O Kalamazoo

I just woke up from two hours of deep sleep, which took place while curled up in a chair in the middle of Western Michigan University's library. Luckily no one stole my laptop or wrote on my face while I was out. I've hit the travel wall--every Kleenex used in my purse, lymph nodes swollen, craving peanut butter for the sheer energy--and soon, after a visit to a WMU class on "food and culture" that has read Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, I'll be on my way back to North Carolina. But what a wonderful time I have had while here. So I give you: three days in photographs.

Kalamazoo is an ace town for coffeeshops. Here is a glimpse of the 24-hour-open Fourth Coast (which refers to the coast of Lake Michigan, in case you're wondering). After a welcome-to-town lunch with my host, the poet Traci Brimhall, I spent my Friday afternoon here--and got 1,000 words written of an essay I've been mulling over for months. Creativity upon arrival is always a good omen. 

Afterwards my other host, Jon, picked me up for dinner and a trek to Louie's Trophy Grill, which features very large game animals on the walls. We saw three guys and their bartender do a shotski--four shot glasses mounted in a ski for simultaneous drinking. I could have gotten in on the action had there not been sour mix in the shots. Foiled! Afterward a slight mis-Google-directioning landed us in, um,  Galesburg. I got back to Traci's at 1 AM; the poor, brave poet had to stand outside in her socks so I could find their apartment amidst the identical rows of snow-covered buildings.

The next morning Traci, her husband Robert, Jill Osier (the other KBAC reader), and I headed out to South Haven, a beach town about an hour away. On the drive out we saw Christmas tree farms, fields of bare blueberry bushes with bright red branches against the snow, a 20-foot-tall compound bow advertising an archery shop, and the place that sells "The World's Greatest Hamburger," which as you can imagine was quite the temptation. But we pushed on to the Thirsty Perch, which had good hot french fries and this Make-Your-Own Bloody Mary bar. Celery salt, two different varieties of hot sauce, horseradish, thick crisp bacon: we were in heaven. But what followed was even better.

This is what happens at the icy edge of a Great Lake...

...where one watches each splash of a wave freeze as it meets the shore. 

I asked Jill, who lives in Alaska, if this made her feel at home. But she lives in an area that is fairly dry, without a lot of snow fall. Traci and Robert had never been to South Haven in winter before. In other words, we were all agog at the beauty of it. 

By the time we got back to Kalamazoo, we had only an hour to warm up and change for our reading at the Kalamazoo Center for Book Arts. Great crowd--almost 40 people--including some folks I had written to over the years, or known as fellow New Issues poets, or published in Folio, but had never met in person.

Jill read first. Her work is quiet and stunning, offering double-takes of language as a signifier of emotional indeterminacy. This is the lead-off poem to her chapbook Bedful of Nebraskas from sunnyoutside press; it first appeared in a 2005 issue of Poetry:

DEAR 

I did not walk down to the lake today.
Maybe I should have, though if you leave
a pail of rainwater sitting in the yard,
it gives an answer to most things. Emptied,
it's metal asking questions. Your face appears
undisturbed if you approach it carefully.
No one at the lake would have known me.
I don't think you can approach a lake carefully,
or I don't think we ever approach what we mean
to a lake.

During an intermission, copies of our books and broadsides were raffled off to the crowd.  I was anxious to see which poem of mine they had chosen for a broadside. Turned out they had picked "Mercy," the poem that currently closes my third collection. 

I talked about my gratitude to have had New Issues Poetry & Prose take a chance on my first collection--it was great to have both Marianne Swierenga, who was my editor, and current managing editor Kimberly Kolbe in the house. I shared a mix of poems from Theories of Falling, I Was the Jukebox, and new work.  I read "The Hotel Devotion" because Kim, the lovely intern who introduced me, said it was her favorite. 

Afterwards we went to Food Dance, where I ate an amazing Moroccan dish: roasted butternut squash piled high withIsraeli couscous, olives, chickpeas, and almonds. Conversations ran late and included this guess at someone's age: "I figure, between 25 and 65." We marveled at the music mix, which somehow covered the guilty-pleasure spectrum from Verve Pipe to Guns 'N Roses to Tom Petty to Jay-Z.

The next morning we went by the downtown Water Street Coffee en route to dropping Jill off at the train station. I stayed to get work done, enjoying one of the most delicate cups of coffee I have ever savored--a gently ground pour-over whose surface swirled--while reading through a batch of submissions for a sestina contest. Then I couldn't resist the allure of returning to Food Dance, across the street. 

The music was still addictive; this time, an even peppier mix that included Stevie Wonder and Culture Club. I sat at the bar, ordered a Bloody Mary with Absolut Peppar, house-made vegetable juice and a pickled asparagus garnish, and settled in to read. Not that a searing account of contemporary war isn't a good way to spend a Sunday morning, but after the first 100 pages I decided to change it up. 

I convinced the waitress to let me try all three of the Sandra-friendly housemade breads--sourdough, multigrain, and a stellar hot-from-oven rosemary and potato bread, all of which I slathered with thick blueberry-blackberry jam. My neighbors at the bar, overhearing me introduce myself as an out-of-towner, struck up conversation. The guy to my right was on his way out of town, moving to Cincinatti to serve a one-year fellowship as a team doctor to the Reds. He said of the guy to my left, "You've come to the right place; he's the mayor of Kalamazoo." It took several jokes and 20 minutes of conversation later to figure out he was, in fact, the actual mayor.

Me and Mayor Bobby Hopewell. An incredibly nice guy who, in addition to his civic service, works in hospital administration. On his way out, he told the Food Dance folks he wanted to pick up my check. Kalamazoo, you rock. 

Bobby said my mission of coffeeshop surveyance would not be complete without a visit to the Black Owl, so that is where I went to finish Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds. This is a small but very cool new venue, with a steampunk aesthetic and six different methods of making their coffee. There are plans to add a bar angle; I bet it flourishes.

To walk off all the calories from my morning's indulgences I headed down to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, which offers quite a bargain of entertainment for $5 admission. An exhibit of Ansel Adams photography had just opened over the weekend. An unexpected highlight was "Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay," which focuses on the legacy of the Saint John's University Pottery studio, now in its thirtieth year, anchored by the influence of artist in residence Richard Bresnahan. My favorite work was by his youngest apprentice (and the only woman) Anne Meyer.

No Kalamazoo experience is complete without a round at the Eccentric Cafe of Bell's Brewery, for which Jon met up with me. Bell's has quite a friendly, boisterous scene; I bet it's a great place for live music. I ordered a flight of six samplers and decided my favorite was Harvest Ale, a pale ale brewed with Michigan-sourced barley and hops. My dinner was the veritable bucket o'peanuts they scooped me for $1.60.

By the time we left Bell's the snow was coming down. We made a quick pit stop at the aptly named Beer and Skittles; I picked up one last Michigan beer, New Holland's "The Poet" Oatmeal Stout. Jon dropped me off at Water Street's Oakland location--where chairs are luxurious and KBAC broadsides are on display--to head home with Marianne, where we spent a few hours talking before deep sleep (part one; "deep sleep, part two" took place at the aforementioned library, where Marianne now works). 

I met Marianne on my first night of my first visit to Virginia Center for Creative Arts, way back in 2005. We had no way of knowing that she'd be my editor at New Issues, much less that eight years later we'd be in her living room. One thing I've learned about traveling is that everyone has their favorite cities and towns; places where you'll take any excuse to go back for a visit. Kalamazoo, welcome to my list. I'll see you again.

ALWAYS ALMOST, NEVER QUITE by David Howard

at home 
in the interpreted world

-
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies I





1





The tree on the slope is contingent upon
your voice.

I hear nothing so the tree won’t bend –

I need that tree to bend.



The horizon does not want poetry to keep
going.

Intention? No star meant to be admired and yet…

Praise is impossible without doubt, ask a
teenager.



The

Rabbit Holes

"tuff turf" is from Minneapolis artist Brock Davis's collection "2012 iPhone photos," favorites taken over the past year. Lots of wonderful images to be found. 

Amidst teaching classes and finalizing my poetry manuscript (!), on Friday I'll fly to Michigan for a Saturday night reading at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center with Jill Osier. They have designed a broadside of one of my poems--but I don't know which poem. Since it'll be on the snowy side, my sightseeing plans are modest: a series of coffeeshops, the local art museum, and Bell's brewery. Then on Wednesday, February 6, I will trek up to Charlottesville for a reading with the VQR folks. It will take place at OpenGrounds, an interdisciplinary space that didn't even exist when I was at UVA. 

There's been a lot of "po-world" conversations buzzing around the internets in the past month, from Robert Pinsky's announcement that Slate will no longer publish poems; to Richard Blanco's inauguration day poem (and, dare I say, his Huffington Post essay that probably won even more hearts in the writing community); to the laughable inauguration poem authored by James Franco, which becomes less funny when you realize he has a contract for a collection with Graywolf, an opportunity so many poets work their whole lives toward; to the headlines determined to frame Sharon Olds' T.S. Eliot prize in the context of her divorce; to this ridiculous blogpost by Washington Post staffer Alexandra Petri, which was immediately smacked down by Coldfront's John Deming and others. 

I never know how far to go with these discussions, especially in the strange space of social media. The problem with Facebook is that people (myself included) go on too long; the problem with Twitter is that we have to keep comments so short. What I do know is that if I get physical flashbacks to the days of my college debating society--sweating, nausea, loss of circulation in a foot too long folded under me--that's a bad sign. Besides, so much of it is momentary, passing. This is not the month that poetry will live or die in contemporary culture. Poetry is a coelacanth, lurking and ancient. Yet it's also the sparrow; everywhere, accessible. Poetry can take care of itself.

That said, the moments that have interested me have not been Poets vs. The Philistine World, but Writers Disagreeing With Writers. The latter is getting lost amidst the bluster of the former. I was surprised to see a respected editor say on Facebook that Sharon Olds is a particular case who has earned having a heavy biographical reading applied to her work because she lacks attention to craft. I disagree. And I would love to have a deeper discussion of that, looking at exemplar poems from the perspective of line break and figurative language. 

I was surprised when poets said that the "fiscal pressures" that led to Slate's editorial decision (though I doubt that is the real, sole reason) should be allayed by having poetry editors volunteer their time, and poets forgo contributor fees. That is categorically bad precedent to set. No magazine that pays should be encouraged to think of poetry as a mode that isn't "real work" and needn't be compensated in a manner comparable to other genres. Even if that means venues wither along the way because their ROI isn't judged sufficient. But there are poets I respect who would disagree with me. And that's the conversation I'd like to have, in real time and space. Not on Twitter.

AWP in Boston is coming up in March. Most attendees joke about the fact that the hotel bar and the offsites are as much the destination of the in-conference events. It's because the discussions we are craving most can't be pitched months in advance. They lace together news and gossip, personal experience and bias. I'm game to go down the rabbit hole with y'all in discussing these issues, and others. But only if we can hold hands along the way, and drink from the same bottle of potion. You can't hold hands online. As for the potion--well, that's why I carry a flask to AWP. 

Life Among the Bears

I am halfway through my second week at Lenoir-Rhyne University, whose mascot is the Bears. Our poetry workshop kicked off with looking at some of my favorite contemporary poems, such as Meg Kearney's "Creed" (anaphora and other rhetorical ordering principles) and Natasha Trethewey's "Mississippi" (explaining the ghazal form). We looked at Henry Taylor's "Artichoke":


ARTICHOKE

"If poetry did not exist, would you
have had the wit to invent it?" 
-Howard Nemerov


He had studied in private years ago 
the way to eat these things, and was prepared 
when she set the clipped green globe before him. 
He only wondered (as he always did 
when he plucked from the base the first thick leaf, 
dipped it into the sauce and caught her eye
as he deftly set the velvet curve against 
the inside edges of his lower teeth
and drew the tender pulp towards his tongue
while she made some predictable remark
about the sensuality of this act
then sheared away the spines and ate the heart)
what mind, what hunger, first saw this as food.

-H.T. (from The Flying Change)


...They immediately fixated on that parenthetical phrase, of course, and the way it changes the tone of the scene. I asked if they'd ever seen a similar move in a poem. Then I showed them how it echoes something John Keats did two hundred years earlier:


This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.

-J.K. (1795-1821)



That's what I love about teaching, those little a-ha moments.

This week I came on strong with the craft vocabulary. I admit, John Hollander isn't the friendliest voice for beginning students. (He's like Waldorf and Statler combined, if Waldorf and Statler insisted on bickering in iambic pentameter.) But I'm a big believer that workshoppers are always talking about things in loosey-goosey terms when there are wonderful words--caesura, assonance, spondee, stichic, chiasmus--designed to articulate our aesthetic impressions. If I can inspire even one student out of fourteen to adopt the vocabulary of form in talking about free verse, to understand that the two modes exist on a continuum, I'll be thrilled. 

I was met with glassy stares by the time we got to ottava rima. They're antsy to turn to their own poems.  "I gotta give you vegetables first," I said, "before the cotton candy and funnel cake." At one point, I chanted the "Pat-a-cake" nursery rhyme (to demonstrate accentual meter), and I seriously considered tap-dancing in anapestic tetrameter. In for a penny, in for a pound. 

Hickory has its charms. My welcoming party included some fun, quirky conversations; never again, when buying chairs, will I settle for less eight-way hand-tied upholstery. (The things you learn in a furniture town.) I am exploring a spectrum of North Carolina beers. UMI, the Japanese restaurant, continues to amaze me--my new favorite dish is the vegetable nimono, which includes thick slices of gobo (mountain carrot) and lotus root simmered in a dashi broth. 

The roads are bizarrely tricky. In addition to quadrants (NE, NW, etc) there are numbered streets, numbered avenues, and numbered "Avenue Place"-s, often all three intersecting within feet of each other. There is Lenoir-Rhyne Boulevard, which seems like a convenient main road--up until the intersection where Lenoir-Rhyne's campus is within sight-line, at which point it refuses to let you enter and veers off to the right instead. Bears must have excellent senses of direction but I, mere poet, get lost and turn around and get lost again. Luckily I'm used to it. I am, after all, also a DC girl.

What We're Reading Now

Since we've been reading lots of fine work lately, this month on Poetry Matters, instead of an in-depth review or interview, you’ll find four quick posts filled with book-candy: 

• Barbara offers an overview of a chapbook by Sarah Freligh.


• Caroline touches on her work with Writing For Your Life writing circles and takes us into a book by Elyse Fenton that concerns one woman's experience with war.


• Karen gives us a mini-review of Alison Luterman’s second book of poetry.


• Nancy shares a sampling of what has captivated her in the last few weeks: two debut books, one from Jennifer Chang and the other from Ryan Teitman, as well as a quick nod to a few of her favorite journals.

So take a look—you might find that next great book of poetry or a poet whose work resonates with you. And friends, please do share with us what you're reading. We're always looking for good books!

 Barbara's Chapbook Recommendation

A Brief Natural History of an American Girl

by Sarah Freligh

Accents Publishing, 2012

2012 Accents Publishing Poetry Chapbook Contest Editor’s choice award winner

ISBN: 978-I-936628-14-8

Accents Publishing, Lexington KY

http://www.accents-publishing.com

A Brief Natural History of an American Girl by Sarah Freligh is all that the title promises, and then some. Brief (alas!), offering a wholly natural first person portrait of a girl in literary landscape vividly American and tangibly reminiscent of the 50’s and 60’s. The references, evocations and vignettes summon my own American girlhood of that same period. Here is the post WWII era deromanticized, an engaging subversion of the Nelsons and the Cleavers. The book is a stunner, in every sense of the word. However, no matter the decade or cultural window through which the poems are framed, most any reader can relate to the awkward, the confusing, fraught, exhilarating nature of youthful self-discovery.

This is the true stuff of growing up: languishing in the back seat during the endless family car trip, fantasizing about Davy Jones, about “doing it,” teenage pregnancy, the naïve response to sexual harassment (“I was sixteen and didn’t understand/yet how life can kill you a little/at a time. Still, I kissed him back”): all moving parts of girlhood. Freligh presents her journey from a wry perspective; looking back on her particular yet universal tender years from a middle-aged woman’s knowing wink and sensitive edge. Her voice is authentic, unyielding, carrying a great sense of spontaneity. Yet beneath the seeming automaticity of the lines lay carefully crafted poems: analog, ekphrasis, the boom of prose blocks, couplets, tercets, free verse. She achieves the tricky pairing of the natural speech line and considered technique rendered inconspicuous by the immediacy of lines like “. . .clatter of engine,/rev of cells: oh axons : oh dendrites.” (“Old Flame”).

A Brief Natural History sketches a life journey whose point of departure is girlhood, whose mode is memory, and whose imprint is indelible. The poems are freshly rendered yet tempered by the wisdom of a mature speaker (self-deprecatingly yet affectionately described as an “Old hen: all fruitless//tubes and bristled/chin” in “Depending”). The collection is a compelling narrative which this reader drank in in one captivated sitting. Freligh has given us an entirely original collection whose coming-of-age theme knits these poems into a throw of unadorned retrospection, at once heartbreaking and humorous.

Caroline, Writing for Your Life, Poetry of Witness

For several years now, I have, at different times and in different places, offered ongoing writing circles called Writing For Your Life © for active duty troops, veterans and their family members.  Currently, I lead a weekly circle for women veterans at the VA hospital in Albuquerque, NM and am preparing for two structured programs about women’s writing and war. * As a teacher, veteran and military family member myself, I am always on the lookout for poetry about these experiences. 

Currently, I am reading clamor, by Elyse Fenton.  The book won the 2009 Cleveland State

University Poetry Center First Book Prize.  In 2008, Fenton also won the Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod International Journal.  clamor’s  fifty love poems explore a woman’s feelings and pre-occupations from the beginning of her fiancé’s Iraq deployment to his return and the lingering emotional aftermath of the deployment.   

The book begins with the speaker’s contemplation of a combat related experience her fiancé reported to her, in the book’s first, stand-alone poem. “Gratitude, “previously published in Best New Poets 2007.

          Wreckage was still smoldering on the airport road

          when they delivered the soldier—beyond recognition,

          seeing God’s hands in the medevac’s spun rotors—

          to the station’s gravel landing pad.  By the time you arrived

          there were already hands fluttering white flags of gauze

          against the ruptured scaffolding of ribs, the glistening skull, and no skin

          left untended, so you were the one to sink the rubber catheter tube.

          When you tell me this over the phone hours later I can hear rotors

          scalping the tarmac-gray sky, the burdenless lift of your voice.

          And I love you more for holding the last good flesh

          of that soldier’s cock in your hands, for startling his war blood

          back to life.  Listen.  I know the way the struck cord begins

          to shudder, fierce heat rising into  the skin of my own

          sensate palms.  That moment just before we think

          the end will never come and then

          the moment when it does.         

   

Section I consists of lyric poems concerning the time of the fiancé’s deployment.  Most have to do with an event in Iraq.   Severalrelate the speaker’s concerns to those of Dante’s classic and Greek Mythology.  One such is “Refusing Beatrice.”

           Dante needed a whole committee—

           Beatrice, Lucy, Virgil—to guide him

                                                    down and back, even though hell

           was a known descent, a matter of pages, a book

           ending in certainty with a hero seeing stars.

                         You’ve got no itinerary.  Just an armored car

                                       to ferry you down the graveled airport road, a Chinook

                                                     gut-deep in the green swill waiting to dislodge.

           Maybe it’s time to stop comparing—

           I could never be Beatrice, couldn’t harbor such good faith.

                        And I won’t be there in the Tigris basin to watch

                                      heat flake cinders of paint from the Chinook’s body

                                                                                       like a rug shook out

                           or see it hasten to sky’s surface

                                                                    like an untethered corpse—

           My curse or gift is blindness;

                                         I’ve never read this story before.

                     And if the updraft’s whirlwind

                                     doesn’t make the sniper miss, if your helicopter lifts

                                                 From Baghdad as doomed as the Chaldean sun,

           I won’t be there to see the wreckage

                               or papery flames, the falling arsenal of stars—

Section II consists of prose poems about the realities of return, reunion and ruminations about loss endured and escaped.  Section III begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno when he returned from hell to “once more [see] the stars.”  It deals with the joys and challenges of picking up a life and relationship after the separations and traumas of war and worried waiting for the lover’s return from war.  The joys, as small and bright as stars, and the challenges, as large as the night sky, are lyrically explored in poems that take the reader on a PTSD type roller coaster.  Grief and guilt contaminate even the happiest moments of reunion.  “Infidelity,” the section’s last poem is startling in its conclusion.

                When you were in Iraq I dreamed you

                dead, dormant, shanked stone

                in a winter well, verb-less object

                sunk haft-deep through the navel

                of each waking sentence.  I dreamed

                myself shipwreck, rent timbers

                on a tidal bed, woke to morning’s cold

                mast of breath canted wide as a search light

                for the drowned.  Dreamed my crumbling

                teeth bloomed shrapnel’s bone light

                bricks mortared into a broken

                kingdom of sleep where I found you

                dream-sift, rubbled, nowhere.

                Forgive me, love, this last

                infidelity:  I never dreamed you whole.

The last poem, “Roll Call,” stands alone at the end of the book, just as “Gratitude” stood alone at the book’s beginning.     I read it as a tribute to loved ones who did not return, a testimony to the never ending fear of losing the beloved and a reverent acknowledgement that, for each of us, that loss will come, even if not premature or through the vagaries of war.

                No matter the details.  It always ends

                at the sweat-salt metal of your un-

                answered name.  Twenty-one triggers

                and twelve-hundred bit down tongues.

                Last clamor of the swan-beaked rifle.

                Last unmuzzled  throatful of air.

clamor contains poetry of witness touched by the proximity of the loving witness.  Many in our country give little to no thought to the fact that we are still at war, still sending troops into harm’s way, still calling on their loved ones to wait  in near despairing uncertainty, still bringing home traumatized troops home to bewildered and differently traumatized loved ones—parents, siblings, lovers, children.   It is my hope that these graphic poems, tenderized by  lyric beauty and loving tones, will invite readers to share in the realities which they witness.

* WRITING FOR YOUR LIFE: A Writing Circle for Women with Ties to the Military is a six hour workshop I will offer as part of the Women and Creativity celebrations sponsored by the National Hispanic CulturalCenter.  Women, Writing, the Military and War is a six week review and discussion of women’s war related writings offered through the University of New Mexico’sContinuing Education OSHER Institute .  

 Karen's Mini-Review of See How We Almost Fly

I was first introduced to Alison Luterman when I read her poem in the January 2010 issue of The Sun, "Because Even The Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle," which begins with the line, "Try to love everything that gets in your way." That poem led me to buy her second poetry collection, See How We Almost Fly, selected as winner of the 2008 Pearl Poetry Prize and published in 2010 by Pearl Editions. The foreword mentions that Luterman's first collection, The Largest Possible Life, won the 2001 Cleveland State University Poetry Prize.

The poems of See How We Almost Fly cover a diverse range of subjects such as poverty, homelessness, greed, bullying, rape, quilting, Olympic gymnastics, massage therapy, fireworks, relationship problems, grief, prison, and capital punishment, in such varied locales as Alaska, Africa, and Haiti. But there are common motifs that thread throughout this collection to give it a pleasing sense of continuity: privileged vs. deprived; innocence vs. worry, fear, shame; love vs. loss and grief; joy and hope vs. despair; and success vs. failure.

Music, dance, and art are also weaved into many of these poems, as a means through which the poet and her personas find release, solace, and hope. There are also repeated images of flying that connect with the collection's title, See How We Almost Fly, just one example of how the poems celebrate the resilience of the human spirit.

Luterman's poems are full of beautiful and unusual imagery, as in the poem "Rooster": "At the first crack/in dawn's black eggshell,/my neighbor's rooster crows/with a voice of rusty tapwater." In her poem "Liar," she writes, "Sun lay a lascivious tongue/along the blonde hairs of my arm." "Song" honors a woman singing while she cleans an airport restroom, in a voice "thin and sweet and a little blue,/like the first spurts of a new mother's milk." She describes a gymnast in "Young Girl at the Olympics" as "Like a salmon leaping upstream to spawn,/Her sleek body unfurls/ Impeccably through the absence/Of matter." But what I found most compelling and at the same time haunting in Luterman's collection, See How We Almost Fly, was her compassion, her sense of longing, and her unflinching honesty that resonated throughout the poems.

 From Nancy's Bookshelf

I recently finished re-reading for the third time The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia  Press, 2008), Jennifer Chang’s first book of poetry, which was selected for the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. I love this book filled with lyrical poems rooted in myth and fairy tale, haunting, sometimes frightening, poems. (Her quiet, yet hair-raising poem “Obedience, or The Lying Tale” was included in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2006: 19th Annual Collection.) The History of Anonymity is mostly imagistic—evocative images, remarkable use of language. There’s not much in the way of direct narrative, although one certainly gets bits and pieces. If a narrative takes shape, it does so in a way more akin to Rorschach inkblots, but with words/word-images rather than ink splotches. The bulk of the book centers on the familial relationships of mother, father, and sister, and, as you probably would have guessed, it’s not the Brady-bunch. Here’s my favorite poem from the collection, “Innocence Essay.”

The book I’m in the middle of reading right now for the first time is Litany for the City(BOA Editions Ltd., 2012), Ryan Teitman’s debut book of poetry selected by Jane Hirshfield as the winner of the 10th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Since I’m on my first read, I’m still learning how to dance with it. So far, I’ve experienced it as a thoughtful, smart, and compelling collection of intimate memories and episodes that cohere around the construct of ‘city’—the city as scaffolding—ripe with biblical references and beautiful language. I’ve just rounded the half-way point and have been captured by two poems in a row, the evocative “Ode, Elegy, Aubade, Psalm,” published in issue 9.2 of DIAGRAM, and the dark “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning,” published in 2010 in Sycamore Review.  As some of you might know from my blog, I have a meditation practice of writing certain poems out by long-hand, something about the feel of carbon on wood, the way lead can be erased. These two poems are ones that I am now writing out, so compelling are they to me. I’m not going to say much more about this beautiful book, because I’m thinking of doing a fuller review of it in March.

As for literary journals, I’m making my way through a few, currently catching up on back issues of Rattle and Ploughshares, and reading the latest issues of Ruminate and Michigan Quarterly.  Here are a couple of favorite poems from issue #37 of Rattle: “Property,” by Ace Bogess and “Honeysuckle” by Lyn Lifshin.

My Heart is Full

My heart is full.

I don't mean my heart is a playpen of puppies. My heart is full like a saturated cloud chamber in which the slightest particle shift causes precipitation. So much good and bad has been happening that I don't know how to hold it all. If you've noticed my online quiet--and it extends another week or so--you know the cause. 

I was in Mississippi when I learned about the passing of Jake Adam York. 36 hours earlier I had been having a spirited conversation about local real estate in the Faulkner/Falkner House kitchen with Jake's brother Joe, and Joe's beautiful & pregnant wife Kathryn (now a proud mama of a gorgeous little girl). I spent the night in between sleeping on the floor of a borrowed living room in Water Valley, rain falling in torrential sheets over the tin roof. The man I love had put a ring on my finger and I said Yes, all over again. Then I said This house is not our house, is it? 

It wasn't, much as we'd wanted it to be. So we went out and found the finest crab legs and corn you can get cooked in a gas station. We hunkered down and made best of it. The diamonds got juicy with king crab juice and spice boil. A storm came and went. And the next night, when we went out for the fancy dinner befitting an engagement, I was selfish enough to check Facebook on my phone, and there was news of Jake. 

A moment of grace for a barbecue poet. 
A proper obituary. 
A couple of joyous fools in earnest conversation for Southern Spaces. 
His amazing poems.

We'd traded emails not that long ago, on the occasion of his reading in Jackson one night, mine the next--two ships, passing. We promised a drink for next time. There was always such a promise. That man was determined to teach even a diehard scotch lover like myself to enjoy bourbon. We split the difference with rye.

First time we traded missives was spring of 2010, after I'd been asked to follow in his footsteps as Ole Miss Summer Poet in Residence in Oxford, a town and summer than changed my life. Jake warned of bees living in the Grisham House mailbox. He praised Jack Pendarvis. His solemn advice was, "And since I did it last year you have to roast a hog or some other large animal at the conclusion of your residency."

He was writing some of the bravest poems of any of us, poems than confronted and embraced American history in equal measure. If the world were a James Bond villain, its gift would be the cruelty of juxtaposition. There's a newborn who doesn't even know the uncle she's missing. 

I woke from a nap on January 1 and thought, 8:09 PM? Too late to call. But I called anyway--to wish the woman who has mentored me, who has done so much to shape the author I am today, a Happy New Year. Only to find out she'd fallen down a flight of concrete stairs the day before. Her husband answered her cell phone. Somehow she was awake, voice odd from the hospital's oxygen, and we spoke. She was determined to offer her house as our wedding palace. She spent all today in surgery. 

I am praying. I never pray. I listen over and over to the interview that Maurice Sendak did with NPR shortly before his death. Don't even get me started on "The Lives They Loved," which pulls me down the slope of tears every time I even try to read it. My heart is full. I go over Jason Crane's 2012 round-up (of which I was honored to play a small part) and I love the honesty there. It is the eve of my move down to Hickory, and I am as tense as a bird that hasn't yet figured out it has wings. For all the celebrations going on in my life--and they are many--there is also the the knowledge of loss and change. 

So much happens in a year, to break our hearts and mend them, to break them again and make them ever stronger.