In Doty’s presentation of the DCAL Medal to Rich, he noted, “Her lived commitment to questioning and revealing the structures of power and how we live within them turns out to be the deep rock shelf under her work.” Rich’s acceptance speech echoed these words: “I am both a poet and one of the everybodies of my country. I live in poetry and daily experience with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion, and social antagonism huddling together on the fault line of an empire.”

Patricia Smith writes:

Let’s just say I lied to America, and singlehandedly ruined journalism for all time.

I was a demon, a lightning rod, a circumstance, the downfall. I’d been fired from my job, publicly flogged, pointed at, pointed to. I was the news. Someone on CNN muttered the wretched four syllables of my name. Panicked in the sudden flood of limelight, my husband at the time left skid marks getting away. My mother was ashamed at her church. I think she denied knowing me.

Look it up if you’re curious. This is not the place for that story, but there is much, much story if you care to explore. You will see me differently when you are done. But you will see me. 

And you will know the woman who ventured home in the midst of this, hungry for the warm clutches of Chicago.

Chicago. I was raised up on the West Side, first generation up north, and it is that locale and that time came to define me. I was the gangly little colored girl who opened the dictionary and started with “A,” repeating and memorizing, stunned by the way words pried open my world, determined to own every one of them. After all, everything I laid eyes upon was expected to fail—my neighborhood, my school, my mother, my father. But language dazzled me, entered my body, became both hurt and hallelujah. It screeched otherwise. I wanted all of it, wanted to hurl it at every day’s blank canvas, wanted its riotous colors. I wanted to live in the center of its stories. Being who I was, where I was, I was born to fail, but words taught me to live beyond my boundaries. I believe it’s called defying the odds. 

Until the odds defeated me. Look it up. Let’s just say I handed the words all the power that I had. I allowed them to rename me. And the world as I knew it imploded. I locked myself in the smallest rooms, swilled biting spirits, and shoveled oily food into my mouth, desperate to change my shape. Depression swirled through the core of my body. I slept desperately, waking to sweat and a discussion of my sins on morning radio. Convinced that days would spin brighter without me, I held a gun in my hand. Its chill, clunky weight was an answer. 

But Chicago knows her girl. As I balanced on the edge of an end, she called me, said Come home, chile like a mother, like a warm wall. Poetry was the only language I hadn’t betrayed, and Chicago wanted to hear my voice, whole and possible, it wanted rhythm, it wanted breath from me. My friends, knowing the outline of what I’d held in my hand, wanted to know I would not die.

What kind of poet was I? Fresh from the slam, teetering on that line between making a splash and living my passion. Reading poems like reading poems was food. Come home, meet this woman, read with her, and the woman was Adrienne Rich, and I suppose right here I should tell you how Adrienne Rich saved my life.

The Chicago Cultural Center is a massive, high-ceilinged, glitter-tiled place, and I didn’t know her before we both found ourselves there, and we said hello, friendly but formal at first, and then she pulled me to her and held me there, her fingers pressing into the backs of my shoulders, she held me just long enough for both of us to know. And that evening I read my poems like reading my poems was food, every word took on a new, and I gasped my stories and there she was, small and glaring love at me from the front row, hating me for giving up, daring me forward. And I swept the room with my eyes and saw friends who clutched me hard before I was a headline, people who remembered how language was bone. And then this woman, Adrienne, took the stage and wrecked me with narrative, dismantled and rebuilt me, brought me home. 

We became friends after that. A friendship built upon a fracture.

That night after the reading, I stumbled into the restroom and wept myself stupid, snorting snot and saying some words aloud and cursing that woman for making me remember

the weapon of language coiled inside my body

that I was a woman still, and a woman’s whole voice is weather 

Patricia Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including the newly-released Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah; Blood Dazzler, chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and one of NPR's top five books of 2008; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Tin House, and both Best American Poetry 2011 and Best American Essays 2011. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition's history. She is a professor at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island, and is on the faculty of both Cave Canem and the MFA program of Sierra Nevada College.

Patrick Rosal writes:

The Making of a Difficult World 

A patriot…

I voted for George Bush in 1988. I was 19. I got kicked out of college a second time. It was the same year Clint Eastwood, my childhood hero from “The Outlaw Josie Wales” and “Dirty Harry,” directed “Bird,” which drove me towards the records of Charlie Parker—I wore “Ornithology” down to a crackle on wax. Same year, I cut class every week with a basketball in my trunk and hit the outdoor campus courts, more for fistfights than the runs themselves.

A patriot is a citizen…

Of course, Bush won. And 1988: that was the year that Adrienne Rich began to write An Atlas of the Difficult World.

Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference…

Here, she says, are the suburbs of acquiescence—whose streets I knew well. (By nine I’d ride a half block off our tree-lined street and head not a quarter mile down the county road to pass the truck ramps at Revlon and Fedders—now closed; if I pedaled southwest along the same stretch, the Ford auto plant—shut down now too—lay just past U.S. Route 1). Rich’s poem maps out a landscape of collisions, crossfade, quick cut and splice. 

This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water…

Though I was American, there was no country I knew that would take me, none to accommodate my rage. No nation, you could say, but violence itself… or, maybe, poetry. It was 1988. For the next half decade my anger would grow faster than any language I could acquire in order to record or transform it.

…locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside… 

Edison, New Jersey, heading south on our block, up the hill, another county road, four lanes across with a grass divider, led to what used to be army barracks. An eight-foot fence of iron pikes painted black picketed the sidewalk all the way to the plastics plant. As kids, we scaled that fence, flipped our scrawny legs over, and dumped ourselves into a huge blacktop lot: missile casings lined up for some hundred yards. Sometimes we would just stand there looking at the rows. We ran our fingers along their shells’ smooth bodies. We played among them. We were never chased out. 

“An Atlas of the Difficult World” names the wardens of silence, but also the political being I would eventually choose to be…

A patriot is trying, Rich writes, to remember her true country.

I used to cover our piano with a bed sheet and slide my hands underneath to practice II-V-I changes in various inversions, hoping I could play one day like Dodo Marmarosa. Hours later, I could choke a kid so his spine bent back over a flimsy second-floor banister. Let him up, Pat. Let him up… Or I could be one of about three dozen half-time roughnecks who burst out a bar to flood the intersection of Livingston and George Street, cracking each other in the nose until the red hatchets of police lights chased us out. And don’t we read maps, in part, by legends? What’s the story anyway? I thought. It was 1988. What’s a boy to do with his hands…

… bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish…

I was a young man, a kid really, who felt radically about love and justice but had no way to name that feeling let alone describe what that meant in civic or intellectual terms, a boy who knew something about the good exile of music and the terrifying wonderment of art but who had no way to make peace or sense of his estrangement from a nation to which he was obliged a particular kind of patriotic love.

…and he experiences his first kindness, someone to strain with him,
to strain to see him as he strains to be himself,
someone to understand, someone to accept the regard,
the love, that desperation forces into hiding.
…no one responds to kindness, no one is more sensitive to it
than the desperate man

Rich’s poems in An Atlas of the Difficult World and my numerous reckless withdrawals into personal violence and the comforts of ignorance belong to a time—down to the year. I didn’t know that my own desperation might correspond to something or someone else. It was 1988, the year I’d begun to confront my own terror and my own sensuality.

A patriot is a citizen trying to wake…

It was certainly not the last year I would thoughtlessly fulfill an obligation. But I look back now and consider that all my bewilderment might indeed have been the beginning of awe. The making of my poetic life was the making of my political life. The difficulty of the world is the difficulty of connecting the personal and particular to the public record. (What’s a civic institution got to do with a kiss?) It was 1988. And the making of my poetic life could not have happened without the work of Adrienne Rich.

Epilogue

California; March 2000.

I’m 31. Have been reading/writing poems for six years. Dropped $250 from my dwindling 400-dollar bank account to fly from Jersey to L.A. 

Childhood friend, Phil, is a pharma rep on a trip to Marina del Ray. We meet at his hotel. On our way down to dinner we enter the elevator where a boy, maybe four, with his back to his father, examines his yellow plastic pistol. He is shooting at the doors as we drop one floor. When the doors open, Adrienne Rich enters. The boy begins to shoot her with his imaginary bullets. The child is not rambunctious but matter of fact. The father pats the boy on the shoulder. The late West Coast light is bright off the marina’s waters and through the glass. This is the America that confounds me. The boy is firing away. Which one in the sun-filled elevator is ruffian? Which one the man in the good blue suit? Which one poet, which one father, which one boy with the gun? Where is the America I refuse to wrestle with or love? Which one do I dare not write down?

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?

Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive. His poems and essays have appeared widely, including in Tin House, The American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review. He has won, among other honors, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. He is a member of the Creative Writing faculty at Rutgers University-Camden.

Suzanne Gardinier writes:

In 1999 Adrienne and I worked together on what became her Arts of the Possible; one afternoon we met to talk over the manuscript in a borrowed room on Central Park South, where we could see the statues of the Latin American revolutionaries from the window. At one point we were talking about a world beyond the "savagely fathered and unmothered world" her book described and struggled with―"where the new could be delivered," she wrote later in "Midnight Salvage," in a draft she sent―and in the book it became "where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it"―and I said something like "We wouldn't recognize it―the new world would be too strange to us, it would be for our children and grandchildren"―and she looked at me and gestured with her chin out the window and said, "What if everyone out there had a place to sleep tonight," and my eyes filled with tears, at this thought that of course wasn't strange at all. She had a way of finding cowardice and despair and illusion and not dreaming big enough, and a way of taking it apart, with her acuity and her fury and her tenderness, which often began with those revolutionary words she loved: What if.

Here she is on Dickinson, in "The Spirit of Place":

with the hands of a daughter I would cover you
from all intrusion even my own
saying rest to your ghost

with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands
open or closed as they prefer to lie
and ask no more of who or why or wherefore

with the hands of a mother I would close the door
on the rooms you've left behind
and silently pick up my fallen work 

Suzanne Gardinier is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Iridium & Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow Press), and a book of essays on poetry and politics, A World That Will Hold All the People (U of Michigan Press). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Manhattan.

Martha Collins writes:

In fall 2007, FIELD magazine devoted its annual print symposium to the poetry of Adrienne Rich. The following is a slightly revised version of the anonymous introduction I wrote for that feature, to which several poets contributed essays on individual poems. The most difficult change I made in revising this short piece was shifting from the present perfect to the past tense, from has become to became.

Beginning in 1951, when she received the Yale Younger Poets award at the age of twenty-one for A Change of World, Adrienne Rich’s work was characterized—in practice, awareness, intention, and effect—by expansive change. Some of the changes seemed dramatic, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when even women who rarely read poetry found in Diving into the Wreck and The Dream of a Common Language a radical new voice. But change was, for Rich, a process of expanding, not supplanting.

As Marilyn Hacker has noted, Rich did not so much abandon the accomplished formalism of her early poems as build on it. And when, following the books mentioned above, Rich opened herself to both personal and political concerns that transcended gender in Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), she was not turning from the feminism of the past twenty years but rather extending the idea of what “the dream of a common language” might mean. After that, the poems moved beyond nation to world, as the 1991 title An Atlas of the Difficult World suggests, taking in more and more of what a 1993-1994 note calls “the continuing pressure of events.”

But Rich’s concerns were not limited to the political turmoil of the present: no poet has used historical materials more thoroughly than she, and none has looked more consistently toward the future. “I wear my triple eye as I walk along the road / past, present, future are all at my side,” she wrote in “Calle Visión” (1992-1993).

In expanding her territory, both geographically and temporally, Rich made way for a wealth of materials that include prose, journal-like entries, and extensive quotation from non-literary as well as literary sources, as well as the techniques of photography, film and collage. At the same time, she remained deeply conscious of poetic traditions and forms, among them the sonnet and the ghazal. That both of these forms are practiced sequentially is significant: poems in sections, or sequences of poems, became a trademark of Rich’s work.

Ultimately, Rich’s inclusiveness comes not from a facile vision of universal likeness and wholeness, but rather its opposite: the earliest poems address the tension between perfection and imperfection, and acknowledge that “We are split, / Done into bits” (“The Insomniacs”). It is precisely by acknowledging splittings, tensions, binary oppositions—between men and women, between art and life, between the powerful and the powerless, between the personal and the political, between tradition and change, between the poet and the reader—that Rich helps us to overcome them.

If there are more reasons than ever to despair of such a project, Rich is ultimately a poet of great hope. A poem from the 2007 collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, defines what she has done for generations of readers, including those who have followed her work for decades and those who are discovering poems that were written before they were born. What Adrienne Rich has written for 56 years are “poem[s] with calipers to hold a heart / so it will want to go on beating.”

Martha Collins is the author of White Papers, which was published by Pittsburgh in January, as well as the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems and two collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship. Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

Lighthead                   

By Terrance Hayes

Original and Current Publisher: Penguin Books        

Katie Peterson writes: 

It’s hard to know where to start talking about Terrance Hayes’ 2010 National Book Award-winning collection Lighthead because there’s just so much in it. Love poems sit next to poems about African American history: in fact, they sit inside poems about African American history. Poems about music accompany family narratives—or rather talking about music makes it possible for the poet to talk through family narratives. In many of these lyrics, the poem you think you’re reading becomes another poem. If you try to pull one strand, you get the whole tangle. The title is suggestively brainy (there’s a “light” in Hayes’ “head”) and sexual (you do the math). The book is also full of hints: let’s get heavy on Lighthead for a second and call them “cultural insinuations,” delivered in the form of strings of associations of found and made language. In Hayes’ world, a personal story not only takes place within a larger cultural context—it’s pressurized, intensified, and made fluorescent by that context.

There’s nothing simple about this book, but it still manages to be immediate and intimate. You don’t get intimidated by the names and places you don’t know—you get curious. There’s someone talking to you in these pages, and that someone wants you to listen—in fact, needs you there to perform the task of the poem. Lighthead is (as one of its titles proclaims) “All the Way Live.” But “live” is different than “alive”: the poems get “lit up” and find their presence through performance, not the more sentimental delusions of earthly humanity. They’re, appropriately, full of singers: Marvin Gaye, the queer crooner Anthony of our present day, and then, in the final section of the book, almost like a joke, poetry’s first diva, Orpheus, makes an appearance.

The persona Lighthead begins the collection by addressing his version of the actual collective in the first poem, “Lightead’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state, / I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.” The problem that the speaker has, Time, might be the problem of living an individual life in time while also living out a cultural destiny. It also might just be the problem of being impatient in the mind while living a life in the body, and therefore, in time: it’s hard to quote effectively from these poems because the sentences are nothing short of headlong, rushing forward as if to beat the clock. The reference in the title of the first poem, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is to one of the great classics of the alienated male teenager, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was later made into a mediocre movie that generally disappointed the book’s cultish admirers. It’s my understanding that the book still provides a virtual support group (akin to video games) for alienated young people everywhere, but I think of it as being really male and really white (it was kind of mandatory high school reading where I grew up in the eighties and nineties, the Silicon Valley). I remember the main character, a human stuck in space, complaining that living in eternity would be bearable except for the Sunday afternoons. The trouble is, as Hayes recognizes, that mortality can feel like eternity even if we keep dying. Especially if we see how history keeps roughing us up again and again the same way. Hayes ends the poem as follows:

Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening. I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.

Lighthead here offers us consolations for the difficulties of life lived “out on a limb”: how do you survive when you’re “carrying the whimper / you can hear when the mouth is collapsed?” His answer is a poet’s answer: you fall in love with a word, you create a myth of heroism, you keep singing. As he begins a wickedly titled sonnet later in the book (“God is An American”), “I still love words.”

Throughout Lighthead, Hayes’ intense, unpredictable voice pulls together qualities that may seem, at first, opposed. Throughout his career, he’s been a master of the poetics of the vernacular, bringing together blues rhythms, slang, riffs on song lyrics, and hip hop style. In his previous book, Wind in a Box, he writes, “Suppose you were nothing but a song // in a busted speaker?” That poem, a self portrait called “The Blue Terrance,” continues:

That’s why

the blues will never go out of fashion:
their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of
consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in

trouble.

Poetic form is nothing if not a way poets have of holding themselves to consequence. Poetic form is how poets revise fate into destiny. Lighthead is full of poems in traditional and self-made forms. They can even feel purposely overwrought. In an intricate ghazal, a Middle Eastern poetic form enslaved to the repetition of the final phrase of each couplet, he writes: “I lied, what about it? I loitered too. Like dust. / I did what you did like a no-good mirror, that’s what.” (“Ghazal-head”) In this and other poems, the reader witnesses Hayes merging his own cultural vernacular with a poetic form that already has a history. In a set of poems based on the pecha kucha, a Japanese business presentation format based on images, Hayes pairs resonant words with intense, self-contained cinquains that iterate through intense dramatic scenarios. In these, he reveals that he can write simply beautiful lyric lines, full of loss and the kind of intimate melancholy we read poetry to experience and to heal. I love this moment at the end of “Arbor for Butch,” a poem later in Lighthead, which feels like the contemporary speaking to the ancient:

[CONFESSIONAL]

Where there were too many trees and too many names
etched into the trunks; where the knots in the wood
were the scars of old limbs; where, to be reborn, the birch pine
must be set aflame; where the door if I opened it might have
revealed the lovemaking or abuse still waiting to be named.

Katie Peterson is the author of a book of poems, This One Tree (New Issues, 2006). She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her reviews have appeared in the Boston Review and the Chicago Tribune. She teaches literature at Bennington College. (Photo credit: Ariana Ervin)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Kathleen Graber for The Eternal City
• James Richardson for By the Numbers
• C.D. Wright for One with Others
• Monica Youn for Ignatz

Poetry Judges that Year: Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson,
Jeffrey McDaniel, Brenda Shaughnessy

The Year in Literature:

• Versed by Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• W.S. Merwin was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Other Information:

• Terrence Hayes (1972- ) was born in Columbia, SC.
• Cornelius Eady has said of Hayes’ work, “First you'll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you'll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world."

Hayes receiving the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry

Hayes reading from Lighthead at the 2010 National Book Award Finalists Reading

Suggested Links:

• Terrance Hayes' 2010 National Book Award profile page
• NBF Interview with 2010 National Book Award Poetry Winner Hayes, conducted by Jean Hartig
• Hayes' profile page at Poets.org

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy   

By Keith Waldrop

Original and Current Publisher: University of California Press           

Ross Gay writes:

On the cover of Keith Waldrop’s book, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, is a reproduction of one of Robert Motherwell’s collages made with the Gauloises wrappers.  It’s significant that he chooses Motherwell’s image for his cover, as Waldrop’s book employs the collage as its primary mode.  In the introduction to The Painter and the Printer: Robert Motherwell’s Graphics 1943-1980, Stephanie Torenzio writes: “Collage (a strictly 20^th century phenomenon) evolved as a pictorial solution to convey the simultaneity, relativity, and multiplicity of the modern sensibility.”  And the Motherwell image serves as one (perhaps the first, depending on how you get to the book) of many facets of a dynamic accumulation of signifiers that accrue meaning certainly not in narrative or even conventional lyric fashion (I’m thinking Keats or Dickinson), but rather through their whimsical interaction (temporally disrupted, relative), an interaction that is very much dictated by the hand of the poet…but maybe that’s the wrong word: the interaction is suggested by, or released from the hand of the poet.  Conjured maybe.  Discovered.     

In an interview for the National Book Foundation, Waldrop explained that he discovered collage as a mode for making this book while being swamped by the burden of running Brown’s M.F.A. program.  After a while of not writing any poems, he decided to take a new approach:

“I decided to do some collage work with my poems, and the mechanical part of it, just getting words from somewhere, I thought would be something I could do without thinking, so I got a batch of books and put them on the table—the plan was very simple, I put three books in front of me, all prose, a novel, then something psychological, then whatever I happened to have around. I would take phrases from these three books and make some stanzas, four, five six lines. Once I had that I’d make more stanzas of the same number of lines, and when that gave out, after a page or two, I’d say alright I have this poem now and I would take it to the typewriter and type it up and in doing so I would rearrange the stanzas alphabetically. I wasn’t worried about keeping the words exactly what they were—sometimes I changed words. I wasn’t trying to prove anything about collage, I was trying to write poems.”

Necessity (lack of time, lack of mental energy) occasioned the formal decisions of these poems, and this book.  The pleasure, of course, is reading through the poems, which read sometimes like loosely-knit philosophical wanderings, sometimes like fragmentary descriptions, sometimes like lightly cohering lyrics, and stumbling upon or discovering gems of what, for lack of better words, I’ll call intelligence or insight or meaning (which of course does not override the fact that the whole way of the book is a kind of meaning: formal meaning, sonic meaning)—a kind of meaning that arrives despite the intentional lightness of touch.  Section five of the first part of the triptych is one of these, alphabetically ordered, apparently unconnected, but gathering as they go:

after this, the cold more intense, and the night comes rapidly up
.
angels in the fall
.
around a tongue of land, free from trees
.
awakened by a feeling of heavy weight on your feet, something that seems inert and motionless
.
awestruck manner, as though you expected to find some strange presence behind you

The poem continues like this, concluding:

while with a sickening revulsion after my terror, I drop half fainting across the end of

the bed
.
with a pair of great greenish eyes shining dimly out within the lattice fonts
.
with painting carvings of saints and devils, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope

It makes you wonder what’s in the middle.  Some of it means as we come to expect a poem to mean, and some of it does not.  It points toward or alludes to, or perhaps evades meaning entirely.  But as it turns out, meaning only evades for so long, as the arranging mind makes things mean, despite any artist’s intentions.  The final section of the book is constituted of, among other things, many short pieces, and in these I find moments that I especially want to sit with—not to “understand,” but rather to feel, or sense, to wander through and circle around.  Something the book as a whole invites as well.  I’ll conclude with an especially beautiful one of these.

The Macedonian Architect

Dark forms of belief.  I have
made a design: to shape Mount
Athos into the statue of a man.

In his left hand a city, in his right
a bowl for all the water of all the
streams from the whole mountain, so that it might
pour
from the bowl into
the sea.

Ross Gay’s books of poems include Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming January 2011). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, MARGIE, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. He has also, with the artist Kimberly Thomas, collaborated on several artists’ books, including The Cold Loop, BRN2HNT, and The Bullet. He is an editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue. Gay received his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and his PhD in American Literature from Temple University. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program in poetry at Drew University, and in Indiana University’s English department. (Photo credit: Zach Hetrick)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Rae Armantrout for Versed
• Ann Lauterbach for Or to Begin Again
• Carl Phillips for Speak Low
• Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon for Open Interval

Poetry Judges that Year: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A. Van Jordan, Cole Swensen, Kevin Young

The Year in Literature: The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Other Information:

• Keith Waldrop (1932- ) was born in Emporia, KS.
• Waldrop composed parts of Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy using what he called a “collage method,” by pulling words from randomly chosen books and arranging them into phrases and stanzas.

Keith Waldrop receiving the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry.

Video from the 2009 National Book Awards Finalist Reading

Suggested Links:

• Keith Waldrop's 2009 National Book Award profile page
• NBF Interview with 2009 National Book Award Poetry Winner Keith Waldrop, conducted by Craig Morgan Teicher
• Waldrop's profile page at Poets.org 

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems        

By Mark Doty

Original and Current Publisher: Harper Perennial

Kiki Petrosino writes:

Long ago in poetry workshop, a professor assigned us the task of listing ten original images.  This was homework: come up with ten units of language that you think fit the definition of image.  Our professor wanted to see who, in the class, was a gifted builder.  We were all disappointed, of course.  My list came back with a slash through every entry, and question marks, besides.  Only one “true” image emerged from the exercise, and if I’m not mistaken, our professor gave it to us.  It had to do with a red bandanna tied to a wooden post, and I can still see it.

Constructing imagery in a poem is more demanding than you think.  It’s not enough simply to point at the world of the senses by saying “I hear” or “I see.”  A well-chosen image must somehow embody the act of perception.  Images are the tiny conveyors that transmit meaning in a poem, because it’s through the senses that ideas—and language—take hold of the imagination.  In his 1997 essay, “Souls on Ice,” Mark Doty writes, “Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.”

This notion is one key to understanding Doty’s poetics.  In Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, we find a voice that continually asserts its devotion to the pursuit of image-making.  This volume, for which Doty won the NBA in 2008, gathers work from seven prior collections, as well as selections from a newer project, Theories and Apparitions.  Taken as a whole, the volume provides a marvelous introduction for those readers previously unfamiliar with this attentive, compelling lyric presence.  The poems draw much of their energy from the rigor of Doty’s metaphors, rooted as they are in precisely drawn images of “the landscape in front of us.”

I keep returning to the poem, “Chanteuse” (from Doty’s 1993 collection, My Alexandria), as particularly emblematic of Doty’s mastery of both image and metaphor.  This poem proceeds as a series of tightly-constructed tercets with a lustrous syllabic sheen (most lines are between nine and twelve syllables, which lends a measured, even quality to each unit of sound).  At the same time, the verse is awash in images that appeal to every bodily sense, and the accumulation of these images takes us on a rhapsodic journey.  This is an ode to the city of Boston, but Doty enfolds a myriad of other loves into this theme.  Take these lines from early in the piece:

             Jots of color resolve: massive parasols
            above a glimmering pond, the transit
            of almost translucent swans.  Brilliant bits

            —jewels?  slices of sugared fruit?—bloom
            into a clutch of skirts on the bridge
            above the summer boaters.  His city’s essence:

            all the hues of chintzes or makeup
            or Italian ices, all the sheen artifice
            is capable of.  Our city’s lavish paintbox.

In these stanzas, Doty’s speaker describes a Prendergast painting of Boston’s Public Garden, but he also treats us to a veritable Eden of sights and sounds.  Note the kinetic qualities conveyed by “jots of color,” the swift “transit / of almost translucent swans,” and the slower “bloom” of the skirted figures on the bridge.  Even the “slices of sugared fruit” seem to pass over the tongue, thanks to the almost granular consonant shift that softens “slices” into “sugared.”  It took me more than one reading to realize that there aren’t any colors actually named in these early stanzas—I’d been seeing all kinds of things in my mind’s eye, but not colors. Doty uses his “lavish paintbox” with discernment here, making for us a portrait of light.  We see “brilliant bits” of “almost” translucence, the traffic of “hues,” if not yet the hues themselves.  The language of this poem dazzles with an evocative imagerial “sheen” that transports us to a place of wonder.

When the poem moves to the “intimate interiors” of personal memory, the city’s magic takes on the physicality of an earthly muse.  The “chanteuse” is a “beautiful black drag queen,” whose voice unfolds themes of love that animate the poet’s remembered cityscape.  Now it’s the singer’s “sparkling ankle shoes” which “glimmer” in the space opened by the dual work of writing and remembrance.  She effectively becomes the swan that moves between the poet’s present and his past.  And it’s with this extended image of the chanteuse that Doty sweeps us into the larger concern that’s brought the whole poem into being: the painful divide between the seeming artifice of memory and the ephemeral nature of immediate, lived experience.  The vitality of Doty’s initial images prepares us for more expansive, philosophical statements at poem’s end:

            As she invented herself, memory revises
            and restores her, and the moment   
            she sang.  I think we were perfected,

            when we became her audience,
            and maybe from that moment on
            it didn’t matter so much exactly

            what would become of us.

This shift in diction comes to us like a rest within a musical score.  It’s a move that effectively grounds Doty’s metaphors within a larger lyric investigation and brings us back to the poet’s mind and heart.  As Doty remarks in “Souls on Ice,” descriptive details in poems “aren't ‘neutral,’ though they might pretend to be, but instead suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being seen.”          

Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009). She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in FENCE, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Louisville. (Photo credit: Philip Miller)                                          

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Frank Bidart for Watching the Spring Festival
• Reginald Gibbons for Creatures of a Day
• Richard Howard for Without Saying
• Patricia Smith for Blood Dazzler

Poetry Judges that Year: Robert Pinsky, Mary Jo Bang, Kimiko Hahn, Tony Hoagland, Marilyn Nelson

The Year in Literature:  

• Time and Materials by Robert Hass and Failure by Philip Schultz both won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Kay Ryan was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Other Information:

• Mark Doty (1953- ) was born in Maryville, TN.
• Doty was the first American poet to win the T.S. Elliot Prize for Poetry, an award typically given to poets from the United Kingdom.

Doty reading at the 2008 National Book Award Finalists Reading

Doty accepts the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry for Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems

Suggested Links:

• NBF Interview with 2008 National Book Award Poetry Winner Mark Doty, conducted by Craig Morgan Teicher
• Doty's 2008 National Book Award profile page
• Doty reading as part of the NBA 2011 Poetry and the Public (4/12/11)
  Evening examines, through discussion and reading, the place poetry occupies in American culture as well as issues specific to the making of modern poetry.
• Doty's Official Website, markdoty.org
• Doty's Blog
• Doty's profile page at Poets.org

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Time and Materials:

By Robert Hass

Original and Current Publisher: Ecco/Harper Collins

Evie Shockley writes:

The problem with trying to write about Bob Hass’s wonderful collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, comes directly out of one of its most appealing qualities: the expansive territory it covers.  It opens with a poem consisting of a single, rhymed couplet—not regularly metrical, but indebted to meter—and before we reach the last poem, we have encountered short, multi-sectioned lyrics; conversational narrative poems; long, Whitman-esque meditations; a prose poem; and a haibun, among other styles and structures.  Without his venturing much into the realms of the avant-garde or the neo-formalist, he exploits enough different possibilities for line, stanza, and syntax that the collection refuses the visual consistency that risks dullness or promises orderliness (depending on your view).

It isn’t, however, these formal matters that I most have in mind when I point to the volume’s expansiveness, but rather the book’s geographical, historical, and thematic breadth.  We move from California to Germany to Korea; from Horace to Vermeer to John Ashbery; from sex and nature to art and domesticity to death and war.  True, there is a sizable chunk of the world (the part near or below the equator) that remains beyond the scope of these poems, and they privilege what has traditionally been called “high” and “Western” culture.  But Hass works out his ideas across a pretty wide range of contexts nonetheless, and those ideas are articulated in such a generous manner as to indicate their even wider applicability.  That my own cultural landscape overlaps with his somewhat imperfectly is thus grounds for disappointment, but not complaint.

Looking back to an early career book like Praise, which I am teaching this semester, I get the impression that Hass has all along been trying to strike a certain balance between a poetry of rich, physical detail and one of transcendent, metaphysical compass.  In Time and Materials, the book’s very title suggests that here he succeeds.  He certainly achieves some measure of success with it, as the book won not only the National Book Award, but the Pulitzer Prize as well.  I am struck by the way his sometime luscious, sometimes stark descriptions provide robust scaffolding for his engagement with the conceptual. Similarly, his soaring meditations really launch the poems that might otherwise be almost heavily concrete.

For example, a poem like “Bush’s War” moves from gorgeous images to gory ones:

                                                            In May
            At the end of the twentieth century
            In the leafy precincts of Dahlem Dorf,
            South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,
            The northern spring begins before dawn
            In a racket of birdsong, when the amsels,
            Black European thrushes, shiver the sun up
            As if they were shaking a great tangle
            Of golden wire.

            . . . .

            Flash forward: firebombing of Hamburg,
            Fifty thousand dead in a single night,
            “The children’s bodies the next day
            Set in the street in rows like a market
            In charred chicken.”

He proceeds to march us through a century of war-driven massacres in Tokyo, the Katyn Woods, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Ukraine, and Vietnam (with Baghdad, of course, on the poem’s horizon) on the way to noticing a present-day German student with “The kind of book the young love / To love, about love in the time of war.”  This moment, and all the images and references with which he precedes it, enable him to ask the necessary questions:

            You are never not wondering how
            It happened, and these Germans, too,
            Children then, or unborn, never not
            Wondering.  Is it that we like the kissing
            And bombing together, in prospect
            At least, girls in their flowery dresses?

                        *           *           *           *

            Look at boys playing: they love
            To figure out the ways to blow things up.
            But the rest of us have to go along.
            Why do we do it?

I can’t do without that shivery golden tangle of wire anymore than I can do without the interrogation of the relationship between humanity and violence.  I don’t insist on having both the stunning image and the engagement with socio-political questions in the same poet’s work—let alone the same poem—but when I get both (as in Lucille Clifton’s work, to take the example of another National Book Award winner), I am deeply moved.

People frequently refer to Hass’s work as “intelligent,” and I can only agree.  There are various ways a poetic intelligence might be evidenced, but his curiosity about all manner of subjects and ability to draw connections among them is certainly one way.  His dry sense of humor only adds to the appeal, as here: “Hay / Is the Old English word for strike.  You strike down / Grass, I guess, when it is moan.  Mown.”  I’ll close by quoting in full a short ars poetica that not only embodies the Hass-ian poetic intelligence, but also gestures toward his important work as a translator and the “nature poetry” he is known for.  In “That Music,” he generously presents us with the kind of challenge he delights in, inviting each of us to think with him about it:

            The creek’s silver in the sun of almost August,
            And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
            Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
            Vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

            Do they confer, do the lovers’ bodies
            In the summer dusk, his break, her sleeping face,
            Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?
            If you were the interpreter, if that were your task. 

Do they? We may.

Evie Shockley’s collections of poetry include the new black (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. She is also author of the forthcoming critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Poems have recently appeared or will soon appear in such journals and anthologies as Callaloo, A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line, Iron Horse Literary Review, esque, Talisman, Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Shockley co-edits jubilat and is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. (Photo credit: Stéphane Robolin)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Linda Gregerson for Magnetic North
• David Kirby for The House on Boulevard St.
• Stanley Plumly for Old Heart
• Ellen Bryant Voigt for Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006

Poetry Judges that Year: Charles Simic, Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, Natasha Trethewey

The Year in Literature:

• Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Charles Simic was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Other Information:

• Robert Hass (1941- ) was born in San Francisco, CA.
• Hass’ book Time and Materials would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008.

Robert Hass' 2007 National Book Award Acceptance Speech

Suggested Links:

• Hass' 2007 National Book Award profile page
• NBF Interview with 2007 National Book Award Poetry Winner Robert Hass, conducted by Craig Morgan Teicher
• Hass' profile page at Poets.org

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Splay Anthem 

By Nathaniel Mackey

Original and Current Publisher: New Directions     

Megan Snyder-Camp writes:

Merging two ongoing serial poems, Splay Anthem engages a vast historical and geographical sampling of voices. Splay Anthem is foremost about motion and transition, and Mackey is as precise and curious as a jazz musician in his attention to a range of movements including migration, alliteration, limbo, battery, crab-scuttle, planetary circling, highway driving, and lovemaking. Even his lines sway against the left margin, hinging down from the right every so often like a sprung jaw.

As he traces the nuances of these forms of movement, Mackey’s cast of characters and scenes shifts in and out of focus. Heavy with musical references, mythical gods and places, political and cultural turning points (from fraught elections to O.J. Simpson), and wry hybrids like “Chuck E. Jesus,” Splay Anthem transcribes their singing rather than narrates their story.

The book is divided into three sections, “Braid,” “Fray,” and “Nub,” and alternates between numbered installments of two ongoing serial poems, “Song of the Andoumboulou” and “mu.” While Mackey gives referents for the two series in his preface, story is so subsumed to sound in this captivating book that I was reluctant to turn myself over to his liner notes.

In “Braid” we meet lovers and travelers, peer over their shoulder and under their feet. Part book of the dead, part pillow book, these opening poems linger where one thing folds into another, as in “Lag Anthem—‘mu’ eighteenth part”:

  Lifted our legs, an arrested
   run we made look like
  dancing.

and soon after in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 40:”

                         Emptiness
                                    kept us
afloat. What we read said
  there’d been a shipwreck. We
     survived it, adrift at sea…

These are expansive, bold poems of creation and destruction: the violence of a drum beat to the head, cloth stretched across a lover’s body, liturgy on a page. They are located at points of departure—tavern, train, shore—and from there they alight in Peru, Egypt, Jamaica, as well as in the layered nodes of meaning—as here in “Glenn on Monk’s Mountain—‘mu’ twenty-fourth part,” tightening the gap between the noun and verb meanings of “rung”:

    Pads and keys cried out for
  climb, clamor, something yet
                                                to arrive
   we called rung. Rickety wood, split
reed, sprung ladder.

Lifting and lowering are recurring movements in the book, often in connection with images of boats. Mackey’s ships are far from pleasure boats—they are more likely to carry slaves, explorers, or exiles, and in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 52” in the book’s second section, “Fray,” our lovers, in alluding to the shipping locks whose varying water levels allow the passage of boats across a canal, enact a lock’s movement across several levels at once:

                    […]                  “Locks,”
   he announced, lifting his hand, touched
                                                    her
  hair, braids he saw lifting the boat he
lay down in, course he’d have run, boat
   being soul. Twisting a braid with one
hand, she answered, “Hair,” as if correcting
   him, locks’ lifted boat rescinded […]

Splay Anthem’s final section, “Nub,” engages, among other things, an apocalyptic landscape and the drive of humans to settle and build. These are poems at once political and, as the nub of a half-gone limb, vulnerable and bare. In the untitled second part of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 58,” Mackey writes:

  […] Unsay said what there was of
                                                            it
   to say. Nub’s low skyline lay to our
                                                            left…
  Nub lay close to the earth… Nub cut us
    off. We were never all there. Raw knuckles
pounding the earth bled rivers. Bloodrun
                                                            carried
us away

This tension between table-clearing and table-setting, or rather, this vibration between the two gestures, carries Mackey’s love of language. Spilling beyond the content of his work, he draws a compelling connection between the sentences we build and the life we make. He finds syntax-patterns (like “It wasn’t…”) and riffs off of them, finds the connection between that sentence’s habit and its original fruit. Then, where the words were, he sets our bodies. In this way a wavering sentence shimmers into a dancing body, an interrupted fragment becomes a caught wrist. This is jazz.

For all the social relevance and urgency his work contains, the best way to read Mackey is to take it in the way you would listen to one of the eclectic radio shows he DJs from his home in Santa Cruz—sit back and let the sounds carry you. Feel the movement of the words around you, their tug and wash. Let them thrum on the top of your head. Let your head sing. Be moved and carry this movement forth into the world.

Megan Snyder-Camp's first book of poems, The Forest of Sure Things, is a deconstructed domestic narrative set in a small, historically preserved village on the Pacific Northwest coast. Her poems have appeared in Field, the Antioch Review, Smartish Pace, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She recently received an Individual Artist grant from Washington's 4Culture Foundation to support her current work. (Photo credit: Laura M. Hoffmann)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Louise Glück for Averno
• H.L. Hix for Chromatic
• Ben Lerner for Angle of Yaw
• James McMichael for Capacity

Poetry Judges that Year: James Longenbach, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Li-Young Lee,
Claudia Rankine, C.D. Wright

The Year in Literature:

• Late Wife by Claudia Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Donald Hall was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Other Information:

• Nathaniel Mackey (1947- ) was born in Miami, FL.
• Since 1982, Mackey has been editor and publisher of Hambone, a literary magazine that has published an eclectic group of poets ranging from Sun Ra to Robert Duncan.
• In 2010 Mackey received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mackey reads from his new book of poetry and talks about his writing to an audience at UC Santa Cruz where he is a professor of literature.

Suggested Links:

• Nathaniel Mackey's 2006 National Book Awards Acceptance Speech for Splay Anthem
• Mackey's 2006 National Book Awards page
• Mackey's profile page at Poets.org

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Migration: New and Selected Poems

By W.S. Merwin 

Original and Current Publisher: Copper Canyon Press     

Patrick Rosal writes:

Some Questions about Questions… and Vanishing

In Migration: New and Selected Poems, W.S. Merwin has a poem called “St. Vincent’s,” (originally published in The Compass Flower) which feels elegiac now that the West Village hospital is shut down.  “I consider that I have lived daily and with / eyes open and ears to hear / these years across from St. Vincent’s Hospital.” The poem accrues a series of memories through litany: “I have seen…” and “I have come upon the men in gloves taking out / the garbage at all hours…” and “I have seen one pile / catch fire…” and “I have noticed…” The speaker acknowledges his own neglect; he’s one of many witnesses who has taught himself to ignore the sirens and to abandon the emergency arrivals, a disregard that suggests how complicit he is in a city’s blindness to suffering. He has been a part of a machine of erasure.

When I consider the fate of St. Vincent’s hospital, I wonder, what does it mean for a poem to outlast its subject (particularly a poem that points to erasure)? It gives the illusion of endurance and maybe even perpetuity. But even a “fixed” structure is mutable. Consider the plastic arts for a moment: there are materials that decay, rot and rust. The elements of a place—its weather—change the feel and appearance of these materials. Conventionally, we think of such changes as a kind of ruin (though the most interesting architects and sculptors, to me, must imagine decay as a part of the structure’s substance).

We might say, ruin is essential—and sometimes beautiful.

In poetry, the elemental forces of language and history can also alter (i.e. ruin) a poem on stratospheric and/or molecular scales, though we’re often unaware of the transformations, sometimes gradual and miniscule, sometimes acute. Point is, a poem like Merwin’s “St. Vincent’s” continues to interact with the world it renders. Both language and the subject(s) it refers to are changing dynamically.

Merwin’s poem is, in part, a meditation on (and praise of) evanescence and vanishing. Most telling, the poem returns briefly to some beautiful observation, but lands ultimately on the interrogative, wry and ironic:

several of the windows appear
to be made of tin
but it may be the light reflected
I have imagined bees coming and going
on those sills though I have never seen them

who was St. Vincent

(The poem’s irony is doubled by the fate of St. Vincent’s, isn’t it: the hospital gone; the Saint also now long gone…)

What I admire most here is the movement between memory and question. We live in an era in which certainty is privileged over questioning. I think about how interrogation holds a powerful place in our public imagination—if only by its distortion and its absence. In the dimmest precincts, it’s a bloody process. I often ask my students what makes a good question and what questions suggest about power. Who gets to question whom? What kinds of questions might map the disappearances of our time?

I don’t know of a good poem that doesn’t traffic in investigation/questioning. Sometimes those poems are explicitly comprised of interrogatives. The widely anthologized “Some Last Questions” appeared originally in Merwin’s earlier collection The Lice. Published in 1967, the poem’s interrogation of the body and its accompanying surrealist responses are brutally understated. The interaction seems both formal and magical.

What is the head
             A.  Ash
What are the eyes
             A.  The wells have fallen in and have
             Inhabitants

The tongue according to the nameless respondent is “[t]he black coat that fell off the wall / With sleeves trying to say something.” Meanwhile, the hands are simply “Paid.” What is the disjuncture between the straight-forward, simply composed questions about the body and the somewhat hallucinatory answers? The responses are not just strange in the images they depict, but in their hacked syntax: “What is the silence / A. As though it had a right to more.” (One notable poem in Migration is composed entirely of questions, “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field.”)

Migration is a 500-page book that collects a half a century of Merwin’s poetry. There’s much to mine. I suspect that the poems of The Moving Target and later consist of the work we have come to admire. Because it’s impossible to provide a survey of a survey of a life’s work in this short post, I did want to make my recommendation for a poem I hadn’t encountered in anthologies, but which I have come to enjoy deeply, called “The Houses.”

In it, a boy is brought to the woods by his father for some curiously innocuous reason, and as his father starts a fire and cooks hot dogs, the boy is permitted for the first time to run off by himself. On two occasions, the boy sees two different houses, reports them to his father who insists there are no houses there, that is his property. The boy is scolded and warned “not to tell stories.” The houses magically seem to appear and disappear and we are left with what resonates deeply, I think, with many who love the imagination: the profound sadness and private joy of what the boy has seen and can’t speak of or explain.

Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive (Persea, 2003), which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman (Persea, 2006), which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry and the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award. Awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009, he has had poems and essays published widely in journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Tin House, American Poetry Review, The Literary Review, the Beacon Best, and Language for a New Century. (Photo credit: Stephen Sullivan)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• John Ashbery for Where Shall I Wander
• Frank Bidart for Star Dust: Poems
• Brendan Galvin for Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005
• Vern Rutsala for The Moment’s Equation

Poetry Judges that Year: Carl Phillips, John Balaban, Carol Frost,
Lawson Fusao Inada, Julie Kane

The Year in Literature: Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Other Information:

• W.S. Merwin (1927- ) was born in New York, NY.
• Merwin has published more than thirty books of poetry and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice (in 1971 and 2009). 
• Merwin was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2010.

Bill Moyers  The Journal: W. S. Merwin
Poet W.S. Merwin joins Bill Moyers for a wide-ranging conversation.

Watch the full episode. See more Bill Moyers.

Suggested Links:

• 2005 NBA Poetry Chair Carl Phillips presents W.S. Merwin with the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems.
  Merwin's acceptance remarks are read by John Burnham Schwartz, his stepson.
• NBF's post when Merwin was named Poet Laureate
• Merwin's profile page at Poets.org
• W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38
  Interviewed by Edward Hirsch, The Paris Review, Spring 1987, No. 102

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

By Jean Valentine

Original and Current  Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Dilruba Ahmed writes:

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?”

—Dickinson to Higginson

After reading Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain, New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, I have little hope of ever reattaching my head to my body.  Like her literary predecessor, Valentine is a poet of great intensity, brevity, restraint, and lyricism. 

To read Jean Valentine’s work is to enter a dream-space, one filled with the familiar and the strange, both bliss and terror—an emotional and psychological place where voices and visions ring true even as they pose the impossible or refuse to offer resolution.

In Valentine’s writing, dreams become a portal to the workings of the conscious and unconscious mind.  Of the role of dreams in her poetry, Jean Valentine states in a Ploughshares interview with Amy Newman, “Sometimes I'm using dream as a way of almost trying to translate experiences and thoughts that I have that I think might come to the reader more easily if they said they were dreams.” 

While reading Door in the Mountain, I was fascinated to see Valentine’s more recent poems juxtaposed with her first collection, Dream Barker, which was originally published in 1965 as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.  While both sections—along with the collection as a whole—take dreams as a chief theme, we can see a significant contrast between the poet’s earliest publication (which contains poems with formal rhyme schemes, syntactically complete sentences, and full punctuation) and her later work, which is characteristically spare.  In “New Poems,” Valentine’s phrases appear as tips of icebergs:  dense, fragmented, Sapphic passages. 

Part of the power of Valentine’s work rests in her artful use of white space, compressed language, and dream-like, unpunctuated phrases.  In “Happiness (3),” a poem of a dozen lines and nearly as much white space, the speaker makes a wintertime graveside visit to her companion’s parents.

The moment you turned to me on W. 4^th St.
Your gentleness to me

The hard winter grass here under my shoes
The frost

I knelt in the frost to your parents

                                                            The warm

light on the right hand side of your face
The light on the Buddha’s eyelids

I knelt to my parents
Their suffering        How

much sleep there was in sleep      How no
suffering is lost.

Faced with the specter of mortality, Valentine’s speaker is filled with tenderness, humility, and gratitude.  Here, the “gentleness” of the speaker’s companion is juxtaposed with the “hard winter grass” underfoot.  The speaker’s literal action of kneeling “in the frost” before the gravestone morphs into the spiritual or religious action of bowing down in recognition of her own parents’ sacrifices: “I knelt to my parents / Their suffering….”

But this kneeling is also a gesture of supplication, and the fragmented “How” creates multiple resonances:  How could this happen?  How do we make sense of mortality?  What is the role of suffering in our lives?  The word “how” both questions and accuses, hanging in abeyance as we register two full lines of white space.  Valentine closes the poem with the stark recognition of death’s finality, but the speaker remains hopeful that suffering can instruct us:  “How // much sleep there was in sleep     How no / suffering is lost.”  Still, the circular definition of “sleep” as consisting of “sleep” reveals an inability to truly grasp death, and the placement of the word “no” at the end of the penultimate line strikes me as a refusal to acknowledge impermanence: no, this can’t happen.

Like many of Valentine’s later poems, “Happiness (3)” is a poem of density, brevity, and carved white space.  Haunting, tender, and terrifying by turn, the silences here are palpable.

In this book of collected work, many other poems grapple with mortality:

She would long / to dig herself into the ground, her only / daughter’s ashes / in her nose     in her mouth… (“In the Burning Air”)

I cannot hold him: he is dead. (“Kin”)

I could go / anywhere.  I could go to where you are. / I lie under the bank, my face on a wall of wet grass. / I can’t go anywhere, No such thing my dear. (“The Father”)

Now a year after your death, fish-mother, skate / you swim up off the surface of the earth…face / under all the pieces of light, / how could I get to you? (“Skate”)

In some poems, Valentine confronts nightmarish fears without necessarily offering resolution:

You drew my head….and even the skull / is turned away // no eyes. (“You drew my head”)

Sleep drops its nets for monsters as old as the Flood (“Sleep Drops Its Nets”)

Valentine’s speakers grapple with helplessness in the face of suffering:  “And my friend is in pain and there’s nothing I can do, / Suffering is everywhere intense, and if / We make pain ourselves, who can help it?” (“Sheep”). 

Her writing also depicts a desire for intimacy while conveying the inexplicable gaps between people: 

Our ghosts bob and hug in the air where we meet (“To a friend”)

I ask for a dream / about my marriage…My ink-stained hand / his paint-smudged hand // gone     where / nothing joins (“They lead me”)

Valentine’s poetry tackles faith and doubt in poems such as “I came to you,” which begins in explanation, “I came to you / Lord, because of / the fucking reticence / of this world,” and concludes with a repeated exhortation, “Lord Come / We were sad on the ground,” and the epistolary poem “Dearest”:   “…to come in time / into this world, unlikely, small, / bloody, shiny, is all, is God’s good will / I think, I turn to you, / and fail, and turn, // as the day widens // and we don’t know what to do.”

And yet, in the midst of fear, uncertainty, and struggle, Valentine’s speaker takes to heart Rilke’s injunction from “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:  “You must change your life.”  In a “field of graves” with “sunk, unmarked, green edges of hammered granite / sharp as a shoulder blade,” the speaker vehemently wishes for change:  “…God break me out / of this stiff life I’ve made” (“Forces”).  This movement beyond the “stiff life” involves risk and unanswered questions:  “Every day you move farther outside / the outlines, kinder, more dangerous. / Where will you be going. / Who will the others be” (“Dufy Postcard”).  Valentine’s poems convey moments of hope, love, and an intimacy equivalent to God.

The doctors tell me, ‘Swim./ You are beginning, moving on; yes, / trailing his side, still / amazed at our own body apart…’ (“After Elegies (2)”)

Dove, it’s time for peace, / Time to taste the round mountains, the white and green, / and the dusk rose of relationship, again, / for the first time, it’s time to take off our clothes, / and the fortress around our eyes, to touch our first fingers, / you and I, like God, across everything. (“The Summer Was Not Long Enough”)

 A day a year ago last summer / God filled me with himself, like gold, inside, / deeper inside than marrow. // This close to God this close to you…..Our second life. (“The River at Wolf”)

While some of Valentine’s poetry gestures to the public world—with poems for Matthew Shephard as well as elegies to fellow writers James Wright, Lynda Hull, Jane Kenyon, and Robert Lowell, the gift of Valentine’s Door in the Mountain is that it helps us to uncover “the hidden way of each of us, buried.”

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless Prize for poetry. Ahmed’s writing has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, and The Normal School. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives near Philadelphia. For more information, visit her website at www.dilrubaahmed.com. (Photo credit: Mike Drzal)

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• William Heyen for Shoah Train
• Donald Justice for Collected Poems
• Carl Phillips for The Rest of Love
• Cole Swensen for Goest

Poetry Judges that Year: Lynn Emanuel, James Galvin,
Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Waters, Al Young

The Year in Literature:

• Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Ted Kooser was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Other Information:

• Jean Valentine (1934- ) was born in Chicago, IL.
• Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine’s work, “The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.”

Suggested Links:

• Jean Valentine's 2004 National Book Awards Acceptance Speech for Door in the Mountain
• Valentine's 2004 National Book Awards page
• Valentine's official website
• Valentine's profile page at Poets.org

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com

The Singing                

By C.K. Williams

Original and Current  Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Saara Myrene Raappana writes:

At first, I was suspicious of C.K. Williams’ The Singing. When it comes to poetry, I’m a clean freak—I like my free verse in tidy stacks of wordplay. I love the symmetry created by rhyme, be it direct or slant; I brake for terza rima; give me a ghazal only if it’s metrically strict and restrained. So when I saw The Singing’s sprawling, gangly lines of conversational language, its sparse—and sparsely worded—images drawn along by trains of ethereal philosophy, I felt off-balance. Upset. These poems seemed to revel in disorganization, growing like vines in whatever direction offered the most room. I wanted to take a pair of gardening shears to them. At the very least a rake.

Why, then, did a stanza here, a line there tap on my cold, metrical heart? Why did those stripped-down images repeat through my head days later? Why, despite all my discomfort, did I end up loving these poems?

Here’s my theory: Williams is a magician—an adept one—and who doesn’t love a great magician? On first read, I was distracted by the smoke of Williams’ informal tone and then entranced by the flash powder of his relentlessly forthright statements. In “Dissections,” as the speaker inspects a skeleton at an anatomy exhibit, he says, “I felt embarrassed, as though I’d intruded on someone’s loneliness / or grief, and then, I don’t know why, it came to me to pray, / though I don’t pray, I’ve unlearned how, to whom, or what.” The poems feel direct, unedited, effortlessly musical. Williams’ elliptical, syntactically befuddling sentences carry a metrical and emotional cadence that belies their apparent plainness. At the conclusion of “Dissections,” Williams ends a seemingly meandering journey from anatomy models to sorrow, to empathy, to faith and lack thereof with: “Flint and fire, science and song, and all of it coming to this, / this unhealable self in myself who knows what I should know.” The magician has dropped two eggs, a feather duster, and a pair of gardening shears into a hat and, with a wave of his wand, pulled out a sharp-beaked bird of paradise.

The Singing is a book of doubt, lament, and elegy, but, as is characteristic for Williams, genially so. These poems struggle with identity, perception, and the weight of both. In “This Happened,” he chants, “Weightfully upon me was the world. / Weightfully this self which graced the world yet never wholly itself. / Weightfully this self which weighed upon me . . .” Whether a doe, a piano teacher, an anatomy skeleton, or the death of a cherished friend, Williams’ subjects are heavy with fear and sorrow, but granted a kind of buoyancy by their connection with the speaker, the “I” of the poem that is Williams’ poetic persona. That’s the deftest of Williams’ magic tricks—the creation of intimacy with his subjects that spills over onto the reader.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the book’s final section, which contains poems about 9/11. Here, Williams tackles the despair and fright of that event and its aftermath. “Fear” reveals Williams as a despondent idealist: “I still want to believe that we’ll cure the human heart . . . / . . . but hasn’t the metaphorical heart been slashed?” In the final stanza, a “half-chorus of grackles” —a ubiquitous bird that returns again and again to ransack dumpsters and parking lots—as “negative celestials, risen from some counter-realm to rescue us. / But now, scattering towards the deepening shadows, they go, too.” 

The book’s third section, an extended elegy, spans from the month of illness before his painter friend’s death to a year afterward, each segment carrying its own type of heartache. Williams interlaces tender particulars like “the sheet of Arches / paper tacked to its board . . . the wash, the cottonwoods / I helped you plant” with long strings of internal monologue that transmit, through their candor, both the heft of Williams’ own anguish and the unavoidable human experience of grief:

Never so much absence,
so many longings ash,
as you are ash. Never
so cruel the cry within,
Will I never again
be with you? Ash. Ash.

The poem ends with an oboe repeating scales (“descending the stairway it itself / unfurls before itself”), as if the speaker has realized that his grief, rather than finding resolution, will continue to echo like a lovely, sad song drifting in through his window.

Saara Myrene Raappana has new poems in 32 Poems, Cave Wall, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review Online, and Southern Poetry Review and has been featured on Verse Daily. She is a managing editor for Cellpoems.

Poetry Finalists that Year:

• Carol Muske-Dukes for Sparrow: Poems
• Charles Simic for The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems
• Louis Simpson for The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001
• Kevin Young for Jelly Roll: A Blues

Poetry Judges that Year: Bruce Weigl, David Baker, Kate Daniels, Kwame Dawes, Jane Hirshfield

The Year in Literature:  

• Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Louise Gluck was named Poet Laureate of the United States

Other Information:

• C.K. Williams (1936- ) was born in Newark, NJ.
• In addition to the National Book Award for The Singing, Williams won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Flesh and Blood, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Repair, and in 2005 he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Suggested Links:

• C.K. Williams's 2003 National Book Awards Acceptance Speech for The Singing 
• Bruce Wiegl, 2003 Poetry Panel Chair, presents the National Book Award to Williams
• Williams's 2003 NBA page with excerpts from The Singing
• Williams's personal website, www.ckwilliams.com
• Williams's profile page at Poets.org
  

Buy the Book:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes&Noble.com
• Borders.com
• AbeBooks.com
• IndieBound.org
• Powells.com