RL: Believe it or not, this August makes 12 years! Our first event was at Bluestockings Women’s Bookstore (changed now to Activist Bookstore, a somewhat different though linked mission) in 1999. The readers were Akilah Oliver and Marcella Durand. Luckily I had a little hand-held cassette recorder and you can listen to it thanks to Penn Sound. This little story feels particularly even fiercely relevant to your question at this time — Akilah Oliver, who would have turned 50 on April 18, 2011, died this past February. Here was a brilliant poet and thinker, whose work and teaching inspired many many of us and would have inspired (and will inspire) many many more. Her performances and writings insist upon and make space toward a public arena of grieving that is unprecedented at least in my reading — along the theoretical lines of Butler and Derrida — a publicly performed poetic of the body. Belladonna* published and will soon reprint her Putterer’s Notebook chapbook a part of a book length manuscript she was editing when she passed.

Yes, Belladonna* has the mission you say — to provide a forum, not merely as redress or compensation but also because we are a community based on conversation and aesthetic desire — we promote this work because we want and need it and the writer who creates it. More and more we refuse to see the made and the maker as separate — we met at a retreat in March and committed ourselves to thinking about “Our Material Lives” as the driving aesthetical and political theme for the coming years. We poets have had issues with facing the REAL. I know I have but now I am 47 and people like me are dying for not having their material realities cared for better. And my job does not insure me though I work very hard and my work seems to be desired and appreciated.

SQ: The real and the material is certainly making itself more physically apparent, I agree. And it seems to me that the work presented at Belladonna* usually had a sense of urgency about it, in response to these issues… I should say that working with you and Erica was a highlight of my time in New York, and that the experience really changed the way I think of readings. The chapbooks, the introductions, these provide context for the poets’ work and those events constituted a kind of master class in innovative feminist poetics for me, and I’m sure others. Post Belladonna* a reading without a discussion seems impossible. Is poetry ultimately a means of physical engagement? Can you ever consider it a passive transmission?

RL: I am fascinated by your notion, here, of passive transmission… sort of like being beamed up Scotty! I think we take in so much visual and intellectual information everyday so anything can ‘get in’ be it poetry advertising or cloud formation — I personally never know what signals I’m receiving that will turn into something else, that I will ‘insist’ upon in writing later on. I just heard the British novelist Tom McCarthy at Pratt Institute describe all writing as reception/transmission, in a talk called “Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works.” He quoted heavily from Rilke, Cocteau and Heidegger — a great talk — I being I was of course reminded of Stein who I think says it best in Portraits and Repetition, when she distinguishes between repetition (passive transmission?) and insistence (that which is transmitted turned back, or over, with intent). Repetition, Stein notes, while recalling her Baltimore aunts, is that which happens when listening stops, but insistence is that which can never be done the same twice, so there is a kind of joining of reception and action. And that is what she calls genius — literary action that is in the present. I like this idea because it includes the passive and the active. I hope I haven’t circumvented your question so I will say that I do not like, I don’t give much credence to the liberal and repetitious idea of literary specialness, special interiority that must be removed from the outside world in order to be special genius. I choose to think that Stein’s notion of genius is more public but I am mostly likely wrong about that.

SQ: You said in an email recently that increasingly you were seeing Belladonna* events as books in themselves. Can you comment on that?

RL: Well this goes back to the materiality of maker and made. A lot of the poets that we love are people who make (poet meaning maker) in real time, in an oral or performance modality that is on the edge of criticality because it takes into its construction everything received and thought up to the moment of its making, which is in real time, in front of people who are also part of what is seen and thought. A lot of these poets are activists and action scholars, people like Akilah Oliver, Julie Patton, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman, Latasha Nevada Diggs, Carla Harryman, Tonya Foster. Recently Cecilia did an event at Dixon Place with us called “Flux Poetics: Writing in Cultural Duality.” She said to me, months before the event, that she was excited about doing it and making a little chaplet with us but that she no longer constructed her work as written compositions to be performed at a later date, that rather, she began to write the day or days leading up to a performance event, engaging her thinking at the moment of performance and how it could be channeled into poetic presentation. So I suggested we construct an open book with space for what would happen in the moment. She wrote three poem-drawings having to do with hand-seeing and then for the performance she expanded this with sound and the wearing of a jeweler’s magnifying headset — so touch and seeing and performance were being joined together with the language/sound doggerel of living in two and between two separate linguistic worlds. It was amazing. Cecilia and Mia Bruner, our intern, sewed pencils onto the books so folks could add.

We’re interested in finding ways to both be in-time and have something representative. Typically, books are more weighted toward reification. But that is problematic for many of the artists we are working with, and for thought that is action focused. I’ll stop here for now.

SQ: Lest we forget that organizers of the Poetic Event are also poets, can we end with a poem from your latest book, Neighbor? (Note, due to limitations of WordPress the poem may appear slightly different in this format.)

shaft/hall/stoop      0305103051030510 030510

HOMELAND

There is a public crisis
war on the others
with the planes
from our store.

Maybe the neighbor
cares but here but ereereh but here
is her baby. beere bereere She sees only
it. Who has made her.

My miracle, she says,
I sing for him here bute but he
is my here but here bute but only
song. That’s something.

I am the neighbor
who calls to the neighbor: Hey!
My window’s broken—
could you lower your voice?

But cannot interrupt
his snoring, for that is
the job of the lover
on his other side.

Can they help it buthere bu the people
in that country heuthere but we bomb.

Can we help it the people
in this one that bombs.
Someone says general strike
now there is a good idea.

Would the singing mother
join the strike. Are the
bombed babies far away
are they able to help it.

Would she strike her child.
In the night does the cat act
like a dog. I suspect I’ve
been up for hours.

The bottle collector’s
fastidious with black
plastic bags, strewn widely
upon the sidewalk.

The bellowing now stopped.
Has she gone away?
Has he stopped drinking?
Did he get a job?

Is it a boy is it a girl.
Is it in the country that bombs
or the one bombed.
Or the other one.

from Neighbor, Rachel Levitsky, UDP 2009

What I find potent in Bellamy’s work is a concern with class, feminism, performed subjectivities, and trangressive sexuality rendered in imaginative hybrid poetic-fictional forms. If someone wants to give me a grant or fellowship, I’d love to write a book on why art/poetry is necessary and the relation of this—or not—to healing (yes, that unfashionable topic among art and poetry world cognoscenti). Or to put it more politically, what are the spaces of resistance to, and healings from, arbitrary exertions of power? I feel as if Bellamy’s interests have moved in this direction as well, if recent writings (such as the story “When the Sick Rule the World” she read at White Columns last April) and her excellent blog are any indication.

Bellamy recently used her blog to document the end of a romantic entanglement, and these entries have now been published by Publication Studio. The book includes photographs and material not posted online. Here’s the publisher’s description: “While ending an affair with a Buddhist teacher, Dodie Bellamy wrote about it simultaneously on her blog. This experiment in writing in extremis explores nuances of public shame, the vagaries of desire and rage, and Bellamy’s confusion over the authenticity of group and individual spirituality. What is personal, what is public? In the electronic age, can anybody tell the difference?”

Entitled the buddhist—intentionally lower case (see page 39)—the book begins with Bellamy and the buddhist fucking in a hotel room and proceeds to cycle through spells of elation and abjection, with more veering (as in much of Bellamy’s work) toward the latter. “This is what I do, I push things until they break.” Which is—as Bellamy knows—very un-B/buddhist of her. After this introductory vignette the book moves through a chronological series of blog entries that creatively mix mundane aspects of everyday life with reflections on art, the past, pop culture, while sprinkling—in non-narrative sequence—details (that are more like reflections) about her relationship with the buddhist. Photographs of poets, Neil Young, Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa, etc., create a smart interplay of image and text.

How does it all end? It’s obvious from the first page that the relationship is doomed, and Bellamy says as much early on, “Of course it ended badly.” But the conclusion itself is hardly the point. The process is existential.

You can order the book in paper or electronic format here.

“Timelessness is woefully overrated. Timeless poems should be appropriately noted, revered, analyzed, celebrated and tucked back into their slots on a seldom dusted bookshelf in clear view of the six or seven people who read them constantly.

I’ve been in the trenches–that is to say that I’ve recently encountered a class of surly and suspicious seventh-graders; an open mic audience that only wanted to hear poems about were hips and slavery; and a college class that couldn’t (or didn’t want to) comprehend the concept of the civil rights movement until I pointed out a mention in a rap lyric.

If the reading and listening community for poetry is going to grow, members of that community have got to stop pointing backwards. Granted, there’s some pretty damned good work in that direction–and those of us who are already “consumed” by the genre are always going to draw upon those poems that teach the great lessons.

But our society is designed to snap every person firmly in the center of his or her own stubbornly egocentric universe. So a whole new crop of potentials, poets and audience, want to see those great lessons connected to something they can see, touch, cry for, dance to or gossip about. I’ve met more and more people who can’t feel without a focus. And that focus needs to be rooted in a time and situation they recognize.

So ‘timely’ it is.”

Thanks, Patricia, for answering my question! For speaking up right away and lending your voice to my thinking. I see connections between what you wrote to me and the other things you’ve written on Harriet. Isn’t part of the pleasure of Slam Poetry the way in which the poem is happening and happening now? And, is it my imagination or does timeliness win a whole lot more slams than timelessness ( I found, in my short career as a slam poetry that mentioning oral sex helped a lot too)? Seriously, I think that Slam and other forms of spoken word are critical in reminding us of the voice in poetry. Not “the VOICE” but a human voice, the spokenness of all poetry (even when some poetry is (whisper, whisper) barely audible). I think this has to do with TIME because I think that part of what’s important in poetry is the feeling that someone, a real person, was really alive at a certain moment in time. In performance it’s easy to convince someone of this—you’re standing right there!—but poets have ways of doing this on the page, also, without the audience there in person. Maybe the moments in a poem that are particularly timely are like little slam moments or maybe a little slap—a connection between the reader and writer/speaker.

I hope, Patricia, you get your whole mouth back soon—all of it. You need it and we need it, need you!

*

My title for this post refers to an invite I received from a poet friend who is celebrating her menopause. I bet there will be some poem reading happening at her party, but a lot of talk about female bodies as well so what does this have to do with the craft of poetry. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down with that question and it won’t happen, my answer, till after the poetry month is over. So we’ll just have to see. I’ll see. And I’ll try and make it that you’ll see too. With of course considerations for privacy. The invite said women and transgendered people only. Is this starting to constitute political poetry. I don’t think you necessarily have to think of it that way. But it’s somewhat embodied. Don’t you think a book is an embodiment. That’s the part I resist. But I’m excited about this and other group non-group ways of being a poet. It’s all of us bellying up to the bar in a multitude of ways. What does a poet give – to herself and anyone else. Does she only and always give poetry. A poet gives widely in a multitude of ways. I’ve used that word twice. Multitude. There now I’ve done it again.

*

It is my pleasure to introduce Doug Powell tonight. His first book Tea was a debut that astonished for its maturity, formal inventiveness, exact diction, tonal shifts, and vision. No one sounds like Doug Powell. Maybe if we took Dennis Cooper’s experience, added John Berryman’s syntax, and Walt Whitman’s heart, a little Donna Summers, two scoops of Frank O’Hara’s sass, and three slithers of Emily Dickinson into a blender, we might be getting warmer.

Dickinson instructed us: Tell the Truth, but Tell it Slant. And Powell does this, in book after book. With a lethal combination of humor and feeling, he is a poet whose ear and heart and mind are all alive: pulsing and synchronized.

If we think of broader trends in American poetry, we might see the 1950’s as a very conservative era in terms of the mainstream, and vibrant in the margins; the 1960’s as an era where the field opens up, where the Well Wrought Urn gets thrown on the ground and trampled into pixie dust and inhaled. By the 1980’s and early 90’s, the blurriness subsides, and the dust settles; the mainstream and the experimental put on their uniforms and return to their separate corners, separate camps.

The camps were very clear back then: Language, (first-person) Narrative, Neo-formalism. Doug Powell obviously did not follow his factionalized instructions; he did not get in line in the appropriate camp and march in the prescribed manner. And for that we are grateful. He took what worked for him, from various aesthetic approaches, and forged his own unique path into the woods of language, staked out terrain entirely his own. He has led by example and today, like in the 1960’s, the full cafeteria is open to young American poets.

Please join me in welcoming, California Book Award winner, National Book Critics Circle award finalist, Kingsley Tufts award winner, recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Original: Doug Powell.

As I matured (somewhat), the swirling questions grew more insistent and complex. Can you really burn a pimple off with a match? Will I ever really need algebra again? Can you get pregnant through a skirt?

But now, at a time when I assumed all questions would be answered to my satisfaction, here comes the most pressing of all: Can I be a poet with only half a face?

Just a tad of backdrop: A week or so ago, I dribbled a little soup and laughed at it and then drank something and felt that one side of my mouth was stronger than the other so I ran upstairs to look in the mirror and asked hubby “Does my mouth look different?,” and it did, just a teeny teeny little downturn in one corner so I got in the car and off to a neighborhood med center, all the while feeling (or thinking I was feeling) the left side of my body slowly collapsing, and I got there and said “I think I’m having a stroke,” and then there was the ambulance altho I remember being upset both that they couldn’t find a vein and didn’t play the siren and I got to the hospital and had a CT scan and many, many people told me to raise my arms and curl my toes and lift my eyebrows and smile, smile, smile, which I couldn’t, my smile was just grotesque little one-side-only grimace and I remember cursing every fatty food I’d ever inhaled, blaming the world for my soaring blood pressure, hating being black and female and overweight and predisposed to this chaos, stroke stroke stroke, die die die and i wrote a goodbye poem in my head during an MRI and started saying see ya to my life and then a nice lady came into my room and said “Never mind.”

No stroke. Bell’s Palsy. A niggling little virus, maybe, that has no real purpose, comes on unexpectedly, and stays as long as it likes. A week? If I’m lucky? Six weeks? Maybe. A year? It’s been heard of. What it means is, for the unforeseeable future, the left side of my face is just–well, frozen. I can’t grin. I drool when I eat. Headaches are frequent and unannounced. I can’t lift my eyebrow. And I must blink my eye manually, which is much more of a pain in the ass than it sounds.

Now that my medical issues are seemingly under control, and I’ve realized that I don’t have to rush through my memoirs, here is the question I most need answered: Am I still a poet?

I never realized how tightly the way I sound is connected to what I want to say. The minute I’ve written something, I begin looking for a way to say that something out loud. And yes, I’ve read mythic tales of poets who hate the sound of their own voices, who are content to have their words inked, bound, and therefore relatively accessible. Me? I believe that words are meant to touch the page for a tiny little instant. They don’t truly live until they’ve ridden the air.

But now my stanzas come halting and lazed. I have to slow my speech and enunciate. I’m terrified that I will speak and not be understood, that the full meaning beneath those words will be lost within the newly-slurred mechanics of my deadened half.

How can I say this? I am a poet. I need my whole mouth back. My pen can’t do it alone.

Now we are jumping to the Math Quiz portion of this post:

You land at LaGuardia Airport close to 1:00 a.m.

You have a 2:00 a.m. Metro North train to catch at 125^th St. for the 70-minute journey home

LaGuardia is 6 miles from the 125^th St. Station, about 15 minutes by car

Do you:

1. Pay $40 (with tip) for a cab ride to the station, or
2. Pay $2.25 and take the public bus that is supposed to arrive at 1:16

If you said A, congratulations, you are fast asleep in bed now, next to your wife.

If you said B, then you are at the bus stop wondering why the bus is so late. You are getting on at 1:31. You are looking at your phone obsessively, wondering if you will make it, as the driver goes slower and slower. You are getting off at 125^th and Lexington and watching the train you want to be on, the last of the night, on the overpass, slide into the station. You are kissing the train good-bye. You are coming up with a contingency plan. You are still on West Coast time, you tell yourself. You duck into the subway station on the corner and ride downtown to go to a diner till the trains start running again.

The 6-train is a brightly-lit, mobile motel: a number of passengers are slumped in their chairs, hats pulled over their eyes. It’s a ride to work for others, and a ride home for two young women who get on at 79^th. But the image you can’t get out of your head is the twenty-five year old man, with his two year-old son asleep, belly-up, in his arms. The father’s hands are locked around the boy’s waist. The father has a large backpack parked under his legs and a large brown shopping back wedged under the plastic seat. You hope they are going somewhere: a relative’s, a friend’s. You pray that they aren’t riding under the city all night. You remember the father you saw the day before at the Tucson Street Fair; he was with his daughter, who appeared to be about eight. There were five cops surrounding them. “Leave him alone, not in front of his daughter,” you were tempted to say, till a bystander said, “the father brought it on himself. He was cursing and yelling at one of the cops.” You think of your father, the Monday Night Football game when you were eleven, the drunken vibe in the air, the wasted guy in his Wrangler jeans and mustache and glossy eyes, who cursed at your father right in front of you, mocked him, how you felt angry, sad, and helpless.

You get off the 6-train at Union Square. It’s 2:50 a.m. As you walk the shadowy, empty streets to the Lyric Diner on 22^nd and Third, you wonder if someone will try to intrude upon you. When you were twenty, you had a thirst for confrontation, but you are forty-three now, rolling a handled suitcase, and wearing a Steven Alan sweater. And you have a four year-old daughter at home, who you haven’t seen in five days. You ease into a booth in the diner and order Earl Grey and eggs and read the Duino Elegies for a class you’re teaching. The next train isn’t for three hours. Rilke says, “only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently do I know the world”.

Mary Karr reads on Tuesday, April 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Rubloff Auditorium. She took a few minutes to talk about what she’s reading, what she’s read, and who she’d quote:

What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again?

Too many to count. My message to young writers always comes from Beckett: “Fail better.”

On your bookshelf but unread:

New book on Stalin (Bloodlands), rereading John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction.

Can you remember the first poem you read and really liked?

Winnie the Pooh, “Wherever I go there’s always Pooh…” and cummings “[in Just-].” Memorized “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at age 12, but it’s faded and tattered as an old flag.

A cause you would attach your name to:

What cause would have me?

The picture that comes to mind when you hear the word “poetry”:

Zilch.

If forced to quote your own writing, what line or poem would you provide?

Oh God. I’d bob and weave like a boxer. Never happen.

Expression you greatly dislike:

Art for art’s sake. It was necessary when Gautier said it and through about 1950, now it’s an excuse for doily-making art that refuses to be necessary.

The longest amount of time you’ve gone without writing [creatively]?

15 months. I was very sick, told I had liver cancer.

Favorite public figure:

Jesus.

Favorite literary device:

Metaphor.

When I think of Chicago, I think of…

Studs Turkel buying me lunch at a great steakhouse. How we’d first sat in the sound booth playing Janis Joplin, who’s from my neighborhood. And he was so loud at lunch a guy came by after and said, “Nice have lunch with you, Studs.” It was  a record-breaking 109 degrees that day. I also think of the fine stories by Stuart Dybek in The Coast of Chicago, and of a great conversation Stuart and I had till 3am there once with my then student Adam Levin about Cormac McCarthy.

BOOK Southern Africa has posted videos from a reading last week organized by South African PEN and Poetry International Web South Africa. Part of a protest reading that took place in 33 countries around the world, South African writers shared their own prison writing alongside English and Afrikaans translations of Liu’s “Charter 08″ and “You Wait for me with Dust.”

The final item on the programme was the reading of Xiaobo’s poem, “You Wait for Me with Dust”. First it was read in the original Mandarin by an anonymous, masked reader. This was a haunting encounter for those who imagined the solitude from which it was written. It was followed in English, read by Liesl Jobson, and an Afrikaans translation by Johann de Lange was read by Karin Schimke.

The reading was a call for free speech as Liu remains in prison despite the international attention his Nobel Peace Prize drew last year. In solidarity, SA PEN’s newly formed Writers in Prison Committee announced that they would begin efforts to bring attention to imprisoned writers throughout Africa.

What line or poem do you find yourself sharing again and again?

Of my poetry, I’d have to say “My Name’s Not Rodriguez,” “The Calling,” “Piece by Piece,” or “Tia Chucha.”

On your bookshelf but unread:

I have many books I’ve bought and have not been able to read. The one I want to get to soon is Richard Price’s Freedomland.

Can you remember the first poem you read and really liked?

I heard poetry before I really read it. It was a reading of Jose Montoya, David Henderson, and Pedro Pietri in Berkeley when I was 18 years old—I had no idea what poems were until then. I’ve never been the same since. As for reading poetry, I’d have to say Pablo Neruda‘s poems were the first that really spoke to me.

A cause you would attach your name to:

The healing of the world through the natural means already existing within us and around us. The arts being key to tap into our own natures and to connect to nature.

The picture that comes to mind when you hear the word “poetry”:

A young girl from Mexico, undocumented, age nine, reciting poetry in Spanish when asked to do so—although she had never spoken in class before.

If forced to quote your own writing, what line or poem would you provide?

A hungry people have no country

—from “Running to America”

Expression you greatly dislike:

The word ‘awesome.’

The longest amount of time you’ve gone without writing [creatively]?

Ten years, more or less.

Favorite public figure:

Harold Washington, former Mayor of Chicago.

Favorite literary device:

None other than just writing, writing, and more writing.

When I think of Chicago, I think of _________.

Snow, snow, and more snow (I love Chicago nonetheless).

Via The Best American Poetry, John Ashbery reads his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Promontory” from Illuminations. Originally published in 1886, Norton will release Ashbery’s translation in May, though not with his above comments about scholars’ endless attempts to track Rimbaud through Scarborough just because he mentions it in the poem. “He could have just read about it like the rest of us have, at one point or another.”

(More of Ashbery’s Rimbaud translations will appear in the April issue of Poetry, along with an essay by M. Ashbery about his work)

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this very thing lately. After my recent interview about the books I read last year, I realised I’ve hardly read any books from other African countries except for South Africa. It is easier for me to buy a book from America or the UK than is is for me to buy a book from another African country. The books are just not available. There is something wrong with that. It appears this is the same for many areas of the arts.

The limitations on African poets are bidirectional; not only is there little access to material from other African countries, their work is vetted to a global audience through outside systems, keeping a very tight, closed loop on the definition of African literature and the new work its influence produces. According to the The Africa Centre, “New voices in Pan-African poetry have historically gained their global exposure and documentation through foreign publications and academic research. These narrow channels have limited the plethora of African writers, poets, and academics from being read and heard throughout the world.” To help you catch up on all of the Pan-African poetry you’ve been missing, the site also features and impressive database of poets’ recordings here.

This very room where audience members now sipped cabernet and leafed through back issues of the BLR, once served as the social work office. As a third-year medical student many moons ago, I rifled through bins of used clothing, hunting for a pair of pants for one of my patients. He was homeless, and his discharge was delayed because he lacked pants.

I could never have envisioned that someday poetry and prose would be regular denizens of Bellevue, alongside staphylococci, appendectomies and myocardial infarctions.

In 2001, the review put out a call for “poetry, fiction, and nonfiction submissions on the themes of health and healing, illness and disease,” subjects which, at an earlier time, would not have been considered topics for polite company. Instead, Bellevue Literary Review and its readings have attracted a broad following. Ofri theorizes that this is because “everyone is at some point touched by illness, whether personally or through the experiences of a family member. None of us are immune to the frailties and limitations of the human body.”

Hal Sirowitz, the former Poet Laureate of Queens, NY, recited his poems with an absolute deadpan delivery. This was not a self-styled conceit, however. Sirowitz discussed, forthrightly, the Parkinson’s Disease that has been gradually limiting his motions and speech. He’d undergone deep-brain-stimulation surgery a few years ago that released him from the tyranny of rigidity, and allowed him to participate in events such as this. In the poem “Father’s First Heart Attack” he read:

“…He had seen actors pretending
to have heart attacks on TV,
so he knew what was happening.
But he couldn’t get the dramatics
right…
…If he ever gets a second one, he
hopes it’ll be more TV-line.
He wants to die like a professional.”

Each week he throws the microphone open to any poet or musician brave enough to accept the challenge in front of a heckling crowd. Language is no barrier. “My aim is to introduce people to the best of other cultures,” Derki says. “And always the best of other cultures is poetry.”

This video raises one of the more urgent questions of the day: What poem would you break over someone’s head? And whose?

The British Council’s Wales-India programme in Kerala includes bringing two of Wales’ most famous poets (Menna Elyfn, Paul Henry) together with two of Kerala’s (O.N.V. Kurup, K. Satchidanandan) for a unique and compelling joint reading encompassing poetry in Welsh, English and Malayalam. Poet and dancer Tishani Doshi will read from her debut novel ‘The Pleasure Seekers,’ and National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will discuss her much-loved poetry in a separate session. To wrap up, the five poets attending will explore how poets from Wales and Kerala respond to the different challenges and opportunities of writing across more than one language.

Speaking to The Hindu on the subject of the festival’s ambitions and readers’ actual adoption of translations, Jnanpith Award winner Kurup notes:

Kerala is a land of avid readers, even in the rural areas there are plenty of people who revere the written word. Most of them are keen followers of Malayalam literature and poetry. English is read by a comparatively smaller group of readers. One of the reasons is the prohibitive price of books in English, which pushes it out of the reach of a large number of readers.

Go to a poetry reading or sloth around the house in your Slanket? Tough choice. Well, now you can do both, because the eighth installment of HTMLGIANT’s Live Giants online reading series is tonight. In honor of the release of Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems, local poets in Chicago and New York—including such comrades of Harriet as Matthea Harvey, Suzanne Buffam, Jordan Davis, Dorothea Lasky, and Jaswinder Bolina— will read from Ruefle’s work. The readings will be streaming live, so sit in front of your computer, Slanket or no, and enjoy.

The Star Tribune has kept up with the latter-day “Walt Whitmans, Amiri Barakas, and Nikki Giovannis”:

The poems in the slam, many R-rated, often fit into certain types. There were bullet-pointed list poems, poems about politics and contemporary issues, war and intractable social problems. Spirituality and sex, with partners and one’s self, were frequent topics in frank rants that sounded like personals ads. And there were anthems, as well, with some performers declaring comfort in their girth (“I’m not fat”), sexual orientation or religious beliefs.

All of those topics are standard fare for slams, even if delivered with mastery by the likes of Khary Jackson, of Soap Boxing. One of his poems was a celebration of gay black sexuality.

Themes of hope and survival — a mother surviving cancer, a young woman surviving violence — surfaced in some of the most poignant poems . . .

Poets of a certain age — as in, eligible to collect Social Security — dominate the literary scene around town. Now a younger generation is demanding to be heard.

The leader of the pack, Daniel E. Pritchard, 27, founder of the online literary review Critical Flame, explained in a recent e-mail: “A number of young poets, myself included, sitting in a reading at a big Boston University lecture hall, were put off by a comment about 35 being ‘like 17 in poet years.’ Well, none of us were even 30 yet (just the age of, say, [John] Keats and [Percy Bysshe] Shelley). We hardly felt ourselves to be children. Over drinks later, we joked about being tired of listening to our elders, and a reading series for young poets was proposed”. . .

It’s the middle of Poetry Month, so I think we’re obligated to send some love to the poets and their books. This was always one of my favorite posts when I did Harriet back in the day: it’s not exactly like getting singled out from the general audience on The Price is Right, but hey, people of the profession with few monetary rewards are grateful nonetheless. I’ll be doing a few of them before my time expires.

But I do want to rant a bit here and say that we shouldn’t subscribe to the notion of the freebie for everthing or that poverty is part of our game. That only leads to a type of abuse. Case in point: when newspapers were cutting costs, one newspaper in particular, which for years had been paying a notable poet to write a weekly column on poetry, determined that “poets would do this for free!” So the column was cancelled and now poets introduce their own poems. Is there no dignity in poetry?

It’s rare for me nowadays to do a reading or presentation gratis. It’s not that I think my creative work is worth any money, but I sure as hell know my time is. When organizers approach me with the opening phrase “We’re on a limited budget” or “We really don’t have much funding” I grow wary. These are not the most persuasive arguments. What I’m really hearing is that I’m worth as little as they can afford. If they had more money they’d probably not be asking me. I think it’s more endearing when organizers are upfront and say, “We can’t offer an honorarium but we will make sure you have a warm audience” or “We can’t pay you but we will sell your books!” It’s called an exchange: and it doesn’t have to be monetary.

Since my time is more limited than ever, I pick and choose carefully. When I turn an offer down I do so graciously and I follow-up by recommending other readers. And sometimes, if the organization or institution is doing great work for the community, I say I’ll do it for no pay. It’s not charity; it’s acknowledgment.

The only time I get annoyed is when I turn an offer down and then the organizer fires back with a guilt trip that appeals to my ethnic sensibilities: “But we have a large Latino community that’s hungry for writers of color.” All the more reason to pay me–or bite me. Would this tactic ever be used on white writers? It would sound rather funny and awkward. Also, it affirms the suspicion that we writers of color are asked to read because we’re writers of color, not because we’re good poets or performers

I mean, it’s bad enough that this misrepresentation is finding itself into poems. Where did I hear that? Oh, yes, there was a white boy poet who wrote and read a poem at AWP that made reference to people benefitting from their “caramel-colored skin” and “short skirts.” But we’re supposed to think it was funny and ironic and tongue-in-cheek. Har har fucking har har. Asshole.

Anyway, this afternoon I’m off to attend a ceremony honoring high school students in Newark who participated and placed in our annual High School Writing Contest. It’s a wonderful festivity with proud parents in the front row and giddy teenage writers at the podium, most of them reading in public for the first time. It’s a nice reminder that writing thrives in communities that don’t stroke egos and sanction stupidity like the aforementioned incident. Who knows what seeds will be planted at this event? Who knows what artists will blossom from these first steps?

(Well, technically there was one audience member but she seemed confused as per her question: “What’s this thing about?”)

One has to be gracious, and I was neither mad or annoyed, just disappointed. And then I moved on. It reminded me of other memorable occasions: once I co-read with Eric Bogosian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. It was clear no one was there for me. And after we read, we both had to stand on stage for the Q&A and even I asked Bogosian a question.

And on one occasion, I had my best friend attend one of my readings. While I was being introduced (by Harryette Mullen, no less), the microphone kept fading out, so I prepared myself for the worse. I decided I would project and raise my voice if that happened in the middle of a poem. When I got up to read, I thought I sensed the microphone going dead so I raised my voice volume a few notches. All was well until my BFF finally called out: “Why are you shouting, bitch? We can hear you.” (Thanks, friend.)

And then there was that time at Columbia University when someone turned the lights off (it was a cold winter evening) while I was smack in the middle of a poem. It was so pitch black and no one said anything that I thought to myself: “Fuck. So the rapture is true.” I wasn’t the same when the lights went back on again; it takes a while to shift from atheist to believer to atheist who just got the caca scared out of him.

But you understand me, don’t you. Unlike members of my family. One time I was visiting my cousins in California and they were trying to wrap their brains around what I did–travel all over the country to read my work to other people. For pay. I thought they had figured it out until the next time I visited, one of them said: “Carlos was asking about you. You remember Carlos, the neighbor? Anyway, I was telling him how you went all over the country selling your books, so he asked if there was a chance he could tag along once in a while.” I knitted my eyebrows. “He wants to see what I do?” And my cousin said, “No. He wants to sell burned CDs.”

But the point to all of this is that one must have a sense of humor about the whole po-bizz thing. Taking it too seriously is bad for your health. I’m reminded of Fady Joudah (at our AWP panel on race and poetics) saying that he found out Emily Dickinson’s father was black. No one batted an eye. I even muttered, “Interesting.” And Fady whispered, “I was kidding.” But no one thought he was, because it was a panel on race, so he had to be serious…

Anyway, I just had to unburden myself a bit. Even I have to concede that I need to chillax. But this is it! I’m going post postal after this.

Went over to Green-Wood Cemetery this afternoon, in fact, to hear Allison read from the book to a crowd of nearly one hundred and lead a very sharp and decidedly un-academic question and answer session afterwards that delved into her process in putting together a book that necessarily moves back and forth through time while encountering a wide range of large subjects (life, death, war, the European settling of the northeast, the development and constant threats to the ecosystem supported by the 478-acre cemetery & its approximately 600,000 denizens, the blurring of the line between natural and unnatural, the reality of personal experience – Cobb’s consciousness – as the glue holding the writing together through what I take as a process that invented itself as it went along, and that’s just what’s obvious so far).

This event was a return of sorts for Cobb, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, as well as an opportunity to give a reading on the grounds of a site she so deeply investigated and clearly fell for – and for my part I felt honored to be in the cemetery’s chapel surrounded by that various audience. It wasn’t bad, either, to walk with my daughter around the chapel in which Cobb read and get to see robins and quaker parrots (there’s a flock of wild urban parrots nesting in the cemetery – they’ve been there for years – along with the multitudes of other avian life; between Green-Wood, Central Park, and Jamaica Bay there’s a hell of a lot of bird watching experience available here in our lovely despicable metropolis of unsortable dimension) landing and looking for grub on knolls covered with graves of Revolutionary and Civil War veterans and making it work. Here’s some material from the beginning of the book, which delves into the early history of the cemetery while rooted in our recent past as well, not to mention the ever-present construction, word by word, of a present:

“As first cemetery president, the soldier and engineer David Bates Douglass set about sculpting a garden landscape. A few decades earlier, Douglass had surveyed the wilds of the Michigan Territory with its governor Lewis Cass. In hopes of luring settlers, they reported that they found the Indians peaceful and the land promising.

Douglass brought order to Green-Wood. He had the trees thinned and the underbrush cleared to create the aspect of the glade rather than the thicket. A look coming into the light:

English hawthorn

Big-leaf magnolia

American elm

Italian cypress

Black locust

Scotch pine

ancient whisper for “spear” and “spire”

***

First snowfall.

I follow a path scraped down to stiff grass to the grave of JOSEPH O. BEHNKE. Beside ist sags a half-melted snowman, thorned branch sticking out of its back. 1958-2004. OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM II, CHARLIE BATTERY 1/258 FIELD ARTILLERY, 95^TH MILITARY POLICE BATTALION. LIVED FOR HIS FAMILY, DIED FOR GOD AND COUNTRY. A soldier carved into the stone kneels with his head down, rifle propped in one hand, helmet dangling from the other. The name MIRIAM P. is inscribed below, awaiting her dates.

word a lamp awaiting fire

In the late 1940s, grave owners at Green-Wood donated the wrought iron fences around their plots as scrap for bullets and ships. Today in many places only the gates remain, connecting nothing, an opening older than soil, an eye.

More than a dozen condolence notes appear on the Behnke tribute site at fallenheroesmemorial.com. Specialist Kovalik ends his note: I still feel a bit guilty though, and you know why, take care Behnke.

The first use of the word wood to mean “insane” appears in the year 725. They bee bitten by the wood dog the devil, and be fallen wood themselves.

Numb with cold, I turn from Behnke’s grave back toward the gate, head down against the wind. By the edge of Valley Winter, I notice a stone inscribed MARTHA, with a seal for the WOMENS OVERSEAS SERVICE LEAGUE, half sunk in dirt. I scrape off leaves and snow with a stick to uncover the last name, EFFIE. A fat white caterpillar ticked inside the I recoils from the stick. It moves more and more slowly until it freezes in the frigid air.

I shall appear blank

a gleaming creature”

(A few extra things: some of the above formatting is not accurate to the actual layout in the book; there are copious notes in the back of the book, which indicate without a lot of jargon the very broad range of sources used in Green-Wood, and I am finding them informative and non-intrusive without exception; several members of the Behnke family were at the reading today, which, without asking Cobb about it, I took to be an indication of the rigor and sensitivity she brought to this work; I included this passage because I heard Cobb read from it today and was particularly struck by it….the book seems to me to have a tonal range that can’t be adequately captured by a single excerpt, so I wouldn’t take this one as purely emblematic if I were you.)

“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge‘s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

I guess looking like shit is a matter of opinion, or taste, or preference, or fixation, or habit. Senator Harry Reid, who is from Searchlight, Nevada, a town I’ve been through many times as it is the one stop on the 111-mile route between Las Vegas and Needles, CA, home of my grandmother Beulah, who will be 91 in February, may not look like shit – if televised press conferences and talking head style interviews (sans rhythmic fear of air) are any indication he seems to possess a vigorous sheen no doubt succored by the folksy austerity borne of communing with creosote bushes while speculating on the nature of dialect and avoiding the speed trap that is the other major feature of Searchlight (pop. 562) along with a few casinos and a little gas station/McDonald’s/convenience store triumvirate that wields a large portrait of the Senator himself in its connective tissue between businesses and the oddly over-mirrored restrooms. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that a political son of Searchlight (there’s a great song by the late band Mule called “Searchlight” / which might / if I recall with any accuracy / which I do not typically / when it comes to memory / be about being pulled over / in the existential manner) may stake claim to a wholly archaic relationship with the notion of dialect – regular trips to our nation’s capital notwithstanding; one’s professional life and one’s speculations on human speech patterns in solemn collectivity should be separated by a near-impenetrable magnetic shield, as any creative commenter will tell you -– given that one may go very long periods of time in Searchlight, decades even, in isolated contemplation. This can produce a personal diction of curious historical range and one no doubt difficult to contextualize rapidly, as would be required on a word-by-word or even syllable-by-syllable basis. Serious reframing. Who can know from one word to the next if passing terms are from last year, last decade, or last century?

At any rate, to solve the two-poems-left mystery I decided to turn to K. Silem Mohammad’s book Breathalyzer and read only the next to last lines in all of his poems. The book was kindly just sent to me by the publisher in the same box as many copies of old books of mine that I didn’t even have to pay for because our publisher is too broke to charge me for copies in the first place and there’s a great deal of generosity to be found in a situation that can’t afford the integrity of a large scale distribution apparatus, much less a staff to keep track of shit, which I will nonetheless look like eventually before I get elected Senator (“I’d be a terrific Senator / because I’d love it”). In looking through one of my books I came across a poem I wrote in 1999 with the title “The banana peel is an important part of the eco-system,” which is something my brother Edmund said to me and which I even attributed to him out of some momentary moral failure (or else I was sub-consciously predicting the next century’s waves of attribution). But what got my attention was the following stream of words: “In the Iceman’s days nicknames / Were prevalent: Annie Annie Oakley / Ansy Slem Arnold Anton Ralton Leston / Selmton Tonton Selmselm Fuckton Cuntton Asston Workton.”

Seeing all those monikers again lit within me a burning urge to identify their sources so they might not get misunderstood as operating within a type of white dialect that could prevent me from getting elected in the future. I used to get e-mails from the Harry Reid folks that were part of a “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” general campaign of political schlock and aww, and if I take that example and run with it I want people to understand just what “Give ‘Em Argh Asston” is all about. Anselm can be a difficult name for you Americans to pronounce, and the above “lines” are actually a list of nicknames conferred upon this body across a roughly twelve year period that began at the age of nine in fourth grade when a few classmates decided it would be easier to call me Annie than try and deal with the tongrobatics required to utter the lm combination in Anselm. Christian Ortiz discovered a little biography of Annie Oakley in a pile of books at the back of the classroom one day, having been ordered there to mull over his loquacious bouts of inattentiveness, and his punishment gave way to the realization that it would be far more entertaining for our class to refer to me as Annie Oakley than just Annie, and so that stuck for several years.

Ansy represents a sadder tale, if you can believe that, for it was the teasing nickname my wonderful half-sister Kate used to call me and which I pretended to detest but secretly didn’t mind hearing until her abrupt and tragic death in 1987. No one has been allowed to call me Ansy since, though no one else really knew about it so its circulation was a little easier to control as opposed to the viral spreading of Annie Oakley around the halls of P.S. 19. Pointing out that Ms. Oakley was a crack shot with a rifle did not advance the cause of my true name. Slem was a kindlier nickname in that one of my track coaches in high school, Mr. O’Neal, simply could not pronounce Anselm without swapping the e and l and decided to shorten Anslem to Slem, thereby making things easier for the whole team. This worked until I got to college in Buffalo and starting being called Arnold by my three horrifying roommates who heard me do an imitation of the Hans and Franz “pump you up” characters from late-eighties SNL and decided Arnold was more apt for my then-130-lb. geek frame than Anselm. Finally came the –ton years. A very drunk but generally genial bass-throated gentleman named Mac started loudly calling me Anton one day from a balcony in downtown Buffalo during a massively attended street festival and that stuck. Shortly thereafter a new housemate (one of seven) revealed that some friends in his hometown, three brothers as it were, went by the names of Anton, Ralton, and Leston. Suddenly I found myself with a modular nickname, thus begetting, depending on the nature of an evening’s activities, Selmton (for those who could do the lm combo), Tonton, Selmselm, Fuckton, Cuntton (never sure if that should have one t or two), and on and on. It also became situational: Workton was what I was called leaving home for any job; Schoolton when threatening to study; Foodton I remember as well as Peanutbutter Foldton (a Buffalo delicacy) during culinary moments. One guy refused to call me anything but Ralton, thinking it the funniest thing he’d ever heard. No day went by during which I wasn’t referred to by a half-dozen different nicknames, a condition which, as one might imagine, had cause to infect my humor with a brooding idiosyncrasy.

When I left Buffalo in 1994 for San Francisco I left behind that whole world of –tons as well, and the poem in question was written during a flashback on a return visit to SF after having left that cuckoo joint for New York some sequence of trips later. The names poured back onto me and would have drownded me with their peculiar histories had poetry not been my ally and filter. Speaking of poetry, the experiment with Mr. Mohammad’s next-to-last lines in regards to the two-more-poems phenomenon (I have even, myself, felt the phrase ready its frame in my larynx for articulation wholly unprovoked by my own intentions, such as they may be, as if the words were their own act…which is why I only read from single long poems at readings now) have led me to isolate the following line as potentially useful in the classic ambiguous-yet-vitally-internal fashion of replaceable reference as practiced by Mallarmé, early Polvo, and the old weird America: “in a way love is all there is.” In order to finish the experiment I will from this moment forward choose to hear “in a way love is all there is” at any instance a reader is forced by mysterious compulsion to state “two more poems” near the end of their reading (I already ignore the awful apology implied by the occasional inclusion of “just” ahead of “two more poems” or “two more”). If you do it too then we can get together some day, and we’ll have a good time, for I will not report the results of our experiment here.

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

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

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

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

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

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

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

When I do come across the 5-10% of poets who know how to illuminate their poems at a reading, without getting in their own way…I’m grateful to have been a witness. Creeley was an amazing between-poem talker, and Will’s mantle, functioning as sage-storyteller…showed me another side to the fine art of settling into your work. I felt it was a master class in astral projection, in accepting density as lineage. The operative parable for me, how poetry is a difficult art form to listen to, maybe related to his particular work and its wealth of trajectories…(the word-scapes in his new book, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the seepage that drenches the poet during the poem’s genesis, is incredibly rich)…but I imagine he meant poetry in general. 

And so he says, his solution at a reading is to contain the work. To frame/re-frame its context without giving it away. To sort of create a buffer between the intensity of the work by talking about the one plane of reality, before diving into the next.  Aware of each plane equally, the challenging one, shifting…depending on alignment.

 And I realized that’s something I attempt when I spend hours preparing for a reading, choosing the trajectory within my time slot, the vibration of material being the dynamic that drives the reading. But a speaker in touch with his many hemispheres can perform that sort of delicate dance without losing focus. I felt he was determined to impart on us a deeper, fluid note beneath his tone. His drive, mesmerizing, as poem gave way to filter.

 But maybe this cushioning relates to a more mystical writing, one that knows body as vehicle more than witness. Anyway, just a thought about getting lost in preparation when the work tells you what you need…and when the need speaks louder.

That said, I would like to build on the conversation that gathered a few angles in the comments on Douglas Oliver’s letter. My feeling is that prosody in performance (and taking off on Doug’s sense of this we can include public performance and private readings both aloud and internally of a poem under this umbrella), if it’s unchained from any particular polemic or prejudice, can be a connective thread of discussion across poetries that might be radically different. The difficulty is often in finding a solid opening question, so I’ll try one with the understanding (and hope!) that most answers will by necessity be various: how do you – you being anyone reading this who reads or writes – begin to hear in your practice of reading and/or writing? Or how do you think you begin to hear?  My own angle on this is slanted towards the writing side of the question, but I’m interested in any possible take. For my part I often, but not always, look for a single sound, usually a consonant or two, to begin writing with or against. That listening for a sound might be something like an attempt to get near Doug’s “smallest possible unit” of the poem-in-formation (though what I hear to begin with isn’t necessarily a stress point), but I also understand it as part of a working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice. This is when I am looking for a way to begin and don’t have an idea, a subject, a line, a text, a work in progress, etc., to be clear about it. And I’m not assuming that hearing begins when writing begins. In fact, there are many times when I’m quite conscious that I’m listening before I begin writing. Anyway, this is a different kind of attempt at beginning, so please take it from here and change it as you like……

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

This implies to me, against much that is fashionable in literature today, that it does make sense to talk of people being able to read poetry better than others. There is no need for this to be in the least anti-democratic, because my statement also acknowledges that other interpretations will yield other tunes; but there again the notion of a better or worse reader will arise.

I needed to take such trouble over what may seem a minor point because I couldn’t reform the description of prosody unless I could put into it some secure-ish notion of the melody of a given poem. My prosodic reform begins with a redefinition of what a poetic stress is. All poetic music in any language, just about, depend upon duration, stress (or rhythm), and melody (intonation). Stress seems to happen in an instant of time that we may click with our fingers. Duration is its paradoxical bedfellow because everything that makes a syllable seem to carry a heavy stress takes time to happen. I have given many lectures testing out the following definition of stress before audiences, mostly by playing them the same blues song and asking them what causes a certain syllable to carry stress. As much as possible, I don’t influence their replies.

By common consensus we find at least one or two, often more, of the following elements as reasons why we think a syllable bears a stress. The basic model to bear in mind is like this:

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

… past of stress stress pause future of the stress

From everything audiences say the following can be factors in making us think a stress is heavy or light:

1. The sound: pitch (melody), duration, loudness, and voice quality. Since the stress happens in a notional instant of time – without content – duration is also the element that gives stress its content.

2. The main assignment of the position of a heavy stress is from abstract metrical pattern (if used) – or other poetic forms of patterning – plus linguistic factors, including the natural individual word-stress, the main information focus in the sentence (very important), syntax, etc.

3. In actual performance, 1 and 2 are combined with how important the meaning of the word is and how important is its emotional significance. A stress is a moment when we think we have unified the sound, the meaning, the emotional significance, and the functioning of the word within the sentence, into a single moment when all these come together into a single “beat”.

4. In practice, this gets more complex than I have time to go into. For example, audiences always agree that the pause after the word “Blues” affects our sense of how stressed the word is. How quick the syllables are before counts; how quick they are afterwards counts. The fact that “Blues” is part of the title (meaning) or that it is “blued” in the singing (emotional significance, plus voice quality) are part of the reasons why we think it is stressed. And so on.

5. All that is unified in the beat needs time to develop in the past or the future of the stress, or otherwise we have no time to make the comparisons which tell us whether a word is high or low in pitch or in loudness, important in meaning, emotionally significant, and so on. The past of the stress and the future are therefore read back both ways by the mind on to a single moment when we think the stress had occurred in the immediate past.

–––––––––––––> <––––––––––––––

past of the stress stress pause future of the stress

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

6. All this boils down to saying that the stress is the smallest moment in a poem when we perceive the developing artistic form. For poems I’d define form principally as a unity between sound, meaning, and emotional significance. I accept that forms are never perfect: again, I’m not reactionary. But someone has to explain why an audience when it sings along knows exactly at what moment to clap and knows when it gets the beat slightly “off”. It is not a moment of exact mathematical interval between the beats, but a much more mysterious interval which depends upon a formal perception.

7. Edgar Allen Poe thought metrics was like mathematics. In a way so do I, except that it is a mathematics of durations and pitches which has to take account of our emotional response to meaning.

Once stress has been redefined, it can also be seen as the sliding point where the instant of time through which the sounds have passed is united with duration. That is, it is also the moment when we unite the individual (and ineffable) instant of form into the ongoing processes of form. And we do that by reading durations of time both ways (past and future) on to that instant.

You can think of the instant as quantum-like if you wish. This is why I keep saying “notional instant” and “instant” – it’s an ancient philosophical problem whether we can bring an instant of time into consciousness. We can’t.

Then we may build up a hierarchy of formal development in the poem, considered in its ideal (ineffable) formal perfection:

The stress unites change (notional instant) and flow, but has to be anchored down in time before we can appreciate this. We anchor it in the syllable. The syllables unite into words and poetic lines, phrases, sentences, cadences, stanzas, and so on. Again, described in ideal perfection, the poem would then meet the Romantic poet’s ideal: the union of the part (stress) with the whole (the poem) within the one form, a form which gives “delight”.

Of course poems never do this perfectly and much experimental poetry is designed to allow them to do it as little as possible, by forbidding closure. But the forbidding of closure presupposes closure, so that avant-garde forms or art are always in tension with traditional forms; and much of their interest stems from that. We are, however, in a new era of space-time mathematics and our descriptions of the human mind are, in tandem, changing. This doesn’t mean that the human mind itself has changed much, perhaps….

Love,

Doug