Line Art

Reading at OSU Urban Arts Space

2011-04-18T00:13:00.000-04:00

My thanks to Hannah Stephenson for putting together a terrific reading at the OSU Urban Arts Space that featured her, Maggie Smith, Jen Town, and myself. It's a wonderful space for art and for readings, and worth a visit if you find yourself in town. Audio from the reading is available over on the right.

Also worth a visit is Hannah's blog, The Storialist, where she posts a new poem every weekday.

Readings

2010-09-30T23:05:00.000-04:00

New readings have been scheduled:

Philadelphia, Oct. 19th, 7.30 pm.
WineO Reading Series
447 Poplar St.

Portland, Nov. 11th, 7 pm.
Rough Copy Reading Series
The Canvas Art Bar and Bistro
1800 NW Upshur St.

Come by and say hello.

Kathy Fagan on "Ox" and "Craic"

2010-09-27T17:18:00.000-04:00

This is a wonderful piece about the Irish term "craic" and how we deal with suffering.
http://aboutaword.blogspot.com/2010/09/kathy-fagan-ox.html

Well done, Mr. Abramson

2010-07-21T23:02:00.003-04:00

Seth Abramson on Ron Silliman's unfortunate epithet, "school of quietude":

part 1

part 2

Mr. Silliman is a smart guy, but his continual use of this term is so laughable that I hope this helps him put it aside, because it makes him appear unable to read any kind of poetry that isn't very much like his own, which I would doubt to be true.

Sandra Beasley, I Was the Jukebox

2010-07-08T23:21:00.004-04:00

I Was the Jukebox is an excellent act of imagination. Beasley’s poems aren't showy, they adhere to a standard contemporary versification, but they evoke worlds, make the language shiver—they are not fancy, but fanciful to be sure.

I’m hard-pressed to describe how charmed I am by the opening poem, “The Sand Speaks” (one of several “[ ] Speaks” poems):

I’m fluid and omnivorous, the casual
Kiss. I’ll knock up your oysters.

Sand as Lothario sneaking inside the cleft shell and leaving a grain of sand behind to worry the oyster into creating a pearl. A thing of beauty made out of such casual stuff. What a smart opening salvo for the book. Wonderfully metaphoric, and funny.

It continues:

I’ll eat your diamonds. I’m a mutt, no
One thing at all, just the size that counts

and if you’re animal small enough, come;
if you’re vegetable small enough, come;
if you’re mineral small enough, come.
Mothers, brush me from the hands

of your children. Lovers, shake me
from the cuffs of your pants. Draw
a line, make it my mouth: I’ll name
your country. I’m a Yes-man at heart.

Let's play Hide and Go Drown. Let's play
Pearls for His Eyes. When the men fall
I like the way their arms touch, their legs
touch. There are always more men, men

who bring bags big enough to hold
each other. A man who kneels down
with a smaller bag, cups and pours, cups
and pours, as if I could prove anything.

(A bit of praise for knowing sand is a measure of particle size, not necessarily a particular thing [salt is a sand—see this terrific book]).

The technique that Beasley deploys here works on an incantatory level, but does not get overbearing. Look at the anaphora—you get a phrasal or structural repetition, but then it switches to another, which will be repeated once or twice, and then another. "I'm..." / "I'll..." / "I'll..." / "I'm..." / "If you're..." (x3) / "Mothers, brush..." / "Lovers, shake..." / "Let's play..." / "Let's play..." And you can see it go 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, thus keeping the sand from being a very bad date. I'm impressed by the ear that can handle these shifts in syntax.

Beasley is a fine poet and I Was the Jukebox, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, is definitely a keeper—go out and find what's on page 2.

Also see Sandra Beasley's first book, Theories of Falling.

New poems on Kenyon Review Online

2010-07-04T00:10:00.001-04:00

A pair of poems posted by Kenyon Review. Many thanks to them.

Alex Long on The Offending Adam

2010-02-10T13:31:00.001-05:00

Nice essay on poetry and photography and Larry Levis by Alex Long on The Offending Adam.

2010-02-08T23:32:00.003-05:00

"Circus Circus" mentioned today

2010-01-10T20:34:00.001-05:00

The good people of As It Ought to Be blog have featured a poem of mine today.

David Baker, Never-Ending Birds

2009-12-07T23:33:00.007-05:00

David Baker's newest collection of poems, Never-Ending Birds, increases the poet's already large body of magnificent work.

Baker's poems are often, though not exclusively, arranged in stanzas like set gems, as in "Bright Pitch," a poem that compares the creation of the atom bomb with modern-day advertising. It begins:

A few survive, black-
shellacked and
bannered with ads
(as, Chew Mail Pouch
Tobacco), but the un-
subsidized implode--

faint shadows
of plank rot, straw
     mulch, ghost hardware
     and tractor car-
casses wrecked and ribbed
as things Cretaceous.

Wood barns are,
floating the vast
     fields of Ohio, rarer
     than specks of matter
in the blown heavens.
As: one barn =

10^-28
square meters:
     a single nu-
     clear particle in
cross section.
The term being

code at the Manhattan
Project (couldn't
     hit the side
     of—) for the rarity
of finding such universe
stuff. [...]

I admire greatly Baker's ability to suspend his syntax over these jewels, and to interweave the scientific lexicon with the descriptions of the barns and the parenthetical asides. The poem manages to work its way down by sound as well, moving along As from "black" to "shellacked," "bannered" to "ads." In another instance, see the short and long A(r) in "hardware" followed by the slant rhymes in "tractor" and "car."

Pun aficionado that I am, I love the use of "pitch" in the title (as uranium was once called "pitchblende").

Never-Ending Birds is a beauty of a book, and if you haven't found Baker's anthology co-edited with Ann Townsend, The Radiant Lyre, look for it now. It's really a must-read collection of essays on the modes of lyric poetry, featuring, among others, Carl Phillips, Linda Gregerson, Eric Pankey, and the editors.

Carrie Jerrell, After the Revival

2009-12-04T21:44:00.010-05:00

After the Revival is Carrie Jerrell's Anthony Hecht-prize winning first volume. She's recently discussed her terrific poem, "Big Daddy," over at Brian Brodeur's blog How a Poem Happens (Do stop in: There's much treasure there).

Though I wouldn't hold this poem as the best in the book, it is a particular favorite of mine.

The Poet Prays to the 9mm Under the Driver's Seat

Coldest friend, pretty little monster,
I know relief lies low and left of center.

I'm looking for it now. The windshield
shines with my body's outline on its field

of nighttime glass, of stars on glass, though I'm
no star, just a waning mark at which to aim

my crooked sights. My days are dry-fires,
and better actions call for calibers higher

than my own. Be savior to my lovesick bones,
groom to the primed bride of my loneliness,

and I'll forever be your best brief muse,
your straightest shooter. You have a way with wounds,

with damage and deliverance, and I make
a ready berm for both. Let your trigger's break

perform my lullaby. I'll hold the final note.
Bury it here, in the hollow of my throat.

There's not nearly enough gunplay in poetry. The poem fires on its abundance of puns, risking being nothing but a collection of smart, cute jokes, but succeeds as it plays with the centuries-old motif of sex and death. The heartsick speaker's days are "dry-fires" (shooting an unloaded weapon), without power, empty, impotent. The very real, loaded weapon beneath her seat will bring her a communion at last, if only in death, its one-note song singing her to sleep. The most interesting question here though is whether the speaker would aim at her own throat, or that of her reflection: "I'm / no star, just a waning mark, at which to aim / my crooked sights." Is the depressed speaker, feeling so low, so beneath the heavens and the idea of being a star, going to kill herself, or this translucent and unreal reflection of herself?

Perhaps the best is the remarkable title poem, which tells the story of her near-death exposure to wasp venom during a riverside baptism celebration. I'll only quote my favorite lines here, because the entire poem is alone worth the price of admission.

O Death,
so proud in your jacket of cheeriest yellow,
this world is a dark cloak I tire of wearing.

New issue of Unsplendid

2009-09-02T14:00:00.004-04:00

Unsplendid
http://www.unsplendid.com
Issue 2.3
Poems by David Danoff, Caitlin Doyle, Andrew Frisardi, Ben Howard, W. F. Lantry, Kyle Little, Amit Majmudar, Nicholas Messenger, Kim Roberts, Freeman Rogers, Scot Slaby, Matthew Smith, Janice D. Soderling, Stefi Weisburd, Lesley Wheeler, Patrick Whitfill, and Johnathon Williams. Translations from Charles Baudelaire by Clay Cogswell and from Rainer Maria Rilke by Lorne Mook. Art by Mark Khaisman. Brief reviews of Susan Stewart and Geoffrey Hill by Jason Gray.

(Image copyright Mark Khaisman)

Beth Bachmann, Temper

2009-08-29T23:58:00.005-04:00

I've been waiting for Temper since 2001, when I graduated from the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University with Beth Bachmann (along with Alex Long and Dan Groves and several other great poets), and now that it has won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, at last I get to read it in trade book form (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press).

A book of discrete, short lyrics that tell, or rather imply, the story of a murdered sister, and the father's possible involvement. The poems function as pieces of the story, and pieces of the psyche of the teller, accumulating as the book turns its pages.

The first, title poem, "Temper":

Some things are damned to erupt like wildfire,

windblown, like wild lupine, like wings, one after

another leaving the stone-hole in the greenhouse glass.

Peak bloom, a brood of blue before the firebrand.

And though, it is late in the season, the bathers, also,

obey. One after another, they breathe in and butterfly

the surface: mimic white, harvester, spot-celled sister,

fed by the spring, the water beneath is cold.

Ms. Bachmann's musical gifts are evident. Take for example, "windblown, like wild lupine," where the second picks up three distinct sounds from the first, the "wi," the "l," the "n." Her choice of "temper" is a smart one: the definition we most often think of, that of losing one's temper, which can lead to violence, but also to make tougher, or more balanced, as one who has gone through some great hardship will hopefully receive as an outcome. And we are introduced, without fully knowing it, to the sister, with one of the butterfly choices in the list.

The poems aren't always directly about the narrative at hand, though they do contribute to the atmosphere of the story. "A New Way of Thinking About Space" is an ekphrastic a crucifix of Giotto's.

In Giotto's cross we see for the first time
the weight of the body
pulling against the wood.

This is the moment after the accusation
of the father, when
the effects of gravity

take over. It's a break with the past,
a refusal to stylize
the holy, a rupturing

of the plane.

Religious imagery stipples Temper, as the narrator struggles with the difficult questions of a sister killed and the life we have left to live in this fallen world.

This is a beautiful debut—one I hope receives the attention it deserves.

Reading at Stain Bar, Brooklyn, NY

2009-03-02T21:02:00.001-05:00

On Friday, Feb. 27th, I was pleased to read as a part of the Stain of Poetry Reading Series.

See videos of my fellow readers here.

Sarah Gambito, Delivered

2009-02-22T23:01:00.002-05:00

I'd like to write a little about each of the books I picked up at AWP, and I'll start with Sarah Gambito's Delivered (Persea—who, by the way, has put out a remarkable number of good books of poetry lately). I approached the Persea table in the bookfair with the idea of picking it up, and as luck would have it, she happened to be at the table. She was very warm and cheerful, and her book is a delight to read.

The book deals often with the lives of immigrants in America, and one poem one that subject that I particularly enjoyed is "The Puppy" (of which there are two with that title; each section has at least one pair of poems with the same title).

Immigrant families began to arrive and children were born. Eventually the children picked up English at school. The English was cool and light like a puppy but more useful. They picked it up and threw it at each other at playgrounds. Some were better than others. Some just thought it was cute but a waste of time. Some compared back legs and the length of fur and the set of the nose and the wide dripping eyes. Even if they didn't say so everyone competed.

Not having the experience of learning English as a second language, or being an immigrant myself, it was a surprise to see the language treated as a toy by the non-native speakers. The unusual description of the language as a puppy is unsettling, because it is made so apt, even though it risks being such a "light" image. The poem remains light up until the end, when it turns deeply serious, and yet, the idea of "competition" is right in line with the body of the poem. The dog show this puppy could be in keeps that last sentence from coming out of left field, keeps it honest. The bridge by the previous sentence which has some of the speakers examining the puppy makes the connection work.

A very strong poem in a very small space.

AWPMeeting Heather McHugh

2009-02-17T19:42:00.006-05:00

Back from Chicago, wonderfully tired. The highlight for me was getting to meet Heather McHugh, the judge for the Hollis Summers Prize which Photographing Eden won, and more importantly, a fantastic poet. Her reading was phenomenal—wild, funny, a delight. (August Kleinzahler, who shared the bill with her Saturday night, was equally amazing.) I'd never met her or heard her read before; I only knew her through her poems. So it made for a special Valentine's treat to say hello and give her a copy of the book. Here are a pair of photos, courtesy of Heather Price.

Reading Audio

2009-01-30T13:28:00.002-05:00

I was happy to participate in Ohio State Library's ReadAloud program yesterday. Here's a link to the audio. Also with me on the program is Susan Ritchie, a Unitarian minister reading a pair of very good essays.

Reading in Brooklyn

2009-01-23T14:09:00.002-05:00

I am very pleased to be reading as a part of the Stain of Poetry reading series on Feb. 27 @ 7 pm. They've got a terrific line up of poets throughout the spring. Check out the series blog.

Stain Bar
766 grand street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
(L to Grand,
1 block west)
718/387-7840

The Snow Leopard

2009-01-16T16:35:00.002-05:00

In a conflation of events, the Poetry Foundation has posted my poem, "The Snow Leopard," in their poetry tool archive. My thanks to them.

The Snow Leopard

RIP Friday

2009-01-16T15:31:00.003-05:00

I'm on a roll with the death posts, so I'll share this email I just received, from The Snow Leopard Trust, a wonderful organization that is helping to keep snow leopards from disappearing from the planet. I have a strong bond to these animals, which I wrote about in what may be the first good poem I ever penned.

Important Snow Leopard Alert

Dear Jason,

For the past few months we have all been following the snow leopards living in the South Gobi near our new long-term study site. Thanks to photo trap cameras and GPS collars we have been learning a great deal about where the cats go and how they live their lives. We recently learned the grim challenges faced by the cats as well. It is with heavy heart that I write to inform you that the snow leopard named Longtail (known as Bayartai in Mongolian), was killed by a herder defending his livestock. This has come as a terrible shock and our entire team is devoted to learning the details of this unfortunate event. We will be making regular updates available on our website and blog. Please understand that it takes time to fully investigate and understand what happened.

We first met Longtail when he was captured on film by hidden trap cameras over the summer of 2008. On September 14, 2008, he was fitted with a radio collar and we had the privilege of following his wide-ranging movements through Mongolia's Tost Mountains for nearly 4 months. The information gained from Longtail and the other cats is invaluable as we work to develop programs that will ensure the survival of these beautiful animals. The loss of Longtail is a sad reminder of the hard work that remains and adds urgency to our efforts to involve more communities in Mongolia and other range countries in our conservation efforts. We know snow leopards face similar threats every day across their range and we pledge to continue our efforts to bring safety to more cats as quickly as possible.

In the coming days, many of your questions will be addressed through our website and blog. If you have other questions you are welcome to contact us about Longtail by writing to info@snowleopard.org. Thank you for your support through this entire project. I truly hope that together we can help prevent the loss of the other snow leopards still surviving in the Tost mountains and beyond.

Sincerely,

Brad Rutherford
Executive Director

W.D. Snodgrass

2009-01-16T15:26:00.002-05:00

A couple of days ago, but I thought I'd still post a poem of his here. It must have been difficult to live up to winning the Pulitzer with one's first book.

April Inventory
by W. D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned

All white; the cherry blooms once more.

In one whole year I haven’t learned

A blessed thing they pay you for.

The blossoms snow down in my hair;

The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.

The sleek, expensive girls I teach,

Younger and pinker every year,

Bloom gradually out of reach.

The pear tree lets its petals drop

Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now

I have to nudge myself to stare.

This year they smile and mind me how

My teeth are falling with my hair.

In thirty years I may not get

Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,

I made myself a little list

Of all the things I’d ought to know,

Then told my parents, analyst,

And everyone who’s trusted me

I’d be substantial, presently.

I haven’t read one book about

A book or memorized one plot.

Or found a mind I did not doubt.

I learned one date. And then forgot.

And one by one the solid scholars

Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.

I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;

One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.

Lacking a source-book or promotions,

I showed one child the colors of

A luna moth and how to love.

Andrew Wyeth

2009-01-16T15:16:00.003-05:00

Andrew Wyeth, painter, has died.

Though never a huge admirer, I did grow up in Chester County, near the Brandywine River Museum and Wyeth's stomping grounds, so I spent many a class field trip examining his art.
His most famous painting, perhaps, is "Christina's World."

I always liked this painting of a sleeping dog better, however.

I was quite fond of his father, N.C. Wyeth's illustrations for classic adventure books. I remember being entranced by this one of a dying Robin Hood when I was a boy.

Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking

2009-01-05T15:09:00.002-05:00

Reading through Michael O'Brien's Sleeping and Waking (Flood Editions, 2008--such absolutely wonderful books they produce, due in no small part to Quemadura, aka Jeff Clark, a brilliant designer), one small image in particular struck me. It isn't overwhelmingly beautiful or thought-provoking, but it felt like an image I hadn't read before. Many of the poems in his book resemble haiku, which are extremely difficult to pull off, either becoming too generic and stale in their use of nature images, or too obscure in attempt to not do the former. But O'Brien's poem, "In Maine," which consists of 3 parts, begins:

Tree-wraiths in
fog, wind-clatter, a

rash of
lichen-flowers.

Many clouds marry
the one mountain.

It was the last couplet that got me on first read. It seemed apt, and something I'd not read. Sure, the clouds and fog gather around a mountaintop--marriage. Except clouds are intemperate things, and, despite the current divorce rate, marriage seems to me something more permanent than clouds offer. So I'm not sure I'm convinced by this anymore. Of course, some taller mountains are almost continually shrouded in cloud, and I'd be willing to concede this is what O'Brien is thinking of.

On repeated read, it's the previous couplet that I like better, the "rash" of lichen across rock, which is what lichen can look like on stone, and it is precisely not a pleasant image, and therefore cuts against the usual motif in these types of poems.

RIP, Harold Pinter

2008-12-25T15:21:00.001-05:00

Harold Pinter has died, Christmas Day, 2008.
BBC Report

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T12:50:00.003-05:00

A poem for Christmas Eve, from Geoffrey Hill.

A Picture of a Nativity

Sea-preserved, heaped with sea-spoils,

Ribs, keels, coral sores,

Detached faces, ephemeral oils,

Discharged on the world’s outer shores,

A dumb child-king

Arrives at his right place; rests,

Undisturbed, among slack serpents; beasts

With claws flesh-buttered. In the gathering

Of bestial and common hardship

Artistic men appear to worship

And fall down; to recognize

Familiar tokens; believe their own eyes.

Above the marvel, each rigid head,

Angels, their unnatural wings displayed,

Freeze into an attitude

Recalling the dead.

From New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Copyright 1994 Geoffrey Hill.

NewsHour Art Beat Blog & Turner Cassity

2008-12-23T12:28:00.006-05:00

I had the great good fortune to be the first featured poet on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat Blog yesterday. It looks to be a terrific new venue for poets' work. Having a recording to go along with the poem enriches the experience of reading it.

This occurred same day my copies of the book arrived from the warehouse. This is the second convergence--when I initially received a pair of copies of the book straight from the press, a couple weeks ago, it was Milton's birthday (and I was wearing the same shirt I was when the jacket photo was taken).

The Milton coincidence is only so because Turner Cassity, kind enough to blurb the book, compared me to Milton (very loving, but hyperbole, to be sure).

Cassity himself is a terrific poet, who I only got to know since my association with Ohio University Press, who has published his last two books, and a selected poems before that. Cassity is witty, acerbic, dry, a satirist critical of current trends, but not nostalgic for the past either.

One of the most affecting to me is from No Second Eden, a poem called "Smile Please."

I've paid off my debentures
By photographing lynchers.

Above their easy grins
They stare into my lens

As, placing for my view
Their firstborn, parents do.

To keep it sharp, I hope,
I focus on the rope:

A good strong vertical.
The neck twists in the fall.

You want to show the drop
full-length. I never crop.

Lash marks are hard to catch.
I touch them in; I match

Them up from shot to shot;
Touch out the crotch or what,

So I can send by mail.
Nudes have the biggest sale.

It's hard to shoot a burning,
But year to year I'm learning.

Cassity has some of the tightest control over his meter writing currently, close to Richard Wilbur. There are very few subsitutions, very few triple feet, and yet his poems do not sound forced. Cassity, here, doesn't shame a terrible practice from outside, but writes as someone who profits from it, thus complicating the situation. The speaker pays of his debts by picturing racist murderers, along with the occasional family portrait apparently, set in opposition. The writer manages to be critical though in that las couplet, showing that this awful side of humanity continues ("year to year"), even if not by lynching, but other means.

Vote!

2008-11-04T07:44:00.002-05:00

Made it to the poll right at 6.30 am. Waited 45 minutes, which was a relief--my friend waited 6 hours and 15 minutes voting early on Sunday.

Wasting time on a poetry hoax

2008-10-04T18:49:00.003-04:00

So apparently I'm included in this silly poetry anthology with 3,000 plus of my closest poet-friends. I don't know if everyone included is attributed to a poem they didn't write as I was, though I would venture to say yes. But here's the Poetry Foundation story, which will also link to the anthology.

"For Godot" seems to be the name of the anthology. Oh, very clever. Naming a collection of false poems for a guy who is never going to show up. Bravo. Assigning poems to people who didn't write them is equivalent to libel, as they are defaming the abilities of the poets they list.

But my guess is they are lonely college kids who want some attention, and that's what they got.

Hayden Carruth

2008-10-01T14:59:00.002-04:00

Carruth died yesterday.

The New York Times' obituary.

Sandra Beasley on Verse Daily

2008-09-30T10:49:00.002-04:00

I was enjoying this poem so much I wanted to link to it here.

"The Sand Speaks"

Photographing Eden Available for Pre-order

2008-06-19T18:42:00.003-04:00

Amazon has a listing for the book.

Don Paterson, OBE

2008-06-14T13:25:00.002-04:00

Scottish poet Don Paterson has been appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II. Not high enough to earn him a "Sir," but a nice honor, I suppose (perhaps a Scot wouldn't hold it in high regard?). He's a terrific poet. His books, Nil Nil, God's Gift to Women, The Eyes, Landing Light, and his recent translation of Rilke, Orpheus, are available from Faber, and Landing Light from Graywolf in the states (kudos to them for publishing him and many other new British poets here).

New Broadside Available

2008-06-12T13:29:00.002-04:00

Ohio University Press has created a downloadable broadside of my poem, "The Snow Leopard," included in Photographing Eden.

Take a look here.

Moment for prose

2008-06-04T12:31:00.002-04:00

I wanted to share the opening paragraph of Missy, a new novel by Chris Hannan, a British playwright, that was graciously sent by FSG to the OSU Press offices.

"I expect you have the consolation of religion, or the guidance of philosophy, but when me and the girls get frazzled, or blue, or rapturous, or just awfully so-so, we shin out and buy ourselves some hats."

I laughed out loud. Having recently been to the Kentucky Derby, I can see the hats they probably would have bought. This opening certainly promises good things to come.

New Issue of The Journal

2008-05-28T01:05:00.003-04:00

The Journal's new issue is just about out, and they've posted a poem by Hailey Leithauser on the web site. Hailey's a terrific poet, and I like "Grr" very much. It's a tight, short poem, which might seem reminiscent of Kay Ryan, but Leithauser doesn't pop out the rhyme as heavily, relying more on assonance and alliteration, leaving the full-rhymed couplet at the end to have the showcase.

The First Sale

2008-05-27T11:35:00.002-04:00

Apparently my book has had its first sale. One of my father's coworkers pre-ordered a copy from the press. You're a good woman, Christina Chai.

Paradise Read

2008-05-26T14:34:00.003-04:00

A friend of mine, poet Jen Town, and I are reading Paradise Lost. Neither of us had read it completely (I've tried twice, stalling after book one), and it was a pretty gaping hole in our poetic educations. I don't know why I wasn't able to get through it the first times—it seems right up my alley. God, Satan, Adam & Eve, blank verse—what's not to love?

We read book one together the other night at the Chocolate Cafe. I munched chocolate covered blueberries between my turns at reading. I don't know if the other patrons heard us, but if they did, they didn't seem to mind. The first book has the good lines: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n"; "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n."

One of the things that struck me the most was Milton's inclusion of the gods of Greek and Egyptian myths, because making them a part of Satan's host also claims that they exist(ed). That seems antithetical to a one-God Christianity. I suppose the argument would go something like they were demi-gods or on an order with the angels.

It occurred to me that as far as I can tell, no one has made a movie of this. That's surprising. I'm not sure how you would represent the angels and devils—human-like or all-out CGI unworldly forms?

The Book

2008-05-24T15:38:00.004-04:00

Ohio University Press has put the announcement about the book online along with a spiffy information page. We're looking at October for a release (just in time for Halloween... black cover, scary!). I suggest you buy several and hand them out to kids as they come by trick or treating. Though whether that qualifies as a trick or a treat, I can't say.

Skipping Poetry Month

2008-05-01T16:17:00.004-04:00

I had planned on trying to review more for National Poetry Month, but as it stands I didn't get to review at all. So instead, I'll start reviewing with May Day. Old Time Is Still A-flying and all that.

I've got a whole slew of books I need to get to, and here are a few:

Michael Hofmann, Selected Poems

Jennifer Moxley, Imagination Verses

Leslie Scalapino, It's Go in Horizontal

Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar

Karen Volkman, Nomina

That's just off the top of my head.

But what I'm going to start with today is a short mention of Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff (Doubleday). Don's getting a lot of (well-deserved) press for his first book of short stories. The stories are set in the actual town of Knockemstiff, from the 60s to close to the present day. The characters' lives are rough, exceedingly rough, both by choice and from circumstance. They huff Bactine, beat up people for sport, and those are the nice guys. Pollock's writing is compelling, wince-inducing, that even the disturbing nature of the stories is, can I say it, enjoyable? I've heard Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O'Connor, Chuck Palahniuk, all tossed around to compare, and though I don't like to go overboard with the hyperbole, I wouldn't disagree.

This book is going to be read, and read, and read, for a long time.

It's Full of Stars

2008-03-18T23:26:00.002-04:00

Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. The BBC reports. I grew up on Clarke's work. His stories and novels were truly remarkable pieces of imagination.

Poetry in Newspapers

2008-03-12T11:38:00.004-04:00

Say what you want about the selections (only one woman, all white, etc.), the fact that Britain's Guardian newspaper is publishing little booklets of 20th c. poets in its pages is a wonderful thing. The included poets, Eliot, Auden, Plath, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, and Sassoon, aren't surprises, and are most likely to already be known perhaps to the general reader, but what good gateway drugs. Just the fact that some resources are being dedicated to the project should be applauded.

(Though this is an awful picture of Heaney.)

Now, if we could only get some contemporary poetry printed in newspapers again. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette still does, in its Saturday Op-Ed page. Does anyone know of any others?

Book!

2008-03-03T23:34:00.002-05:00

At last, at long, long last, my full-length book, Photographing Eden, will be published. The wonderful Heather McHugh (more of her poems here) selected my manuscript as the winner of the Hollis Summers Prize, and the book will be published by Ohio University Press.

She has three new terrific poems in the March issue of Poetry, and "Space Bar" is my favorite.

My thanks to her, to the OU Press (Go Bobcats!), and to all of my teachers and fellow poets who helped me get the poems right over the years.

More information as I know it.

Unsplendid Issue 3

2008-02-27T22:52:00.003-05:00

Unsplendid has uploaded issue 3 for viewing. It features the wonderful poets Ned Balbo, Jennifer Reeser, Juliana Gray, and Heather Kirn, among many others.

We're looking for submissions for issue 4 now.

Crossing the River Styx

2008-02-23T14:41:00.002-05:00

Very happy to report the mail brought news of the inclusion of my poem, "Circus Circus," in issue 77 of River Styx. My thanks to Richard Newman, editor, and the staff.

Wick Poetry Center

2008-02-20T16:22:00.002-05:00

Last week I had the good fortune to read at the Wick Poetry Center in support of How to Paint the Savior Dead. Matt McBride, the other 2006 winner for The Space Between Stars, and I besides reading to a packed audience of 60 (thanks all for coming out!), also went to visit a terrific class of high school students--I haven't seen teens that excited about poetry, or anything, really, since a few of my friends and I staged a midnight super-soaker raid on the neighboring grads at senior week. But I digress.

The students asked great questions. I'm sure their teacher, poet Jen Sullivan, prepared them well. We also visited Catherine Blackbird's college poetry class, and were interviewed for a number of different formats. You can read one here.

The Wick really has a good thing going. They are serious about what they do, and they do it well. Between the outreach, the reading series, and the MFA program, it's a wonderful place.

I'll be posting pictures soon.

First good news of the new year

2008-01-24T13:38:00.000-05:00

Just heard word that The Prague Revue will be publishing "The Snow Globe of Drowning Bears" in their forthcoming issue (#8), circa Mid-February. Find them here. My many thanks to be included.

Best of 2007 List

2007-12-31T23:27:00.001-05:00

That's right, I'm foisting another list on you. But I'm waiting until the very last day. Who knows, maybe some publisher will slip a book in before the end of year like the do with movies for Oscar consideration. All right, that's not going to happen. But here it is. In alphabetical order, my top ten.

Rae Armantrout, Next Life
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life
Geoffrey Hill, A Treatise on Civil Power
Mark Jarman, Epistles
Eireann Lorsung, Music for Landing Planes By
Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Green & Gray
Mark Svenvold, Empire Burlesque
Cole Swensen, The Glass Age
Elizabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers

I'd also like to give some mention to books that were published in earlier years, but that I just got around to reading.

Kate Fagan, The Long Moment
Sarah Gridley, Weather Eye Open
Geoffrey Hill, Without Title
Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic

And some books forthcoming in 2008 that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on.

Jennifer Atkinson, Drift-Ice
Erica Dawson, Big-Eyed Afraid
Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables
Eamonn Grennan, Matter of Fact
Eric Pankey, Pear as One Example
Alan Shapiro, Old War
Cole Swensen, Ours

If he were Paul

2007-11-28T16:41:00.000-05:00

II'm reviewing Mark Jarman's Epistles (Sarabande, 2007), for The Southern Review, so I won't say much here, other than it's great, and worth telling the local bookshop to stock it if they don't. Here's a teaser, from the first poem, "If I were Paul":

Consider how you were made.

Consider the loving geometry that sketched your bones, the passionate symmetry that sewed flesh to your skeleton, and the cloudy zenith from which your soul descended in shimmering rivulets across pure granite to pour as a single braided stream into the skull's cup.

A Mind of Winter

2007-11-20T19:41:00.001-05:00

Well, I guess they're headed to summer down at the South Pole, but you get my drift. Melanie Challenger, whose Galatea (Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for this year's Forward Prize for first collection, and deservedly so, is on her way to Antarctica. She is serving as the British Antarctic Survey’s Artist in Residence, and will be blogging about her experience here. Count me as very, very envious. I have wanted to go to Antarctica about as long as I've been writing.

[Follow the Salt link above for her page on their site, which includes a video of her reading, worth a listen. Take a look around. Their site is remarkably well put together, with samples for each book, and lots of other goodies, including a relaunch of Salt Magazine, with its impressive array of poets.]

But let's turn to her book. "Galatea" is now commonly used as the name for the statue Pygmalion brought to life with the help of his consummate artistry and Aphrodite, though in the earliest version of the story she has no name. Galatea the book in its first of two long poems, "The Service of the Heart," employs this myth and others like it (Lot's Wife, for instance) to meditate on the use of women by men, gods, the world. Challenger's poems, however, are fresh, lively, compelling even though her subject has been treated before. It is a difficult venture to trod on such well-worn steps, but she does it wonderfully. The unnamed segments (though a few are numbered, I-V, then I-II) are interspersed with fragments of quoted material, with the only differentiation being a slightly smaller typeface, sometimes appearing at the head like an epigraph, sometimes between stanzas, sometimes trailing at the bottom of the page. Most of the sources are enumerated at the beginning of the book, though curiously, not all. Dryden's phrase from his translation of Ovid's Pygmalion version, "In sculpture excercis'd his happy skill," is not listed. Hard to say if it was just forgotten or purposely neglected. Perhaps they were considered common enough.

Here is an early segment from the book:

What delights me is the part of me to beocme this girl--
Her outline an iceberg in the death-world,
Persevering fragilely like memories of passion.
Who wonders what she might have let slip to devour
Of the world's prospects? Bare possibility weighed down
By the logic of rotten fruit upon the garden floor.

Now, the ultraviolet womb is sunk beneath her,
Closing ranks upon the grail of another,
And her body cherishes not the disco-purple of those lips
Like a gentle handbag's clasp--instead elapse
The same generous tulips of flesh, as if her body of chance
Had always envied what she thought of as ugly, the corpse
Delighting in the swallowing of her inheritance:

The Sodom of her bruised heart, atrophied fruit of Eden.
O that I might love my unbeautying.

I like how Challenger can blend ancient and contemporary idioms, "disco-purple" with the worlds of Sodom and Eden. Her manner of writing is generally unmetered verse, but often rhyming, as she does in the final couplet of one of my favorite pieces of the second section, "The Spark of Transgression":

And yet inside each one. The fire appears to be boundless.
Its analogues flatter every surface like Brocken flames
Upon the grey cuirass of mountains, mocking, intoxicating.
The fire-ship anchors in the pit of the stomach,
Spits hackbut, howitzer and snickersnee. If you should reach
Inside, your calluses would sting immediately
And the stealth of flames would lap your hand to the bracelet
Of its wrist, leaving behind the soft endeavour of a handshake--
Fleshing what was hardened, threshing sympathies to the break.

I have yet to find out what "Brocken flames" are, but how wonderful are "hackbut" (a flintlock rifle) and "snickersnee" (a long knife; calling to mind "snicker-snack" from "Jabberwocky"). The image of the flames enwreathing a hand is so finely tuned, that I'm sure I will not forget it for a long time.

Corresponding with this is another artist-in-residency in Antarctica, this time a photographer. Camille Seaman's stunning pictures of icebergs document the atrocity that is our melting of the polar ice fields. See them here.

Judge Rules on What Makes a Poem

2007-11-09T00:09:00.001-05:00

On the "creativity" behind editing a collection of Dorothy Parker's uncollected poems. The judge in the case wrote:

"A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary," Keenan wrote. "A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization." In a footnote, he cited testimony that before "World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter." Now, "the popular definition of poem has become much more lenient."

Read the AP story.

2007 The OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry Winner

2007-11-06T23:08:00.000-05:00

Mark Svenvold's Empire Burlesque, the winner of the 2007 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, is now available, with its snazzy cover. I'll admit here to bias, I designed it, but I am very proud of it. Even better is the poetry inside. Check it out here or here.

Welcome to the World

2007-11-06T23:05:00.000-05:00

A different kind of poetry: my nephew, Oliver Emmanuel.
(C0-starring, my mom, the new grandma)

Columbus Reading

2007-10-26T01:09:00.001-04:00

This coming Tuesday, Oct. 30th, I will be reading from my chapbook, How to Paint the Savior Dead, at the Lennox Town Center Barnes & Noble at 7pm.

Scared of my pillows

2007-10-07T22:08:00.000-04:00

How brilliant is Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman?

Fucking brilliant.

I know very very little about contemporary theatre, but this is a good sign.

Odds on Nobel

2007-10-01T15:23:00.000-04:00

Ladbrookes have released their odds on the 2007 Nobel Lit Laureate: see if your favorite is there.

Personally, I don't understand the appeal of Les Murray. Everyone else listed that I recognize seems ok to me. I'm surprised to see the likes of Peter Carey, John Banville, & Ian McEwan, all of whom I love, but mostly because they seem to only write good books, and not make political statements, which is what the Academy seems to be interested in these days.

And hey, if you can pull off "Adonis," my hat's off.

Open Comment to the Editor of "Formalist Poetry News"

2007-09-21T22:49:00.001-04:00

I tried to post this comment on the Formalist Poetry News blog, but comments aren't allowed by those who aren't members of the blog, which isn't surprising, given the anonymity of the blog. So here is the comment I would have posted there:

If you are going to criticize, then do so professionally, and leave out the ad hominem attacks. "Nasal-voiced"? What does that have to do with anything about written poetry? For someone who seems to be interested in promoting "Formalist" poetry, you come across as very ignorant about it. I am one of the co-editors of Unsplendid, and yes, there might be a slight edge to poets from Maryland, but when you are filling a first issue of an unheard-of-before magazine, you go with who you know. Our hope is, of course, that if we gain attention, we will get high-quality submissions from across the globe. As far as I know, there is no "Baltimore School."

The fact that you remain anonymous is cowardly. And who are these people that are "in" the know? You criticize Doug's talent as a poet, but who are you? Are you a writer? Have you published anything, besides this blog? You're trading in gossip here. If you want to be the poetry equivalent of TMZ or Perez Hilton, that's fine, but say as much, rather than pretending to be someone actually concerned with the state of poetry.

Muldoon to Edit Poetry at New Yorker

2007-09-20T23:20:00.000-04:00

I was very pleased to read today in The New York Times that Paul Muldoon will be the new poetry editor at The New Yorker. A terrific choice, I think, as he is obviously brilliant, but also friendly to a variety of styles.

Reading at Penn State

2007-08-29T17:18:00.000-04:00

For those of you in the central Pennsylvania area, I will be reading at Penn State next Thursday, September 13th at 8 pm.

Red Weather Reading Series
N159 Burrowes Building

And don't forget, this Saturday is the Unsplendid issue launch reading at Area 405 in Baltimore, 4.30 pm.

I love these photographs

2007-08-29T16:41:00.001-04:00

The night photography of Kristopher Grunert. Gorgeous.

Unsplendid Issue 2 launch reading

2007-08-23T20:51:00.000-04:00

Unsplendid is hosting its first ever reading to launch issue 2. The reading will feature several great poets from issues 1 and 2.

Peter Campion
Terese Coe
Elizabeth Hadaway
Alexander Long
Traci O'Dea
Greg Williamson

The reading will take place at Area 405 in Baltimore, MD at 4.30 on September 1.

For information about the venue, see here.

There will be limited edition broadsides for sale.

Liam Rector, i.m.

2007-08-16T16:02:00.000-04:00

Very sad to hear Liam Rector committed suicide today. I knew him only by affiliation with AWP, when I worked there as an assistant editor. Here is a poem of his, with a wonderful reference to my favorite Byron poem:

So We'll Go No More

So it's fare thee well, my own true love;

I'm leaving you behind. And not

For the early, for the young reasons, but

For these late, last, ill reasons. I'm almost

Kaput! Yea, you'll get no more of me....

Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all

In the same year? My chances

Are one out of two! And I'm fucking well

Ready, ready to go. To go!—how often

I've operated that way. That way

Almost the entire caper, the way

For people, places, things:

Abandon, abandon, nay abandon before

Being abandoned. But we've, we've

Stayed. You the third wife for me, I

The second such boy for you, and I love

Looking directly into you, as we look

Directly into this last get-go. We all

Have the talent for leaving, like it

Or no. And oh, how rich it is, how fine

To finally inherit!: the final thing

I was looking for, as it turns out,

The great power of leaving

All the breathtakingly brief all along.

Poets at the fair

2007-08-11T19:53:00.001-04:00

Poet Jen Town at the Ohio State Fair, waiting for the Clydesdales to clomp by.

And no trip to the fair would be complete without the butter cow.

The Never-Never

2007-08-01T15:25:00.000-04:00

Not a dance, though it should be, it is the title of the first book by British poet, Kathryn Gray (no relation--that I know of), who is a recent discovery for me. I found The Never-Never (Seren, 2004) via our blogs being next to one another on Ron Silliman's blog-roll.

It's a little wonder of a book, full of terrific, short lyric poems.

"The Book of Numbers" reminds me of Bishop's "One Art," not only for its concatenation of things, but its meditation on forgetting. Some seemingly incongruent things get connected very well, as the "earlobed shape on the canvas" is followed by the "coin produced from a sleeve" (where else does one pull a coin from?--an ear), or the magic trick which leads to cards that turn out to be a casino deck.

The last four digits of your number I can't remember:
the first might be her winning call at bingo,
some of the houses (evens on the street) I never lived in.
A pack of John Player's, then double Mahler's
whatever, the Chanel counter, acrylic sienna daubed
into an earlobe-shaped space on the canvas
or a coin produced from a sleeve, during an evening's
prestidigitation and the deck of incontinent cards
that spills and skims from the coupier's hands.
The times shuffle for each departure gate at Heathrow
or the trains on a station concourse I've memorized
in no particular order, a date for Waterloo, then the buses
tour Trafalgar Square, the total degrees to all those angles,
collapsed roughly to the Equator, tiers becoming slices
of wedding cake; the vital percent off that dress,
without which no man can buy or sell, or else a tetragram,
which brings me back more or less to what I mean,
the last four digits of your number I can't remember.

There are other similarities to Bishop's poem, of course--"the houses" for instance. Though note here they are houses the speaker never lived in. While this is not a poem that equals Bishop's (but how many could?), it shows a poet alight with the history of her art, as well as a superior linguistic skill ("incontinent cards"--how perfect).

Gray moves in and out of the use of rhyme and metrical patterns (a feat which many British poets seem more capable than Americans) when she wants, as in "Guilt."

It can seem like history, ad hoc, Imperial Leather
lathered away to the gold leaf sticker,
the coal tar smoke through a fist of water.

In a B&B in Colwyn Bay you wake to find the old brand
and feel morning spread from sea to land
or think of your father from nowhere, understand

how a workday morning for years was little more
than the end-of-terrace billboard's just post-war
Lifebuoy carp of down there, behind the ears,

Now Wash Your Hands in the raw. The filth
of an inside-collar Saturdays at dances. The Macbeth
you read when you were twelve. Hold your breath.

You spell out that word against a mirror. Cunt.
Remember how she gave you a clout,
dragged you to the basin to clean your mouth out?

We're better than that, you cant as of old; the Lux
slapped against the beige flannel, the knucks
she lathered up babbling to the Armitage Shanks.

Worth notice too that lovely, careful use of sound echo in that first stanza--"Leather" to "lather" to "leaf." Her ear is a great gift, which she uses well.

I'd like to mention another poem, "Nostalgia," which is perhaps my favorite, if for nothing else how erotically charged it is without much in the way of erotic detail (only the hand, the skirt), and a good place to exit this post.

If I could tell now of just how that grass felt -
itchy, summer wet - as we rolled the incline,
raced each other down, bad-landed in a heap;

if I could pull from my pocket the chalk dust
from shattered Parma Violets and blow this
from my palm like so, then I'd be getting

some proximity toward his hand spanned up
my skirt and that particular instant, loosed
and everywhere as pollen, when my eyes filled.

Unsplendid Is Verse Daily's Web Feature of the Month

2007-07-31T10:29:00.000-04:00

Unsplendid's first issue, and AE Stallings' poem, "Pluto," are Verse Daily's Web Feature of the Month.

Video Poems

2007-07-31T10:28:00.001-04:00

Despite the fact they feature Billy Collins' poems, these short animations are cool. I'd love to see what video artists could do with good poems.

Poetry Raided

2007-07-26T21:02:00.001-04:00

Poetry Magazine's Chicago Printer's Ball is raided by the police.

More drivel (not) from Maya Angelou

2007-07-18T22:04:00.000-04:00

This is hilarious.

A Rare Political Post...

2007-07-12T12:35:00.000-04:00

... before I return to literary matters, after an absence.

Finally, someone is pointing out that Giuliani isn't God. He's actually an asshole.

Campion on Slate

2007-06-26T10:45:00.001-04:00

Unsplendid author Peter Campion appears on Slate today.

Campion on Slate

2007-06-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

Unsplendid author Peter Campion appears on Slate today.

Dylan Thomas's home up for sale

2007-06-15T20:06:00.000-04:00

Dylan Thomas's former home, Sea View, in Laugharne, Wales is going to be put on the auction block July 11. If you have about 200,000 Pounds Sterling, you could be in the game. Or trump everyone for 450,000 right now.

Whitman on the DC Metro

2007-06-06T09:44:00.000-04:00

Washington, DC has begun carving lines from Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser" into the wall by the escalators at the Dupont Metro Station. A lovely idea, as is the Ethelbert Miller poem also being inscribed.

Unsplendid

2007-06-02T12:45:00.000-04:00

The premiere issue of Unsplendid is now online. It features the work of Greg Williamson, AE Stallings, Dan Groves, Ida Stewart, Ben Howard, Mark Jarman, Alexander Long, and others, along with reviews of Sarah Arvio, Eric McHenry, and Anne Pierson Wiese.

Unsplendid is a quarterly journal of poetry written in received and nonce forms, with an eye towards eclectic considerations of these forms. We welcome unsolicited submissions via editor@unsplendid.com.

William Meredith, 1919-2007

2007-05-31T01:20:00.000-04:00

The poet William Meredith, whose Effort at Speech won the National Book Award in 1997 and Partial Accounts the Pulitzer in 1987, has died. His site on the Academy of American Poets can be found here.

A poem of his:

Envoi

Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can't take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.

The New Hopkins Review

2007-05-22T22:22:00.001-04:00

After about 50 years, The Hopkins Review has been resuscitated. The first issue, Winter 2008 (available Sept. 07), will feature Richard Wilbur, John Barth, Frank Kermode, Stephen Dixon, Erin McGraw, and many others. Look to the right for an announcement with fuller details.

Police Inspector Poet

2007-05-19T22:03:00.000-04:00

A story from Nigeria, about the Assistant Police Inspector-General and poet, who is under the delusion American writers can make a living from their work. I think he's better off being a policeman along with his poetry.

Poetry Magazine looking for new poets

2007-05-15T18:12:00.000-04:00

Poetry has decided to only read submissions by writers they have yet to publish this summer. Bravo, I say. Though that means I can't submit. I'll have to stick with letters, perhaps drunk, like Franz Wright.

Some poetry news

2007-05-15T17:52:00.000-04:00

Be Pittsburgh's Poet Laureate for a day.
My brother was a Pitt Panther, so I have fond memories of this city. Especially Pamela's, which has the yummiest banana chocolate pancakes, in the Shadyside neighborhood. Pamela's makes an appearance in Terence Hayes' first book, Muscular Music.

The Poets Laureate on Cross-Country snooze-a-thon.
I can't imagine a more boring lineup of poets. The work is dreadful, and in the case of Hall, so is the reading.

John Major, former UK Prime Minister, aspiring to be a minor poet.
Please forgive the easy pun.

Delaware Poet Laureate realizes she's in Delaware, flees.
OK, that's not very nice to Delaware, but until that state stops charging to drive along its miniscule portion of I-95, I'll keep nickel-and-diming them with smart-ass remarks.

Wear it proudly

2007-04-27T12:17:00.000-04:00

http://scq.ubc.ca/sciencescouts/index.html#5

Harsent on Art, Food

2007-04-17T11:47:00.000-04:00

David Harsent, a terrific British poet, is currently featured in the Tate Gallery's "Poem of the Month" series, which invites poets to respond to work in their galleries. You can hear Harsent read the poem on their web site.

Spatchcock

Jean Dubuffet: L'Arbre de fluides; Susan Hiller: From the Freud Museum

As I entered, she had her pinking shears to the backbone,
having dropped the gizzard into the kitchen bin,
and barely looked over her shoulder to see who it was

when I gave the door a little back-heel
then ferreted round in the fridge for an ice-cold Coors
before slipping up from behind to cop a feel.

Another hot day in September, and that the cause
of her half-baked look, brought on
by lying bare-assed in the garden all afternoon,

a flush coming off her, the veins so close to the skin
I could trace the flow like sap, could tongue-up the ooze
of sweat at the nape of her neck: and this the real

taste of her, like nothing before, like nothing I ever knew.
You have to go hard at it, either side of the spine,
all the time bearing down against the sinew,

then lift the long bone entire and get both hands
into the cut, knuckle to knuckle, and draw
the carcass apart, and press, till you hear the breastbone crack.

Looked at like that it's roadkill, flat on its back,
sprung ribcage, legs akimbo, red side up, and sends
a message (you might guess) about life lived in the raw.

So then it's a matter of taste: herb-butter under the slack
of the breast, perhaps, or a tart marinade,
to flatter and blend, spread thinly and rubbed well in.

She favoured the latter—that and a saltire of thin
skewers driven aslant from thigh to neck,
which might, indeed, have said something about her mood.

That done, she stripped off, gathering the oils and the balm
she'd need for however long the thing would take,
and went back to her place in the sun. It did no harm,

I suppose, to watch from an upstairs window: a hawk's-
eye-view as she lay there timing the turn
(face-up till you tingle, then flip) to brown but not to burn.

The marks of the griddle, the saltire, the subtle flux...
We ate it with lima beans and picked the bones,
after which we took to bed a bottle of bright Sancerre

and I held her down as I'd held her down before,
working her hot-spots with a certain caution and care
as she told me not here... or here... but there... and there.

I left her flat on her back - flat out and shedding a glow,
or so I like to think, as I slipped downstairs
and lifted, from a peg-board beside the hob,

her mother's (or grandmother's) longhand note on how
to spatchcock a chicken, or guinea, or quail, or squab,
or sparrow, even, with emphasis on that 'crack';

and lifted, as well, before I lifted the latch,
myrtle, borage, dill, marjoram, tarragon, sumac,
all named and tagged, in a customized cardboard box.

Blackbird & Wolf

2007-04-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

The title of Henri Cole's new collection, Blackbird & Wolf, features a variety of animals, but the blackbird itself doesn't show up until the last poem, "Dune."

Cole's poems are very personal, in that they are about him and his life, yet they seem anti-personal, or perhaps anti-confessional, which I'm regarding as a good thing. I'm not quite sure how he does it, to adhere so close to his own "I" and yet manage objectivity.

"Dune" ends with the arrival of the bird.

Throw a man into the sea and he becomes a fish,
but still, the sound was unsettling--
its foaming energy, its vibrant mutability.
Then I lay face down in wet sand,
my arms strung with strands of seaweed,
as I rolled over, trembling,

and a solid blackbird flew into view,
catching a bee in its mouth, calling to mind
the purple wild thyme that grows on lawns
in these northern parts, tawny bees murmuring
onver them on their way home to sleep and safety,
remaking them when nature beats them apart,
putting their whole lives into the small sting
that hurts us, but not before changing gum
into gold, like poetry, which is stronger
than I am and makes me do what it wants.
Is there something in earth that makes us resemble them--
rising at dawn, the sun flashing scarlet,
rubbing together for warmth, going forward--
even when the world seems just a heap of broken images?

It hinges more on the bee really, though the bird perhaps is akin to the uncontrollable force. Cole is aware of something larger than himself, and it shows in his poems. He's an alluring poet to me, though I can't fully realize why, but I imagine it has something to do with this.

Reading at Cafe Muse

2007-04-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

The good people of the Cafe Muse Reading program asked me to read tonight in Chevy Chase with John Surowiecki. Audio is available on my web site, here. Click listen.

Derek Mahon Honored

2007-03-23T11:18:00.000-04:00

Derek Mahon, Irish poet and contemporary of Seamus Heaney, has just won the David Cohen Prize, a lifetime acheivement award, and much deserved. Mahon is often overshadowed by Heaney, as are many other Irish poets, but he is a fantastic poet, translator, and literary journalist. He is perhaps best known for "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford."

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
by Derek Mahon

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among
the asphodels –
Seferis, Mythistorema

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong –
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!

A moment for self-promotion

2007-02-24T23:53:00.000-05:00

My new chapbook, How to Paint the Savior Dead, is now available via Amazon or directly through Kent State University Press. The book was selected as one of their Wick Chapbook Prize winners, and I couldn't be more pleased with the work they did on it.

W. S. Graham

2007-02-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

"Much of what has been criticized as his 'rhetoric' might be better understood as a joy taken in the design and joining of words, cadences and images, all within what seems a concept of sonic draughtsmanship," writes Douglas Dunn in his Foreward to Faber's New Collected Poems of W. S. Graham. Graham is a recent discovery for me: a mid-20th century poet from Scotland (Dunn is a contemporary poet from Scotland; also wonderful). Reading Dunn's comments, as good as they are, didn't prepare me for the beautiful oddity of Graham's early poems. The first set collected is "The Seven Journeys" (1944), and here is the opening of the opening poem, "The Narrator":

I am the hawk-heart braced in the epic's hero
Hollow and lit in a single follyless zone
Twinned with a dawn and a dark.
Graceless in gardens I hear my unvisited care
Squawk back at the sculptured cuckoo's nursery rhyme
Chimed in a dandelion tower.

There's a gusto here I've not read in poems in quite some time, almost Whitmanic, though Graham's closer influences seem to be Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane, Eliot. And a bizarreness that I still can't say I understand fully, but I love reading it.

More to follow soon.

New Online Journal

2007-01-26T18:51:00.000-05:00

Announcing Unsplendid, a new online journal publishing poetry in received and nonce forms. The first issue will launch in conjunction with National Poetry Month (April). We are looking for poems such as sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, ghazals, pantoums, blank verse, rhymed verse, as well as nonce (creatively made up) forms.

Please visit the web site for further guidelines.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-25T11:33:00.000-05:00

from "A Christmas Hymn" by Richard Wilbur

A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.

Steve Scafidi's For Love of Common Words

2006-12-22T16:33:00.000-05:00

Certainly one of the best books of poems I've read this past year, For Love of Common Words contains poems of breathless beauty. Scafidi lives up to his title with the music of his lines, his playfulness of language, and his intelligent, sometimes witty, sometimes biting, sometimes both, poems. The encompass both erotica and Dr. Seuss.

The opening poem, "Life Story of the Possible," uses a single rhyme, "-ail," on the third line of each tercet to serve as its timing bell.

At six in the evening on a Tuesday night
  after a supper of poached
          salmon and snails

Mr. Garland Calhoun, an ordinary bear
  eight foot tall with top hat,
          black tie and tails

unlatched the gate of his cage and walked
  the zoo quietyly ambling
          under the silver trails

of the summer stars [...]

The fantastic often populates his poems, as the bear evidences here. Scafidi often foregoes punctuation, or just periods, and so creates a breathless quality to the lines, and yet he very rarely seems out of control, which is the danger of this method. Say, the way Merwin's poems of late that you finish before you realized you've begun. See what might be the best of the poems, "After Homer's Catalog of Ships."

The wish kiss, the list kiss, the take-it-or-leave-it
  missed kiss we live forever without, the all-day
the go-away, the closer-closer-you-cannot-
  get-closer-but-try kiss, the I-don't know-
who-you-are-or-why kiss of new love
  and the I-know-why-and-love-this kiss old
love practices in the hollow the mattress [...]

Scafidi's achievement in using the fantastic and his gift for music is well-represented in "Lullaby for the Wolf."

Galileo's mountains and Galileo's trees
  Galileo's rivers and Galileo's seas
all make the world I live in his
  to give and the moon is made of cheese.
There is a fish I have heard speaking

Finnish to the stars and a spoon
  between the seats in my father's car.
There is a gnome in a picture
  in a book somewhere and the bright
of the dark is the color of my hair.

Someone told me that a god died
  so we don't have to. And yet, look.
Just look at us. Nothing's fair—
  people screaming, the rides too rough.
And Death with his huff and his puff.

There must be an atom always burning
  somewhere—a mansion in the sky
to which we are returning. A place
  of real quiet, a bundle of straw
where the wolf lies down by the door.

Maybe this is what our words are for.
  To be a lullaby for death. To know
paradise in the nonsense of the poet
  and the scientist—to say some
theory of peace to the wolf who is law.

Google Poetry

2006-12-19T18:02:00.000-05:00

An interesting writing assignment from 3by3by3 blog.

Richard Wilbur, Not Your Average Chalk Artist

2006-12-13T15:28:00.001-05:00

An excellent piece on Richard Wilbur by Eric Ormsby appeared on The New York Sun today. For those who read the string of responses to Ron Silliman's comments on Wilbur, among others, in his post yesterday, this will be a good follow up, as it speaks to the darkness that appears in much of Wilbur's verse, that goes under-recognized by those who are quick to dismiss his art as unoriginal.

"Hecht & Wilbur may be tremendous practitioners, but of a tradition that was rendered obsolete by Wordsworth, Blake & Coleridge. It's the equivalent of sidewalk chalk artists who can do perfect copies of the Mona Lisa. Within that framework, yes, they are not bad. But....." (RS)

This logic, of course, could easily be applied to Silliman's own work in comparison to his immediate "New American" forebears. Or, quite frankly, almost all artists. And to think that Wilbur writes anything like Wordsworth, beside the employment of meter and rhyme, is ridiculous. As is it for Hecht. Beyond their use of formal technique, they are very different writers. And formal technique is just a tool.

A Moment for Art

2006-12-07T22:56:00.000-05:00

I visited the Smithsonian Museum of American Art this evening to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit. It is exhilarating. The fantasies he created are worth diving into over and over. I highly recommend a visit if you can get there. The exhibit runs until Feb. 19, 2007. I was surprised to find when I browsed the book store that Charles Simic has a book of poems on Cornell, Dime-Store Alchemy. He will be giving a talk on the artist this Sunday, Dec. 10, at 3 pm.

Untitled (Juan Gris Series) -- Smithsonian Museum of American Art

More on the Moon

2006-12-07T13:32:00.000-05:00

Another poem with the moon. Robert Hass's "Privilege of Being" was introduced to me by someone very special, and I'm listening to it again, and so I thought I'd share it. "Moon" was my first word, so I think about it often. (Hear Hass read it.)

Privilege of Being

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shutter pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because i realized
that you could not, as much as i love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

(from Human Wishes)

Poet Laureate of the Moon

2006-12-06T01:02:00.000-05:00

In honor of NASA's recent announcement that we're returning to the moon, which I think is a great idea, and the only initiative the Bush administration will be remembered positively for, a poem by Mark Strand, who loves the moon.

From the Long Sad Party

Someone was saying
something about shadows covering the field, about
how things pass, how one sleeps towards morning
and the morning goes.

Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding it white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same.

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We begin to believe

the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

(from The Late Hour)

Slate's Poem of the Week

2006-12-05T09:06:00.000-05:00

Slate's new poem, "Update" by Cody Walker, is a good one.

Don Paterson's Rilke

2006-11-26T22:35:00.000-05:00

Don Paterson, perhaps the best of Britain's younger poets, has just released a version of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. (There's a great write up on Paterson at the Guardian.) Paterson ends the book with an afterword about Rilke and the sonnets, and it is equally as interesting as the poems themselves, along with a section of notes on versioning, as opposed to translating, poems. Due to a recent move, I don't have any of my other translations of Rilke handy to compare these, at least as poems (I don't know German so I can't discuss the actual translation, though Paterson doesn't know much either, a fact he admits, and why he has produced versions). However, to begin, here is his version of one of the more well-known of the sonnets. Paterson has given the poems titles instead of the standard roman numerals, and this is "Unicorn."

This is the animal that never was.
Not knowing that, they loved it anyway:
its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny,
right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love
the beast arose, where they had cleared the space;
and in the stable of its nothingness
it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn
but with the chance that it might come to pass.
All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn.
It grew inside a young girl's looking-glass,
then one day walked out and passed into her.

The first of Rilke's sonnets is also one of the most frequently cited. "Orpheus":

A tree rose from the earth. O pure transcendence--
Orpheus sings: O tall oak in the ear!
All was still. And then within that silence
he made the sign, the change, and touched the lyre.

One by one they crept out from the wood,
emptying each set and form and lair;
and looking in their eyes, he understood
they'd fallen quiet in neither stealth nor fear,

but in their listening. Growl and bark and roar
died in their breast as each took to the clearing.
Before this day, there hadn't been a shack

that might have held the song, a plain earthwork
hollowed by their most obscure desire:
today the temple rises in their hearing.

In these poems, Paterson is staying close, I think, to the original sense, even in the language. His language avoids making the poems feel dated, but it doesn't feel overly modernized either (though "oak" certainly makes it British), except perhaps "shack."

Paterson's ability with meter and rhyme is useful to him here, though not all the sonnets follow an iambic pentameter pattern. He sometimes opts for shorter lines, sometimes all tetrameter, say, and sometimes heterometric. For instance, in "The Sarcophagi in Rome":

Old tombs, you never leave me long.
Your heavy lids still guard their dreams:
the murmurs of the ancient streams
roll on like half-remembered songs.

One concern with this is that tetrameter has a tendency to sound comical, or a little too sweet, and the closed couplet inside the stanza is falling that way. But this is a minor, and relatively infrequent case in the poems. Often his shorter-lined sonnets are the most contemporary of the group--as he is breaking further away, he must feel a greater license with the language.

The Race

Man is the driver.
But time and speed
in the weave of forever
are twists in a thread:

what races or flies
is already over.
We're already baptised
in the endless river.

So boys, don't waste
your courage on time-
trials, or test-flights--

all these are at rest:
darkness and light;
the book and the bloom.

Paterson balances his rhyme well; he can make them full or half, keeping him within the form, but allowing himself enough freedom so that he does not have to manipulate meaning to slave for the form.

In the short essay that follows the poems, Paterson writes a brief account of their creation, and then follows with a refreshingly new critical reading. His main argument is that the poems are specifically "non-religious," even though Rilke has been sometimes touted as a religious poet. I hope to say more on this and on his appendix of thoughts on versions as opposed to translations soon.

Rilke's sonnets are one of poetry's masterworks, and deserve to be continually brought into the idiom of the day. And if Paterson's Rilke isn't great, it is a good, and highly readable English version, that one could "carry around" in his head, as Paterson originally set off on this project to create, at least for himself.

Paul Muldoon's Horse Latitudes

2006-11-09T00:27:00.000-05:00

Horse Latitudes (FSG; Faber) is written in a time of calm that belies the state of emergency we're actually in. The title sequence is a series of nineteen poems of famous battles all beginning with "B," meant to suggest, as James Fenton points out in his review, the unwritten twentieth poem about the recent battle of Baghdad. (It was a surprise to read Helen Vendler's review that appeared afterward not seeming to understand this or forward much of a theory about them at all. And her not realizing "toot" here means cocaine, not "dung," at least in its first usage in the sequence; in the second, it probably is a "great pile of [shit].") After reading Fenton's thoughts, it became clear, though I have to say I didn't understand that on my first unassisted read. Of course, the war is clearly here. It's a very tidy theory, but it makes sense in a way that Muldoon makes sense, so I'm inclined to follow it. I should say that Vendler's review is generally a good one, despite my contentions with it on this set of poems.

James Longebach, whose essay "The End of the Line," is the best classification of the free verse line I've yet to read, weighs in on Muldoon here. My only wish for this piece is that it was longer. He's a smart critic, and understands Muldoon's work. (Although he may be right about Muldoon's "90 Instant Message to Tom Moore" pushing into "blissful idiocy," they just aren't interesting enough to get there. I feel the same about Muldoon's "Hopewell Haiku." It's about the only bit of Muldoon I can do without.)

Web Site Update

2006-11-09T00:25:00.000-05:00

The web site has been moved to here <jason-gray.net>.

But Baby it's cold outside

2006-10-24T15:32:00.000-04:00

Kathy Fagan with Slate's poem of the week: "'There's just one little thing: a ring. I don't mean on the phone.'"—Eartha Kitt

Phil Levine on the difference between Conscientious Objector and Refusing to Serve

2006-10-23T10:11:00.000-04:00

“No, I could kill some people, but they’re all here in Detroit.”

I'm glad the diamonds are hers

2006-10-18T23:18:00.000-04:00

I've just read Sarah Manguso's The Captain Lands in Paradise, and I'm in love.

"Nine hundred pounds—that’s a lot of dead bear."

Line Art

Reading at OSU Urban Arts Space

Readings

Kathy Fagan on "Ox" and "Craic"

Well done, Mr. Abramson

Sandra Beasley, I Was the Jukebox

New poems on Kenyon Review Online

Alex Long on The Offending Adam

"Circus Circus" mentioned today

David Baker, Never-Ending Birds

Carrie Jerrell, After the Revival

New issue of Unsplendid

Beth Bachmann, Temper

Reading at Stain Bar, Brooklyn, NY

Sarah Gambito, Delivered

AWPMeeting Heather McHugh

Reading Audio

Reading in Brooklyn

The Snow Leopard

RIP Friday

Important Snow Leopard Alert

W.D. Snodgrass

Andrew Wyeth

Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking

RIP, Harold Pinter

Christmas Eve

NewsHour Art Beat Blog & Turner Cassity

Vote!

Wasting time on a poetry hoax

Hayden Carruth

Sandra Beasley on Verse Daily

Photographing Eden Available for Pre-order

Don Paterson, OBE

New Broadside Available

Moment for prose

New Issue of The Journal

The First Sale

Paradise Read

The Book

Skipping Poetry Month

It's Full of Stars

Poetry in Newspapers

Book!

Unsplendid Issue 3

Crossing the River Styx

Wick Poetry Center

First good news of the new year

Best of 2007 List

If he were Paul

A Mind of Winter

Judge Rules on What Makes a Poem

2007 The OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry Winner

Welcome to the World

Columbus Reading

Scared of my pillows

Odds on Nobel

Open Comment to the Editor of "Formalist Poetry News"

Muldoon to Edit Poetry at New Yorker

Reading at Penn State

I love these photographs

Unsplendid Issue 2 launch reading

Liam Rector, i.m.

So We'll Go No More

Poets at the fair

The Never-Never

Unsplendid Is Verse Daily's Web Feature of the Month

Video Poems

Poetry Raided

More drivel (not) from Maya Angelou

A Rare Political Post...

Campion on Slate

Campion on Slate

Dylan Thomas's home up for sale

Whitman on the DC Metro

Unsplendid

William Meredith, 1919-2007

The New Hopkins Review

Police Inspector Poet

Poetry Magazine looking for new poets

Some poetry news

AWPMeeting Heather McHugh