Mrs. Hunter is the only name I have for her,
A rich old woman who engaged my father, a painter,
To document her collection of keys.
Photographs she considered vulgar.

She lived in a mansard carriage house, painted black.
While my father made paintings of the keys
I made drawings of the house—
The Chinese parasol in a backlit case,
A sheikh's robe draped across the dining room table, under glass.

I added things that should have been there, a harpsichord.
I deleted what seemed mysteriously out of place.
Once, after I fell against my father's palette,
He had to scrub the paint from my hair.

Not to make things was idleness.
The house contained things to be made.
Not raw material: material that bore
Heavily the impression of having been used, worn,
Made previously into other things—

Like the house itself, once a place for horses,
Now the visible confirmation of what I knew by instinct
But had never seen: that only strange things could be beautiful.
McNamara, Westmoreland—outside the war was on.
Her house was where I lived in my mind.

For a time, I thought I'd be a painter too.
Then I thought perhaps a musician.
When I first saw San Simeone Piccolo
Floating across the Grand Canal,
I stepped into my mind.
I bought Mrs. Hunter a key.

As though undreaming the mountain
from the sea or tweezering hands from
a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes:
a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden
village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up
like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse
whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears
when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us,"
and the storm inside seething below
the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.

Whichever way our shoulders move, there's joy.
Make a soft hollow noise. We've our own hourglass
and no one else to blame. I thought of our lives, 
caressing ruins through half-opened windows.
I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now,
like scented candles, your ferocious wolf.
I no longer want this weather on my breath
or the many recognizable texts of our celestial holes.
A ceiling fan turns above. The arson is in us.
This is the year I'll contemplate the fire-fangled sky.

Beth Ann Fennelly: I still like the young love poems I wrote for my husband.  Maybe because I still like my husband.




Eavan Boland: I still feel connected to one poem in my first book called “Athene’s Song.” It’s about a woman trying to choose art and language, when her official role is as the goddess of war.



Stephen Dunn: Some still please me. “What,” “Teacher Answering Young Radicals,” “Sympathetic Magic,” “Biography in the First Person,” “Men in Winter,” “Day and Night Handball,” and “How to be Happy: Another Memo to ‘Myself.’”


Linda Pastan: There are many poems in my first book that I continue to feel strongly about and continue to include in readings.  Some of them are: “Notes from the Delivery Room,” “At the Gynecologist’s,” “Emily Dickinson,” “Passover,” “A Dangerous Time.”

Eavan Boland: I published my first collection, New Territory, when I was 23. No book I wrote or published afterward had as simple a framework: I just put together the poems as I wrote them and when I had enough they turned—magically it seemed at the time—into a book. Of course I never used that method of crude accumulation again. But at the time it seemed logical. And besides, I didn’t know any better.

Stephen Dunn: I tried to compile what seemed like the best poems I’d written up to that point. If anything held them together, it was voice. The manuscript was rejected for about two years. Then I wrote a long-ish poem in sections called “Sympathetic Magic,” and put it in the manuscript. It seemed to collect the other poems around it, and gave the manuscript a coherence it hadn’t had. It was taken almost right away, by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book is called Looking for Holes in the Ceiling.

Beth Ann Fennelly: I struggled to find a good organizational structure for Open House, because the poems vary pretty widely in style and tone. For example, there was a section of blank verse dramatic monologues, and a section comprised of a twenty page long experimental poem in the form of a writer’s notebook. The collection finally gained some cohesion when I decided to think of the different sections as rooms in a house. Each room in a house has a function different than the others; each room may have an awareness of the others, a communication between them, but has its own identity. When I thought of that metaphor, I came up with the title, Open House, and the book felt done for the first time.

Linda Pastan: Though many of my poems continue to reflect the changing seasons, nearly all of the poems in my first collection did so. Hence the title: A Perfect Circle of Sun. It was easy, therefore, to divide the book into four parts, one per season.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Open House in some ways feels written by a different person, although it’s only ten years old.  I can only imagine how Gerald Stern feels when viewing poems he wrote 40 years ago! Sometimes when I look at those poems, I feel the bemused affection one feels looking at old photographs—I recognize myself a bit, but Lord, what was I wearing!  And why didn’t someone tell me to comb that cowlick out of my hair?

Eavan Boland: I think most poets need to be careful about their early work. It can all too easily feel like a friendship you’ve grown out of. It’s hard not to feel distant—and not just from the poems you’ve written but also the poet who wrote them. I try to be practical about it. I think of first books in general as part of a written record, a sort of tracking device that shows where a poet began. As such they have a real value. The worst thing you can do is try to re-write or polish that early work. That becomes a kind of forgery.

Linda Pastan: Though my subject matter changes as I age, I seem to have found my “voice” fairly early. I still feel quite attached to many of the poems in my earliest books.




Stephen Dunn: About half of it holds up. It should be said that all of the poems in my first book were written after I was thirty.

“I’ve been very surprised by how open people are to being approached, to hearing about the project and to engaging with poetry in front of a camera,” she says, and adds that about 95% of the people she approaches agree to read, and that those who refuse usually do so because they’re nervous about the camera, not the poetry. “I’m bothering people randomly, and yet almost everyone is genuinely excited about participating. The experience has really reminded me of how alive [Toronto] is,” she says. The majority of readers react noticeably to what they are reading, and many request to keep a copy of the poem, to which she always readily agrees.

Sometimes, the week’s poems are grouped around a theme, often tied to an event in Toronto. For two weeks in June she captured the World Cup fever that is consuming the city, bringing poems about soccer to the bars and cafes where supporters congregate. Last week featured G20 protesters reading poems about resistance.

Click through to watch one of the videos filmed at the G20 protests in Toronto.

Woman reading “Implosions” by Adrienne Rich in Toronto, June 2010

What do you think? Is the How Pedestrian blog on to something?

I believe the search for the oppressed became identified, in my poetry, with the very particulars of my own life: including the oppression of working-class people in the city of Pittsburgh, where I came from, and the abuse of minorities, particularly Jews and blacks. This even includes the attention I gave not just to individuals but to plants—weeds, say—which are also hated and neglected. But most of all, the death of my sister, Sylvia, at an early age, who became, as it were, the muse of my poetry. I spent my earliest years reading a little but mostly wandering—endlessly—through the streets of Pittsburgh. The results of this would show twenty, thirty years later.

* * *

Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965—1992 includes poems from Rejoicings, Lucky Life, The Red Coal, Paradise Poems, Lovesick and Bread Without Sugar. Here is a preview inside the book:

Theuth describes the art of writing to Thamus and argues that the Egyptians should be allowed to share in its blessings. It will, he says, “make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,” for it “provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.” Thamus disagrees. He reminds the god that an inventor is not the most reliable judge of the value of his invention: “O man full of arts, to one is it given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of the tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect.” Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” The written word is “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.” Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will “seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing.” They will be “filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.”

Socrates, it’s clear, shares Thamus’s view. Only “a simple person,” he tells Phaedrus, would think that a written account “was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters.” Far better than a word written in the “water” of ink is “an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner” through spoken discourse. Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing—“as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age”—but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

Unlike the orator Socrates, Plato was a writer, and while we can assume that he shared Socrates’ worry that reading might substitute for remembering, leading to a loss of inner depth, it’s also clear that he recognized the advantages that the written word had over the spoken one. In a famous and revealing passage at the end of The Republic, a dialogue believed to have been written around the same time as Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates go out of his way to attack “poetry,” declaring that he would ban poets from his perfect state. Today we think of poetry as being part of literature, a form of writing, but that wasn’t the case in Plato’s time. Declaimed rather than inscribed, listened to rather than read, poetry represented the ancient tradition of oral expression, which remained central to the Greek educational system, as well as the general Greek culture. Poetry and literature represented opposing ideals of the intellectual life. Plato’s argument with the poets, channeled through Socrates’ voice, was an argument not against verse but against the oral tradition—the tradition of the bard Homer but also the tradition of Socrates himself—and the ways of thinking it both reflected and encouraged. The “oral state of mind,” wrote the British scholar Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato, was Plato’s “main enemy.”

Implicit in Plato’s criticism of poetry was, as Havelock, Ong, and other classicists have shown, a defense of the new technology of writing and the state of mind it encouraged in the reader: logical, rigorous, self-reliant. Plato saw the great intellectual benefits that the alphabet could bring to civilization—benefits that were already apparent in his own writing. “Plato’s philosophically analytical thought,” writes Ong, “was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes” In the subtly conflicting views of the value of writing expressed in Phaedrus and The Republic, we see evidence of the strains created by the transition from an oral to a literary culture. It was, as both Plato and Socrates recognized in their different ways, a shift that was set in motion by the invention of a tool, the alphabet, and that would have profound consequences for our language and our minds.

In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory. Knowledge is what you recall, and what you recall is limited to what you can hold in your mind. Through the millennia of man’s preliterate history, language evolved to aid the storage of complex information in individual memory and to make it easy to exchange that information with others through speech. “Serious thought,” Ong writes, was by necessity “intertwined with memory systems.” Diction and syntax became highly rhythmical, tuned to the ear, and information was encoded in common turns of phrase—what we’d today call clichés—to aid memorization. Knowledge was embedded in “poetry,” as Plato defined it, and a specialized class of poet-scholars became the human devices, the flesh-and-blood intellectual technologies, for information storage, retrieval, and transmission. Laws, records, transactions, decisions, traditions—everything that today would be “documented”—in oral cultures had to be, as Havelock says, “composed in formulaic verse” and distributed “by being sung or chanted aloud.”

The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.” But intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own. The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation. It opened to the mind broad new frontiers of thought and expression. “The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy,” McLuhan wrote.

Ong, in his influential 1982 study Orality and Literacy, took a similar view. “Oral cultures,” he observed, could “produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.” But literacy “is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself.” The ability to write is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials,” Ong concluded. “Writing heightens consciousness.”

In Plato’s time, and for centuries afterward, that heightened consciousness was reserved for an elite. Before the cognitive benefits of the alphabet could spread to the masses, another set of intellectual technologies—those involved in the transcription, production, and distribution of written works—would have to be invented.

* * *

The above is an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. With The Shallows, Carr makes the convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence—from the oral tradition to the written word, and now the Internet.

Photo by Chip Cooper

6/16 - New York, NY - Cornelia Street Cafe, 6PM
6/19 - Sag Harbor, NY - Canio’s Books, 6PM
7/13 - New York, NY - Poets House, 7PM
8/12 - Berkeley, CA - Moe’s Books, 7:30PM
8/14 - East Hampton, NY - East Hampton Public Library, 5PM
8/17 - Seattle, WA - Elliott Bay Bookstore, 7PM
9/24 - Los Angeles, CA - Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center

Listen to Julie Sheehan read “Brandy Stinger” from Bar Book.

When strangers ask me what I do, I usually follow the lead of W. H. Auden, who said he was a teacher. So much easier than saying “poet,” and having to deal with the inevitable follow-ups: Have I heard of you? What books have you written? Do they sell that in bookstores? 

Those questions are just tune-ups for the really hard one.

“You’re a poet, you say?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind of poetry do you write?”

I know I’m being offered an opportunity to promote an art that needs promotion and maybe sell a book or two. I know the question is coming, but like a recalcitrant student, I’m always unprepared.

If another poet asks, the answer is easy: “I write in blank verse about seventy percent of the time, mostly in the plain style, and often about history, my family, the South, and religion. But lately I’ve been writing a lot more free verse on the one hand, while working a lot more with rhyme on the other hand.”

That’s not the answer the guy was looking for yesterday, as he picked the label off his second bottle of Michelob at my brother’s Memorial Day BBQ in Albertville, Alabama. 

“Um, uh, well I write a lot of poems about history,” I said. History sounds serious. Writing about your family sounds too damn Oprah-ish. And I just don’t like to talk about the South to Southerners or about religion with pretty much anybody.

The history answer invited suspicion. It usually does. “Poetry isn’t about history,” say the dubious looks of my inquisitors. And I don’t want to explain about The Bible, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Shakespeare’s histories. We poets and professors are all too ready to unleash the horrible harrumph, harrumph of elucidation. 

Self-defeatingly, even though I know nobody but poets care, I sometimes give the formal answer.

“I write a lot of poems in blank verse,” I say.
Blank verse. Blank stare.
“Oh, you know what it is. It’s the form Shakespeare wrote his plays in.”
“I think I’ve heard of it. In high school maybe, but I’m not sure.”

The explanatory harrumph, harrumph begins to gather in my throat like German troops along a border, so I move quickly along.
 
“Sometimes the poems rhyme.”
 
The conversation now divides like Frost’s two roads in a yellow wood.

First response: “I thought poetry didn’t rhyme anymore. I liked poetry in elementary school, but after that, when it stopped rhyming, that’s when I stopped reading it.”

Second response: “I thought poetry didn’t rhyme anymore.”  And then the wary silence invites you to explain why you didn’t get the memo about rhyme being old-timey. Are you like the kook at the office who still uses the mimeograph machine?

It’s hard to whine to the Michelob drinker that he’s asking you to label and limit your life’s work, when he’s just done that for you:

“Real estate.” 
“What kind of real estate?”
“Mostly commercial. Some industrial. But I have done residential when it falls in my lap.”

I wish I’d had the guts to simply say, “Here’s a poem,” and started reciting.  But that would be even less of an answer—like his reading a purchase agreement and expecting me to know what it meant about what he did.

Here on a blog for poets and poetry lovers, it is the only and best answer.

“The Names of the Lost” from the book American Rendering, and originally published in The Hudson Review:

The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer—
ninety-four at midnight, eighty at dawn. Late June,
a high-speed chase. Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner

rammed off the road and hustled from their car.
Wayne Roberts asked, “Are that nigger-lover?” 
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.

“I know exactly how you’re feeling, sir,”
said Schwerner. Roberts shot him in the heart.
They shot them all: Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner.

“You didn’t leave me nothing but a nigger,”
Jim Jordan griped.  “But at least I killed me one.” 
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.

Ray Killen prayed a funeral prayer. The preacher
beseeched God’s mercy on these communists,
these agitators—Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner—

before they buried them, using a bulldozer.
The murderers, old men now, still walk the town.
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.
Ask Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner.

* * *

Andrew Hudgins is the author of American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (illustrated by Barry Moser), and After the Lost War. He teaches at Ohio State University.

Look for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007—2010, a new work from Adrienne Rich, in January 2011.

I examined my father's eyeglasses late one Friday morning. I had to climb
to the bureau-top from a chair to do this. And I managed to drop the
eyeglasses and they broke. My father was to leave for a business trip that
very day, and the breaking brought on a confusion. I pushed them under the
bed—not well, not hidden. And I don't know if the punishment was for
breaking them or for hiding them or both. And I don't know if I broke them
intentionally or not, if I dropped them through memory to the floor so that
my father would not depart again. I tried pretending in my memory for 
years that my father himself broke his own eyeglasses, that he himself
dropped them in order to prevent himself from leaving, and that I was
merely a necessary pawn in this. And how could I forgive him this—for
who would want to take a train to a foreign city only to leave his family
far away? To leave a son who was the unknowing double of the older son,
to leave a daughter whose room's high window looked out at the tree, the
moon, and the man who lived atop the telephone pole a street away.
Whose room was a wonderful stillness we each visited but in which we
never stayed. And a wife, a mother to three who would care of us as
much from sleep as from waking. Whose sister Dorothy lived with us
from the sea and lantern light of Nova Scotia though she was far,
far away. 

     What could he see with eyeglasses in a foreign city anyway, away from
us? What multitude of faces and voices could alter the longing of our loss
and tenderness? Were we tender? And if so, when? Whose version is as
valid as my sister's room, or her quiet witnessing of major and minor light?

When I was about that young man’s age, say twenty-eight, I was in the throes of an art movement here in New York City. It was 1983, and the group became known as Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Reagan was president and he was funding “freedom fighters” to undermine the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region. We congregated in the loft of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero.

(Note: At the risk of sounding too much like the pontificating Rothko of Red: they are crucial to that moment and beyond. So if, dear reader, you don’t know who either of these artists are, then please Google—or better yet, check out Golub’s prints at the Drawing Center; Spero’s The Torture of Women is in book form.)

The significance of that particular social concern has faded. But what has remained for me is the sense of camaraderie, learning a bit about grassroots-style organizing (in this case of artists), and the experience of hanging out with artists from other media. I was not only meeting with visual artists, I was going to see their work in galleries and even on the street. The same was true of theater, film, dance, and music. It was a heady education in the art scene of the day. (City context: imagine a pre-gentrified Soho.)

Urban Photography. Photo by Janrito Karamazov on flickr.

The point I wish to make is that it is not enough for writers to read—and read widely. In a display of support, writers need to support one another. (It needn’t be expensive with public libraries and Poets House.) And we should also fan out to experience other art forms. I know this can be daunting, but with some artfulness there are ways around great expense. I also know it’s difficult to discover what dance performance to see if one is not acquainted with the dance world. But in the case of city dwellers, the main venues are a place to start. And in the summer there are free (or nearly free) outdoor events. There are Web sites for events (see the Poetry Society of America). But maybe, if we writers seek out other arts, those artists and performers will make their way into our “margins” as well.

Or perhaps we just need to organize ourselves into, say, Artists Against Offshore Drilling.

My daughter is falling, is falling from catalpas,
from monkey bars, piano benches, is falling
in barbeque pits at playdates, St. Patrick's Day parties,
she's falling out of bed, she's sleeping and flung.

What startles, that paisley rugs and asphalt alike
could volunteer her embrace? In flight from infant
dread, a Moro reflex plays her six years
obsessively. Her arms parachute open,

but where down should be is gravity's unbroken
surface, and off to Dr. Grace go humerus,
clavicle, carpals. The parts add up to spirit
lemon-laced and cordial: a sling for heartbreak

palpated, not to be healed of shrapnel and flack
no jacket dissuades. My daughter is falling back
into her Good Girl routine, a junior drill team
officer doing her backover port spin best

with a sequined rifle. Outside weather's clear,
but trauma embeds itself like fractured bone,
cracked ice, lightning deep in a Homer seascape.
She's falling into reverie, slinging Together

with cherry Get Back into a gulf you'd call hope
if it hadn't been drained long ago, and not by her.
She's just a falling daughter, floating brandy
shot at high velocity, stone in a Singapore sling.

But the truth is I do have my own “tricks.” This feels like a good moment to share one in particular.

When I taught workshops in the past, I used to bring in a volume of Emily Dickinson, a hand weight, and a newspaper. The first was obviously in the “go read poetry” category. The hand weight was there to remind students to take care of their bodies (since even the deskbound have bodies). And the third was meant to inspire them to read the newspaper.

Edward Schildhauer Relaxing at a Desk. Photo by Wisconsin Historical Images.

I realize that the latter might sound terribly old-fashioned: read the news printed on paper? So my updated advice for our cyber-age is to somehow get the news. As William Carlos Williams noted in “Asphodel”:

                                            It is difficult
                      to get the news from poems
                                             yet men die miserably every day
                                                           for lack
                       of what is found there.

Yes, the quote is out of context, but I think Williams would forgive me since he was also concerned with world events and catastrophe. I believe that writers especially need the news because, for one, we deal with language and ideas. Second, the world outside expands the inner life of the writer. Third, I believe that influences from diverse spheres, personal and public, make for potentially more complex material. Not complicated, but complex!

What do I read and what do I find? I am a very slow reader, and on Sundays, faced with umpteen sections of the New York Times, I try to get through the Week in Review and, later over lunch, the first section and something from the Book Review. (If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll look at real estate classifieds for “fun” or a Guy Trebay piece on fashion.) During the week I read over whatever jumps out at me—especially in Tuesday’s Science section. I also pick up the Daily News for the comics and horoscope and a different take on events. Plus I relish its fuggedaboudit-tone. And on Fridays I pick up the Wall Street Journal, fancying that it might offer an alternate view; at the very least, I like to check out their Weekend section.

I am not suggesting that a writer has to write about the news. Of course no one has to write social or political poems. (Although I do encourage my students to write a piece using “outside material”—just as I encourage them to write a tanka or a sonnet.) My interest is in language and ideas. And I have always found inspiration in newspapers. Also, I know I would not be the poet—or the person—I have become without the news in its many forms, including television news that ranges from PBS to Comedy Central.

For me, personally, the news extends the range of song. The news colors the song. And the news even influences the form of that song—whether sonnet or collage. The material itself triggers deep emotional material in much the way a smell evokes a childhood memory. I certainly would not wish to dismiss or disregard this kind of rich dimension. (Apparently, even Emily Dickinson kept up with the news—especially sensational crimes and disasters.) On the other hand, I admit that reading the news, on paper or online, will not necessarily produce more radiant poetry. Still, it will make one’s life richer—and that is a step in a potentially radiant direction. And it will make each person more of a citizen of this fragile planet.

And why wouldn’t a writer wish to learn about current events? Honestly, I can’t stand the person (poet or otherwise) who claims, “The news is too depressing!” Or, “I don’t have the time!” Or, “The news has nothing to do with me!” Those excuses are so pathetic that I find I don’t have time for people with such an attitude. When she or he is my student, well then, it’s my task to engage them. What is not fascinating about the New York Times, Friday, May 7, 2010:

“They trade bomb makers and people around. It’s becoming a witches’ brew.”—senior U.S. intelligence official in “Pakastani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances”

“If you see Joseph Laubinger on your doorstep, start packing.”

“As Homeowner Dreams Die, He’s the Undertaker”

“[American] Group Backs Ritual ‘Nick’ as Female Circumcision Option”

“That marsh is really our pantry.”—New Orleans chef

“Fish Sells Out as [Oil Spill] Threat Creeps Closer”

After a recent conference out of town, I came home to discover that “over 300 people in northwest China” had perished in an earthquake. Not only was I shocked at the scope of the tragedy, I was also disappointed in myself. How did I not hear that? It felt shameful not to know. (Later reports placed the death toll at 2200.)

To completely rephrase Williams, men and women risk their lives to bring us news. On page A10: “Abducted Kurdish Writer Is Found Dead in Iraq.” He gave his life so we might have the events of the day. What better way to honor this death, than to read the news.

I finished Sandra Beasley’s latest, I Was the Jukebox, and I am in awe of it…just pure awe. It’s not what I do, and it’s not what I want to do, but damn, do I want to read it again. It’s easily one of the best collections I’ve read this year so far. Now I just need someone to offer to review it for The Rumpus for me.

Send your pitch to review this awe inspiring new collection to Brian at poetry AT therumpus.net.

A Braid Of Garlic, the last poem in the collection, is partly an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish, “whom, daring, I called a brother”. The verse is written in an informal Sapphic quatrain, its stanzas sometimes impressionistic ‘scenes’ or vivid jottings. The dying fall of the feminine endings and foreshortened last lines seems appropriate to the overall mood. But against this sorrowful cadence is pitted a vigorous appetite for joy and survival, expressed in the muscularity of the syntax, and embodied by the “aging women” who continue valiantly to shop and write and celebrate their “memories and continence”.

Read Marilyn Hacker’s “A Braid of Garlic” at The Guardian.

1. breasts of bestial
2. chuckles of supreme
3. girl’s tall
4. gorgeous bullet
5. ivory garden
6. jiggled
7. loam
8. pants
9. supreme sex
10. worms rushing

From the Erotic Poems entry on Google Books

You young ones wouldn't know where to begin
with all the strappy contraptions trussing up us old birds.
Girdles! Lord, where do you buy those catastrophizing things anymore!
Back then courtships were long, honeybunch; they had to be
just to figure out the clothes, not to mention getting them off. Yes,
I'll have one more and that's it. But at least you knew how to dress
then, and which aisle was lingerie and which was men's briefs!
I stopped trying to shop in 1975, when my husband died. Now, child,
it's too confusing. You can't tell a lawyer from a rap star.
Just look at the shoes the girls wear! Deadweights! Back in Texas
we used to tie things like that to sacks of doomed puppies, why,
every time I see such shoes I think the poor girl's liable to drown.
Though I do confess, the ones we wore may have been a little unkind,
expecting your foot to assume a triangular formation to which it did not
                  naturally incline,
but they got you where you wanted to go: married,
however unstably, but secure, knowing you'd both totter on.
All right one more, and that's final. I don't envy you
your loose fits, your quick change.

Mosquito and Ant was the first manuscript I submitted to Jill, who was familiar with an earlier book of mine, The Unbearable Heart. She found the new book intriguing but not quite ready—that was the gist of her response. A year later, I tried again and she returned the manuscript with a few comments on the parts that felt most compelling to her. She suggested I add a prose section (what I’d been calling zuihitsu, a Japanese genre) that would give the dominant sequence some kind of backdrop. I love assignments, and so I wrote two zuihitsu: “Reflections Off White” (a sort of catalog of weddings) and “Morning Light” (a more narrative piece on a wife’s leave-taking). If memory serves, I already had two other such zuihitsu: “The Downpour” (written in response to a Sei Shonagon millennium celebration at The Poetry Project) and “Sewing without Mother” (a prose elegy). I saw that Jill was right: these changes added some backdrop and the manuscript felt richer. After about another year, I sent this new version. At that point, the collection resembled the finished book—except for arrangement. Given that Jill is a writer herself, I’ve often wondered how she finds the time and energy to offer such guidance. Even with no guarantee of publication, I was intensely grateful.

With this latest version on her desk, Jill made a radical suggestion, what I call her editorial magic really. I had arranged the poems in a fairly rigid and predictable manner: the epistolary sequence in one section, the rest in others. She suggested I take the epistolary section and fan it throughout the book, giving its themes and concerns a kind of narrative force. This editorial reordering completely changed the sequence itself—making it fuller as it absorbed the other works, rather than merely living side-by-side.

Having learned this lesson from Jill—who has been as much mentor as editor—I applied it to my next books. When I began compiling The Artist’s Daughter a few years later, I wanted to add zuihitsu “as a kind of backdrop”: considering all the poems I had on monsters and the monstrous, I wrote “Exhume” on necrophiles and two others on “characters” (Daphne and Blue Beard). Jill pretty much took the manuscript as it was. Similarly, when I was compiling The Narrow Road to the Interior—a collection of over ten years of zuihitsu and tanka sequences—I fanned the sequences throughout the collection, á la Mosquito and Ant, creating a kind of narrative with two chronologies. This proved to be a good way to go as well. (Not that Jill so quickly took either of these without sending back: “needs more work.”) [Listen to Hahn read “Sparrow” from The Narrow Road to the Interior]

But such was not to be the case with Toxic Flora. With three collections so neatly arranged, I felt I should continue to repeat this kind of success. In an early submission I had three zuihitsu “as backdrop” with varied topics: sexual cannibalism, metaphor and research, and a fabricated journal on monarch butterflies. When the collection was ready for final comments from Jill (after a send-back), she suggested I think again about these zuihitsu because she felt they weighed down the more delicate lyric poetry. She proposed I take one of these and use excerpts as section dividers. Frankly, I was a bit unhappy to eliminate the zuihitsu because I liked the feel of the collection. But I was fascinated by the suggestion and very much trusted her judgment. So I took the manuscript with me on a family holiday and sat in a sunny hotel room every morning, cutting and pasting pieces from the sexual cannibalism zuihitsu (of course). After fanning them throughout, these “dividers” became a kind of narrative through-line. Jill’s editorial magic again at work.

We will see how I proceed with future collections. Meantime, what I learned from all this, I find I am immediately applying in mentoring my own advisees at Queens College. How so? I might reveal some of Jill’s magic, but I’ll wait to divulge my own.

So: the synthesizer's solo is a Valium
for the backed-up road on Monday morning,
heat already visible and the sky already gone,
motorcyclists gliding at fifty miles an hour
between stalled cars, the hair blown
free from their shoulders, and a crow,
lowflying, turning east below the sun,
the sheen rejected off its back like mercury,
spilling into the concrete reservoir of waterstriders
standing on nothing but the shine,
such a fortune of surfaces, such painless
glazings on the air.
                               What else but a fine,
clean gloss could carry you through the week
as it sears you free of features—the little family,
smiling, framed in silver beyond the horror
of an office telephone, still farther on
the 4th Street mailboxes, the lawns this spring growing
irreproachable as artificial turf,
                                                 and the horizon
of antennas, where you can almost see yourself
released like newsprint burned to ash
into Friday's violet tiredness, refined
of every striving but the need to glide.

My plane did not leave until the following morning. I spent Tuesday night in the casino. The Nugget is not actually as big as I’d thought at first—a trick of mirrors—and most of my time was passed at the Aquarium Bar. The musical entertainment came in the form of a well-oiled duo known as Bobby and Ricky, whose engagement was listed as “indefinite.” Bobby was a sax player with a genial smile; Ricky, a guitarist in a leisure suit with curly gray hair. When I arrived Bobby was tying up the last few bars of “Secret Agent Man.” When the song was through he grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Have some more tequila!” pronouncing the last word with a lascivious sneer. The mostly geriatric crowd responded with a lusty yell. I noticed a table of famous poets, all wearing their medallions and drinking heavily. Bobby and Ricky started into “Unchained Melody.” Dancers crowded the floor. An elderly couple stood in the center, barely swaying, locked in an embrace. A man wearing a cowboy hat and a shirt patterned with the American flag asked one of the poets to dance. I knew her. She had bent my ear the night before, telling me all about her unhappy marriage that fell apart a few years back and the poetry that had helped her through it. Her first poem had come to her on her birthday at the exact hour of her birth. Smiling, she gazed up at the cowboy and laid her hand on his outstretched forearm. Some of us began to sing along with Bobby. The din of the slots died away. Out of the fake thatched roof descended Apollo, god of song. The waitress stood and watched, her tray full of tequila shots, limes, salt. The muse of the lyre visited Ricky, and he strummed a lovely chord. Time and loss for us seemed distant, made-up things. At the center of the world were Bobby’s lips, singing the immortal verses, and in these verses our hearts were gladdened. This was poetry.

* * *

And that’s it folks, the conclusion of Chapter 3 from Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did. Thanks for reading! The book is available wherever books are sold. Here’s what a few critics have to say about it:

Tom Bissell for The New Republic
Carolyn Kellogg for The Los Angeles Times
Kimberely Jones for The Austin Chronicle

* * *

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The Famous Poet’s Society had impressed upon us throughout the convention that we were all winners: that as far back as the first night when we had put pen to paper we had ceased to lose. But some would leave Reno with less than others. This fact was underscored by the $6,000 in door prizes that greeted our return to the Rose Ballroom.

After this preamble, Alisha made ready to announce the names of the winning poets. Behind her, the stage was set with a winners’ circle of chairs—seventeen for the $1,000 third prizes, and one each for the second, first, and grand prizes, worth $3,000, $5,000, and $25,000. We all stared hungrily at the $25,000 seat, on which lay a red fur robe with a leopard-print fringe and a twelve-foot train; a matching crown in red, leopard, and gold, inlaid with red and green jewels; and a golden scepter.

The ballroom was tense. Muscles stiffened. Nails were chewed. I saw at least one lucky charm brought out. “Extry Sarff for ‘Wild and Free’!” Alisha cried, and the first winner, an old fellow from Ketchikan, Alaska, with a giant white beard, mounted the stage. He read his poem, which was about orca whales, and we gave him a short hand. There was no time to dwell on the relative merits of the verse. Fortuna’s wheel was spinning.

“Saundra Young Obendorf for ‘Celestial Butterflies’!” A woman seated several tables to my left let out a small scream and ran through the crowd, throwing her arms in the air and leaping. When she read the title of her poem she imitated the flight of a butterfly with her hands. “Vanessa O. Sullivan for ‘Born Black’!” A white woman in a cowboy shirt rushed the stage. “This is the second time I’ve been here, first time I won. So to all of you: Keep trying!” Her poem was about being an oddball in a conventional family. “Robert Nielson for ‘Dance’!” Over to my right, a man in a dark suit popped up and pumped his fists in the air, screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Some of the winners let out huge sighs of relief and gazed graciously to heaven. Some were catapulted into frenzies of hugging and crying and clutching of the cheeks. One girl, whose winning poem was entitled “My Elusive Heart,” immediately began to fan herself, as if she were worried she might overheat. She fanned herself all the way up to the stage and then stood speechlessly at the podium for a quarter of a minute. Finally she shrieked, “World peace!” and burst into tears.

The number of empty chairs onstage was thinning when Alisha grasped the edges of the podium and yelled a name so familiar I didn’t recognize it at first. My legs, however, took her meaning immediately and propelled me into a standing position, where I believe I then exhibited all the celebratory tropes that the others had. Blushing and grinning and waving my arms in the air, I stumbled through the crowd while a trumpeter blasted out a here-comes-the-king sort of tune. Along the way I ran into various friends from Class Six, who gave me the thumbs-up sign or snapped a picture. When I got to the stage I met Alisha, who seemed much bigger up close and more freckled. She shook my hand, slipped me a check for $1,000, and led me to the podium, where I turned and looked out at the sea of famous poets.

The third prize meant that I would break even; I had failed to capture the big money. But who cared? I was at the podium, addressing a crowd of hundreds. The dusty plains of Far West Texas and the greasy streets of New Orleans were thousands of miles away. I stared at the audience, my mind as slack as it had been during Rigg Kennedy’s lecture. On Sunday, I had fallen into conversation with an old man who had accompanied his poet wife to the convention. When I asked him if he thought his wife would get nervous if she had to read in front of everybody, he said, “She will most likely have to refer to her notes because she may forget who she is.” This is precisely what happened to me. I seemed to slip out of my body entirely. Who was Jake Silverstein? Some made-up person? Some giant mask? My voice, when I began to read, sounded muffled and far away. It was a strange sensation, and I could see how it might work on you until you broke down and shouted, “World peace!”

My chair in the winners’ circle afforded me a new perspective on Scully’s question. Who gave a damn what poetry was? Poetry was the check in my hand. Poetry was the golden scepter, only five chairs away. Alisha cried out, “Gladys Ogor-Edem for ‘I’m a King’s Kid—Jehovah’s Princess’!” A black woman in a long black dress got up and gave a stirring performance in which she sobbed, screamed, waved her hands, stamped her feet, lost her voice, and then collapsed in her chair completely spent, clutching a $3,000 check. “Calvin G. Benito for ‘Apache’!” A bald Oklahoman read a somber elegy to the great tribe’s warriors with their “long black hair,” and sat down with $5,000. The moment was upon us. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Cathy L. Kaiser for ‘I Choose to Dance’!”

We looked around excitedly, but no one stood up. The initial applause had begun to peter out when all at once a buzz swept through the crowd, fingers pointed, and our eyes swung to an unused corridor of the ballroom, behind a series of mirrored pillars, where with a look of grim determination Cathy L. Kaiser of Phoenix, Arizona, slowly advanced toward the stage in a motorized wheelchair.

The applause erupted with renewed vigor. Poets on the opposite side of the ballroom hopped up on their chairs to get a better look at the handicapped laureate. Some held their cameras above their heads and snapped photos. A wave of energetic disbelief passed from table to table. Short people asked their taller companions what the hell was going on. Fingers were pointed and wheelchairs pantomimed. A cowboy poet swatted his knee with his hat. Kaiser motored silently along, her chin pressed to her chest. It was not yet time for her to celebrate. There was still the matter of what she would do when she got to the stage, which had no ramp.

Try to imagine the most melodramatic scene you have ever witnessed. Now add to the tableau as many soaring eagles and galloping stallions as can be mustered. Color it in pinks and purples. Bring up the French horns. Do all of this and more and still you would have no hope of touching Cathy Kaiser’s performance that day in the Rose Ballroom. As she rolled up to the foot of the stage, the trumpeter belted out his last hurrah and fell silent. Grasping Tab Hunter’s suntanned arm, Kaiser took a deep breath and heaved herself up onto her feet. She was standing! Gritting her teeth, she began to struggle up the stairs, one excruciating step at a time. She was walking! Once on the stage, she shook loose of Tab’s support and stood free under her own power. The crowd lost its mind. Alisha’s husband, Bob, rigged out in a jewel-encrusted doublet with a white frilly collar, placed the laureate’s crown upon Kaiser’s head. Tab hung the robe from her shoulders and presented her with the scepter. Her coronation complete, Kaiser began to wobble across the stage toward the podium. Alisha crept along behind her, bearing aloft the leopard train.

Her poem did not disappoint. “A song leaps from my heart at the beginning of each new day,” Kaiser began. “A song with a melody that never plays a sad song.” At several points she appeared near collapse, but clenched her fists behind the podium and pushed on. “If I have the choice of sitting this one out, I will choose to dance!” she chanted. “If you have a choice dance, dance, dance!” As far as raking up the judges’ coals was concerned, you had to admit this was hard to top.

Kaiser gave the crowd a royal nod and fell into her throne. Alisha thanked us all for coming. “See you next year!” she shouted. Poets began to file out surprisingly fast. There were planes to catch. Cathy Kaiser sat in silence, a dazed look in her eyes. Her crown was tilted. Sweat ran down her cheeks. Poets rushed forward to congratulate the prizewinners they knew from their classes, but it did not look like Kaiser had any intention of moving, perhaps for days. While the other prizewinners—her court, I suppose—bustled around the stage taking pictures and shaking hands and even signing autographs, Kaiser, whether from exultation or exhaustion, remained seated on her throne. Hers was a quiet reign.

Within twenty minutes it was over. All in all, the glory was, as the man on the balloons put it, “too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say, It lightens.” Out in the hallway, I ran into Doc. I asked what he thought of the winners.

“Dunno,” he said. “I left. As soon as I heard that crap about dolphins and butterflies I left. I could see where the judging was going.”

“We feel,” another man said, “furthermore, that the time limits were unfairly imposed. There were some on the stage who should not have been there.”

“She could walk!” said a wiry little guy with a Hawaiian shirt and tattooed forearms. “We all saw her walking across the stage. I been to L.A. I seen how the panhandlers do it in their wheelchairs and with their crutches.”

“Gentlemen,” said a man with luxurious dreadlocks, “we have been duped.”

The man with the dreadlocks proceeded to make an allegation that I had some trouble swallowing. He claimed that Cathy Kaiser was an employee of the Famous Poets Society, the idea being that by awarding her the prize money they could fold it back into their revenue, with maybe a little coming off the top for Cathy’s show.

“Following the tragedy in New York,” he explained, “a man whose acquaintance I have made here in Reno called in to the office. Today when Ms. Kaiser read her poem, he recognized her voice as the same one he talked to on the phone that day. We’ve been had.”

The tattooed man let out a long low whistle. “I knew something was up,” he said. “I could tell the fix was in from the way the judges were acting. They weren’t even paying attention. Why not? Because they knew who was gonna get the prize. I went down for my group, just trying to wake them up. When my turn came, I says to the guy behind me, I says, ‘This is for you, buddy,’ and I went out and took a nosedive, yelling at them, doing my best Pee-Wee Herman routine, jumping around on the stage like a retard, you know, just to get them to open their eyes. Well, it worked, one of the guys in my group won a prize. But I got the shaft, and I got the shaft from this other society too. I came out here with just my shirt on my back, all the way from Jersey without a penny, and now I’m gonna have to ride the train cars back, which I don’t mind because a freight car is a fuck of a place to write some poetry.”

* * *

BONUS: See photos of all the winners from September 18, 2001 in Reno, Nevada.

* * *

Stay tuned for the final segment of Jake Silverstein’s story in which he reflects on what he’s learned from The Famous Poet’s Society.

* * *

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That night at the Shakespeare banquet we hashed out the odds on the twenty-five grand. From the open field a few favorites had emerged. At my table a dental hygienist from Dallas advised that the smart money liked a man from her class. “His name is James Stelly,” she said, “and he’s given his whole life to going around and telling what drugs did to him. He can bring tears to anyone’s eye that hears him.”

We chewed on that one for a minute. A Brownsville poet wanted to know what Mr. Stelly’s poem was about. The hygienist explained, “It’s about how if every time zone in the world would pray for one hour we could have a week of solid prayer. Or two weeks. I can’t remember, but he had it all worked out with a chart. Some people were crying just from the chart.”

A silence fell over the table as we readjusted our own hopes in light of this new information. How were we to contend with this man and his chart? No one had told us that visual aids were allowed. Charlotte Partridge, a fellow Class Sixer from Trinity, Texas, said, “I have a poem called ‘You Are My Everything’ that is awesome, but it was too long.”

Irregularly enforced time limits had become the convention’s dominant controversy. Apparently, a number of the recitations had exceeded one minute without incurring any sort of penalty, and this had troubled those honest entrants who had cut their poems or changed them entirely to comply with the rules. I myself had been well within the minute.

After dinner I ran into Doc outside the ballroom, and we stood off to the side for a while, watching the poets promenade. Many had seen the banquet as a chance to air their finest soup and fish. There were red tuxedoes, pink tuxedoes, green tuxedoes, and black tuxedoes; satin ball gowns and ruby slippers, strapless evening dresses and short skirts with red spike heels. Some poets wore Elizabethan-era costumes with bodices and billowy sleeves; some wore great African robes with matching turbans. They paraded back and forth in the hallway in front of the ballroom, admiring one another’s drapes and reciting their verses aloud.

Doc was still in his jeans. He had some complaints about the banquet.

“First of all, at the International Library they bring you into the dinner with trumpets,” he said. “Then they have a real fucking meal. None of this boiled chicken.”

“People get pretty dressed up, though,” I said.

“Nah, this is nothing. The International Library is much-classier. It’s got real class.”

Across the hall Rigg Kennedy stood at the center of a small crowd, hawking copies of Riggwords. I told Doc I was going to go see what Rigg’s lyrics looked like on the page.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna check out the slots.” He had lost about half of the $800 he won the night before.

The crowd around Rigg was mainly older women pestering him to reveal his age. Although we had never met, Rigg seemed overjoyed to see me. I asked for a copy of his book. On the front cover, there was a psychedelic drawing of a tricycle floating over a moonscape under a lunar eclipse. The back cover was entirely filled with a photograph from Rigg’s second wedding, which took place on the set of Jesus Christ Superstar.

“She was a dentist,” Rigg explained. “I didn’t stick around too long. But that front cover, that is art. It’s done by R. Cobb, who did the cantina scene in Star Wars and the national ecology logo. George here remembered it all these years and just came over here, didn’t you, George?” He turned to a large oafish man with a video camera standing outside the inner circle of women. Many years ago George had been a ship’s librarian in the Navy, and one of the books on his shelves was Riggwords.

“A couple of my shipmates came in,” George said, “and they copied love poems out of this book and sent them on home to their girlfriends. Then later they got married.”

Rigg’s expression was beatific. “It transcends time and space,” he said, turning to his tiny audience. “You all know how I believe that poets can change the world, and here George tells me that these people got married. I only hope they’re still together.”

“You can’t be expected to control that,” I pointed out.

“No,” he said, a faraway look on his face. “But I can control time and space.”

By Tuesday morning the Famous Poets staff had managed to fill the Rose Ballroom with hundreds of colorful balloons bearing the words FAMOUS POETS PARADE AND BALLOONATHON. Under these words was a caricature of Shakespeare looking like a Spanish fencing master. A misstep in balloon layout put the words TAB HUNTER GRAND MARSHAL directly underneath the caricature, as if it depicted Hunter. Each chair in the ballroom had one of these balloons tied to its back with a long shiny ribbon. Now and then a balloon would slip loose and float up to the ceiling.

I found balloonless Doc standing off to the side with his arms crossed, staring critically at the stage, where Annette Ackerman, one of the assistant judges, was singing “The Rose” but with her own words, which tackled the war issue. Next, Judge Rudge climbed onto the stage in her Mrs. Claus suit (some said she had been up all night deciding the winners) and launched into a wild sermon that ranged over the Big Bang and “eternal sound vibrations” and eventually got to: “Oh, you day beyond dawn mist, beyond comets and night-falling creatures, and those who even by rubbing their legs make rhythm sounds. Oh, you brilliant, rose-surrounded day of fingers and lips, of hearts, of flute…”

“She’s gone,” Doc muttered.

There was some truth to that, but spending ten hours watching more than three hundred poets recite their verses, and then staying up all night long trying to pick the best of these while around you a casino rings and dings, would likely have devastated even Doc. Frankly, it surprised me to see Judge Rudge holding it together at all. Gesticulating with her right arm, she went into a jag about “my Super Bowl” and “five billion souls.” Just as she was winding up to the meat of her idea, however, a balloon popped loudly, causing a ripple of nervous laughter. She stopped to acknowledge the interruption and then continued, but had not completed more than two sentences before another balloon went off. This time she pretended not to notice. The crowd was buzzing now, and Judge Rudge had to raise her voice to be heard: “I’m gonna shine like the stars, the moon, the sun,” she yelled, “which are the microphones of the gods, through which they recite their—” Two balloons burst at the same time, and we did not hear any more about the gods.

I looked up at the ceiling. The balloons up there had been heated by the light fixtures and were going off like popcorn kernels in a skillet. A quick count of the unpopped balloons revealed that there would be no respite for the judge. Because the balloons had flown up at varying times, they were all on different popping schedules, ensuring a continuous barrage. “In universal mind you can really be anything you truly want!” she hollered, as three balloons exploded above. “You are like a golden child!”

Doc shook his head. “The balloons always cause problems,” he said. “Last year the hotel was right next to the airport, and when they let them go in the balloonathon a big gust of wind came and blew them straight into the flight path. Runway was full of balloons.”

Judge Rudge finished to kind applause. Everyone felt bad about how her speech had gone. During the clapping, I asked Doc what his poem of peace would be.

“I’m not sending one up,” he said. “That’s just for the people who haven’t been here before.”

The program continued illogically. Alisha, decked out in a purple velveteen Renaissance gown and matching coronet, introduced the Famous Poets Society Dixieland Band. Tab Hunter appeared and gave a short forgettable speech. The band led the Famous Poets Parade through the casino. Not all of the bleary-eyed gamblers glanced up from their games. Outside the Reno sky was clear. It was a warm day. Judge Rudge formed us into a huge circle and said a prayer. Her voice was hoarse, and it was hard to make her out, but she was certainly praying for peace, and possibly sanity. In unison, we released our balloons.

“There’s mine! There’s mine!” poets shouted. A few of the balloons got trapped under the Nugget’s eaves, but most of them made it, and for a quarter of a minute or so the bobbing, multi-colored orbs filled the sky. It was something. The Dixielanders played. Tab Hunter signed autographs. High above it all our poems of peace fluttered and waved. They floated so deep into the blue that people put down their cameras and just stared, trying to keep their eyes focused on what they thought was theirs. Awe quieted the ranks. Each balloon became a minuscule dot, then disappeared entirely.

* * *

[Update: Continue to Part 7] Stay tuned for Part 7 in which the winning poets names are announced…

* * *

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The judged readings had been going on since eight a.m. in the Celebrity Showroom, an old dinner theater with heavy tables and plush cocktail booths. This was the Nugget’s swankiest venue. The railings were dark polished mahogany. Red velvet covered the walls. A gold lamé curtain bordered the stage, bunched in dazzling symmetrical folds around the proscenium. Tiny Tivoli lights outlined the aisles and the steps and the ample round lip of a stage that had been trod by the likes of Dick Dale, Pasquale Esposito, and Gordon Lightfoot.

I arrived in the midst of Class Five’s performances. A pretty young woman with heavy eye makeup and a tight black T-shirt was reading a poem called “Aloha Blue” that made the case for Hawaiian sovereignty. Emblazoned across her shirt in rhinestones was the title of her poem. In the center of the stage, behind the poet, hung a giant movie screen, on which was projected her enormous image, as if she played to a crowd of thousands.

The three judges sat in three cocktail booths, rapidly shuffling through mountains of paper as the readings proceeded. Despite the importance our lecturers had placed on dramatization, the three barely lifted their heads to watch the action on the boards. The top judge, Mary Rudge, wore massive spectacles and a red velvet dress. She was pear-shaped, with curly white hair and big round cheeks, and reminded me a little of Mrs. Claus.

The poets of Class Five finished their readings, and Class Six formed into a line that snaked through the darkness to a door that led to the wings of the stage. I was the final poet in this line, with the best view of the readings. It was not a show I was particularly looking forward to. In the past twenty-four hours, I had witnessed most of the performances four times. When Emma Tutson Thompson of Clinton, Louisiana, began with her poem, “Our Love,” I was able to recite the opening couplet along with her: “Our love is like a dream that comes true. / Really because, I love you.”

I soon found that I had involuntarily committed much of Class Six’s verses to memory. Kevin Banks read his poem, “You’re Not Alone,” which told the story of a supernatural visit from his dead grandmother. The last line was, “Grandmother’s rocking chair is rocking.” One of Doc’s teenage girl poets, Nicole Noel Miller, stepped up to read her poem, “The Encounter,” a melodramatic account of a suicide attempt averted at the crucial moment through Jesus’s intervention. Extensive choreography accompanied her verse. Initially I had found the gestures rigidly theatrical, but seeing them repeated so many times in exactly the same way gave them an almost ritualistic appeal.

As the next poet’s head filled the screen, it occurred to me that beyond their differences in form and content, the Class Six poems were all remarkably similar on this point. They all included at least one verbal or physical gesture that was repeated in exactly the same way at every reading. The gestures might be flamboyant, like Nicole’s; or they might be as subtle as Flora Dozier’s odd way of ending every line with a spondee, or Audrey Soto’s practiced shrug in the midst of her final couplet. Every poet had a certain routine that she adhered to with clerical rigidity. Running through the familiar rhythms of voice and gesture put her in a trance, an eternal swoon within which the much-debated time limits were rendered irrelevant.

The anthologies in my hotel room were full of the same sort of thing. The earliest poems in English were lamentations on the theme of time. To the anonymous poets of the thirteenth century, time was organic and indifferent.

Nou goth sonne under wode—
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
("Now goes the sun under the wood—
I pity, Mary, thy fair face.")

To Shakespeare it was brutal.

O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

In Reno, it was incomprehensible and cruel. Most of the famous poets had begun to write their verses in the aftermath of a great pain. Some were widows. Many had lost children, parents, and friends. Yet in the chanting of their poems, time and loss were forgotten for a minute. Sunsets did not fade. Children kept their innocence. Grandmothers endured.

Some of the first poets to have read began leaving. As they swung open the glass doors I heard that machine cry, “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” It was my turn:

New York, so often recorded in photographs,
Must have trouble believing its crows can fly,
Or that when snow, in clouds
Of misdirection, is falling, it falls.

The weight in the withstanding snubs
The whitened flakes of logic, flees
Wet streets that are streets, scoffs
At routine measurements of what is there.

New York, so often recorded in photographs,
Must have trouble believing its heart can stop,
Or that as doves, in nests along the river, forever
Swept and sweeping, are hatching, they have hatched.

* * *

Stay tuned for Part 6 in which our hero eats boiled chicked at the Shakespeare Banquet and marches in the Famous Poet’s Parade and Balloonathon.

On Monday morning I woke in a tangle of sheets and lay there turning things over in my head. The confidence I’d felt after the first homeroom session was shaken. Clearly I needed to be dramatizing my poem if I wanted to win the $25,000. This kid with the Ricky Martin routine was going to walk all over me. How would it feel to come all this way and lose to a dance routine? I ran over my poem a few times, looking for places where I might go down on a knee, but my poem did not seem to lend itself to that kind of theater. The clock was ticking. Class Six was scheduled to read before the judges at three p.m. I threw on some clothes and headed downstairs for Joel’s morning lecture, “How to Be a Poet on Your Feet.”

The session was under way when I arrived. Classes Five and Six were both in attendance, and rows of poets sat listening studiously to Joel’s discourse. “As actors we always deal with being in the moment,” he said, speaking quickly in his Bronx accent. “As famous poets, we do the same thing. When we read it, we want to make the feelings and everything happen just like when we wrote it. Just to go back to the acting thing for a minute, we do a play like ninety times, and every night we eat the same donut, and even if you like donuts it becomes repetitious. But that audience that comes in shouldn’t know that you’ve been eating that donut every day, and that, you know, the donut’s terrible, because you’re still eating it like it’s the first time you’re ever biting into that donut and boy, that is so good, that donut! Or apple or whatever.”

Joel referred to this as “In the Moment,” the second of the poet’s four basic tools. The others were Focus, Emotions, and Life Experiences. In the Moment, however, was the most important of the four, and to get us there Joel had devised a game he called “How to Be a Poet on Your Feet.” The idea was for each famous poet to take three random words from the audience and just rattle off a poem, employing the words like verbal stepping-stones. No one volunteered, and Joel had to jump-start us with a few demonstrations. By the time he’d banged out his fifth poem-on-his-feet, the Ponderosa Room was boiling with volunteers and people trying to get their words chosen. “Sex!” yelled a man in a T-shirt with FREE SPIRIT printed across the front. In a matter of minutes the whole thing had devolved into a rancorous competition between Classes Five and Six over who had the best poets. As each poet took the stage and announced his or her allegiance, the audience responded with cheers and taunts.

“Class Six! Class Six!”

“Class Five represent!”

“You’re the best, Class Six!”

When Bertha Venson of Class Six took the words “strawberry,” “pancake,” and “nugget,” and turned them into, “In the morning I love to eat pancakes / And with them, I love to eat nuggets. / But the best of all is when I eat strawberries,” the crowd went wild.

“That is Class Six!” the German woman screamed.

A woman from Class Five stood up, shaking her head, and said, “Class Five is ‘bout to take home the cash money, though.” Pandemonium ensued. Joel was pressed for a verdict. “Enjoy your next class!” he shouted. “You’re all winners!”

We headed across the hall for Rigg’s talk, “The Importance of Being a Poet for Life.” Today he had on a blue turtleneck, with the same safari pants as before. I recalled that he had been photographed wearing a black turtleneck for Schramm’s color brochure. This run of turtlenecks seemed in keeping with the whole Rigg Kennedy persona. Perched atop a stool at the head of the Bonanza Room, he looked like some sort of eccentric zoologist, on tour to promote his unorthodox theories about natural selection. As we filed in, he stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, nodding periodically as a familiar face drifted by. The program was as different from “How to Be a Poet on Your Feet” as “Kozmic Alley” was from “On My Way to Shea.” Whereas Joel’s style as a lecturer had been to challenge us with fun games, Rigg’s was to confound us with weird philosophical questions.

“How do you spell a sound like this?” he asked, crumpling his lecture notes into the microphone.

Silence fell.

“Crumple?” offered a woman.

“Crinkle! Crinkle!” shouted a man.

Rigg stroked his goatee meaningfully. “Crinkle, crumple. Okay. But what is the sound? The sound is not saying, ‘Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle.’ It’s saying…”

“Rumble!” someone yelled from the back.

It was hard to know what Rigg was driving at. He nodded his head as if we had hit a familiar wall. “I don’t know if we’ll get an answer today, but I want you to think about it. You, as poets, have the godlike privilege of inventing words. I find that pretty amazing. Can you imagine the person who created the word ‘peace’? Or the person who created the word ‘war’?”

There followed another baffled silence. It occurred to me that baffled silence might be Rigg’s primary goal as an artist. He told us about the numerous Eskimo words for snow; the possibility of using extrasensory perception to compose poetic verses; the parallels between writing poetry, acting, and doing cancer research; and aliens. “What do you think?” he asked us. “Do extraterrestrials enjoy the power and pleasure of poetry?”

The whole lecture seemed to be built around questions that caused the mind to go slack. They had the opposite effect on Rigg, however. He had worked himself up into a lather.

“Adventure awaits!” he exclaimed. “Once I let a blind person lead me to a poetry class in West Hollywood. I drove several elderly poets there, but when I parked the car the rest was up to her. She used her cane and her superior instincts, and I held her arm, with my eyes closed, trusting her to navigate the busy boulevard.” Here, eyes closed, Rigg fumbled about, dramatically enacting the scene. “Tires were screeching, horns were honking. The blind leading the blind to a poetry class! It was a beautiful afternoon. And when, my colleagues, you let go and trust that a spontaneous creation is about to happen, then you will have become twenty-four-hour-a-day poets for the rest of your lives.”

The lecture came to an abrupt close. It mystified me on many fronts, and I hoped he would take questions. What had he meant by “Many poets have been proven to have six senses”? But Rigg was curious to hear our poems and opened the floor of the Bonanza Room to all. A bottleneck formed instantly.

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[Update: Read part 5 here] Stay tuned for Part 5 in which our hero performs his poem “New York, So Often Recorded in Photographs” for the judges.

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TIME TO PLAY “HOW TO BE A POET ON YOUR FEET”!!!
We’re going to play our own version of Joel’s poetry game and the best three entries will win a copy of Nothing Happened and Then It Did. Just compose a short poem using the words “happened”, “book”, and “texas” and post it in the comments section below. We’ll notify the three winners by April 15th. Poems Out Loud readers represent!

After a short break, we reconvened for the Master Workshop, presented by Al D’Andrea. Al affected a professorial demeanor, repeatedly snatching off his reading glasses and gesturing philosophically with his hands. He ranged over a number of poets, from William Carlos Williams to Lucille Clifton, each one serving the overall point of his address, which was called “Saying Yes: Embracing the Life Force of Your Poem.” He closed with a poem by James Scully entitled “What Is Poetry?” Having just witnessed the dramatic opposition of Rigg’s experimental soundscape and Joel’s corny baseball rhymes, and with $25,000 hanging somewhere in the balance, I found the question pertinent. Unfortunately, Scully offered no definitive answers. He posed instead a series of odd counter-questions, such as “if it were a crib / would you trust your baby to sleep in it?” Al added to the weight of these quandaries by chewing on his glasses.

As we filed out of the Rose Ballroom, it suddenly occurred to me that despite all the time I had spent trying to become a poet, I’d never once tried to formulate an answer to Scully’s question. What is poetry? How could I have expected to get anywhere if I’d never even tried to solve this riddle? There were twenty minutes to kill before the next activity, and I spent them upstairs, thumbing through my books, looking for someone who had. What is poetry? For that matter, what is journalism? I’d never tried to solve that one either. No wonder my plans kept foundering. The closest I got to an answer was Samuel Johnson, who had struggled with Scully’s very question before concluding, “It is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not so easy to tell what it is.”

How would Joel Weiss field the query? To prepare our poems for the judged readings, we had been divided into ten “classes” and assigned “homeroom monitors.” I’d landed in Class Six with Joel, a lucky break. He was no Dr. Johnson, to be sure, but the feeling among Class Six poets was that the chance to study under him, if only for several hours, would give us a considerable advantage over the poor slobs whose monitors had not even been deemed worthy enough to speak at the opening ceremony.

“Just to give a brief introduction to myself,” Joel began, as we found seats in a gigantic room we only half filled. “I’m an actor. I’ve got a movie coming out in October with Wesley Snipes. I’ve been in forty-two films, and in most of them I get beat up or killed. I started writing poetry on trains and stuff. I never really call myself a poet. I just try to get out my frustrations. Who’s got a question?”

“Do I need to cut my poem to twenty-one lines?” This came from Bertha Venson, a small black woman with a lisp from Euclid, Ohio.

“That’s important,” Joel said, dropping his voice an octave to indicate that he was leveling with us. “If your poem’s going over, cut the extra lines. You have one solid minute when you’re up there. I know you care about your poem, but once you’re up there, you’re trying to win the moolah.”

This was true. Whatever Dr. Johnson might think, in Reno a poem was a lottery ticket, and none of us shied from this important fact. Poetry might be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as Wordsworth said, but what good would it do you if it flowed right over the time limit? Joel’s caveat sparked an anxious discussion, in which it came out that many of the poets were in violation of the time limits and at a loss for how to prune their verses. Realizing he had caused a minor crisis, Joel hurriedly offered up the best panacea he could muster. “You know what I always say?” he said, leveling with us even more. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This settled things down somewhat, even though it didn’t make any sense at all. A blond woman with heavy eye makeup and a German accent stood up. “I have a glittery dress,” she said. “Do I wear my glittery dress before the judges?”

“What about a peach dress?” another poet cried. “Is peach a good color for the camera?”

Joel relaxed a little, sensing that he was out of the woods with having to edit all our poems and back in familiar territory. “Peach, glitters, or whatever you’re gonna wear,” he said. “Figure it out tonight and lay it out on your bed so you won’t have to think about it tomorrow morning.”

We took a dinner break after the first round of readings. I brought my books down to the Golden Rooster and, over a plate of fried chicken, reconsidered Scully’s question in relation to the Class Six poets. About half the class’s poems operated on the understanding that poetry was an instructive art, a pleasant way of passing along an uplifting lesson. In this they fit the neoclassical mode outlined by Sir Philip Sidney in his 1581 Defence of Poesie, which defined poetry as “a speaking Picture, with this end to teach and delight.” There was “An Imperfect World,” by Anita Jones of Cincinnati, which put forth, in list fashion, all of the things that were wrong with the world, that we might learn to accept them; “Taking Time,” by Lydia Heiges of Kempner, Texas (she of the glittery dress), which reminded the reader to slow down and enjoy life; “At a Time Like This,” by Myra Ann Richardson of Kernersville, North Carolina, a patriotic verse that aimed to rally our spirits; and “I Want to Know Please,” by Lou Howard of Azle, Texas, which used the device of an inquisitive child to illustrate how “it takes both sunshine and rain to make rainbows.” These poems relied on poetic tropes—flowers that stood for hope, sunsets that led to contemplation—and standard formats—the list, the apostrophe, the regular metrical line—to convey certain messages to the audience. They would have pleased Sir Philip, who felt that poetry’s purpose was to appeal to those “hard hearted evil men who think vertue a schoole name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the Philosopher.” Sir Philip figured these men would swallow the uplifting message of a poem, “ere themselves be aware, as if they tooke a medicine of Cheries.”

Around 1800, Sir Philip’s utilitarianism gave way to the unkempt ravings of the Romantics, from whom the remaining Class Six poets seemed to take their cue. These poems were meant to convey the rawest inner emotions, most of which turned out to be gloomy. Reena Louis’s poem, “The Lost Letter,” matched up against the most melancholy that Keats had to offer, and Wes Dodrill’s “The Last Race,” an elegy for stock-car driver Dale Earnhardt, was every bit as mournful and sad as Shelley’s “Adonaïs” or Wordsworth’s “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.” For these classmates poetry was, as Lord Byron had seen it, “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”

My own poem was neither a medicine of Cheries nor a blowhole of the soul. It was called “New York, so often recorded in photographs,” and so far, I hadn’t heard anything I thought would beat it. I shut my books and took a stroll around the casino floor. There were famous poets everywhere, easily identifiable by their gold medallions and red T-shirts with the proclamation I’M THEIR MOST FAMOUS POET! printed in black across the back. They stuffed coins into nickel and quarter games with such names as Quartermania, Betty Boop, Blazing 7s, and I Dream of Jeannie. At their sides, cigarettes burned untouched in ashtrays. Every once in a while, a machine shouted, “Wheel! Of! Fortune!”

I made my way over to the Aquarium Bar, where in a pale blue light, surrounded by wooden tiki lanterns, plastic banana trees, and red totem poles, I ran into Doc. He was peeved.

The Aquarium Bar

“They don’t have the alumni jacket,” he said, shaking his head.

“The what?”

“The alumni jacket. If you go to one one year you’re supposed to get an alumni jacket the next year. They don’t have them. You know, you get your people who swear by the Famous Poets Society, but to me it’s just amateur compared to the International Library.”

It was hard to believe this business with the jacket alone had set him off, so I asked him if he had been losing money too.

“Nah,” he said, gazing out at the casino. “I’m up eight hundred bucks. Been at Blazing 7s all day.”

It turned out that what was really eating Doc was some teenage poet who had won a prize for the last three years running. The kid was back again, looking for a four-peat.

“Kid doesn’t even change the poem,” Doc complained. “Just keeps bringing the same one back and winning the prize.”

“Well, it must be pretty good,” I said.

“Nah, it’s nothing special. But he does a whole Ricky Martin routine on it. Goes down on his knees for the sad parts. The judges like that crap.”

The Aquarium Bar’s evening entertainment—Darcy on vocals, January on keys—started in on a cover of “Captain of Her Heart.” Through the banana trees I saw a woman run out of coins on a Quartermania machine and jokingly try to stuff her Poet of the Year Medallion down the slot.

“The main problem I have with poetry is this,” Doc said. “It’s totally subjective.”

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[Update: Read part 4 here] Stay tuned for Part 4 in which our hero learns “How To Be a Poet on Your Feet”…