All winter and into spring I’ve been reading and writing about poetry in the courses I’m taking. One of my assignments was to write a review of a prize-winning first book, and I chose to review Clamor.
As the University of Wales web site states, the Dylan Thomas Prize “is awarded to the best eligible published or produced literary work in the English language, written by an author under 30.” Fenton is the first American to win this prestigious, international award, which comes with a prize close to $50,000.00 dollars.
Part of what intrigues me about Fenton’s work is the subject matter–she has written about her experience of living far away from her young husband while he was deployed in Iraq following the 911 terrorist attack. The theme of young love and the Iraq War gives her project a heightened sense of relevance that one does not always expect from an emerging artist. The collection, which revolves around a central, narrative theme, places the project squarely within current trends of poetry books that also tell a longer story, such as Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guardor Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s Slamming Open the Door.
The howling wind tonight reminds me of Tess Durbeyfield when she wanders across the moors dressed in rags. I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles around the same time that Nastassja Kinski appeared inTess, a 1979 film adaptation of the novel, but I haven’t yet seen the 2009 Masterpiece Theater version. Good times await!
Thinking of Tess brings to mind the nineteenth century and persona poems, both of which I love, and although The Suitable Girl (Pindrop Press, 2011) contains much more than period piece poems, there are some delightful ones to savor among the rich variety of poesy in Michelle McGrane’s latest collection.
The photo of the wine and my gorgeous copy of The Suitable Girl was taken at Kavarna, a coffee bar in Decatur, GA, near midtown Atlanta. The book is the first project from Jo Hemmant’s Pindrop Press. What a lovely debut collection! The Suitable Girl, in addition to Michelle McGrane’s wonderful imagination and gift for words, reflects Jo’s attention to detail and her excellent taste in poetry. Jo, a fine poet in her own right, has a keen eye for the printed word and a well-tuned ear for verse.
On the Monday after Christmas, Big Tent Poetry proposed a list poem for their next prompt, and Carolee suggested we try a little irreverence in the piece. She’s unconventional that way, and I like her for it.
So, I first did a focused free-write on the stuff that’s under my bed, but without actually getting down on my knees to look. What came out of the free-write is a sestina I’ve now been tweaking since before New Year Eve! It’s called “While the Dogs Nap on my Bed.” I start by listing real stuff I have left or stored under the bed, but since I had to repeat the end words, strange things happened. I ended up cutting a part I will try to use elsewhere, about an imaginary woman named Agnes who lives under my bed.
Thanks Big Tent Poetry! I’ll let you know if there are still publishers out there who will publish a sestina or two.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is best known for her sonnets and ballads, although after 1967 she wrote primarily in free verse. She is associated with the Black Arts movement, but because of the breadth and scope of her writing, many place her in a category all her own. She was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Below is a partial list of some of the items included in an annotated bibliography I prepared for a course in 20th century American poetry. I’ve only listed the resources available online, but there are plenty to keep you busy for an hour or so.
Although there are many free recording of Gwendolyn Brooks online, Poets.org sells a wonderful CD of Lucille Clifton and Brooks reading at the Guggenheim Museum in 1983. Brooks tells wonderful back stories to her poems that are entertaining in and of themselves.
Armenti, Peter. “Gwendolyn Brooks: Online Resources.” 30 July, 2010. Web Guides, US Poet Laureates, Virtual Services Digital Reference Services, US Library of Congress.
A list of just about every type of Brooks-related items: audio recordings, videos, websites, lesson plans, books, reviews, obituaries, histories, and criticism.
In his critical examination of The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (Harper, 1971), a collection of her poems from over three decades of work, Houston Baker offers a succinct summary of many classic Brooks poems, as well as an exploration of her interest in race, gender, and class. He also shows how her work grew out of, yet differed from, the poetry of such well-known African American writers as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
Brooks is one of only a few American poets included in the BBC poetry archives. This BBC website contains a brief but informative biography, as well as recordings of Brooks reading the following seven poems: “Kitchenette Building,” “The Mother,” “a song in the front yard,”? “of DeWitt Williams on his way to the Lincoln Cemetery,” “We Real Cool,” “The Lovers of the Poor,” and “A Sunset of the City.”
Many of Brooks’ poems first appeared in Poetry, which has enabled this website to share a great number of her poems, including those written after her pivotal Fisk University experience. There is an excellent critical biography and a long list of both recorded and printed poems. I especially like the details about her publishing experiences after she left Harper’s. There is also a long list of reviews, books, biographies, and obituaries for those who might be interested in conduction a more in-depth research of Brooks’ work.
Contains a copy of “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee” from her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, 1945. Also included is a brief but useful note on how Brooks fits into both the Harlem and the Chicago Renaissance.
It’s been a while since I’ve shared the state of my writing life online. Teaching freshman composition takes up a good chunk of my energy– I spend a lot of time writing responses to their writing on our class blog. Alright, I admit I also waste time on facebook.
Reading
In my two classes (a workshop and a seminar) we’ve been reading William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, and now Frank Stanford. We still have to get to James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Everett Maddox, and Andrew Hudgins.
Writing
This fall Ouroboros Review, the magazine Jo Hemmant and I started, published three of my poems in issue five: “Last Lollipop,” “Between Loads of Laundry,” and “Pain Drives by the Delivery Room at Wayside Hospital,” found on pages 12-13. I wrote these poems in 2009, two of them during a workshop I was in at GSU.
Many thanks to Jo, Carolee Sherwood, and Jill Crammond-Wickham for putting together another great magazine. Sara Hughes, fellow GSU poet has work in this issue. Her lovely poem, “The Secret of Life,” appears on page two.
There’s an interview with poets January Gill O’Neil and Kelli Russell Agodon, in which they discuss the writing life and how to balance creativity with adult responsibilities. Not easy! Their poems after the interview will knock your socks off.
The word on the street is that Ouroboros Review will be changing editorial directorship before the next issue comes out. It’s a gorgeous magazine, one of the few truly international reviews that publishes both online and in print. Ouroboros is available for purchase at Magcloud.
Jo Hemmant has done a wonderful job maintaining the unique tone and style of the art and poetry that appears in each issue. I love discovering poets and artists living in South Africa, France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, England, Canada, as well as the U.S. Whoever takes over the job will be inheriting a fine showcase of world writers.
In 2010 Jo Hemmant’s independent press, Pindrop, is launching A Suitable Girl by poet Michelle McGrane.
It’s impossible to pigeonhole renaissance man Dave Bonta. Poet, essayist, naturalist, photographer, and editor of qartsilunni are just a few of the hats he wears.
In January 2010, Phoenecia Publishing (Montreal) released his first printed collection of poetry, Odes to Tools. I say first printed collection, because Bonta shares many of his poems online at his long standing blog, Via Negativa, where he also highlights the literary endeavors of his fellow bloggers under the heading “Smorgasblog.” We love it when our work appears on Dave’s column–it calls for a Snoopy dance, or at least a tweet!
Bonta is a web-based curator of literary arts. He collects video poems at his website, Moving Poems, and he manages a related forum where video poem enthusiasts can share their finds on the web.
And now his latest project is up and running, Postal Poetry, an incarnation of a photography and poetry e-zine that he and Dana Guthrie Martin started in 2008.
Dave published seven of my postcard poems between 2008 and 2009– I’m grateful to Dave for gathering these poems together again in such a beautiful layout. The poems were fun to create, especially the ones I wrote to quirky photos Dave and Dana chose for the contests they sponsored.
My in-laws had a print of “The Kermess” in their cottage. I used to look at it quite a bit, but I didn’t know it was depicting a particular dance until I read William Carlos William’s poem about the painting, titled, “The Dance.”
In the poem Williams focuses on the dancers’ bodies–their bellies and shanks in particular, and how strong the dancers must have been to prance about so lightly with such large frames.
I like how Brueghel painted common folk, people who carried their own wooden spoon with them in their back pockets so they would always have a handy utensil for dining. There’s a lot to imagine in the painting, and I can see why Williams wanted to write about it.
Williams often wrote about the poor, even though he was a doctor and highly educated. There’s a certain kind of mythologizing present, almost a sort of nostalgia, when someone who is not poor writes or depicts the stories or the misfortunes of others. I know many painters, filmmakers, and writers do just that.
In my own poems I think of writing about social problems, but I want to be careful about not appropriating someone else’s story as my own. To avoid this spurious representation of myself as the other, I need to do what Williams did–show how I am observing and recording my thoughts and impressions. In this way there is still a need for the first person singular.
Not to get too theoretical, since all I know about literary theory is what I’ve heard from grad students and the bits I’ve read on Wikipedia. There’s also an eerie documentary about Derrida that gave me a few hints.
I visited the Dalí exhibit again, this time with a poet friend who hosts the radio show melodically challenged on WRAS. Her program broadcasts on Sundays from 2:00-4:00 in the afternoon, and features poets reading their own works, along with music that enhances the show’s theme. One of the more recent playlists highlighted poems about birds, or poems that include birds. I intend to tune in this Sunday.
It was fun to walk through the exhibit a second time. At my friend’s suggestion, we used the audio tour as we progressed through the halls, and we ended up finding out a lot that would have gone unnoticed had we merely meandered along on our own. One interesting aspect the curators brought out was how Dalí experimented with how he applied his medium to the surface–he used a loaf of bread, his mustache, a rhinoceros horn (which he equated with the unicorn, a symbol of virginity), and an octopus. He also shot paint pellets out of a gun, a technique he dubbed “bulletism.”
I also found out why he was kicked out of the Surrealist movement: with Marcel Duchamp’s blessing he included a painting with religious iconography in a Surrealist exhibit, a theme the surrealists rejected. So he was ousted. The title of this exhibit is Dalí, The Later Works, a time period that until recently has not been admired by art critics, maybe because of the religious nature of the pieces. I did read, however, that Dalí declared himself a “Catholic without faith,” and that he did not believe in miracles.
I’ve already written two drafts of poems in response to his paintings. This summer has been very contemplative for me. I’ve been reading After by Jane Hirschfield and studying Buddhism, meditation, yoga. All the mind work, plus lap swimming, to calm my inner waters.
Even though I want to be at peace, I’m very drawn to the zany world of Da Da, Surrealism, and dreams. I keep thinking that if I remember my dreams and explore the images the meaning of everything will fall into place. A pretty illusion.
Emily Elizabeth Schulten read from her collection Rest in Black Haw (2009, Summerfield Press) for the Solar Anus Reading Series at Beep Beep Gallery in Atlanta. Many of the poems from her book, rich with imagery of domestic life and the natural world, point to her Kentucky roots. She also read a few pieces from her current work, which were written after her travels to Barcelona and Rome.
One of the poems from her collection, “Labor Day Weekend,” was featured on Verse Daily. You can also read the blurbs on the back cover here.
Before reading her later work, Schulten, who has traveled widely, remarked that her more recent poems reflect her thoughts about how we create the concept of home as we move through the world.
Jim Goar, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at the reading, read a few pieces from his most recent book of poetry, Seoul Bus Poems. Goar told the audience that all the poems in the collection were written on the bus while he was working in Seoul. Great economy of words and meaning in the title, I’d say.
Most of the work he read came from his latest project, a book-length serial poem based on his immersion in the Holy Grail legend, the focus of his studies as a PhD. student in Norwich, England. I look forward to reading the collection. I’d also like to learn more about his method of writing the serial poems.
You can read more about Jim Goar at his blog, Can of Corn. Discover how he named his blog by reading his book, Seoul Bus Poems.
I’ll be honest, I’m not much interested in literary theory. When I read a poem I look up words I don’t understand or references that I’ve never heard of, but in general I prefer to figure out the gist on my own. That’s what’s fun about reading, isn’t it?
I offer that statement as an apology for my musings about poems, because probably all of it has been said much better by someone else. So you could say I’m writing these musings for myself, or for some future reader who comes along, surfing the web the way some people still troll through microfiche.
The Epigraph
I took a course on modern British poetry many years ago, and I’ve read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”several times over the decades, but I never bothered to look up the Italian epigraph until now, and I guess I should have, because it does inform the poem. Or it could be that I forgot the meaning after so many years.
William Blake: "Dante's Inferno, Whirlwind of Lovers."
The epigraph comes from a section of Dante’s Inferno, and is the speech of a man who apparently committed some heinous misdeeds, because he’s consigned to one of the lower circles of hell. Roughly, the stanza says the man would not tell the story of his sins if he thought the listener could return to the world to relate the man’s crimes, but since he has never heard of anyone escaping from the fiery pit, he will go ahead and spill the beans, or wag his flaming tongue. He has been so terrible that he has lost his human form, and has become only a tongue of fire.
The Poem
When J. Alfred invites the reader to go on a walk with him through the city streets, he believes we are with him in hell, never to return. If he tells us what’s really on his mind, it’s because he thinks we’re stuck in this place with him.
Prufrock admits he has tried to create a persona to win favors from the world. He admits he’s getting old, and reveals his paltry efforts to conceal his aging. He shows us his hurt when a woman he has either seduced, or tried to seduce, tells him, “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.”
Yet he thinks he really does have something to say. He wants to come back from the dead like Lazarus to tell everyone about the “mermaids singing, each to each.” But he doubts himself. He doesn’t think he’s a prophet. He doubts the mermaids will sing to him.
But what he has to say is that at night we dream we are mermaids riding the waves out to sea, and it’s only when we wake up that we drown.
Prufrock is like the rest of us ridiculous humans, caught up in our gains and losses, always thinking we have time to make our “visions and revisions/Before the taking of toast and tea.”
Lately I’ve been reading about Buddhism and the need to follow the Dharma right now. We might die at any moment. It could be in an hour, when we drive to the market, or later on, while walking the dog. And so the need to die with a peaceful mind is of the greatest importance. Catholics might say something about needing to be in a state of grace during the moment of death.
Prufrock obsesses about our having time for all the things we haven’t done yet. But really there is no time left for that. He knows his time is up, yet he clings to the idea of himself: parting his hair down the back, rolling his pants legs up, walking the beach in white flannel, all the images of himself as a lady’s man or an urbane gentleman amid the sordid yellow smoke of the city.
The collection Prufrock (1917) is dedicated to Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal who, according to the inscription, died at the age of 26 during WWI at Dardanelles. Maybe this character of Prufrock is a satire of Eliot himself and others. Through revealing the character’s weaknesses he exposes our frivolities and our vanities, which at our death amount to nothing.
My favorite lines from the poem are these:
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
and
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
Those lines make me believe Prufrock might not be a bad sort at all. Because he has told us about the mermaids, after all. If he’s in hell, maybe he’ll have a chance to climb out of the pit.
Balanced On the Edge 