Maira Kalman may be best known for her recent clever-as-hell illustration of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” or, if you are under 12, a beautiful series of books centered around a charming, well-traveled dog named Max– in any case, here’s her latest offering: an illustrated account of her trip to Washington to witness the inaguration of President Obama as featured on her New York Times blog.

Even if you’re suffering a little inauguration fatigue, this’ll charm the optimism right back into you. 

Promise.

@Design watch: Online journal Frostwriting publishes poetry, fiction, and translations in an issue-based format that’s surprisingly readable. The success of the format is due in no small part to Colin Lewis’s clean, open design, which uses a javascript accordion to make each issue’s full contents accessible from the front page without cluttering the ample white space. (The design also makes use of my two favorite web fonts: Helvetica Neue and Helvetica.)

The design’s basic aesthetic — gray-on-white text, generous white space, clear headings (often in Helvetica), and red text for links/accents — has become popular among online journals and magazines, maybe because it provides a sense of literacy that seems both modern and classical. (Black, white, and red were the colors of the Gutenberg Bible, and Helvetica was the mainstay font for modern design.) Does this aesthetic have a proper name? I’m calling it avant-print, until someone calls me stupid for doing so.

Today I’ve been reading Paul Zimmer’s Family Reunion: Selected and New Poems. While some of the poems don’t float my poetry boat, some of the poems really are delights.  “Zimmer’s Last Gig,” “I Go Out in the Long Nights,” “An Enzyme Poem for Suzanne” and ”Wanda and Zimmer” (to name but a few) are especially tasty cakes.

• I haven’t worked just one job since, well, never, but Tina Brown reports that now even the upper-middle class are finding themselves in the gig economy. (Do writers without tenure ever work just one job?) Favorite new economic phrase: “The Nut.”
• Note to self: learn to say no.
• As other magazines struggle to survive, Cook’s Illustrated is thriving. (via 37 Signals)
• A pulp fiction cover gallery from Hang Fire Books, including such classics as Love Addict and Gutter Girl. The Hang Fire Books blog describes the life an independent, specialty bookseller.
• The Book Cover Archive, a collection of cover designs and designers. (via Daring Fireball)
• Joe the Plumber (yes, that Joe the Plumber) files his first report as a war correspondent.
• And just for fun: “It comes at you in waves.” — Man eats world’s hottest pepper.

I’ve been a fan of Carla Bruni since a classmate at UMass-Amherst put a few tracks of hers on a mixtape– fine, fine, it was a mix-CD.  If Mme. Bruni’s name sounds oddly familiar, that’s probably because she’s the first lady of France as well as an international pop-star/former model.  That’s got to be one hell of a resume.

Before you wonder where the poetry is in all of this, the lyrics on her 2007 album “No Promises” are credited to the venerable W.B. Yeats, Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare,W.H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, and Emily Dickinson.

Does it always work?

Well, what do you think?  The chosen texts are undeniably rhythmic, if not inherently musical.  Bruni’s voice itself has all the fidelity of an old record (which is actually quite cool, considering how clear and worked so many songs come off these days), and part of the allure of the whole collection is that someone visible on the international/political stage has written a sloppy love letter to verse.  In any case, it was a cool find.  Hope you enjoy it.

We didn’t make much of it at the time, what with the inauguration and all, but Tuesday was Linebreak’s first anniversary. Since our launch on Jan. 22, 2008, we’ve published a single poem each week. This week, M.C. Allan’s “Rube Goldberg Draws the Human Heart” became our 53rd poem. We’d like to thank all of our contributors, especially those who took a chance on us when all we had was a concept and a legal pad with a sketch of our design. Linebreak is what it is because so many poets have been so generous with their talents — both written and recorded — and we appreciate that generosity more than we can say.

Of course, there’d be little point to any of this without our audience. From all of us here at Linebreak, thanks for reading and listening. Here’s to another year.

Poets Geoff Brock and A.E. Stallings get their formal on at Able Muse. He also gives us a plug:

“my three favorite new [literary magazines] are linebreak.org (which does interesting things with audio—I love Leon Stokesbury’s reading of Seth Abramson’s “Cash at Folsom”), memorious.org (which is well edited and exquisitely designed), and unsplendid.org . . .”

Read the rest here at www.ablemuse.com/v6/featured-poet/geoffrey-brock

It was two years ago around this time that I helped judged the regional (Twin Cities) championships of the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud competition. I judged it with Venessa Fuentes, Alex Lemon, and Eric Lorberer. The contest was held on a performance stage in a central location, the Mall of America. Unfortunately, this performance stage was in the middle of the mall, in the amusement park Camp Snoopy, under the roller coaster. Occasionally the kids were interrupted by the grind of the cars on tracks overhead, a few dozen people with their arms in the air, shrieking.

We had thirty seconds to tabulate scores between recitations, so things moved faster than the roller coaster. I don’t remember having time to talk to any of the judges; I do remember occasionally glancing to one side and seeing Alex or Venessa circle numbers as fast as they could. I remember that high school students are partial to Maya Angelou’s poem “I Rise” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” They are partial to Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I hear more people talk about practicing memorization lately, including myself, and wonder whether it’s because our memories grow less and less necessary. Once, people used to talk about creating a “memory palace” in their heads; you added things that were beautiful or worthy. My laptop, however, is more of a memory palace than I could ever make. My husband jokes that an apartment complex is named after whatever natural feature the builder destroyed to put it there — Oakcrest, Riverview — and I wonder whether my laptop’s “memory” is like that.

I had a decent memory as a child because I was an insomniac, and my parents (correctly, I think) kept me on a regular sleep schedule anyway. So I was in bed at 9 every night, even if I was awake until midnight. At some point my father would sit on the edge of the bed a while, acknowledging it was “hard to turn the machine off,” hard to stop thinking. I kept myself occupied by seeing what I could remember: the order of every knickknack on the shelf above the piano, every word of the third-grade musical, every detail of that day I could dredge up. That same year I first memorized a poem I loved, by Emily Dickinson, because I’d found it in a book, and worried I’d never find it again after I had to give the book back.  

I’ve taught two classes now in which my graduate students memorized a poem. It changes them. They clear the poem with me ahead of time, but basically, they’re free to memorize whatever they wish. Everyone can do it, even people who say they can’t. Even the people who get nervous can usually do it alone. A student who couldn’t say hers in front of the others, once, took me aside in the department mailroom the next day and said “An Old Man’s Winter Night” perfectly, as if she were confessing something, or we were having an intimate conversation. My students seem to become closer to each other after they’ve done it, and more open about what they love about poetry. Too, our culture and poetry are pretty visually-oriented at the moment, so the act of doing it creates a little balance — reminds all of us of the pleasure a poem can be in one’s mouth. There’s always someone who memorizes a poem of astonishing length. There’s always someone who goes on to memorize more poems, after the semester ends, on his own.
Memorizing — having something “by heart” — connects us across time and place. Here’s a poem I memorized because the poet Michael Heffernan, when he was my teacher, once recited it to me from memory. And he had decided to learn the poem because once, he had been walking up Dickson Street in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with the poet James Wright, and Wright had stopped on the sidewalk in front of the train branch of the Bank of Fayetteville and recited it to Michael. James Wright was the first poet who really mattered to me. I wanted that poem, too, to be my own.

Amaryllis, by Edgar Arlington Robinson:

Once, when I wandered in the woods alone,
An old man tottered up to me and said,
“Come, friend, and see the grave that I have made
For Amaryllis.” There was in the tone
Of his complaint such quaver and such moan
That I took pity on him and obeyed,
And long stood looking where his hands had laid
An ancient woman, shrunk to skin and bone.     

Far out beyond the forest I could hear
The calling of loud progress, and the bold
Incessant scream of commerce ringing clear;
But though the trumpets of the world were glad,
It made me lonely and it made me sad
To think that Amaryllis had grown old.

I like that the tragedy of Amaryllis is not that she dies, but that she grows old. Knowing that poem makes me feel I understand a poem like “Saint Judas” a little more.

Thank you, Linebreak, for hosting me this week! It has been a privilege and a pleasure.

Once, I despaired that zombies and poetry would ever find their proper relationship. Today, I despair no more, thanks to this YouTube channel in which famous dead poets read their work. A few favorites: Wilfred Owen reading “Strange Meeting,” Gerard Manly Hopkins reading “The Leaden Echo,” and Anne Sexton reading “The Truth the Dead Know.” Computer animation or necromancy? You decide!

Here’s my vote for the creepiest of the bunch, Dylan Thomas reading “Poem in October:”

(via Kottke)

Toward the end of a late night at Lightbulb Club, a ramshackle collection of folks started playing desert island games. What would we take? Whose songs, what gadget, an everlasting bottle of which liquor? Given enough time, we eventually got around to picking out a single poem to bring with us. Memorization was not an option. For me, this was a snap: “The Cleaving” by Li-Young Lee.      

The City In Which I Love You was the first book of contemporary poetry I laid hands on, which was a striking experience of itself as I was an aspiring medievalist. But the sixth stanza of “The Cleaving” staggered me on first reading, and continues to catch my breath. It’s a long stanza in a longer poem, but I’m unjustifiably self-indulgent. Consequently, I can only hurl myself at your mercy for spurring the following quote through the chop-shop: 

In a world of shapes 
of my desires, each one here 
is a shape of one of my desires, and each 
is known to me and dear by virtue 
of each one’s unique corruption 
of those texts, the face, the body: [...]
each pleases, verging 
on utter grotesquery [...]
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.  

The poem insists in this section that what are sometimes thought of as flaws are also identifying marks, that these are the essence of the inimitable and memorable self. Gorgeous. Possibly not meant to be universalized beyond the particular group he’s addressing in this section, but I think I’m on sound theoretical ground when I open the poem, which I’ll avoid getting into right now. (I think we can handle that in the comments. Maybe? Yes?) 
 
Regardless, when I first read this poem, it had a religious air and–for me–it still does. Its forgiveness was and is astonishing, especially because I’ve always secretly let this sentiment move beyond the body, where it’s rooted in the poem, to include all aspects of the self that could be seen as flawed, all insecurities. Instead, all particular, idiosyncratic flaws sometimes form an essential part of who one is, what makes one inimitable and memorable. 
 
This is the kind of revelation that defined poetry for me–that made poetry actual, necessary–and it’s a poem I would never want to be without, a poem that actually changed how I understood the world around me and continues to do so. It’s become more than a poetic touchstone for me: more personal, emotional. 
 
I’ve internalized these lines now, hoping that any real or imagined character flaw of my own might also be an exact and defining grotesquery that makes me recognizably and singularly myself in the eyes the people who care for me. Even faults can be endearing. 
 
Hopefully. I’m banking on it.

Since I got to Massachusetts, I’ve spent more time outside than I have since I was a child. Massachusetts is the sixth smallest state, but its forest and park system is the sixth largest, and nearly 150,000 protected acres of land exist in Berkshire County alone. Amy Clampitt’s house is in a neighborhood, but as soon as you walk out her door, more or less, you’re in the woods, and the acres of trails are just a short drive away.

“Outside,” here, looks different than it does in Michigan, where I grew up, or Minnesota, where I live now. I’d never been to rural New England before I got here in August, unless you count a month at the MacDowell Colony. But ever since I arrived, I felt as if I had always lived here.

One reason for my comfort might be that, like all good schoolchildren, I grew up with the poetry of Robert Frost. Because his lyrics are so familiar, we forget what a good scholar he was of place and the natural world. Frost particularly loved books on botany, and when he took his children for walks around their New Hampshire farm, he insisted that they be able to identify every plant they came upon. Like Thoreau, who said, “A true account of the actual is the purest poetry,” Frost says in his poem “Mowing” that “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Though Frost’s poems sound as if they are written in the voice of a New Englander, biographer Jay Parini says that Frost always thought of his home as being California (which he left at 11), and so he wrote of New England with the clarity of an outsider.

In October, writer and naturalist Bill Roorbach was nice enough to drive over from Worcester, where he was teaching at Holy Cross, to take a walk with me and tell me what I was looking at. I’d been doing a fine job walking around “appreciating” everything for a month or two, but suddenly I was more frustrated with every afternoon. What’s that bird? Is that a yellow jackets’ nest or a wasps’ nest, hanging from that tree like that? What kind of tree is that, anyway? Why do they have these little rocky streams everywhere, when I’ve never seen one in the Midwest? Why do the rivers feel low and close, and different than they do in Minnesota? I felt as if I couldn’t read the world, and for the first time, I cared.

So Bill and I went into the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, and he started naming names: that’s an oven bird, here’s the difference between a hemlock and a fir and a pine, come take a look at this spring. Every thing he named had Frost line that went with it: “that he knows in singing not to sing,” “the way a crow shook down on me,” “I sha’nt be gone long — you come, too.” We were done with apple picking; we knew that something there is that does not love a wall. Time and being used to Frost sometimes make him feel a little fusty, but I was newly impressed and amazed.

I believe in being exceptionally loose and free in the first draft. I believe in overwriting. I believe it’s easier to cut than to add.

To this end, I’d like offer you one of my favorite poems. To me, it’s “about” revision: Emily Dickinson’s “The Props Assist the House,” from the Poetry Foundation’s website.

So, an obvious question for a topical blog like Unstressed is how closely to adhere to the topic. My favorite topical blogs are those that stray widely and often, using the chosen subject as a window through which to view the rest of the world. The topic, then, serves as a shared interest that provides a path to the writer’s other interests. 

What say you, Dear Reader? Do you prefer a diet of pure poetry in your poetry blogs? Or is the various & sundry fair game?

• The Playmobil Security Checkpoint introduces 4-7 year-olds to metal detectors, body cavity searches, and crippling paranoia. Don’t miss the product reviews at the bottom of the page. (via Jemima)
• Photographically, I have a thing with glimpses and half-seeings lately. The Web is an endless source of ekphrastic inspiration, yet none of my clicking and writing has produced one decent poem about a photograph. (And this despite a long-standing interest in photography.) Something about the ekphrastic poem eludes me, or is it something about photographs in general? Perhaps the panel on Ekphrasis at this year’s AWP will help.
• Mankind builds multi-million dollar radio telescopes to listen intently into the farthest reaches of space, only to hear the universe screaming incoherently. (via BB)
• Looters have irradiated sections of the arctic by stripping the shielding from nuclear lighthouses abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yes, nuclear lighthouses. (via Warren)
• This song by Tim Minchin nicely sums up some of my favorite arguments against common examples of magical thinking. Also, I’m pretty sure the tune is borrowed from “Accidental Babies” by Damien Rice. (via McHuff)
• The most moving photograph I took in 2008. Odd that it was taken on my least capable camera.

Our friends Matthew and Katy Henriksen at Cannibal Books are offering a $60 subscription for all of their 2009 publications. So far, their ‘09 catalogue includes chapbooks by Carolyn Guinzio, Patrick Morrissey, and Kevin Holden, as well as Cannibal #4.

In a recent two-part editorial, the editor of Free Lunch reportedly took online journals to task for being “poetry dumpsters for poetry that has been rejected by the print magazines.”

I haven’t read the pieces in full (they are, predictably, not available online), but I’m trying to get copies of the issues so I can respond. As you might guess, we here at Unstressed have some definite thoughts about the value and unique capabilities of online journals. (We also have thoughts on how often technophobic ignorance masquerades as literary discernment.) More on this topic soon.

In the meantime, read Diane Lockward’s excellent list of the qualities she looks for in an online journal, as well as the online journals that she admires. Linebreak’s presence in the latter post is a happy accident, nothing more.

I love poets’ letters. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites, by Amy Clampitt. It’s about the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters in New York, and celebrates the anonymous and collective nature of medieval art — art from a world where the “I” was less celebrated than it is today.

Someone once told me they think Clampitt’s letters get less interesting as she gets famous, if only because she gets busier, and maybe it’s true. . . I don’t have my own book collection here to find the exact quote, but what is it Edward Abbey says about writers’ letters? “But hell, I do like writing letters. Much easier than doing work.”

“On a sunny afternoon, as this one was, its location high on a bluff above the Hudson, facing the Palisades, is bathed in light, both direct and reflected. There are ramparts where you can walk in the open, and inside there are gardens where, just as I had hoped, some hothouse daffodils and crocuses and narcissus were already in bloom — the Cloisters proper. Or rather, not proper — a true cloister does not exist in any aggregate, but is simply an enclosed courtyard, quite generally, if not always, open at its center to the elements and attached to a church of a monastery — a place not for formal worship, but simply for walking and meditation. Rockefeller money has made a museum of various elements of a number of cloisters, most of them from different regions in France, and there are odd pieces of painting, sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, enamel, and so on, dating to the middle ages. These, and above all tapestries. The really glorious treasure is a roomful of these which have to do with the mythological hunt for the unicorn. I have always loved them — everybody does — but on that afternoon I felt that I had discovered them for the first time. Before then I had been inclined to regard tapestry, even so marvelous a specimen of it, as a minor art, a sort of inferior brand of painting. But on that afternoon, while I wandered in and out, visually speaking, among the little wild strawberries, the bluebells and daisies and periwinkles and dozens of other flowers (so faithfully rendered that nearly all have been botanically identified) which are woven into the background of each of the scenes of the hunt, for the very reason that it was a composite work rather than that of a single individual — and not only composite but anonymous; not only the weavers, but the designer and even the place of origin are unknown, and even for whom it was commissioned is a matter of conjecture — I found it more satisfactory than painting. . . . When it came time for the regular Sunday program of transcribed medieval music, I found myself a stone, instead of a chair, to sit on, and watched them file in. And after a while, when the first Kyrie started, I stopped watching the people and simply concentrated on listening to the music and watching the sunlight come in at a thirteenth-century window. The Kyrie, which of course is a cry for mercy, and the sun on the stone, a purely physical phenomenon, seemed while I listened to have some affinity, almost to be one and the same thing. After a while, when the music changed to something else, I was mildly aware that while this was going on I had — perhaps for no more than an instant, but there is no measuring this kind of experience — entirely forgotten my own existence. . . . Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism — but if baptism it was, it wasn’t of water, but of light. By this time it was late afternoon, and with the reflection from the river so bright that you could barely look at it directly, the whole hilltop, the whole world was fairly brimming with radiance. I walked around for a while, looked at the people, and walked to the subway, rather tired, and yet rested too, and pleased with everything.”

We’re happy to welcome Katrina Vandenberg as this week’s guest editor at Unstressed. Katrina’s first collection Atlas was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A new chapbook, On Marriage, was published last year by Red Dragonfly Press. She’s received residencies from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Amy Clampitt House, and the MacDowell Colony, and her work has appeared in journals such as The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, and Post Road.

For an online sampler of her poetry, we recommend Fuchsia, One Argument for the Existence of God, and First Lesson: The Anatomist Explains the Primacy of Imagination. Oh, and you might as well read an essay, too: Putting Your Poetry in Order: The Mix-Tape Strategy.

Admiration for Katrina’s poetry was one of the common tastes that drew we Linebreakers together when we started planning our little project more than a year ago. We’re thrilled to be sharing a screen with her.

I’m writing you from Lenox, Massachusetts, where I am in the last three weeks of being poet in residence in the Amy Clampitt House. I went for a walk down Old Stockbridge Road this morning. There’s snow here, but what a difference from the weather at home in Minnesota when I left, a little after New Year’s — the sidewalks were caked with ice and it was five below. I’m thinking, as usual, about Amy Clampitt.

I’ve been obsessed with Amy Clampitt the entire six months I’ve lived here, a side effect of the residency I didn’t expect. But it’s an intensely personal residency. I don’t just live in her house, as the poet-in-residence lives in Robert Frost’s farmhouse in Franconia, NH, I live among her things. The chairs and dresser and artwork were hers. There’s photographs of her on the walls, and there’s a K for Korn — her husband was Harold Korn, a Columbia law professor — on the sterling silverware. I’m allowed to leaf through her archived letters. Most of all, the house is full of her books. Hundreds of books. Books on all topics: poetry, of course, but also botany, and vegetarian cookbooks from the seventies, and field guides, travel guides, Greek theater, religion. There’s a book I keep leafing through without actually reading it. It was published in the sixties and is all about different ways to end a poem, called Poetic Closure. Lots and lots of slim volumes of poetry published in the 1980’s, by poets with impressive publications and blurbs that herald each as the next great poet of our age, poets I’ve never heard of. Books that seem to magically appear as I re-read Willard Spiegelman’s Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt: one day, I read a letter she wrote from Assisi, Italy, and it was only then that I noticed the guidebook to Assisi on the bookshelf in the dining room. Books that were actually read, by her, and are still full of penciled notes in her barely decipherable handwriting and the little slips of paper with which she kept her place.

It’s hard to believe that the collection of books in the house represents only half of the books she left behind. Her editor at Knopf, Ann Close, told me that they kept the books that seemed most appropriate for the residency. I am sad that I will leave without having read more than a few; back in August, I dreamed of reading all of them, but back in August, the days were long, and it felt as if I had a lifetime to spend here, writing and walking and reading.

I spend a lot of time wondering which of her books aren’t here.

Someone’s book collection is a version of their thumbprint, a visual map of their brain, and a writer’s book collection is especially fascinating. I always wonder how writers lead their private lives. After all, their published books of poems are art, separate from the poets. But the writers’ book collections, maybe, are where their selves and art meet, are some of the raw material that gets composted into their work.

Once, early in my residency, in a book about Greek theater, I found a note from a friend of Amy Clampitt’s. It was postmarked April, 1950. In the note, the friend thanks Amy for bringing a lobster-mushroom casserole to a recent potluck, and asks for the recipe. I have no idea whether Clampitt ever sent it to her, but I’m almost sure this is it. It’s from a book called Casserole Cookery: One Dish Meals for the Busy Gourmet, published in 1943. In the front of the book there’s a list of substitutions for rationed ingredients.

Is what goes on in the kitchen a poem? No. But I know an awful lot of poets who are great cooks, too.

Lobster and Mushooms (Time: 50 minutes)

Ingredients:
1 package frozen lobster
½ pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
¼ pound butter
3 tablespoons flour
½ cup white wine
½ cup light cream
2 eggs
salt and pepper
grated lemon peel

Melt butter, blend flour. Stir the cream in gradually; heat mushrooms in sauce; add wine (slowly), salt and pepper and lemon peel. Remove from the fire, cool slightly, and stir in the eggs. Add the lobster (slightly thawed). Turn into a low buttered casserole and bake in a medium oven (350) 30 minutes. Serves 4.

The Sun Magazine interviews Wendell Berry. Aside from his usual topics of ecology and economy, Berry touches on his method as a writer:

Fearnside: In your own writing, you seem to confront head-on the speed and thoughtlessness of contemporary society by your deliberate, thoughtful style. Do you consciously write this way?

Berry: I did make up my mind at some time that instead of trying to serve my purposes by rhetorical artifice or personal attacks, I would try to make as much sense as I could. If your cause doesn’t make sense, why defend it? Writing is a test of sense. It’s an exposure of your ideas to your own scrutiny, and then to the scrutiny of other people.

The Monocle Review’s 2nd Edition includes a report on a long-standing Beirut bookshop struggling to survive amidst political instability and changing tastes.

The review is a new video production from Monocle Magazine, a fantastic (and exquisitely beautiful) source for international news on business, culture, and design. Each issue is as thick as a book and includes an exclusive manga series. I read it religiously, although I suspect I fall short of its target demographic by about $75,000 per year.