Ron Egatz - “Post-Eisenhower Nouishment”

© Photo by Ab Sesay

Ron Egatz is the winner of the Glimmer Train Poetry Award and the Greenburgh Poetry Award. Beneath Stars Long Extinct, a collection of poems, will be published by Red Hen Press in April 2010. A poet widely published in literary reviews and anthologies, Egatz also runs Camber Press, Inc., an independent literary press. He lives in a loft on the Hudson River while missing Paris.

In what direction would you like to see American poetry move?

Egatz: I’d like to see the continued trend of readers and listeners coming back to an art form which turned it’s back on it’s audience long before I was born. We’ll never get back to the pre-radio days, or the numbers of readers poetry enjoyed a century and a half ago, but it can’t get much worse. I firmly believe the only way to regain readers is to promote poetry humans can understand. There’s no reason lucid poetry cannot have incredibly deep emotion or music in the language—energy in it that makes you want to read it aloud to your friends and strangers in the streets. The main problem with achieving this is most Americans are completely unaware this kind of poetry even exists, and that’s not their fault. Critics became translators of the obscure, the virtually incomprehensible. They stopped judging and recommending. In turn, generations of educators got this trickle down of oblique verse. They, in turn, pushed it on students, who came to know of American poetry as annoying, at best. Publishers allowed this to happen and they killed their own audience. They did it to themselves. No one wants to pay money for a product that makes them feel stupid.

Reading a poem like “Poopie Head,” it is obvious you don’t have a limited view of what constitutes poetic vocabulary. Do you believe any particular nomenclature is off limits to poetry?

Egatz: To me, that’s a compliment. Thank you. As the poem indicates, that was sparked by a phrase I heard a small girl say. I think any verbiage is fair game in the arena of poetry. Charles Bukowski horrified many readers with his subject matter, opinions, and word-choice. Through his countless paying readers, he eventually earned a living from his poetry in our time. Not many poets can say that. Toward the end of his life even Allen Ginsberg taught in Brooklyn, if memory serves.

Fear of language breeds ignorance. Words are performatives, and people should be concerned with the thoughts behind the words, not the nomenclature. We’re talking about art, which is, by nature, subjective, and more importantly, human. There will always be ivory towers inhabited by the self-proclaimed elite of all kinds. There will always be poetry by the angry disenfranchised using certain words to shock. I fall in somewhere in the middle, and the middle is vast. I want my art to turn up the heat now and then, but not gratuitously. There should be meaning and reason behind every word, particularly in poetry.

When and how have you been shocked by a writer’s use of a particular word?

Egatz: I’m more shocked by what passes for journalism than I’ve ever been by a poem, story or novel. I’m also astounded by the way reporters dance around truth and meaning. The lack of what they write is painful.

Language is constantly mutating. What was shocking twenty years ago is now spoken by children, and it’s not given a second thought. What was considered elevated diction is now common vernacular. This is only natural. Our fiction and poetry reflect this by dating it. A poem in my new book, Beneath Stars Long Extinct, called “Baby,” has examples of dated language as a main theme.

Some writing holds up well, some sounds silly. Many people think Shakespeare is Old English. They’re off by centuries. Chaucer is Middle English, and he shocked plenty in his time. I’m pretty jaded, and subject matter is what shocks me in fiction and poetry these days, although rarely. Words themselves come and go.

What do you consider “success” in the world of poetry?

Egatz: I heard an old interview where Henry Miller said he hung on the hope there was one real reader out there for him; one person who loved what he did, and fully understood it, collected every book, et cetera. When you think about it, that’s an incredibly serious thing to ask the world to send your way and a hell of a gift if you get one.

For me, the writing itself is the thing. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. I never had cable television; didn’t miss a thing, apparently. Reading a bad book was always better than most shows I can ever remember on the tube. When the writing wasn’t going well, it was still a great ride even though I wasn’t getting published. Whatever was happening in a notebook or with my ten fingers on the Macintosh was always more interesting to me. When you’ve got a new solid poem you can’t revise any further and you feel good about it, there’s almost nothing better—except maybe when the woman you love gives you one of those genuine smiles and she means it.

I’ve been pretty fortunate in that I’ve amassed a small group of people who really turn out when I read in New York. Doesn’t seem to matter if I’m doing my fiction or poetry. I feel fortunate I’ve got them, even though I haven’t had a book out until now. I’ve gotten fan mail based on poems that have appeared in anthologies and small journals. That’s always surprising. Because of these little shots in the arm—these little successes—I stopped submitting to the magazines that didn’t want me. I know that’s the wrong advice to give, but for me, the writing was the thing I lived for, not to see my name in lights. For the last ten years, the only publications I’ve had were anthology editors and magazine editors who solicited me. That was enough. I felt successful. Some editor out there cared enough to seek me out. The ones who wrote from Europe really made me feel honored, at least for a half-hour. Then it was back to work.

How is a poet responsible for shaping his or her virtual persona (a la a website or twitter, for example)? Is this critical to success?

Egatz: It’s hard to define the word “success” when you’re talking about contemporary American poetry. Like I said earlier, you can probably count the poets who earn a living at writing poetry on one hand. Let me clarify that by saying I’m not talking about songwriting, rap, or perhaps other kinds of performance poetry. Most poets wind up in academia to keep the roof aloft and the child support payments going. It’s been like that for a long, long time.

I know many poets older than myself who really resisted the Internet. One famous poet told me, “the promotion should be handled by the publisher and the place hosting the reading.” Well, times have changed. Perhaps it used to be like that in the forties, but that’s history. It’s nice to have your own little outpost on the Internet with all the relevant data and reading schedule, but with the average new poetry book selling 3000 copies and being deemed a real success, you have to wonder if it’s worth a poet’s time and money to build a professional-looking site or blog.

What are the origins of Camber Press? What inspired you to start your own press?

Egatz: The origins are my inability to make a living as poet or fiction writer. I taught myself to be a graphic designer and have been a freelancer for almost my entire adult life. It’s paid the bills most of the time. The art of beautifully-set typography is as brilliant to me as any other art. The frustration of buying badly-written books, or poorly-typeset books, made me want to combine good poems with what I did for a living. If you had to point to a moment of inspiration that was a good kick to my head, it was when someone gave me that collection of letters between Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin. You can follow their struggle to get New Directions off the ground, and while reading it, I thought, “I can set type. I can design books. I can edit. I’ve got a Mac. I know a lot of poets. What the hell am I waiting for?” I procrastinated for years, but eventually I launched it.

You’ve stated the mission of Camber Press is to “publish lucid poetry that is accessible without sacrificing its inventiveness and depth of emotion.” What do you wish to publish books with these particular goals in mind?

Egatz: Well, it’s the kind of poetry that speaks to me. It’s the only hope in hell poetry has of regaining an American audience. It turns out I was right in that we’ve got a devoted following who really enjoy our editions and support the press with their dollars. Some people have sent checks with notes: “Don’t send me any books. I own them all. Keep going!” There’s still readers out there who care and respond.

It’s a labor of love, for sure. I pump every dollar back into the next book printing, web hosting, or postage. We also run an annual poetry award that’s very popular, and this year is our second fiction award. We attract very well-known judges, who seem happy to be part of what we do.

What do you believe makes a great poetry teacher?

Egatz: That’s a delicate balancing act. You want someone who can be firm and point out what’s going wrong with a poem or story, but you also want someone who’s not going to destroy too many young hopes. It’s definitely a human and diplomatic art. I had some brilliant ones when I was at Sarah Lawrence College for my MFA, but that place and its pedagogical ethos is a very rare gem. When I was there the masters of this included Kevin Pilkington, Brooks Haxton, and Thomas Lux. They pushed students in the right direction, and did everything they could to encourage.

Unfortunately, from junior high school on up, the vast majority of teachers are not good writers, and the best writers don’t seem to teach. They keep the good stuff for themselves. I’ve heard a lot of good writing professors talk about how teaching dilutes their work.

In Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen‘s character is a writing professor and he says something like, “You can’t teach writing. All you can do is expose them to good writing and hope it inspires them.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty close. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that bit of dialog. I quoted it when working on a PhD, and it wasn’t well-received, to say the least. I didn’t finish that degree, by the way.

The rare strong students will stick it out if it’s in them deeply enough, and keep writing long after they graduate. Much of a professor’s “success rate” at turning out good writers has to do with one simple thing: how open to criticism and suggestion each student is. If a student enters a workshop or MFA program and thinks their work is set in stone, he or she is just wasting time and money. The institutional education of a young writer is a two-way street, and a lot of stars have to be aligned for things to turn out brilliantly. And then there’s the whole autodidact route, of which I’m a big fan, but it has its own considerable traps and shortcomings.

What is your favorite novel and why?

Egatz: I’m afraid I may disappoint with this, but it’s still In Search of Lost Time. Maybe it’s the only child in me—the endless interior monologue. Maybe it’s my never-ending dream of living in France. I think largely it’s the magical rhythm of the sentences. It’s Keith Richards’ rhythm before he was born across the Channel. It’s a steady rhythm, but there’s beautiful, in-time deviations in it, and it’s always building. Proust seemingly does everything in that novel, and he does it well. It breaks my heart whenever I read it. I fantasize I’ll live in France and become fluent so I can read it without translation.

What is your favorite dish to cook?

Egatz: I make a seared tuna that’s won me many friends. The secret is twofold: the quality and cut of the sushi-grade tuna is paramount, and the rest of it is the dry rub of my own creation. I’ve also had women put up with a lot to be near my popcorn. I’m talking real popcorn. No microwave nonsense, and no hot air popper.

What dead poet makes your heart stop? What living one?

Egatz: Rilke still hits them out of the park for me. Batting for the living team, it’s a guy almost no one knows. Max Garland. He won the Juniper Prize for his first book, The Postal Confessions. It stuns me, still. I’m a Garland groupie, although we haven’t met or exchanged letters. I carry The Postal Confessions in my backpack—I’m not kidding. It’s been around the world with me. I’ve given away almost twenty copies. I would simonize his car. Twice!

How do you believe having a book published will change your life?

Egatz: I’m still going to earn a living doing something else, unfortunately. This is the eighth book of poems I’ve written. I think the seventh is worthy of publication. Number seven includes a series called The Elizabeth Rogations, which is unlike anything I’ve ever written. A brilliant woman named Françoise Brodsky translated them into French, but only a few have been published in journals. The other books were my learning curve, minus assorted gems here and there. Maybe some editor will read number eight—Beneath Stars Long Extinct—and want number seven. Number nine is looking pretty good, too, although it’s not done. The most I can hope for is a wider audience, which is certain to happen, as my audience now is largely my curious following of supports who show up at New York-area readings. I’m lucky to have them. A friend of mine calls them FoEs. Friends of Egatz.

What informed the order of the poems in your upcoming book?

Egatz: This book had a few big sections excised and replaced with newer poems. It’s always a gamble putting a book together. Will someone hate the first poem? Will they read from the front when they pick it up in a store? Will they read the last poem first? Something random from the middle? It’s a crap shoot. I showed the manuscript to a well-respected elder statesman of poetry. He loved all the poems I wasn’t feeling strongly about at the time. It’s art. If we wanted easy answers, we’d work with numbers all day.

The order is a temperamental beast. Some poems just seem to naturally flow together. I lay the poems on the floor and look for a rhythm. You do the best you can and hope you have a good editor who cares.

How much influence did you have over the design of your book? What elements of book design did you feel most strongly about and why?

Egatz: I probably felt more strongly about the production and design of the book than most authors because I’m a designer by trade. I had some real concerns for Beneath Stars Long Extinct, and Mark at Red Hen Press was kind enough to listen. I like the way he designs for Red Hen, and I feel okay with it in his hands. It’s his baby now. I’m very conscious about not wanting to step on his toes, as it’s his job, and no one competent likes being told how to do their job. Kate Gale, the founder and Managing Editor, and I have the same ethos of what a cover should be like and do for a book of poems. Like I said earlier, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on typefaces. Mark knows I have a thing for the Minion family. We’ll see what happens. I’m in good hands.

What are your poetic obsessions?

Egatz: Lucid but deep poetry is my crusade. People of all poetic skill levels write poetry for a reason. They have emotion they want to get out in some concrete form. Why some people choose to write in a way others can’t understand just baffles me. That’s my main struggle: make it as rich as you can, but craft it so others can enjoy it, too.

My other obsession is the word “that.” This word makes me crazy. It can be cut more times than not from any written text or left out of speech. It’s probably the most unnecessarily used word in English. I’ve actually read news stories where a reporter will insert it with brackets into a quote someone gave them. It’s insane. We should start a campaign. I’ll run for office on it. “Eradicate that.” Oh, and I love when someone puts two of them together. “He said that that is why the peanut butter is on the ceiling.” Are you kidding me? Did I just miss you getting tapped on the back of the head with a ball-peen hammer? These are the kinds of things I worry about. That and love, of course.

Tell me about the documentary that will feature you. How does it feel to be filmed? Do you feel you are portraying your true self on camera?

Egatz: The plan is it will be a full-length documentary about the state of contemporary American poetry. There are few filmmakers involved who are endlessly scrambling for funding, and they have some great experience. Apple and camera manufacturers have democratized film making, but you still need considerable money to fly to locations and put up the crew, not to mention pay people a living wage. Because this entire effort is hanging by a thread, and although there’s footage in the proverbial can, certain individuals don’t want their name associated with it until they know funding is in place to bring it to the finish line. I don’t blame them, but I hope they stick around until it’s a reality. Together, we’ve come up with an angle and a story on this big subject no one else has. So far, it’s riveting.

Being filmed doesn’t bother me. I did some acting long ago. You just carry on with the business at hand and don’t let the camera creep into your consciousness. When I’m at the podium reading, I’m trying to be accessible, engaging, and read the hell out of the poem. I get lost in it, so there’s really not the mental bandwidth to be self-conscious. As far as portraying my true self, it’s anyone’s guess. They say the most impossible thing in the world is to see yourself.  But when you’re an only child, I think you have a leg up on self-awareness. Maybe a half of a leg.

Can you cite any other examples of art made about poetry (or involving poetry either directly or indirectly) that you admire?

Egatz: It’s a lot easier to find poetry made about art. Michael Salcman, a poet from Baltimore, put out The Color that Advances, a great little Camber Press collection of poems about paintings, for instance. Paintings with poems or poem-fragments in them have never appealed to me. At the moment, I can’t recall one that really moved me. I always look at them in a gallery or museum and wonder, “Why those words and not others?”

Films about poets or fiction writers are always a mixed bag, at best. The problem is intrinsic to the creation of the art. What does a poet or fiction writer do? They sit in a small room and suffer and struggle alone with a piece of paper. It’s not a very attractive or action-filled situation. All the digital explosions in Hollywood can’t help that screenplay. This is one of the things I love about poetry. It’s incorruptible. When was the last time corporate America hired a poet to do what they do best? Probably when Ford asked Marianne Moore to name one of their cars. Of course they rejected her submissions and named it the Edsel. This is a poem in itself. You can’t make this stuff up.

Poety is a pretty introspective art. Do you believe the prevalence of writing about writing (on the Internet, in journals, and elsewhere) contributes positively or negatively to the state of poetry today?

Egatz: The truth is the art, or, more accurately, the thing that makes us create art, lies in each individual to a different degree. There are those who get into poetry as a form of therapy—like journal writing, if you will. Many of them are served by poetry until they get through a particular crisis, and then they’re done with it, and that’s fine. Unfortunately, when they surrender and move on with their lives, they also give up the chance of refining their craft. And then their descendants wind up throwing out their poems. There’s a depressing thought.

I would never begrudge anyone for either writing a book about writing or buying one. I bought a few when I was a kid. Sometimes it’s nice just to know other bastards are out there struggling with this art just as much as you are. As far as the quality of all the writing about writing, that’s an art, too. Just like anything else, you’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Thanks, Ron!

David Baker:
Is there a poet sexier than E. E. Cummings?  At least in the pantheon of erotic love poets, Cummings stands at the front alongside Sappho, Whitman, and Dickinson, each in his or her distinctive way.  In our day, poets as different as Marilyn Hacker, Carl Phillips, and Sharon Olds learn from his rich sensual methods and rhetoric.  It’s not just the recurring erotic narrative of his poems, all those lovers and breathing bodies and entwined love songs, but it’s also Cummings’s fabulous insistence on the erotic essence of poetry itself—the music and shaping of the art—that makes him constantly sensual, such a flirt, such a convincing and true lover.

Cummings’s very forms woo us.  Sometimes his love poems are dramatic scenes (“raise the shade / will youse dearie? / rain / wouldn’t that // get yer goat”).  Sometimes they are pure songs (“my lady is an ivory garden, / who is filled with flowers”).  One poem of his (“the boys I mean are not refined”)  was deemed to be so lewd that the first publishers consented to print it only in Cummings’s handwriting, not in typescript—and of course the handwritten version is much more visceral and human, much sexier.

Sometimes his poems give us whole, highly compressed histories.  Here is all of one of them:

wild(at our first)beasts uttered human words
—our second coming made stones sing like birds—
but o the starhushed silence which our third's

In just three lines Cummings presents the story of evolution as well as the evolution of lovers’ language from speech to song to silence.

Cummings adores the sensory and physical delights of words, as he takes them apart, caresses them, exposes their syllables and their other most private parts:  a solitary letter here, a piece there, a rounded or dangling segment usually hidden immodestly in the body of the whole word or line.  We feel the music and see the painterly movement of his poems like no other poet’s work.  How delighted we are when we remember, once more, how formally true he is, even in his most rapturous disfigurations.  More than a quarter of Cummings’s poems are—if you reassemble and rebuild their ragged parts—sonnets.  And isn’t that the lyric form of lovers?  Even the little poem above, with its self-interruptions and coinages, its hesitations and hurry-ups, is crafted into ten-syllable lines with a single sure rhyme.  He is old and new at once.  He is in so careful a rush.  That’s Cummings.

David Baker, author of several volumes of poetry and criticism, is the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University and Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. His most recent collection is Never-Ending Birds (Listen to Baker read “Too Many” on Poems Out Loud). He lives in Granville, Ohio.

Patricia Smith:
“there is between my big legs a crisp city…”

When I read that line from /vii/, l felt a distinct and definitive ripple, a stinging buzz, a blue electricity in my nether-regions. The city that came immediately to mind? Chicago—its gilt edges and unbridled stank, back alleys and harmonica moans, train tunnels and gunshots. The only way I survived that city was to swallow it whole, to feel it’s arrogant pout threatening my ribs and heartbeat, to firm its blade edges edging their way into muscle. But once I read e.e.‘s line, I knew right away where Chicago lived, in that landscape bordered by my rambling hips. “…the streets beautifully writhe…all the houses terribly tighten/upon your coming”: I easily feel what he felt, a teeming metropolis rattled by weather—friction-fueled heat, a sudden absence of wind, a rain with a beauteous stink. “…you feel the streets of my city with children,” life where there was no life.

What can I say when I’ve said that this poem pulled me away from my chair, down a hall and into my husband’s study, there I tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Yeah, babe?,” he said in the crime-fiction writer way of his, without moving his eyes from the computer screen. I answered simply: “I’d like to hotly shove the lovingness of my belly against you.”

And just like that, it was on. But we didn’t move to the bedroom. We settled on a trip to Chicago.

Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, performance artist, and author. She is a Cave Canem faculty member and has served as the Bruce McEver Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University. Her fifth book of poetry, Blood Dazzler, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. For more information, go to wordwoman.ws.

Ann Townsend:
In May of 1919, Scofield Thayer, E. E. Cummings’s dear friend and patron, writes a letter to his friend in which he narrates a recent journey to Chicago to visit the offices of the Dial.  Thayer, as it happened, served as both literary advisor and financial patron for this distinguished magazine, and had brought along a group of Cummings’s poems to show the editors. “Your sordid verses are now profaning the office-building gentility of the Dial,” he writes.  Martyn Johnson, the magazine’s editor, had admired several from this group of Cummings’s newest poems “but,” Thayer notes wryly, “as I had expected, was discretely silent as to my favorites ‘Kitty’ and ‘The Grape-Vine Lady.’”  Most devoted readers of the poet are familiar with “Kitty,” with its police-blotter-style portrait of a young prostitute.  But his readers are perhaps less familiar with the poem that Thayer nicknamed “The Grape-Vine Lady.”  “My girl’s tall with long hard eyes” is the second poem that profaned the civilized offices of the Dial; it is perhaps my favorite of Cummings’s erotic poems.

Like many of the verses in Erotic Poems, “My girl’s tall…” raised eyebrows when it was initially published in Tulips and Chimneys.  Even as late as 1938, when Cummings was preparing the manuscript for his Collected Poems, his editors hesitated at the inclusion of “My girl’s tall…”  But, as Richard Kennedy, Cummings’s biographer, tells it, “the Harcourt lawyers finally gave their opinion that none of the poems were going to invite prosecution.”  I laughed when I first read that sentence; it seems so unlikely now, in an age where very little shocks us, and where the possibility that a poem might prompt an outraged lawsuit seems remote indeed.

Yes, like many of Cumming’s poems, it’s a sonnet. Yes, it masterfully uses the sonnet form as both a template and storyboard for seduction. In the poem’s octave the lovers assess each other, and in the sestet they leap in to bed; the poem ends in a tangle of lovemaking. It’s speedy from beginning to end. But what’s really engaging, for me, is that this isn’t a poem of praise of the feminine, not exactly. Her hands are big, and strong.  She’s tall. In this seduction, she takes the lead. Carpe diem, the poet says. Lots of sonnets talk of seizing the day, but only rarely is it the woman who’s doing the seizing. Cummings praises her “long hard body filled with surprise / like a white shocking wire.” She is alive, tough, electric. And not sweet. When they “gravely go to bed,” their sex has the air of fierce desperation. After all, with her “thin legs just like a vine / that’s spent all of its life on a garden-wall, / and is going to die,” she has no time to waste. She’s passionate, she’s angry, she takes him to bed. His words tell us this, and more. The poem contains not only praise, but an equal sense of awe. This woman scares him a little, and he likes it.

Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics and The Coronary Garden, and is the editor (with David Baker) of Radiant Lyre: Essays on Poetry.  She directs the creative writing program at Denison University, and lives and works on a small farm in Ohio, where she is currently at work on her third collection of poems. For more information, go to AnnTownsend.com.

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with eyes of trains.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shown and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren't afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed.

She had some horses

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Or rather, I’ve been trying to write love poems.

To be precise, I’ve been cursing the blank page where my love poems should be. I’m in love, damn it. Where are the poems? When I’m sad, I can write about sadness. When I took a cable car up Mount Pilatus, I could describe the view from 7,000 feet.

It’s not uncommon for a lover to ask, “why aren’t I in your poems?” Usually the poet thinks, “You don’t want that. Showing up in poems is a bad sign.” There is a truism that poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. No, that’s not quite it; great poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. Mediocrity flourishes in any petri dish. William Butler Yeats, in “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” diagnosed the problem. “Only an aching heart,” he said, “Conceives a changeless work of art.”

You’d think the ratio of poems about love affirmed, versus love lost, would be similar to the ratio of happy marriages to failed relationships. But look through any sampling of literary journals, and you’ll realize that genuinely joyous “love poems” are like unicorns. They’re extremely rare; they come to people seen as preternaturally faithful or naïve; and afterwards, someone points at what’s left behind and says, “Well, looks like plain old horse manure to me.”

Poets resist celebrating love in poems. Perhaps it seems boastful, or trite; the practitioner in us trumps the romantic. So what do we do instead? We complicate love. We challenge it. In Eavon Boland‘s sequence, “Quarantine,” (from Against Love Poetry) an Irish couple’s devotion is pitched against the winter of 1847: “In the morning they were both found dead. / Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. / But her feet were held against his breastbone. / The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.” In an interview with the journal Caffeine Destiny, Boland spoke of this (true) anecdote as “a dark love story, and an exemplary one…All the things I wanted to get at—the stoicism of dailyness, the failure of conventional love poetry—all came together there.”

In Louise Glück‘s “Purple Bathing Suit,” the famine is of a different sort, as the banalities of suburban life whittle away at the impulse to cherish. Looking at his wife in a swimsuit, a husband sees that “You are a small irritating purple thing / and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth / because you are all that’s wrong with my life / and I need you and I claim you.” His love, perversely, can be acknowledged only in tandem to his frustration (and their eventual divorce). Love is one thing; happiness is another.

Sometimes, instead of challenging love, we sublimate it. In Peter Pereira‘s poem, “A Pot of Red Lentils,” the lovers engage in carrying, planting, and cooking, verbs of noble if oddly chaste service. It’s the legumes that have the fun, as “All afternoon dense kernels / surrender to the fertile / juices, their tender bellies / swelling with delight.”

Science also provides vehicles for love, as in Jason Schneiderman‘s poem “Sublimation Point,” which suggests the first meeting with a beloved shifts the speaker’s molecular structure, “straight to a new state without passing / through expected ones—as though enough / of me left at the moment you appeared that / I could never be whole without you.” The speaker is not unlike dry ice. “Apply heat,” he invites, and “I turn straight into ether.”

Poets invoke equations and recipes as traction against the slippery slope of sentimentality. But sometimes, nothing but sentiment will do. What then? Then we camouflage love poems in dense syntax or experimental forms. “Show, don’t tell,” we instruct students, but e.e. cummings is all about the bold, bald telling. That is not to say his poems are simple. “[S]omewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond / any experience,your eyes have their silence,” he swears, and “in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, / or which i cannot touch because they are too near.” Who’s the who? When’s the when? Where is the context we’re always demanding in workshop? No matter. We are too busy parsing out those claustrophobic, yet sensual commas.

A reader can spend the first half of Olena Kalytiak Davis‘s “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled,” trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “Reader unseduc’d / and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still / I creep toward you,” declares the speaker—at once seductive and terrifying, despite what she says to the contrary. “Toward you, I thistle and I climb.” We just got here; why are we leaving? Who is this Italian mistress with “her dark hair, and her moon-lit / teeth”? What is her “leopardi,” much less her “cavalcanti,” and why can we not resist them?

“Reader, I will never forgive you,” we are told, “but not, poor / cock-sure Reader, not, for what you think.”

Only in the endgame does Davis’s speaker confess “I had been secretly hoping this would turn into a love / poem.” We cling to this sentence not because of its craft (it sounds a little like an Elton John song) but because of its clarity. And this is a love poem, of course; “I have cleared this space for you, for you, for you,” she promises. But we must play along that it isn’t one, or risk humiliating the speaker by illuminating her vulnerability. Love, it seems, is a flame that cannot be caged by palm, nor lamp, nor poem—its air supply would run out. Love is wildfire or bust, and Davis’s language runs rampant to suit.

In The Last Unicorn, a book by Peter S. Beagle (later made into an animated movie), for a time the unicorn submits to being on display in Mommy Fortuna’s travelling carnival. One of Fortuna’s henchmen affixes a gaudy horn alongside the unicorn’s actual one. Humans refuse to see the real thing, she is told. Their eyes need to see a plain mare with a fake appendage, even as their hearts recognize the unicorn.

I am not arguing against these ways of writing about love; these are great poems. I am only pointing out that when we showcase love in its futility, or hide lust in a menu, or bury devotion in grammar, we are gluing a horn on the unicorn. Our jaded eyes insist that “real” love is shaded in compromise. But my blank page is waiting, and my heart reaches for an older truth. Because there is love in this world: earned, fought for, fallen into, given away. Call me conventional, or sappy, but I believe that for precious seconds at a time there is pure, happy, human love in this world.

How strange that we are so bad at capturing this in our poems—and, worse yet, so afraid to try.

Weirdly enough, when we’re talking about language, not people, hate redeems love. Hate poetry, I mean, redeems love poetry. Take those sagging lyrics from “I Love You Truly” and substitute the word hate for love.

That’s what I did for the first lines of this poem:

Voilá! New life! Like the line, “life with its sorrow, life with its tear / Fades into dreams when I feel you are near,” all clichés were once powerful, magically powerful, turns of phrase. They got at something so perfectly, they were doomed to overuse. All writers know this, because each of us has, in the fury of the moment, believed we’ve found the exact and singular expression of a heightened emotional reality (“I am a real poet,” we’re thinking), only to wake up the next day and see that what we’ve “found” is a line like “life with its sorrow, life with its tear…” Mostly, we cross that stuff out. With “Hate Poem,” I got to keep it. I got away with the literary equivalent of manslaughter: cliché. [More crimes against language.]

Photo by Steve Rhodes on Flickr.

The other operational observation for this poem is that hate demands of its bearer the same scrutinizing myopia as of the lover. Hence, the list seemed the perfect form, the more exhaustive, the better. Also, I found that the delight we take from inspecting each minute feature of the self in love and the beloved can be derived in equal measure from the self in hate and the be-hated. Therefore, the list could be a gleeful one. But all list poems present the same problem: how do you know when you’re done? You can’t go on forever, even if the list certainly can. Luckily, that final image of idealism as a pair of lungs came to me as I sat down to write. I thought it was for another poem, and so I scribbled it in the margin (“Idealism=lungs”). But as I wrote, those lungs pointed out to me that they, like lovers and haters, come in pairs. Then they relocated to the broken submarine of the body, where their idealism would be tested, and settled into the ending, a felicity for which I can take no credit, as it was a visitation, not an act of writing.

Over the years since 2005, many students have contacted me because they are reciting or writing about this poem, which gives me great hope that the era of assigning snowflake haiku is over. High school students in particular make no bones (cliché) about what they want to know: Who is the bastard? Reader, I invite you to plug in your own nominee, but be careful. If hate and love are so interchangeable in their written expression, then who’s to say they’re not interchangeable in real life? It may be that first in line for your hate poem is the one you love.

“…autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.”

I am still hard at work on this project of the self. The solitary self, as well as the self in relation to the world and the unknown universe we swirl around in, uncertain of our purpose or future. When I wrote the poems that would become my first book, I didn’t think of it as a book, but rather as a need to understand the basic questions that all human beings ask: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is beauty? Why is there suffering? Where is truth? These questions would arise in me in the form of poems, and in making the poems into a collection, I tried to arrange them in a shape, find a path for them to travel to make clearer those questions. I write to know the questions.

Poem after poem, book after book, the ante is upped. I think this could be why it takes so long between books. The poet is working harder each time to go deeper, farther, layering on or stripping away to find the exact color or texture, the core or the root, the frail light or the watery dark. I write to work things out. I write to concentrate, to feel a sense of purpose rise up in me. I enjoy the struggle of making a new object to present to the world, a gift made from scratch—whole, unique, edible as bread. And I want that gift to travel well, packed into an old boat on calm water or hidden inside a greased body diving into a blue pool, a sleek arrow that leaves a feathered silence and wonder in its wake. I like moving, word by word, toward a sense of discovery, toward an awareness of self—a curious, energetic, intelligent, sacred, baffling, depthful, heartful self. I work to find my subject, something I can sink my teeth into. I live for that flaring up of language, when the words actually carry me, envelope me, grip me. And all the above is why I read poetry, to hear the truth, spoken harshly or whispered into my ear, to see more clearly the world’s beauty and sadness, to be lifted up and torn down, to be remade, by language, to become larger, swollen with life.

I write to add my voice to the sum of voices, to be part of the choir. I write to be one sequin among the shimmering others, hanging by a thread from the evening gown of the world. I write to remember. I write to forget myself, to be so completely immersed in the will of the poem that when I look up from the page I can still smell the smoke from the house burning in my brain. I write to destroy the blank page, unravel the ink, use up what I’ve been given and give it away. I write to make the trees shiver at the sliver of sun slipping down the axe blade’s silver lip. I write to hurt myself again, to dip my fingertip into the encrusted pool of the wound. I write to become someone else, that better, smarter self that lives inside my dumbstruck twin. I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.

Editor’s Note: This short essay is from Red Thread, Gold Thread: The Poet’s Voice an anthology edited by Alan Cohen. It is a book of essays by poets on how they came to poetry and why they practice their art. Funds from the book are going toward the continuation of the annual Power of Poetry Festival held in Logan, Ohio since 2002. You can buy the book here.

This didn’t deter my husband, who began making regular trips to Haiti in 1995 to research a trilogy of historical novels (All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That the Builder Refused) about the Haitian slave revolt of 1791. Since he is an intrepid, resourceful traveler, who recognizes little in the way of danger, I decided it would be pointless to worry about his safety until the day of one trip, when the Haitian Times landed on our doorstep in Baltimore running the bold headline “Kidnappers Run Amok.” Fortunately, his plane to Haiti had already taken off, which was a good thing, since I know that that particular story wouldn’t have stopped him from going. But my misgivings on that occasion spurred the poem “You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country.”

There are places that we know well—we’ve lived in them in our adult lives, we remember them from childhood, we visit them on pleasure trips—and there are places that we have never been (and we may never go to), which exist just as vividly, and maybe more vividly, in our imaginations. Haiti is such a place for me. But the Haiti that I imaginatively possess is not the devastated Haiti currently in the news. It is another Haiti painted by Haitian painters in the towns and villages across that country, a Haiti that my husband has brought back—in the form of many small, perfect paintings—in his well-worn, travel-stained duffel bag.

One painter in particular, Armand Fleurimond, born in 1967 in Cap Haitien, has given me a sense of Haiti that could never be gleaned from the shattering stories currently making headlines. Fleurimond paints everyday Haitian life with charm, mystery, humor, and an occasional touch of surreal whimsy.

Many of Fleurimond’s paintings depict a realm of childhood not unlike the scenes in Popo and Fifina, where girls jump rope or play hopscotch in front of delicate pastel houses trimmed in gingerbread, where boys fly kites next to a pristine sea, where street vendors sell fruit in the market, women wash clothes in the river, and skeptical couples engage in flirtation and romance. The focus in Fleurimond’s work is usually not on large historical events but on the small moments of daily life. Some painters and writers can look so closely at everyday life that they are able to convince us that the most ordinary moment is actually extraordinary. Fleurimond is one of them.

One small Fleurimond painting in particular that I have in my study, no bigger than 6 x 8, is a close-up of a ruddy-chested bird perched on a leafy green branch in the dark of night, singing or ready to sing. It has always struck me as a kind of painterly counterpart to a much-quoted Emily Dickinson poem, “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” In a disaster, it is the picture I would want to take with me to get me through.

Although I seldom hear from Fleurimond (I met him only once, briefly, here in the United States several years ago when he came for an artist’s residency), this past fall he e-mailed me to ask if I would send him some painting supplies, which I did. He didn’t say so, but I assumed his day-to-day situation was difficult. This was before the earthquake. He was living in Port-au-Prince, near the Presidential Palace, and since the earthquake, I have not heard from him. I hope that he has made it safely through these past few weeks. If so, what he will paint now I cannot imagine. But looking at his paintings, which I have been doing a lot of recently, has led me back to a passage in Popo and Fifina in which a wise old Haitian carver is talking about what inspires his art:

“If I walk down the beach on my way to the shop in the morning and see the tiny boats putting out to sea, that makes a picture in my mind. If I see a hungry beggar, that leaves a picture, too. Some pictures make me glad…Some make me weep inside…And when I’m glad to be living, trees and birds and leaves look one bright color to me…what I am inside makes the design…I put my sad feeling and my glad feeling into the design. It’s just like making a song.”

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt on Flickr

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romanticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

This has certainly been true for me. I remember how a long-ago trip to the town dump in Stonington, Maine—certainly not a beautiful or “poetic” place—inspired a poem of mine titled “The Woman on the Dump.” And, a few years later, how a visit to my daugher’s elementary school led to my writing “Snail.”

It was Parents’ Day. Predictably, we moved from classroom to classroom, ending up in the science lab where the fifth-grade girls, notebooks in hand, were busily gathering data and performing experiments on snails. I had never really observed a snail before, and I was struck (really and truly struck, as if by a tiny lightning bolt) by the grace, mystery, and the utter strangeness of my daughter’s snail as it traversed the long green lab table in minute increments.

Photo by Dave & Karin on Flickr.

A poem in the process of being composed, advancing in to the world snail-like, word by careful word, is always a series of small, crucial decisions. Even if a poem is written in free verse, the choice of even one wrong word can mar the overall rhythm and sound pattern. “Snail” seemed to insist on its own distinct form and shape and ended up looking very different from most of my other poems (which use conventional lineation, punctuation, and capitalization). Why this should be so, how a unique “free” form rises up spontaneously in a series of drafts, is always a mystery. One proceeds by intuition. Only later, the poet may understand and approve (or despair) of these decisions, depending on how well the poem turned out.

Looking back at “Snail,” it seems now as if the subject had demanded a different style, speed, and shape. I certainly did not articulate these things to myself as I was writing, but, in retrospect, choices do have reasons. Certainly abandoning the forcefulness of capital letters in favor of more humble lowercase seemed intuitively “right,” as did dispensing with the too definite, inarguable quality of punctuation and enjambed, or end-stopped, lines. A snail’s slow, inexorable progress, or stillness, the sense if it being engaged in being rather than doing, is something I wanted to convey. White space replaced punctuation as a way to alternate between sound and silence, movement and stasis. Ampersands contributed (maybe) to the spare, minimal quality, moving the poem along. Poets hope to create certain effects but can never know if they succeed. That’s for the reader to decide.

I should say one more thing. Sometimes another poet’s poem will shadow a poem I write. Certainly, A. R. Ammons’s poem “Still” will always be for me the parent poem of “Snail.” Ammons’s poem begins,

                    I said I will find what is lowly

                                       and put down the roots of my identity

                                       down there:
 
                              each day I'll wake up
 
                              and find the lowly nearby,

                                        a handy focus and reminder,

                                        a ready measure of my significance,

                                        the voice by which I would be heard…

Ammons’s declaration, spoken passionately at poem’s end, that “there is nothing lowly in the universe” is where, poetically speaking, I am right now. Looking for the next lowly thing, something almost, but not quite, below the radar of my attention. Waiting for the next “happy accident.”

In the schools I’d visit, I’d sometimes pick up a discarded sheet of paper from the hallway floor, something a student had written in his notebook and then torn out. Sometimes, I could tell that he’d been given an assignment, and that he’d tried to fulfill it, and by tearing it out it was clear that he felt he had somehow failed. Out of all the ephemera I’ve bent down to collect from black and green elementary school linoleum floors over the years, one has stayed with me. Likely it was part of a research paper, likely for biology. It started with a general statement, which was, I imagine, meant to be followed by supporting facts. The sentence, neatly printed on the first line, was this: All living things have shoulders—after this line there was nothing, not even a period, as if even as he was writing it he realized something was wrong, that he would never be able to support what he was only beginning to say, that no facts would ever justify it. All living things have shoulders—the first word is pure energy, the sweeping “All,” followed by the heartbeat of “living”—who wouldn’t be filled with hope having found this beginning? Then the drift begins, into uncertainty—“things”—a small misstep, not so grave that it couldn’t be righted, but it won’t be easy. Now something has to be said, some conclusion, I can almost hear the teacher, I can almost see what she has written on the blackboard—“Go from the general to the specific”—and what could be more general than “All living things,” and what could be more specific than “shoulders”? He reads it over once and knows it can never be reconciled, and so it is banished from his notebook. All living things have shoulders—this one line, I have carried it with me since, I have tried to write a poem from it over and over, and failed, over and over. I have now come to believe that it already is a poem.

All living things have shoulders. Period. The end. A poem.

Editor’s Note: Nick Flynn is currently on tour for his powerful new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb. Tonight he’ll be reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn, NY. And next week he’ll be on the west coast in LA, San Francisco, and Portland. Check out Nick’s tour schedule on BookTour.com.

An excerpt from Phaenomena by Aratus (ca. 315—240 BCE)
trans. by Aaron Poochigian

Aratus explains why the goddess Justice departed from the
world and how to identify her (as the constellation Virgo) in
the Northern Sky.

A Maiden clutches golden ears of corn.
Whether, as poets rumor, she was born
The daughter of Astraeus, primal source
Of stars, or some god else, I pray her course
Above us bring no evil. Some maintain
She used to walk earth and did not disdain
To meet the tribes of mortals face to face.
Though born divine, she joined the human race.
Her name was Justice then; through every street,
Through all the markets where we mortals meet,
She propogated what was fair and right.
Humans had never heard the hiss of spite,
The bellow of quarrel and the cry of war.
The wicked sea churned at a distance; oar
And sail had never shipped our livelihood.
Cows, ploughs and Justice, giver of the good
And queen of peoples, furnished everything.
So long as land alone was nourishing
The Golden Race, she only lived on land.
Though later stooping low to hold the hand
Of the Silver children, she still walked the earth
Yearning for ways and men of greater worth.
From twilit foothills she would steal alone
And chasten humans in a harsher tone.
While gawkers hunkered on a mountainside
She would give speeches from the peak, deride
Their baser stock and swear that, come what may,
She would no longer help them when the prey:
"What trash your golden fathers have begotten!
O, your descendents shall be still more rotten—
Burdens of blood and war shall bow their backs,
Conscience shall crush them." She retraced her tracks
Down to the foothills when she had her say,
And all the people watched her walk away.
When they were dead, a fiercer brazen race
Inherited—the first men to unbrace
Cows from a ploughshare so that they might gorge
On flesh instead of grain, the first to forge
Marauders' trouble-making scimitars.
Justice turned misanthrope and joined the stars.
She still resides in heaven where at night
The Maiden wheels above us mortals, right
Beside the prominent Ploughman.
                                                      Wings carried her
To heaven—atop her right wing, Vintager
Is borne along, a star shedding a glare
Bright as the star which follows the Great Bear.
The Maiden is ill-omened stars that circle near her.
Using these stars, however, one can plot
The contours of her figure, dot by dot,
For all her stars show plainly to the eye.
There's one before her toes, one on her thigh,
And one beneath the backside of her knee.
Anonymous, they all wheel separately.



Note to the reader: After The Iliad and The Odyssey, Aratus'
Phaenomena was the most widely read poem in the ancient world.
Aaron Poochigian's full translation of The Phaenomena will be
available from Johns Hopkins University Press in May 2010.
» Pre-Order

I watch you     traverse     the long green table
your trail slick & shiny     then pluck you up
& hold you     wet & glistening     in my open hand

You are a dusky brown     your mottled shell attached
by a wrinkled skinlike mantle     to the rest of you

Touched     your eyes     on long tentacles
retract     & you have to shorter lower tentacles
that feel the ground in front of you     first one
then the other     up & down     carefully they touch the ground

Like someone     feeling her way along     a pitch-black-corridor
with no way of knowing     where she is going
like me     perhaps

Your radula     spiked & ragged black mouthhole
tears up & chews     chalk & lettuce     that is all
you need     chalk & lettuce!

For you there is no fight     or flight
startled     you contract into your shell & wait
for Danger to tire     & walk away

A slow-going-forward     a staying-very-still     that is you
speechless creation that leaves me     finally     speechless

Sometimes     I cannot     bear the world
the beauty & perfection of a snail     created
by the same Creator     who created     me

But we are different     you are lowly & humble
you have grace & compression     whereas     I am awkward
& huge     & not humble     forgive me

Do you see me?     is the world seen
from your wary waving eye stalks     a perfect circle?
you see ahead of     & behind you     a thing
I cannot do     do you too     feel terror?

I     monster that I am     bow down before you

You have flown to the dangerous country,
how easily you have left this life behind,
this street, this quiet city street,
where letters arrive each day dependably,
where trees make a canopy in summer,
and winter, it is winter now, possesses a cold clarity.

But in the place where you are there is heat,
there is hunger, and the trees have been cut down,
and dogs, there must be dogs, slink out of the night's
blackness, teeth bared, and the sound of drumming penetrates
your sleep even when there are no drums. And slowly,
you begin to forget the words we are used to saying here,
they speak another language there, a language that has no place
for words like snow and safety, a language I will never know
because I have never been to the dangerous country,
                                                             and I do not think I will go.

I think of a tear in a curtain, a jagged man-high tear,
that you step through easily, without a glance backward,
because you are drawn to the dangerous country,
to the need and the want and the hunger,
and to something more that I cannot name.
I feel such a distance, such an unreality,
when I think of you in the dangerous country,
with the heat and the dust and the dogs,
the drums and the knives, the nightmares and the screams.

But I tell myself there must be birds and flowers,
rare flame-colored exotica surrounding tiny pastel houses
that a child might draw, there must be children flying kites,
running along a curving shore where watercolor waves
wash up in shades of ultramarine, there must be
painters painting paintings of it all, and laughter
and singing, because people laugh and sing everywhere,
                                                      O tell me that they sing.

Do the people there, do they ever ask you
what it is you mean by winter and by snow,
by safety and by silence? Do you try to explain?
And then I begin to wonder what it is to be safe,
do I feel safe here, and is there safety anywhere,
as I move through the rooms of this house, drawing the curtains,
the street so quiet now, and twilight coming on.

A poem by Dinos Siotis (1944—)
trans. by Peter Constantine

Perhaps the Barbarians
were not as brutal after
all as they are described

in the chronicles of history,
even if they drank the tears of
Greek and Romans in cupfuls,

even if they shared their caves
and huts with beasts and reptiles
they did not perfume

their sturdy bodies as did
the youths of Sidon, they
did not sing and did not

dance, with soiled faces
they worshipped the dust
of their war cries and

lay down upon the stones
after yesterday's battle, they
did not know how to write

or read—it was others
who set fire to the library
of Alexandria—

they were seeking practical solutions:
to become good hunters,
to gather in groups, so that their

wives and children would
have food to eat, and if
the civilized were also to

be included among their prey
barbarians were not to blame,
they were driven there because

their cold climates had repelled
them and they wanted to know the
sea: that too was a practical solution.

A poem by Yannis Kondos
trans. by Peter Constantine

The excavations proved your mornings
ill-omened. The earth kept the footprints.
Calculations showed five men. One of them,
the strongest, wore golden sandals.
It was he who broke down the door, and the servant girls
scattered. You had just dipped your foot
in the cistern, your first bath of the day.
Your shrieks and the steam
still show on the walls.
Everything else is lost:
the curses, the attempted explanations,
your nurse's pleas,
the frightened flight of the dove.
The knives were found, the blood,
the hair in his grasp,
the rumbling and the debris of the earthquake
that struck at the moment of the carnage.

After thousands of years,
the classification, the dull glass cases, conservation,
the museum, people strolling past.

• Watch out DC, poetry is about to stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World goes to DC the same year that the Beltway Poetry Quarterly turns 10 years old!

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• The new issue of Cerise Press is now available. Francophiles rejoice!

• Poetry and e-readers. Match made in heaven? or Neruda is spinning in his grave? Comment with your thoughts in haiku form.

A poem by Semonides of Amorgos
trans. by Edmund Keeley

The man from Chios called Homer said a beautiful thing:
              "The generations of men are like the leaves of a tree."
Few mortals who've heard this take it to heart:
              all men carry the hope rooted in their youth.
While mortals are still living in youth's lovely flowering,
              light-headed, their hearts cling to many vain things:
they won't grow old, they'll never die,
              and being healthy, why give sickness a moment's thought?
Fools to think that way, they don't yet know
              how quickly time moves for mortals, how short the young days.
But since you know this now that your end is near,
              treat yourself entirely to what good things there are.

A poem by C. P. Cavafy
trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy find things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

A section from "Helen" by Euripedes
trans. by Rachel Hadas:

The Chorus laments Helen's destiny and the tragedy of war.

CHORUS

Nightingale high in a tree so green,
come and sing me a song of pain,
a song for Helen and all the men
slaughtered when Greeks destroyed the town,
a song for Paris' rapid flight
and the fateful wedding night,
a song of sword and spear and shield
and heroes sent to the underworld.
Widows wailed and cut their hair
in silent houses—no men were there.

Divine or not divine
or something in between:
what mortal man
after long scrutiny
of the mind of god
could undertake to see
and then come back
and somehow make it plain,
all he had understood—
with what impossible luck
leaping the mortal gap?

A song for the swan who was Helen's sire,
having come to Leda with his desire.
So Helen is the child of Zeus,
yet they attack her all through Greece:
Unjust! Faithless!
Godless! Traitress!

But I can see
no clarity
anywhere among mankind.
Only the mind
of god, I find,
is clear, is free.

And why, oh why do heroes try
to prove their excellence in war?
As if a spear could guard a man
from the onslaught of life's pain.
Strife will be with us forever
if blood is the criterion,
from our cities vanish never,
just as it ruined Priam's town,
Helen, discord over you.
Once it still could be
cured, this malady
of hatred, violence, war—
no more, no more.
Disaster's bolt has struck;
the city walls burn black.
And why, we wonder. Why?
There is no answer. Only misery.

A poem by Sappho trans. by Diane Rayor:

Pursue the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses,
you children, and the high, song-loving lyre.

My skin was soft before, but now old age
claims it; my hair's gone from black to white.

My spirit has grown heavy; knees can't hold me,
though once they could dance, light as fawns.

I often groan, but what can I do?
Being an ageless human is not possible.

For they say rosy-armed Dawn in love
went to the ends of earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time grey old age
seized him too, even with an immortal wife.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main Branch. Photo by JanetandPhil on Flickr.

When was the last time you went to the library? Too often, writers outside academia (myself included) fall out of the borrowing habit. We fetishize book-buying as a variation on the Golden Rule, i.e., Pay unto others as you would have them pay unto you. Whether it’s a silky French-flapped chapbook from Tupelo Press or a hardback collected Bob Hass or a hand-sewn booklet hocked after the open mic, we offer money as a gesture of both financial and symbolic support. We get the book signed, hoping the author writes something quirky and personal, determined to make our copy as irreplaceable as possible.

In contrast, libraries treat today’s books as eminently replaceable. They are vessels to be denuded of their dustcovers, Dewey-decimaled on their spines, worn out, replaced, worn out again. Yet the book lover in me, returning to the library for the first time in many years, still feels at home. Fields of brown, nubby carpet, the sweet must of accumulated paper, all lit by a fluorescent sun. Why has it been so long?

Fifty: the magic number. Fifty: one stack under each arm, one stack in each hand, and one stack teetering on the tray of my extended forearms, edged carefully onto the checkout counter. Fifty: the maximum quantity of books that could be checked out from the Tysons-Pimmit Regional Library circa 1990.

Every writer begins as a reader, and every reader benefits from the code of readership learned in public libraries. These lessons are found not on the page—or in the page’s electronic equivalent—but in the experience of sharing shelves in a public space.

For starters: where else do you learn to pick a title using the rule of thumb?

I mean actual thumbs, the thumbs of readers who came before you. In libraries we recognize the judgment of touch; the best books are usually in the shabbiest shape. Every dog-eared corner marks a moment worth returning to. Every splotch of soy sauce is a medal of honor. Every creased binding proves hours spent using one hand to Xerox, or iron, or whatever the day required, while clutching in the other hand a story that could not be put down. When I first began browsing my way through the science fiction stacks, I didn’t choose books that looked like pristine runway models. I chose the grizzled field veterans. That’s how I came to Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Would I have found them at Borders? I don’t think so. In stores you stand before a sea of untouched editions. You drift toward volumes with striking designs, perfect trim sizes, showy end-of-aisle displays; that’s the tidal pull of good marketing. There’s nothing to judge by but cover after cover. I once picked up Fahrenheit 451 in a store, only to put it down again. The book was too small and tightly bound, the ink too fresh and smelly. The plot looked interesting, but lots of plots look interesting. The copy lacked the magnetism of a library’s dozen broken-in paperbacks, each loved into near oblivion.

What if I’d bought it anyway? Well, a confession: Fahrenheit 451 might have become just one more in my pile of unread books. This brings me to my second point. You know the books I’m talking about: the critical darling that tops so many end-of-year lists you have to buy it; the coffee-table book that’s as much sculpture as script; the beach read that you never quite choose over shut-eye on the sand; the Amazon.com impulse buy that pushes your bill just high enough to earn free shipping on the Cuisinart.

Consider this my equivalent of a field-to-table eating philosophy: I believe selecting a book should flow, seamlessly, into reading it. Once you sever the act of acquisition from the act of consumption, you’ve ruined the integrity of the product. A book that goes unread is a corpse of paper. Authors, of all people, should know better. Yet we’re often the worst perpetrators of bibliocide.

Library users observe the natural order. The system’s defining characteristic, the due date, is as compelling as it is simple. Purchasing a book feels like an end; checking one out is a beginning, a firing of the starter pistol from which we race to finish in the time allotted. I remember days when I didn’t even make it out the front doors of Tysons-Pimmit Regional before curling up in a beanbag chair, in the kids’ nook between the windows and the guinea pig cage, and turning to page one.

I miss reading with that kind of urgency. I miss taking responsibility for the decision to not read a book, rather than slip-sliding into the excuse of “one of these days,” days that soon add up to months. There’s a reason why people return overdue library books decades after the fact. The consequence lingers. The decision should matter.

In walking away from the checkout counter with a book, we have one more unique lesson waiting for us. For many, this proves to be our first engagement with civic duty. A library card is a social pact; something of value, placed in your hands based on no more than a legal address and a baseline of trust.

A book is not a Wikipedia article that can be sampled without impact. Books on loan are organic bodies, vulnerable, that must be kept safe in return for the privilege of access. If you prick it, does it not bleed? If you drop it in the tub, does it not swell? If you leave it at the bus stop, is it not gone for good? As a matter of survival instinct, every child grows up with an inherent sense of Yours versus Mine. Not every child develops a sense of Ours. For many, public libraries are what makes the difference.

When The TypewriterGirls asked me not only to read but to speak in support of the Carnegie Library system, my first worry was that I’d have nothing to say. My second worry was that I wouldn’t shut up in time for a couple of poems. My best testimony was not verbal but physical. On stage, I opened my wallet and there—under the insurance cards, under the Exxon card, years after I’d changed my legal residence to DC—was my tattered, emerald-green Fairfax County Public Library card. Still.

“It’s simpler to call myself a poet of Washington,” I told the audience. “And true, in some ways. But I will always be a northern Virginia girl. Because the place that claims your allegiance, the place you call your hometown, is where your dreams took root. Where someone said, You can do this. We can give you the tools to do this. And for me, that was in the stacks of the Tysons-Pimmit Regional Library.”

I come to praise. I also come to rally. It’s too easy to marginalize, in this digital and penny-pinched age, the crucial skills cultivated by libraries. They are not antiquated constructs; they are vital resources. Card-carrying readers of the world, unite. Card-carrying writers of the world, unite. Our public libraries need us—and we still need them.

Thanks, Andy!

• National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch is about to publish a new collection of stories in February 2010 called Apparition and Late Fictions. Poems Out Loud asked him to revisit his only book of poetry published ten years ago. Listen to Thomas Lynch read “No Prisoners” from Still Life in Milford.

• Nick Laird‘s most recent novel, Glover’s Mistake featured a culture blogger as the protagonist. Now this blog features Nick Laird. What goes around, comes around. Listen to Nick Laird read “Light Pollution” from On Purpose.

• Martín Espada has been called “the Pablo Neruda of North America”. He was kind enough to read a poem that guest stars Neruda from his most recent collection which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Listen to Martín Espada read “The Soldiers in the Garden” from The Republic of Poetry.

• A first listen to one of the new poems from Sherod Santos’ forthcoming collection. Listen to Sherod Santos read “Variation on a Theme (I)” from The Intricated Soul: New and Selected available in March 2010.

1. The Pier
What she said was not what she meant to say.

As they side-stepped past
the rotting patches of giant kelp
the tide dragged up on the strand,

she held his hand, she admired
the fine-boned features of his face,
she studied the overlapping
shadows they cast.

He seemed less distant than preoccupied
(or was he simply shy?),
and his narrowing slightly cross-eyed stare
would rarely hold
on hers.

Nevertheless, two years younger,
she followed him into the shadows of the pier.
The joint, the condom,
the in not out of the body thing,
she'd heard about them
from the other girls.

But once they went their separate ways,
she was surprised to find
the throb of whatever she felt inside
was no bigger than a bottle fly.


2. Film Noir
A mist had settled over everything.

It was after ten, almost eleven.
A smudgy lamplight overran the curbs
where leaves had started
to gather as well.

Some young people
prowling the neighborhood
were afraid that nothing would happen tonight,
just as nothing
had happened the night before.

Although it was cold,
the boys wore cutoff sweatshirts,
and the girls,
more comfortably dressed for the weather,
kept laughing at things the boys said.

A car turned onto Millbrook Road,
dimmed and then extinguished its lights
before rolling to a stop in the leaves.

When the young people passed,
they banged on the hood with their fists—
the boys, not the girls,
though the girls were amused by this as well—
and frightened the man inside.

Or did they?

The car door opened.
The man stepped out and,
as killers do in Hollywood films,
slipped a hand inside his coat.

And then, in a quiet, almost whisper
of a voice, he said something
none of them could hear,
though how he said it
was the thing he said.

Without looking back,
the young people kept on walking,
though faster now,
kicking up leaves as they went.

And when they were finally
far enough away they were sure
the man couldn't hear,
one boy turned and shouted back
"Oh yeah motherfucker,
we're really scared."

And that was that.
One of the girls drew closer to the boy
who'd said those words,
another drew farther away.

When you turned to me—you in bed, still sleepwarm, against
                                                                                            the pillows,
I across the room, skirt zipped, stockings on—
and you asked, so quietly,

"Was that a truthful answer?"

and outside our narrow third-storey window
the Norway maple was poking odd thumbs into the sky
and a skim milk early morning light leaked down the street,
down front porch steps, around grimed collars of snowbanks,
and the oval Victorian mirror of my dresser
reflected all that, with odd angles of rooflines, gutters, chimneys
                                               jutting into its peripheral vision,

your question cut
like a knife so sharpened it
  slices clean and the surprised flesh doesn't know for a moment
                                                                                        how to bleed,

and I answered, after a pause
in which the strangeness felt like a form of love,

"No."

As when her friend, the crack Austrian skier, in the story
she often told us, had to face
his first Olympic ski jump and, from
the starting ramp over the chute that plunged
so vertiginously its bottom lip
disappeared from view, gazed
on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him
like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not
for all his iron determination,
training and courage
ungrip his fingers from the railings of the starting gate, so that
his teammates had to join in prying
up, finger by finger, his hands
to free him, so

facing death, my
mother gripped the bedrails but still
stared straight ahead—and
who was it, finally,
who loosened
her hands?

• This week we liked “On Translation” by Mónica de la Torre. Listen!

• Sandra Beasley picks the Best Poetry Books of 2009 for the No Tells blog. Check out all of No Tells guest Best of ‘09 lists.

• Do you Swindle?

• The election of Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry post will now involve online voting. Do you think that’s a good idea? Take our online poll.