Just after 16-year old Amber Rose Johnson (pictured) won the 2010 Poetry Out Loud National Competition in Washington D.C., Kristin Esch tracked her down with some questions.  Johnson will receive a $20,000 award and her high school, Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island, will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books.

KE: Has participating in the Poetry Out Loud competition changed your relationship to poetry?

ARJ: Because my sister—and coach—Sarah Ashley is a spoken-word artist, poetry has always been a part of my life. I have always enjoyed poetry, mostly what I’ve found in the ‘underground spots.’ More recently I personally have taken an interest in written poetry rather than slam poetry. I do have other poems memorized that I like to share with other people—as well as poems that I think all people should just know for daily use.

Competing in Poetry Out Loud has completely changed my perspective on written and classical poetry. For example, since Shakespeare was the author of one of my competition poems, it forced me to really analyze his style of writing and the message he wished to portray to his audience. During this process, I came to find out what a funny, and romantic writer Shakespeare really was! I no longer disregard poems because of how long ago they were written, or because the language isn’t easy to understand at first glance. In fact, because of Poetry Out Loud I truly seek the beauty in every poem, and the meaning in each line.

Read the whole interview on the Poetry Foundation articles page.

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.

Phebus Etienne, the warm, effusive sister to everyone. Sekou Sundiata, fiery and unflinching lyricist. And just this past weekend, Yictove, stalwart of the Knitting Factory and community firebrand. No matter how many times it happens, it jolts. That much throat, no longer here. No longer here.
A month or so ago, I was doing at residency at a middle school here in Westchester. During a break in the middle of the day, I came home to have lunch. While I was having my sandwich, I felt a twitching pain just above my left breast. At first I told myself that it was the kind of pain that results from the inadvertent stretching of something, but its dogged persistence worried me. I went to a doctor and the doctor called an ambulance, and before I knew what was happening, I was hurtling down Rt. 9 through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow and Ossining and Briarcliff Manor to the emergency room, where I was thoroughly convinced I would die.
I wondered what I would leave behind. Did those poems, those lovingly crafted indy press offerings mean anything beside the paper they were printed on? Would I be, as I predicted in one poem, one of those “…shamed by the tiny blips
we’d leave behind/ notebooks of indecipherable stanzas, self-published tomes,/ blurry VHS tapes of ourselves reading to ourselves”?
How do you decide if your mark on the world is enough of a mark? If you’re a poet, what legacy is enough? A book? A number of books? An award or two? The fact that someone somewhere calls you “teacher”? A consistent present in the glitzy, heavily-funded lit mags? A couple of National Poetry Slam championships? A bundle of cash rewarding you for a lifetime body of work? A kid who picks up your book and starts writing because she or he can’t help it? A teacher, a secretary, a pump jockey, an ex-con who reads or hears you and realizes a throat they never knew?
Phebus, Sekou, Yictove. You didn’t stop doing what you do. And look at all these unfolding worlds you’ve left us, all this rhythm and challenge and answer. Thank you for reminding me to forge something, however small, that will last.
Thank you for reminding me that poets die.

Dana Gioia’s voice is uncannily gruff but pitched at the level of a voice-over on a sure-fire hit block buster adventure movie. Gioia is the chairman of the NEA and he is the big booster for the event. At dinner he is gregarious and consummate at eating up awkward silences with very superficial small talk that is good enough to make us laugh. We are grateful for his enthusiasm—he believes in the program. John Barr is not a tall man, but he smiles a lot and he too is a booster—he glows with the same enthusiasm that most of the organizers have. Of course it is hard not to smile. These young people are really into the contest, and this too is understandable. At stake is twenty thousand dollars in scholarship money, and I know none of these young people is going to say, “I really don’t plan to go to college, it is just not my thing right now…” No, these are high achieving young people and they all plan to make use of the twenty-thousand first prize of the ten thousand second prize or the five thousand third prize of scholarship money. They should be giddy, the ones who are on the stage now competing. They are the top twelve, they have been winnowed down from fifty-one state winners, they are already winners (it is something people keep saying) and the crowd is stoked. And there are celebrities in the house. At least one celebrity is in the house, anyway. The tall and surprisingly lean Garrison Keillor is in the house. He is a judge. I am a judge. Indeed, I am grateful to him for being a judge because his presence makes my traveling to DC to judge this competition a wonderful legitimacy for my family who all like to listen to his Prairie Home Companion. I have not told this to him as yet. We have talked about the “islands” (I hate that), and about the “South”. His view of both is disappointingly familiar and predictable, but he is brilliant at turning even the most ordinary observation into a sketch from the Prairie Home Companion. “Somewhere in Antigua or Barbados, I am walking on a street and I realize I am the only white man there, and I feel no tension, no disquiet. Yes, they must have experienced slavery, too, but it is quite different…” And I am waiting for all of this to become part of a Lake Woebegone monologue, but it actually becomes a conversation and I am both aware that I am talking to Garrison Keillor about race and remembering that his show has not had a hip-hop act on it as far as I can tell and I am tempted to say, “You know Mos Def is really cool, very articulate,” when he says something about not understanding some of the hip-hop talk in a moment of cultural inter-dialogue. Of course I don’t say any of this because I am a fan and the ride from the lovely dinner to the auditorium is a short one and we are here to judge a contest and we are not alone. There are other judges including the brilliant poet Marilyn Chin and the past winner of the contest, a sharp witted but pleasant young man, Jackson Hille. Keillor wants us to have a little discussion between contestants and about the contestants, but the rules won’t allow this. I know this. I have judged the state finals in South Carolina. I already know that filling in the slots along with the other judges is like playing the pools—the “football pools”—you pass the sheets in and the scores are tabulated and then you find out who is winning and who is not. Despite being a judge, you are just as surprised by the results as anyone else is.
For over an hour we watch these twelve contestants walk slowly into a simple white pool of light surrounding a microphone on a stand. They pause for a while, collect their thoughts and then begin, with the title, and then the poem. They speak the poems with restraint, as if they have been told that going over the top won’t sell well, but they are still aware of the performance in the moment—they angle their bodies, raise hands, create cracks in their voices, suggest tears. The poems range from the ditty-like moral fable “The Spider and the Fly” to Yusef Komounyakaa’s quite striking poem “Facing It” about the Vietnam Memorial. A popular poem is “beauty” by Tony Hoagland. It is a quaint piece void nuance and with a quiet simplicity that can come off as ordinary. The performers seem totally sincere about this idea of age and sickness taking away beauty that is defined as a high school quality. Another two choose Wilfred Owen’s politically charged protest poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” and I keep wondering which of the two performers is correct: one says “dulche” and the other says “dulke”, but both capture the harrowing nature of the piece—one of them intoning the poem in a voice edged with a 1940’s pseudo British broadcast voice, as if the performer is trying to invoke the spirit of Orson Wells. He is “actorly”, pacing himself slowly, and it is no surprise that his bio says he wants to have a career on Broadway. Some sing, some raise their arms and one performs “Preludes” by Eliot with a strangely surreal interpretation that seems to have nothing to do with meaning but that is about the sound of the poem, the music of the poem, the shape of the poem—her arms move, her body moves, and her voice rises into sharp tones, the settles into more fluid undulations—it is a sonic treat, and it has the quality of a piece that seems almost satirical—a kind of spoof—but only almost, there is something so sincere about the performance that we believe it. And a tall black boy performance with a slow, measured voice, Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” taking us with skill from the ordinary into the sermonic, the elevated oratory of a grand speech. And we circle the numbers: “Level of Difficulty”, “Appropriateness of Dramatization”, “Presence”, “Projection” and so on.
The winners do not surprise me. Well, they do. But they do because they are my top three as well. The winner is my choice. She is consistent, beautifully articulate and her rendering of Anne Sexton’s at times melodramatic poem about a woman giving her child up for adoption is so delicately nuanced, so beautifully felt and filled with wonderfully fitting texturing that we are enthralled. She makes an okay poem quite a powerful monologue. She is Amanda Fernandez, the DC contestant, dimpled, deep brown skin, head covered in a black scarf, and her voice rich with feeling and strikingly capable of evoking even the slightest nuance. She is good. Very good. And I am glad she has won because of how strong she is on the stage. The runner’s up are also strong. A lanky black boy from Indiana, Brandon Emanuel Wellington, is the first runner up. He is happy to be there. He hugs every one of the contestants as their names are called like a politician, and he exudes a confidence that could be construed as cockiness. But we are too far away to know what is happening. He is hugging. He hugs the third place winner, Alana Rivera from Arlington, Virginia, who is also a gifted performer but may have chosen badly for her final piece—a more formal piece. It feels like a grand occasion. One imagines the world is enthused and will want to know who the winner is all the next day. But the rest of the world may not really care. And this moment of winning, of taking pictures, of getting free tickets to anywhere (one assumes) from Southwest Airlines is the height of it. Still, there were over a hundred thousand contestants from 1,000 schools nationwide competing in the contest. This is no small thing, it seems when you look at the numbers. But at the state level, the program is just getting started.
I think it needs an injection of something. Perhaps a People’s Choice winner, perhaps a state finals that involves all the district of school winners so that families will come out to watch and the noise of the shouting and cheering will demand attention. Dana Gioia says there will be more money next year and everyone is saying very uplifting things like, “It touches my heart just to see young people reciting poems like that.” And I wonder if folks are just impressed that the kids can remember the poems. That is the greatness of the feat—memorizing so many poems. Scott Simon assures the kids that they will be enriched by these poems as they grow older, they will recall them and be grateful for having learnt them. I am not so convinced by this. Nor am I convinced that this is always the best way to restore poetry to its place of value and dignity in America. Gioia thinks so. He thinks that there is a lot of bad poetry out there and this way the great poetry will be in the mouths of young people. The canon is getting a boost, here, and this is important the argument goes. I like the honesty of this approach. Gioia, of course, can say that he has achieved something significant already: 100,000 kids have each learnt at least one “important’ American poem by heart. These are 100,000 more kids than would have done so without the contest. If we believe that poetry is good for us, then we must rejoice at this business.
For my part, I am happy about it all. I have finally told Garrison Keillor that my family—all of my family—are fans of his show and he makes some slant comment about it that is gracious and yet distant. He is a likeable man in his pink sneakers and his sensible suit and red tie. I shake hands with a beaming John Barr and I think of his essay about saving American poetry and how much of it I agree with and how I disagree with, and I keep thinking that he is a happy man, which is always nice to see in poets. I stand with the rest of the judges for a photo on the stage, and then I leave the auditorium to make it into a studio across town for a late night interview.
I keep thinking about how much money is going into this contest. I keep thinking that I have to find some way to help the NEA and the Poetry Foundation to understand that with just a fraction of this money, the noble work that the SC Poetry Initiative is doing in South Carolina will offer a model for a way to really celebrate and promote poetry at the grass roots level across the country. I realize that I have not done a good job of schmoozing, and I have spent far too much time discussing race with Garrison Keillor.

I just got back from an exhilarating all-day-night Race/Poetry symposium at Sarah Lawrence that I co-organized with fellow writing professor Tina Chang. I love putting on readings, (it makes me feel like I am inhabiting my life), and this one was fairly intense on the planning end, involving 8 guest poets and 4 Sarah Lawrence professors, and 3 readings, 2 panels, 2 small-group discussion sessions, 1 dinner for the poets, and 1 wine/cheese reception, all over the course of 11 hours. It was a lot of work for Tina and I (and a cadre of generous student volunteers), but it was 100% worth it.
I tend to think in metaphors, and today’s voluptuous event kind of reminds me of a wedding: Tina and I planned for weeks, went over little details that popped up unexpectedly, all for this one intense day that vanished so quickly—we felt really alive when it was happening and then tired and relieved and happy when it was over. (The ironic thing is that I actually conceived of and structured my marriage ceremony in theatrical terms, but that’s another story.)
I’m sure many comments and fragments from poems will come back to me tomorrow and at random moments in the future, but here are some things I remember at this late moment about the symposium, some impressions that are slipping through my brain’s fingers. (I realize the futility of this endeavor, that isolated memories can’t catch the wonderful spirit of the sympoisum, that a good reading, like a good theater performance, is something that exists in time and vanishes as it is experienced.)
Roger Sedarat’s poems were striking. His book, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, doesn’t come out until the end of the year, but if today’s reading is any indication, he has a very bright future. His work is at times hilarious, (especially his riff on the ghazal), but also smart and full of feeling, as he fixes his poetic gaze/brain on Iran, the nation his family emigrated from.
Ravi Shankar, editor of www.drunkenboat.com, talked about his conflicted relationship with one of his earliest literary heroes, Wallace Stevens, and the challenges of dealing with family pressures and expectations, how “poet” was not the job his parents envisioned for him.
A number of writers talked about the benefits of being two things: for instance, Indian and American, and how bouncing back and forth two cultures gave them room to consider.
Eric Gamalinda mentioned the liberation he feels when he returns to the Philippines and race is not an issue the way it is in the United States. He also read work from his new collection, Amigo Warfare, including the title poem that utilizes anaphora and jumps from the direct (Because you offer praise and weapons to our dictators) to the hauntingly surreal (Because you send your spies out to investigate our dreams)
Paisley Rekdal read from the newly published The Invention of the Kaleidoscope and talked about being bi-racial, and how she is often very aware of the way different people are treating and perceiving her. In a funny moment, she also half-complained how friends in Utah always expect her to be the one to order the food in Chinese and Japanese restaurants.
Tracy K. Smith read work from her forthcoming book Duende, including a poem that dealt with John Ford’s The Searchers. Vijay Seshadri said that, because of Tracy’s poem, we would not see the film the same way again.
Grad student moderator Brynn Saito read a quote to Vijay on the subject of race, which he quickly renounced with charm.
Edwin Torres did amazing things with his body and voice. Edwin Torres, maybe more so than other American poet, blows open the aesthetic stereotypes. Is there another poet with as much credibility in both the performance and experimental communities? I remember being in grad school in the DC area and talking with Rod Smith (editor of Aerial) after a reading at the Black Cat Club (that’s one of the cool things about being in a small out-of-the-spotlight city—poets tend to hang out with one another, regardless of faction). Rod was saying (if my memory is correct) that the performance and experimental poets had a lot in common, since they were both outside the mainstream. While I agree with Rod to some degree in theory, I feel that common ground in my gut when I listen to Edwin perform.
Fellow blogger Patricia Smith stretched open the audience’s collective heart, with her poems that plunge into the emotional depths of a variety of characters, giving voice to the voiceless and talked about her experiences as a teacher at Cave Canem.
Sean Thomas Dougherty talked about growing up in a bi-racial household with an African-American stepfather and a Jewish mother. He read poems from his forthcoming Broken Hallelujahs (BOA) and talked about seeing race everywhere, at gas stations, in silences, in the way people are physically positioned in conversations.
Cathy Park Hong read a poem from her forthcoming book, Dance Dance Revolution(Norton). (Cathy has a cool blog http://www.cathyparkhong.com/)
Dennis Nurkse read two haunting persona poems, one in the voice of a 12th century heretic being buried alive in the walls of a building, a mason stoning him in; and the other in the voice of an Iraqi being abused (“loosened up”) by an American soldier. The second poem turns against our expectations as the speaker ends up pitying the soldier who holds the gun to his head and threatens to take his life away.
Thomas Sayers Ellis discussed the origins of the Dark Room Collective and top-secret boycott plans for this spring and also read several poems, one that deftly sonically spotlights the word or in a variety of words.
But the lasting feeling, beyond these perceptions, is one of poets coming together and breaking breath. The sense of unity in the air.

Aimee and co. organized a number of exciting Dead Poets Slams. One night at Beyond Baroque in 2000, we switched things up a little and hosted a Dead vs. the Living poetry slam, where actors, reading the work of dead poets, competed against living slammers. Boy, was that fun. It really made the audience decide which way they were going to lean: toward the slower-paced, theatrically-delivered work that had much stronger language, or toward the faster-paced, more contemporary, pop-culture-driven slam material. (In poetry slams nowadays, it sometimes seems like the audience must decide between coke or pepsi—two poets that sound very similar.) (Just for the record, the audience that night veered to the dead.)
Another funny tidbit. In 2001, I mentioned the Dead vs. Living Slam to two poetry organizers in Munich, Germany, (a couple of lovely ruffians named Rayl and Ko), and they have turned it into a financial success. They call their show Poetry: Dead or Alive. They use big-name German stage actors and have them compete against the nation’s top slammers in theaters that hold nearly one thousand people. Coindentally, Rayl just sent me an e-mail where he mentioned that they’re about to do a show in Switzerland, meaning they are exporting their version of the Dead Poets Slam. It’s strange to think an event happening this week in Switzerland has a root winding back to a lightbulb flashing on in the chest of Aimee Bender as she watched a Sylvia Plath poem performed in front of fifty people at Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach, Los Angeles.
Incidentally, for the past five years at Sarah Lawrence, I’ve organized a Dead Poets Slam each fall. (It’s not a competition; we just use the word Slam because we want the audience to be loose and energized.) It’s a lot of work to put into an extracurricular project—about ten three-hour rehearsals, leading up to a seventy-five minute show in front of a couple hundred students—but the rewards are plentiful: seeing a poem grow inside someone is a wonderful process, and hearing great poems in rehearsal over and over, like John Donne’s Flea, beginning to learn the turns, the nuances like a hiking trail. Thank you, Miss Bender and co.