Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country

 

 

I have just finished sending out my chapbook copies for the DUSIE Chapbook Kollectiv.

The title is this post’s title. I have a few copies left over, so if you’re interested in receiving one – freely and imminently  – I’ll post it to you before the holidays.

My DUSIE chapbook from last year can now be viewed online here, “The Good Campaign“. Read a review of it by Chris Rizzo here or read another review of it by Fionna Doney Simmonds here.

5 Responses to “Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country”

Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers

Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers

How about a pleasant poem to start your month off right? Ugly Duckling has smartly created a Eastern European Poets Series that we Americans might benefit from. I am currently immersed in Lidija Dimkovska’s most excellent book, DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS, translated by Peggy Reid – yay!

Craig Santos Perez wisely reviews this collection at Galatea Resurrects – check it. And if you’re thinking of holiday gift giving already … hint hint.

Incidentally, I’ve been thinking about where the bulk of my paycheck goes lately, after rent and other bills. I’ve narrowed it down to books, fine wines (recently got into sampling), and the occasional dining experience. I don’t even go nuts for clothes anymore, and many friends would concur – I’m not the “fashion plate” I once was – ha! No more keeping up with the Joneses, ahem, I mean, the hipsters.

Okay, no further ado; it is now for your daytime treat – here’s one from the collection:

ADVICE FOR EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT AND EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR

The Newscaster entered the history of her people,
the children study her for a grade, and they know her
from the advertising billboards in all the suburbs.
Who knows if she’s going to have her photo taken for “Playboy?”
Mommy, why does this lady have such a big ass?
So that the daily “Nova Makedonija” will not perish or else your father
will hang us. And why did you get an F in history?
The teacher asked who wrote our anthem,
and I said Ataturk, because I had melted into the palms
that the Turkish girl sitting next to me on the school bench
was warming between my legs, and drawing
bridal veils in my notebooks.
Shame on you son.
Is that why I sit at home, patching dead languages,
starching sonnets, is that why my back’s killing me
from washing Byzantine hymnographers’ manuscripts,
Havel’s letters and all sorts of other cult mystifications?
And every night my cheeks defecate,
and I have to tell you, not even Cleopatra went through
so much toilet paper. It is for nothing that
I press Delete, nothing can erase them,
and even less stop them from ejecting
feces–worms in a game of mirrors.
Oh son, son, it’s not the wind beating against the shutters that wakes you at night,
it’s the pores of my outer skin flushing themselves with water from the toilet,
and whoever arrives first in the dream
on the other side of the cable TV goes to pee. Look at her,
she’s all dressed up as if she was talking about Osiris,
not about the rice that caught diarrhea at dawn,
and do not ask shy she has such red eyes,
or why her nails are all gnarled, and her cheeks transparent.
Study son, repeat, not battles and peace summits,
but: why doesn’t a dead person’s hairdo stay in place
for more than ten minutes, why didn’t Isis
catch it from Osiris,
(and your father once told your uncle:
the more I beat her, the more she loves me),
because you have to know everything so as not to know anything
and be photocopied on freshly painted walls,
white walls for all those wonderful people.
Study son. Study will not harm the head underwritten
by the Lethe Insurance Company.

–Lidija Dimkovska, DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS

~~

Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia. She is a poetry editor for the online literary review Blesok (Shine). She took her Ph.D. in Romanian literature from the University of Bucharest, and now lives in Slovenia. Her books include The Offspring of the East (1992), The Fire of Letters (1994), Bitten Nails (1998), and Nobel vs. Nobel (2001).

Ljubica Arsovska is editor-in-chief of the quarterly Kulturen Zivot, the leading cultural magazine in Macedonia, and translator of numerous books, plays, and poems.

Peggy Reid is a translator of Macedonian poetry and prose. In 1973 she and her husband, Graham W. Reid, received the Struga Poetry Festival Translation Prize for their translation of The Sirdar, by Grigor Prlicev. In 1994 she received the Macedonian Literary Translators’ Society Award; she has also won first prize at the Avon Poetry Festival, UK, twice for her own poetry. She teaches English at the University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje.

One Response to “December Day Treat”

MiPOesias • December Issue

MiPOesias presents

POETRY [with Poets’ Portraits!]

+ Gabriella Torres • The History of the Body
+ Christopher Stackhouse • Mater – Pater
+ Ken Rumble • Learn All This Stuff • From St. Apples
+ Reb Livingston • The Third Chronicle of Marriage • The Sixth Chronicle of Marriage • The Seventh Chronicle of Marriage • The Eighth Chronicle of Marriage
+ Sara Femenella • The Secret of Everything That Concerns You • Come With Balloons • Seduction • An Apt Misunderstanding and I Would Thank You
+ Michelle Buchanan • My Body Parts • An Experiment in Breathing
+ Miguel Murphy • Cricket • Red • Self-Portrait’s CaravaggioWalking Night’s Pier • Enjoy Flesh! • Coprophagy (2) • Nihilist of the Heart’s Divine
+ Barbara Jane Reyes • The Bamboo’s Insomnia • The Bamboo’s Insomnia 2 • Killer of Ferdinand Magellan • We, Spoken Here • Upland Dance

REVIEWS

+ The Indefatigable Hope for Place by Michael Parker
+ Lee Herrick’s This Many Miles from Desire
+ Xantippe 4/5
+ The Landscape of Flesh & Blood by Michael Parker
+ William Aleggrezza’s Fragile Replacements
+ Pris Campbell’s Abrasions
+ Reb Livingston’s Your Ten Favorite Words

INTERVIEW

Jenni Russell asks Billy Collins

Enjoy!

Amy King, Editor
Didi Menendez, Publisher
MiPOesias

5 Responses to “MiPOesias • December Issue”

Are Your Papers in Order?

This is your passport. It will cost you $8. It’s really a now or never situation. Think of it as boarding a transatlantic ship. The one you love is on the ship. But now you need the passport.

Document by Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
Hand-bound, envelope-style chapbook, letterpressed brown on grey cover
Edition of 88
$8 (includes shipping)
Order from Octopus Books and read a sampling here.

6 Responses to “Are Your Papers in Order?”

This is your passport. It will cost you $8. It’s really a now or never situation. Think of it as boarding a transatlantic ship. The one you love is on the ship. But now you need the passport.

Document by Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
Hand-bound, envelope-style chapbook, letterpressed brown on grey cover
Edition of 88
$8 (includes shipping)
Order from Octopus Books and read a sampling here.

6 Responses to “Are Your Papers in Order?”

O Review!

Alexander Dickow reviews my book, I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU, in the most recent issue of Jacket Magazine. A few excerpts:

… King displays her taste for paradox, conceptual knots and conundrums:

[…] I named my dog for the future except
I couldn’t remember what we’d all been calling her by then […].

My own preference for the baroque attracts me to these occasionally excessive verbal ripples and folds (is excess a negative quality?). Only Lautréamont’s contorted syllogisms can compare: they are never opaque, never senseless, but disfigured just enough to provoke a double-take:

What comes now? None of us died
the very moment that so many of us are still alive. … (‘La Vie Quotidienne’)

Amy King’s lexical palette is enormous, but her language remains economical to the extent that it evacuates the flabby redundancies and laziness so common in everyday speech (and in the poets that adopt a related esthetic). King is aware of the artifice at the heart of her poetic idiom, an artifice rare and refreshing in the thoroughly colloquialized landscape of contemporary American poetry. …

… I would suggest King should be read first of all as an unequivocally committed feminist: she often lampoons our inherited 19th-century conceptions of gender (see for instance, ‘This Is an Acting Marriage,’ quoted below, or ‘The Monster Within’). However, if she feminizes the internal storyteller, she by no means exclusively addresses a female audience (in other words, she feminizes your internal storyteller: yes, you). One of the collection’s most persistently recurring motifs is the inherent reversibility or interpenetration (!) of gender and sexuality …

King relentlessly flirts with her reader: eroticism is a privileged mode of interaction between reader and poem:

I know we can live without love from the waist up
and the kind that flows from up above, even horses
that speak our language, but the rest remains
a place we frequent with panty-laced desire and rely upon
for everywhere with bonus scenes as yet in production,
postoperative and pre-season. Like an apricot foam,
the hand that strokes a felt-like rose stem assumes
where it’s moving and when it’s moving in. (‘Mildly Free’)

Here as elsewhere, King’s poetry accomplishes a paradoxical synthesis of the cerebral and the sensual, viscera and intellect, summed up by the expression ‘scientific copulation in / religious veils’ (‘The Marriage of Birthdays’). Sex always involves an ironic ingredient, suggested here, for instance, by subtle comic allusions to the sexually ambiguous, male-and-female rose stem of the Romance of the Rose, not to mention Mr. Ed and Swift’s Utopic land of the Houyhnhnms. Such allusions suggest a sexuality filtered through layers of literary representation, complicated by culture, but no less invested with desire (indeed, all the more so).

–Alexander Dickow (Please go to Jacket Magazine #34 for the full review!)

6 Responses to “O Review!”

How Red Are Your Poppies?

If you aren’t sure, read these new ones:

ARI BANIAS

“who is ghost”
“From Somewhere in the Middle”
“Find Love in Brooklyn Now!”
” If Fear Were the Teacher”

~~

KATE BELES

“Faulkner’s Caddy”
“Count Me In” –
“An Apology for my Father”
“The Signified”

~~

ANA BOZICEVIC-BOWLING

“Voicemail Anthem”
“Oranges”
“Fall Hopscotch”
“The Moment of Love! (a Board Game)”

~~

SAMPSON STARKWEATHER

“A Review of a Review of Robert Olen Butler’s Severance”
“Prussian Dance Steps are Making a Comeback, Or a Review of a Review of Zoli by Colum McCann”
“A Review of Ms. Pac-Man”

~~

Enjoy!

Amy
MiPOesias Editor in Chief

~~

2 Responses to “How Red Are Your Poppies?”

Pardon My Dust

 Kevin Cornell

And my absence. I’m at work on a number of things, including a tenure application. That means lots of non-blog time; I hope you’ll come back in a few weeks to find me rising from the dust, phoenix-like. Or zombie-ish, if necessary. Either way, there’s a distant blurry plan which will narrow its retina and find something of me in focus.

In the meantime, enjoy some poems I found in a random journal, “whis*key“, as well as a post from Stephen Vincent that is timely and political. Vincent posted this to the Poetics List, where he is a regular poster of merit.

~~

clouds like hatchets & carrot sticks

the clouds today over the sea
look like hatchets & carrot sticks,
mercury poisoning & green tea,
a frothing latte in a red mug
the teeth of a bloodhound,
throwing the i ching, rhapsody
in rebounding sheaves of gold
& glimmer, flesh & fasting
the mercilous pebble bath of
the raging ocean, french wine
marigolds on rye no mustard
the look on yr face when i
explained everything i would
do if you only gave me half
a chance, sleeves, buttons
retreating rings of the moon

–mark s. kuhar

~~

in love with a raving liar

when you fell in love with me
i told you i worked for NASA
designing space shuttle components,
hell, it sounded better than
saying i worked at radio shack.
no, i don’t shop at the friggin’ mall
i go to volunteers of america
whenever i can, cheap 1970s suits
make me look like gabe kaplan on speed,
my idea of a good time is reading
the directions on the back of cereal boxes
but i’ll read them to you, twice if you want
if you’ll stay in love with me
just don’t believe everything i say, in fact
listen carefully, i’m only going to say this once,
i’m a raving liar
i’m a raving liar

–mark s. kuhar

~~

And, as mentioned, from Stephen Vincent:

For urgent reading, go to Sy Hersh’s current New Yorker article on Cheney/Bush and Company’s apparently intractable intention to make ’surgical strikes’ on Iran and Syria.

These folks apparently want to play the Mideast like an old-fashioned juke box. Bing-Bing-Bing.

The consequences of such madness are beyond their concern or
imagination. Unless they are just committed to infinite global mayhem.

Such attacks – apart from being inevitably (more again) self-destructive of whatever remains of this ‘democracy’ – will drive gas prices through the ceiling.

Does one have to wonder much why Chevron just bought back 15 billion dollars worth of its own shares?

Are there any spines left in this ‘roll-over we serve your terror, Mr. Bush,’ Congress?

Stephen V

~~

2 Responses to “Pardon My Dust”

Women of the Web!

Interviews with Female Editors

• Deborah Ager
• Daniela Gioseffi
• C.M. Mayo
• Amanda Johnston
• Jean Emerson
• Maria Mazziotti Gillan
• Danielle Pafunda
• Lori Jareo
• Janet Holmes
• PJ Nights
• Jenni Russell
• Shanna Compton
• Elizabeth Treadwell
• Arielle Greenberg
• Carmen Gimenez Smith
• Elisavietta Ritchie
• Jen Tynes
• Carly Sachs
• Karren LaLonde Alenier
• Anny Ballardini
• Juliet Cook
• Kaya Oakes
• Anne Boyer
• Kristy Bowen
• Michelle Detorie
• Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
• Amy King
• Lina ramona Vitkauskas
• Liz Bradfield
• Patty Paine
• Jennifer Bartlett
• Reb Livingston
• Cheryl Townsend
• Meghan Punschke
• Kate Bernadette Benedict
• Barbara Quinn
• Kim Roberts
• Jill Chan
• Christine Klocek-Lim
• Grace Cavalieri

diode

“Enter diode, teeming with ‘poetry that excites and energizes. . . . poetry that uses language that crackles and sparks.’ We set out to find poetry that creates an arc between writer and reader, an arc that hums with the live current of language.”

Includes work by Chris Abani, Laura McCullough, Rick Barot, Amy King, Bob Hicok, Frankie Drayus, Allison Titus & Rob Schlegel, Julie Doxsee & Mathias Svalina, Eve Rifkah, Peter Jay Shippy, Suzanne Frischkorn, Jake Adam York, Susan Settlemyre Williams, Tara Moyle, Matthew Wills, Karen Schubert, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Joshua Ware, Rich Murphy, and Didi Menendez.

diode

~~

5 Responses to “diode”

mid)rib

 mid)rib

We’re pleased to announce the inaugural issue of mid)rib. It is the mid)rib staff’s hope to foster an international voice for experimental poetics. We hope you’ll take as much pleasure in reading the work of our contributors as we have. In the issue you’ll find new work from an eclectic group of writers, including: Tomas S. Butkus, Joel Chace, Regina Derieva, Anna Fulford, H.T. Harrison, Scott Hartwich, Beth Joselow, Kerry Shawn Keys, Amy King, Sarah Maclay, Nicholas Messenger, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Matt Reiter, Susan M. Schultz, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, Ted Stimpfle and Jim Warner. We welcome your comments and feedback. Please feel free to forward this to any interested parties. Enjoy.

Thanks,
the mid)rib staff

andy martrich, editor
gordon faylor, editorial assistant
jeremy schevling, art boy/ designer
craig czury, contributing editor

Two From CITIES AND TOWNS

 Ross Von Rosenberg – “I Am The City”

I like these two poems, very much, from Arthur Vogelsang’s book, CITIES AND TOWNS.

~~

NEW STREET

The final light is the last fur and no animals left.
Listen to me as if you’ll be on earth forever.
Some lamps of the rehabilitated enriched neighborhood
Like six approaching mocking bodies in space
Are ochre, white, sorrel, sulphur blue-white,
Imitation suns of the sun letting go of us
In late winter under a big blue steel bridge
Where the warehouses and their repulsive sidewalks
Have been washed and dried as if they fit in a dishwasher.
Would you listen as if I were gone,
A time from now, but gone,
A time from now, but gone,
And you were around, not to pass on my impression
Of the lamps gathering in a darkening space
Like a round-up of suns in a solar-system prairie
Between the bridge and our building,
Not to pass on my impression
As an immortal impression (pitiful desire),
But I think it would not be too like hell
For you to travel alone by foot through the rare light
Under the obnoxious domineering bridge
Between the phonied buildings where the jobs will never come back.
Listen, I don’t know if everything’s an accident,
A continuing explosion in which the myths of eating and love are beside the point.

–Arthur Vogelsang

~~

2215 SPRUCE

On the one hand, the shady side of the house,
The window built of leaves, shifting,
The rooms adequate and cool,
But the other way
The sun in the street flat and finding everyone.
They are very still in it.
A new song about Durango from next door,
They thud when they dance to it,
An American on the tape sings some verses in English,
To tell the moot story,
And sings some verses rawly in Spanish.
People you want in the mega coastal city
To the south and to the north, to be absorbed in them.
The boiling short poems of a student four years ago.
How they do everything better but three hours earlier in L.A.,
Better that the sun is like a wife, and the shade is its husband.
Durango, deep in Mexico.
The appointment rushing near,
The gin and tonics after,
The ache for certain ones never to be known,
Then bed but now the dark to the left the bright to the right.

–Arthur Vogelsang

~~

3 Responses to “Two From CITIES AND TOWNS”

Arrivederci, Tenore Matrice

“I don’t classify myself–I let other do that. If you sing all the roles put in front of you, you are a tenor [as compared to a lyrice tenor or a light lyric tenor]. Punto [period.] If you are also an actor, or a good driver of your voice, if you have personality and a stage presence, personality in life, you become something more than a tenor, more than just a voice.” –Luciano Pavarotti

“People think I m disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.” –Luciano Pavarotti

“I’ve been buying the same lambrusco from Correggio [a town between Reggio-Emilia and Modena] since 1965.” –Luciano Pavarotti

Luciano Pavarotti (October 12, 1935 – September 6, 2007)

5 Responses to “Arrivederci, Tenore Matrice”

Mini-Review

I wrote a little diddy about Rae Armantrout’s book NEXT LIFE.

Back at school today but I have two good poems to post later for you. I hope you re-visit tonight. Or tomorrow. The next day? Next life?

11 Responses to “Mini-Review”

Épisodes

It’s just me who said just cinema … “Just cinema.” … not like showing a photo of Marilyn Monroe when you’re talking about her, more like showing a photo of something else to introduce another idea … Not long after the Liberation there was a brief vogue for what were called “poetic films,” there would be poetry or text and then there was simply illustration. You take a poem or a text and you simply put photos or images on it, then you see either that what you’ve done is banal, that it’s worthless, or that the image you add enters into the text and eventually the text, when the time comes, springs from the images, so there’s no longer this simple relationship of illustration, and that makes it possible to exercise your capacity to think and reflect and imagine, to create. That simple form, whether with an interviewer or an illustrated poem, enables you to discover at a stroke things you’ve never thought of before.

–Jean-Luc Godard, “Constellation and Classification”

~~

… there was already this way of working with a photo and a text that didn’t exist separately … Benjamin says that in the beginning is understanding, in other words hearing as much as seeing, and to say one understands is to say two things, yes I hear what you say and yes I apprehend what you say. In my opinion these are two different things that go together and are indissociable. So you can say crudely that there is image and text. In my view, they were on a socially equal footing from the start; one may come first at a given moment and the other second, one can be stronger than the other for a moment, but without any inequality at the start or finish … It was here, if you like, that the whole thing was badly misunderstood, and misunderstood by the distributor Gaumont, which brought Historie(s) out like this … I wanted to do it in the usual way: television showing, books after that, perhaps high-quality videocassettes later. They did the opposite: books first, then cassettes — of appalling quality — with television still to come who knows when. I anted to put on a small exhibition or something of that sort in a gallery, assemble something that would show the different modes of entering and leaving what one can call History. Because for me the book is what will remain afterwards, books survive longer. Apart from that it has a small audience, a small print run of a book isn’t felt to be shaming, but in cinema it is and actually it’s very rare. There are secondhand bookshops but there’s no secondhand cinema … in the book, you perceive much more clearly the equivalence or fraternity or equality between the photo and the text, which are on strictly equal footing, things that completely disorient historians but don’t disorient film people. But they don’t want that, people who talk about films; they want illustration and their separate text, in which they can exercise a certain learning and a certain power. They do texts, and that’s the snag. Rather than taking three images simply and arranging them differently, going too far and remaking cinema. They could be doing that, but they aren’t, they want to do text … The book has more of that than the film proper, the book shows this relation between image and text. They may say the book hasn’t got everything the film has, it hasn’t got all the sound, it hasn’t got all the tricks … no matter, more of it comes through, while with the film audience, except for sincere people, it gets lost.

–Jean-Luc Godard, “Historie(s) du cinéma: Films and Books”

~~

There’s no such thing as reason. Thinking, creating, is an act of resistance; that’s what Deleuze was saying in his fashion. It was to get through on the level of understanding, to be understood in the raw sense and the intuitive one.

–Jean-Luc Godard, “Towards the Stars”

~~

All excerpts taken from CINEMA by Jean-Luc Godard & Youssef Ishaghpour.

~~

2 Responses to “Épisodes”

MTV’s Poet Laureate

MtvU, the subsidiary of MTV Networks that is broadcast only on college campuses, will announce Monday that it has selected its first poet laureate. No, he doesn’t rap. And it’s not Bob Dylan, or even Justin Timberlake.

It is John Ashbery, the prolific 80-year-old poet and frequent award winner known for his dense, postmodern style and playful language. One of the most celebrated living poets, Ashbery has won MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). In another first, mtvU will help sponsor a poetry contest for college students. The winner, chosen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, will have a book published next year by HarperCollins as part of the National Poetry Series.

“We hope that we’ll help discover the next great poet that we’ll be talking about for years to come,” said Stephen Friedman, the general manager of mtvU, which broadcasts at 750 campuses nationwide.

The idea of the laureate program was not to create more English majors, but simply to whet an appetite, said Friedman, a poetry aficionado since he majored in literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan. Ashbery, he added, was the No. 1 choice to inaugurate the position. “He resonates with college students that we’ve talked with,” he said.

Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. “It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry,” he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From “Retro” (2005): “It’s really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill/and you’ve gotten over someone/salty and mercurial, the only person you’ve ever loved.” From “Soonest Mended” (2000): “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued.”

The excerpts were chosen by David Kermani, Ashbery’s business manager, and two interns and an employee, all in their early 20s, in his office.

“We were just trying to pick lines that were catchy and sort of meaningful in some way, something that would appeal to what we thought younger people would be interested in,” Kermani said. These young people picked “things that had sort of raunchy references,” he added. “They thought it was sort of a hoot.”

Ashbery too was pleased by their choices, particularly because they reminded him of what was in his own canon. “I have a lot poems, so there are a lot of them that I don’t really think of very much,” he said. ( Ashbery published “A Worldly Country: New Poems” in February, and an anthology, “Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems,” is due out in November.)

But will droves of young people respond?

READ ON @ International Herald Tribune

~~

4 Responses to “MTV’s Poet Laureate”

“Why Poetry?”

An excerpt from James Baldwin’s essay, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979):

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. …

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: The price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one’s temporal identity. So that, for example, thought it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Proven�al, which resists being described as a “dialect.” And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.

It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one’s antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden.

–from James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979).

~~

An excerpt from Paule Marshall’s essay, “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983):

‘’If you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends you’ll probably say something beautiful.’’ Grace Paley tells this, she says, to her students at the beginning of every writing course. …

I grew up among poets. Now they didn’t look like poets – whatever that breed is supposed to look like. Nothing about them suggested that poetry was their calling. They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers, my mother included, who dressed in a way (shapeless housedresses, dowdy felt hats and long, dark, solemn coats) that made it impossible for me to imagine they had ever been young. …

Later, armed with the few dollars they had earned, which in their vocabulary became ‘’a few raw-mouth pennies,’’ they made their way back to our neighborhood, where they would sometimes stop off to have a cup of tea or cocoa together before going home to cook dinner for their husbands and children. …

The basement kitchen of the brownstone house where my family lived was the usual gathering place. Once inside the warm safety of its walls the women threw off the drab coats and hats, seated themselves at the large center table, drank their cups of tea or cocoa, and talked. While my sister and I sat at a smaller table over in a corner doing our homework, they talked – endlessly, passionately, poetically, and with impressive range. No subject was beyond them.

True, they would indulge in the usual gossip: whose husband was running with whom, whose daughter looked slightly ‘’in the way’’ (pregnant) under her bridal gown as she walked down the aisle. That sort of thing. But they also tackled the great issues of the time. They were always, for example, discussing the state of the economy. It was the mid and late 30’s then, and the aftershock of the Depression, with its soup lines and suicides on Wall Street, was still being felt.

Some people, they declared, didn’t know how to deal with adversity. They didn’t know that you had to ‘’tie up your belly’’ (hold in the pain, that is) when things got rough and go on with life. They took their image from the bellyband that is tied around the stomach of a newborn baby to keep the navel pressed in.

They talked politics. Roosevelt was their hero. He had come along and rescued the country with relief and jobs, and in gratitude they christened their sons Franklin and Delano and hoped they would live up to the names. …

THERE was no way for me to understand it at the time, but the talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends. Not only did it help them recover from the long wait on the corner that morning and the bargaining over their labor, it restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth. Through language they were able to overcome the humiliations of the work-day. …

But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that – in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one – was an integral part of their lives.

And their talk was a refuge. They never really ceased being baffled and overwhelmed by America – its vastness, complexity and power. Its strange customs and laws. At a level beyond words they remained fearful and in awe. Their uneasiness and fear were even reflected in their attitude toward the children they had given birth to in this country. They referred to those like myself, the little Brooklynborn Bajans (Barbadians), as ‘’these New York children’’ and complained that they couldn’t discipline us properly because of the laws here. ‘’You can’t beat these children as you would like, you know, because the authorities in this place will dash you in jail for them. After all, these is New York children.’’ Not only were we different, American, we had, as they saw it, escaped their ultimate authority.

Confronted therefore by a world they could not encompass, which even limited their rights as parents, and at the same time finding themselves permanently separated from the world they had known, they took refuge in language. ‘’Language is the only homeland,’’ Czeslaw Milosz, the emigre Polish writer and Nobel Laureate, has said. This is what it became for the women at the kitchen table.

It served another purpose also, I suspect. My mother and her friends were after all the female counterpart of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. Indeed, you might say they suffered a triple invisibility, being black, female and foreigners. They really didn’t count in American society except as a source of cheap labor. But given the kind of women they were, they couldn’t tolerate the fact of their invisibility, their powerlessness. And they fought back, using the only weapon at their command: the spoken word.

Those late afternoon conversations on a wide range of topics were a way for them to feel they exercised some measure of control over their lives and the events that shaped them. ‘’Soully-gal, talk yuh talk!’’ they were always exhorting each other. ‘’In this man world you got to take yuh mouth and make a gun!’’ They were in control, if only verbally and if only for the two hours or so that they remained in our house.

–from Paule Marshall’s essay, “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983).

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3 Responses to ““Why Poetry?””

A Sexy Franz Wright

 MiPOesias New Issue

Want to see and hear more of Franz?

How about some poems by Cynthia Sailers, Dana Ward, Mark Bibbins, Campbell McGrath, Betsy Wheeler, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop?

You’ll also find a review of Annie Finch — all in the new issue of MiPOesias — enjoy!

3 Responses to “A Sexy Franz Wright”

Hot Afternoons Have Been In Montana

I post with no authority but with the enthusiasm of a person eager to know more. A certain someone lent me HOT AFTERNOONS HAVE BEEN IN MONTANA — Poems by Eli Siegel, complete with a letter by William Carlos Williams written November 3, 1951, which I quote from now:

“We are not up to Siegel, even yet. The basic criteria have not been laid bare. It’s a long had road to travel with only starvation fare for us on the way. Almost everyone wants to run back to the old practices. You can’t blame him. He wants assurance, security, the approval that comes to him from established practices. He wants to be united with his fellows. He wants the “beautiful,” that is to say … the past. It is a very simple and powerful urge. It puts the hardest burdens on the pioneer who while recognizing the virtues and glories of the past sees its restricting and malevolent fixations. Siegel knows this in his own person. He must be tough and supremely gifted.”

Williams also goes on to discuss the implications of Siegel’s founding “Aesthetic Realism”, which I don’t presume to speak about. But I will say there seem to be many adherents, including Ken Kimmelman, who made a film inspired by Siegel’s book and quotes Siegel on his site. If you’re interested in ordering the film, contact Kimmelman through his film company, Imagery Film, Ltd.

Alas, allow me to present a few poems from HOT AFTERNOONS HAVE BEEN IN MONTANA for your edification and pleasure:

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HAIL, AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT

There is a city,
With white in its center,
And white in its edges.
Somewhere in the southwest,
Across several creeks, several hills, several valleys,
This city’s to be got to.
Seventy autumns this city’s had,
(Not counting this year).
At any one moment in the afternoon
Two women are walking south and north,
Two men north and east,
Two men west.
The river near it has been noticed.
And a warm boat is on it now;
Southwest, southwest of reposing tracks,
And houses near railroad stations.
Hail, American development.

–Eli Siegel

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CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

Moods
Are waiting
So that you
(Or anyone)
Can get
Into them.

–Eli Siegel

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DEAR BIRDS, TELL THIS TO MOTHERS

Education consists in instilling into them the universal mind.
–W.T. Stace after Hegel

Fly, birds, over all grieving mothers.
Tell them, if they know more,
They will grieve less.
Tell them that the children they grieve for
Are as mysterious as the God they pray to;
For God’s way is in them.
Tell them that the children who came from their bodies
Have come from so far away,
And from so much;
And that these children
Are going for so much
Of Hell and Heaven, dark and light—
That mothers can be as away from them
As lost lines in the early poetry of France.
Find the lost lines in
The writing that is your child, mothers
(Dear birds, tell them),
And you will not grieve;
You will stand up
In sweet universality.
You will be God’s mothers,
Not just your own.

–Eli Siegel

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ALFRED-SEEABLE PHILADELPHIA SKY

Philadelphia sky,
Seen by Jane,
Not by Alfred,
In Omaha.
Philadelphia sky:
Maybe Alfred
Will see you.
For, Philadelphia sky,
You are an Alfred-seeable sky.

–Eli Siegel

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All poems from HOT AFTERNOONS HAVE BEEN IN MONTANA — Poems by Eli Siegel. Order the book here.

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4 Responses to “Hot Afternoons Have Been In Montana”

How About a Poem?

I don’t think I’ve ever read Ron Padgett’s poem, “Joe Brainard’s Painting ‘Bingo’”, but apparently, you can hear Ron read it on Daniel Kane’s cd, “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s”. Track 21 was originally taped on “Susan Howe with Poetry” radio show, WBAI, New York, June 17, 1975.

How did I find this gem tonight? I was moved to search for it after reading a recent poem of Matt Hart’s on H_NGM_N, among other notables. But go there yourself to discover more. And one always wants more, no?

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NEW YORK SCHOOL LEAF LETTER

More than a hundred thousand copies. Massive

the piling of leaflets to burn. The cento.

The BINGO. The leaves and the letters.

This is not always so easy. This is not always

so massive. Nor is it more than a hundred thousand

copies. It is not Joe Brainard either. It is not

his painting BINGO. Dear Ron Padgett.

The cento. The aching machine. The

raking the leaves. You may think this is

nonsense or merely a penny, but it isn’t.

Nor is it. Nor leaflets to burn. Liberty’s

Statue proclaiming inferno. Joe Brainard.

Ron Padgett. Heroes both and towering

above me. The raking. The poem. Massive is more

than a hundred thousand copies. Otherwise sold to

a nonsense inferno. Joe Padgett. Ron leaflet

Dear BINGO,

–Matt Hart

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Library of Congress – The Poet and the Poem

 Interview for “The Poet and the Poem”

Still more news of the me? I’ll make it up to you later. In the meantime, listen in on an interview Grace Cavalieri conducted with moi.

And thanks to all of you birthday and surgery well-wishers! Your kindnesses went a long, long way — the surgery went off without a hitch yesterday. I was up and about in the evening, eating, walking, and simply feeling fine. Thanks very much!

Poets in “The Poet and the Poem” series:

Billy Collins
Tory Dent
Rita Dove
Rita Dove and Henry Taylor
Cornelius Eady
Claudia Emerson
Daniel Mark Epstein

Nick Flynn
David Gewanter
Maria M. Gillan
Brian Gilmore and Brandon D. Johnson
Daniela Gioseffi
Michael S. Glaser
Louise Glück

Patricia Gray
Donald Hall
Robert Hass
Jane Hirshfield
Major Jackson
Reuben Jackson

Katia Kapovich
Dolores Kendrick
Myong-Hee Kim, Barbara Goldberg, Sibbie O’Sullivan, and Kathi Wolfe
Amy King
Ted Kooser
Stanley Kunitz
Laurie Lamon
Merill Leffler
Herbert Woodward Martin
Hope Maxwell-Snyder and Rob Carney

Campbell McGrath
Heather McHugh
W.S. Merwin
E. Ethelbert Miller
Daniel Thomas Moran

Quique Avilés
James H. Beall
Anne Becker, Ernie Wormwood, Moira Egan and Lyn Lifshin
Jody Bolz, Sarah Browning, Donna Denizé and Judith McCombs
George Bilgere
Fleda Brown and W.D. Snodgrass
Kenneth Carroll
Michael Collier

Library of Congress

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4 Responses to “Library of Congress – The Poet and the Poem”