The Best American Poetry

Matthew Thorburn, Guest Blogger May 20-24

Matthew Thorburn is the author of three books of poems, most recently This Time Tomorrow, published in March by the Waywiser Press. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives in New York City, where he works as a communications manager for an international law firm.

Welcome, Matt

-- sdh

What to Read this Summer (or Any Time): Marianne Boruch [by Matthew Thorburn]

Tonight I’d like to recommend some summer reading. I’ve long admired Marianne Boruch as a poet. Her work is beautiful, quirky, wonderful to read aloud, and absolutely her own. Her poem “Still Life,” from Grace, Fallen from, for instance, is one of my favorites. (And what a great book title.) It’s hard to quote from without just giving you the whole poem, because where to stop? But here’s how it begins:

Someone arranged them in 1620.
Someone found the rare lemon and paid
a lot and neighbored it next
to the plain pear, the plain
apple of the lost garden, the glass
of wine, set down mid-sip—
don’t drink it, someone said, it’s for
the painting. And the rabbit skull—
whose idea was that? There had been
a pistol but someone was told, no,
put that away, into the box with a key
though the key had been
misplaced now for a year. …

This gives you a sense of how her work can move very swiftly from thought to thought across the lines. It’s associative, makes leaps—and that “don’t drink it… it’s for / the painting” and the way the people here, their impulses and actions, are a little scattered, a little inappropriate almost, and funny-sad, is all quintessentially her. 

If you haven’t read her poems, the Innisfree Poetry Journal will give you a good taste. Then go read Grace, Fallen from, probably my favorite book of hers, or pick up her earlier New and Selected.  

But what I also especially want to recommend here is her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, about a nine-day hitchhiking trip to California in the 1970s. Written in 77 short chapters, each just a page or two, The Glimpse Traveler reads like a series of prose poems, or postcards from a different world (the American counterculture) and a different time (the 1970s, but also that time in life when you’re 20 years old and struggling to find your place in the world).

These many brief chapters add up; they tell the story in flashes of action and emotion, illumination. But this is prose written by a poet. Which is to say, you should read for language—the sounds of her sentences, their rhythms—as much as for plot.

Here’s how the first chapter starts:

No plan that Thursday but a big breakfast—eggs, toast. The classic college boyfriend’s apartment: milling about and underfoot, one or two other boys and their maybe girls. A straggly neighbor born Harold, called Chug, forever turning up to make a point then stopping mid-sentence. Someone’s cousin crashed there for a week. Someone’s half-sister from Cincinnati figuring out her life. Not to mention the dog, the cat, and nothing picked up off the floor, no sink or toilet cleaned in how long. Books read and loved and passed on, dope smoked or on a windowsill….

You can read the first four chapters here. But better yet, go buy the book.

"That grand old Irish/Italian tradition" [by Moira Egan]

One of the great things about being an American poet who happens to live in Rome is the proximity to the American Academy in Rome. In recent years, things have become even better for us poetry-loving Romans, thanks to AAR trustee William B. Hart, who endowed an eponymous Residency for a senior poet to join the community at the Academy. 

Karl Kirchwey, poet, professor, and, for these past three years, Heiskell Arts Director at the AAR, has provided some wonderful programming in conjunction with the poets' visits (a remembrance of Brodsky, readings and seminars on and in translation [Italian/English and Polish/English], and the fascinating facets and various reworkings of the Ovidian oeuvre, for example). 

Poets who have been lured to Rome by this fellowship include Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and, most recently, Seamus Heaney. And you can well imagine the thrill that passed through the DNA of this Irish lass when it was announced that Mr. Heaney would be the Hart Poet in Residence for 2013! 

"Happy 41, Andrew Zawacki!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

ANDREW ZAWACKI  (5/22)

Zawacki babe, khaki babe
RAH RAH RAH
The baby gotta incubate 
And HA HA HA

With a Chickasaw, Chickasaw
Chapanese sword 
Ya got a chicken with a Choctaw
Writin’ on the board

With a Ballyhoo, Ballyhoo
Babblin’ away
Just like an ocelot that talks a lot
To Mr Mallarmé

With a Winnemac, Winnemac
Howdja like me now—
We goin’ to the gamelan
That mama don’t allow

With a Taliban, Taliban
Buddha Andalou— 
And Caliban and Yes-We-Can
’ll tell ya what to do

Just like a ’wacki-babe and accolade
And RAH RAH RAH
Ya gotta thwock ’em in the colonnade
And HA HA HA

•

China in A Day [by Matthew Thorburn]

Philip Larkin once remarked that he would like to visit China, but only if he could come home the same day. (I could do another week here on funny and/or curmudgeonly things he said.)

He also said in his Paris Review interview that writing a poem was, for him, a way “to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.” (As coldly scientific as that sounds, he of course also wrote some of the most beautiful and moving verbal devices in 20th century English. And he did go on at least one overnight trip abroad, to Germany, or so I’ve heard.)

Having written and now recently published a book of poems about traveling in China, Iceland and Japan, I’ve often thought of Uncle Phil (as I think of him) and these remarks of his when someone asks me what my book is about, or especially why I wrote it. But to tell you what I tell people, I first have to share another quote.

Jasper Johns said that sometimes life gets so close we can’t see it anymore. Small children and the outrageously wealthy aside, who doesn’t sometimes feel like that? Work or school – or both – plus getting there and home again, taking care of kids (if you went against Uncle Phil's advice and have some yourself), cooking and cleaning and hopefully somewhere in there sleeping… It’s hard not to get caught up in the busy-ness of everyday living and feel that life – real life, the good life, whatever cool thing your friends are doing (and posting pictures of on Facebook) and you’re not – is rushing past you in a blur.

Next thing you know, you’re one of those people who say things like, “I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday” or “Where did the summer go?”

Whereas traveling in another country can have the exact opposite effect. You notice everything – or try to. Because everything is new and different and strange (mostly in a good way). For instance, going to the bathroom in Japan can be an adventure in itself: one involving high-tech toilets and a quick change of footwear. Ordering dinner in Iceland can be too: do I feel like whale pepper steak or is tonight more of a fermented shark kind of night? Should I try the puffin? Or plokkfiskur, perhaps?

Finding yourself in another country is like putting on a new pair of glasses. Everything snaps into focus. Everything seems brighter and sharper. 

Which is, of course, like writing a poem – or like what it takes to write a poem. Traveling and writing poems are both about finding your way, in all the different senses of that phrase. And in both cases you have to pay attention.

I think it was Jordan Davis who once said that’s the biggest thing: you have to be present. Show up and pay attention. That’s the job, you poets – and you travelers. And notice how this thing connects to this other thing. How they are – or aren't – like the things you know back home. How this reminds you of that.

And now we’re making metaphors. And now the world just got a little smaller.  

I wrote poems about being in China to create verbal devices that would enable me to go back to China, if only for a day or an hour, and only in my imagination – and so that (so my hope goes) interested readers could do the same. What I wound up with on the page is a mix of memory and imagination, of course, and so not exactly the China I set foot in some years ago.

And interestingly the best part for the poet (for this one, anyway) wasn’t that finished verbal device, but the process of building it, how the words – or the search for the right ones – kept spurring me on to remember more, imagine more, to go back there again and again.

And finally it’s worth remembering too that one of Larkin’s most beautiful poems is about a journey (again, in all the senses), albeit a domestic one. Listen to him read “The Whitsun Weddings,” which picks up steam slowly but surely, like the train the poet travels in--

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

--and then ends with the most beautiful rain.

Leonard Koan Haiku [by Jim Cummins]

Empty bell.  Sex with
a narcissist is the sound
of one hand clapping.

-- Jim Cummins

Of "Leonard Koan Haiku," Cummins writes: "I see this poem wearing a hat."

Does Poetry Demand Bravery? [by Alissa Fleck]

  When I think of bravery in poetry, I think of having the courage to own the lifestyle. As a now twenty-something who grew up with parents who worked ceaselessly to give me every opportunity they never had, it’s hard not to feel certain pressures—pressures to strive and succeed in the conventional, “American” sense. I occasionally feel that being a writer is somehow my private rebellion, one which is sometimes difficult to own.

For others, bravery in poetry is about the courage to say what needs to be said.

Yet we undeniably live in a time and place where “bravery in poetry” means something very different than it has in the past. This bravery has sometimes meant putting aspects of one’s life on the line.

Still, bravery is and always has been an infinitely broad rage of experience. In some cases it manifests most profoundly in what is not said.

All this and more was broached at The Poetry Society of America and PEN World Voices Festival’s “Bravery in Poetry” presentation last week at The New School. Several contemporary poets discussed the work of poets they feel have demonstrated bravery and risk-taking in their work and lives.

Mary Karr talked about the “brute facts in unvarnished terms” in the work of Zbigniew Herbert.

“Risking something is more than unconventional line breaks,” said Karr, as though reminding us of a different time and place, one in which what was risked was significant, one today’s young poets may struggle to channel.

Yet, to Herbert, who shrugged off such accusations, it was never about bravery—it was simply a matter of taste.

Concluding “The Power of Taste” he writes:

            It did not require great character at all

            we had a shred of necessary courage

            but fundamentally it was a matter of taste

                                                            Yes taste

            that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer

            even if for this the precious capital of the body the head

                                                                                    must fall  

 

Herbert raises the important question of whose place it is to qualify one’s bravery. 

Yusef Komunyakaa talked about “the severe bravery” and “lack of hesitation” in the work of Muriel Rukeyser.

As someone who “breath[ed] in experience” and “breath[ed] out poetry,” Rukeyser’s life and work were about “learning the so-called Other,” said Komunyakaa.

Edward Hirsch’s depiction of Joseph Brodsky as “a party of one,” (in “I Sit By The Window”: “My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, / but at least no chorus can ever sing it back”) and one who saw poetry as a form of existence for which he must make the largest possible case came closest to my own realm of experience, and the tensions between declaring oneself a poet and standing by the lifestyle (though I would never dare compare my “bravery” to Brodsky’s). 

In perhaps the most moving presentation of the evening, Henri Cole took on James Merrill, who eventually succumbed to AIDS-related illness, though he, arguably, never directly addressed the experience of his illness in his work, nor did he tell anyone but his close friends he was sick. 

“I hate the word ‘elegant’ to describe him,” said Cole, who sees the word as a slur by critics for Merrill’s homosexuality.

Merill, said Cole, did not want to be treated as a sick person despite the moral pressures of the time to speak out.

“His silence was heroic,” said Cole. “He denied himself the comfort.”

Maybe we don’t have to be as socially and politically courageous in our work as the writers who came before us, though we struggle still, and forever will, to be personally courageous. The bravery our predecessors took on is a luxury for us but, potentially, a detriment as well. Will we ever learn to be as bold as they were—as they remain in their immortalized words—if not presented with the challenges they helped remove?

(Ed note: this is a second review of the May 1 "Bravery in Poetry" event.  Read Sharon Preiss's take here.)

"Happy 325, Alexander Pope!" (5/21/1688) [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook] [corrected by Chris Crawford]

ALEXANDER POPE  (5/21) 

She’s weepin’ inurr Poarridge,
Creyin’ inurr SOUP:

An’ naebody’s there 

To wape urr Tairs,

Etsept for Alikzandurr POOP.


She’s bocked intae a Cairner;

She’s come to the Aynd o’ urr ROOP:

An’ hü should be the Hongman if naw

For Alikzandurr POOP.


Tha’ Soon of a Divvel’s gawturr!

Ah dinna ha she’ll COOP:

For she ga’ praignant wi’ a Dawtair

An’ the Father is Alikzandurr POOP.


An’ the fainal Vairse ’ll tell yaboot
Tha Deeth o’ urr last HOOP:

For tha Beebee hath coomootuvvair an’ it looks
Like Alikzandurr POOP.
 

Alikzandurr Poop!
 
Alikzandurr Poop!!
Naebody’s there

To wape urr Tairs,
Etsept for ALIKZANDURR POOP.

•

"Happy 45, Christine Hume!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

CHRISTINE HUME  (5/21)

Christine Hume
To the crack of doom
She’ll lower the boom
On her birthday

The fruit of the loom
Cannot help but consume
· KING TUT in his tomb
On her birthday

We must never presume
To harass the legume
Of borascible Hume
On her birthday

We’ll give ’er some room
Or illegal perfume
Or a mop and a broom
On her birthday

☎

King Tut on my foot!
Cashed out and kaput

Cannot but consume
Canopic his tomb

Illegal legume
Borascible Hume

She’ll lower the boom on her birthday
She’ll lower the boom on her birthday

•

"Our Abidance" [by Matthew Thorburn]

I want to kick off my stint here with a painting, a favorite poet, and a poem called “Poem.”

At the beginning of last year I paid a visit to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery for what felt like a belated Christmas gift. It was one of those January days in New York – cold but sunny, no snow, milder than a January day ought to be – when you half-forget it’s winter, and I had brought my wife along to check out a compact but wonderful show of pictures by Elizabeth Bishop. “Small paintings on paper,” the Times called them; a selection of her works in watercolors, gouache, ink and graphite.

Some I recognized from other places. Merida from the Roof you would know as the cover art of The Complete Poems 1927-1979, the salmon-colored paperback we all owned (and probably still have, because it’s so portable) before the Library of America edition and the one simply called Poems were published. And her painting of a tiny-looking Louise Crane kicked back on an enormous bed I’d seen reproduced in The New York Review of Books, in a piece celebrating her centennial.

The show also included an assortment of “Bishopiana” (the Times again) such as a pair of her binoculars (produced by Abercrombie and Fitch!), two of her desks from Brazil – heavy, rough-hewn, rustic-looking things – as well as some folk art sculptures from South America, a birdcage (I think it was a birdcage) and a couple of paintings. The desks didn’t thrill me the way I thought they might, though I did run a finger along the edge of one just to touch it.  

No, the moment of amazement came when I looked up from that desk and realized what else I was looking at, hanging a little off to one side. It really was “About the size of an old-style dollar bill”— or so I’d imagine, never having seen one. (I take it on faith, since EB said so.) 4 and 3/16 by 9 11/16 inches, oil on masonite, in an old wooden frame. A mini widescreen landscape: one-third sky, blue-gray and cloudy; one-third dark ground, with light and dark houses and barns; one-third water, vaguely (cloudily?) reflecting the sky and clouds. Poor painting, it didn’t even have a name – or a date. Untitled, nd, by George Hutchinson – “Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George.” 

It was the painting Bishop describes – and in describing, gradually arrives at a sort of definition of what a poem is for her – in the poem she called “Poem”:  

Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how we live, how touching in detail
– the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

I snapped a quick picture when I had the little room to myself, but it came out blurry. (You can click through a slideshow of all the pieces here; this painting is image #19.) And I thought – just for a minute, just to enjoy thinking it – what if I bought it, what if I could take this relic home and hang it over my desk? Because it seemed amazing to me that, all these years later, here it was: the actual painting. It existed. Because if it were in someone else's poem, it might not, but because it was in Bishop's, it did. And because this was a gallery, almost everything on show was also on sale. Though of course the thirty-something-thousand-dollar price tag was beyond me, and anyway I think it was already marked "sold."

But just to know it was still out there, that it might again hang over someone’s desk, or in their foyer (as it once did in Bishop's aunt's house), made me very very happy. There's a poem in this that I haven't written yet. And I'll have more to say this week about Bishop's poem and what it means to me.

KGB Finale Moved to Friday This Week

If you are looking forward to tonight's Eileen Myles & Rebecca Wolff reading at the KGB Bar -- the season finale of KGB Monday Night Poetry -- just hold it right there. Due to a scheduling conflict, the event has been postponed to this Friday evening, May 24, at the same time -- 7:30 PM (doors @ 7).

KGB Monday Night Poetry was founded in 1997 by David Lehman and Star Black. It is currently hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager. Thanks for a great season everyone -- see you Friday!