Since I've got a new poem called "A Force Too Familiar" forthcoming there, and because Jake York suggested that those who are fans of Copper Nickel do so, I'd like to lend them a hand in promoting a wonderful subscription opportunity they're offering.
From Jake's Facebook message: "There, you can snag pairs of the journal---past, present, and future---for only $12, just $6 a copy. It goes without saying: this is a bargain. And: as we publish this for the primary purpose of getting text into the hands of readers, we'd be very happy if you'd pick up a few copies. They make a great gift and, in many case, a tax deduction. If you're already stocked up, spread the word about the sale."
The Copper Nickel Great Internet Sale:
"We know you wanted to be there, so we're passing on something of the festival atmosphere via an Internet Salewhere you can get a number of two-packs for only $12. This is a great way to catch up on recent issues you may have missed or to go ahead and lock in a low price for the fabulous issue 13, which will arrive in late January.
You might think since we put out a slick journal and have a home in a university that we're floating pretty high, but we depend on readers like you to help establish value both for the literature we circulate and the format itself. Help keep this journal going... Pick up some goods for yourself, or for a friend."
Also, you if you haven't seen the two recent poems from Copper Nickel up at Verse Daily, be sure you check them out as well.
Late one afternoon in October I hear them for the first time: loud-voiced palavering, whistles, murmurs, quarrels, bickering and warbling, croaking and chatter in the high plane trees of the street. The leaves are all turning yellow this time of year, causing huge yellow sunlit rooms to appear at the level of the fifth and sixth floors opposite the barracks, where the tram turns off from the Via delle Milizie. Solid branches, twigs, and perches: every bit of space is taken up in this parliament of starlings! They are tightly bunched together there among the leaves; and the hundreds of thousands of starlings that perform their flying exercises against the backdrop of the evening's mass of motionless cloud will surely soon have lost their places: there are myriads of swarming punctuation marks out there, starlings flying in formation, sudden sharp turns, steep ascents, swarm on delightful swarm against a rosy cloud bank in the east. The October evening is cool. The shop windows of the Via Ottaviano are shining. And the starlings are chattering, quarreling and laughing, whispering and quietly enjoying themselves, when suddenly a blustering as of ten thousand pairs of sharp-edged scissors passes through the republic of the plains— it is as though an alarm had sounded, heard as an echo over the muffled traffic. Soon the darkness of night will fall. But the starlings up there won't stop talking, they move together, push one another, chatter and flit. Virgil must have had them in mind when somewhere he likens the souls of the deceased to flights of birds which toward sundown abandon the mountains and gather in high trees. I seem to be standing in an Underworld in the midst of a swarm of birds. The block is Virgilian; the street is crossed by the Viale Giulio Cesare, where you lived for some time before you died. That's why I am stopping here. The souls of the dead have gathered in the trees. Their number is incredible, suddenly it seems ghastly; is this what it will be like? For a moment I am a prisoner of the poem I am writing. There must be an exit. The soldier coming up to me has noticed that I have been standing for quite some time looking up into the foliage— into the darkness of feathers, bird's eyes, and beaks. The peasant boy inside him apprises me of the fact that starlings come in vast migrations "from Poland and Russia" to spend the winter in the south: "And things go very well for them! In the daytime they fly out to the countryside and spend the night in here," he explains with great amusement, turning his gaze up toward the swarm of birds. Their anxiety seems to have ceased; in just a moment they all seem to have fallen asleep. Only single chirps and clucks are heard from starlings talking in their sleep. What are they dreaming of? Ten thousand starlings are dreaming in the darkness about the sunlight over the fields. As for myself, I am thinking of the tranquility in certain restaurants in the countryside, in the Albano Mountains and on the Campagna-- the tranquility at noon on a sunny day in October. I am filled with the clarity of the fall day. And am touched by something immeasurable, transparent, which I cannot describe at first but must be everything we never said to each other. There are so many things I'd like to say. How shall I be able to speak? Today you are not shade, you are light. And in the poem I am writing you will be my guest. We are going to talk about Digenís Akrítas, the Byzantine heroic poem with the strangely compelling rhythm; and since the manuscript of the poem is preserved in the monastery at Grottaferrata I shall order wine from Grottaferrata, golden and shimmering in its carafe; we shall talk about the miraculously translucent autumn poem by Petronius which appears first in Ekelöf's Elective Affinities; and about Ekelöf's poems, to which you devoted such attention. Did Ekelöf ever come to Grottaferrata? I seem to detect your lively gaze. And we shall see how the starlings come flying across the fields in teeming swarms. They will come from Rome and spend the day out here where they will eat snails, worms, and seeds and suddenly they will fly up from a field as at a given signal and make us look in to the sun.
Jesper Svenbro Translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson from Three-toed Gull
Perhaps the most widely respected and read poet of his generation in Sweden, Jesper Svenbro makes his debut in the English-speaking world with this selection of poems drawn from his seven previous volumes and impeccably translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson. At times intellectual and erudite, at other times invoking intimacy and closely observed memories, Svenbro appears here at his most richly allusive, calling with consummate ease upon the myths of the Greeks, real and imaginary journeys in Lapland, the poetry of Sappho and T. S. Eliot, the plaints and joys of childhood, and the evocations of nature and of art. Whether in intricate formal innovations or flights of free verse, in the linguistic politics of "Stalin as Wolf" or the political linguistics of "A Critique of Pure Representation," Svenbro's work captures in its every nuance the transcendent possibilities of the poet's art.
If you're in Knoxville, please do come on out to the Laurel Theater tonight to hear some wonderful writers read their work from the first MOTIF Series anthology Writing By Ear: An Anthology of Writings About Music.
What: Reading/Celebration of Writing By Ear: An Anthology of Writings About Music
When: 7pm, Thursday, November 5
Where: Laurel Theater, Knoxville, Tennnessee
Readers will include: Marianne Worthington, R.B. Morris, Carol Borges, Kali Meister, Linda Parsons Marion, and others. I'll be reading, too.
It seems like this time of year is a busy one for many of the poetry blogger folks, probably since many of us work in academia which means piles of papers to be graded, conferences, proposals, editing, meetings, etc. So, I guess that's where I've been the last week. Lots has been going on, so here's a post just to catch up on some of the finer points.
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My good friend Jeff Schultz has a monster of a poem in the November issue of Poetry--this is the second time he's appeared there.
Here's a little bit of the poem just to whet your appetite. You can click the title to read the rest of the poem online, but I encourage you to buy the issue. There's something about seeing the sheer size of Jeff's four-page poem in the magazine that makes it all the more powerful. After all, when was the last time you saw Poetry publish a poem that long?
Because the body now and its organs suggest nothing
but those pathologies in which we’ve been instructed,
Because the gutter’s black as new blood, a Petri dish
of piss and teeth knocked loose at the root,
Because our walking here’s scared up pigeons and the air’s
thick with their disease, because, therefore, we’re holding
Our breath in silent prayer, Good People of Los Angeles,
for our immune systems, for hand sanitizer,
For swift and decisive return of the sun’s irradiating
grace, I can hardly say I even know you much
Beyond the turnstile’s slick in the discount supermarket,
the sidewalk’s chewing gum and tuberculosis.
But I’ve been thinking of you, of your eyes darting behind
the tinted lenses which minimize exposure to UV, to God-
Knows-what, even though it’s dark this morning, cold, cold,
at least, by our way of thinking: frond-tips glimpsed
Through fog-bank, a dew so lightly acidic we’ve forgotten
it’s the cause of these few more leaves dropped
From evergreens, the rasp at the back of the throat.
[Click the title to read the rest of the poem.]
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The latest newsletter from Voice Education Project features my friend William Archila's recent collection, The Art of Exile, and links to a review by Renny Golden.
The new Hem album, Twelfth Night, is now out. This is Hem's fifth album and is original music written for the Public Theater's production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night which was performed last summer in New York's Central Park as part of the annual Shakespeare in the Park celebration.
It's not your typical Hem album. I mean, it's instrumentation sounds like music that should accompany a production of a Shakespeare play. What you call that, I'm not exactly sure. I'm no musicologist, and I'm too lazy to look it up. But it does certainly sound like Hem. No question about it. It's like a 400 year old Hem.
The music website Amie Street has a great deal on the album, and you can also preview all of the tracks for a good 40-60 seconds, which is more than iTunes, I think.
Jack Wiler’s poems are rock-bottom genuine, totally direct, and disarmingly moving. He’s the Nazim Hikmet of Hoboken; his poems are full of great love for the broken world, great love for his fallen fellow human beings, and great rage at the inequity of things. -- Mark Doty
The Taste of Beer in Late Fall
I need to talk to my brother now. I need to tell him my house is clean. I fixed the broken chest of drawers. I need to tell him about the Palisades. The Hoboken Library, a tuscan ruin in a pale, pink dawn. I need to tell him I’m falling in love. That trees have been stripped of their leaves after a hard cold rain. That I’ve been on my knees scrubbing. Tears at my throat nearly every day and I need to tell him I’m sitting alone in this clean house waiting. My heart beating so loud it fills the room. I’m waiting. He needs to know. I need to tell.
Hilda Raz will read from her work tonight at 7:00 in the Hodges Library Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. She will also be available in the afternoon at 3:30pm in McClung Tower Room 1210 for an informal chat about poetry and her work.
If you are in the Knoxville area, please come out and hear some great poetry tomorrow night.
Several UTK folks (you can see there names on the left) will read and perform their work at The Remedy Coffee House which is in the Old City near Barley's Tavern: 125 W. Jackson. Here's a link to Google Maps directions.
The reading will start at 7:30, but it sounds like there will be a bunch of people there (according to the facebooks), so you may want to get there a bit early if you want to have a seat.
Yesterday we did a practice run for timing, and the work is excellent. You WILL have a goood time. If you don't, I'll pay for your coffee!
I plan on reading three newer poems, two of which I've never read at a reading. I may even read a couple new hymns. We'll see...
Here's what they had to say about Laurie's new book:
Laurie Lamon's second collection of poetry, Without Wings, makes an excellent autumn read. Like the season, Lamon's poems reside in the tension between two very different places, and they contain at once the alluring sensuality of summer and the contemplative shroud of winter. The former invites the reader inside by presenting lyrical descriptions that appeal to the senses, such as that of pigeons in the poem “Heaven,” “their pearl gray breasts pulsing with ordinary blood.” However, from this beginning the reader is taken to a much more inward place, subtly drawn towards meditation and the discipline of concentration. A good example of this is Lamon's poem “Prime Number,” in which each sentence (or more accurately phrase, as the poem is itself one long sentence) begins “It looks like...,” an invitation to sight, to visualization. What follows, though, eludes visualization in any easy sense: “It looks like a man wearing a shawl whose body is / another shawl wrapped around a man who has already / gone to his death in a subway, an office building, / a chair beside a hospital bed....” The questions that lines such as these create in the mind force an attentiveness that yields discoveries much more satisfying than if the answers lay on surface level, easily within reach. Dogs, birds, plants, and various natural elements people these poems more often than actual people do—the most interesting individual is Pain personified, who stars in no fewer than twelve included titles, always “thinking of” something. Pain thinks of wind, death, eschatology, “something biographical,” Alicibiades, and more, but what the reader invariably ends up thinking of is what it means to be human, and to experience life through the disparate lenses of sense, consciousness, and conscience. These are poems that begin in the body, are processed in the mind, and end in the heart.
The newsletter also included a link to an audio sample (click here to listen) of B.H. Fairchild reading two poems, "Frieda Pushnik" and "Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967" from his new book of poems, Usher, which is splendid. (I got it, along with Charles Wright's latest, as a birthday gift from my brother-and-sister-in-law. Thanks again, N & S!)
This poem was triggered by a visit to the Renaissance and Baroque rooms at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and in particular by my response to the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán. The boys in the poem have been out late on a Friday night drinking and smoking weed. Afflicted by the munchies (a common term in the late '60s, though I have no idea whether it's still current), they are at the only grocery mart in town that is still open. It is not unusual for the composition of a poem to have its own rewards, and in this one I was interested to watch a rather detailed nativity scene take shape at the close of the poem, although in this case we have, instead of the three wise men, the three idiots.
And here's the poem:
Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967
A litter of pickups nose into Sancho's Market south of town late Friday night rinsed in waves of pink neon and samba music from some station in Del Rio spilling out across the highway. Sancho's wife dances alone behind the cash box while her daughter, Rosa, tries to quiet her baby whose squalls rip through the store like a weed cutter shredding the souls of the carnal, the appetitious, indeed the truly depraved as we in our grievous late-night stupor and post-marijuana hunger curse the cookie selection and all its brethren and Al yells at Leno lost among the chips, beef jerky, string cheese, bananas for chrissakes, that if he doesn't stop now and forever telling Okie jokes he will shoot his dog who can't hunt anyway so what the hell, but the kid is unreal, a cry ascending to a shriek, then a kind of rasping roar, the harangue of the gods, sirens cleaving the air, gangs of crazed locusts or gigantic wasps that whine and ding our ears until the air begins to throb around us and a six-pack of longnecks rattles like snakes in my hand. And then poor Rosa is kissing its forehead, baby riding her knee like a little boat lost at sea, and old Sancho can't take it either, hands over his ears, Dios mio, ya basta! Dios mio, so Rosa opens her blouse, though we don't look, and then we do, the baby sucking away, plump cheeks pumping, billowing sails of the Santa Maria in a high wind, the great suck of the infinite making that little nick, nick sound, Rosa smiling down, then Sancho turns off the radio and we all just stand there in the light and shadow of a flickering flourescent bulb, holding our sad little plastic baskets full of crap, speechless and dying a little inside as Rosa whispers no llores, no llores, mija, mijita, no llores, and the child falls asleep, lips on breast, drops of milk trickling down, we can even hear it breathing, hear ourselves breathing, the hush all around and that hammer in our chests so that forty years later this scene still hangs in my mind, a later work, unfinished, from the workshop of Zurbaran.
I also received my box of contributor's copies for the latest edition of Best New Poets in which my poem "The Man in Hopper's Office in a Small City" appears.
The anthology is edited by Kim Addonizio and, though I've only had a chance to look at it briefly, it is a wonderful cross-section of new work from 50 emerging poets.
Yesterday, a new friend gave me a copy of Dan Albergotti's first book, The Boatloads. I've read a handful of the poems, and I'm very much looking forward to sitting down with what promises to be an impressive debut collection.
And, lastly, I was invited to read poems at the South Atlantic MLA Conference in November which makes seven readings between the fall and spring. Apparently someone had to drop out for some reason, and I was asked to step in. Thanks, C, for thinking of me!
The only things that would make this week better would be to hear back from American Poetry Review on the new poems, and from the remaining publishers that have the manuscript, but I'll certainly take what I've been given.
My last night in Los Angeles, Jeff and Leah and I went to this little Mexican joint somewhere near Hollywood and Vine.
Pork roasting on a vertical spit + pineapple roasting on the spit above the pork + freshly-made tortillas + two of my best friends = the greatest tacos I've ever had. Ever. I had two servings and could have had at least two more.
And here are a couple from the Saturday reading in which I read with three amazing poets: Lory Bedikian, William Archila, and Jeffrey Schultz. We all went to University of Oregon's MFA Program, and so had a beautiful reunion after several years.
Apparently I do things with my hands while reading -- I chop and punch the air more and more as I get into it -- and then stand back calmly, and wait for the gestures and words of the poems to make their impact. Hm.
As I said last Saturday after tearing up at the touching, kind, and thoughtful introduction Lory gave me, "I'm a crier."
I know I'll go back to the photos from this weekend again and again over the years.
Lory Bedikian, William Archila, Jeffrey Schultz, me
The University of Tennessee English Department received word last week that the United States Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan, will come to campus in the winter to give a reading and interact with students!
The info thus far is that Ryan will read at 7pm on February 16, in the University Center Auditorium. No doubt more details will be forthcoming, and I'll post them here as they become public.
Hopefully, she will read poems from the new book which is forthcoming. The Best of It: New and Selected Poems will be released by Grove Press on March 3rd. Here's the blurb from the Grove Press website:
Kay Ryan’s recent appointment as the Library of Congress’s sixteenth poet laureate is just the latest in an amazing array of accolades for this wonderfully accessible, widely loved poet. Salon has compared her poems to “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The two hundred poems in Ryan’s The Best of It offer a stunning retrospective of her work, as well as a swath of never-before-published poems—all of which are sure to appeal equally to longtime fans and general readers.
I am mostly familiar with the collection Say Uncle which was released, I believe, around 2000. I bought it on the recommendation of my poetry teacher, Laurie Lamon, and it was a book that confused me quite a lot, or at least, that's what I remember feeling.
I'm not really sure why I would react that way then, except that I was much more interested in poets like Jack Gilbert, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Charles Wright--all poets I still love--and the way Ryan's poems look on the page and their seeming simplicity likely baffled me. Funny how tastes, reading ability, interests, willingness to invest oneself in reading, changes over time. I think that's a good thing. Not so much in favor of stasis, of reading the same kind of poems over and over again. And there's a subtle humor and play to Ryan's poems which I now find enchanting. I'm looking forward to diving back into her work.
Kay Ryan has a poem called "Patience" up at The Writer's Almanac today, and you can get there by clicking this link. Here are also three more poems from Say Uncle. I'm going to try to read the most recent collection soon, and I'll likely post poems from it when I have it.
Like I said, more info on her UTK reading will be shared as I come by it. Enjoy the poems.
Patience
Patience is wider than one once envisioned, with ribbons of rivers and distant ranges and tasks undertaken and finished with modest relish by natives in their native dress. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable— a place with its own harvests. Or that in time's fullness the diamonds of patience couldn't be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness.
Say Uncle
Every day you say, Just one more try. Then another irrecoverable day slips by. You will say ankle, you will say knuckle; why won't you why won't you say uncle?
A Hundred Bolts of Satin
All you have to lose is one connection and the mind uncouples all the way back. It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life: a crate of tractor axles, for example,
a dozen dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin— perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.
What a girl called "the dailiness of life" (Adding an errand to your errand. Saying, "Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to A means to a means to) is well water Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world. The pump you pump the water from is rusty And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands And gulp from them the dailiness of life.
So I'm currently in Los Angeles to give a poetry reading on Saturday alongside my good friends Jeff Schultz, William Archila, and Lory Bedikian. If you're in L.A., I hope you can make it! Tell your friends!
The details: 1-3pm, Eagle Rock Branch Library, 5027 Caspar Avenue, Los Angeles, CA. Email me if you have any questions.
Today, I'll be heading in to UCLA with Leah, Jeff's wife, and then up to Malibu and Pepperdine University with Jeff. Maybe participate in his teaching of Plato and John Stewart Mill. We'll see.
Flying out of Knoxville and landing in Los Angeles was like being lifted up off the set of Sling Blade only to be dropped down in a matter of hours smack dab in the middle of Blade Runner.
I've never really been to L.A. and I'm looking forward to seeing quite a bit of it before and after the reading. I've been to UCLA for a soccer scouting thing back in the late 1990s, and to Disneyland a few times. But, as Leah said, "Um, Disneyland is NOT L.A."
So true.
I've got the camera battery charging, and will post pictures as I can.
Two "Northern Pikes" today: one just published in Iowa Review, and one that's lasted over thirty-five years, published around 1971 in James Wright's Collected Poems. Both certainly worth reading.
I've lifted Fleda Brown's poem from Poetry Daily, though I plan to post more work from the latest Iowa Review as soon as I get my copy of it. The James Wright I've included below is widely available on the interwebs, but the audio file I have of him reading is not. Scroll down to hear James Wright read "A Blessing." If the embedded player doesn't work, click the title to download the file. Northern Pike
Just past the railroad bridge over the Green River, the deep pool— dragonflies and white moths— where you can see the huge fish hovering. And Zach with his skinny arms, leaning, and the whack of the line, the wrenching. I wish I could save him from his nightmares, his waking fear of muggings, of bombs, of what there is legitimately to be afraid of. Up came the pike, nearly three feet long, teeth set on the line. I didn't see this. Zach came back with the fact of it in his face, terror and the joy of terror, the pike down there in his soul, making up its mind without thinking, moving up and down like a submarine by shifting molecules of gas from its blood to its swim bladder, not a motion of the body involved, waiting to clamp fish, frogs, children, sideways in its teeth, nothing to do with consciousness, with will, and here is Zach to tell me, as if I hadn't been there myself, watching the worst come up because I fished it up out of its waiting and almost went down with it, to the green and gloom, to the churning ghosts. As if I hadn't won, too, when the line snapped, the weight of it lasting forever in my skinny arms.
All right. Try this, Then. Every body I know and care for, And every body Else is going To die in a loneliness I can't imagine and a pain I don't know. We had To go on living. We Untangled the net, we slit The body of this fish Open from the hinge of the tail To a place beneath the chin I wish I could sing of. I would just as soon we let The living go on living. An old poet whom we believe in Said the same thing, and so We paused among the dark cattails and prayed For the muskrats, For the ripples below their tails, For the little movements that we knew the crawdads
were making under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman. We prayed for the game warden's blindness. We prayed for the road home. We ate the fish. There must be something very beautiful in my body, I am so happy.
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
Originally from the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area, I received an MFA from the University of Oregon and am currently a doctoral student and lecturer at the University of Tennessee where I teach poetry writing, serve as Poetry Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers, and am the Alwin Thaler Fellow working with the poetry manuscripts of James Agee. I won the 2008 James Wright Poetry Award, and my work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Third Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Fourteen Hills, Mid-American Review, New South, Southern Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Southern Indiana Review, Apalachee Review, Sonora Review, Tusculum Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Still: Literature of the Mountain South, the anthology Writing By Ear, and elsewhere. My manuscript, Suburban Hymnal, has been a finalist in recent contests.
U of Oregon MFA Reunion & L.A. Poetry Festival pre-show William Archila, Lory Bedikian, Joshua Robbins, Jeffrey Schultz 1-3pm Saturday, October 17, 2009 Eagle Rock Branch Library Los Angeles, California
Poetry Rocks at the Remedy 7:30pm Friday, October 23, 2009 The Remedy Coffee House Knoxville, Tennessee
An Afternoon in Agee Park James Agee's Centennial Celebration 2-4pm Sunday, November 1, 2009 Agee Park Knoxville, Tennessee
Since I've got a new poem called "A Force Too Familiar" forthcoming there, and because Jake York suggested that those who are fans of Copper Nickel do so, I'd like to lend them a hand in promoting a wonderful subscription opportunity they're offering.
Anna Faktorovich
