Best American Poetry 2012: The Rest of the Best

I had planned over the next several days to post a separate blog on each of several more poets/poems from Best American Poetry 2012--my personal best in this year's issue. There are, however, so many additional poets I want to write about that I'm going to condense these BAP poets into one final post, and then move on.

Jane Hirshfield's, "In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed"

At the risk of losing some of my readers, I'll be very honest: I don't like many of Jane Hirshfield's poems. I find most of them simplistic, more about expressing pet ideas of the poet than about forwarding language, or creating art. Happily, "In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed" subverted all of my expectations. Its diction, its themes, its tropes, its typography all work together to create heightened language in the service of nothing except for art. Since it is a short poem, here it is in its entirety:

In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed

In a kitchen where mushroom were washed,
the mushroom scent lingers.

As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whole.

As a person who's once loved completely,
a country once conquered,
does not release that stunned knowledge.

They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels,
clownish puffballs.

Lichens have served as a lamp wick.
Clean-burning coconuts, olives.
Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing:
light that is fume and abradement.

Unburnable mushrooms are other.
They darken the air they come into.

Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.

Steve Orlen's, "Where Do We Go After We Die"

Orlen has created a lyrical-narrative poem at its best, all classical stages of an interesting story neatly packed into a stanza-less box, with room enough for several moments of the ineffable. The setting is the favorite bar of the deceased and friends after the funeral. The conversation begins with the big question of what happens after death. Orlen tells us "The question/Commands and divides them." He then, in turn, has his characters each give us their versions: "One sees the pictograph/Of the great wheel; another, a figure of closed eyes,/Another, the heavenly throne surrounded by a choir of angels,/Remembered from Sunday School."

More opinions. More brew. Then stories about Jon, the recently deceased. Other friends who have died. Then Orlen finds the lyrical that is always residing in the material, waiting for the poet to titrate it out with the magic of language:

...they drink, they complicate,
They begin to forget the quirks they loved
And the spirit that flows like a river powerful enough
To ignore the seasons. The lights flash off and on,
The bartender is drying the last of the glasses,
Stories slide under the chairs into the shadows,
Speech reverts to its ancient, parabolic self--"Yea,
Though I walk through the valley"--
And actions lose their agency--"It came to pass"--
The things of the world become scarce,
And what's left spreads its wings
And flies around among them, like bats at dusk.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz's, "The Afterlife"

"The Afterlife" is even more narrative than Orlen's poem. Although less lyrical, it certainly is musical with sound work like "I dreamed I was in the afterlife" and "Who should I search for? The answer came quick: my mother."

And so the story of the poem develops: everyone is looking for her mother--even all of the mothers, on their own quests, no time to help their children with theirs. Hear the words of the narrator's own mother:

Here is no help, no love, only the looking. This
is what death means, my child, this is how we pass
eternity, looking

for the love we no longer know how to give.

This is not just another poem about death. It is a poem that gives insight into why poets seem to gravitate to it--because it is emblematic of life.

Natasha Trethewey's, "Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1951"

I would be remiss in an article about my personal "Best of the Best" if I failed to mention another friend of this blogspot (see my November 7 post, "Natasha Trethewey: A Poet Laureate for our Time"). Natasha Trethewey's powerful poem of historical witness represents the first section of three in the longer poem, "The Americans" from her recent book, "Thrall." I will not delve deeply into the poem here, but rather will point my readers to the longer work, in order to be able to appreciate it as fully as it deserves.

In the same spirit, I must mention the final selection in my own person "best of the best", and perhaps the best poem of all that Mark Doty selected for this year's BAP anthology:

Spencer Reece's, "The Road to Emmaus"

Fully thirteen pages long, Reece's six-part condensation of conversations he had with a Catholic nun of the Franciscan order over a seven-year period, is also too long to even begin an analysis here. I will mention that the title is from the New Testament story of 2 disciples traveling the road to Emmaus after Jesus' death, and their encounter with a stranger. I will also mention that Reece comments in the contributor's notes that "[the] experience of not realize the love that is in front of you until it is gone resonates deeply for me." For anything more, I point you to the actual poem, in the actual anthology, Best American Poetry 2012.

In closing, I remind readers that the poems I have written about from this year's BAP are merely my personal favorites. In the same way that Mark Doty said he could only really represent his choices as "Seventy-Five Poems Mark Likes," and went on to say, "but who'd buy that?", I can only say that these last few blog posts could be collectively entitled "Nine Poems from BAP 2012 that Terry Likes." It would be interesting to hear back from any of you whose taste might agree or disagree with mine.

Best American Poetry 2012: Kerrin McCadden: Collisions & Creations

In her contributor's note to BAP 2012, Kerrin McCadden writes:

I like collisions. I like to bang things together inside a poem and use a tangle of rubber bands to hold it together. In this poem ["Becca"], there is a clear story, and, I believe, a clear understory, but there are also a pile of antique bird books, Kafka, geography, my standing love of etymology and fonts, Mary Oliver, and the terror and thrill of letting children go. There is something in the gathering storm of wide and disparate reading that charges me for writing. I am fond of a coming-of-age poem that leans on Kafka, of a wish for a beautiful life that leans on tattooing, of a man who creates beauty all day by inking people's skin but does not know what a stanza is--who thinks its a kind of bird.

Living in this world for any time at all will expose one to an experience of something constructive being created from something destructive.

Creation comes from collision. The heavy element of iron that carries the oxygen in our blood to sustain our lives is born from the collision of molecules deep in the core of an aging star, losing their identities as hydrogen and helium, exploding in a climactic burst, spreading not only iron, but gold, silver, platinum--all of the metals we hold as precious--into the cosmos. And some four billion years ago a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth, a glancing blow that stripped away material that coalesced in orbit to form our moon.

Last night in San Rafael (CA), I attended a launch part for the book, Creating On Purpose, by Anodea Judith and Lion Goodman. Among other things, I learned from Lion that the "cide" of "decide" means to cut. When one decides, one "cuts off" some possibilities in order to gain others. And I took away from Anodea a satisfying saying: "We can have anything, but we can't have everything."

And so it is with our poems. They start with a word, a line, a "vision" and then expose themselves to a larger (infinite?) universe of words, images, and ideas, where the original material is pummeled and reshaped--even some of it destroyed--in order to "re-vision" the work, in order to bring the act of creation through the poem's entire evolution, not just to its inception.

And so it is with our lives...

Here, then, is the conclusion of McCadden's poem, "Becca," after Becca has "decided" on her tattoo:

...............................She lies
on the bed while the artist marks her back,
his needle the harrow for her sentence. Make of
my life a place to stand, stopping-places, a series
of rooms, stances, "stare, stantia, stay." She has
shown him a bird she wants perched above the final
word, "stanza." It is a barn swallow--ink blue flash.
He says, toward the end, so she can know it will hurt
to ink so much blue. "I am filling in the stanza now,"
and he stings her right shoulder again and again,
filling the room of the bird. Make of my life
a poem, she asks me and him and her mother
as she walks away, make of my life something
wild, she says. I watch her strike out across
Number 10 Pond, the tattoo flashing with each stroke
and there is barely enough time to read it.

Best American Poetry 2012: Hanging out with Friends: Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is a friend of "The Widening Spell." (See "The Crack in Everything: Metaphor and Love in the Poetry of Alicia Ostriker," 07-12-12.) Her poems connect with the literary canon all the way back to the first Greek poets, to Blake (a favorite of hers), to Whitman (in particular), and to countless other master poets who have sung the pain and the passion of life--both of humans and of all other sentient beings.

And Ostriker is also a friend of Best American Poetry. Her significant work has found its place in many of its issues. "Song" is a deceptively simple poem in three stanzas that I share here as gateway to the best poetry being written today, and to her best poetry written over several decades.

Song

Some claim the origin of song
was a war cry
some say it was a rhyme
telling the farmers when to plant and reap
don't they know the first song was a lullaby
pulled from a mother's sleep
said the old woman

A significant
factor generating my delight in being
alive this springtime
is the birdsong
that like a sweeping mesh has captured me
like diamond rain I can't
hear it enough said the tulip

lifetime after lifetime
we surged up the hill
I and my dear brothers
thirsty for blood
uttering
our beautiful songs
said the dog

Unless you know Ostriker's work, you might not see "Song" as her metaphoric "Song of Herself" (with all connections intended), looking backward "lifetime after lifetime" and forward, singing "a lullaby" to the future, while celebrating the present "delight in being/alive in this springtime." Each stanza not only connects with all three dimensions, but also with noteworthy images in her (and in her poetry guides') previous work.

In "the first song...a lullaby/pulled from a mother's sleep/said the old woman" of stanza 1, I hear Whitman singing of "The little one sleep[ing] in its cradle" and then "lift[ing] the gauze...and silently brush[ing] away flies."

In "the birdsong/that like a sweeping mesh has captured me" of stanza 2, I hear the "tuwees" of "Birdcall," Ostriker's opening poem in her book, No Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005):

Tuwee, calls a bird near the house,
Tuwee, cries another, downhill in the woods.
No wind, early September, beeches and pines,

Sumac aflame, tuwee, tuwee, a question and a faint
But definite response, tuwee, tuwee, as if engaged
In a conversation expected to continue all afternoon.

Or in a conversation expected to continue for lifetimes.

And in "surg[ing] up the hill/I and my dear brothers/thirsty for blood/uttering/our beautiful songs/said the dog," of stanza 3, I hear Ostriker's other dogs, part of the pack of "The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz"

As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselves

The owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf
And the happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted--

These "black dogs, tan dogs,/tubes of glorious muscle" are not the same dogs as the ones "thirsty for blood," because their beach world "of absolute innocence" is not the world where their brothers "surge up the hill" (in order to capture it, not enjoy it). They still have the same teeth that "snap and sink...into floating wood." But these teeth are now in the service of something outside of (but not greater than) themselves:

[They] bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.

This "Song" of Alicia Ostriker is the song of all of us. It too, is for nothing but joy."

Alicia, you can come to the party anytime, because you bring the party with you!

Best American Poetry 2012: James Kimbrell at The Party!

Anthologies are private literary parties. You can hang out all evening with old friends, make new acquaintances, spend the night, leave whenever and with whomever you want. But the best part is the morning after--if you wake up with someone in bed with you, you can see him or her to the door before breakfast, and never have to hear their voice again--or you can invite them to stay, spend the day, see the city together, start a relationship. The decision is all yours.

James Kimbrell is a poet new to me from Best American Poetry 2012 that I will definitely follow up on.

About "How to Tie a Knot," Kimbrell comments in his contributor's note that he "wanted to ground this poem in a physical hunger that might give voice to a more or less spiritual desire, the desire for access to the real, whatever it might finally be." With antecedents reminiscent of St. Paul's famous "Love Chapter" in I Corinthians ("If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels..."), Kimbrell opens the poem:

If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O.
in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter,
say "not-it!" to the sea oats, "not-it!" to the sky
above the disheveled palms, "not-it!" to the white or green oyster boats
and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods
that resemble so many giant whiskers,
if I repeat "this is not-it, this is not why I'm waiting here,"
will I fill the universe with all that is not-it
and allow myself to grow very still in the center of
this fishing town in winter?

But, as can be seen, unlike St. Paul's consequent pronouncement ("and have not love--I become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal"), Kimbrell's consequent "then" statement is not a statement, but a question. Thus does his syntax begin the unwinding of the poem, even as it begins to bring together two disparate stanzas, the second of which informs us:

I came out here to pare things down,
wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note
in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out
beneath the rotting dock at five o'clock in the afternoon
when the voice that I call "I" is a one-man boat
slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion.

After reading "How to Tie a Knot" I have no illusion about Kimbrell's ability to join together his "physical hunger" with "spiritual desire" as he fishes for his "fat flounder out there/deep in [its] need...flesh both succulent and flakey/when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, [its] eyes/rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel/ clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up/the ocean floor for a mouthful of land."

James Kimbrell leaves me hungry for more. Thankfully he has two books, The Gatehouse Heaven (1998) and My Psychic (2006), both from Sarabande Books, which I intend on devouring soon. And if I'm ever in Tallahassee, Florida, where he is an associate professor of English at Florida State University, I will try to be there when he is reading--maybe there will be a party!

Best American Poetry 2012

By series editor David Lehman's own admission, each annual anthology bearing the title Best American Poetry cannot really have assembled the best 75 poems published in American journals in any previous year. Speaking to the precariousness of such a claim, John Ashbery, guest editor of the first issue in 1988, asked Lehman if it had to be called Best American Poetry. "Couldn't it be Pretty Good American Poetry, or even Just OK Poetry of 1988?" he inquired. Ashbery knew full well that he had not even read every poem published in 1988, much less had he the authority to pronounce his pick as best in an absolute sense.

Thus, each issue becomes 75 poems that the particular guest judge likes--a kind of annual list of poems published that year recommended by an established poet to take with you in case you find yourself stranded on a desert island. As such, each annual addition to the series is mostly palatable and, occasionally, brilliant, if not quintessential. It is a slice of the annual life of poetry taken from the offerings of some of the most highly acclaimed poets from some of the most highly acclaimed journals in America. Each annual judge has free reign so, naturally, his or her favorite poets are selected. Over time, many of the same names appear year after year, fostering the image that American poetry has--that of being a closed club. New poets and poems published in lesser known journals occasionally make their way into an issue. To Mark Doty's credit, BAP 2012 has more than its share of these relative unknowns. Not surprising to me, I enjoyed reading it more than I have in several years--both for the newcomers, and for the fine work presented from old friends.

One such poem is "The Imagined" by Stephen Dunn, originally published in Here and Now and later in The New Yorker (with my apologies for the intrusion of the word [indented] to make up for the programming's inability to actually indent):

The Imagined

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

[Indented] And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she's made for him, that he's present even when
you're eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

[Indented] once again, not to talk about it?

Spencer Reece: Clerk, Poet, Priest

I really don't know why I haven't posted about Spencer Reece before now. His work has been formative for mine, and his faith in faith is an example to all who write in obscurity. Reece quietly practiced his art for nineteen years--submitting his first manuscript to every contest, receiving rejection after rejection. Revising. Then submitting again. Nineteen years. Year one: no. Year two: no. Years three through eighteen: no. Year nineteen: won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize. What if he had quit after five years? Ten? Eighteen? I would never have read the following poem, would never have memorized it and recited it time and time again on my morning walk.

Midnight

--"I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place. --E.M. Forester

Pine trees stir in a chorus of darkness.
The lake taps the shore as if to tell me something.
A light rain increases the abstractions, all edges blur.
Dark tilled fields stretch for miles.
The Midwest settles into my chest.
Colts bolt across untouched Dakota acres
alive with the cymbal-smash of affectionate caresses.
Farms, barns, somnolent cows, empty gravel roads and distant houses
make up the landscape I walk in, where once, a long tine ago,
Indians slept and walked, dissolving into the shadows with tenderness.
On Andy Cleland's farm, the one closest to the lake,
where cattails flourish at the water's edge,
there is one huge hill, vacant of shrubbery.
I was told once it was an Indian burial mound
and that was why no tree or bush would grow on that hill.
All these years later and the hill is still bald,
whispering softly as the revolutions of the sea,
echoing with the mouths of the vanquished.
Sheep maraud across the hill's back,
exhilarated by the dirt smells born again by spring,
the wind haunted with the songs of comrades now gone.
The rest of this panorama is immense, dark, impenetrable, unstructured.
But if you look closely in the left-hand corner,
I can just be distinguished from the blue blue brilliance of all this land,
a tiny figure, no bigger than a grass blade, a shadow hugged by shadows,
heading home after a long walk nowhere,
encircled by a halo of rocks, trees, crops, rivers, clouds--
by every blessed thing conspiring together to save my life.


Of course, I identify with Reece partly because he spent several years as an assistant manager in a men's clothing store--part of a famous chain. The title poem of his first book, "The Clerk's Tale," is a layered combination bildungsroman and diatribe against the superficiality of capitalism. After poignant description after description of his fellow salesmen, customers, and work day, Reece closes the store and the poem with the following lines:

The lights go off, one by one--
the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gate's grating checkers our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial,
yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits
before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks our bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag--
the one he bought on his European travels
with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips
liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint
and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal
and occurs between us many times.
As last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

It is of interest to me that Reece worked several years as a clerk, writing poetry in the middle of the night, forging a direction for a life quite different from that of his fellow salesmen--and then when his poetry gained the attention it deserved ("The Clerk's Tale" is the only poem ever to have been published as the entire back page of The New Yorker) he won a fellowship which allowed him to work part time in the store and enter the priesthood. His new book, The Road to Emmaus is due out in 2013. Its title poem appears in The Best American Poetry 2012, and I heartily recommend it. His first poems, however, will always be favorites of mine. I end with the haunting, "Tonight," whose Everyman ending, for me, ranks among the all-time greats!

Tonight

You are being born. Feels good.
Something enormous kisses you.
Its eye surveys your revolutions.
Relaxed in your new nudity,

you work your labyrinthine ears,
those perfect disciples,
registering all that hums, ticks.
O you encyclopedia you,

you do not know what I know,
how blank the cold world can grow.
But let the addendums come later.
I listen to the dust from the city

gather on the necks of the saints
at the hospital's exits I exit.
And so I say to you yes you:
everyone's a fugitive. Everyone.

Dorianne Laux: Mining the Lyrical from the Status Quotidian

I believe in love at first read. One poem, even one line, is sometimes all that it takes to forge a bond between reader and poet that will last a lifetime. We've all have our experiences of falling for certain poetry gods or goddesses. Collectively they become our personal canon. We turn to them when we are in distress, can barely take one more breath or get out of bed to recite one more line of our lives. We carry their pocket books of prayers in our purses, our backpacks, read them during our thirty-minute lunch hours, our mandated labor law breaks from waiting tables, from ringing up sales in department stores and retail shops for gifts that no one wants, as we worship at the altar of doing exactly what we want to do for one more minute.

Dorianne Laux is a member of the ranks of my personal, poetic hosts of heaven. How can one not be saved by poetry upon reading her following poem?

Waitress

When I was young and had to rise at 5 am
I did not look at the lamplight slicing
through the blinds and say: Once again
I have survived the night. I did not raise
my two hands to my face and whisper:
This is the miracle of my flesh. I walked
toward the cold water waiting to be released
and turned the tap so I could listen to it
thrash through the rusted pipes.
I cupped my palms and thought of nothing.

I dressed in my blue uniform and went to work.
I served the public, looked down on its
balding skulls, the knitted shawls draped
over its cancerous shoulders, and took its orders,
wrote up or easy or scrambled or poached
in the yellow pads' margins and stabbed it through
the tip of the fry cook's deadly planchette.

Those days I barely had a pulse. The manager
had vodka for breakfast, the busboys hid behind
the bleach boxes from the immigration cops
and the head waitress took ten percent
of our tips and stuffed them in her pocket
with her cigarettes and lipstick. My feet
hurt. I balanced the meatloaf-laden trays.
Even the tips of my fingers ached.

I thought of nothing except sleep, a T.V. set's
flickering cathode gleam washing over me,
baptizing my greasy body in its watery light.
And money, slipping the tassel of my coin purse
aside, opening the silver clasp, staring deep
into that dark sacrificial abyss.

What can I say about that tie, those years
I leaned against the rickety balcony on my break,
smoking my last saved butt?
It was sheer bad luck when I picked up
the glass coffee pot and spun around
to pour another cup. All I could think
as it shattered was how it was the same shape
and size as the customer's head. And this is why
I don't believe in accidents, the grainy dregs
running like sludge down his thin tie
and pin-stripe shirt like they were channels
riven for just this purpose.

It wasn't my fault. I know that. But what, really,
was the hurry? I dabbed at his belly with a napkin.
He didn't have a cut on him (physics) and only
his earlobe was burned. But my last day there
was the first day I looked up as I walked, the trees
shimmering green lanterns under the Prussian blue
particulate sky, sun streaming between my fingers
and I waved at the bus, running, breathing hard, thinking:
This is the grand phenomenon of my body. This thirst
is mine. This is my one and only life.


Auden not withstanding ("For poetry makes nothing happen"), this poem, along with comments from another one of my poetry mentors, changed my life. Upon hearing Dorianne read it and Michael Waters say that if you're going to be a writer, be a writer full-time, I returned from the 2012 AWP conference and stepped down from a full-time management position to part-time sales in order to devote more time to writing.

Who are your poets? What are they saying to you? What are you doing about it?

Where is the lyrical in your quotidian? How will you mine it? When?

Natasha Trethewey: A Poet Laureate for our Time

(Editors note: My apologies for the unannounced several week hiatus. I am back and will be more consistent with my posts. TL)

For the time being, the poetry gods have smiled on the United States: we finally have a Poet Laureate who is at (or near--who knows how good she will get?) the peak of her powers. That she is a terrific poet (and from what I could tell of her in one ten minute conversation, probably at least as good of a human being) is a gift. And that she not only writes savory poetry, but is committed to (and actively engaged in) the teaching of it, is a blessing that we have not had in some recent Poets Laureate. I learned all of this about her (and more) attending her reading earlier this week at Stanford as part of the renowned Lane Lecture Series.

Trethewey, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, has a list of credentials, of course, as long as the stage is wide in the 500+ capacity (yet intimate) Zambrano Hall on the campus of Stanford. Her honors include, but are not limited to, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bunting and NEA fellowships, The Cave Canem Poetry Prize (for her first book, Domestic Work), a Pulitzer Prize (for her third book, Native Guard), and an impressive list of state and national writing awards, including her recent appointment as US Poet Laureate.

But, most importantly, her poetry is virtuosic. In Thrall, for example, her subject matter (exploration of her own interracial and complicated roots) is highly significant, being at once deeply personal (without making herself the center of a new confessionalism), and globally significant (without devolving into a dispassionate chronicle), pursuing events and narratives that have been painted over on both her family's and history's canvas, for the sake of protecting its status quo images.

"Taxonomy," for example, with the epigraph After a series of casta paintings by/Juan Rodriquez Juarez, c. 1715 begins "The canvas is a leaden sky/behind them, heavy/with words, gold letters inscribing/an equation of blood--"

On the sonic level, Trethewey's sonorous iambs frame a fresh vocabulary of the calculus of race with section titles that give the precise term for each child of several interracial unions: 1. DE ESPANOL Y DE INDIA PRODUCE MESTISO; 2. DE ESPANOL Y NEGRA PRODUCE MULATO; 3. DE ESPANOL Y MESTIZA PRODUCE CASTIZA. She writes "this plus this equals this--as if/a contract with nature, or/a museum label,/ethnographic, precise."

Add music and passion, and we could say the same for Trethewey's work: the result of a contract with the universe that brings her perfect-pitch voice to bear on score after score of skewed and sometimes hidden American stories--in order to bring them from their dim pages to our astonished and hungry ears.

I will have more to say about our new Poet Laureate in the days ahead. For now, I close with final lines from the ultimate poem in this collection: "Illumination." (My apologies for not being able to duplicate precisely the typography of indentation of every other line.)

So much is left

untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the afterimage

of measured syntax always there

ghosting the margins that words

their black-lined authority

do not cross Even

as they rise up to meet us

the white page hovers beneath

silent incendiary waiting

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!