My wife, Suzanne, and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which we go to rarely, because it’s so expensive, but like a lot. Also, I smiled a lot.
How is place important to your poetry?
I think the world, the world I find myself in, is poetic primarily, and my ideas poetic secondarily, in relationship to the world I find myself in. I guess I would say that good poems give us the world, this world, and that’s as true of Sylvia Plath’s poems as it is of William Carlos Williams’s.
What’s your favorite poem?
“Song of Myself.”
Which of your own poems is your favorite?
They’re all my favorites. I don’t think I could make a selected poems. But the one I read the most these days is “Trailing Clouds of Glory,” because of its pertinence to the current immigration debate.
* * * * *
Trailing Clouds of Glory
Even though I’m an immigrant,
the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
a few desultory orgies, a billboard
of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
So why the angel with the flaming sword
bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
and the men with the binoculars,
elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
peering into the desert? There is a border,
but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension
before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train
to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across
from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them—
delicate and archaic and Mayan—
and obviously undocumented to the bone.
They didn’t seem anxious. The mother was
laughing and squabbling with the daughter
over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a
video game together. The boy, maybe three,
disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face,
the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.
He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother
after thirty hours of labor—the head squashed,
the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous
with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel
and into the cold room of harsh sounds.
He looked right at me with his bleared eyes.
He had a voice like Richard Burton’s.
He had an impressive command of the major English texts. I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth, he said. The child, he said, is father of the man.
“Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I’ve said, No, this isn’t going to work, forget it.”
“I like the idea of poetry, but you know, when you write prose, I think you have to be careful not to make it consciously poetic. It’s got to have some sharpness to it, and that’s the way I like to write now. I like to write in a way that, I don’t know, maybe that will frighten people a bit?”
There’s reading and there’s reading. Much of the year I’m teaching and I’m reading what I’m teaching or I’m reading what I need to read to teach what I’m reading. It goes like that.
But in the summer I read. And this past summer I sat on the screened-in porch of my little crackerbox house in the country and read Celan. I had Felstiner beside me and Celan in front of me. I had a notebook and a pen and sweet summer breezes. And I read slowly and closely, trying to take in everything this great poet had to teach me, and I got only so far in the summer. So I keep reading–for urgency, for compression, for the amount of work a single word can do. (I don’t read German, but having both English and German allowed me entrance, brief and imperfect, to the power of the words.) Devastated by the loss of his parents at the hands of the Nazis, and struggling to make meaning in spite of that, Celan wrote poems unrelenting in their power and beauty. I’m a beginner. I will go on reading. I hope I will learn.
Sally Dawidoff
Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies, translated by Jeffrey Yang (Graywolf Press, 2012)
Every year for twenty years, Liu Xiaobo, the blacklisted Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote a memorial offering to those who were killed in Tiananmen Square on 6/4/89. His haunted poems may haunt you: “Remember those black-haired dead souls / who hold up the white-haired mothers. . . If my eyes are plucked out, I’ll use my eye sockets to stare at you / If my body’s eaten away, I’ll use my scent to embrace you” (2005). Jeffrey Yang tells us that, throughout the process of translating the nearly 100 pages of poems in this collection, he was unable to communicate with Liu; the poet is serving a long prison term for co-writing a manifesto calling for democratic reforms. Liu writes out of anguish, refusal, and outrage. From his luminous introductory essay to June Fourth Elegies: “The living should really shut their mouths and let the graves speak.”
Elisabeth Frost
Catherine Barnett, Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012)
One of the most beautiful & innovative books of poetry I’ve read in the last few years.
David Groff
Aaron Smith, Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012)
Aaron’s book is a bold and uncompromising confrontation with the body and its dangers, from the perspective of a gay male poet. In poems too urgent to take refuge in the decorousness that defuses many poems about desire, he writes with wit, smarts, and heart about the connections that all of us (queer or less queer) attempt to make using the precious and problematic vessels of our selves.
I like reading about evolution (I studied biology in college), and I am researching connections and inspirations for my second book, entitled “Stay This Easy Way Down.” The subtitle of Stott’s book is “The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough.” Often a poem can be or feel like “one tiny creature,” and as poets, we know what importance this “tininess” holds. We inhabit an exterior world which needs to be reconciled with our interior world in order for us to grow and progress. Parallel developments occur but are often visible only when we look back. Writing a poem is a way for me to inhabit the present–since I feel sometimes the past can mock the present, and the future is an emptiness because time does not inhabit it yet.
Stephen Massimilla
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
A Village Life defines a real departure form Glück’s earlier work. Composed in long, lucid lines, it is more open, more ample than anything she has written before. The themes—aging, lost youth, a marriage heading south, the vulnerability of children, etc.—are not new to Glück. But the geographical unity is novel: All the poems are set in an imaginary village, where the tensions between the valences of rivers and of mountains, thought and action, the ideal and the real, illusion and “truth” are realized in evocatively suspended meditations. These reflections shed light not only on the spaces between the stages of life, but between human compassion and the indifference of nature, including, sometimes, human nature. One of the many questions the book raises for me is what it could mean to postulate “omniscience” in a narrative or ontological sense. In a social village full of childhood memories, grown-up problems, and confrontations with the self, what can it mean to speak of the “savagery” of the natural order or backdrop? Isn’t our conceptualization of time and indifference in itself a moral, human, and even judgmental act?
The poems are alive with a wit, spontaneity and freshness of form I so admire. As a young mother with no free time, Browne re-conceived of writing as a collaboration with language and happenings that came her way, and she composed in short bursts. There is found language from her children, the voting polls, a Russian novel; sonnets that are amulets; and my favorites, love sonnets to the light.
Congratulations to Marie Ponsot, recipient of the first N.Y.C. Literary Honor for Poetry! The work of this extraordinary poet and teacher has been vital to many. Here is the New York Times article announcing the awards. Find poems by Ponsot here and here and in her books (also here). The poet talks and reads here, here, and here (sound recordings) and here and here (conversations in print).
