Not A New Mexico Poet: Michael Ryan

Editor's Note: Three months ago I interrupted my series on Pittsburgh poets to write about Michael Ryan. At that time I had only read God Hunger and desired more of him. I recently worked through his New And Selected Poems, and so I offer a break in my New Mexico series to deepen understanding and appreciation for Ryan's work.

What poet hasn't written of sex and faith and death? In this regard, Ryan is no trailblazer. But few poets write poems that are so palpably, so embarrassingly, about my sex, my faith, my death. And if not, at least about my neighbors--both in open, as well as in closed, form. Hear then, "This Is A Poem For The Dead," from Threats Instead of Trees.

This Is A Poem For The Dead

fathers: naked, you stand for their big faces,
mouths stuffed flat, eyes weighted, your miserable dick
sticking out like a nose. Dressed, you're more of
a mother making dinner: those old dirt bags,
the lungs, sway inside your chest like tits
in a housedress. Perhaps you're frying liver
that shrinks like your father getting older.
You still smell him breathing all over
your skin. He drank himself to death.

Now each woman you meet is a giant.
You'd crawl up their legs and never come down.
Even when you think you're big enough
to touch them, his voice flies from inside
your throat and "I love you" comes out
a drunk whimper. All you can do
is breathe louder. You're speaking
out of his mouth. Finally you admit
you know nothing about sex
and drown the urge slowly
like a fat bird in oil.

Still, those wings inside you.
At the hot stove all day you feel yourself
rising, the kids wrapping themselves
around your legs oh it's sexual
this nourishing food for the family
your father stumbling through the door
calling to you Honey I'm home.

Part of the beauty of this poem is its deceptively simple plain language, masterfully sensitive to the line, with enjambments that season the experience without calling attention to themselves: "Dressed, you're more of/a mother," "Even when you think you're big enough/to touch them," "his voice flies from inside/your throat," "All you can do/is breathe louder" and "all day you feel yourself/rising."

On this backdrop Ryan hangs lines and phrases that typographically, sonically and ideationally "stick out": "your miserable dick," "like tits/in a housedress," "You'd crawl up their legs and never come down," "you know nothing about sex/and drown the urge slowly/like a fat bird in oil."

Duality--its battles and its comforts--is a prevailing theme in Ryan's poems. The speaker in these poems is "painfully grateful there's breath/to make noise with." It's the pain that makes us so grateful for the gratefulness, and the gratefulness that gets us through the pain.

Speaking

I'm speaking again
as the invalid in a dark room
I want to say thank you
out loud to no one.
I want to suck my cracked lips in
on the sound, as the sound
dissolves slowly like a man living.

I'm painfully grateful there's breath
to make noise with, and many words
have meaning. I feel lucky
when hello doesn't hurt.
On a bus, I could love anyone.

It's not terrible to be alone.
Last night I talked to a person
so haltingly I might have been looking
for a word that wouldn't change.
That made her misconstrue everything.

Did she feel what I thought she was feeling?
Did she feel me concealing
the pleasure that keeps me going,
as I circled that pleasure
like a dog around its master?
This pleasure, for me, is speaking,
as if words enclosed the secret
in myself that lasts after death.

I would be remiss if I ignored Ryan's shorter, newer poems. In them, the darkness still threatens to overcome, but the containment of it in rhyme and verse, contrasted with the expanded field of white, allows some kind of hope to be an organic part of the message. Ryan's pithy last lines also assist. Two poems illustrate:

Every Sunday

Psychotic homeless boy
clocking our exit from the church--
straggle-haired, bloated,
eyes shining like ice--

doing his rooster-pecking thing
with his hand made the beak
into each of our faces
as we file out--

or is it snake-striking
or airhole-punching
or just compulsive counting us
one and one and one?

He will not live long.
He will allow the pastor
to wrap an arm around his shoulder,
and lead him to coffee and crullers.

But to "be" him


Mr. Pain Speaks For Himself

That I love you you can't
deny because you think
you don't love me. Each day
I drive you to the brink

as faithfully as mom
her precious little one
to soccer, dance, and violin.
Don't you get it, hon?

I'm not going anywhere,
but you are. So when
you feel me rolling in
like a fleet of Peterbilts,

don't try to run away again
like a watermelon on stilts,
but love me and be changed
to what you can't imagine.


Michael Ryan--a poet I couldn't imagine. Yet once experienced, a voice I cannot do without.

My Top Ten New Mexico Poets: Connie Voisine

Under the heading of "Research and Creative Interests" in her faculty page of the New Mexico State University website, Connie Voisine explains how the subject matter of her poetry has evolved to a fascination with desire and death, coinciding with the transition from her twenties to her thirties. I am envious of the craft and restraint with which she captures these two themes, and the way they interact with one another. This is never more true than in the opening lines of "Anonymous Lyric:"

It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.

It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk.

The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my

oblivious siblings.

'A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.'

A gush of yolk and then darker.

Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala—vinyl seats, the rear- view,

headrests and you, your hand through your hair.

'An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.'


Notice how the images flow in and out of one another as the poem progresses:


Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander.

Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must.

Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother.

That girl was shining me on.

In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of my room.

I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans.

'It must be the Night Fever,' I sang with the 8-track.

But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon

was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door,

'tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . .'

and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn.

I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms.

'I shall say what inordinate love is.'

The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.


Other examples of Voisine's images that sing of both desire and death range from "bullet holes above the bed," to "the crumbling pyramid's altar top flocked with moonlight," from "the hysterical crush of insect limbs rubbing, animal want, all night bang[ing] against the window" to "the saints, robes heavy with must, with ancient gnarled hands, deserving the nothing they felt their way toward (all from "'The Altar' by George Herbert").

I'm new to Voisine's work, and I'm still investigating it, but what I've read of it so far has earned her a place in my top ten New Mexico poets.

Connie Voisine is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University, where she directs the creative writing program. Educated at Yale University, she received her MFA from University of California at Irvine and her Ph.D. from University of Utah. Her book, Cathedral of the North, was winner of the AWP Award in Poetry and was released by University of Pittsburgh Press. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award--from her official bio.

My Top Ten New Mexico Poets: Malena Morling

The biography of Malena Morling prior to 2007 would give no indication that she might be considered a New Mexico poet: born in Stockholm, raised in southern Sweden, moved to the US to attend Hampshire College in Massachusetts, MA at NYU, MFA at Iowa, two critically acclaimed books--one by New Issues Press and one by Pittsburgh Press, Associate Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington and Core Faculty in The Low Residency MFA program at New England College. BUT, after numerous other awards, including The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award in 1999, and the Lotos Club Foundation Prize in 2004, in 2007, Morling won a Guggenheim that sent her to The School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe. After her year as a Research Associate, she had fallen under the spell of The Land of Enchantment, and she still resides there with her family, commuting weekly to North Carolina and semiannually to New Hampshire to teach. In my book, that qualifies her as a New Mexico poet--and her poems make her one of my top ten favorite!

Morling sees the world with the eyes of a visitor, and that open stance is what made her a New Mexican poet, even before she had ever seen its eternal skies and infinite sands. Share her awe in the presence of "the other" in her opening poem to Ocean Avenue:

Visiting

In the shape of a human body
I am visiting the earth;
the trees visit
in the shapes of trees.
Standing between the onions
and the dandelions
near the ailanthus and the bus stop,
I don't live more thoroughly
inside the mucilage of my own skull
than outside of it
and not more behind my eyes
than in what I can see with them.
I inhale whatever air
that grates breathe in the street.
My arms and legs still work,
I can sun if I have to
or sit motionless purposefully
until I am here and I am not here
the way death is present
in things that are alive
like salsa music
and the shrill laughter of the bride
as she leaves the wedding
or the bald child playing jacks
outside the wig shop.

Morling has a lot of poems about traveling on planes, on trains, in cars--she's told me that a lot of them were written while she was traveling, which she does often. For me, these poems are always negotiating with death, even if it is not mentioned outright, as it is in "Gone." (My apologies to Malena and my readers that I cannot format the poem as it is published in Astoria, with alternating lines indented.)

GONE

The world
is gone
like the exact
slope of a cloud
or the exact shape
of a hand waving
in the sunlight
from across
a crowded
train station
parking lot
to another hand
that waves back.

Come to think of it,
everything up to now
is gone.
And I have also
already left
even though
I still ride
the train
through the outskirts
of the city.

And I still sit
by the window,
the filthy
train window
while what is left
of the demolished
buildings
goes past
and the empty
billboards
and the transitory
architecture.

It's amazing
we're not
more amazed.
The world
is here
but then it's gone
like a wave
traveling toward
other waves.

Or like
the delicate white
spaceships
of the Dogwood
that float
as if there were
no gravity,
as if there were
no moments
isolated from
any other
moments
anywhere.

If I had to attempt a one-liner for Morling's work, I might roughly quote those last few lines--her poetry supposes that there are "no moments isolated from any other moments anywhere."

Revealing the inherent connections residing in all things is a driving force of Morling's poems. And making the invisible visible, the ethereal solid, the palpable ineffable, is a current that sweeps all images along in her Zen-like Big Mind poetry. "If There Is Another World" is a perfect example:

If There Is Another World

If there is another world,
I think you can take a cab there--
or ride your old bicycle
down Junction Blvd.
past the Paris Suites Hotel
with the Eiffel Tower on the roof
and past the blooming Magnolia and on--
to the corner of 168th Street.
And if you're inclined to,
you can turn left there
and yield to the blind
as the sign urges us--
especially since it is a state law.
Especially since there is a kind of moth
here on the earth
that feeds only on the tears of horses.
Sooner or later we will all cry
from inside our hearts.
Sooner or later even the concrete
will crumble and cry in silence
along with all the lost road signs.
Two days ago 300 televisions
washed up on a beach in Shiomachi, Japan,
after having fallen off a ship in a storm.
They looked like so many
oversized horseshoe crabs
with their screens turned down to the sand.
And if you're inclined to, you can continue
in the weightless seesaw of the light
through a few more intersections
where people inside their cars
pass you by in space
and where you pass by them,
each car another thought--only heavier.

I don't know about you, but I'm "inclined to continue/in the weightless seesaw of the light" through a few more of Morling's poems, in hopes of seeing a few more connections, in hopes of seeing you passing by...maybe even on the way to or from New Mexico...

My Top Ten New Mexico Poets: Jay Wright

"I carried my life, like a stone,/in a ragged pocket, but I/had a true weaving song, a sly/way with rhythm, a healing tone."

This gorgeous quatrain, ending Jay Wright's poem, "The Healing Improvisation of Hair," featured on the 2008 National Poetry Month Poster, is emblematic of Wright's writing life, and might well be an apt goal for all poets.

A Bollingen Prize winner, McArthur fellow and author of over a dozen volumes of poems, plays and essays, including the highly acclaimed, The Double Invention of Komo, a succession of poems following the Komo initiation rites of the African Bambara people, Wright blends disparate elements into a body of work that is sometimes difficult to penetrate. But, by applying effort, the reader is rewarded with a unique vision borne on a language that is virtuosic on all levels: typographic, sonic, sensory and ideational.

The spirituality and universality of Wright's work were, no doubt, born from an early exposure to Mexican, Spanish, and Navajo cultures, growing up African-American in his home state of New Mexico. He held this open stance toward the world as he moved through diverse careers in professional baseball, the U.S. Army, and academics, first majoring in chemistry, then winning a theological fellowship, before finally completing a masters degree in comparative literature from Rutgers in 1967.

Listen to the Latin dance rhythms and cobbled musical textures in "Areito," which is, among other things, a celebration of celebration, bringing together Aztec (mitote), Carribean (Areito), and Spanish ceremony and mythos. ("Corre," "corrido," and "navideno" in line 8 refer to "running," "family history" and "festival," respectively.)

Areito

This is my mitote,
batoco,
areito,
my bareitote.
This is my bareitote,
areito, batoco,
my a-ba-mitote.

Corre, corrido, navideño.

Friday the thirteenth
and snow in the birch.
Love’s days all begin
with that kind of coldness.
We had come down
to the fog and the bite of the sea,
another of love’s soft nibbles
on the skin.
The axe had chipped in the trees.
High up, the squabble of birds
through the evergreens
became the painful sound of palms.

And the woman sang:
I’ve got love all around me
My own treasure’s found me
My savior
is a boy in bloom.

So you guess that I wrestled
the shadows of my cabin at night.
My wife, in her corner,
tumbled over the milk in her sleep.
We had arrived
with more than a small purchase,
a small reparation,
to make.
Was it only the axe wronged in the trees?
My skin is the repository
of the sun’s needles.
Why had I chosen the cold?

And the woman sang:
Flesh of my flesh, I nurse your dreams
I nurse your screams
I am
your mother.

Mystic rose of the heart,
how could three of us
be imprisoned there?
And how could we come
from the dark wood into the light
yet still hear the moonlit canticles
prey in the water
still pray in another tongue
for sunlight on our nets?
Three of us to nurse the night,
and three of us for saving.
Santos and serpents,
tangled in the streams of our bodies,
dance in the blue of our altar lights.

Dolor, dolori, passa
A strength in a weary land
A shelter in the time of a storm.

I had lived alone with the woman,
sunlight, a son, fish, the fallen apples,
the holy deer that would kneel to our knife,
all the provisions or prayer,
to find myself unmarried,
my woman drunk with God,
nurse of a savior’s screams.
Then out of the woods,
I turned to the woods,
to the toothless nurse of my own dreams.
by the light of the thirteenth moon,
I began to search for my own light.

Wood of the woods
Bird of the woods
Woman you were created by God.

Necromancer of the hummingbird,
I bring you this bird’s body
and the thirteen rings of my love’s chains.
I bring you the secret whispers of my wife’s sleep,
the tangled passions of the forest,
the thorn I would return
to another heart.

Bird of the woods, fly into her heart.

Teach me how to stalk her sleep
and the bible of her loves.
Teach me the darkness of thirteen moons,
how to contend with a God.
Bathe me in love’s coldness.
Woman of the woods.

Dolor, dolori, passa.

I lie down in the sand
to hear my batoco,
my mitote,
my areito,
end.

Jay Wright--not only a poet, but a poet's poet AND one of my top ten New Mexico poets!

My Top Ten New Mexico Poets: D.H. Lawrence

What is a New Mexico poet? Is one required to have been born in "The Land of Enchantment?" Is it enough to have an MFA from one of its universities, or merely to have resided long enough within its fronteras to become addicted to Hatch green chili enchiladas? Does one have to be living there now? Living anywhere?

Answers will depend upon to whom you ask which question. For me, a New Mexican poet is one who has produced significant work under the spell of its light, its zia, and the question I ask it whether its deserts, its skies, its mountains--all of its sacred peoples and places--have worked their way not only into the lines of the poems, but also into the white spaces between them--regardless of whether they were written in Las Cruces or in L.A.

This series, therefore, will deal with poets who are natives, as well as those whose work has been influenced by New Mexico's magic, no matter how much time has been spent in residence. All will have been indelibly marked by New Mexico, and all will have affected me and my work deeply--for I consider myself a New Mexico poet.

Although considered mainly a novelist, and having been born in England, D.H. Lawrence wrote poetry highly influenced by New Mexico. He wrote that, in New Mexico, a "new part" of his soul "woke up suddenly" and "the old world gave way to a new". In Native American religion he discovered there were no gods, because "all is god".

New Mexico liberated D.H. Lawrence's poetry, moving it away from a "closed" to an "open," more American form. Here is a rather familiar poem of that illustrates this quite directly:


Eagle In New Mexico

Towards the sun, towards the south-west
A scorched breast.
A scorched breast, breasting the sun like an answer,
Like a retort.
An eagle at the top of a low cedar-bush
On the sage-ash desert
Reflecting the scorch of the sun from his breast ;
Eagle, with the sickle dripping darkly above.

Erect, scorched-pallid out of the hair of the cedar,
Erect, with the god-thrust entering him from below,
Eagle gloved in feathers
In scorched white feathers
In burnt dark feathers
In feathers still fire-rusted ;
Sickle-overswept, sickle dripping over and above.

Sun-breaster,
Staring two ways at once, to right and left ;
Masked-one
Dark-visaged
Sickle-masked
With iron between your two eyes ;
You feather-gloved
To the feet ;
Foot-fierce ;
Erect one ;
The god-thrust entering you steadily from below.

You never look at the sun with your two eyes.
Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast
Looks straight at the sun.

You are dark
Except scorch-pale-breasted ;
And dark cleaves down and weapon-hard downward curving
At your scorched breast,
Like a sword of Damocles,
Beaked eagle.

You’ve dipped it in blood so many times
That dark face-weapon, to temper it well,
Blood-thirsty bird.
Why do you front the sun so obstinately,
American eagle ?
As if you owed him an old, old grudge, great sun : or an old, old allegiance.

When you pick the red smoky heart from a rabbit or a light-blooded bird
Do you lift it to the sun, as the Aztec priests used to lift red hearts of men ?

Does the sun need steam of blood do you think
In America, still,
Old eagle ?

Does the sun in New Mexico sail like a fiery bird of prey in the sky
Hovering ?

Does he shriek for blood ?
Does he fan great wings above the prairie, like a hovering, blood-thirsty bird ?

And are you his priest, big eagle
Whom the Indians aspire to ?
Is there a bond of bloodshed between you ?

Is your continent cold from the ice-age still, that the sun is so angry ?
Is the blood of your continent somewhat reptilian still,
That the sun should be greedy for it ?

I don’t yield to you, big, jowl-faced eag
Nor you nor your blood-thirsty sun
That sucks up blood
Leaving a nervous people.

Fly off, big bird with a big black back.
Fly slowly away, with a rust of fire in your tail,
Dark as you are on your dark side, eagle of heaven.

Even the sun in heaven can be curbed and chastened at last
By the life in the hearts of men.
And you, great bird, sun-starer, heavy black beak
Can be put out of office as sacrifice bringer.

D.H. Lawrence: one of my top ten favorite New Mexico poets!

My Top Ten New Mexico Poets: Keith Wilson

I will always consider New Mexico home. Not the home of my birth (we moved there when I was nine), but of my real life--my soul. Home of my first kiss and my first fist-fight, my first bb gun and my first sled-ride. First car, first love, first drink, first heartbreak. And in the spring of 1970, as part of a class at New Mexico State University, my first poetry reading.

Even though William Stafford was the current poet laureate--more precisely, the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress--I had never heard of him. (Nor had I heard of Allan Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, or Frank O'Hara--all the poets I knew had died in another century.) But that night in Las Cruces, as William Stafford's voice "talk[ed} along in [his] not quite prose way," I found what I had been looking for all of my life, and I didn't even know I had been looking for it.

It was Keith Wilson, the professor of my poetry class that I was enrolled in because it was the only elective I could fit into my full-time work schedule, who introduced me to Stafford after the reading. It was Keith Wilson who invited me over to his house to hang out with him and "the poets." It was Keith Wilson who brought Creeley and Olson and a dozen other world-class poets to the campus of this unknown desert college in southern New Mexico in the late sixties and early seventies. It was Keith Wilson who rocked my world. And it was only after I graduated and moved on to another state for graduate school (in a completely different field), that I understood the significance of his own poetry and his own life.

After graduate school, floundering in a job totally unsuited to me, I began a thirty-year correspondence with Keith, in which he directed my reading, exchanged poems, and mentored me in the writing life. What I did not know, was that Keith did the same for scores of students over his lifetime. (I have met some of them, in the most amazing ways--but that is another post....) The point of this post is that Keith Wilson has to be number one in my top ten New Mexico poets.

But it is not just because of my personal connection that I begin this series with him--Wilson stepped into critical acclaim in 1969 with the publication of his Graves Registry & Other Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award and the Lamont Prize. It is to his work, beginning in that collection, and growing into his Shaman of the Desert, Collected Poems, that I direct attention in this post.

Hayden Carruth calls Wilson's poems "quiet, held like the moment of the whirlpool's brink of cosmic lust and extinction, held but ready to let go, to dance and die, to shatter. They are magical." G.E. Murray said "There is a sense of the mystical in Wilson's work, a quiet assuming eye for the marvelous, the incredible, the simple magic of wind and rain, of a quick-draw." And, finally, Jerome Rothenberg quotes Wilson himself ("I am a voice, nothing more"), in order to declare that "Wilson writes too modestly; for what that voice delivers is an authentic vision that transcends its place by being of it."

"A vision that transcends its place" is an apt description for Wilson's body of work. Often dismissed as merely "a New Mexican poet," in the same way that Stafford has been criticized for being "only a poet of place," Wilson's work rises above this short-sighted assessment by those who fail to see the entire universe in a drop of water or, in the case of Wilson, in a single grain of New Mexican sand. Hear the universal voice of the poet in the particularity of "The Grain of Sand":

The Grain of Sand

There he goes, old hawk, he touches
the thermal, rises, lifts himself to dot
sky bending in a semicircle of blue heat.

The grey shimmer of mirage standing unbroken
until the strike

down he drops knocking
a buck rabbit off his feet, flurry of dust,

rises again, talons blooded,
crippled rabbit hiding in the sage and brush
for coyotes to find:

desert, crawling under heat,
slick glass sand tumbles in little avalanches and
the tarantula flashes back, her catch firmly
in her hairy mandibles. The quick awkward gait
of the Giant Desert Scorpion. His more deadly
kin, the straw colored Durango, all cocked, waiting

as this desert son goes down, as blue, grey
and pink spread themselves to silence and I hear
tiny feet and scales flee the hunting night.


Or hear the music, the prophecy, the powerful conceit in "The Way Things Are Going":

The Way Things Are Going

--Horsehead Crossing, South of Fort Sumner

New Mexico will soon have passed away,
gasping like a minnow on a clay bottom of the Pecos
I know, I feel the same. The air drifting up
from El Paso, down from Albuquerque, East from Tucson
West from Odessa is heavy, hangs like plastic rock
above us I know

nothing but that beauty is the most
transitory while ugliness lasts and lasts. One comes
to hail the shining moment for what it is: one scale
of one tiny minnow flashing in the dying light, one face
--so loved--aging in this still brilliant, holy Sun.


While the above poems are examples of Wilson's "desert poems," collected mainly in Bosque Redondo: The Encircled Grove, New and Selected Poems, it is his life-long polemic against war,Graves Registry, a five-part unfinished sequence of visions blending scenes from Korea, the New Mexican desert, the ocean, and the inner journeys of their unwitting participants, rising from his own experiences as warrior, shaman and sailor, that brought the most critical acclaim. Here is the opening poem from Part IV, SeaChanteys, first with Wilson's own introductory comments to the complete work.

Graves Registry:

A Joint Service Operation that comes
in after battles, & wars, to count
the dead, identify bones, draw up
a total of what has been lost . . .

Part IV
Seachanteys

Ballad of a Sailor

...wave, interminably flowing--Wallace Stevens

It is because my fingers
move over these keys
compulsively
that the result
quiets me

Dark images of war,
storms, hands raised like waves
in my dreams the wind
never stops

betrayed shores
sick girls in foreign bars
children begging outside
a night that is always closed

Comrades, their drowning faces
pale tourmaline, rayed with light,
open eyes and seawashed mouths

It is because my fingers
move over these keys
restlessly
that the chanty
moves me

Here, far from the sea,
this house is steady. It does
not rock and that noise is
thunder, not gunfire. It is
peaceful here. Say it again.
Peaceful. One has only to stay
awake, not dream, the faces of dreams
cannot touch, dreamed blood stains
only the bedsheet sails of haunted ships.

Sailing, sail on, its crew of phantoms
wave, passing beyond the light, wave
& giggle among the shrouds, knowing
it is not the last goodbye nor the first
we are sharing.

Keith Wilson, Shahman of the Desert, know that your goodbye to the battles, to the desert, to your vision, is not goodbye. And know that countless "fingers still move over these keys restlessly..." but move more surely because of you...

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poetry Editors: Ed Ochester and Peter Oresick

My hope for this final post in the Pittsburgh Poets series is for it to function as the final line of the first sonnet in a crown of sonnets, a stepping stone from one nexus of writers to another, that also will supply its own path to the unique canon that each of us is building, with each poem, each poet we read. Thus, I point you to The Pittsburgh Book Of Contemporary American Poetry, Ed Ochester, Peter Oresick, editors.

I have listed the poets that comprise this muscular anthology at the end of this post, in order to give the reader the option of tasting small portions of perhaps unfamiliar offerings before paying for the entire meal, and to tempt the more seasoned reader with favorite dishes laid out on this plenteous smorgasbord.

From the 45 poets and 370 pages of poetry, some of whom I have previous written about in this blog (e.g. Larry Levis and Alicia Ostriker), I will underscore one example of a poet indispensable to my own writing life, and one example of a poet new to me, but one who I will continue to read in order to broaden my own poetic diet.

Sharon Olds is no stranger to poets and readers of poetry. Her first book, Satan Says, began what Alicia Ostriker calls "the erotics of family love and pain." Ostriker continues: "In later collections, [Olds] writes of an abusive childhood, in which miserably married parents bully and punish and silence her. She writes, too, of her mother's apology 'after 37 years', a moment when 'The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window/someone is bursting into or out of'"

Here, then, is the title poem from that first collection:

Satan Says

I am locked in a little cedar box
with a picture of shepherd pasted onto
the central panel between carvings.
The box stands on curved legs.
It has a gold, heart-shaped lock
and no key. I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says, "I'll get you out. Say
My father is a shit." I say
my father is a shit and Satan
laughs and says, "It's opening.
Say your other is a pimp."
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
My spine uncurls in the cedar box
like the pink back of the ballerina pin
with a ruby eye, resting beside me on
satin in the cedar box.
"Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,"
Satan says, down my ear.
The pain of the locked past buzzes
in the child's box on her bureau, under
the terrible round pond eye
etched around with roses, where
self-loathing gazed at sorrow.
Shit. Death. Fuck the father.
Something opens. Satan says
"Don't you feel a lot better?"
Light seems to break on the delicate
edelweiss pin, carved in two
colors of wood. I love him too,
you know, I say to Satan dark
in the locked box. I love them but
I'm trying to say what happened to us
in the lost past. "Of course," he says
and smiles, "of course. Now say: torture."
I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,
the edge of a large hinge open.
"Say: the father's cock, the mother's
cunt," says Satan, "I'll get you out."
The angle of the hinge widens
until I see the outlines of
the time before I was, when they were
locked in the bed. When I say
the magic words, Cock, Cunt,
Satan softly says, "Come out."
But the air around the opening
is heavy and thick as hot smoke.
"Come in," he says, and I feel his voice
breathing from the opening.
The exit is through Satan's mouth.
"Come in my mouth," he says, "you're there
already," and the huge hinge
begins to close. Oh no, I loved
them, too, I brace
my body tight
in the cedar house.
Satan sucks himself out the keyhold.
I'm left locked in the box, he seals
the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.
"It's your coffin now," Satan says.
I hardly hear;
I am warming my cold
hands at the dancer's
ruby eye--
the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.


Perhaps you have, but I had never, heard of Greg Pape before acquiring Ochester & Oresick's anthology. However, I will continue to read his poems that take the back off the case that encloses the machinery of connection ticking inside all that is. The Minotaur Next Door is emblematic of his seven poems included in The Pittsburgh Book Of Contemporary American Poetry. It, like the others, uncovers connections that invite promising investigations into a landscape, although bereft of salvation, seemingly rife with grace. With uncanny echoes of "Satan Says," here is Pape's "The Minotaur Next Door":

They are very small, my neighbors.
Sometimes I imagine them as a single creature
arguing and worrying and tearing itself apart.
That first night I heard her moaning
I imagined the sort of scene this city
is famous for. I didn't know she had a husband.
I hadn't seen him yet. I thought she might be
alone, or worse, a rapist or burglar, some
screwed-up half-man having broken in, having
robbed and beaten and violated her, having just
fled, or was about to flee . . . It was up to me.
I had to do something. I ran out into the night
and stopped. There she was in her bright kitchen,
in the faded flowers of her bathrobe walking
back and forth behind the window making that sound
with each deliberate breath. It was clear
she needed more than what I was willing to be.
Tonight again she moans, a sound I will not try
to put on the page, a constriction of blood
and breath, a complaint and a pain as monotonous
and worn as the words she shouts at her husband
in the afternoon: "My life is a living hell."
I can imagine for her no loveliness, only
the diversion of a meal or the still moments
before the television when, perhaps, without speaking
he brings her a glass of water. I do nothing
but believe her. Just as once there was a man
with the body of a bull, or a bull with the body
of a man, and that creature made of halves turned
on itself or on another, these houses and these
streets and this woman, although they are exhausted,
will not tire, will not sleep.

Pape's "cool glass of water," Olds' "ruby eye," are but two of the delightful divergencies from our own hells, waiting for all who will enter the the world of The Pittsburgh Book Of Contemporary American Poetry and The Pitt Poetry Series beyond it.

Here, then, concludes "My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets" series: the final line in the second stanza of a crown of posts, that will continue with "My Top Ten New Mexican Poets," in honor of New Mexico's Centennial Celebration (1912-2012). Coming soon!

Poets Included in The Pittsburgh Book Of Contemporary American Poetry:

Claribel Alegria
Debra Allbery
Maggie Anderson
Robin Becker
Siv Cedering
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Nancy Vieira Couto
Kate Daniels
Toi Derricotte
Sharon Doubiago
Stuart Dybek
Jane Flanders
Gary Gildner
Elton Glaser
David Huddle
Lawrence Joseph
Julia Kasdorf
Etheridge Knight
Bill Knott
Ted Kooser
Larry Levis
Irene McKinney
Peter Meinke
Carol Muske
Leonard Nathan
Sharon Olds
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Greg Pape
Kathleen Peirce
David Rivard
Liz Rosenberg
Maxine Scates
Richard Shelton
Betsy Sholl
Peggy Shumaker
Jeffrey Skinner
Gary Soto
Leslie Ullman
Constance Urdang
Ronald Wallace
Belle Waring
Michael S. Weaver
Robley Wilson
David Wojahn
Paul Zimmer

My Top Ten (Almost) Pittsburgh Poets: Gerald Locklin

Again, I'm pushing the envelope. Gerald Locklin is not from Pittsburgh. But he did spend time as poet in residence at The University of Pittsburgh, and he does have a chapbook entitled The Pittsburgh Poems to prove it, so I do not feel too guilty about including him in this series. He is a favorite of mine, so he (almost) qualifies. (Bear with me--I got myself into this series, and I'm trying to get myself out of it.)

I met Gerald Locklin in Albuquerque in 2002. He was Mark Weber's guest at a small monthly venue in a ramshackled building that looked like a gutted bar with cold metal folding chairs in the middle of winter. I was the first to arrive, after Mark Weber, and as the audience trickled in (it never really was a gusher) wearing down-filled coats and wool scarves, an anorexic man in a short-sleeved T-shirt and wrinkled chinos, hair disheveled, sat down near me and proceeded to read his mystery novel, while waiting for the reading to begin.

Fifteen minutes past the hour, Weber got up on the 6-inch raised, squeaky stage and addressed the mostly-empty chairs, and the few bundled bodies huddling together in the center of the room. During the introduction, the skinny man continued reading his book and, only when Weber had stepped down from the stage, and all was silent, did the man snap shut his mystery and walk to the front of the room.

What an entrance! And what a reading! Locklin wowed us with his stories, his jokes, his singing and his dancing, which at 5500 feet elevation gave him such a wheezing, coughing attack (I later learned that previously he had nearly died from blood clots in his lungs), that I thought it would send him to the emergency room. In between, he did read some poems, which sounded like Bukowski with a Ph. D., by which I mean a poetry of garrulous gab--full of humor and wit and obscenities but, instead of idolizing the underbelly of society, Locklin's poems deprecate the American dream and his tentative place in it.

Here is a stanza from Bukowski's "a poet in New York," from The Last Night Of The Earth Poems: "eating out tonight/I find a table alone/and while waiting for my order/take out my wife's copy of/A Poet In New York./I often carry things to read/so that I will not have to look at/the people." Bukowski separates himself from "the crowd," and disparages "the people" with that dry voice, that aftertaste of rage.

For Locklin, it's not what he thinks of "the people," it's what they think of him. Compare the above to "you begin to wonder if you've ever heard of yourself," a poem from The Cabo Conference: "if not exactly humbling,/it is at least a little discouraging/to be in a room with/the fifty leading professors of poetry in america/and someone jokes,/'you notice that none of/the poets showed up'."

There is no way that I can do justice to Locklin's body of work (over 3,000 poems in print, more than 125 books) in this short post. I can hopefully, however, turn you on to Locklin if you don't know him. And if you do, perhaps I can motivate you to re-read him with a different view, a different ear, in order to season your own work with a little more levity, and give yourself permission to write more about the extraordinary ordinary in your own life.

Here is a short series of four poems that end section II ("Intoxication") of The Life Force Poems.

An Occasional Coyote

in the high ranch desert valley,
people are painting their houses
cape cod blue,
planting irrigated lawns,
fencing their yards,
and paving their driveways.

the wild burrows that used
to rut in the night
and dump their odorless vegetarian shit
to be cleansed by the endless wind,
have been rounded up,
thus effectively leaving the area
without remaining signs of wildlife.

the above have been accomplished
to make it more convenient
for city-dwellers to get
back to nature.


A Penny For Your Thoughts

we all seem to want
to sum up our lives
in loosely bound works:
the meditations of marcus aurelius,
les pensees of pascal,
the notebooks and essays
of emerson and thoreau,
the gettysburg address,
the tower and crazy jane
(not a vision;
not a fable):

even bukowski let himself
be talked into
the captain is out to lunch
and the sailors have taken over the ship,

and it didn't turn out
all that bad.

others tackle the task straight on,
like a linebacker who knows
he can't be steamrolled.
here i have in mind
beethoven's final string quartets,
the four quartets of t.s. eliot,
the book of ecclesiastes,
the lives of christ.


Jackson Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950

suddenly we realize that this is everything:
the universe, the self, the molecules,
their nuclei, motion, rest, the stars,
desire, shakespeare, color, absence, heat
and light, anxiety, the umbilical telephone,
the beast and beauty, chaos, order,
stimulus, perception the creative,
virginia woolf, the waves, emotion,
monasteries, christ and shiva,
music, wagner, bach, mile, coltrane,
philip glass and seymour, kna,
the life of the senses,
the life of themind,
life, literature, lifelessness,
death, time, eternity,
the teapot in the tempest,
control and spontaneity,
space, boundlessness, boundaries,
you name it.

it's all here.
all language.
all there is to see.
all there is to hear.
all there is to think.

sleep never stops.


The Motive

as a writer you get to seek
popularity or immortality,
riches or fame,
rewards for your labor
in this life or the next.

it's highly unlikely
you'll achieve both.
the nature of originality
tends to render the two
mutually exclusive.

of course the strongest odds
are that you'll end up
with neither.

i've got to go, though,
with the idea that
the life force is always
the driving force within
the greatest artists
because the life force is,
after all,
what the greatest art
is always all about.


After the reading, getting Locklin's signature, I found out what he meant by this last stanza. Instead of scurrying off with Weber or playing the room (what room?), he talked with me and the few others standing around for about twenty minutes. He thanked me for listening to him carefully while he was reading (he had directed much of his eye contact towards me), he asked me about my writing, he invited me (all of us) out with him for drinks. He was old school; his poems were as well--confessional, highly narrative, slices of life in only slightly elevated language.

His life story was his literary persona. It still is. And that's perhaps what I admire most about him--he's still writing (at age 71), and the life force is still the driving force within.

And he hasn't combed his hair in forty years.

Gerald Locklin--one of my top ten favorite Pittsburgh Poets.

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Debra Allbery

Debra Allbery is, technically, not a Pittsburgh poet. As far as I know she's never lived in Pittsburgh. She does appear, however, in The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, a terrific anthology edited by Ed Ochester and Peter Oresick. And even though she was born in Lancaster, Ohio, she did teach for a time at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so calling her a Pittsburgh poet is not totally out of place.

Allbery's poems creep up on you with their deceptively simple strategies of straightforward narrative and camouflaged diction that blends into the poem's context until, in their final stanzas or lines, they pounce, flashing powerful muscles, present all along, knocking you off your feet. "Carnies" is one such poem:

Carnies

That's what we went for, Holly and I,
not for the rides or the games we couldn't win.
What were we then, fourteen, fifteen,
wearing cutoffs and our brothers' workshirts.
Holly tossing her hair as we walked down the midway,
her talking big and me saying nothing, a half step
behind her. But don't you know how deep summer
crawls inside you in a town like that.
You can't keep still, you need fast
fresh air from another place. And if boys
your own age try showing off for you there,
you nod and shrug but keep glancing away.
You look over at the quick swipes of grease
on the jeans of some muscled roustabout unlocking
the safety bars on the Octopus, you watch
the flutter of his T-shirt, the travel of his eyes.
And when he looks at your you're caught
not knowing what to do, and afraid to smile.
You just move on through that broken-down music.
Holly and I, we took our time getting on
and off those rides, we craved that coolness
just an extra second airborne, scrambling
summer and Main Street and a stranger's level gaze.
And you bet we'd take them home with us,
their soft goddamns that followed us out,
and wouldn't we toss all night with them, too.

Debra Allbery has won two NEA fellowships, a Sherwood Anderson Fellowship, the "Discovery" Nation Prize and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her books are Walking Distance (1991) and Fimbul-Winter (2010). Ms. Allbery is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she has been on the poetry faculty since 1983. She lives in Fairview, North Carolina.

"The Bridge"

This post is the result of several intersections, some coincidental (between the birthday of Hart Crane--just a few days ago, July 21--and our current year, 2012, the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge), some juxtapositional (between The Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges), and some born of personal history and poetic heritage. With the direction of my poetic mentors, my particular reading path led me through Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Eliot and Crane--argued by Harold Bloom to be (with the addition of Robert Frost), the major American poets.

The result was that after reading Crane's "The Bridge," I was compelled to write a tribute to our own bay area icon that shines its beacon of "International Vermillion" to the pleasure of all who approach or pass through The Gate.

By no means do I equate my work with Crane's masterpiece. I share it to add my grateful note to his symphony, to celebrate the art and life embodied in our own "harp and altar, fury fused," and to encourage readers to read (or reread) Crane, both for the pleasure of his rhapsodic lyricism and as inspiration to realize their own transcendental yearnings. First, the proem to Crane's "The Bridge," as call, and then my proem to "The Gate" as answer...

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Hart Crane
1930, Black Sun Press


The Gate

To The Golden Gate Bridge

How many sunsets have white hairs of fog
Fallen from the headlands, collected
In the gate’s throat like fleece beneath
A sigh of stars? How many torn

Moon-ears, up all night, listening
For the feverish cries of gulls
Sweeping vermilion waves
Through restless shadows?

I think of the sepia harvested for ink
From octopus, cuttlefish and squid.
How they glow with phosphorescence that reaches
Its greatest intensity a few days after they are dead.

And you, golden blade, surrogate stitch
In the continent’s deep wound,
Suppurating your stories out to sea,
Stories of limestone, ash and lava,

How many times have your waters parted, dissolving
Into nothing, then starting up again
In the life of this shorn planet? How many worlds
Have collided to flood this valley, slice

Its hills into islands, how many words strung together
Into sonnets beneath your harp strings,
Rising like incense, like a web of vines stretching
To the mountains to which we look for help,

Shrouded in burning clouds, smoking by day,
Glowing by night? How many foghorns
Pressed into the dark wall of sleep,
Like swollen seeds thumbed into humus,

Sprouting to the surface, waiting
For the sun, that one faithful fire-eye
Blinking through mist, searching for its twin—
The earth, and all its fullness, which turns

Art to life, life to art, the truest of all
Lovers? How many nights
Has your watery bed swayed
Beneath your broad back? How many days

Has the bay rolled open its scroll of ciphers,
The moon squinting to read the pages
Of the surf, all in one glance, before they fade
On a loom of soggy loam, weaving

A landscape that is more like itself than itself
At each power of magnification, each level
Of imagination, twisting like snowflakes
In an earthquake, ragged white corpuscles

Swimming up the bloodstream to the head
Waters of the brain, where fractals mediate
Between the amygdala and the Dalai Lama,
The pain of wisdom and the ecstasy of speech?

The last cigarette and the iron sea.

Terry Lucas
2009, Fifth Wednesday Journal

The Crack in Everything: Metaphor and Love in The Poetry of Alicia Ostriker

At first I was going to entitle this post Departure. It is a slight detour from my current series My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets. But only slight. For some time, Ostriker's poems have found a home at the University of Pittsburgh Press with more than half of her dozen collections of poetry being published in the Pitt Poetry Series. And since I met her in 2006, her work (Ostriker is also a world-class scholar, essayist, non-fiction writer, lecturer, literary critic, social reformer, feminist, wife, mother, daughter, friend), has found a place in my life, my writing life, my soul. I will attempt to limit my remarks to a small portion of her capacious body of work in poetry.

I decided to borrow the title of Ostriker's National Book Award nominated collection, The Crack in Everything, as she borrowed it from Leonard Cohen (There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in), because it seems to celebrate life and art in the same way that Ostriker does: by not stepping over the cracks on the sidewalk, but by working one's toe into them (even if it breaks your mother's back), testing to see if they crumble to reveal a pit to be avoided or a root system that connects at a deep level what appears on the surface to be isolated, individual organisms, but is rather one living tree of life. I also decided to use the title of her book because just last night I had the privilege of hearing her read from it once again. (Ostriker is a faculty member of the conference going on this week at Dominican University on The Healing Art of Writing.)

Section IV is entitled The Mastectomy Poems. The series is a master class in metaphor, which Ostriker defines as the "intuitive similarity in dissimilars." Their language is at once gorgeous, erotic, ambiguous, tragic and comedic. Below is a compilation of Ostriker's own explanation of the most salient passages of metaphor in the poem, "Mastectomy," and my own observations.

Mastectomy

for Alison Estabrook


I shook your hand before I went.
Your nod was brief, your manner confident,
A ship's captain, and there I lay, a chart
Of the bay, no reefs, no shoals.
While I admired your boyish freckles,
Your soft green gown with the oval neck,
The drug sent me away, like the unemployed.
I swam and supped with the fish, while you
Cut carefully in, I mean
I assume you were careful,
They say it took you an hour or so.

The metaphors in this passage, as well as in others, serve both to unite the things compared and to provide a distance, a separation between them. This process is not a neat or tidy one--just as in the case of lovers, the goal is to lose identity and to further define it.

Comparing the surgeon to a ship's captain, and the body of her patient to "a chart/Of the bay, no reefs, no shoals," elucidates both the metaphrands (the patient/her body) and the metaphiers (the captain, the chart). This surgeon (like a ship's captain who has navigated the waters of numerous bays), is as experienced performing this surgery on the patient's body as the captain is charting her course through the bay. But notice how the unspoken images of the surgeon and the waiting body of the patient lend meaning to the work of the ship captain who surgically navigates through the open body of water lying before her. This unspoken gesture, this holding back is what adds to the eroticism of the passage that would be spoiled with simile. The further details of "no reef, no shoals" provides more interest as we approach the images: this body, this procedure, is uncomplicated, straightforward--an additional reason for the "manner confident." In addition the choice of "bay" rather than ocean or river or lake (which would all give different slants to the roles of captain, chart, physician, patient), as the body of water connotes a place one returns to: home, hearth, family, safety, the consummate place of nurturing.

A similar analysis could be made of lines 7-8, as well as in the first half of the ultimate stanza:

Was I succulent? Was I juicy?
Though flesh is grass, I dreamed you displayed me
In pleated paper like a candied fruit.
I dreamed you sliced me like green honeydew,
Like a pomegranate full of seeds,
Tart as Persephone's, those electric dots
That kept that girl in hell,
Those jelly pips that made her queen of death.
Doctor, you knifed, chopped and divided it
Like a watermelon's ruby flesh
Flushed a little, serious
About your line of work
Scooped up the risk in the ducts
Scooped up the ducts
Dug out the blubber
Spooned it off and away, nipple and all.
Eliminated the odds, nipped out
Those almost insignificant grains that might
Or might not have lain dormant forever.


This is poetry at its highest function: to express love of language and life by shining the light of metaphor on both to discover inherent connections--the chiefest among them in this volume residing in "the cracks." Not just in the The Mastectomy Poems, but in the entire work, Ostriker exposes these cracks, these seams, the hidden zippers in fabrics that cover us, and artfully (even with humor) undresses one reality in order to reveal another--and to be revealed by them both. This is the reason one must read in order to write. And I have found no one better to read than Alicia Ostriker to discover what one didn't know that one knew. I can think of no better place to start reading her than with The Crack in Everything--you'll find her love (metaphors) shining on all the cracks--even yours--and you just might find your own metaphors, as well.

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Julia Kasdorf

Julia Mae Spicher Kasdorf grew up in the suburbs of southeast of Pittsburgh, daughter of Mennonites who chose to leave their rural community in central Pennsylvania for work in a city. Her Mennonite background shapes her work, as well as her life, with three poetry collections--Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve's Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)--, a scholarly study of Pennsylvania writer Joseph W. Yoder (Fixing Tradition), and co-editor of two editions of Pennsylvania local color novels, Rosanna of the Amish by Joseph W. Yoder and The House of the Black Ring by Fred Lewis Pattee. Her essay collection, The Body and the Book: Writing a Mennonite Life, was awarded the Book of the Year award by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her poetry and other writings have won numerous awards, as well. Kasdorf is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

Kasdorf's accessible lyrical-narrative poetry resides in what she calls "the free space between places"--the place of the rural, provincial Mennonite community, and the world of the urban, traveled intellectual. The negotiation between these two worlds energizes her unique poems. "Uncle" is an example of a poem that speaks of these two worlds:

Uncle

At nine I knew what Jesus would do
if he got C.O. just for being born
Mennonite. He'd go anyway, like you.

In the name of peace, he'd race
an ambulance through the screaming streets
of Saigon. He'd grow a moustache to show
he wasn't a soldier--a speck
on the camera lens, Grandpa insisted.

He'd take a generator to a village
in the hills where golden children
would run behind him yelling, "Mother Fucker."

He'd thrust brilliant green blades
of rice into the fields where men's legs
and the torsos of water buffaloes exploded
when plows struck bombs in the mud.

When the planes returned, he'd load
whomever he could into the only car,
drive to a refugee camp, and there give up
at last, as you gave up bearing that war
on your tall, blond body.

Lost across the continents for months,
you returned to us, the uncle of someone else,
gaunt as a corpse, pale and haunted.
And when you could barely finish
a child's portion at Howard Johnson's,
that was the only miracle I could grasp.

Kasdorf's simply gorgeous music is a bonus on top of her elucidating content. I've not read her widely, so I will end with a challenge to read her books as I will, and I'll report back at a later date on what I find. In the mean time, based upon what I've already read of her, Kasdorf is definitely one of my top ten favorite Pittsburgh poets!

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Joseph Bathanti

About Joseph Bathanti's Restoring Sacred Art Gerald Stern writes:

I am a sucker for Pittsburgh poetry, but it's not just the location that moves me in Bathanti's book. I like two main things: the outrageous and amazing memory of particulars, of things; and the mad and tender turns the work suddenly takes. Bathanti is loyal, maybe grudgingly, to a dear--a loved and hated--world. Throughout the narrative, his poetic strategies are marvelous; one poem after another is deft, and moving, and original. This is an important book.

To this delightful recommendation from Gerald Stern--a poet who knows a lot about Pittsburgh and about writing important books--I would add that Restoring Sacred Art possesses a diction of apotheosis, raising the ordinary language of his Italian Pittsburgh roots to divine utterances of sacred images gilded with the profane. How else to describe the kind of descriptive language Bathanti uses in a poem like "The Tongue" (Epigraph: And the tongue is a fire,/a world of iniquity--St. James 3:5), where as a little boy he drops the F bomb on his mother:

I'd thought I'd been talking to myself,
but the sound of that word--
cheap, weightless, thrilling--
wormed out of me in a voice
which the house over and over whispered back.
In only her underthings,
my mother wheeled, clutched for cover
a towel to her throat and breast
in a gesture I would see
astonished women forever copy.

Unable to deny it,
I stood outside her bedroom door,
the tip of the word still hanging
like a switchblade from my mouth.

But it is in the narratives of the quotidian rituals of growing up in the particularity of his family, on his street--Collins Avenue--with its unique raised octaves of mothers calling in its sons and daughters for dinner, with its coal dust and soot so thick that the streetlights remained lit in the afternoon so the children could see to walk home from school--that Bathanti best shines his inherited ecclesiastical language. Although this language of faith inadequately attempted during his childhood to explain in one hour a week what happened during all of the rest, in these poems he conscripts it to successfully communicate the unresolved tensions it created. Take, for example, the poem "Penance"--

Frantic with relief,
like a child fished from a well,
I burst from my First confession
into the sunlit world, how kind now

that I was finally good. Upon my tongue
the next morning I would accept
another sacrament, Holy Eucharist,
and become the bones of slaughtered saints

immured in glass reliquaries,
all light and sweet decay.
It was fine to die.

But heading home, he gets into a game in "Booze Alley" with "the black kids from Hilliards [who] didn't wear shirts." The inevitable tussle ensues with one Jacky Lando--Little Jack:

We argued: "safe" or "out."
He fired slag in my face,
remanding me for a blind instant to pitch and fear.
Sin grouted inside my eyelids.

I threw a wild punch,
opened my gravelly eyes, and saw the others
frozen in wonder:
Jacky soughed a crown of blood at my feet.

Then from his mouth slipped a pearl,
and then another and another
dropping like fantastic alms onto the alley floor,
as if my fist, guided by the Holy Spirit,

had split a secret vault of treasure in him.
The other children backed away,
as if I were the bad one. Jacky howled
like judgment, blood bearding him,

dripping from his chin, and I knew
that my Confession had been annulled.
Jesus would refuse my tainted heart.
Dipping my hands into the dirt,

scooping up his blood and teeth,
sun and silvery filth coating them,
I knelt and offered them to him,
as if he were the Prince of Peace,

the very least of them.
In was in His power to call back His blood,
resow His teeth, spin time back
to the moment outside the confessional

when my soul was spotless. But instead,
looking down at me upon my knees,
he marshaled his principalities,
his wiles and discernment,

cried piteously
like a wounded little boy,
then spit his wild suffering
blood in my face.


Not all poems in Restoring Sacred Art are replete with ecclesiastical diction. There are times that we almost forget, like the characters in Bathanti's Holy History, that we are in a universe watched over by a God as silent, yet as immanent, as Bathanti's dead tailor grandfather. But just as we begin to get comfortable in our secular thoughts, the poet restores our minds as bicameral vessels--now cracked-- desirous of salvation, yet unable to find it, either in the old liturgy or in some new iconoclasm.

Collins Avenue

The nights of tripe and bocci
they hobbled down to Troiano's saloon,
dragging like chained shades behind them
lives shipped in steerage
across the Atlantic,
artifact hands working like marionettes,
coarse operatic garments
of self-loathing and insane pride,
headstone faces inscribed
with gold teeth, concrete skin
we expected any minute would chip away
and reveal a monster with a shrill,
superstitious wife given to rosaries
in dark churches.

All evening behind the clubyard wall
we heard Vivaldi's sonata,
"Al Santo Sepolcro," revving and dying
over and over on the windup Victrola,
the querulous wooden crack of the balls
and voices like the creak
of a crowbar unprying the rusted-shut.

They didn't own the words to articulate
their wounds, not even in their native tongue,
though we, the children, "Americanos,"
could not have comprehended.
They belonged to us, these old men,
and we to them; but we had no old country,
only Collins Avenue, this one "via"
along the pinched breast of a new country
they could not turn their mouths from.
America had murdered Christ all over again.

Doomed to haunt the family "fotografie":
no names, averted faces,
flashing gunbore eyes,
canes and crutches propped
against the Quince tree, rising
arm after arm with its mutant fruit,
under which they brooded, hoarding
their damnable secrets like blood money.

Spare is my translation.

Neither the translation, nor the world that Bathanti translates into his gorgeous poetry are spare--both are replete with elucidation: in the art of language and in the art of life. In a single volume of poetry, Bathanti contributes immensely to the restoration of art in the sacred and the sacred in art.

Joseph Bathanti is the author of five books of poetry: Communion Partners, Anson County, The Feast of All Saints, This Metal (nominated for the National Book Award), and Land of Amnesia. His first novel, East Liberty, won the 2001 Carolina Novel Award. His latest novel, Coventry, won the 2006 Novello Literary Award. His book of stories, The High Heart, won the 2006 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. He is the recipient of Literature Fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1994 (poetry) and 2009 (fiction), the Sherwood Anderson Award, and many others. He teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Not A Pittsburgh Poet: Michael Ryan

Editors Note: My apologies to my readers for the interruption in the series, "My Top Ten Favorite Pittsburg Poets." Today's post resumes regular entries on this blog and I will return to the thread of "Pittsburg Poets" soon. Thank you for your patience and loyalty. TL

I love used bookstores. Recently my friends and poets Michael Waters and Mihaela Moscaliuc visited from New Jersey. I treated them to several local used bookstores. Upon entering each one, Michael and I would race to the poetry section to see who could get to the "finds" first. Michael usually won (I was being polite to a guest), but I did manage to capture a hardback copy of Michael Ryan's God Hunger for a pittance. Ryan is new to me, but I am completely taken with him. I am now looking for his selected works, and will dutifully report back when I find it.

The opening poem to God Hunger, "Not The End Of The World," blew me away. It is three pages long, so I will not reproduce it here in its entirety. Since the last line is one of the strongest I've ever read, I'll summarize the narrative of the poem, and then let the final two stanzas speak for themselves.

A bird flies down the chimney into a wood stove. "Wings/alive inside cast iron/gave the cold stove a soul/wilder than fire, in trouble." The narrator knocks the window-screen out, drops a shade over the window, shuts the study door and stuffs a wad into the keyhole, hoping the bird ("whatever it was") would fly back up the chimney, would fly for "the full, clean stream of light/like the sliding board from heaven/our guardian angels slid to earth on/in The Little Catholic Messenger/weekly magazine." But, no success. Instead, "A dull brown bird no bigger/than my fist hopped modestly/out, twisting its neck like a boxer/trying to shake off a flush punch." It stayed on his rug, not moving, for so long that finally he scooped it up "and sat it outside on the dirt."

Ryan then describes how he rushed back inside and watched what happened through the window: the other birds started landing in a circle around the collapsed bird, at first encouraging it with chirps and cheeps, but when it didn't move, raising the stakes by pecking it and stepping back to wait. Ryan's climax and denouement provide an ultimate view of reality that is rare, even in poetry.

It flapped once and fell forward
and rested its forehead on the ground.

I've never seen such weakness.
I thought to bring it back in
or call someone, but heard my voice
saying, "Birds die, we all die,"
the shock of being picked up again
would probably finish it,
so with this pronouncement
I tried to clear it from my mind
and return to the work I had waiting
that is most of what I can do
even if it changes nothing.

Do I need to say I was away
for all of a minute
before I went back to it?
But the bird was gone.
All the birds were gone,
and the circle they had made
now made a space so desolate
that for one moment I saw
the dead planet.

For reasons I trust you can see above, if you do not know Michael Ryan, I recommend him to you. Of God Hunger, Robert Pinsky says:

Michael Ryan's book has what we seek every day from our radios and magazines and television sets, but rarely find: copious imagination, words that meet the test of reading out loud, our ordinary daily language joined to the extraordinary, the palpable force of life itself, held in words worth repeating.

I would only add that far too often we are thirsty for the memorable when reading a poem, as well. Not the case with Michael Ryan. Each one workshops the canon and can improve our lives--writing and otherwise. To read God Hunger is to be sated for a time, and then to desire Ryan's next book. Thankfully, there are many...

Trio House Press Open Reading Period July 1-July 31

I have been on hiatus for a month. The series "Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets" will resume shortly. In the mean time, please be aware of the following submission opportunity. Trio House Press' website can be accessed by using the link in the right-hand column below.

Trio House Press is open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts (48-70 pp.) during our open reading period, July 1-July 31. Poets whose manuscripts are selected must serve as Collective Members of Trio House Press for a period of twenty-four months.

All submissions are through Submittable, accessed through our website (http:www.triohousepress.org/home.html) between July 1 and July 31. Please include a detailed cover letter, approximately two pages in length, with bio, publication history and marketing plan at the beginning of the file in front of your manuscript. Open reading fee is $20.

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Lynn Emanuel

Unlike many of the poets I write about, I've never met Lynn Emanuel. Only in the flesh of her poetry have I experienced her intelligence, her pathos, her wry wit. But those pages--ahh. One is all I need to set my own pen to the blank space; her entire body of work is not enough to satisfy...

Hear the proem to her latest collection, Noose and Hook:

My Life

Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it,
swung and swept in its dark waters,
driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks.
Without any touching of its teeth, I tumbled into it
with no more struggle than a mote of dust
entering the door of a cathedral, so muckle were its jaws.
How heel over head was I hurled down
the broad road of its throat, stopped inside
its chest wide as a hall, and like Jonas I stood up
asking where the beast was and finding it nowhere,
there in grease and sorrow I built my bower.

Reading "My Life," I am reminded of both Bukowski's "Born Into This" and Spencer Reece's "Tonight." But Emanuel avoids the nihilism of Bukowski and the homiletic nature of Reece and strikes a chord common to everyman: if we can't do our best, we do the best we can: "there in grease and sorrow I built my bower."

Emanuel's wit is not on display as commentary on this existence, but as interactive engagement with it--its particularities--making once again for a familiarity about her work the first time it is read. Many of her poems in Noose and Hook are untitled, giving them a media res feeling. Here is the first poem after the proem:

Martinis, filets and cigarettes, tea sandwiches
with butter and matted snarls of watercress,
coffee white with cream and caffeine black,
the egg's cornea looking up
from a frizzled mat of hash.
The food looks guilty. And why not?
It's cooked by men in wraparound aprons.
There seems to be no motive to it.
On the plate the T-bone bleeds to death.
The ceiling's bare bulb is clear and perfect as a hard-boiled egg.
The block of Stilton's gangrenous and veined.
A cobbler's dark clottedness looks like a hemorrhage in a bowl.
It's a hard and dirty world. Noir,
Hello.

The poem is right justified, making it seem like the other half of the proem, or something we cannot directly access. Unfortunately, I cannot (or do not know how to) duplicate that typography.

From my reading of Noose and Hook, I highly recommend Lynn Emanuel. I'm going to dig deeper into her work, myself. In the mean time, stay tuned for my next Top Ten Pittsburgh Poet: Joseph Bathanti.

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925, a contemporary of Gerald Stern. In fact, in a Paris Review interview, Jack credits Gerald with the reason he started writing poetry.

I started writing poetry because I finally got to go to college and I met Gerald Stern. We started hanging out together. I was interested in writing novels, but he was always talking about poetry—usually poetry, sometimes fiction. We were competitive with each other. So I decided I would write poetry for a semester and then go back to writing novels. I never went back.

Jack, now in his eighties and still writing (like Stern), is something of an enigma to the poetry world. He won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1962 for Views of Jeopardy, and then didn't publish again for twenty years. One of the reasons I admire him is that he is more concerned with the work than "being a poet" or marketing himself in any way. With that in mind, let's jump right into one of his poems.

Searching for Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.


He has always fought against the grain, even as a student. He flunked out of high school and worked as an exterminator and door-to-door salesman before being admitted, thanks to a clerical error, to the University of Pittsburgh. From the same Paris Review interview:

I failed freshman English eight times. I was interested in learning, but I wanted to understand too, which meant I was fighting with the teachers all the time. Everybody accepted the fact that I was smart but I wouldn’t obey. I didn’t believe what they said unless they could prove it.

This being at odds with his environment is a subject of many of Gilbert's poems, as in "Rain," in which he laments the control that the natural universe has over him:

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.


I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.


Jack prefers fire to water, heat to light, passion to cold reason. I close with "The Great Fires," a typical Gilbert poem that breaks with the notion that a poem's particularity is more important than its message, that the poem is more important than its referent world.


Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.


Jack Gilbert's CV would be longer than a girder forged in a Pittsburgh steel mill. In keeping with his attitude about awards, you can look up his bio for yourself. I hope his poems themselves speak to you about why I consider him one of my top ten Pittsburgh poets!

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Judith Vollmer

Any accounting of Pittsburgh poets must give its due to Judith Vollmer; she is a writing professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and co-editor of 5 AM. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, Centrum, Blue Mountain, and Vermont Studio Colony. She has four collections of poetry to her credit: Level Green, winner of the Brittingham Prize, Black Butterfly, The Door Open To the Fire and Reactor. The Water Books is due out later this year.

More important to me is her passion about revision, and her willingness to give of herself to the global community of poets and artists who address issues of importance to the planet and all of its inhabitants. She once encouraged me to continue revising right up until poems are published or read--to make every minute you have count in the evolution of your work--something I'll never forget. Vollmer was a reporter for the Pittsburgh Press, and she continues to report the human news in each one of her poems with a jazzy blend of her classical education and pop culture--no matter what subject she is addressing. Here is a sample from one of my favorite poems from Reactor that was recognized by the 2005 Public Poetry Project: "Coffee With Narrative:"

Voltaire's 70 cups to my 2,

what does that make me, though

his we think were demitasse and mine

are big as small dogs. How no one

smokes anymore, sad, I open my pack

here in the night kitchen and out comes

the exotic Mlle. Teuer, laughing, black cat

on her shoulder, and I rivet on her cup

of sugar-tar while she smokes into the night

and regales me with her vanished minor opera-

star years, drops of holiness wetting her smock.

If I run my hand along this shelf I slide into a farm-

stead where I drank the green, the black teas,

organic leaves picked from bushes silvered under

rain in far places no longer fat. But the beloved sister

to merlot & cognac, to mountain water over matching

ice cubes would be the gift of Ethiopia

that would transmogrify Earth.

Dear red berries who made goats dance about,

dear leaf veins standing turgid & erect, how

the little goats in their happiness peed

on those bushes, thus deepening the primal

blend from Dante to Beauvoir;"

I can't wait to read her forthcoming book. And after I do, you'll here more from me about Judith Vollmer, one of my top ten favorite Pittsburgh poets and one of my favorite living writers from anywhere.

Life On Mars by Tracy K. Smith Wins Pulitzer Prize or "We'll Be Back To The Pittsburgh Poets After This Important Message From The Universe."

My apologies to Tracy Smith, but before yesterday I hadn't heard of her. Or of Life On Mars, Duende, or The Body's Question. But when I heard that she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, I googled her and immediately fell under her spell. I've commented before about how many excellent poets and writers there are, and how difficult it is to keep up with all of their books. Life On Mars proves my point.

Smith's work is a perfect example of consilience: no matter from what category one measures it (theme, tropes, sound, typography), it is virtuosic. Her ideas about and descriptions of the universe ("It") intersect in a diction that is both musically transcendent and scientifically precise, a prosody that can be apprehended, and yet still subverts our expectations, full of elucidation and yet mystery--like the subject "ITself." And what is that subject? Everything that is! About which in section 4 of "My God, It's Full Of Stars," describing the faulty lens of the Hubble telescope and the ensuing correction that engineers made, she writes:

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. Se saw to the edge of all there is--

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Looking into the universe to see it looking back is one of many themes of Live On Mars that Smith writes about so well. In "The Museum Of Obsolescence," after we understand the tour she's about to give of things "that would have saved us, but lived,/Instead, its own quick span, returning/To uselessness with the mute acquiescence/Of shed skin," she gives us the lines

...It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts

Ticking through our shirts.

Then later after a litany of obsolete artifacts ("the gimcracks, the naive tools," "green money, and oil in drums," "pots of honey," "books recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars," "old beliefs," the "special installations [that] come and go": "Love," "Illness:"

The last thing you see
(After a mirror--someone's idea of a joke?)

Is an image of the old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

I will not give a complete review of this masterful collection without a more careful reading. The final section seems less organically related to the theme than the first three, although my first reading of her smart poems tells me there are still veins of underground connectivity waiting for me to mine.

The point of this posting is to get out the word about Tracy K. Smith. About Life On Mars. About the importance of reading these poems.

William Carlos Williams not withstanding, it is easy to get the news of the universe from Smith's Life On Mars--it oozes from every line. And if you died without what is found there, your death might not be more miserable. But, your life will certainly be less so for reading these poems.

My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets: Gerald Stern

In the late forties and early fifties my father hauled steel from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. I was born in 1949 and remember the daily ritual of my mother boiling coffee for his thermos, his flatbed truck pulling out before dawn, my waking up in the middle of the night to the smell of his diesel-soaked boots. As a child I never heard of any living poets, and if I had, I would have never imagined any of them residing in "The Smoky City." But, while my father was making entries in his log book by flashlight in the cab of his Mack truck, college students in Pittsburgh were straining their eyes beneath dim desk lamps, writing poems that would later appear in prize-winning books, fashioning a tone for poetry in the second half of the 20th century that would coalesce into a major "school." One of those poets was Gerald Stern.

Stern's poems did not receive critical acclaim until 1977 when Lucky Life appeared in the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Stern was not only quickly ushered to center stage by winning the Lamont Poetry Prize and having a series of essays on writing poetry published in American Poetry Review that same year, but he followed up his opening act with a prolific outpouring of books that either nominated him or won him almost every major prize in poetry, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, The National Book Award, The Wallace Stevens Award and The Pulitzer Prize (nominated).

The Poetry Foundation has said that "Stern’s poetry frequently references his all-American, working-class upbringing as well as his Jewish and Eastern European heritage." Cosmopolitan, even international in scope, and yet deeply personal, Stern’s work is known for its passionate defense of human emotions and needs. According to Jeffrey Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez, all of whom interviewed Stern for the journal Willow Springs: His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame or sentimentality."

Stern's work has carved out a unique place for him in American Literature. About that place Stern has said I stake out a place for myself, so to speak, that was overlooked or ignored or disdained, a place no one else wanted. Stern continues, If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance, it would be "The One Thing in Life," which appears in Lucky Life. According to Stern, the poem makes a claim for his own inheritance and legacy:


The One Thing In Life

Wherever I go now I lie down on my own bed of straw
and bury my face in my own pillow.
I can stop in any city I want to
and pull the stiff blanket up to my chin.
It's easy now, walking up a flight of carpeted stairs
and down a hall past the painted fire doors.
It's easy bumping my knees on a rickety table
and bending down to a tiny sink.
There is a sweetness buried in my mind;
there is water with a small cave behind it;
there's a mouth speaking Greek.
It is what I keep to myself, what I return to;
the one thing that no one else wanted.


There is much to admire in Gerald Stern's poems: their Whitman-like narrative lyricism, their unique stories of suffering and joy, their visceral imagery, their hypnotic cadences. Stern's poems I love the most are the self-reflective ones about his work of writing poetry. I close with "Little White Sister," but before I do, let me say that if you do not know Stern's work, you need to. Writing poetry without Gerald Stern in your ear is like flying without ever hearing of the Wright Brothers, without ever seeing the Kittyhawk--you might be able to do it, but you'll never know where you came from--and you'll never be as good as you can be--he is that important to American literature. And he's from Pittsburgh. Go figure...


Little White Sister

It was in Philadelphia that I first lived a life of deferment,
putting everything off until I could be at ease.
There, more than in New York and more than in Paris,
I lay for hours in bed, forgetting to eat, forgetting
to swim, dying of imperfection and loneliness.
It was in Vienna that I learned what it would be like
to live in two lives, and learned to wander between them;
and it was in the rotten underbelly
of western Pennsylvania that I was saved twice by a pear tree,
one time living and one time dead, and enslaved
once and for all by a patented iron grate
carrying words of terror through the yellow air.
My ear betrayed me, my little white sister
glued to the side of my head, a shiny snail
twisted everywhere to catch the slightest
murmur of love, the smallest sobbing and breathing.
It wasn't the heart, stuck inside the chest
like a bloody bird, and it wasn't the brain,
dying itself from love; it was that messenger,
laughing as she whispered the soft words,
making kissing sounds with her red lips,
moaning with pleasure for the last indignity.

My Top Ten Chicago Poets: Nina Corwin

There was a time before the poetry MFA explosion. Before the poetry MFA. Even before poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac "workshopped" poems at a kitchen table in a Harlem apartment. And during that time, poets seemed to be born rather than made. Nina Corwin is such a poet--by profession, she is a psychotherapist; by calling, she is what J.D. McClatchy said of Ginsberg: "a bard in the old manner--outsized, darkly prophetic--part exuberance, part prayer, part rant."

I first heard Nina read her work at "The Cafe" on North Lincoln Avenue early in 2004. The poem she read was "The Prince and the Woodcutter."

The Prince and the Woodcutter

Some days you drag the crutch,
Some days the crutch drags you.
The other folks get all the breaks:
the better bowl of cocoa puffs.

Your lover's tongue comes boxing with its gloves off
and you bruise easy as a peach.

You cast your net too wide
and the fish you were counting on for supper
are lying phosphate-wasted belly-up along the beach
And the bottom feeders linger whistling
imperfect protein melodies:
"Sometimes it seems that nothing
is good enough."

Did you ever feel like you were being dragged
through a car wash without the car
...because the repo man was here to claim it
just last week?

And you needed it to drive your son
to pom-pom practice because he
volunteered for the pep squad of the girls'
homecoming powerpuff football team.

Did you ever find yourself in need of a personal tune-up?
So you go to check out the electric chi-machine
at the ti-tech new age health center down the road
but then you find you haven't got a chi to speak of, and besides the line is way too long.

So you hitch a ride to Door County
for a getaway weekend, thinking there's more color
in every particle of autumn
than one can grab with two eyes groping.

But your friends are in the front seat
hunting down knick-knacks and souvenir shops,
Out-of-Towner written all over their T-shirts
jostling their catalogs and shoulder bags
complaining they can't understand
why happiness eludes them.

And you wonder why a pitcher of beer
won't transport you
al all those carefree magical places it used to.
Seems like nothing is good enough.

But then you remember the fable about that wimp of a prince
who is suckled on so much convenience
and over-sauced cuisine that finally his appetite goes flat
and no one in the kingdom can find a remedy
until one day this woodcutter comes along
and takes him out for a day in the woods
to whack on some logs and work up
a drop of sweat and a proletarian hunger
for a piece of dark rye and a tin cup of apple cider.

So when you start to think that nothing's
ever good enough, you remind yourself that life
is not a sitcom promising a happy ending in a half an hour.
"Just Do It" only works in Nike ads.
You cast too wide a net
and there's always one that gets away.

But when the bottomfeeders linger
singing "what did you learn in school today,
dear, what did you learn in school?"
You can say:
"Some days you drag the crutch
Some days the crutch drags you."



Lest it be thought that without her MFA degree Nina's poems onstage might outshine her poems on the page, take a look at a partial list of where she's been published: ACM, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review and Verse. She has two books: Conversations with Demons and Tainted Saints, and The Uncertainty of Maps. In addition, her work has been recognized with a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, by the Illinois Arts Council and Illinois State Poetry Society. Here is "What Morning Looks Like," a smart lyrical-narrative poem whose typography, ideography, tropes and music work in concert to enact the interaction between its characters.


What Morning Looks Like

Another dawn poem. A virgin Thursday
morning that sparkles and blushes before
falling to the spatterings of day.

I'm starting a journey, dragging my suitcase
and carry-on bags to the taxi stand
at the corner. It's an hour before the earliest

alarm I know. Before the street lights shut down
at the tired end of their shift; when the air bites
crisp and clean. Before the turbulent machine of day

accelerates into full throttle. An orange cab
pulls up, driver devout as desert sand
serenity riding int he passenger seat.

I slide into the back, give my destination.
He glances at my face in the rear view mirror.
I can see only his eyes, the dark oasis

of them. It seems as if we're sharing
a secret, though we are not. Red streaks
begin to reach along the horizon.

Obviously he and dawn are old acquaintances
having peered into each other's blinking,
bloodshot eyes a time or two. Can't remember

the last time I was out at this hour, I say
reaching for conversation. I ask him what time
his day starts and he tells me 4 a.m.

So then I ask what 4 a.m. looks like and he says:
It looks like anything else. It looks like God.
He accelerates easily. An occasional car rolls toward us.

Headlights nod as they pass.


If these two poems have whetted your appetite, check out my review elsewhere on this blog of Nina's latest book, The Uncertainty of Maps--or better yet pick up a copy. If you prefer, check out her work on voices.e-poets.net or fishousepoems.org, or just google her--she's all over the net. In fact, she's all over Chicago--she's one of those hubs for what's going on artistically and poetically in the greater Chicago area and beyond--another reason she's one of my top ten Chicago poets.

This concludes the series "My Top Ten Chicago Poets," but it certainly does not exhaust Chicago poets I admire. So, at some point I will revisit the topic and include more poets from my favorite city in North America.

In the mean time, get ready for my next series: My Top Ten Pittsburgh Poets!