Search results: “star in the East”

Husband is The Loveliest Word

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In that terrible heat,
we made our feast. The oil
golden with spices, the skillet’s
wicked, dissolving whisper
reminding us of every old burn.
Savor of warm flesh. Umami.
It was very good. From your fingers,
the salt was a blessing. I had to take
my shirt off. To take the paring
knife from your hand. I wished
we had Bordeaux. We were trapped
in a kind of silence. When the song
ended, it started to play again.

 

 

 


Logan February

Periodic #2

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“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love. This series is an experiment in occasional writing and an exploration of what it means to write about menstruation with a queer imagination. 


 

Thirty years old, and I’ve ruined another pair of underwear. In the café bathroom, I blot at my black jeans with toilet paper and tell myself I’m too old to keep staining all my clothes like this. It feels so middle school every time I fail to keep my insides inside, like I’m back in the 8th grade bathroom, wadding up a makeshift pad and tying a sweatshirt around my waist. Those were dark, leaky years. I was always spilling, always leaving stains wherever I went.

In those early years, my period seemed, like everything else I was feeling, larger than life. I remember trying to lie perfectly still on my back at night, as my mother had instructed, so that the blood would fall exactly in line with the bulky overnight pad underneath me. I would hold my body in prone submission this way, training myself not to flop onto my side, in hopes of directing the bloody animal in me into some kind of order. I’d wake up stiff, groggy—and still, more mornings than not, I climbed out of bed to find a little burgundy proof of escape. A little wildness despite all my good.

It was a bit like the way I’d hold my body on the nights my parents would start up in the living room of our apartment—still, alert, listening for signs of danger. Whenever my parents fought, my father would whisper in Korean, so we wouldn’t be able to hear him; my mother would yell, in English, so we would. And I’d lie in bed, or crouch in front of the door with my siblings, or sit silently, afterward, across from my mother as she thought and fumed. What else could I do? Nobody does childhood; it just happens to us.

I didn’t realize that something of my home life had been leaking through until my sixth grade teacher, Ms. Aiello, brought it up one day after school. She’d noticed that I was having trouble in class; all I’d noticed was that I’d begun, vaguely, to hate her. With her prodding, I started, slowly, to talk. I was surprised that Ms. Aiello had been able to tell that something was wrong, and even more surprised when she pulled a plastic baseball bat out of her car trunk and handed it to me.

“Next time you’re feeling angry at your dad,” she said, “go out back and hit a tree with this.” Anger. So it was anger I was feeling. It had spilled out of me, onto her, before I’d even realized what it was.

That year was also the year of my most public period stain to date. It happened at church; to be precise, it happened in front of my whole church. I’d become an altar girl earlier that year, mostly to have something to do during the long Korean mass, which I only half-understood. Plus, I liked the ritual of it—carrying the candles, ringing the bell. I liked the word “tabernacle” and the crunch of the wafer as the priest bit into it. I liked the solemnity of the rope when I knotted it around my waist. Mostly, though, what I did as an altar girl was sit; sit for what seemed like hours, as the prayers and recitations passed through me, unheeded.

One Sunday, as mass ended, I stood from my chair as usual to join the priest and the other altar children at the front of the pulpit. As the choir sang, we turned, as usual, away from the pews and bowed to the crucifix before proceeding out. What I didn’t know—until a church mom rushed back to the sacristy to tell me—was that something other than the Korean verses had passed through me, as well. And so, when I’d bowed, the congregation had been greeted with a perfect red circle in the seat of my robes—perfectly red; perfectly unambiguous.

It’s strange to realize, now, that I don’t remember feeling particularly embarrassed when the woman fussed about the stain. If this had happened at school, I would have crawled under a desk and pretended to be sick for a week. But maybe there was something about it having happened during mass that made me feel a different kind of shock—one that felt a little closer to thrill. Maybe it was the fact that we’d just spent twenty minutes talking about drinking Christ’s blood. And there may have been something, too, about the way the priest had lowered his head as he bit into the wafer, in that silent moment just before the choir started up—how it had suddenly felt voyeuristic, to intrude on this moment of intimacy between his teeth and God’s brittle flesh.

And when he’d lowered his head, it hadn’t been out of embarrassment, but something more like a performance of submission; like showing us all how to hold still in order to let something large and terrifying work its way through you. So maybe a part of me was, without exactly understanding why, slightly proud of my own brief performance, of the little red sun I’d made as I’d sat, daydreaming about boys and death. I’d been told confession was a sacrament; and maybe, it turned out, I sort of liked the way mine had riled up the church moms.

In any case, it seems I’m still stuck on the confessional, here, at thirty. Still can’t keep my insides inside, can’t not spill my own secrets, either on the page or onto my jeans. At least I started carrying a Tide pen with me and wearing black jeans more often. And maybe that’s all it means to be an adult: to find safer ways to leak, so that you can still walk around and have a day afterward. It’s still embarrassing when I leave stains, when my feelings leave me without permission. But the days I feel most able to survive the work of making these little red suns are the days I remember how it felt, in those years, to be touched by something large and terrifying—and to rise in the morning to marvel at the evidence of what was wild in me.


Franny Choi

The Journey of ANOTHER LAST DAY — an Interview with Alex Lemon

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We’re honored to have had the chance to explore with Alex Lemon the journey of his new book, Another Last Day (Milkweed Editions, March 2019). He’s invited us in to see the gritty aspects of publication: the passions and the doubts, the rejections and the (eventual) acceptance. Learn more about  Another Last Day here.


What were the most joyful moments of Another Last Day‘s journey to publication?

Alex Lemon: Another Last Day was a very different kind of book (it’s a book length poem), but the deep pleasures I found in its journey to publication were similar to what I’ve felt when my other books worked their way into the world. My top 3 most joyful moments—1: Opening the box that Milkweed Editions sent to me with copies of the finished book staring up at me, and then holding that first copy in my hands, 2: Somehow finding a sense of closure when writing Another Last Day—that never-finished finish that somehow feels good—or kind-of-ok-goodness—which for this collection was the closing months of years and years of revision, when I finally felt the final movement in the book (the last few pieces) were honed delicate and sharp; 3: Receiving the email from Mary Austin Speaker, the designer at Milkweed Editions (also an amazing poet), with mock ups of potential covers for the book. Mary’s design work is stellar, and it’s always a pure kind of happiness to see her work—but there’s also something moving about seeing how others, especially a mind/artist/writer you admire envisions your work. Seeing cover options also calms me, in a way—it says to me that the book is almost done coming into being, that it’s actually happening. It’s an excited sense of relief instead of the excited anxiety that the rest of the journey is thick with.

 

What were the toughest moments you faced while getting the collection to the world and what have you taken away from them?

This is my fifth book of poems, and I’m sorry to say, it has not gotten any easier. But the challenges have changed. I think with my first book the biggest anxieties were rooted in revision—in not knowing what was what, being unsure in what I was doing. Those anxieties are still here, but they are dampened now, less poignant but because my life is full with loves and commitments—my beautiful family, my beautiful students, etc.—it feels like there’s never enough time. I started what would become Another Last Day in 2006, and I still feel like I could work at it.

 

An author never really works alone—without whose support would Another Last Day not have made it across the finish line?

I’m indebted to SO many people for the many ways they’ve helped me complete this book. On a personal level, I owe a tremendous amount to my partner, who has forever supported me in my writing life—odd hours, letting me stare out into space or randomly speak gibberish (she is also a tremendous reader of my work), my two children who fill my world with love and light and have the uncanny ability to pull me up from the wreckage of my sadnesses, and also my closest poetry friends, even though I didn’t show this book to anyone until it was done. On a more practical level, the folks at Milkweed Editions were amazing. The poet Chris Martin helped with edits and suggestions—his eye is diamond sharp and his heart his huge and I owe so much to him (and will forever feel guilty for forgetting to acknowledge him in the finished book). Joey McGarvey, who has been my editor at Milkweed for a while now, who is brilliant and always makes my work better. She sent a number of proofs—back and forth—and worked with me on edits, too. Abby Travis. Yanna Demkiewicz, everyone at Milkweed, especially Daniel Slager the Publisher & CEO who has long been a tremendous supporter of my work. But I was also supported financially: I received a NEA Fellowship and other grants, and also received intuitional support from TCU (where I teach), where I’ve received a number of internal grants that have supported my work as a writer.

 

What did you learn about writing over the journey of this book?

How beautiful the tenacious work of writing can be. I really love this new book—it’s jagged delicacy—and how very different it is from my previous work.

 

What was the favorite piece of media or art you consumed while writing these poems?

Oh, this is hard. I read/watch/listened to so much over the last decade. I’ve spent a lot of time reading Richard Scarry books—and thinking about the possibilities of the instable body in an overly-alive world, of motion and vibrancy and the moments of stillness and quietude within them. I’ve also watched a lot of cartoons with my kids.

 

What’s your one sentence piece of advice for poets currently putting a collection together?

Don’t let the fuckers get you down. Or if you don’t want to walk around saying that mantra out loud to yourself, maybe, Do work.

 

 


Alex Lemon is a poet and the author of two works of nonfiction: Happy, selected by Kirkus as one of the best memoirs of 2010, and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards. His collections of poems include Mosquito, Hallelujah BlackoutFancy BeastsThe Wish Book, and Another Last Day. His writing has appeared in EsquireRiver TeethBest American PoetryAGNIBombPleiades, and many other magazines and journals. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, as well as the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University and is Associate Professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he lives.

Periodic #1

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“Periodic” is a monthly column by poet Franny Choi. Every month, she writes a short column on the first day of her period—a check-in that might cover issues of gender, queerness, writing, health, and/or love. This series is an experiment in occasional writing and an exploration of what it means to write about menstruation with a queer imagination. 


 

I’m writing this to you on the first day of my first period of the lunar year. Which I guess is a sort of personal New Year’s. Last night, with a friend, I jokingly called it a going-out-of-business sale (“Everything Must Go!” and so on). But it would probably be nicer to think of the year’s first period as something more like the traditional household deep clean that some Asian families do at New Year’s—a way of sweeping out the old to make space for what’s ahead. A ritual not just for discarding, but for preparation.

I don’t know. Something like that.

I understand that, as a poet, writing prose about my period comes with the danger of getting real sappy real fast. I feel especially aware of the danger of slipping into melodrama because this whole thing started as a kind of joke. When asked if I’d like to write a monthly column for Palette, I sent in two proposals: one was something respectable involving poems as a lens to think about conversations in current politics. The other was: Wouldn’t it be funny if I did something synced up with my other monthly activity? Needless to say, I was a little surprised when the editors wanted to go with this one.

To be fair, the only thing I love more than a good gimmick is a good gimmick that pivots (successfully) toward the profound. The real worry here is that this particular gimmick is the product of a dangerously boring kind of feminism—pussy hat feminism, cis (hetero, white) feminism. The kind of feminism that starts and ends with saying “I, A WOMAN, MY PERIOD” in public. And yes. This is almost exactly the kind of thing I would have thought to do in college, when I stopped shaving my (already sort-of hairless) armpits and wrote weird slam poems about my vagina. It’s all a far cry from the rich, rigorous thinking happening in trans studies circles, especially recently, about gender and reproductive processes.

As an experiment in being kind to my 19-year old self, I’ll say that writing about my body was the first way I knew how to be a feminist. In my college’s spoken word poetry group, I took up my anatomy as a kind of battle cry in my poems. I did this, mostly, because I felt so overwhelmingly angry about all the years I’d been made to feel shame about it. So I wrote poems—which, I have to remind myself, were the most honest and complex poems I could come up with at the time—in order to try to defend my body, along with all its strange leakages.

In one of the first poems I ever read in front of an audience, during my sophomore year of college, I wrote, “I am not a wicked person / and neither are my hips.” Aside from the disturbing implication that my hips are people (just not wicked ones), I feel, mostly, tenderness for the young woman who wrote that line—for what she needed to say to an audience as a pretext for saying it to herself: I’m not bad. My body doesn’t make me bad.

And so, in some of these poems, I tried to write lovingly about menstruating, too—as a way of trying, if sloppily, to love myself, as a person with a uterus and as a woman.

The problem, of course, as always, was in yoking the two together. The more I learned about queer/trans theory and activism, the more uncertain I felt about my ability to write about my body in ways that wouldn’t alienate or silence my trans loved ones. So, for a few years, I stopped. Or rather, I stopped writing about menstruation in explicit terms and began transforming the body in my poems into all sorts of other things: robots, squid, riverbanks, marionettes, wolves. I wrote a book about cyborgs, taking on the personae of androids whose femme bodies and identities had been constructed by their makers, but who were too non-human to have truly coherent genders. And my own gender identity began to shift, as well, or at least to get shiftier—to feel more mutable, harder sometimes to pin down.

I should clarify that I don’t bring up this period of period-silence with any sort of regret or martyrdom. I believe it is perfectly legitimate, and maybe even very responsible, to hold off on saying stuff in public while you’re trying to figure out the language for your experiences. To not feel a breakneck urgency to comment on a narrative about one’s body is, after all, an overwhelming privilege. This is also not to say that I’m writing again now because I’ve come any closer to figuring anything out. And all the anger of my early twenties is still here, especially as the autonomy of women, trans folks, and queers over their/our own bodies is rapidly being legislated away. But I’m back with, if nothing else, more curiosity, more questions, and, hopefully, more love for the thing my body does every month. More jokes, too, for better or for worse.  

I’m trying, with all of that in tow, to figure out how to write, now, about my body and its leakages—not just the parts that leak out of me, but the porousness of my body’s demands for coherence. That is, I’m trying to write, not how about menstruating amplifies my womanhood, but to ask: given the strangeness of gender, given that I am a woman and also a queer person of color and a cyborg and a squid and a riverbank, how might thinking about what leaks from my body help me think about other kinds of leakiness, too? Yes, it all started as a big joke, but I’m hopeful that writing with a spirit of play will help to give this series the flexibility it needs to stay unstuck in a number of ruts, including and especially trans-exclusive ones. To discard what needs to be discarded, and to prepare for what I haven’t yet begun to imagine.

In that same sophomore poem, I wrote: “please understand that this / fleshy starfish cookie-cutout / is not the infinite unknowable that I am, but still it is holy.” It’s comforting to know that 19-year-old Franny was starting to think porously about it all, too: the menstruating femme body as both not-wicked and also not-everything. I’m hoping that she’ll guide me through this, and that, by asking some of these questions, I’ll be able to give her a little comfort, in turn.

In any case: Normal flow this month. No cramps. Happy Year of the Pig.


Franny Choi

Poetry We Admire: Family

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The holiday season is here, the family season is here. This time of year can be joyful, but also especially painful for families that have dealt with loss—our sympathy goes out to all those who face the beast of sorrow in these winter months. For November’s PWA, our editors sought out poems that nod to this season’s duality: like Laura Kasiskche’s poem in Poetry Magazine that pinpoints the mystery of a mother-daughter relationship, like Victor Ugwu  “Fragile” that lays bare the vulnerable mess of all families, or like Madeleine Wattenburg’s “Osteoclasts” which seeks to discover what can be repaired, and what can’t.


 

 

don’t cry    no one’s to blame     and nothing’s ruined, nothing’s wrong      there’s no discomfort
there seems to be no pain     there’s only time, letting something looser     and I’ve made the
preparations     it will die when I die

 

from The Eavesdropper, or What I Thought I Heard My Mother Talking About on the Phone, in Another Room, Thirty-Six Years Ago

by Laura Kasiskche in POETRY

A phonecall? A prayer? A seánce? Laura Kasiskche’s poem floats like a half-remembered dream, touching down on the edges of sense and reason just enough to suggest an animate, haunting, and unnameable truth. The poem deploys gothic imagery within a deceptively domestic schema: sleeping husbands and eavesdropping daughters, kitchen table conversations during Christmastime. You feel rather than see—because seeing would be incomplete—a delicate strand of unspoken reality between a mother and her daughter, and her future daughter, captured in a jar of salt water and held secret for thirty-six years.


 

 

my father’s body was simple,
it had a lack my body carried into

water.

 

from Fragile

by Victor Ugwu in Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (hosted by Brittle Paper)

All families lie fragile in the end, none immune to trauma or pain or hidden hurt. The speaker’s display of family in “Fragile” shines familiar—the poem gives a sibling in distress, a mother losing her body to the family, a father lost, aching, lacking, but hopeful. Victor Ugwu performs the truism of poetry with “Fragile”: the specificity reveals the universality; and the poem serves us well to remind all that our family is neither alone nor special, a state of equitable fragility.


 

 

Our bones remodel themselves all the time, my father
through the phone. He is explaining to me how

deer lose their antlers each spring and people break
their knees and hips. Recently I have thought of changing

my hair and my attitude toward the person I love.

from Osteoclasts

by Madeleine Wattenburg in Sixth Finch

Great poems often reveal intimacy like the night’s first star, an authentic private exploration and search for truth amidst the dark void background of ambiguous, layered, unraveling reality. “Osteoclasts” is essentially a meditation on losing love, the speaker seeking answers in the bits of words and phrases and memories of her familial past, latching on, as we do, to the minutia of graspable fact: in this case, broken bones.

 

Becoming Poet: Kazim Ali

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We’re honored to have had the chance to chat with the amazing Kazim Ali, author of six books of poetry, and over a dozen of prose and beautiful translations—here’s what he has to say about his journey of becoming poet.


 

What’s your relationship to rejection?

Kazim Ali: It isn’t easy, it’s always terribly difficult. Sometimes the work is returned because it isn’t ready or you’ve sent it to the wrong place. It takes time to remember the creation of art is alchemical, by which I mean you can’t measure it or know it. Rejection can be a blessing. Success can be rotten. Some of the most widely distributed poetry on the planet is some of the most terrible. So I suppose it depends what you are doing it for and why. If it’s to be famous or make a living, I can think of a lot of better ways to do either. So rejection is a teacher, both about the work and about your own practice, as a writer and a human.

 

When did you start calling yourself a poet and why?

KA: I can’t really remember. Probably early, around 16. It’s awfully pretentious when you haven’t really even written anything. But I think it is OK to call yourself a poet because it is an aspiration. Mostly it means that you see the world through music and through the beauty of language. And that a sense of beauty or music may be more important to you than just explaining things or describing things. Magic and mysticism is so much a part of my cultural background that I always wanted to be a wizard when we played Dungeons and Dragons as kids. So that too is a poet’s work.

 

What was the journey of getting your first book published?

KA: It was a meandering journey. I didn’t have a project in mind, I was just writing individual poems. I had done an MFA but I was very unfocused and worked mostly independently. My MFA was more of an apprenticeship for me, I was trying to figure things out, write really experimentally. Often I would spend months and months reading one book. I spent a semester just reading Swarm by Jorie Graham; I spend much of the year after graduation reading If In Time, Ann Lauterbach’s Selected Poems. I spent a good two and a half months in my last semester of grad school reading Joan Retallack’s book Afterrimages. So these writers were very much my teachers too as much as anyone I sat in a room with. Plus I was all over the map with my writing practice. I had more than one teacher and more than one fellow student tell me they had no idea what I was doing. It was OK because I didn’t either. The poems eventually sparkled together, they made a constellation of meaning. I suppose that, like a constellation, one sees a different shape in the sky depending on how you fill in the blanks. Or you can just enjoy the stars.

 

How do you climb out of a dry spell of writing?

KA: Well at least partly you move to write in your journal or write a letter or read deeply. But mostly I do not stress out too much about times when I am not writing because when I *am* writing, I write intensely. I have written a book in a month (Fasting for Ramadan), I wrote a book in four months (Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities), once I wrote a book in sixteen days (Anais Nin: An Unprofessional Study). On the other hand, certain books takes years and years and years to come together. It probably took me eight years to write the material that became Silver Road: Essays, Maps and Calligraphies, but of that eight years, one set of pieces took me a week and a half, another set of pieces took me a month, another set of pieces took me around six months and the final set of pieces took me two days. So there’s a lot of “dry spells” in my writing process, but can you really call them purposeless? Things cross-fertilize. Richness arises without harbinger.

 

What’s part of your job as a poet that would surprise most people?

KA: I suppose the above. I publish a lot. A fair amount. In the last not-quite-fifteen years I’ve published more than twenty books. So I suppose I am what is called “prolific” but there are long spells when I am not working at all. It feels like necessary silence. Silence is a part of my life as a poet. And it is frightening and divine.

 

 

Becoming Poet: Jane Hirshfield

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We’re honored to have had the chance to chat with the amazing Jane Hirshfield, author of eight books of poetry, and recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim—here’s what she has to say about her journey of becoming poet.


 

What’s your relationship to rejection?

Jane Hirshfield: In 1986, I wrote a poem responding both to the Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearing and to a neighbor’s son starting (entirely audible to me) piano lessons. I believed that poem, “Justice Without Passion,” was among the best things I’d yet written. It was rejected eight times. I looked it over and changed one word, then sent it next to the then-new West Coast journal Zyzzyva. They took it, and it then became my first poem chosen for the Pushcart Prize anthology. I couldn’t know if it was that one changed word that made the difference, or simply that the poem had finally found the right reader. But that experience, with the happy Pushcart award, taught me two things: one, don’t ever stop looking to see if a poem can be made stronger, and two, if you believe in a poem, don’t give up on it, someone else will likely eventually agree.

No socially-attuned, awake mammal will ever like a rejection. But it’s still information that something needs to change—perhaps the poem, perhaps the poem’s reader. My worst rejection was an acceptance asking for changes I didn’t think were improvements. I declined. You can tell if a suggestion is right, and not all are. Still, coming to that can sometimes take time. My best rejection wasn’t for a magazine, it was the poet William Matthews, visiting an adult ed workshop I took, saying he thought my poem (which I thought was a breakthrough poem) was completely confused. At the time, I thought he was dead wrong. A couple years later, when I was putting my first book together, I looked at that poem and thought, “This poem is totally confused.” It was still a breakthrough poem, it just wasn’t salvageable as an experience for anyone other than me.

 

When did you start calling yourself a poet and why?

JH: I still have trouble calling myself “a poet.” The verb form is better. When I’m writing poems, I’m a poet. When I’m not writing poems, I am not.

One morning in 1988, shortly after my second book came out, I received a phone call. A voice said, “Is this Jane Hirshfield?” The business of junk phone calls had just started, and I answered with skepticism, “Yes…” I didn’t hang up only because the voice had an accent. Then the voice said, “Jane Hirshfield, the poet?” No one called me that, then. A little less skeptically, I replied, “Yes….?” And the voice said, “This is Czeslaw Milosz.” He was inviting me to come to his house in Berkeley for dinner. If I hadn’t been still in bed, I’d have fallen over. But even after one of the great poetry heroes of our time called me a poet, I never thought of myself as such an august creature. Milosz was a poet. Adrienne Rich (another of my local-living heroes) was a poet. I was, and remain…. me. A person through whom poems sometimes travel into the world.

 

What was the journey of getting your first book published?

JH: My first book was published accidentally. I sent my manuscript to my old teacher, Theodore Weiss, for his opinion before starting to submit it. I was disconnected from all information, and had no idea that he and his wife Renee had changed the format of their long-standing bastion journal, The Quarterly Review of Literature, to publishing five full-length books together under one cover. He wrote back asking if he could publish it in that series. My companions in that 1982 volume were two other American poets, Christopher Bursk and Marguerite Bouvade, and then two translations: the Swedish poet Lars Gustafsson (who remains on my pantheon bookshelf), and a then entirely unknown Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, translated by a group of young American poets including the then equally unknown “S. Olds.” My book got no attention, beyond the journal’s subscribers; I think there may have been a single review somewhere. But when I look at the others who appeared in the ten years that QRL published its series of full-length books, I find in retrospect the most amazing things. One is a first book of poems by Anne Carson, though you won’t find it on her books’ lists of previous works.

My second book, Of Gravity & Angels, was more the usual publishing story. It came out from Wesleyan University Press in 1988, after maybe two years and a dozen rejections. During that time I kept revising, and also dropping some poems, adding others. I have no doubt it became a better book for the extra ripening. I found out afterward that one of the outside readers who gave it his blessing had been David St. John, who has since become a long-standing friend. Though I moved on to HarperCollins and then Knopf, I’ve always felt the strongest gratitude to Wesleyan for being the publisher that took a chance and launched my work into public view. They remain one of the best of the university presses. And they’ve kept that early book in print, to boot.

All this was before the landscape changed to what it is now, where almost all new poets’ books come into print through organized contests. May I add something about that? I truly believe this is a good and fair system, though I do realize the entrance fees can add up. But time after time, I’ve seen writers I believe are good writers arrive at publication. Strong poems rise, and it’s just a matter of the right manuscript finding the right judge for that particular poet’s strengths. When I judge these contests, I am looking simply and only for the poems that thrill me the most. Over the years I’ve chosen experimental poets, narrative poets, lyric poets, men, women, poets of diversity of every kind, poets of dense language, poets of spare language. Of course a person will like what they like, which is why the system of rotating judges is so good an idea, but I have only one agenda: to choose a book it thrills and awakens me to read. I like the blind reading process, also. I just last week chose a book prize manuscript blind, then found out it was a writer I’d had in a workshop perhaps 15 years ago. I liked her work 15 years ago, and to see that she had become such a fully ripened writer pleased me no end. But if I had seen her name, I might have felt I had to bend over backwards not to choose a book by someone I knew and liked.

 

How do you climb out of a dry spell of writing?

JH: By longing. I grow lonely for poems, the way you would grow lonely for an absent lover. And then they return. Longing is the ladder we meet on.

I do have a larger set of specific suggestions. They can be found in the January 2018 issue of Poets & Writers. The url is https://www.pw.org/content/reconnecting_after_a_silence , though the piece itself may only be readable by subscribers (or from your local library, if they subscribe.) Poets & Writers is in general one of the best resources available to any emerging writer, with information both practical and large.

 

What’s part of your job as a poet that would surprise most people?

JH: How much I fly, and where poetry takes me. Twelve days ago I gave a reading 1000 feet underground in an ancient coal mine (now a minining museum) in Zabrze, Poland. One hundred and ten people filled that auditorium to standing room only, all having come down in the caged miners’ elevator eight at a time. Tomorrow I leave to teach a poetry retreat in a wilderness monastery. Two weeks from now I fly to a festival on the East Coast, and a week after that I go to one in Australia. Two years ago I said some poems to the Global Seed Bank in Svalbard, in the Arctic. Seven years ago, poetry took me, along with a few other American writers to Aleppo, Damascus, Amman, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Istanbul, under the auspices of Iowa’s International Writing Program. We met with a larger group of writers on the Greek Island of Paros, also, for a symposium on the theme of Justice.

I’m not a particularly good tourist poet, and almost never write poems directly about these kinds of experiences at the time. But now, seven years later, as the war in Syria goes on, I have written poems I would not have come to if I hadn’t walked through Aleppo before it was destroyed, or wondered for so long about the lives of the university students I spoke with there and in Damascus… These young people were concerned, back then, about the war in Iraq coming into Syria. Syria was stable then, and had taken in 750,000 refugees. Now it is those students who are likely displaced, fighting, dead, or living with their own young children in a distant country or a refugee camp.

That I suppose is the deeper surprise: how much my life as a poet has brought some small entrance into the lives of others far from my own. The poems themselves have always done that, also. It is part of poetry’s job to knit lives across distance, time, culture, language, circumstance. An ancient Egyptian love poem brings you a girl drinking beer for breakfast with her lover, as they cool their feet in a river. It could be Fresno. A Japanese woman poet writing a thousand years ago speaks my own feelings of eros, my own thoughts on aging. Akhmatova and Hikmet show me how a person can go on in impossible circumstances… Poems are the pollinating bees of interconnection.

 

 

A Body in a Room

By

1

A body covered in dust in a room covered in dust.

A body with an existence, dark spot on the ground.

A room admitted to itself again.

A body that had studied a room like a book.

A room on its cold knees.

 

A room traced back to a body and its nail-tough ancestors.

A body shedding. A room in a shed with a chair in it.

A room, for a time being, quarters for a body.

A body of bittersweet sweat, and proud hands.

A room with no inkling of what a body will do next.

 

A body and a little play of toes in warm socks.

A room measured by breaths.

A body as it tortoised-and-hared its way through a room.

A body an aware one, holding a letter not yet opened.

A body too fast for a room, yet where else to go?

 

A body of questions in a room of questions.

A body, a room. Who’s in there?

A body breaking-off a thought, a gasp.

A room a breach, a body gone to flowers.

A room joining the cracking limbs of a body.

 

2

A room called bastard and its vagrant heart.

A body coursing and room refraining. A room a room

A room many rooms ago, a skipping record.

A body with its skin-toned scars from its vinyl youth.

A room and a body and the music they liked.

 

A room dedicated to repose, a body to its plumbing.

A body and a room, necking and neck.

A body as it rifled through a room for a piece of paper.

A body holding out, a room with no EXIT sign.

A body fugitive.

 

A room a dimmer switch for a body.

A body that shared a password with a room (they were that close).

A room a good friend to at least three people, maybe five.

A room and a copy machine flashing all the outside parts of a body.

A room and its sex, a body and its sexes.

 

A body whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

A room growing into its proverbs and posters.

A body that died for truth, a room that died for beauty.

A room that could answer as easily as sneeze.

A room that had no way of being framed.

 

3

A room a mirror, a body in the wings.

A room an endangered habitat.

A body unable to utter a word.

A body of darkness, a room and its razor blade.

A body admitted to itself.

 

A room of inane refrains, a body of artless rhythms.

A room a sound of soon.

A body and a room, a name touching a name.

A body its first Bonnie, a room shy, high, exalted.

A room in praise of its shadows.

 

A body flooded in night light, a room whispering.

A body until it had no more thoughts, utterly a body.

A room very long and very deep. A body of soft striped light.

A body and its laughter, a room of soothing sounds.

A room a superposition of times in the laundry in the laundry bin.

 

A room a body was done-in in.

A body in the ground and a room with its windows open.

A body star westward from the pole, a room illuminated where it burned.

A body of the east that was green, black body of the north, red body of the south,
white body of the west, a room for each.

A room released from any sense of intelligibility.

 

A body, a brief history of light in a room.

A body if only, a room as if.


Thomas Devaney

Poet Wrestling with the Blood Hooves

By

Make no more birthdays of these bloody hooves.

When you strike :: stop dead, only horse & I move—

+++++++++++& {nothing}—+++++++++++no, never broke our

+++++groove,+++++++++++not tentacles nor telling

+++++++++++++++tears of Job

falling like succulent snow
around our throat++++++++++++++& choking.

There is no {you}. Was never a rib missing. Only your forked-
done & curses you hid in alms.++++++++What a demon would

++++++++++has tongued :: the kind of light men
++++++++++brung. & only a two-footed fool

++++++++++would believe you ever

{breathed.} Don’t start. {If you wanted to.} On thicket-stone.
In carnage hospital where doctor & priest pray my blood is full

& faulty & foiling. Contagions. {As you}. I’ve crushed beneath
these blood hooves. Sodden-electrical sting. Touch me. Even

the floor sinks its teeth
+++++into. {When horse & I :: done with you}. In labyrinthine

countryside. In broad day
+++++where you once rang the women & the wolves

mad & mange
like shill bells.

Shepherd & soft cheek you will not find within. {Horse &
I}.+++++++++++Flailing men of the wind we make flesh

& stilled. My brothers think. Caging {you} as if bars
a sealing. Falsetto & neat. A bit of cotton in the ears

++++++++++++++++++++++++++cauliflower & pealing

++++++++++across fallen fields. How they make {you} :: of them,

+++++flimsy

& carousing as if ever {could you}. With these bloody hooves. These ::

+++++little beast. Won’t even speak

++++++++++:: don’t have to. When we are the bleeding

upright, the fourth tense calling, for every horse {I am} too

wrestling with these bloodied :: bloodied hooves.

+++++Lay restless rust on {you} —++++++++++++breaking

++++++++++nothing from nothing,++++++not even the dust

++++++++++++++++++++of our

+++++++++++++++++++++++++death_____++++++++t o u c h.

 

 


Rosebud Ben-Oni

Author’s Website @RosebudBenOni