House Party

The Universe Is a House Party

The universe is expanding. Look: postcards
And panties, bottles with lipstick on the rim,

Orphan socks and napkins dried into knots.
Quickly, wordlessly, all of it whisked into file

With radio waves from a generation ago,
Drifting to the edge of what doesn’t end,

Like the air inside a balloon. Is it bright?
Will our eyes crimp shut? Is it molten, atomic,

A conflagration of suns? It sounds like the kind of party
Your neighbors forget to invite you to: bass throbbing

Through walls, and everyone thudding around drunk
On the roof. We grind lenses to an impossible strength,

Point them toward the future, and dream of beings
We’ll welcome with indefatigable hospitality:

How marvelous you’ve come! We won’t flinch
At the pinprick mouths, the nubbin limbs. We’ll rise,

Gracile, robust. Mi casa es su casa. Never more sincere.
Seeing us, they’ll know exactly what we mean.

Of course, it’s ours. If it’s anyone’s, it’s ours.

Tracy K. Smith
from Life on Mars

Fortunate

I'm honored to say that I'll be sharing the stage with poet Arthur Smith this Thursday evening (7pm at the Laurel Theater) for the monthly meeting of the Knoxville Writers' Guild. Here are the details:

Poets Read, Disclose Writing Process at May Meeting

By ADRIA AMOS

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Arthur Smith and Joshua Robbins, both award-winning poets, will read from their latest books at the May Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting.

The event, which will be open to the public, begins at 7 p.m., Thursday, May 2, at the Laurel Theater, at the corner of Laurel Avenue and 16th Street in Fort Sanders. A $2 donation is requested at the door. The building is handicapped accessible. Additional parking is available at Redeemer Church of Knoxville, 1642 Highland Ave.

“We will each read from our new books and speak about our respective processes for writing lyric poetry and how we each attempt to explore a deep-seated faith in the mysterious and redemptive powers of poetry,” Robbins said.

Smith’s “The Fortunate Era,” published by Carnegie Mellon University Press earlier this year, follows a narrator through personal loss and – looming in the future – the threat of our own extinction. In the process, the poems range from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the worlds of literature, science, culture, politics and religion

Robbins writes from a suburban landscape of strip mall bars and vacant lots in which addicts and itinerant preachers, hymns and the turnpike's whine are all made to confess, to testify to the hard truths of faith and doubt in middle-class America, in “Praise Nothing,” published by University of Arkansas Press earlier this year.

“It should be a fun evening,” Smith said.

Both men teach at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Robbins teaches literature and creative writing, and Smith is a professor of English. Robbins has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and his other recognitions include the James Wright Poetry Award, the “New South” Prize and selection for the “Best New Poets” anthology.

Smith is the author of four collections of poetry and his awards include a “Discovery” / “The Nation” Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.

Copies of both books will be available for purchase at the meeting.

This event, in some ways, feels like the culmination of years of work. Back in the Oregon MFA days, I took a seminar from Garrett Hongo on elegy. I worked for Garrett as his assistant that first year and, one evening, as he often did, Garrett called me and said I should read something for our discussion the following Wednesday. I was to read his "good friend Art Smith's book Elegy on Independence Day." I read it, devoured it, ended up writing my first grad school paper on it.

Art was a big reason I ended up at the University of Tennessee for my PhD work. I've learned so much from him about trade craft, poetics, the writing life, how to be a better man.

(Students: if you're looking for someone to blame for my "six lines per day" assignments, Art Smith's your guy.)

I'm honored to read with him. And I'm proud to call him my friend.

Hope to see you Thursday evening. Here's a poem from his most recent collection, The Fortunate Era:


Valentine

Back then, for all I cared,
God could have been a spider
Glossy as a buttercup
Sunning in the garden
Of the first woman
Time gave me to
And then took back.

What I mean is, once, like ice,
Something pierced my heart
With a light
So fierce
It heightened
Every thin-stemmed flower after.

That’s how I think of God now,
Each time—
Going back to her—
That immense and holy cold, an arrow
sinking in.

Arthur Smith
from The Fortunate Era


Other poems by Arthur Smith posted at Against Oblivion:

"Elegy on Independence Day"
"The Brilliant Days"
"Golden Gate"
"Sea of Blessings"

"Everything / leads me back"

Terrorist

Reading night and the fire that lances
the sky, reading day and the arabesques
of strewn corpses, I become my brother’s
Siamese twin. Rubbing the ashes of his
bones unto my face I become his blue
screams at birth. And despite what I’ve
told myself, what I’ve grown to believe,
despite my bunkered heart and fortified
skin, my thick bile and phlegm, I am bled
white by an appalling battle. I have cleansed
my body with the soap of his fat, stuffed
my pillows with his shorn hair, I made
dice of his molars. Everything, and my
contradictions above all, bring us closer.
Will I walk on four now to recall what I
thought was human? Will I climb the tree
shedding skin whispering the apple’s secret?
What poisons will house themselves in
my gills? Will I be a victim again? And again
a murderer? I split in two and two more,
and I fill a room growing like yeast into
all the selves I’ve known. Everything
leads me back, unified and cellular, to
the womb we shared. Reading thunder
made in preachers’ salons, reading lightening
that severs the sun’s rays, my silences spill
an ooze that fastens me to him. My cowardices
hook us into one destiny. See how short
my arms are. Take a look into my blind eyes.
Every breath I inhale is the cold wind
that makes us embrace like statues of
eternal lovers. In every exhale there’s a
wisp of silver smoke from the warm clay
that binds us. Reading night, reading
day, I twin myself to my brother.

Khaled Mattawa
from Tocqueville




Other poems by Khaled Mattawa posted @ Against Oblivion:

"Ecclesiastes"
"Growing Up with a Sears Catalog in Benghazi, Libya"
"Echo & Elixer 2"
"Corpus Christi"

"You can understand / Wanting to"

As we conclude the semester, my intro poetry students are writing about poetic structure, specifically the Greek choral ode structure deployed in many lyric poems. Included in our readings for this inquiry is Arthur Smith's new collection, The Fortunate Era. Today seemed to be the day that the readings fully clicked with the majority of my students, in large part because of our discussion of this poem:

Golden Gate

All the known jumpers off the Golden Gate
Chose to face the known Bay
And not the towering cold Pacific.
There are witnesses. You can understand

Wanting to, trembling out there
On braided cables, wind-whipped
Hundreds of feet in the air. From that height,
Water has the density of rock. It’s surprising

A handful have lived. Any one of them
Would tell you jumping is an act
You have time to reconsider.
In a heartbeat, they knew.

Arthur Smith
from The Fortunate Era












We also talked about the documentary film The Bridge. None of my students had ever seen the Golden Gate Bridge in person. Few had been to the Bay Area. All agreed: "You can understand / wanting to."

We are saying thank you

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is


W.S. Merwin
from Migration

Additional Merwin poems posted at Against Oblivion:

"A Contemporary"
"Worn Words"

What Kinds of Times are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich
from The Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995

Tax Day

Tax Man

Thunder Bob used to drive for Consolidated Freight
before the small bones began to press
against the nerves in his lower back
and his right foot went numb.
Now he slouches in blue suspenders,
forearms propped on a steel desk, doing my taxes.

In the den his wife watches the Simpson trial
and he wants to get me done, squinting down
at last year’s forms, muttering, a Chesterfield
burning away between his fingers. You need
more write-offs, he says, peering sideways
through the smoke. Since you can’t afford a house,
why not have another kid, eh?
Rain blowing in off the bay rattles the windows
and the branches of the pin oaks moan. He knows
my wife moved out last year. The kids I’ve got
are waiting, eating cold Chinese by the TV.

You watch, he tells me. Soon they’ll start messing
with Social Security. I can hear the lawyer’s voices
carping down the airwaves and I think sometimes
the rain will never end, a bleak mudcaked creature
prowling the landscape, entering our homes
while we sleep, its ragged breath like quicklime
misting our faces.

Driving home through the storm I think of him
leaning against his porch, telling me
to be careful. Try to kick down more cash
into Retirement, he’d said, bracing himself
on his good foot. Nobody knows for sure
what the hell’s going to happen.


Joseph Millar
from Overtime








More poems by Joseph Millar posted @ Against Oblivion:

"Sentimental" from Willow Springs
"At Bay Meadows with Robert Herrick" from Overtime
"Love Pirates" from Overtime
"Dark Harvest" from Overtime
"Feeding Tristam's Snake" from Fortune
"Fall Night" and "Caroling" from Fortune
"Lyrical" from Fortune

Upcoming Readings

This Saturday, I'll be reading poems from Praise Nothing alongside Will Schutt, winner of the 2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, who will read from his first book, Westerly.

On Saturday, April 12 we'll be at Parnassus Books -- yep, the glorious indie bookstore in Nashville founded by Ann Patchett. The reading starts at 2pm. From what I understand, Parnassus doesn't hold that many poetry events and so we're really hoping to bring out a good-sized crowd and to set a precedent for future poetry readings. If you're in Nashville or know anyone who is, can you send them our way? Promises to be a great event.

I've also just been asked to give a reading for the Writer's Night series at Artifactia in Knoxville. I'll be reading along with Linda Parsons Marion whose third book, Bound, was recently published. Not yet settled on the date for this event, but it'll be sometime soon in April. I'll let you know.

I've also got a reading as part of the Knoxville Writers' Guild speaking series. I'll be reading with award-winning poet Arthur Smith at 7pm on May 2 at the Laurel Theatre. Free admission and signing to follow.

Art's most recent book, The Fortunate Era, was just published by Carnegie Mellon University Press and it is a stunner. I reread it recently and sat on the couch shaking my head and laughing and wondering, "Damn, how does he do this in poem after poem?" Highly recommend his book.

Hope to see you soon!

Interview with "First Book Interviews"

Thanks to Keith Montesano for interviewing me for the First Book Interviews series online and for giving me the chance to discuss the process of assembling and submitting the manuscript for my first book, Praise Nothing.

The interview series, originally started by Kate Greenstreet in 2008, was a critical research database for me as I determined where (and how) to send out my manuscript for the first time a few years back. First Book Interviews was also a source of encouragement and hope during a emotionally-draining process of significant financial expenditures, publication and prize near misses, and, of course, rejection letters.

Reading these interviews, I knew that if I just kept the faith and persisted, the manuscript would find the right home. And I'm blessed to say that the poems certainly did fine the right home in the University of Arkansas Press, a place I could only have dreamed of when I started out.

Some of my favorite interviews: James Allen Hall, Dan Albergotti, Sandy Longhorn, Michelle Bitting, and Bobby C. Rogers.

Here's an excerpt from my interview:

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out? 

Wash, rinse, repeat

I finally arrived at the closest approximation to the book’s current form when I had the chance to leave Tennessee and return to Lawrence, Kansas, for a period of concentrated work on the manuscript during the summer of 2010. Before moving to Knoxville, I lived and worked in Kansas for a few years and I yearned to get back to the Sunflower State.
For two weeks: just me, the stack of poems, a tiny loaner cottage, and the Kansas summer heat. Getting to the final order took a process of spreading all the poems out on the living room’s dusty hardwood floor, assembling a draft, and then reading and rereading. Wash, rinse, repeat. And repeat and repeat. 

In many ways, the assemblage process was similar to my poem revision process: making pass after pass over the draft, tinkering with the count and measure, culling superfluous lines, improvising and moving the puzzle pieces around until I finally recognize the picture. I was also fortunate to have a few poets read the manuscript and offer their affirmations that I was heading in the right direction. 

"This is just the place for you."

The Soul as Rooms for Rent

Good light a few hours each morning and cheap,

just you’ll want to think about the neighborhood–

Not dangerous, don’t misunderstand–just dead, storefront

church and hourly-rate motel boarded up both.

Buses don’t run past eight and not at all on Sundays.

Means you’ve got to think ahead since the market’s

Gone under, but honey, you don’t look like a big eater,

and I bet you like quiet some too. We’ve got that,

Quiet. I’d bet, in fact, this is just the kind of place

you were hoping for. Over there’s the stove;

Pilot’s out but it works fine, don’t worry, and that, well,

that’s formica, not original, but looking out

There’s the under-eaves scrollwork, only wanting some paint

and maybe the thrashers’ nests cleared out.

Or maybe not. Nothing here, the hardwood

sure echoes. That walnut? Maple? Anyway,

I bet you don’t have a whole lot of furniture. No.

This is just the place for you. And we can do

Month-to-month. Whatever you need. I don’t know,

you could set up a little table beneath the window there,

Make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe get some work done.

Just imagine that. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Jeffrey Schultz
from 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2012

Waking

Waking

Waking, I look at you sleeping beside me.
It is early and the baby in her crib
has begun her conversation with the gods
that direct her, cooing and making small hoots.
Watching you, I see how your face bears the signs
of our time together—for each objective
description, there is the romantic; for each
scientific fact, there's the subjective truth—
this line was caused by days at a microscope,
this from when you thought I no longer loved you.
Last night a friend called to say that he intends
to move out; so simple, he and his wife splitting
like a cell into two separate creatures.
What would happen if we divided ourselves?
As two colors blend on a white pad, so we
have become a third color; or better,
as a wire bites into the tree it surrounds,
so we have grown together. Can you believe
how frightening I find this, to know I have
no life except with you? It's almost enough
to make me destroy it just to protest it.
Always we seemed perched on the brink of chaos.
But today there's just sunlight and the baby's
chatter, her wonder at the way light dances
on the wall. How lucky to be ignorant,
to greet joy without a trace of suspicion,
to take that first step without worrying what
comes trailing after, as night trails after day,
or winter summer, or confusion where all
seemed clear and each moment was its own reward.

Stephen Dobyns
from Velocities


More poems by Stephen Dobyns posted at Against Oblivion:
"How to Like It"
"Pursuit"
"The Words We Have Spoken"