Just a Ragamuffin Waxing Poetic

American Life in Poetry: Column 162

American Life in Poetry: Column 162

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem.

Summer Job

"The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss,
once told me, "is that they don't know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,"
he said, "he gets to middle age--and by the way,
he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until
he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he's almost fifty--a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it's all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench--no, you moron, the other one."

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Richard Hoffman, and reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, "Gold Star Road," Barrow Street Press, 2007, by permission of the poet. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Poetry Out Loud

High School Student Shawntay Henry Wins $20,000 First Prize
in National Poetry Competition
Poetry Foundation Announces 2008 National Champion of Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest


CHICAGO — With a fan club including her family, friends, English teacher, poetry coach, and members of the Virgin Islands Council on the Arts, 16-year-old Shawntay Henry of the United States Virgin Islands captured the audience with her poetry recitations and was named the 2008 Poetry Out Loud National Champion. Along with her title, Henry, a 10th grade student at Charlotte Amalie High School, receives a $20,000 scholarship prize. The Poetry Out Loud National Finals were held last night at the George Washington University Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC. Henry was among 12 finalists and 52 state champions from around the country who participated in the third annual national poetry recitation contest, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and National Arts Endowment.

"Poetry was never something I thought I'd get involved with, but I realized I had a hidden talent," said Henry, who capped her winning performance with a thoughtful recitation of the poem "Frederick Douglass" by Robert E. Hayden. This was the first year that the U.S. Virgin Islands participated in the Poetry Out Loud program. Henry advanced to National Champion from a field of competition that included more than 1,500 high schools and 200,000 high school students around the country.

The second-place winner was Sophia Elena Soberon of Brookings-Harbor High School in Brookings, Oregon, who received a $10,000 scholarship prize. The Utah State Champion, Madison Niermeyer, of Skyline High School in Salt Lake City, received the third-place prize and a $5,000 scholarship.

The other 12 finalists included Elijah Orengo of Georgia; Sequoia Jelks of Indiana; Gabrielle Guarracino of Massachusetts; Charles White of Michigan; Allison Strong of New Jersey; Hannah JoBeth Roark of Oklahoma; Elsa Vande Vegte of South Dakota; BreAnna Jones of Washington State; and Carolyn Rose Garcia of West Virginia. Each of the top 12 finalists received a $1,000 scholarship prize and each of finalists' schools received a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books.

Special guest judges presided over the competition, including Garrison Keillor, host of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey; novelist and journalist Leslie Schwartz; Poetry Daily editor Don Selby; 2007 Poetry Out Loud National Champion Amanda Fernandez; and memoirist, activist, and poet Luis Rodriguez. Scott Simon, host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, served as master of ceremonies.

On April 28, 52 high school students — Poetry Out Loud champions from every state, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — competed in three semifinal rounds based on geographic region. Twelve students advanced to compete in the National Finals on April 29. Judges evaluated student performances on criteria including physical presence, articulation, evidence of understanding, level of difficulty, and accuracy. Students performed poems from the Poetry Out Loud print and online anthologies (www.poetryoutloud.org). The event was the culmination of a pyramid-structure competition that began last September among schools across the country.

The National Finals are the result of efforts by many partners. The NEA and the Poetry Foundation have contributed support for administration of the program, educational materials, and prizes for both the state and National Finals. Each State Arts Agency implemented the program in high schools in each state, often in collaboration with local arts organizations. The Poetry Out Loud National Finals were administered by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Poetry Out Loud seeks to foster the next generation of literary readers by building on the resurgence of poetry as an oral art form, as seen in the slam poetry movement and the popularity of rap music. Through Poetry Out Loud, students can master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage. Now in its third year of national competition, Poetry Out Loud has inspired thousands of high school students to discover classic and contemporary poetry. To find out how to get involved in the 2009 Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest, visit www.poetryoutloud.org.

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.

About the National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

About Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation
Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation supports the richness and diversity of the region's arts resources and promotes wider access to the art and artists of the region, nation and world. To learn more about MAAF, its programs and services, visit www.midatlanticarts.org.

Gary Snyder Wins 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prze

GARY SNYDER WINS 2008 RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE
$100,000 lifetime achievement award is one of largest to poets



CHICAGO — Poet Gary Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation's largest literary awards. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, made the announcement today. The prize will be presented at an evening ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Thursday, May 29.

In announcing the award, Wiman said: "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation."

Raised in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder began writing in the 1950s as a member—with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—of the Beat movement. For most of the 1960s he lived in Japan and studied formally in a Zen monastery. Blending physical reality—precise observations of nature—with insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism, Snyder has explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose.

The judges issued the following statement in making the selection: "Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there's no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we've been reading Robert Frost."

"The selection of Gary Snyder as this year's winner of the Lilly Prize does honor to the tradition of excellence and importance that the prize has stood for since it was established over 20 years ago," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.

Snyder is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations. His poetry collections include Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country, Regarding Wave, No Nature, Mountains and Rivers Without End, and Danger on Peaks. His essays are collected in Earth House Hold, The Real Work, A Place in Space, and Back on the Fire.

A committed environmental activist who has received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing, Snyder has also been recognized for his contributions to the theory and practice of Buddhism. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, and the Shelley Memorial Award.

Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, and lives in northern California.

Judges for the 2008 prize were poets Eavan Boland, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Christian Wiman. 

***

The Rabbit
A grizzled black-eyed rabbit showed me

   irrigation ditches, open paved highway,
            white line
   to the hill.
   bell chill blue jewel sky
         banners
Banner clouds flying,
The mountains all gathered,
   juniper trees on the flanks
            cone buds,
      the snug bark scale
         in thin powder snow
      over rock scrabble, pricklers, boulders,
   pines and junipers,
      singing.
The trees all singing.

The mountains are singing
To gather the sky and the mist
      to bring it down snow-breath
            ice-banners,
      and gather it water
Sent from the singing peaks
      flanks and folds
Down arroyos and ditches by highways the water
The people to use it, the
      mountains and juniper
Do it for men,

Said the rabbit.

First published in Poetry, March 1968. © Gary Snyder

***

About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
American poetry has no greater friend than Ruth Lilly. Over many years and in many ways, it has been blessed by her personal generosity. In 1985 she endowed the Ruth Lilly Professorship in Poetry at Indiana University. In 1989 she created Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowships, for $15,000 each, given annually by the Poetry Foundation to undergraduate or graduate students selected through a national competition. In 2002 her lifetime engagement with poetry culminated in a magnificent bequest that will enable the Poetry Foundation to promote, in perpetuity, a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Established in 1986 by Ruth Lilly, the annual prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. Over the last 20 years, the Lilly Prize has awarded more than $1,000,000. The previous recipients are Adrienne Rich, Philip Levine, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Hayden Carruth, David Wagoner, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Donald Hall, A.R. Ammons, Gerald Stern, William Matthews, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Carl Dennis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Linda Pastan, Kay Ryan, C.K. Williams, Richard Wilbur, and Lucille Clifton.

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.

They Tell the Truth, But Tell It Slant

THEY TELL THE TRUTH, BUT TELL IT SLANT   

Poets Anne Carson and Charles Wright revise and refresh the usual ways of seeing the world.

By Sandra Gilbert and D.H. Tracy
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

Reviewed by Sandra Gilbert

Anne Carson has won a formidable array of prizes and is a MacArthur Fellow, but I still remember my first encounter with what I could then only define as the utter strangeness of her sensibility. Not the least of the pleasures in her latest multidisciplinary offering is "Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," an essay that illuminates the mystery informing her strongest writings. Recounting a dream that she had as a young child, Carson describes a vision of her family's living room that seems to be as much a product of the visionary imagination as of REM sleep:

The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls ... nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different ... as changed as if it had gone mad.... [but] I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. And it took me years to recognize ... why I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling. For despite the spookiness, inexplicability and later tragic reference of the green living room, it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order ... something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house.

Carson uses this dream as an entry into an analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth," a poem itself based on a sleeper's misreading of the word "mammoth," along with discussions of further sleep-drenched works. But what I find most resonant are the entranced defamiliarizations that illuminate the dream-work out of which Carson's own art often arises.

Like most of Carson's books, Decreation includes some fine examples of such art, including the comically ecstatic "Ode to Sleep," into which "Every Exit Is an Entrance" cleverly segues:

       Think of your life without it.
Without that slab of outlaw time punctuating every pillow
       --without pillows.
Without the big black kitchen and the boiling stove where you

                           

snatch morsels
                 of your own father's legs and arms
               only to see them form into a sentence
      which--you weep with sudden joy--will save you
                      if you can remember it
                      later!

At its best, the verse here shares with the prose Carson's gift for telling what Dickinson called the "truth," but telling it "slant." Especially moving are the elegiac lyrics in memory of her mother with which she opens the volume. "Sleepchains" is heartfelt in the angular grief with which it shapes the cauchemar of lamentation:

Who can sleep when she--
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
.............................

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

But the work of Decreation weakens when the decreation of the daytime world doesn't issue in a recreation of dreamlike vistas: exits don't turn into entrances. In "H & A Screenplay," Heloise and Abelard sit at an absurdist kitchen table uttering a pointless series of Beckett knockoffs: "Hot day. / ... / You know I wonder about those leftovers. / What about them. / Will they last." This stuff makes me wonder about "those leftovers" too: Carson should consign them to the disposal. This brilliant poet should remember the livingness of her dream's green living room.

Sandra Gilbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Belongings, and two works of non-fiction. She is a professor emerita at U.C. Davis.

© 2007 by Sandra Gilbert. All rights reserved.

Scar Tissue, by Charles Wright. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $22.00.

Reviewed by D.H. Tracy

At this point, let's face it, a new book by Charles Wright--Scar Tissue is what, his fifteenth? sixteenth?--isn't going to sneak up on anyone. Thirty-five years into his decorated career, we know what to expect, and one of the pleasures of Scar Tissue is its familiarity. Those long, mossy lines, steeped in the South but trailing references to Italian cities and Chinese poetry like exotic fronds; the poignant descriptions of Virginia landscapes, all cobweb-delicate and yet hiding a robust benevolent sly smile; the meditations on the nature of existence; the unbelievably cluttered imagery, first falling on Vaseline, then church bells, then artillery rounds, then a crystal goblet, which is the order of metaphors in one ten-line description in "Matins"--there's something reassuring about all this. It's like running across a rerun of The Waltons, only the grandfather's been replaced by the concept of Ultimate Nothingness and John Boy's been swapped for Li Po.

It would be easy to pick this book up with a smile, shake your head fondly, and not give it too much thought. But you'd be missing out, because there's a good book of poems here, even if you have to look to find it. The mode of the poems is frequently conclusive, rather than descriptive or dramatic or nostalgic, and the steady arrival of lines telling you How Things Are is at times a dull bombardment. But beside all that, or beneath all that, is Wright's ability to write really striking images--lines about shadows sliding "In their cheap suits," about lightning that "flashes like hoof sparks"--and to create, especially in short poems like "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Waking Up After the Storm," moments of beauty unlike those of any other American writer.

He's been using this limited palette for so long because it works, after all; something about this kooky combination of Virginia forest, Tang poetry, old cars, Dante, and woodsmoke really does bring you to a feeling of contemplative suspension that surprisingly recalls Wang Wei. It's worth looking for, that feeling, even when it's nestled a long way down in a grand late-period complacency. This book won't change your life when it's trying to, in other words, but it might change it a little when it's not.

D.H. Tracy's poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois.

© 2007 by D.H. Tracy. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

American Life in Poetry: Column 161

American Life in Poetry: Column 161

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I may be a little sappy, but I think that almost everyone is doing the best he or she can, despite all sorts of obstacles. This poem by Jonathan Holden introduces us to a young car salesman, who is trying hard, perhaps too hard. Holden is the past poet laureate of Kansas and poet in residence at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

Car Showroom

Day after day, along with his placid
automobiles, that well-groomed
sallow young man had been waiting for
me, as in the cheerful, unchanging
weather of a billboard--pacing
the tiles, patting his tie, knotting, un-
knotting the facade of his smile
while staring out the window.
He was so bad at the job
he reminded me of myself
the summer I failed
at selling Time and Life in New Jersey.
Even though I was a boy
I could feel someone else's voice
crawl out of my mouth,
spoiling every word,
like this cowed, polite kid in his tie
and badge that said Greg,
saying Ma'am to my wife, calling
me Sir, retailing the air with such piety
I had to find anything out the window.
Maybe the rain. It was gray
and as honestly wet as ever. Something
we could both believe.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 1985 by Jonathan Holden, whose most recent book of poetry is "Knowing: New & Selected Poems," University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Reprinted from "The Names of the Rapids," The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985, by permission of the author. First printed in "Black Warrior Review." Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Translating Poetry Into Poetry

TRANSLATING POETRY INTO POETRY 

C. K. Williams on becoming a poet, and how he creates English versions of ancient Greek dramas--without knowing any Greek.

By David Gewanter
Poetry Foundation Media Services

C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Singing, winner of the National Book Award. The full interview is available at www.poetryfoundation.org.

David Gewanter: You've said that you wrote your first poem at 19 and a girl liked it, and things moved on from there. How does that early experience look from this stage in your life?
C.K. Williams: Incredibly unlikely. That's always been my feeling about having become a poet when I did. I still don't know how it really came about. Except for the writing of that first poem, and then futzing around with another. . . . When I arrived as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, the architect Louis Kahn, who taught there, was just becoming famous. My roommate was one of his students, and I became part of Kahn's circle and began to understand a little the life of an artist, which is what Kahn was--more than most, or any, other architect I've ever known. So when I began to write, I must have realized that one actually could be an artist, that there were such things in the real world, and that I might even possibly be one, too.

DG: Your list of works includes several translations. Can you talk about some of the circumstances of translations?
CKW: The first Greek translation I did was Sophocles, Women of Trachis. I was commissioned to do it for the Oxford series, and I had a collaborator with whom I worked who gave me the literal version of the whole play, and I worked with as many other versions as I could find.

DG: This is an old question about translation: do you take an aspect of contemporary language, and of the panoply of people in your experience, and then put them in, say, ancient Greece in order to make the poetry vivid? Or do you keep the strangeness?
CKW: Obviously I took the language of our day, which is my own language; but the mind of the language, if you can call it that, was the characters'. One of the characters in The Bacchae is a god, a nutty god. There was never any question of using anybody I knew as a model for him . . . except perhaps my own nuttiness.

DG: Nowadays, the sought-after translator might be a poet who doesn't know much, or any, of the language, and who works with a person who knows the original language.
CKW: Many of the best translations of poetry have been done by people who don't know the language of the original.

DG: This is turning everything on its head.
CKW: It sounds that way, but it's true. Translating poetry isn't just moving from one language to another; you're translating poetry into poetry, and that's not the same thing. A scholar who has a foreign language will be able to translate any text into English, but translating into poetry requires a poet. You can see this in other languages besides English. The best translation of Faust in French is by Gerard de Nerval, who had hardly any German. And Robert Lowell, in Imitations, did a number of marvelous poems from languages he didn't have.

DG: That's why you say that the translating of poetry and the composition of poetry are almost the same.
CKW: Yes.

DG: Some final questions. You're working on a Collected Poems. Some previous poets, Wordsworth, and Auden, re-edited their earlier poems. How do you view the incessantly tinkering poet, the person who is always fiddling with things, a Giacometti who won't let things go?
CKW: I'm like that; I'm an obsessive reviser. It takes me forever sometimes to finish a poem, and I'll often revise after a poem comes out in a magazine, though very, very rarely after it's in a book.

DG: Some poets were very restrictive in their publication, but their other poems and drafts--I mean Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop--have now been presented to the public. Does that give us the fuller sense of the poet, or should there be more priority given to the poems the poet wanted published?
CKW: Well, in Larkin's case, I think that it may have given a somewhat fuller sense of him; his letters had already given perhaps too full a vision of him. I certainly wouldn't want anyone to publish my drafts, or the poems that never worked out--what I call "dead poems" or "note poems." I'm going to put that in my will.

David Gewanter is author of In the Belly and The Sleep of Reason, and he is also co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

© 2007 by David Gewanter. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

American Life in Poetry: Column 160

American Life in Poetry: Column 160

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I've mentioned how important close observation is in composing a vivid poem. In this scene by Arizona poet, Steve Orlen, the details not only help us to see the girls clearly, but the last detail is loaded with suggestion. The poem closes with the car door shutting, and we readers are shut out of what will happen, though we can guess.

Three Teenage Girls: 1956

Three teenage girls in tight red sleeveless blouses and black Capri pants
And colorful headscarves secured in a knot to their chins
Are walking down the hill, chatting, laughing,
Cupping their cigarettes against the light rain,
The closest to the road with her left thumb stuck out
Not looking at the cars going past.

Every Friday night to the dance, and wet or dry
They get where they're going, walk two miles or get a ride,
And now the two-door 1950 Dodge, dark green
Darkening as evening falls, stops, they nudge
Each other, peer in, shrug, two scramble into the back seat,
And the third, the boldest, famous
For twice running away from home, slides in front with the man
Who reaches across her body and pulls the door shut.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2006 by Steve Orlen. Reprinted from "The Elephant's Child: New & Selected Poems 1978-2005" by Steve Orlen, Ausable Press, 2006, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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Thrills and Chills and Home Movies

THRILLS AND CHILLS AND HOME MOVIES 

Poets Galway Kinnell and David Wojahn create American myths as often as they debunk them.

by Peter Campion
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Strong Is Your Hold, by Galway Kinnell. Houghton Mifflin. $23.00.

I once heard a famous British poet pronounce that most American poets merely make home movies. You get what he meant: the shrinking of ambition, the jittery technique, the staged sentimentality, the private moments that should have remained private. But is there anything necessarily wrong with domestic poems? Reading Galway Kinnell's new book, I'm grateful for the homemade quality. Kinnell might just be our great poet of family life, and even more so, of that rarest thing in our poetry: happy family life.

Certainly when he goes for grand cinema, he fails. His poem here about September 11, "When the Towers Fell," remains a huge mistake. Puffed up with tags from Crane and Whitman, and from Paul Celan and Alexander Wat (untranslated), the poem reads in places like an inflated parody of Modernist collage. Kinnell is simply out of his element here: the interrogating intellect has never been his thing. In fact, the bardic afflatus which ruins "When the Towers Fell," and which laces much of the earlier work with cant, becomes a virtue in the domestic poems. You feel that Kinnell hasn't so much abandoned his brute force as kept it in check. The bull walks through the china shop and does just fine, thank you. Take the opening of "Everyone Was in Love":

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts. With heads raised and swaying,
alert as cobras, the snakes writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty
of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.

If this were a home movie, it would certainly be the weirdest, most thrilling one I've ever seen. The bucolic merriment shows its tense, creepy-crawly edge, and yet remains good fun.

This scene could stand as an emblem for all of Kinnell's best poems. Here at the threshold to the house (think of the "hold" of Kinnell's title) appear the ultimate figures of eros and thanatos, intertwined. Yet they're also just what they are: harmless garden critters. The poem, like the home, gains strength and vitality by allowing this creaturely life. Other equally successful poems include "Burning the Brush Pile" and "The Stone Table." All of these poems are made from the tension between the modest resolve of the householder and sheer animal energy. Those two forces fuse to give this collection its strength.

Interrogation Palace, by David Wojahn. University of Pittsburgh Press. $14.00.

Reading David Wojahn's superb selected poems, one has two seemingly contrary feelings. First comes the sheer pleasure of surveying Wojahn's range. Here's a poet who can write as convincingly of a backstage interview with Bob Marley as he can of Aeneas's reunion with Anchises in Hades. Wojahn is one of the few American poets since Lowell who has believably joined private and public life: individual suffering appears in the poems within the context of history. At times this perspective seems to enrich individual experience by giving it greater dimension; elsewhere it appears to trap the individual within a nightmare. In "Interrogation Palace" Wojahn picked the perfect title: these are poems of both largesse and terror.

Wojahn has developed from book to book, and found formal strategies to give his obsessions and ambitions their full presence. But Wojahn comes into his own with his third book, Mystery Train (1990). The title poem is a sonnet series about the history of rock and roll, as it parallels and contrasts the larger history of the time. One suspects that it's Wojahn's excitement about that subject itself which gives his voice a new immediacy and bite. The full intelligence of the poet--allusive, dense, playful, often darkly deadpan--galvanizes these lines. From The Falling Hour (1997) through to the new poems in this selection, he writes with as much formal and emotional strength as any poet alive. Consider, for example, the opening of his sonnet, "Fort Snelling National Cemetery, St. Paul, MN":

Thirty thousand dead, the markers all identical,
and with a map I find his stone,

                              

                     find my own name chiseled

here between the monoliths of airport runway lights
and "the world's largest shopping mall," its parking lot

nudging the cemetery fence. The spirit in its tunnel
does not soar, the spirit raised by wolves.

It's humbling to see what Wojahn can do in seven lines. Look at the cunning slant rhymes, the small modulations in tone (for instance from "monolith" to "shopping mall"), the balance between the images of personal loss and the insinuations about national decay. All these lead to the big curve in the structure, from the literal scene to the territory of fable and myth.

As in these lines, so in the larger work: Wojahn's formal skills give the movement between the everyday and the mythic its believability. Such range and scope lend distinction to this entire collection. I wish the anthologists and the prize committees would start paying attention. But in the meantime, who cares? We have this powerful, panoramic book.

Peter Campion is the author of a book of poems, Other People, and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson.

© 2007 by Peter Campion. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

American Life in Poetry: Column 159

American Life in Poetry: Column 159

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives.

The Inevitable

To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is "All the Lavish in Common," U. of Mass. Pr., 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from "The Chattahoochee Review," Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Never Far From a Breakdown

NEVER FAR FROM A BREAKDOWN 

Djuna Barnes' Collected Poems: With Notes Towards the Memoir displays her fascinating and furious mind at work.

By Brian Phillips
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs, by Djuna Barnes. Ed. by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman. University of Wisconsin Press. $24.95.

Djuna Barnes is one of those small, sharp points of vividness that seem to hover around important periods of literary history: quick, peripheral, mosquito-like, delirious, drunk on strange intensities. She was in Paris during the high time of Modernism and seemed to know everyone, go everywhere, hear everything. Literary life was a whirl, all "glorias," as she wrote sardonically in her notes toward the memoir she never lived to finish: all "aperitifs, Amontillado sherry or Rhine wines, cocaine, opium, or Cocteau." T.S. Eliot took her to lunch; she called Joyce "Jim"; Gertrude Stein praised her ankles. As a writer--she produced novels, poems, and plays--her manner was lushly and sensationally gothic, and seemed eccentric to those pillars of conformity, Stein and Ezra Pound.

She was taken seriously, only not quite seriously. Even Eliot, who championed her work--he published her novel Nightwood at Faber and Faber and acted informally as her literary agent--had reservations. When he convinced Faber, against his better judgment, to publish her play The Antiphon, he contributed what must be one of the most backhanded blurbs in the history of the medium. "Never has so much genius," he wrote, "been combined with so little talent."

For a long time Barnes's reputation has rested on Nightwood, her novel about lesbian life in Paris. Until quite recently, many of her poems were unknown. When the war broke out, she returned to New York, took an apartment in Greenwich Village, and went into a seclusion that lasted forty years; it was assumed that she had all but ceased to write. But all that time, it turns out, she was writing poetry, and working hard at it, too: piling up hundreds of drafts and feeling her way toward a new style--one that would be derived less from other Modernists than from the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals.

The results of this long experiment have now been published in a new Collected Poems, alongside her earlier verse and the notes toward her prose memoirs, and they are fascinating. There isn't a great poem in this book; very little of the later work is even finished. But the record of this light and furious mind slowly unraveling itself in the attempt to say what it had to say is painfully compelling, and Barnes frequently rises to moments of splendid poetry. She calls the falling Lucifer, marvelously, a "salmon of the air." Her manner is rhythmically compressed, aphoristic, riddling; she dwells on inscrutable allegories, often drawn from a private stock of warped Christian imagery:

How should one mourn who never yet has been
In any trampled list at Umbria? Nor seen
The Unicorn thrust in his dousing beam?
And Mary from the manger of her gown,
Ride Jesus down.

She is almost entirely sealed off from the main currents of influence in twentieth-century poetry, though as in the example above she sometimes echoes the more cryptic mode of Yeats. ("The crowns of Nineveh" would be at home in many of her poems.) At times she reads like a strange combination of Donne and Swinburne; at other times, fantastically, like something scribbled by a goblin from Christina Rossetti:

When I was an infant
Knuckling my foot,
Keeling on the huck-bone,
Blowing through my snout,
It was observed by huntsmen
(Though they did not shoot)
I was in my hubris,
Bowling Gods about.

The backgrounds of these poems, even when they appear to be comical, are almost always bitter, and this is in many ways a difficult book to read. Barnes frequently loses control of her powers and writes verse that is gory or mawkish or absurd. It should be remembered that many of these poems are drafts, written very late in her life.

We begin to feel, however, that the real achievements of this poetry depend on its never being far from a breakdown; that to convey the view from the edge of the abyss it was necessary to risk falling into it. Had Barnes governed herself, had she written poems that might have "succeeded" in a more conventional sense, she might never have attained the beautiful and violent and glorious extremes that sporadically fill this book. But she didn't. And so she did.

Brian Phillips is a regular reviewer for Poetry magazine.

© 2007 by Brian Phillips. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

American Life in poetry: Column 158

American Life in Poetry: Column 158

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Putting bed pillows onto the grass to freshen, it's a pretty humble subject for a poem, but look how Kentucky poet, Frank Steele, deftly uses a sun-warmed pillow to bring back the comfort and security of childhood.

Part of a Legacy

I take pillows outdoors to sun them
as my mother did. "Keeps bedding fresh,"
she said. It was April then, too--
buttercups fluffing their frail sails,
one striped bee humming grudges, a crinkle
of jonquils. Weeds reclaimed bare ground.
All of these leaked somehow
into the pillows, looking odd where they
simmered all day, the size of hams, out of place
on grass. And at night I could feel
some part of my mother still with me
in the warmth of my face as I dreamed
baseball and honeysuckle, sleeping
on sunlight.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2000 by Frank Steele, whose most recent book of poetry is "Singing into That Fresh Light," co-authored with Peggy Steele, ed. Robert Bly, Blue Sofa Press, 2001. Reprinted from "Blue Sofa Review," Vol. II, no. 1, Spring 2000, by permission of Frank Steele. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column  featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Poem-a-Day (National Poetry Month): April 3rd

The Origin
by Jane Mead
of what happened is not in language— of this much I am certain. Six degrees south, six east— and you have it: the bird with the blue feathers, the brown bird— same white breasts, same scaly ankles. The waves between us— house light and transform motion into the harboring of sounds in language.— Where there is newsprint the fact of desire is turned from again— and again. Just the sense that what remains might well be held up— later, as an ending. Twice I have walked through this life— once for nothing, once for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool— glassy-winged sharp-shooter on the failing vines. Count me— among the animals, their small committed calls.— Count me among the living. My greatest desire— to exist in a physical world.
From The Usable Field by Jane Mead. Copyright © 2008 by Jane Mead. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books. All rights reserved.

Poem-a-Day (National Poetry Month): April 2nd

The Charm
by Robert Creeley

My children are, to me,
what is uncommon: they are dumb
and speak with signs. Their hands

are nervous, and fit more for
hysteria, than goodwill or long
winterside conversation.

Where fire is, they are quieter
and sit, comforted. They were born 
by their mother in hopelessness.

But in them I had been, at first,
tongue. If they speak,
I have myself, and love them.

From Selected Poems, 1945-2005 by Robert Creeley. Copyright © 2008 by Robert Creeley. Used by permission of University of California Press. All rights reserved.

A Psalm? How So?

A PSALM? HOW SO? 

"The tension between the attempt to mean and the routine failure to entirely mean": the limits of human language and worship in George Oppen's "Psalm."

By Carl Phillips
Poetry Foundation Media Services

"Psalm" by George Oppen

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down--
That they are there!

                            

Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                            

The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                            

Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                            

The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

A psalm? How so? When I first discovered it, I held George Oppen's poem "Psalm" suspect as one of those poems about very little at all--one whose title, implying substance, in fact hopes to "cover" the poem's absence of it. The modes of psalm being two--praise and lament--I was willing to take the poem, at best, as simply an act of witnessing some deer, witness as a form of recognition, recognition as a form of deeming a thing worth recognizing: perhaps a stretch, but a kind of praise, anyway, for one of God's creatures. As for lament--well, I found none.

But, the epigraph's reference to Aquinas notwithstanding, it was via Gerard Manley Hopkins that I came to read the poem differently, and to appreciate more fully the relationship between syntax and narrative. Hopkins discusses (in "The Principle or Foundation") the praising of God, and the different options for praise available to humans as opposed to the rest of creation. A key difference is that the latter

"glorify God, but they do not know it. The birds sing to him, the thunder speaks of his terror . . . the honey [is] like his sweetness . . . they give him glory, but they do not know they do . . . they never can . . . But man can know God, can mean to give him glory. This then was why he was made, to give God glory and to mean to give it . . ."

By this reasoning, then, it is enough for the deer, "That they are there," their praise is manifest in their deer-ness itself, be it in the form of tearing at the grass or "merely" startling, and staring out. But a shift in phrasing occurs from "That they are there!" (3) to "They who are there." (13). In this shift, a stall seems at work, at the level of syntax, a moment of reassessing more soberly what had earlier been surprised outburst; I believe that this is where Oppen faces squarely the notion that humans have a greater responsibility when it comes to praise. Humans have the ability to articulate praise, via language, and therefore a duty to do so.

Syntax is the chief tool that language has for conveying meaning. And it is at the level of syntax that Oppen puts forward his concerns about praise, our obligation to give praise, and the limits to our ability to do so. Throughout the poem, there are places where the syntax--as if inevitably--gets derailed. Technically, for example, the subordinate clause "Their eyes / Effortless" (4-5) must modify "the soft lips" (5), but that makes no sense. "They who are there" (11) takes us back to the deer only because the phrase so closely resembles line 3, which described the deer; but by conventional syntax, the phrase must refer back to the "strange woods" of line 10. Again, sense is strained.

The syntax both embodies and enacts a constant feinting, a casting outward--only to fall short, each time, of "complete" meaning. The tension between the attempt to mean and the routine failure to entirely mean becomes emblematic of a parallel tension: between the duty we have to try to praise God to the best of our capacities, and the limitations to those capacities, finally, insofar as we are human--small nouns--and therefore necessarily flawed.

In its immediate content, Oppen's poem is an act of praise in the form of granting witness. At the level of syntax, the poem articulates the gesture itself of praise, of attempting to give it; and it articulates the inadequacy inherent to that attempt and subtly laments that inadequacy. Praise and lament. And a persuasive example of how syntax can generate and sustain the psychological narrative of a poem. And Oppen's "Psalm"? A psalm, indeed.

Carl Phillips is the author of more than eight books of poetry, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, and The Tether, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award. Phillips teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis, and he recently was awarded the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

© 2007 by Carl Phillips. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

Poem-a-Day (National Poetry Month): April 1st

 

Secret History
by Charles Simic
Of the light in my room: Its mood swings, Dark-morning glooms, Summer ecstasies. Spider on the wall, Lamp burning late, Shoes left by the bed, I'm your humble scribe. Dust balls, simple souls Conferring in the corner. The pearl earring she lost, Still to be found. Silence of falling snow, Night vanishing without trace, Only to return. I'm your humble scribe.
From That Little Something by Charles Simic. Copyright © 2008 by Charles Simic. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt. All rights reserved.