Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.
Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.
Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.
Craigslist needs your bad poems. Craigslist needs your “Why doesn’t the quarterback/head cheerleader/quarterback and head cheerleader know my name?” poems. Your “love” rhymes with “dove” poems. Your “my anger is like a…” poems.
If you didn’t burn them or bury them in a chest on the beach, then bury the map to the chest on another part of the beach, may they find a home where the awkward turtle swims.
James Galvin’s book X holds a special place in my heart. The way he manages to do so much with so little reminds me of the power of Raymond Carver’s fiction. Throughout X, recurring themes of regret, loss and anger color the poems. The standout piece for me is “Dear Miss Emily,” one that I’ve been reading a lot lately. It takes my breath in a different place every time I read it.
Please to enjoy:
In the first poetry workshop I ever took, now several years ago, Davis McCombs told me something about ending a poem that I’ve never forgotten. A good ending, he said, should transform a poem. It should shoot back up through everything that came before. It should radiate meaning. (That’s paraphrased, but closely.) I’ve read (and attempted to write) the endings of poems differently ever since, and I always take note when I stumble across an ending that exemplifies his advice.
The latest case in point is “Holidays and Sundays by David Bottoms, which was featured a few days ago on Verse Daily. It’s the last two lines that make the poem — everything else is there in service of them. The other lines are not without merit, of course; they’re filled with Bottoms’s customary music and keen eye for narrative detail. But they also seem restrained to me, filled with purposeful quiet, much like the men they describe. They go out of their way not to get in the way.
Oh, and the Bottoms poem I’m most likely to recite from memory when drunk? “In a U-Haul North of Damascus.” No question.
Poet T.R. Hummer posted an interesting discussion on greatness in poetry and the brain chemicals associated with gambling that may explain a couple of things.
At The Millions, Emily Wilkinson describes her fascination with portraits of attractive writers, and includes several of her favorites. Above is Assia Wevill, poet and second wife of Ted Hughes.
“Carl Sandburg wrote me from Chicago, ‘It’s hell when poets can’t afford to buy each other’s books.’”
- Ezra Pound in “A Retrospect”
Mandy Brown, writer of the excellent A Working Library weblog, lays out the principles for designing good reading experiences online in a new piece for A List Apart:
Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.
I’ve read and admired A List Apart for years, and this is easily one of the best pieces they’ve published to date. Required reading.
I attended every Web-related panel at AWP this year, and one of the most insightful moments of any of them was the reading of an email exchange between Frederick Barthelme and Ralph Lombreglia. The exchange was originally published by The Atlantic in 1997, so its status as a highlight of the tech talk at a convention held 12 years later is interesting to say the least.
My favorite bit from Barthelme:
My sense is that the Web is a gun. It’s all potential, what we do with it; it’s a device, a system, a “site” in the linguistic sense, a prospect. How we use it over the next decade or two will define it. At the moment it’s politically and socially semi-neutral, uninflected, a tool for, in our case, the distribution of literary information.
Excerpts from the exchange were read at the Digi-Analog panel by Julia Johnson from the Mississippi Review, which Barthelme edits.
Advergirl offers a new collection of greeting cards with “sentiments for a broken economy.” I’m the breadwinner in my household, so the card pictured above got me where I live. It’s funny because it’s awkward. I think.
via Heather Ackmann and several others
Garth Hallberg diagrams a sentence from one of the President’s recent speeches to gather insight into his characteristic syntax and diction.
The sentence:
My view is also that nobody’s above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
My favorite bit from Hallberg:
This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls “having more than one voice in your ear.”
You may know the site Good Reads but if you don’t and you’re into books, I recommend it. “Into books” is a little different than “likes to read,” but that’ll do, too.
I know a lot of people already spend too much time on the internet — blogging, or “networking” on Facebook, or looking for guacamole recipes. Still Good Reads is an interesting place to read book reviews from aficionados and normal people and fellow poets and maybe even some readers you know in the flesh.
If you want to catalog your books of course that can take time, but you can also categorize or stick to poetry, and branch out when you feel like it. If you have a book you can plug it there. One of my favorite things is browsing people’s favorite books, and finding people I share a favorite with. (Go, Jesus’ Son! Go Green Squall!)
Readers can shelve their books according to genre and all the predictables are there like mystery and magical realism and WWII, but people create odder categories, too. I have one called “schlock,” and I’ve seen some great ones like “threw it at the wall,” “sex and baseball,” “overrated,” “sleaze,” “books that gave me a rash,” and the very enigmatic “cheryl.”
For those who can’t bear to leave the library, a perfume that smells like old books. Designer Christopher Brosius describes it thus:
The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite books — I happened to find a signed first edition of this novel a few years ago in London. I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred in the first place!
Note the 2ml bottle is only $12.00.
Some people insist every poem needs its own title, as if you were naming a baby. Personally I don’t mind if a poem goes around as “Untitled,” although, of course, a title lets the poet determine how the poem is identified. Don’t title it and you run the risk of readers coming up with something like “the poem with sleet in it,” or “the dead baby poem.” Who wants that? Luckily, default will usually kick in and the poem will be identified by its first line, à la e.e. cummings. This can be a good thing.
On the other side are poets who use the same title over and over, like Louise Glück in Wild Iris. This makes identifying the poem even harder than leaving it untitled. There’s “Matins page 2,” “Matins page 3,” page 12, 13, 25, etc. Hey, they were all good, but which one are we talking about?
In my book, anything would be preferable to calling a poem “Poem.” As if there were only one!
There’s a poet I know who hates long titles. I admit this can come off as gimmicky, but usually I find it a draw. A poem called “Poem in Which the Clairvoyant Gives In and Sells Her Internal Organs to Buy the Lycra-Like Trampoline” would pique my interest more than “Snow.” (At least initially.) The danger here is the reader enters with big expectations. If the poem is a let-down, an extraordinary title won’t save it. It will only make the let-down worse.
I thought such long titles were rare but a recent cull of Verse Daily turns up a bunch of them. If any of these intrigue you, you can read them there, and see if the poems deliver.
Mandy Brown on the future of the book:
That age has ended. We are now ushering in a new age of books which exist without any physical presence at all, which can be transmitted across oceans in moments, in which annotations and criticisms can be shared in ways no one of the seventeenth century could ever have imagined. (Indeed, ways we of the twenty-first century are only beginning to understand.) And yet we still stubbornly refer to them as “books,” tucking but a sly vowel up front (“ebook”), as if we’re afraid to really admit how much has changed. This naming convention is no less absurd than if the codex was called a “folded scroll” or the scroll a “soft, thin, rolled tablet.” Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic changes in terms.
Amen to that. I feel this absurdity whenever I describe Linebreak as an “online journal,” when it isn’t a journal at all — it’s a web site that publishes the text and audio of one new poem each week. Phrases like “online journal” and “online magazine” persist only because we have yet to acknowledge the fundamental change that occurs when an online publication stops imitating paper publications in even a modest way.
Dear publication,
I appreciate your trusting me to be among your readers. However, after careful review of your contents, I have decided your publication does not suit my current needs.
Please know I have been overwhelmed by dozens of high quality publications this month, and my resources are limited. I must often reject journals that have merit.
I regret the volume of publications available prevents me from responding in a more personal manner. I wish you luck in placing your product elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Sarah
The winter edition of From the Fishouse is online. The edition includes a selection of poems from Doug Van Gundy, who read and recorded this week’s poem for Linebreak.
Billy Mills’s Guardian column from last week provides an introductory selection of ars poeticas, though sadly it’s a bit late at this point to participate in his challenge to write and share one of your own.
One of my favorite examples of the genre is Ashley Capps’s “Ars Poetica,” available in this PDF excerpt of her first book, Mistaking the Sea For Green Fields.
In addition to Sarah J. Sloat, we have Dorianne Laux serving as a guest blogger this week. Laux has been a supporter of Linebreak from way back, and we’re delighted to have her contributing this week.
Laux has published four books of poems. The fourth, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), won the Oregon Book Award. Eastern Washington University Press reprinted Awake, her first collection, and Superman: the Chapbook is being brought out by Red Dragonfly Press. Her awards include two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The NEA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
After teaching at the University of Oregon in Eugene and Pacific University, Laux recently moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she joins the faculty at North Carolina State University. She’s married to poet Joseph Millar.
I was first brought to Laux’s poetry by the poem “Vacation Sex.” And it’s still one of my favorites.
Read more about her and her work.
When I buy a poetry book from a non-English poet, I usually prefer those with the original language on the facing page. This is pretty standard for German and the Romantic languages. It’s almost difficult to find a book of Pablo Neruda, for example, that doesn’t include the Spanish. Although I never learned Spanish, I can decipher some of it via basic Italian and French. Plus growing up in America you couldn’t really avoid acquiring some Spanish, even in deepest New Jersey.
I enjoy scanning the Spanish when reading Neruda or Lorca or whomever. My eyes sometimes jump to the opposite page just to check that this marvelousness is actually happening, as if I could find out how to do it!
If you’re interested in languages, one fun way to waste money is to buy different translations of the same poetry. I have a couple English translations of Wislawa Szymborska, and it’s a very uneven business. In one poem — Contribution to Statistics — the translator resorts to a baseball metaphor, driving me insane. I doubt Szymborska ever used a baseball metaphor. Or maybe she did. Since I don’t understand a word of Polish, how can I know? Since none of the translations I have include the Polish, I can’t set out to try.
At some point, having the original language alongside the translation loses its usefulness for everyone but a handful of readers. I recently got Lidija Dimkovska’s terrific “Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers.” Although only about a million and half people actually speak Macedonian, the publisher provides the original version of the poem. I don’t read the language, but I still looked through the poems for anything recognizable. I can only report back that they use Pantene shampoo in Macedonia.
Assault
I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not have ventured forth alone
At dusk along this unfrequented road.
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!
–Edna St. Vincent Millay from Second April, 1921
I’ve fallen in love with a poem. It happens. I go along, reading poems here and there, a journal, a rag, a broadside, a poem of the week on-line or I flip through an anthology, a book, looking for something to grab me, stop me cold. That’s what happened with this poem by Millay. I know and love another poem of hers almost as much called “Dirge Without Music”. Many know it, its rage and rant, its straight spine, head held high, refusing to approve of death. The repeated line is tough and memorable: I am not resigned.
“Assault” is a very different poem. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get it by heart. I thought I had it until I tried to recite it for my husband and stumbled. I assured him I had recited it perfectly in the shower earlier that morning, and just before sleep the night before. The difficulty in memorizing the first stanza was in the slightly odd word choice of must and should. In the first line I kept dropping the word “must”, wanting to more simply say, “I had forgotten how the frogs sound after a year of silence”. How they must sound? And then, “…else I think I should not have ventured forth…” Why not I would not have? Archaic usage? Probably. Still, the words must and should have force, imperatives that create tension and momentum. As difficult as those words made the line to memorize, I’d miss them if they weren’t there. It was helpful to remind myself that the title of the poem is “Assault”.
Oh, and then “unfrequented”. When was the last time you used that word in casual conversation?
But it’s the second stanza that really kills me. I am waylaid, waylaid, by Beauty. Of course, you could substitute the word assault there- I am assaulted by beauty. And I am, every day I walk into my backyard and look up into the 150 foot cedar that lives there, one foot stuck stubbornly in the ground, head in the clouds. And the pair of cardinals that light in its branches. Not the red you see in Hallmark paintings of cardinals, but a red like a knife slashed across your eyes. Assaulted. Waylaid. Then, my favorite line: “Who will walk between me and the crying of the frogs?” I wondered over the “who” of the poem for days. If you’re religious you might think of your god as walking between you and the kind of breath stopping beauty Millay speaks of; if you’re a romantic, a lover. Or maybe just a force: the wind, the heated air, the dust of the road rising under your footsteps. Who will protect me from this sound, share this with me, help me comprehend it, be my witness? The mystery of that line, its helplessness.
“Oh savage Beauty, suffer me to pass.” Savage, suffer. “That am a timid woman.” Timid. Difficult to think of the voice in this poem as timid, and yet, in the face of Beauty, capital B beauty, savage, waylaying Beauty, who among us would not be timid, hesitant, unsure? “On her way from one house to another.” Again, you may see the house of destination as the house of god and in another mode, as the house of death we are all walking toward, waylaid, for a moment by Beauty, so terrified by life that death seems an afterthought. You might also see the houses in a more ordinary light, leaving your own house to visit a neighbor, a friend, on a daily pilgrimage to the corner store, worried over the bills, the children, the job, then shaken free by the sound of frogs, their voices crying out to us, croaking in a language we can parse only with the heart: This is the hidden world throbbing behind the trees, pulsing in the creek, battering the air, shaking the leaves, and you belong to it.