt.  Your eyebrows are really ugly; did anyone ever tell you that?Discuss.

11. No.

12.  I love you.

13.  Discuss

14. No

15.  Questions of non-violence bring me to the moment when, face to face with a cobra, two cobras, I look them in the eyes.  I don’t know what this does other than reduce my nausea.  Eileen Myles, would you take over my gig?  I will re-send you the money when I get it, though I need it.  I think I need this money, sometimes.  No, it is better if Eileen Myles takes over from here, and maybe someone else. Elena Georgiou.  Someone fierce and gentle, and someone gentle and fierce.  Someone with a partner, because I think you need someone at home if you’re going to do this.  If you’re going to take this up.  I have a dog.  I have a cat.  I have a son.  I have amazing neighbors and friends. I have you.

15.  I have you.

16. “Shame may be fatal.”  Discuss

14.  No.

15.  Towards an aesthetics of non-violence.  Towards Elizabeth Lonzano’s work on ritual and community in Colombia.  Towards an essay composed in the notebook, where it drifts, a composite of scraps.  MEAT BLANKET.  Discuss.

16.  Towards a different kind of sex altogether.

17.  The question of sex is linked to the question of territory.  Discuss.

18.  Yes.

19.  In a war-time, predatory effects are amplified.  Discuss.

20. Yes.

21.  Mira Bai’s bhajans recalibrate the garden at the end of winter.  In class, we read ZONG!  I direct my students to Fred’s posts on reparation and trance.  When Sina writes about the river and Woolf and her mum and the north, a vertical thread unfurls.  Sometimes I listen to Sotere’s audio: at home, I read Craig’s book, delighted by the rain and the jungle and the aunties, in my first scan.  Thom’s thinking about the sentence affects me, deeply, in the space before writing begins.

22.  ”Mom, can we have a snack?  Abby wants a cocoa.  Can we go to The Coffee Tree?”

23. “Not yet.”

24.  ”How will you put the shit back into the mother’s body?” — Cynthia Sailers, on aggression, community and the group mind.

25.  Discuss!!!

26.  ”Mom!  We’re hungry!!!”

27.  ”I’m almost done.”

Harvey Milk Plaza, San Francisco, 6/28/09 (photo: C. Dungy)

The street sweepers have passed, and the crowd control fences have been carried away.  Pride, for some, is over and done.  But for many, the persistent resistance that Pride weekend celebrates still thrives.  Thank goodness. In honor of Pride and, moreover, in honor of the spirit of resistance and persistence of the Stonewall rebellion and the movements it spawned, (and also in a sort of answer to a question Catherine Halley posed some time ago), I’m going to share a few poems by a small sample of writers from the West Coast LBGT community.

Eloise Klein Healy, author of The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho, connects her love of the poet Sappho to a very contemporary, daily existence.  Our lingering fascination with the poet from Lesbos is filtered through this book’s witty, sometimes heartbreaking perspectives.  In the poem, “How Much Can I Have of Sappho?” she grapples with what it means to be denied the right to claim the poet.  Here are the final two sections of the four-section piece:

III

I live with the anger that Sappho and I
are denied each other.
She’s a word like “aunt,” I’m a word like “quaint,”
we’re always off-rhyme,
two words like “ain’t.”

People say to me, “You know, she didn’t have to be
a lesbian.  You know nothing
is proven, right?”

A one-size-fits-all meaning of the word lesbian
is one I don’t even ask for.

“What would Sappho think?”
I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that
new girl?”

IV

People just can’t find
a way to let me
have her.

And why not?
What would they
lose then?

Maybe people just feel a need
to put me in my place,
to set me straight.

What attracts me to this poem is its plain spokeness, and also its light touch (“What would Sappho think?” / I ask myself.  She would think, “Who’s that / new girl?”)  These belie a turbulent emotional undercurrent.  The poem keeps up a calm face even as there is a great deal of emotion, intention, complexity of purpose contained therein.  It feels like an apt statement of a sort of committed resistance that must carry on daily, that cannot risk expending overmuch energy at every turn because there is going to be another struggle to undertake the next day and there must be energy kept in reserve.

A complaint that is often waged against poets writing from marginalized communities (I hate that phrase, pardon my use of it here for expedience’s sake) is that they are not angry enough, that their poems are not direct enough in their articulations of resistance.  I, personally, love a poem that expresses a kind of restraint while it makes clear that the speaker is not going to roll over and hush up anytime soon.  There is a certain kind of staying power a poem like this suggests, that the speaker’s resilience is not going to sputter out overnight. This is a good thing, since, as her poems suggests (read some more here), there is still plenty of work to be done.

This poetic conservation of energy, even when circumstances might suggest appropriate conditions for immoderate rage, seems to be one of the key factors tying together the poets I am looking at today.  D. A. Powell’s new book, Chronic, is full of poems that play a number of emotional registers, backing away from all out rage much of the time and employing, instead, sarcasm, sideways references (which in poetics speak we call allusion), understatement, dry wit, feigned indifference.  Poems like “centerfold” and “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song ‘good times’ by chic” overlook what’s at their core, if by overlook we can simultaneously mean to willfully look beyond as well as to carefully survey.  When the matter at the core of the poems has to do with chronic disease, the degradation of civilization as we know it, and love’s ever-dissolving potential, it might be best to take a step back every now and again to gain a fresh perspective, to rest the spirit for the inevitable struggles ahead.

This post owes a debt to Cole Krawitz and Griselda Suarez, the two San Francisco Bay Area writers who organized a reading for the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival.  I was familiar with the work of most of the poets reading at the event: D. A. Powell, Eloise Klein Healy, Jewelle Gomez, Elana Dykewomon, Ching-In Chen, the magnificent Dorothy Allison, and the multi-genre force, Rigoberto González.  Only one poet was completely new to me: Ely Shipley.

Shipley’s work fits into this idea of persistent resistance beautifully.  The poems take on ways of looking, and chip away slowly, often delicately, at the perceptions they initially suggest:

Boy with Flowers

My aunt loved me, asked me:
will you be the flower
girl at my wedding?  But I’m not
a girl, I argued, and she persuaded me:
you’ll get to throw rose petals

onto the aisle, walk before me, both of us
crushing them beneath our feet, my gown
dragging over them.  I agreed.  I wanted
nothing but chivalry.

At the church, my mother and I
waited in the small room.  She brushed
my aunt’s hair until the dress arrived.
Isn’t it beautiful?  And I agreed until they tried
to put me in it.  I’d seen my father

and uncle earlier, standing in a circle
of other men, smoke hovering over their heads, a halo
and their voices kind, quiet, and deep.  I told my aunt—
I want to wear a suit like them!  She promised

if I wore the dress I could wear anything
I wanted after: army pants, a sheriff
badge, cowboy hat, and pistols.  My mother shot her
a look in the mirror where we posed, both of them
angelic in white, and me not yet

dressed.  Today I wake from another dream
in which I have a beard, no breasts,
and am about to go skinny-dipping
on a foreign beach with four other men.

I’m afraid to undress, won’t take off my shorts,
so they gab me, one at each ankle, the other two
by each wrist.  I am a starfish hardening.
The sun hovers above, a hot
mirror where I search for my reflection.

I close my eyes.  It’s too intense.  The light
where my lover is tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest.  Each sewn tight
with stitches, each naked stem, flaring with thorns.

The turns in this poem, intensified by the line breaks and also the leaps from one situation to the next, amplify the sense of long struggle.  The poem is about now and also about always, and its pace, slow and steady but also, somehow, accelerated, seems just right for a situation in which everything happens at once and, also, situations unravel over long periods of time. “Boy with Flowers,” the title poem of Shipley’s collection, reveals in increments and, with each revelation, suggests plenty more that’s gone unsaid.

Speaking of plenty more going unsaid, there are a slew of other writers whose work I’d love to address here: Charles Flowers, C. Dale Young, Toni Mirosevich, Troung Tran, Eileen Myles, Jericho Brown, and Elizabeth Bradfield spring immediately to mind.  I’ll close, though, by writing briefly about the inimitable Rebecca Brown, whose earthshaking works of fiction and nonfiction are go-to books for me when I want to think about how to use language most evocatively. This is so partly because Brown’s books are so amazing in the manners in which they manage to be simultaneously direct and indirect.  I’m thinking, for instance, of her phenomenal story “What I Did” in the short story collection The Terrible Girls.  In “What I Did” the speaker narrates, in gruesome detail, the specifics of carrying some very clearly referenced thing, but she fails to ever, directly, state what that thing actually is.  It’s a brilliant deployment of abstraction in the midst of clarity, so the story works as allegory and testimony all at once.  This idea of staying power that I’ve been working around in this post seems to come forward throughout Brown’s many volumes of prose.  Each time she tackles a subject in her books, be it her mother’s death, a progression from young lesbian to elder figure, caring for those afflicted with AIDS, grappling with identity, or learning to play war with the kids on the block, Brown does so in an unflinching manner that demands you stay with her for the long haul.

Brown’s work, like the work of all the writers I’ve written about today, bears little resemblance to the glitzy weekend my city’s just celebrated, with its corporate sponsorship and its start-on-time-end-on-time-kindly-police-escorted parade.  This work bears more in common with the dangerous confrontations at the Stonewall Inn, and before, and after, and on and on for the years and years, the decades of struggle and progress and tide turns and surprises (pleasant and unpleasant) and constant persistent celebration and resistance some of us have made note of only on occasion ever since and some of us, thank goodness, are alert to most days.

Rob Gitin, Executive Director of At The Crossroads, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit organization, turned to poetry as part of his 2009 fund raising campaign.

The campaign is a unique one.  Gitin describes it as “kind of a walk-a-thon where people take any goal they have and turn it into a sponsorship activity to raise money for homeless kids.”  Goals include reading all seven novels of Proust’s , running 500 miles in 50 days, and introducing 20 new people to At The Crossroads.  One man pledged to read a bedtime story to his children every night.  Gitin’s goal?  He wants to woo Sarah Silverman.

To pitch the woo, Gitin turned to poetry.  Check out his open mic debut here.

For many of us, the fact that poets can orchestrate their poems is not news.  Plenty of us know that sound can be used, in poetry, to manipulate emotional responses. Still, it was awfully fun to witness my student’s initiation into the joys of poetic sound.  Therefore, because I believe there are always people for whom these joys will be news, I’m dedicating today’s post to a few of the poems I love to hear.

The first poem I introduced my student to was Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Windfall,” from her book The Orchard.  I read the whole poem and watched his face as the pleasure and surprise grew.  He hadn’t known poems could do what Kelly’s poem does.  He hadn’t known that sounds could be so well orchestrated by a poet that, even without attending to the narrative, he could fathom how he was meant to feel.

Talking about the poem afterwards, we noted the section of “Windfall” when Kelly introduces us to the density of the landscape she explores: “No one tends the land now.  The fences have fallen and the deer grown thick, and the pond lies black, the water slowly thickening, the banks tangled with weeds and grasses.”  When I’d spoken the poem to him, he was aware of the fact that my tongue seemed to grow thick and slow just as we came upon the overgrown pond.  From the lengths of her sentences and phrases down to her choice and arrangement of words, Kelly dictates how I move through her lines.

Reading another Kelly poem, “Song,” we noted how the poet created a foreboding feeling by piling up ominous “h” sounds at some of the poem’s more troubling moments:

…Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head….

Like in a horror film when you can hear the bad guy panting somewhere near (hhuh, hhuh, hhuh) but you don’t know exactly where you’ll encounter him next, Kelly piles on the “h” sounds during this section, and then she distributes them throughout the remainder of the poem just when we might begin to let our guard down.  My student had heard this even before he had a way to articulate how he felt.  Now he had language to identify his responses.

We talked about Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice,” a poem I’d had him memorize earlier in the semester when he was growing excited about the joys of metrical verse:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

We discussed the way the poem’s first three quatrains hold fast to an easy, waltzing rhythm, mimicking the ethereal nature of the poem’s dream.  But, as reality rends the dream and the speaker accepts the truth, the poem’s rhythm changes entirely. The student, being familiar with this poem, recognized immediately the shift I alerted him too.  He mimicked, dancing his hand then pretending to stumble forward, the way those dactyls and trochees made him feel.

Over the last couple years I have co-edited (with Jeffrey Thomson and Matt O’Donnell) an anthology called From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.  Part of our mission was to highlight poets who make the experience of reading their poems rewarding because  they return to poetry’s roots as an instrument for music (or acoustics) and storytelling.  We argue that attention to music comes from attention to the tension between the sentence (the measure of meaning) and the line (the measure of music) in the poem and from attention to the manipulation of elements of sound like rhyme and rhythm. There is a level beyond ration, beyond meaning, at which a poem can be experienced. This is the level of purest experience that we associate with our most deeply hardwired senses, with, in the case of music and poetry, sound. These sensory responses, the responses we have to sonic cues separate from and in addition to purely rational responses, can be the source of inspiration and appreciation. Having dedicated so much time to editing an anthology of poems that “sound great” (an anthology designed with classroom use in mind) you might imagine my pleasure at meeting a student who, early in his career as a poet, was looking to figure out how to make his own work as sonically resonant as possible.

Watching my student grow excited about “the soundtrack” behind the poems we read, I thought of Nikki Giovanni’s “Adulthood (for Claudia),” which I first encountered when I was around the same age my student is now.  The poem’s list of martyred leaders conjured the sound of automatic rifle fire: “hammarskjold was killed and lumumba was killed and diem was killed and kennedy was killed and malcolm was killed and evers was killed and schwerner, chaney and goodman were killed and liuzzo was killed and stokely fled the country and le roi was arrested and rap was arrested and pollard, thompson and cooper were killed and king was killed and kennedy was killed…”  The sense of loss Giovanni describes grew all the more powerful to me as the names of these dead heroes shot off my tongue in rapid fire.

I remember discovering Giovanni’s poem and understanding something I hadn’t understood before. I remember recognizing, in early readings of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the ebbing, flowing sound water can make against a shore.  I remember encountering the breathless rant that was cummings’s “next to of course god america I,” and the cat-like sounds of the third stanza of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”   It was with heady excitement I greeted my growing understanding of the intricacies of the ways sound makes sense.

I saw something similar (and exciting) happening across the desk yesterday as I witnessed my student’s growing recognition that, within his poems, he could create the kind of sonic impact he’d thought he’d have to produce externally.

He wanted to get going immediately.  He started by packing away his guitar.

A year later Napoleon succeeded, and then of course they were ousted in 1867 with the “help” of the United States. But the thing that I find the most celebratory about the day is that it’s a day when the little guy overpowered the big guy. Our own Mexican story of David and Goliath. And if poetry identifies with anything it’s the little guy. The littlest of the littlest guy. The tiniest littlest guy or girl even. Like a cumquat. Poetry is like a cumquat battling a giant.
The second thing that you need to remember is that Octovio Paz is not the only Mexican poet. And there are many anthologies where you can read some beautiful Mexican poetry being written right now, as well as Chicano/a (I know that “o/a” was very Chicana Studies of me, no? Prof. would be proud) anthologies too. I’d list them all, but I’m doing this a bit on the fly.
Now, if I were you and was wondering how to celebrate today, I’d go and toast to poetry. And if I lived in New York, I’d do it by acknowledging the 10th anniversary of the Louder ARTS Project. Tonight at Bar 13 in New York City, featuring Thomas Sayers Ellis and Patricia Smith, Louder ARTS turns a whole 10 years old. The Louder Arts Project is an amazing group that keeps the love of language alive throughout the city. Also Louder ARTS helped to establish Acentos, a Latino reading series that is one of my favorite readings to attend in the city.
Feliz Cinco de Mayo, let us fiercely defend poetry to the end. Tiny cumquats though we may be.

I think it’s because they automatically make a character out of the speaker, and ignore other aspects of the poem. Even in the most dramatic of dramatic monologues, the most narrative of narrative poems, there’s always a tension between character and speaker—some negotiation between the poet and her mask, even if she’s writing in the persona of herself. A poem is not its plot; a good poem insists on its reality as a bunch of words and sounds. The best readers of poetry have an understanding of the abstract, or stylistic, elements of poems. Actors tend to ignore that stuff for the sake of drama, and that’s a disservice to poetry as a form. That’s not to say poems should be read boringly, or undramatically if the poem is dramatic, but it is to say actors tend to get in the way of the poem.
Of course this is not true of all poetry. Certainly Shakespeare’s plays, which contain some of the greatest poetry ever written, are best recited by actors. That’s because they contain ambiguities of character/motive set up to be chosen among by an actor. But a good Shakespearian actor calls attention to the stylization of the language even as she fits it into character and plot. Also, the ambiguities in a Shakespeare play exist between characters, so actors’ choices about character don’t erase the play’s ambiguities. With poem-poems, as opposed to plays made of poetry, the story and its teller—if there is a story—is in the service of something other than itself. The ambiguities are not meant to be resolved—but actors reading poems tend to resolve them.
If you ignore PL’s line breaks, you ignore the fact that Milton’s lines are load-bearing walls, and part of the visceral excitement of the language is feeling all that mass strain to hold as it also shoves you forward down the page. It’s like reading an ocean tide.
And actors stink at reading Shakespeare sonnets.

1. Karawane by Hugo Ball (as performed by Marie Osmond)
Listen to Marie Osmond perform, from memory, a Dadaist poem for the TV-show “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”—and believe it or not, her rendition of this work has become strangely canonical for any contemporary practitioner of sound-poems.
2. Rotomotor by Anton Bruhin
Listen to Anton Bruhin spend half an hour, reciting a series of German words, in which each word differs from its predecessor by only a single letter—and hence be amazed by his echoing lexicon, which seems wholly inhuman in its motorized intensity.
3. The Most Unwanted Song by Dave Soldier (on behalf of Komar & Melamid)
Listen for half an hour to a song composed by Dave Soldier in response to market surveys conducted by the artists Komar & Melamid, who have created a “popsong” that incorporates all the most despised elements in any piece of music.
4. Kenneth Goldsmith sings Jean Baudrillard
Listen to Kenneth Goldsmith (the proprietor of UbuWeb) sing, verbatim, a lengthy passage from America by Jean Baudrillard—and hence be amazed by the fact that Goldsmith can compete with the prior track for being the most “unlistenable.”
5. Blaf by Jaap Blonk and Radboud Mens
Listen to Jaap Blonk collaborate with the deejay Radboud Mens in order to generate techno-tracks of dance-music, using only the buccal output of the human voice—a project that showcases the precise, robotic intensity of Blonk in performance.
6. Angel of Death by Slayer (as performed by Dokaka)
Listen to Dokaka (the Japanese beatboxer) perform a cover of a notorious heavy-metal song, recreating the sounds of every instrument, using only the sounds of his own voice—a project that sets the outer limit of athleticism for most sound-poets.

All of the young women were between the ages of 13 and 18, and each stepped up to the mic with poise, setting the house on fire with emotionally charged verse. Their voices were diverse and motivated by the complex world that surrounds them—I heard poems questioning the war, contesting ethnic and gender stereotypes, and expressing the need for agency in a time when the young woman has been disenfranchised by a male-dominated culture.
The whole night was a touching display of deep love and affection for the art of the poetry slam, and for the great service it has provided for young women seeking a venue to build confidence and self-esteem. A few pleasant surprises: poets Aracelis Girmay and Tara Betts came up to “bless the mic,” standing tall as role models for the young contestants.
I was impressed by the energy, the bravado and the passion in the performances, and I felt honored to play a small part in a large vision. Deep gratitude to Michele Kotler, founder of Community Word Project, and to the founders of Girlstory, Lisa Ascalon and Ellen Hagan (who were recently honored at Adelphi University as “Vagina Warriors” for their work with women’s issues—you go, girls!). Hats off to collaborators Menaka Menon, Chastity Seda, Jasmin Morales and Mauricia Mullings.
And much luck and mad respect to the Girlstory Poetry Slam Team!

Scandinavia has recently taken an elevated interest in both the American avant-garde and the Canadian avant-garde, and many schools of Nordic poetry, including Nýhil (from Iceland), Ny Poesi (from Norway), and OEI (from Sweden) have all made concerted campaigns to establish cooperative interaction with experimental writers from all around the world. All of these northern coteries have produced unbelievable publications, including anthologies of global poetry as thick as any telephone directory.
Ny Poesi has sponsored this biennial festival on three occasions, and the organizers have always done their best to ensure that their jetlagged poets get to enjoy exorbitant drink (probably because the organizers know that they have jampacked our schedules with so rich a cornucopia of lectures and readings that none of us can find any time to sleep).
Readers who might wish to hear some of the highlights from the event can check out recordings by the following poets:
1. Tomomi Adachi
2. Caroline Bergvall
3. Leevi Lehto
4. Jacques Roubaud
More than twenty videos, showing excerpts from the event have also been posted online—and other recordings of both lectures and readings can be found here.
I might also suggest to viewers that, if they wish, they can check out the video of me reciting “The Aria of the Three-Horned Enemy” from the avant-garde opera entitled The Princess of the Stars by R. Murray Schafer. I might also refer listeners to the lengthier recording of me performing sound-poems during the finale of the festival.