My hat goes high and then higher to the new U.S. Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin: extraordinary poet, superb translator, and author of one of my favorite offbeat nonfiction gems, The Mays of Ventadorn.
Poems, yes, in the many-platformed Vitruvius, with, among others written by, among others, a favorite poet of mine, Jules Gibbs.
Thanks to The Rome Review for tucking a poem of mine called "After Jazz" in amongst some really wonderful work by Blake Butler, George Singleton, Steve Almond and Kathleen Rooney, among others.
August 5, 2009, 7:22 p.m.Categories: Auto-trumpeting, Litmags, Poetry
In his book The Other Lover, my friend Bruce Smith has a great poem called "Afterbody" where we get, among other things, this:
"...From the most meager
scraps of voice on the telephone--
a half tone or quarter tone--
he pieces the body together: widow's peak, collarbones,
pelvic tilt, lobes and clefts, the body cloned
from some pressures and inflections,
a stammered word, interference, aspiration."
And I say thee yea, Bruce Smith! Yeah, yea. By our diction shall we be known, shall make ourselves known, shall manifest our very lives aloud, and those of our characters, and thank you for saying so so clearly.
April 22, 2009, 8:57 a.m.Category: Poetry
Last night I cleared out about twenty pounds of paper. Most of it was easy--paid bills from 2004, warranty slips for things I don't even own any more, that sort of thing. Some of it was harder. I have a file of magazine clippings that I've been carrying around (and adding to) since, I don't know, 1995 or so. So I went through it, pruned what I could. One of the things I kept--easy choice--is the following poem by Melissa Montimurro from Literal Latte, Volume 7, Number 5, and first prize winner in the Food Verse Contest, and it gets me every time:
Why Onions Give Us Their Tears
Because they are secretly afraid of the dark.
Because they are homely and humble and cannot bear the sadness.
Because they've held all of the hopes of the lily yet will never pose wanly in a vase
but be tamed in a kettle instead.
Because the garden was a long lush dream above them.
Because once for a moment they felt the sun on their maiden heads
and they knew then what the others knew
cabbage and chard and sugar snap
that it was the hot kiss of the galaxy
and they had misspent their entire lives.
Because they would drown in the waters of their own weeping.
This news made me just unfeasibly happy. I first came to Snyder almost exactly twenty years ago, in an early edition of Donald Hall's excellent Contemporary American Poetry. I'd just dropped out of college and was hitchhiking across the country on my way to Alaska, bought a couple of books in a used bookstore in Seattle before jumping on the ferry, and that anthology was one of them.
I already knew a few of the poets inside--Lowell and Bly, maybe Stafford, maybe Ashbery--but most of them were new to me, and they made me crazy with pleasure and desire, the whole crowd: Duncan and Nemerov and Dickey and Levertov and Logan, Ammons and O'Hara, Kinnell and Merwin and Wright and Kennedy. Creeley and Wilbur were crack to me--the feeling that whole countries were there, and that maybe, if I was just a bit smarter, if I really read the shit out of those poems, I'd be given the visas, have earned them. John Haines felt like a brother-in-arms, because, hey, poems about Alaska, exactly where I'm going right this very minute!
And of course Gary Snyder as well. I like what Margaret Soltan has to say about him here: the man knows how to listen to the world, has hearing most of us can barely imagine. Sitting there on the deck of that northbound ferry, skirting Canada, sun on my face but not in my eyes, reading "Milton by Firelight" and "Hay for the Horses," I'd have given Snyder a hundred grand right then and there, if, you know, I'd had a hundred grand, and hadn't been on a ferry. Thank God Ruth Lilly has my back.
And another few poems are out in the world, this time in the 2007-2008 issue of Pacific Review. And some good neighbors--Amanda Rachel Warren, Allan Gurganus--to share space with.
I've been submitting to Indiana Review for about a million years now. Lots of nice feedback along the way, and a couple of close calls in their contests, but no paydirt until now: it's a great pleasure for me to be able to say that "Body Asking Shadow" is out in their latest issue, Volume 20, Number 1. Much good company too: Denise Duhamel and Stuart Dybek and Dustin Long and Lucia Perillo for starters.
"Body Asking Shadow" is one of the few stories I've set in China so far. I'm pretty sure more will come later, after we've left. That's usually how it goes.
And, to save you a little googling, the title is from Gary Snyder's amazing translation of Han Shan's Cold Mountain sequence:
"A hill of pines hums in the wind. And now I've lost the shortcut home, Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?"
August 5, 2007, 4:10 p.m.Categories: China, Poetry, Short Stories
It's been a good long while since I shifted from writing mostly poetry to writing mostly fiction, but every so often I hear a sentence that's got a line break built into it, and on my good days I pay attention. One result, a poem called "Alchemical Failure," is just now in the splendid Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Confrontation, sharing pages with stories by Tom Stacey and Kathleen Spivack, a play by Tom Lavagnino, nonfiction by George Held and poems by Brett Foster, Rachel Trousdale, Alan Britt and Andrew Kaufman, among many others.
December 5, 2006, 7:46 p.m.Category: Poetry
I taught for five years at the University of Piura in northern Peru, and participated in a fair number of literature conferences there. After the one we did in 1999, two of my colleagues and fellow presenters, Carlos Arrizabalaga and Ricardo Huamán, decided to put together a volume of essays based on the presentations. There were the usual number of false starts and reimaginings, and when I left Piura in 2000, it wasn't clear whether or not the project was ever going to come together. But Carlos and Ricardo never gave up, and the result is now out, a handsome volume called Aproximaciones a la literatura peruana. My contribution is called "Pelando la fruta," and works through one of my favorite books of poetry, Carlos Oquendo de Amat's 5 metros de poemas.
I really wish this poet, and this book, were better known. Oquendo died young, and only published this one slim volume. Not all of his poems have aged equally well, but most of them are beautiful and a few are extraordinary. The book's quite hard to find these days, even in Spanish; the most recent edition is that of Ediciones el Taller del Libro in Madrid, published in 2003, ISBN 84-933844-1-0.
In English, the only translation currently available is this one, and according to Amazon, there are all of two copies for sale, both used, the cheapest of which retails for almost $200. But if you read Spanish, you can find all of the poems here, thanks to Jesus Castagnetto.
December 1, 2006, 11:36 a.m.Categories: Nonfiction, Poetry
