Announcement: Grail Reading Series

Some of the nation's best writers live in Knoxville. Come out and hear three of them read from their latest work: Jessie Janeshek, Molly Jo Rose, and Darren Jackson.

Come out and show your support for local writers and for the University of Tennessee Creative Writing Program's students!

7pm, November 20th
University Center Suite 221
University of Tennessee

Jessie Janeshek is the co-editor, with Jesse Graves, of Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008) and a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Tennessee. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, Boston. Her poetry appears in Washington Square, Passages North, Review Americana, and Caduceus. She promotes her belief in the power of creative writing as community outreach by co-directing a variety of volunteer workshops in the Knoxville area. She is a freelance editor and also works as a writing instructor at UT.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer and teacher living in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Western Michigan University and writes about travel, religion, and the places in between. Her publications include essays and interviews in Santa Clara Review, Flyway, the anthology Voices of Lung Cancer, and most recently in U.S. Catholic magazine. Click here to read a sample of Molly's work.

Darren Jackson’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Smartish Pace, Iron Horse Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and The Potomac Review. He is the Non-Fiction Editor of Grist: The Journal for Writers, and he has recently completed a translation of Henri Michaux’s Life in the Folds.

more 32 Poems

Poetry journal recommendation: 32 Poems. You should subscribe to it.

Their concept is pretty simple: each issue contains 32 poems, and each poem must be 32 lines or less. They also operate a fantastic blog, that has recently raised some provocative questions about the process of editing, submitting poems, about the po-biz.

I don't want this post to come off as a sales pitch, or as a kind of NPR pledge drive moment. I just want to encourage people to subscribe to more journals.

If you feel so inclined, here's a link to their subscription page.

And now, two more poems from the latest issue. (I probably won't post any more from the issue, just because I want you all to buy a copy!)



Spring Recital, Beethoven Club, Memphis, Tenn.

After all the practice, the children in turn mount the two steps of

the riser, jaws set, their Sunday clothes,

new for Easter or just new, making a detectible wrinkling sound as they

compose themselves at the keyboard and unfold

their repertoire books to the marked page, take a deep breath and strike

the opening notes of undanceable mazurkas

and poorly studied études. Hard to add up all that’s been learned just

from looking at a room like this, most of it

having to do with fear. The first week of May and the air-conditioner

already strains, the kids sweating at the Baldwin grand—

of the pair of pianos, the one with the easier action and bright tone.

From our place in the crooked rows of folding chairs, we just hope

the pictures turn out. And then there it is, the architecture of a Bach

invention, the lines of development,

the counterpoint of the piece emerging uncorrupted by technique or

facility, suddenly readable against struggle’s bright foil.

Bobby C. Rogers
from 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2009








When At a Certain Party In NYC

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks,
and everyone here lives in a converted
chocolate factory or deconsecrated church
without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup
in sight, but only carefully edited objets like
the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen
that looks like an industrial age dildo, and
when you rifle through the bathroom
cabinet looking for a spare tampon, you discover
that even their toothpaste is somehow more
desirable than yours. And later you go
with a world famous critic to eat a plate
of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from
Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like
“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is
so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself
impossible to eat. And your friend back home—-
who says the pioneers who first settled
the great asphalt parking lot of our
middle, were not in fact heroic, but really
the chubby ones who lacked the imagination
to go all the way to California—it could be that
she’s on to something. Because, admit it,
when you look at the people on these streets,
the razor-blade women with their strategic bones
and the men wearing Amish pants with
interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you
will never cut it anywhere that constitutes
a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in
a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.
So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators
practically tweaking, panting all the way down
from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on
with their long planned business of snuffling
garbage or peeing on something to which all day
they’ve been looking forward, what you want is
to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other
losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are,
as we speak, half-heartedly exploding.

Erin Belieu
from 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2009

contribution

I received my contributor's copies of the new issue of 32 Poems in which my poem "Praise Nothing" appears. Lots of good stuff in this issue, including poems by Billy Collins, Bruce Bond, Mary Biddinger,  Erin Bilieu, Carolina Ebeid, Julie Funderburk, Lisa Russ Spaar, Bobby C. Rogers, and, seriously folks, the list goes on and on.

Here's one from the issue by a new poetry friend of mine, Stephanie Kartalopoulos, who is a doctoral student at Missouri and is Poetry Editor for the fantastic journal Center. Stephanie also has a blog called "Poet-ish," which you should visit.




Old Age

She opens still-set doors to what’s
farther out, the growl-starred dog,

the years from now when everything
will be just another case

of bad manners. This goes for the glory-
book, its careful binding exhausted under

the weight of misuse, and for the pearls
that won’t shake after years

of being unthinkable. Out of nowhere,
the roads will all stop. It will be

a simple end of gravel and tar, a patch
of witch grass. There will be no metal

barrier, no sign to say stop, turn around.
And for her, just a licked finger

smoothing an eyebrow,
and pursed lips, a quick mention

that so much has already
become unnecessary.


Stephanie Kartalopoulos
from 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2009

memorial

Last week, the New York Times published a poetry op-ed in which they asked nine poets to write new works inspired by the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall. It is certainly worth reading. Here's a link to the op-ed: "What Fell Apart, What Came Together."

Here are two poems from the op-ed. The first is by Vera Pavlova, a prolific Russian poet whose gained a lot of attention recently in America for her poems in The New Yorker and Tin House. I'm only just now familiar with her myself, and happy to know a book called If There is Something to Desire is forthcoming from in English from Knopf in the middle of January.

Pavlova links: 

• Four poems in The New Yorker, July 30, 2007.
• "One Touch in Seven Octaves," from Tin House, Issue #27

The second poem is by Mark Doty, whose beautiful, moving, sad, shining poems, I'm sure many of you know. Doty's most recent book is a new and selected volume called Fire to Fire. (If you are on my poetry e-mail list, I mistakenly typed Fire BY Fire. Sorry!) Click here to link to Mark Doty's blog.

It Was a Weird Wall

It was a weird wall.

Like the Möbius strip,

it had only one side,

the other one was unseen:

the far side of the Moon.

But some people would race

against bullets, to rip

the barbed finish tape

with their chests, to give

a push to the wrecking ball:

the pendulum of the invisible clock.

Under 11/09/89,

my diary says:

“Natasha lost a front tooth,

Liza for the first time

Stood up in her crib

On her own.”

Vera Pavlova

The Lesson

Some workers put up a wall on 25th Street,

plywood sheathing a frame of 2 x 4s, to seal the building

they’d gut and remake. Then they added layers:

stacks of metal pipe bound with black webbing,

a layer of permits, photocopied signatures far removed

from whatever hand inscribed them.

Then a blue expanding ladder, hydraulic,

squatting on its haunches. My friend John took pictures

of the whole unlikely and elaborate composition,

barrier and palimpsest, warning and advertisement.

How could you not look at it, with its tears and concealments?

And though such photos might aestheticize,

allowing us to stand at an annealing distance

from the wreck of things, I think his do something else;

in this way I begin to look at walls.

Decaled plexi between my face and the back of the cab driver’s head.

Blue shroud on 16th like the robe of Venus rippling over the entry

of Pottery Barn, and inside it some burr-grinder

scouring away at the stone. The insidious barrier –

who could put their hands on it? – dividing me and the dark young men

under the scaffolding near my corner, smoking by the door

of the technical school. All going back somehow to the story

one of my teachers told, voice slipping to a register we’d never heard

in our room’s calm rows: how a lover,

desperate to reach the beloved on the other side,

strapped himself beneath a car, face pressed up

into the undercarriage, the back of his head

inches above the pavement; how he’d tried to refuse,

with his own body at least, the sundering of his city.

Did he live, did he ever arrive? I remember only

my teacher beginning to weep, and we children

in our low-slung new school building in Tucson,

the desert freshly scraped to make way for us,

we didn’t understand, what was the lesson?

John’s pictures brought that back -- and how,

decades later, the night they first scaled the wall,

the people at the top reached down to pull up

the others, and shouted Come on, come on!

When the guards turned the water cannons on them,

they sprayed back from open bottles of champagne.

Then the broken chunks appeared, in the hands of those

who had loosened them, fragments of concrete

glazed with spray paint inscriptions, scarred

with sledgehammer and chisel: instruments of union.

A demanding beauty about them,

whatever was scrawled perhaps capable

of realigning, as words in what language?

Something barely spoken yet.

Mark Doty

Copper Nickel -- Deals, Deals, and more Deals!!

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 Sale where 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.

Don't want to pay by Paypal? Download the linked order form and mail it back to us. (Yes, we know this means it's not so much an "internet" sale, but we can live with that if you can.)

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.

Sandy Longhorn - "The Interior Weather of Tree-Clinging Birds"

Jordan Davis - "Evasion of Privacy"

starlings

The Starlings

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

Click here to support a poet and poetry by purchasing Three-Toed Gull from Northwestern University Press.


Blurb via Northwestern University Press:

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.

Reading tonight

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.

catching up

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.

_______

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?

J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change nor Small Bills

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.]

_______

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.

Click here to read the review.

_______

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.

You can also stream the album for free here.

Wiler

Praise for Jack Wiler:

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.


Jack Wiler
from Fun Being Me

Raz at UTK

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.

Click here more details and information on these events from the University of Tennessee Department of English.

The Poetry Foundation also has a number of her poems at their site, as well as biographical and career information, and links to further reading.

Poetry Reading!!

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...

But it's going to be a great time. See you there!

Image: Cairns, Lamon, Fairchild

This morning, I received my monthly(?) email newsletter from the good folks at Image announcing that issue #63 of the journal will be out soon.

The newsletter includes brief reviews of Scott Cairns' new book The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain (which I've been waiting for), and Laurie Lamon's latest poetry book, Without Wings.

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!)

Here's what Fairchild had to say about "Madonna and child, Perryton, Texas, 1967" in his "Poet's Choice" column back in July:

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.


B.H. Fairchild
from Usher

What's certain

This week is shaping up to be a good one:

I have three new shorter poems up at the online journal Still: Literature of the Mountain South: "Less Than Ash," "After," and "Swing Low."

Congratulations and thanks to Marianne Worthington, Jason Howard, and Silas House! Looks like a great new issue.

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.

If you feel so inclined, you can purchase a copy directly from Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

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.

That much is certain.

A few photos from the Los Angeles reading trip

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

Poet Laureate in Knoxville

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.

Here's a Youtube video of Kay Ryan reading "Home to Roost." The video is from a DVD produced by The Academy of American Poets called The Poet's View: Intimate Profiles of Five Major American Poets.

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.


Kay Ryan
from Say Uncle

Support a poet and poetry!
Click here to learn more about Say Uncle and to purchase it from Grove Press.

More on the L.A. trip soon

But first, this:

Well Water

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.


Randall Jarrell
from The Complete Poems