The editors of Harriet have kindly invited me to join their merry band, and I’m honored to be here. Scared, too, though, that I won’t have much of interest to say. I guess we’ll find out. I may be posting snapshots of my tomato plants before my hitch is up.

Earlier this week was Sovereignty Day, and today is Independence Day. To celebrate, please turn off your computer and go eat some ice cream in a park. Come back and read the rest of this tomorrow.

I don’t yet have a favorite Sovereignty Day poem-seems a bit premature-but I do have a favorite Independence Day poem: “Shine, Republic” (1934), by Robinson Jeffers. (This poem is sometimes confused with an earlier, more famous poem by Jeffers called “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1925), which is one of his grimmest, which is saying something.)

After four straightforward stanzas celebrating America’s founding principle of freedom and tracing that principle back to the dawn of Western civilization, Jeffers delivers two far more ambiguous stanzas. They can easily be read as pure cynicism: Rather than let the torch of freedom burn brightly, we’ve hidden it beneath a hood and perched it on the wrist of a government which pretends to be a democracy but is in fact just another Ceasar-headed empire. We can go through the motions of voting and all that, pretend we’re different and special, but we’re as doomed as any other empire, and future states will look back on us and scorn us for failing to remain constant to our ideals and for falling into the torpor of luxury.

But there’s another edge to the imperatives of the poem’s title and its last stanza, too, I think. We may indeed not live up to our ideals, and we may indeed pass away into history as a result, but isn’t there a suggestion here as well that if we nevertheless “keep the tradition, conserve the forms,” we can at least hope that “states of the next age” will learn something from us, namely to “edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury”?

A grim and grimly relevant poem in 1934 just as well as now, but perhaps it has some hope in it, too. Enjoy your 4th, and keep the spot sore!

The groups settled in on either end of the main floor an the upper balcony after I said a few words about silence – it’s dated, so 20th c. so maybe we, the 21st are saying goodbye to it, but once centuries are in conversation all time comes off the shelf. As it turned out only one of the kids, Arturo Campos, came. I asked people to join him and intone but just as we were beginning in came Yancielle and Leslie so the finale had thickened and the need for adult voices was gone. I just wandered like a clock. I bought a cap and the idea had been to give John a signal every ten minutes by taking it off. The point of this signal was to cause the groups of poets to move from station to station and the indoor plan was to stay still but then John would have nothing to do so we did our own call and response every ten minutes so I also had a little job. Monica de la Torre’s group was in the library. They were silently restringing a guitar that had no strings (Jeremy) and as I entered the library I saw a crowd of people raising tiny pieces of paper as if they were bidding. I nodded in approval with no idea of what was going on. The idea of directorhood, or conceptual artisthood I think is to be some kind of ghost. If the machine is working you simply float. Charles’s group and Stephanie’s group in the upper balcony seemed a little isolated. Nathaniel had some kind of light embedded in his chest and at a distance winking means a lot. C.A. Conrad seemed to be methodically reading, deeply involved. His concentration was all. Charles flanked the entrance with another kind of calm. I admired his authority. He wasn’t having to put out. He was. I thought maybe these guys would like to come down. The dancers were wriggling, tearing. Tim (Liu)’s group downstairs had lots of torn white paper on the floor. Rachel’s group all in black connected by ropes were in agon I thought. I get excited at the idea of the female form producing an abstraction. Women might be nothing, but we are so quickly allegorical as well. We’re a rich nothing that goes all ways at once. Rachel’s group was tugging at that thought. Once people began to drift, occupying slightly different spaces, one by one or by group (that wasn’t the plan!) (Oh yes it was!) The downstairs began to be empty. The building began to be empty. Everyone had gone outside, the rain had stopped and the piece was as it was planned with ten minutes to go. Myself and the Dia team (Kristin, Karen, Barbara) were drying John’s outdoor stage with paper towels. He was the final icon. At about eighteen past the kids entered the plaza and walked down the central staircases. Like young gladiators. Two girls and a boy. I forgot to mention the crowds. There were cameras following individual performers. People talked later about how great it was to be a silent audience. Not so much shhh as not bothered with patter as a group, silent mutual appreciation often. Early on the talkers stepped outside if they wanted to speak. When the silent performers began to step out the silence infected the talking space so it was all silent now. The kids performed their Hall of Silence, well silently. But kid whispering, it was sweet, with very expressive gestures. They were so much better than they were at school. Better than in rehearsal, so much better than in the end of the school year talent show in which they had been remarkably scared and still. Here they flew. John hit his note – growling, low, stopped, start. Bleating, stopping. I had to jump my ass off to signal this performance to say the time had come. For me my glasses popping out of my pocket meant I had signaled well. I was done. The kids now performed their poem aloud. The plaza was silent again. Their kid voices traveled. It was about 830 by now. The gloaming had not begun. We saw them crystal clear in the calm of the wet stone plaza. It was a quiet assertion of a sense of beauty, young beauty, in formation. So I thought it was simply ecstatic and it brought tears to many eyes. Not mine, though I was awed which I think I am a lot. The party was like so much bubbles. Returning to our natural urban chatter I think there was communal joy, success. Frankly there’s nothing better than one shot. It hit, it resounds. The night, the silence, was done. Summer is open at last.

Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.

When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”:

It is spring & people are out repainting their front steps
Glacier blue because this village is closer to the glacier than
The volcano emits a tiny rumble & drools lava once every few
Years go by & its followers grow fat with having nothing to
Fear here is of the icy-&-slowly-approaching variety

Zeugma, besides being fun to say, delightfully interrupts any smoothly rhythmical reading of the poem, and reminds me of loosening threads in fabric with a stitch remover. A common image in Pity the Bathtub is glass, and Harvey’s poems equate the formation of glass with the poetic process itself—raw material must soar to a certain degree before it forms to perfection, or at least completion, in a mold. From section two of the title poem:

. . . it is because he works with glass
That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable
(she does not love) he knows how to take something
Small and hard and hot and make room for
His breath quickens at night

So I was very excited to read, see, and listen to Harvey’s latest project; in collaboration with the Miró Quartet, she composed a poem to be read with Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. The poem hauntingly describes girls in a glass factory, making thermometers, portholes, and, most interesting, a glass girl. Listen to the performance, recorded at the White Pine Festival as part of the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Radio Project, and read the poem, including five original photographs that serve as titles to the movements of the collaboration.

Coincidence or consequence, you might wonder, about the Glass/glass connection? When asked about beginning the process of collaboration, Harvey says, “I listened to the CD of the music over and over again and started writing down random images. The first thing that came to me was an image of floodwater going over the banks, and then I started picturing these girls dancing around and pouring liquid from one thing into another and that sort of turned into a glass factory, I think because of the name of Philip Glass.”

This initial association blossoms into a meditation on boundaries and creation; the strains of the music correspond to rising temperatures, the high heat of melting, and the low notes of formation. And the images provide an intriguing mental backdrop on the stage shared by poem and music. In a Bookslut interview, Harvey says, “My poems are friends with paintings,” and this poem is further proof of the weight images and words bear on each other.

Like great poetry, glass both magnifies and reflects objects and subjects. Or, as Harvey writes in “Self-Portrait with Glass Ball, 1936” (in a series of poems about Max Beckmann paintings):

If only I had looked
into that third eye—for though it had no ties to visions
it knew my heart, was my heart.

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

by Kenneth Goldsmith

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

READ THE REST HERE.

Years ago, I wrote the following story about the Muse:

. . .How did I come to think, as a young child who wanted to be a poet, that I had no Muse? The story rides on the kind of convoluted misunderstandings to which children are prone, yet in another sense its logic is impeccable. As far as I can reconstruct it, my reasoning used to go like this:

1. “A woman who concerns herself with poetry should . . . be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence,” wrote Robert Graves. I read this famous statement often enough, stated directly or indirectly, to absorb the idea that not only must Muses of course be female, but, more importantly for me, females must, presumably, be Muses.

2. Men, at least the men in my childhood Bible, Oscar Williams’ Immortal Poems of the English Language, address poems to women Muses. And they also address poems to women whose sexuality they desire or fear or admire. Therefore, according to my reasoning, male poets must have a heterosexual relationship with their Muses akin to the one they have with those other women who appear in their poems, Stella or Laura or Julia or Chloris or the Coy Mistress.

3. And therefore, the Muse must be a heterosexual, man-identified woman. Why should she be interested in women poets then? As feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar finally put it, years later, “is the pen a metaphorical penis?” No wonder the Muse was always hanging around male poets!

After I grew up and realized the Muse was still with me, I tried to find out more about this part of me that gave me poetry. The obvious turnabout was to look for a male muse. In Jungian therapy I uncovered my animus. Growing and writing and learning, I found the male side of myself, had long conversations with him, grew to love him. But though eventually I found him in many good forms—characters in my dreams, the wise man, Pan, the Green Man—he wasn’t where my poetic inspiration came from, but felt far from the place that is called, in Kundalini, “the empty-womb space where creation occurs.”

Inspired in part by my parents’ shared interest in the Goddess (they both took a class with the wonderful scholar Merlin Stone in the 1980s), by the Goddess movement in San Franciso where I was living, and by my interests in anthropology and feminism, I began to muse about and write poems about various goddesses, including Spider Woman, Aphrodite, Inanna, Coatlique, and others, for my book Eve. I forgot about the Muse for a while. . . until one day when I was reading The Muse Strikes Back, Katherine McAlpine and Gail White’s anthology of the poems women have written in response to male poets over the centuries. There suddenly I found her shimmering among all those challenges to the male appropriation of creative literary power. I found the Muse in the seam that links the voices and the answering voices of Meleager and H.D., Homer and Margaret Atwood, John Donne and Mary Holtby, Jonathan Swift and Louise Bogan. I could hear how fundamentally the halves of those dialogues were linked, and it was at last utterly clear to me that the same force had been inspiring the women and the men through all those centuries. The Muse’s voice is strong in the women’s poems. I recognize her tone.

Harriet commenter Terreson tells me that legend says Sappho was walking on the beach when Orpheus’ severed head washed up near her—still singing, inspiring her to be a poet and found her school. They sang to the same Muse. I’ve been calling her the Goddess. To paraphrase Ntozake Shange, “I found the Muse in myself. And I loved Her fiercely.”

But not only is my Muse my Goddess; my Goddess is my Muse. I began to understand this when I wrote he title essay to The Body of Poetry. Living with, and meditating on, the idea of the Goddess as immanent spriritual force brought together ideas I thought had been separate, from sentimentism to the postmodern poetess to metrical diversity to multiformalism (and just last week, in an interview with Tom Cable for the Robert Fitzgerald Award ceremony at the West Chester Poetry Conference, I understood how the metrical code is part of the same overall approach). Still, though, the spiritual aspect of my Goddess occupied one part of me, while my Muse, even though I thought of her in a similar way, was confined to artistic realms. It is only very recently—perhaps only tonight, as I write this final post for Harriet— that I realize that the truth is more demanding. My Goddess is my Muse, there’s no hiding from her, and she wants me to write poems.

As it turns out, the earliest poems ever known to have been written down were about the goddess Inanna, by her priestess Enheduanna. Diane Wolkstein collected these poems and assembled them into a remarkable epic story, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (the basis for Alice Notley’s epic The Descent of Inanna.) Reading this book feels like standing in the Museum of Heraklion in Crete (home of the famed Ring of Minos, as far as I know the only place on earth where one can be surrounded by many rooms of artifacts not created under patriarchy, or matriarchy for that matter, but under the system of female-led equal partnership between the sexes that Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice and the Blade calls gylandry. It is mind-blowingly different, in terms of gender dynamics and entire outlook, than anything created in the West in the last four thousand years. One of my favorite passages from the epic is the wildly erotic love dialogue between Inanna and her husband Dumuzi (scroll down a bit to get to the good parts).

It may seem that there is not much blatantly goddess-oriented poetry in the world, but because the goddess’s nature is not to transcend the world but to inhabit it, actually the goddess has a way of appearing everywhere in poetry. Like the sound of a meter with which one has been unfamiliar until recently, she may be hard to recognize at first, and you may think she’s not there, but once you get to know her and get in the habit of noticing, you’ll find her everywhere and in all kinds of poets. Hopkins’ “Binsey Poplars,” Crane’s “Proem,” Spenser, and early Yeats are infused with it, not to mention many ancient poets, and mystical and rhapsodic poets of all traditions from Rumi to Elytis.

And the goddess can be found everywhere nowadays, from the candles section of Wal-Mart to the remarkable hints pages of Women’s World magazine at the supermarket. I have been meeting with a group started by some young mothers in my neighborhood, one of a huge growing worldwide movement based on Sharon McCarlane’s book The Grandmothers Speak. What strikes me about this group is that it is not explicitly pagan or goddess-worshipping or shamanic in the sense of the various groups and people I’ve learned from for decades now. Instead, this new movement is extraordinarily simple, inclusive of any spiritual or healing path, so that one woman shares a peace pipe ceremony in which she was initiated by Native American elders, another talks about herbs, another about new ideas of Jesus, another about Mayan prophecy, another about minerals, and yet all of them are on some level talking about the Goddess in the simplest way: as female energy. The Grandmothers message for July says,

“We, the Great Council of the Grandmothers, are calling you to work with us in order to return your planet to balance. We are calling women to step into the power of the great yin and we are calling men to support them as they do this. All life on earth will benefit from the work we will do together. . .We have told you many times that for the world to return to balance, women must lead. It can be no other way. The earth must once be filled again with the energy of yin that is presently dangerously depleted. And to this end we have come to empower women and confirm men.”

Married to an environmentalist, I think about the current state of the planet often. A fundamental shift is taking place, very quickly, in the way all of us think about our earth and other people and creatures. This can lead to backlash and fear, but the overall movement is unmistakable. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. In spiritual terms, we can see the movement towards self-determination and civil rights, on the part of all creatures and people, as the goddess in action: the honoring of immanent power. How could poetry not reflect all of this? The next time I go to the Grandmothers Speak group, I will talk about the Muse.

PS I am looking forward to a trip into wolf-dens with a biologist in Montana this fall to begin a poetry project about <a href=” wolves“>wolves (an animal long associated with the goddess). Wolves are under attack and you can help them <a href=” wolves“>here. Thank you dear Harrietteers for a wonderful visit here!

Gary Winogrand, one of America’s greatest street photographers, working in the tradition (or rather reworking the tradition) of Henri Cartier-Bresson, said that he was not interested in reality, per se, but what it looked like in a photograph. Camille’s passionate reading of a Bishop poem recently allowed me to make a connection I would have otherwise never made. Or at least that is what I assume, or I probably would have already made it. But, it was Camille’s picture of the poem, her version, what she highlighted and chose to include in the frame, how Bishop’s poem looked in her post that put me in mind of Padre António Vieira.

Padre António Vieira? The connection would not have been lost on Bishop, since she was, how shall we say, an honorary Brazilian, having lived there for fifteen years. She was also fascinated by the culture of Latin Letters.  He was a 17^th century Luzo-Brazilian priest who left behind him one of the great bodies of Portuguese prose. It is hard to imagine that she would not have come across his work, or at least learned something of his life.

It is one of his sermons, given three days before he was to leave to return to Portugal to push for legislation to free the indigenous peoples of Maranhão State from slavery that suddenly shed new light on the Elizabeth Bishop’s “This Fish”. A few years ago I had translated and excerpt of Padre António Vieira’s “Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes” [Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish], an indictment of the vanities of his compatriots. It shares much with Bishop’s poem in terms of figures, metaphors, description (the suffocation of the fish in what Bishop calls the “terrible air”, the hooks and tackle of the trade) and above all the subject of human vanity.  The sermon is composed as an allegory. Bishop’s poem turns allegorical through the pressure she places on the visual. Both authors rely heavily on anthropomorphism.

One of the most exciting qualities of Padre Vieira’s prose is how close to necessity it is.  This necessity is larger than the author, and yet he invests himself in it, in the guise of Saint Anthony, as though he is the only one that actually understands the true extent of the problem. His stance is almost Socratic in the way he uses the rhetorical question and statements of the obvious to make his audience feel their own thoughtlessness; and not only that, like Socrates he takes actual risks in preaching what he has to say. So there is drama; though it is not displayed so much as implicit. The art of it is that it is so beautifully fluent and so unflinchingly pertinent to the task at hand. The irony, the critical eye, even the grace notes are subsumed in the unwavering logic. Each sentence wields a dialectical edge. The parodic attention to fish, and their fine scales draws comedy to itself in isolation, but as a component of the argument it lays bare its antithesis in a rather miserable depiction of human vanity. Bishop’s poem has much in common. They both, after all, describe the life, character and motivations of a fish.

“The Fish” must be one of Bishop’s most anthologized poems. That is because it is one of her most accessible, even though it doesn’t work that differently from “At the Fish Houses”, “The Bite” or even “The Moose”. They move, these poems, from banality via crescendo through ever deepening riffs of observation until enough pressure has accumulated that epiphany must ensue.

It is only natural that after a few readings of the poems I have just mentioned, the veneer of naturalness becomes increasingly thin and we are forced to look at them as pure aesthetic constructs, assembled with a watchmaker’s care, rather than realistic narratives of the poet immersed in the act of examining her world. We know there won’t be a crisis – things in a Bishop poem are always very precise, emotions always a bit gauzy. How unlike Emily Dickinson, another naturalist, where the movement from natural to metaphysical is always a sharp, somewhat insane leap of faith.  

In “The Fish” descriptive virtuosity is ennobled, to a certain extent, at the cost of its subject. The life of the fish, its history of conquest over adversity for which it carries its medals hooked to its jaw; the portrayed fish, with its wallpaper skin and the isinglass eyes – all of this is gorgeously rendered, yet finally somewhat improbable. They are details that, after we have read the poem enough times, tend to become cloying rather than expressive. Vieira’s fish is a rhetorical fish as well. The difference is that we assume this from the beginning. That’s the premise. Released from realism he manages to be more realistic.

The verisimilitude of the poem’s narrator, what there is of her, depends as well on the description of the fish. She uses the fish to justify her own presence as observer. Besides her keen eye she is hardly there, or made so discrete that she seems hardly there. “I caught”, “I looked”, “I held”, “I starred and starred”. There is absolutely no introspection.  Two issues come to the fore in this poem, both concern the narrator: on the one hand her rather disembodied presence as an actual person sitting in a boat and catching a fish, and, on the other, her exaggerated, painterly precision which increases in power as the depiction shuttles line to line gathering force.

Epiphanic structure, especially when used as a method of closure, typically releases its charge upon the character or narrator who has had the epiphany. James Joyce’s use of epiphany in the short stories of Dubliners is one of the 20th century’s great examples of shattering denouement through sudden realization. The reader, having gradually merged with the narrator is also meant to take the brunt of altered knowledge, in which the story we have just read, thinking one thing, suddenly begins to flicker and shift, like those old-fashioned mechanical arrival and departure boards in train stations and airports. Poets have always relied on this device. “And in the garden, cries and colors.” The last line of one of John Ashbery’s short obscure little poems from Rivers and Mountains is an epiphany wondering what it’s doing at the end of the poem it is assigned to, “Last Month”. And yet the poem would not be complete without it. One of Bill Knott’s great poems, published in Selected and Collected Poems (Sun Press, 1977), “To American Poets”, uses an anti-epiphanic ending to extraordinary effect. Because it is a political poem (one of the most successful ever written by an American in my opinion) we have felt the blood and flesh narrator throughout, as though he were mounting the barriers of 1848 and shouting, like Baudelaire, Il faut aller fusiller le Général Aupick! A bas Aupick! Aupick was Baudelaire’s much-loathed stepfather.

Because the narrator in the Bishop poem is as thin as air, the final epiphany simply discharges, to no effect, into that very same air. The more we read the poem, knowing that that final line is there, waiting to impress us, the more artificial the description of the fish becomes. Is it building towards the epiphany, or is it description for description’s sake? Likewise, the more remote and unlikely the narrator seems to us, the more meaningless the epiphanic structure with its melodramatic penultimate line of repeating rainbows finally is. Like all epiphanies, this one is meant to transcend, and to a certain extent replace the poem with new meanings. But we are not sufficiently invested in this opaque narrator to receive the charge. Any moral line, drawn between narrator and subject (the idea that the narrator has learnt something) is shot to hell by the baroque perfection of the poetic eye – at one remove from the speaker and finally the main subject of the poem. The failure of the poem is that we want the life of the person describing the fish to be sufficiently there to care about. But she’s not. Instead of cathexis there is diffusion. This misalliance grows the more we read the poem, and I’ve been reading the poem for thirty years. I first became uncomfortable with it when I tried to teach it about fifteen years ago, when, naturally I read it many times over a short period. Since then I have hardly read it at all. I finally realized there was a problem when, after reading Camille’s post, I tried to read Bishop’s poem once again for the umpteenth time and found it a labor, not of love.

One about the challenge and delight of writing poems celebrating my husband and particularly his body without objectifying him, and whether or not objectification is such a bad thing, and how I feel about the plethora of poems by men that mention women in passing as if it is inadvertent. One (related?) about how I can’t figure out how to write about children once they can talk, so whenever mine are at one of my readings, I keep reading poems about when they were nursing infants ( I spent, I recently calculated, four years nursing the two of them, and it made for some good poetry-writing time).

One about two talented and interesting young poets from UT Austin I met at the West Chester Poetry Conference, Jill Essbaum and Jessica Piazza, who are excited about rhyme and meter, respectively, and in new ways. One in profound appreciation of Edmund Spenser. One about rapturous contemporary poets such as Margo Berdeshevsky and Oleana Kalytiak Davis, and their roots and branches. One about why there is so much wonderful modern Greek poetry. One called “Flowers for Algernon,” that began with an anecdote about Charles Bernstein and myself both owning the complete Swinburne, an anecdote posted for five minutes on a thread here before I took it down, so that I think only Don Share saw it.

One about the experience of putting together the Multiformalisms anthology I recently edited with Susan Schultz and how the formalism/language poetry are not at all the opposed forces people imagine they are but are practically in cahoots. One about lyric, tracing the contrast between the historical, contextualized attitude of scholars like Virginia Jackson, author of a great book Don recommended to me called Dickinson’s Misery, with Jonathan Culler’s call for a renewed appreciation for pure lyric in an essay in a recent PMLA.

One about Patricia Monaghan’s descriptions of the role of the bard in the Celtic tradition. One about our convention of writing from left to right and up to down and what that says and does about poetry. One about Japanese languge and metaphor, and one about Japanese language and dactyls. One about my visit to Robert Bly’s Great Mother poetry conference and how the cult of personality affects poetry. One about epic, from the Kalevala to Notley. One about Donald Green, who sold me a handwritten book of his poetry from a card table on lower Fifth Avenue as I walked home from an Academy of American Poets event (I have spoken about this for a podcast about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, here).

One called “Time and Detail” about home decorating and poetry, how in each of them, detail is the trace both of love and of time spent. One about amphibrachs, following up on an earlier essay. One about how I adored translating Louise Labe’s poetry but could not make myself translate the women troubadours. One about the year I spent reading versification texts and what weird books they are. One comparing koans and kennings. One about the meaning of “craft.”

One on the tragedy of the ambitious Renaissance poet Amelia Lanier, who was only brought to light in the 1970s because someone thought she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, and how immensely productive she was only during the one brief period when she had a (female) patron. One about verse drama and opera.

There are posts for summer solstice or Beltane, or both, and one called “On Being a Holy Fool: Good Fences” about how boundaries in poetry and life encourage rhapsody. And there’s one on how blogging at Harriet has been so enjoyable, with a tribute to the energy and erudition of the commenters and a gratitude for how this site has provided such a safe and exciting place to change and grow as a poet. But this is that post. Thank you.

And this is also a promised post about some wonderful books of poetry in translation that have crossed my desk recently—Fady Jouhah’s translation from the Arabic of the great Mahmoud Darwish; Susan Stewart’s translation from the Italian of Alda Merini; Juri Talvet and H.L. Hix’s translation of the most important poet in Estonian, the nineteenth-century poet Juhan Liiv, who wrote:

HOME
What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home:
I don’t know, I don’t understand—
My mother loved me.

What made me glad at home,
What made me sad at home,
Made me sad, made me glad:
My mother loved me.

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.

If you are up at the Hispanic Society on Tuesday night at 7PM and then when the performance ends around 8:07 please look towards the lower central staircase. If you can, just head over there. You might see two children standing there, but maybe not. If you would like to you can intone this poem with them, or just us. You can sit on the ground, you can weave or be walking slow. You can do it Buddhist while I mean no disrespect to that kid’s parent or Buddhists themselves. Buddhists will definitely be involved. Maybe Buddhists would like to walk over and read this poem too. There’ll be a copy of it in the pamphlet you get when you walk in the door, but here it is:

Hall of Silence
By Class 401 and The Poetry Club at P.S.4

Silence in your house, it makes you
Sleepy
There’s no such thing as silence when it comes to nature
It’s beautiful to see nature all around you
I’ll fall asleep when I hear the sound of nature
Nature brings possibility
Resting
Colors, colors all around you
Silence makes me wonder
Things all around me
Beauty is a color that I won’t forget
Roads being empty, they are all alone
Ronaldo
Quiet screams the truth
Sometimes when cars pass you don’t really hear anything
Imagination, nature is beauty
Speechless
Quiet
Movement
You walk outside and see the bright yellow sun
You say you will have some fun in the sun
Nature is so beautiful it makes me so relaxed
When I walk through a hallway, there’s no silence near me
Green is the color of the grass on the
Ground
And the colors burst with joy
To play
Walk through the hall of silence
When I walk anywhere all I see is
Nature makes me think about animals flying all around me
Until I burst into a magical universe