Recently, it was brought to my attention that “there’s a certain kind of NPR nerd.”  Not only did my fiance and I get excited that there was going to be an “On Point” and “Planet Money” crossover, the written promo for the show was “On Point and Planet Money, together at last!”  At last, indeed!  We were holding our breath!  They knew we would be excited!

“Planet Money” generally has little to do with poetry or design, unless you consider the intricately designed failures of our economy to be poetic, but I’m pretty sure it’s covered under the “culture” banner.  The “Planet Money” folks produced (at least) two wrenching shows for “This American Life“ on the financial crisis: “The Giant Pool of Money” and “Bad Bank.”  They’re so good, they even find a way to make you feel bad for the guy who used to make a big show of ordering Cristal at the club before everything came tumbling down.

In the vein of “slightly more related to our site’s content,” “On Point” recently did a program on the enduring popularity of the sonnet, featuring Eavan Boland and Edward Hirsch.  How wonderful to hear Tom Ashbrook giggle at sonnets!  Enjoy.

As a reader and writer of poems, it’s difficult not to feel like a member of an endangered species– and even more difficult, perhaps, to remember it hasn’t always been this way.  I started Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey while bored in Massachusetts, and laughed out loud on reading this:

“[T]hey were still resolute in meeting, in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together.  Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining with their greatest enemies to bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up with a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.  Alas! if the heroine of one novel not be patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?   I cannot approve of it.  Let us leave to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another: we are an injured body.”

Poor Austen.  She was double damned– a woman in a male-dominated profession and sad step-cousin to the good old boys of poetry who made the new so-called “novels” look so shoddy.  Sure, Northanger Abbey is a send-up of the crappy Gothic novel, but I can’t help but hear the author grinding her teeth.

How things have changed!  Sometimes, it seems we’re living in a novelists’ world (Novelists: wouldn’t you love to have us think this is true?) and good old Dryden and Pope don’t have the cachet they once had.  Is poetry the new “injured body?”

Don’t answer that.

Gmail just advertised this link to me: “New Bad Poems Daily – Be the first to read some of the worst poems ever written“.

I’m not sure what that says about my inbox. Is it meant to be a challenge? Is it a sad, sad assessment of my work?  (I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!)

Regardless, it seemed like the kind of thing Linebreak readers would appreciate. But click at your own risk: Links sometimes take you places you never thought  you’d go. 

Then again, while ESPN might be off course, I’m assuming that most of you are readers of Linebreak and, therefore, could be -coincidentally or consequently – on first-name basis with Irish whiskey-based drinks.

Call it even?

I’m a little behind schedule when it comes to posting this interview with Katrina, true – but that’s just another excuse for you to return to “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side”, which can only lead to good things. Promise. As a refresher, Katrina Vandenberg’s first collection Atlas was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A new chapbook, On Marriage, is available now from 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. Now – on to the answers you’ve been longing for!   

***

As usual: What was the impetus for this poem? What triggered it?

I saw a production of the play Speak Truth to Power. It’s based on the testimonies of human-rights activists from all over the world, and their stories are singular and moving and brave. After, the director of Center for Victims of Torture made a speech in which he said that “courage and horror stand side by side.” I saw it, literally — characters in Everyman or the gods Jack Gilbert sometimes writes about, passing out decisions about our lives. Like most people, I’ve never found a satisfying answer to the question asked by the Book of Job, which is basically: why do good people suffer? How do we respond?

The spacing and breath accomplished by the dropped lines and drastic spacing of “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” is, of course, the reason it needed to be published in a monospace font, but it’s astounding formally, and handled with a deftness that’s rare to find in poems that attempt to use the full width of the page. Why did the poem call for this kind of form or shape? How did it occur to you?

Thanks for formatting it, by the way. I heard it took two weeks to get right. More below.

The shape of this poem on the page seems to be an atypical style for you. Did you find it a challenging form to work with? How did you approach it? What were your primary concerns?

The poem was originally had a circular structure. It ended with a couple lines that were something like: “Then let this poem be your song for them, / say the gods who hold the cosmos in their hands.” I showed the poem to Jim Cihlar, the poetry editor at Milkweed, and we talked about it cutting it back, roughing it up. He’s a sharp reader, so it’s possible he also suggested exploding it on the page, but I don’t remember.

I liked the idea of breaking open the poem, because it’s not about an orderly universe, and cosmos grow like that — they’re named for the orderly look of their blooms, but the plants themselves are vigorous and unruly, and grow anywhere . . . I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time reading a poem aloud as I was writing it, to make sure there was still some sense of there being lines.

But I was initially suspicious of whether breaking the poem made it any better. White space makes everything look significant, after all, and when I look at that poem, I still see a fairly conventional one in a slightly more dissonant form — in the same way that a lot of verses in songs by groups like the Pixies or Wilco have a slightly more dissonant “new” sound but are still fairly conventional twelve-bar chord progressions. However, I enjoyed doing it, and writers should trust pleasure.

One aspect of your poem that truly impressed us was that the lines in “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” really seem to be lines – provocative units of sense. How important was this to you in composing this poem? How do you judge a line as a line?

A line, Miller Williams said in class, is a unit of sound, sense, and syntax, and that is how I will think of a line forever. In 2006, I heard Billy Collins on NPR, talking about how the University of Arkansas Press published his first book, and how much he learned about poetry from Miller — the press founder and his editor — during the editing process. Apparently Miller taught Collins the same definition of a line, because I was making dinner as I listened, and caught myself reciting it along with Collins.

Rote knowledge is useless if you stop there, but it often makes an excellent foundation. You can bend it, contradict it, explore its gray areas, turn it on its head, but I’ve found it easier to do all that when you begin holding some concrete ideas in your hand. I’m glad I had teachers who made me write 300 lines of blank verse, be articulate about 16th-century sonneteers. My teachers left out tons of writers I wouldn’t — anyone who wrote after the 60s, writers from other countries, women writers, writers of color, just for starters — and I don’t write formal poems much anymore, but I still think about that principle of “sound, sense, syntax,” maybe especially when my lines don’t look like ones I was taught to make. So many of the more experimental visual artists and musicians I admire departed, knowledgeably, from tradition.

Another question about the form or shape of this poem: It strikes me that the dramatic spacing of the poem – both horizontal and vertical – keeps the reader’s eye from moving too easily across the language. However, it seems as though the poem can be read in multiple patterns while still maintaining its strength. Was this something that you considered, or did it occur naturally? How do you feel about the lines being read in alternate orders?

I didn’t think about alternate readings. If you can read it in multiple ways and it’s meaningful, great. Whoever makes the art has to let it go.

In this poem, the gods are actively involved in human lives – “…the gods who / dole out fates…” – but they are also presented as inherently and naturally distanced, which I see in the parallelism of the lines “The gods are busy. / The cosmos are lavender.” How do you see this tension working in the poem? What does this disjunction mean to you personally, if anything?

I like “the gods.” They seem nearly fictional to our cultural mind-set, which gave me more room to move around in the poem than a monotheistic God might. And I’ve always — liked might not be the right word — the way the ancient gods were multiple and had egos and personalities. They were fallible, could take pity, get angry. I wanted that capriciousness. They are irrational, and they are in charge.

That’s why the massage therapist’s response means so much to me: she can’t control the rapist, but because she prays to be in control of her response, she inadvertently succeeds in scaring him. Perhaps if she had prayed to scare him away, it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know. I think he gets scared because he can tell he doesn’t have her.

A lot of poets I know are wrestling with how to portray injustice. We are more aware than ever that we live in an increasingly-crowded planet with scarce water supplies and great wealth disparities, in which there is genocide and mass rape — it wasn’t a kind of poetry many of us were taught to write. The poets I know feel as if they’re trying to build a way to talk about these things, from the ground up.

There are a number of characters in this poem – the gods, the speaker, the “you”, the boyfriend, the rapist, the massage therapist. For the most part, they’re kept straight – which is an accomplishment in and of itself – but while we can assume the gods are speaking through italics in the line,”And did you sing for your enemies?”, I’m wondering who answers them by saying, “No.”

The “you” says “no.” I hope that one way to read the poem is that it is the unsung song for the enemy, but it’s okay if you don’t read it that way.

The simplicity of that answer, and the significant variation in syntax that comes with the answer “No”, followed by the statement that “The gods are busy” lends a lot of heft to that response, as though the two are somehow related, as though that’s the moment the gods become disinterested in the voice that answers. How do you see or feel this moment? What about singing for one’s enemies intrigues you poetically or personally?

At that moment, I see the gods as preoccupied parents, though I didn’t want them to seem all-benevolent, or even parent-like. Perhaps they want the speaker to learn to sing for her enemies, and she’s not yet ready, so they go on.

I’m really interested in compassion and forgiveness. Learning how to truly forgive someone (and whether — I had a long talk with a poet-friend this week, about whether or not “forgiveness” is sometimes a euphemism for taking abuse), is one of the biggest tasks people have. Like a lot of people, I’m not very good at knowing what to do with my anger. I don’t write angry poems well; other poets do.

Having seen an earlier version of this poem, one that featured even more dramatic spacing, I’m wondering how you felt about condensing the lines for the purpose of publication? How did you go about this? What was lost and what was gained?

I pulled in the right margin and took it from there. Most of it was intuitive. The poem’s easier to read now, which I initially had mixed feelings about. But I initially miss most things I cut, then cease to notice.

Also, you originally had reservations about publishing this poem – if I’m remembering correctly. While we’re ecstatic you chose to let us go ahead, what were your reservations?

Part of the rape narrative really happened. The event was years ago, and I’ve never met the woman, but because she’s a real person who lives with it every day, I wanted time to examine my conscience. There was a chance I had learned a detail I used while acting in a position of trust, and if I had, I didn’t feel I could publish the poem. Finally, I called a local journalist; when I learned that the detail had been published in the newspaper at the time, I felt I could let go of the poem.

We could probably have a lively discussion about what details of other people’s lives are free for writers to “take.” When I was in grad school, I learned that pretty much everything’s fair game; at CVT, we talk about the importance of clients owning their stories; hospice nurses talk about “vulnerable adults.” I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer, especially given that the Internet makes a poem so much more public than it might have been, published in a small magazine, ten years ago. I don’t think the Internet makes us less private, by the way. Instead, we’re creating new kinds of shields to suggest openness while maintaining a different kind of privacy.

Generally speaking – and imagine this in the voice of a six-year old girl – Where do poems come from?

Reading other poems? Living in your body, in the physical world? A lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness? Strange juxtapositions. Taking the figurative literally. Generally speaking, if I knew, I don’t think I’d like writing as much, but I could write faster.

Who are your most important influences, the poets to whom you return again and again? How much sway do contemporary poets hold with you?

I’m a fickle reader. I envy people who love a poet or two above all others, and pattern themselves after that poet. But somewhere in my past I’ve had Donne phases, Keats phases, Whitman, Milosz, O’Hara, Bishop, Larkin, Levis, Simic, McGrath, Rilke, Strand, Zagajewski, Berryman phases. James Wright was the first poet who really meant something to me, as a college kid in Ohio. But mostly I obsess over single poems, one after the other, and I always seem to find just the one I need.

Contemporary poetry is amazing in its variety, playfulness, and fascinating associative leaps. How could I not respond, somehow, to the poetry of my own time? It seems pointless to fight about schools of poetry, though, as if only one kind could or should exist, when we, and our responses to the world, are so varied. One quality I greatly admire about the MFA program at Hamline, where I teach, is that the faculty introduce students to a diverse body of writing.

However much I read, I wish I could read more. I try to read new books from Twin Cities presses, especially — Milkweed, Coffee House, Graywolf — and like reading very new books and older ones simultaneously. Recently I co-read Brenda Shaughnessy’s Human Dark with Sugar and Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poems, which resulted in a very good writing week.

What was the first poem you read? How did it affect you? How and when did you realize that you wanted to be a poet? What was your response?

An Emily Dickinson one, in third grade. I remember being happily uncomfortable with the way “gown” and “on” didn’t exactly rhyme, and the poem making me happy and sad at the same time. I found it in a textbook we’d been given to use for only that morning, I loved the poem, and I was afraid I’d never find it again once my teacher collected the books. So it also became the first poem I ever memorized.

Finally, our Rock-Star question, but extended: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it? What about the first time you made any money from poetry? What’d you do then? Any advice for those expecting their first checks?

I won a $44,000 Bush Artist Fellowship in 2005. It let me take time off teaching, write my next manuscript, read a lot, volunteer at the Center for Victims of Torture, apply to places like MacDowell. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I got the best piece of advice about the $1,000-or-so first-book advance from Natasha Trethewey via Dan Albergotti: Don’t use it to make a car payment. Buy something you can keep, something you normally wouldn’t buy. I think Dan bought some first-edition Jack Gilberts when he won the Poulin. I bought our house a twenty-volume set of Oxford English Dictionaries.

And, this isn’t poetry, but in high school, I won $50, second place, in a local story-writing contest. I wish I could find you the photo they took for the newspaper; I have really big hair in it. I learned later, from a PTA member, that the panel had decided that my story was too depressing to win first prize.

An Interview with Sally Molini

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

When I’m back in Boston, moving every few days between the South Shore and Route 2, I spend more time than is healthy listening to NPR.  Surely, my 8 year old self is scratching at the windows in horror, saying “this is boring, you guys.”

However, Robin Young did a wonderful piece on Carl Sandburg’s guitar last week, and it’s a great listen.  It’s at the bottom of the page for the 6/12 show.  Apparently, Sandburg was an accomplished folk singer.  Who knew?  Not only that, but the guitar’s for sale.  Poets, get out your penny jars.

Here’s the wonderfully improbable picture of Sandburg with Marilyn Monroe that’s discussed in the piece:

Many thanks to Daniel Nester (as well as all of the guest bloggers we’ve had over the past few weeks) for bringing the wit and profundity.  It’s much appreciated!

Confession: I have watched the broader-than-broad comedy Caddyshack two, three, four times, every year, since its release in 1980.

I have often asked myself: What is it that draws me to watching this movie more than 50 times, far more than any other movie I have seen?

Part of it has to be nostalgia. It’s an amorphous term, nostalgia, and one I don’t feel like dealing with completely. It’s a word one has to deal with when one thinks about a movie released when one is 12 years old. It’s also kind of boring.

But I also have this inchoate idea that the movie lifts me out of early-spring doldrums, which I tend to have. Unlike many who feel ebullient when the weather turns, I feel the need to stay inside, play records, read, sulk. I have never been able to explain this.

Somewhere in the mix lies Caddyshack, directed by Harold Ramis, who would go on to direct Groundhog Day, Analyze This and That, and this summer’s  Year One.

One of my projects this summer is to write a full-fledged essay about this. Now, other writers have written about Caddyshack. There’s the Book of Caddyshack that is chockful of interesting anecdotes and scene-by-scene analysis. Literary lion George Plimpton penned an occasional piece as well. And I’ve already written a sonnet, “Caddyshackesque,” which appears here on Linebreak. That poem alludes to some of the things I want to write about: how the movie reminds me of Northrop Frye’s idea of the “Green World” of Shakespeare, for example.  I’ve also been researching comedy in general, the poetics of listlessness, and the changing critical perception of the film. The New York Times‘ film critic Vincent Canby, for example, famously dismissed Caddyshack in his piece “The Golden Age of Junk” as “immediately forgettable.”

Me, I can’t forget Caddyshack. So I have this project going for me.  Which is nice.

***
I’d like to thank the kind folks at Linebreak for having me this week as their guest blogger.  It’s one of my favorite literary journals, and I think they do a great job here.  I almost typed the word “knob”; I always do that.

I don’t normally blog so much as shamelessly self-promote over at my own personal website, so it’s been cool to actually blog here. I will be back around October or November to coincide with the release of my next book, How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous noncition, which I urge you all to pre-order, order upon release, then order again.

OK, I’ll stop.

Just Call Me Beastmaster of the Morning

My clout sweeps backwards as I run, girded with a sash of garnets.
Sapphires set ablaze by the fire and light of my movement.
And of course I run vertically, dumbass—of course I face forward and down.
Jesus Christ—that’s just the way you do it— not face up or side-saddled,
side-Earthed, if you prefer. So as you draw my extruded arms
and waves and  bubbles, my companions remain surprised at my world
into which I am drawn.  Listen up, mortals, gather round me
as I caw caw caw while small mammals bite me,
for I am in their wise company, for this Beastmaster
will prepare meal for you. He will assign seating according to your hair.

– from The History of My World Tonight

If you’re in New York, this is a can’t miss!

The breakdown for this year’s festival is:

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E. 6th St.)
Boog City Classic Albums Live will kick off the festival with local musical acts performing, for its 10th anniversary, The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Among those partaking:

Ben Krieger
Dream Bitches
Gracefully
The Trouble Dolls
Andrew Philip Tipton
Genan Zilkha

and more

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 P.M.
ACA Galleries (529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr., bet. 10th/11th aves.)
This is the first date of season seven of our d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press series, where each month we have a different non-NYC small press host its authors and a musical act.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E.6th St.)
We’ll have poets, smaller musical acts, full bands, and theater performances.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
Poets and musical acts performing nonstop during our 6th annual small, small press fair, which will also have readings from poets representing the exhibiting presses. The day will also feature two poets in conversation with each other.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
We’ll close the festival with more poets and musical acts performing, sandwiched around a discussion.

The poets who will give readings on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Ammiel Alcalay
Sandra Beasley
Mike County
Jim Dunn
Eric Gelsinger
Hailey Higdon
Paolo Javier
Paul Foster Johnson
Basil King
Martha King
Brendan Lorber
Dan Machlin
Justin Marks
Tracey McTague
Ryan Murphy
Elinor Nauen
Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Nick Piombino
Joanna Sondheim
Ryan Walker
Dana Ward
Lewis Warsh
Karen Weiser
Dan Wilcox
Angela Veronica Wong

and more

On Saturday, Anselm Berrigan and Buck Downs will be reading and in conversation with one another.

On Sunday there will be a discussion on politics, poetics, and community curated and moderated by longtime Boog contributor Greg Fuchs

The musical acts who will perform solo sets on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Dorit
Gracefully
Serena Jost
Phoebe Kreutz
Alan Semerdjian
The Lo and the Lonesome

and more

Please email editor@boogcity.com for additional information.

Click play to to hear Siblings, Seagulls, Seatides, as read by the guest blogger’s mother, Patricia McCabe

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Boy my brothers are weird.
Hmm, but it’s mostly Charlie and Timmy that’s weird.
One of my brothers are weird. Hmmm.
This isn’t making much sense, but
Laughing gulls aren’t weirder than my brothers.
Um, no–don’t put that.
Hmm, wait I have one.
Uh-uh.
Now the seatide is coming in.
Yeah, my brothers are drowning–but not Charlie.
But Charlie got shot by a nuclear torpedo that was launched into space. Johnny and Timmy lived inside the submarine that shot the torpedo.

Charlie is a smelly poop-bag. Siblings
tend to shoot nuclear submarine torpedoes at each other and call each other poop-bags.
The seagulls will feast on their dead flesh after I destroy them with an atom bomb.
But Charlie forgot he was in space.
Hmm.
Timmy makes grunts and slobbers very much like my childhood dog, Snuffy.
Maybe Timmy is Snuffy.
Timmy was soon put to sleep and then reincarnated as a seagull.

Update from Johnathon [4:50 p.m.]: Yes, we have the technology.

Dirty Frank’s bar, Philadelphia. Photo from tatyana jula’s Flickr.

After Shame

In a damp bar full of old men
she places my hand on her head
just on top of a bulge on her skull—
a bump really, and my stomach sours,
humbled to be across from her, drinking beer with
an abbreviated unicorn.  I swirled kinks
of hair on that knob.  Just so you know, she said.
Which I thought was odd, even
presumptuous, and I felt dead, drawing
my hand back in a jerk.

COMMENTARY TO THE FIRST STANZA
I don’t know why she showed me her bumpy head.
She went off and became a painter,
a good one really, who liked to show groups of kids
languid and calm after playing all afternoon.
After I looked around in her room
she never spoke to me again,
the forbidden knowledge of what deforms us
forgotten until now.  It must be age.
Shame can only be given in particulars.
I tell these stories to explain why people stop liking me.

– first published in Hollins Critic, 2001; also from The History of My World Tonight

Not the actual ceramic apple, but an approximation.

The Ceramic Apple

From deep inside the ceramic apple
on top of the family fridge, I noodle out
a photo, hidden for years.  The Fourth of July
parade, Maryville, Tennessee, the eastern tip
of the state, visiting relatives.  I was a punky kid
with long bangs, and sulked on the curb,
skinny legs wide-flung in shorts,
watching bands march by. I refused to smile.
Both of my hairless balls were hanging out
in the snapshot, and were visible from across the street.
Why did my mom keep this embarrassment,
tucked under tacks and spare birthday candles?
Whole color guards must have passed, distracted
by my sagging family jewels. I was reunited
at last with distant cousins.  Like Dicky Bird Nester.
He was cool.  He had a speedboat
and was my new hero.  I told Dicky Bird
about junior high band, and how I played trombone,
the cruelest instrument for a pubescent
boy to play.  The slide was always
barreling out, jutting, knotted, protruding.  I still know
one song, the bass part
to that damn Coke commercial,
“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,”
when everyone held candles, singing,
beaming for the camera.

–first published in Mudfish, 1997

While Daniel’s already done us the courtesy of posting a meet-and-greet post, and has been wonderfully active over the past 48 hours – posting about Gene Simmons impersonators, required reading, why Mick Jagger’s not afraid, and the assessment of assessment – we’ve hardly done him justice with an introduction proper. 

The thing you really ought to know about Daniel is that he’s published, not one, but two poems on Linebreak: “Stardust Memories” and “Caddyshackesque“, both of which are worth reading again. And again. 

But, in addition to those two fine accomplishments, he’s the author of How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009), a book of humorous nonfiction, God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, prose collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVox, 2006), a book of poems. His work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and The Best American Poetry 2003, among other places. Also: He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Keep on reading those prolific posts as Daniel sets a new – and intimidating – standard of productivity for guest bloggers. Lovely!

The local Burning Chair reading series is hosting a poetry reading in Fayetteville, AR that will feature one of Linebreak’s poets: Farrah Field, who wrote “Matilda Stays Up Late With No Questions to Ask” will be reading with Jared White at “an undisclosed location” that turns out to be at 3996 N. Frontage Road, #2.

The reading will happen Friday, June 12 starting at 6:30. While you should bring your own date, there will be free refreshments. Over at Burning Chair, they evidently understand how important free food can be to drawing a crowd of poets.

Here’s a map:

For more information, contact Matt Henriksen at frankstandfordfest@gmail.com or check out the Burning Chair blog. Hope to see you there!

That is actually Andy.

Found Poem: Gene Simmons Impersonator
From Tribute: A Rockumentary

A lot of Genes—
and I don’t want
to name names here—
get caught up in
the character
and forget who they
are. It’s a trip—
you know you’re
looking out to
the audience
and they’re looking
at you—but you’re
not you—you’re
someone else—and
that’s a weird
connection—because
when I’m looking
at them I’m
someone else—and
I hope you’re
buying into
this. It’s easy
to sink into
it. But last night
when I saw Dave
do his Gene, I
knew we could move
on without Andy.

– first published in The Dead Horse Review, 2007

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature | Beyond The Beyond.

All eighteen deserve mulling over, but it’s the last that’s the most enigmatic: “The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.”

1. Douglas Rothschild’s Theogeny.  Douglas’s poetic family tree comes from second- and third-wave Language poets and fourth- and fifth-wave New York School.  That’s his poetic DNA. The result, however, is a kind of poem that is straightforward, found, outsider, schooled, subversive, arch, and tender, often all at the same time. In person, even Douglas would admit he’s a complete eccentric (just look at the above photo, taken from his book launch, all zoot suited and making rolls out of quarters for one of his jobs, running a couple of laundromats); he is also a died-in-wool poet.  I’m hard-pressed to think of a post-Language, post-NY Schooler who can write a poem feeling and human/e presence.

2. Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic. Imagine a cross of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s 52 Projects, and you have Writing the Life Poetic. If you are teaching poetry to high school or undergraduate students, I suggest you consider adopting this puppy. Check out the book’s website here.

I used to think it was cheesy to call writing a “practice”: it seemed so yoga, so crunchy granola.  Then I did yoga, and then I started to eat and enjoy crunchy granola.  Oh, and then I also started teaching, and using terms such as “practice” and “deep listening” made more sense, made connections to students, moreso at first than, say, “objective correlative” and “negative capability.”  I save those cans of critical whoop-ass for later.

Anyway, there’s an idea that to teach poetry, at least to the beginning writer, means you have to in some sense “trick” the student into thinking they are not writing poetry, that they are really practicing, doing drills, running laps, all for the show, that never quite happens or arrives. And, whammo: those same people have written poems. They didn’t see it coming.

And that’s perhaps the common ground among these two quite different projects: in one, we have poems transcribed in part from voice mails, scrawlings on note books from the subway; and in another, we have a writer-teacher outlining just what it might take to enter that mindspace in which voice mails and writing in notebooks might lead to the life poetic.  Both present poetry as a lifestyle choice. I suggest you get both and enjoy.

Mick Jagger Is Not Afraid And Neither Should You Be
for Ross Martin

there is a way a certain notion of moving that will make
you immune to any real criticism for instance a simple
pirhouette in perfect time on the one-count of most of what
passes for rock music harold bloom would be the only person
who would disagree with me here but what does he
know about movement the man is a freakin planet anyway
how in the fuck would he move he’s so large and in charge
when most of us see mick move even on a huge screen
it’s a spirit we’ve all lost to artifical tans and synchronized
swimming maybe some of those in the hollywood nostalgia
camp would like what’s going on but not mick even on screen
he’s understated in a way most of us could only hope to be
when he juices up a lame composition it’s like no other or
when he tries to put out solo albums that are distinctly modern
it’s exempt from what most of us would call lame or the anxiety
of being like him because he’s well he’s him for chrissakes there’s
no influence involved and so I said to my friend ross there is no
reason to be afraid of reading your work in public even when
other guys are trying to be modern with cool-ass shirts why because
mick jagger is not afraid and neither should you be

–first published in LIT, #7, 2003

“The Rapid Head to Toe Assessment Song.”

So imagine your courageous guest blogger enconsed in his attic office, leafing through final seminar papers–anonymized, of course–and assessing them.  I should say, rather, that I am assessing said papers in order to help my department self-assess the job we do.  In order to do that, we must assess the students’ work.

Assessment, for you non-academics out there, is a quite the buzzword these days. It’s not just in the No Child Left Behind spheres of elementary and secondary education; no, it has spread to undergraduate and graduate college education.

Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association, wrote an article in the MLA Newsletter called “Assessment Changes Everything” that addresses  how and what academics should do with assessment tools, learning outcomes, all that jazz.  (A version of that piece appears on Inside Higher Ed.)

Assessment–by which I mean statistics, proof-of-concepts, number-crunching, multi-phase studies–has become the way teachers of all stripes prove their worth and success, and that is certainly no exception in the humanities. “We make a huge mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in intellectual work,” Graff quotes University of Pittsburgh professor David Bartholomae. “We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.”

Still, as Graff says, “excellent teaching in itself doesn’t guarantee an excellent education.” A student might not be ready for that literary theory course, or another has taken advanced poetry too late in his or her academic career to really give it a chance. Assessment tools, those rubrics and checklists and tests we administer and take, at least at this point, don’t take too many of those variables and others into account.

I don’t have the answers, but when assessing students as well as myself, the one word I try to remember, one that has also entered the cultural zeitgeist lately, is this: empathy. I have yet to see empathy factor into, say, grammar skills. But it does and it should.  President Obama was taken to task by many a pundit for using that quality as a barometer for his selection of Sonia Sotomayor for as Supreme Court justice. I fall on the empathy side of assessment.

Anyway, back to assessing.

Hello Linebreakers. This is a first post meet-and-greet-type post. I will post a couple more things today and this week as your guest blogger for the mighty Linebreak, a journal I greatly admire and, as a former editor myself, quite jealous of its success.

A bunch of 8-tracks, many of which I still own.

I am leaving tomorrow for the beach–the whole family is going for a week to a great house we found in Pensacola, Florida, right on the Gulf. One thing I don’t understand about Florida is that I can never find decent seafood in a restaurant.

Usually, I stress over the preparation for this week, but as I load the car up tonight, I am noticing that this year I have embraced a much more relaxed attitude about packing. Rather than checking each item off of a list before I place it into a suitcase, this year I find myself saying, I think I packed bathing suits.

I don’t care. I am just ready to hit the beach and relax. I have packed all sorts of books I won’t read.

I always say I am going to do it, but this year I am going to get a t-shirt air brushed with a line of poetry–Neruda, Redneck Riviera style.  “I” (pink) “am of the earth” purple writing, glitter starburst, “and with words” black bubble letters “I sing.” pink again, with a star dotting the i.

My son has been begging for this beach towel since last year when he spotted it in a shop window–obviously the answer is no.