Meet Me in St. Louis (or at Politics & Prose)

I always have so much I want to tell you. 

"In the years leading up to his recent passing, Alabama poet Jake Adam York set out on a journey to elegize the 126 martyrs of the civil rights movement, murdered in the years between 1954 and 1968."

A year ago this past weekend, we lost the phenomenal poet and friend Jake Adam York. I'm so glad that we'll have one more chance to read new work from him--ABIDE will be out in March 2014, thanks to SIU Press and tireless editor Jon Tribble. In the meantime, tide yourself over with this interview in MEAD, and this signature poem, "Grace." 

We miss you, Jake. 

*

Last week I went to St. Louis for a reading with the Observable Reading Series. The flight out included hours on the runway, as DCA struggled define our relationship to the sleet (status update: it's complicated), the pilot sometimes changing prediction mid-sentence. Finally we took off, and as the air conditioning units cranked up the smell of de-icing chemicals flooded the cabin. The flight attendants gave us bag after bag of trail mix (and in my case, an illicit Dewar's), as what was supposed to be an afternoon flight slid past the dinner hour. I'm not skittish about flying, but I was glad to land.... 

...and to be promptly greeted by Steve Schroeder's cat, Ozymandias (Ozzy for short). Being home-hosted by people with cats may be one of my favorite part of being on the road. Steve is a co-curator of the Observable Series and he has a great new poetry collection out, The Royal Nonesuch. The next morning, I wandered the Missouri Botanic Garden for a bit, had lunch with a fellow poet from UVA days, and checked in at The Cheshire Hotel, which is kind enough to comp rooms for the visiting writers. 

Good lordy. Apparently, in its prior incarnation this hotel was used for some of the cheesier scenes of Up in the Air. Also the pub lounge, Fox & Hounds, has been a long-favored dive bar for locals. But now the whole complex (which includes three separate restaurants) is refurbished and, while retaining just the right degree of tweed and embroidery and "old world" kitsch, The Cheshire absolutely glows with welcome. I spent hours camped out in front of the lobby's wood-burning fireplace. I stayed in the Robert Herrick Room, gathering rosebuds. Next time maybe I can snag the Ian Fleming Suite, which has a door that opens straight out onto the pool deck. The Cheshire joins The Highland Inn in Atlanta, and The Algonquin in Manhattan, of places where I'd like to be the writer-in-residence for a month, taking in the strangeness of hotel life.  

My co-reader was Paul Legault, author of several books including The Emily Dickinson Reader, which I bought that night; seemed appropriate on the occasion of Dickinson's 183rd birthday (she was born December 10, 1830). Published by McSweeney's, The EDR is one of the most physically handsome books I've ever held, with a center-aligned presentation of Legault's "English-to-English translations" for each of ED's 1,789 poems, as catalogued in the R.W. Franklin edition. The style and font add heft to a series of stichics that might otherwise be monotonous to the eye, and a gold ribbon is at the ready for you to hold your place; the collection invites a browsing pace. Periodically, we're greeted by a re-interpretation of the one iconic Dickinson portrait. The book closes with two indexes--one thematic and one of Dickinson's original first lines, which might be the only way some readers will recognize their canonical favorites. 

ED's poem, "Hope is the thing with feathers-- / That perches in the soul--"

becomes:

Hope is kind of like birds. 

In that I don't have any.

...and so on. Don't read it in anticipation of any one "translation," because you'll probably find that singular instance a little easy or glib; that the index does not alphabetize Dickinson's first lines might be an implicit, wise discouragement of such behavior. Do read The EDR for the conversation across the whole, the wax and wane of surrealism punctuated with sentiment. Legault has a dry humor--this showed in his reading at Llywelyn's Pub, full of small asides and swallowed punchlines--that becomes a wet humor whenever any of the following topics arise: zombies, sex, sex with zombies, and Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, Dickinson's sister-in-law, e.g. "Everything's better when you're naked. Take Sue, for example." (1361)

At first, I had mixed feelings about the use of "Sue," who is the object of this Emily's fiercest desires; it's a bit strategic, a way to give Legault's book narrative cohesion and dramatic arc as it hopscotches across a lifetime of poems. Occasionally, Sue feels like a fallback for dealing with ED's less inspiring poems. Somehow the rather unmemorable "Behold this little Bane-- / The Boon of all alive--" translates to "Love is a bitch named Susan Gilbert Dickinson." (1464) Bury the lede, why dontcha. Some folks may un-questioningly absorb their affair as portrayed here as a bit of newfound trivia concerning the "real" ED's biography. Ack. 

But is that so different from framing her life in terms of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, or the Master, or any of the other ways scholars struggle to capture such a willfully elusive, reclusive spirit? Is it any more presumptive than pasting Dickinson's verse into a greeting card? No, I'd argue--and in fact this treatment, though perverse, carries more reverence. Legault engages us in talking about a poet he loves, and he has a wonderful sensibility for phrasing truth claims in a skeptic's landscape. The reader in me smiles at such non sequiturs such as "Light is a communist." (506). Later, "I'm a bad driver because I enjoy leaving things to chance." (1283). 

The premise for The Emily Dickinson Reader is deeply clever, and I enjoyed it so much I read the whole damn thing in two sittings. Honestly, I'm a little jealous of Paul Legault for writing it--that best, strangest kind of author-to-author compliment.

*

Have you gotten your hands on The Incredible Sestina Anthology yet?  

Two magazines with my favorite trim size--32 Poems and Cave Wall--both have new issues hot off the presses. 

I'll lead a discussion at Politics & Prose, "Inside The Best American Poetry 2013," from 1-3 PM on Thursday, January 16. Advance registration is required; could be a fun holiday gift to a poet in the family, paired with a copy of BAP 2013 and/or Denise Duhamel's Blowout, both of which we'll reference. Much of the session will be spent on real-time, close reading of some of the year's best poems (according to BAP) in terms of craft and theme. We'll also have a fun, frank discussion of how "best of" collections come to exist, how they're curated, and what a guest editor's aesthetic adds to the mix.

"One story and the other" by Sarah Broom, 1972 - 2013

My stomach churns like stormwater
running to the sea

and in the wake of the storm
I am strewn with debris.

*

When you look at me
with that innocent face,
as artless as the full moon,
as simple as the round
of cream at the top
of those old glass bottles �

then I forget
your other side,
the veiled moon,
the averted head,
the shuttered eyes.

*

This afternoon the harbour
was still and sultry

The Biography of Mr Carrot (Daucus carota) by Frankie McMillan

Our family was large; when we met

we embraced six hundred times



for a long while I was inseparable

from my cousin



but such is life

you learn to let go of things



not meant for you

Marcel Proust wrote to Celine



ten times in the hope

of boeufs - carottes



and while
I�m dropping names

there�s Vincenzo Campi�s



painting where I lie

in the arms of my brothers

What I Should Have Done, by Joyce Ellen Davis

Joyce Ellen Davis

Like most of my favourite contemporary poets, I met Joyce Ellen Davis online. Thank God for the Internet, I feel like saying. I believe it was when I asked her for the publication of one or some of her poems among the pages of Canopic Jar, the literary magazine I co-edit with Phil Rice. She did send me poems, as she has agreed today for me to share one of her poems on this

Tuesday Poem: Afastina by Grace Teuila Evelyn Taylor

for Selina & Tusiata

Hey Afakasi
can your palangi hands do the brown siva?
can you S?moa siva a show and tell?
Island Monarchs
rebirth a longing for butterfly belongings
I used to hide unknown in their shame

Awkward siva
is my show and tell
I inherited this landscape of cultural monarchs
they whisper stories of missed belongings
white is my shame
for I am, Afakasi

Can you tell?
bowing to

Heart Land

I've enjoyed hunkering down in Iowa for these weeks. Teaching at Cornell College has been a revelation--the focus on creative nonfiction, with an emphasis on incorporating science on technology, has been a great change of pace. Some thoughts....

1) Meeting with students five days a week permits no room for procrastination. Each week takes on its own thematic shape and pace. The 10-11 AM "workshop hour," in which I divided my 15 students into groups of 3 and 4 for the sake of informal conversation, was both my single best decision (in terms of getting to know my students) and the worst decision (in terms of conserving my own work time).

2) I am still not a morning person.

3) This generation of students doesn't use email much. They don't send a confirming reply unless you explicitly request it, so it can feel like you're shouting into the void. On the upside, I was glad they so readily left behind their laptops in coming to class.

4) Lecturing on five books, a dozen articles, and the craft of nonfiction is a lot for one month. I used cards with abstract keyword prompts (e.g., for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: gender, class, race, identity) to guide discussion. Being a teacher requires an extraordinary vocabulary, one which you can and will flub from time to time, and then you must decide: do I correct myself in front of my students?

5) I still haven't figured out how to balance the needs of the students who get lost in class-wide silences, and the ones who use those silences to shape their answers. 

6) No matter how sophisticated your class, arts and crafts are a good thing. Every time I can work erasures onto a syllabus, I do, thanks in large part to Mary Ruefle's great craft essay. This time around, we're using outdated science textbooks courtesy of Cornell College's library to shape creative texts from "uncreative" sources. 

7) Never give back graded work at the beginning of class; always wait until the end. 

8) Students are comfortable reading beyond their level in an academic field, as long as they are regularly assured that it's okay to not "get" everything. I was delighted by how many gravitated to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War, opting to read it in its entirety, which I suspect is in part because he is so generous on this point. 

9) Strange that we ask students to spend four years offering up informal opinions--"Did you like it?"--and close analysis on the page, without offering practical experience with the intersection of the two: the 1,200-word book review. That's a real-world writing skill. We talked about what reviews are meant to do, reading examples from the New York Times Book Review and The American Scholar, and they wrote their own. 

10) You never know which readings students will love, and which will elicit a "Meh." You never know which personal details to share, or which questions to answer only with editing. You never know who dreams, deep down, of being a poet. 

Back in my own undergraduate days at the University of Virginia, I realize that I had no idea how hard it was to run a class. In recalling the things we harped on--spotting typos, expecting a 100% correct answer to every question, sulking when someone returned graded papers later than expected--I'm embarrassed. And newly grateful. 

Most nights I come home to Collin House and daze out with an infinite supply of SVU episodes. But I made it to Iowa City to see Hailey read from her new book, SWOOP, at Prairie Lights, and afterwards we sat by the fireplace at Sanctuary. In Cedar Rapids, I walked the Czech Village, then camped out at the NewBo Market to watch a juggler and snack on fresh falafel. On a tip from the gentleman who specialized in Eggenberg glass, I drove to Solon and found an oasis of entrepreneurship. The Salt Fork Kitchen is on one side of the street, with a bloody mary bar stocked with house-picked onions and four different pepper sauces. On the other side of the street, Big Grove Brewery sells six varieties of in-house beer--I recommend their seasonal IPA, the Redheaded Stranger--and serves dishes like this elaborate roasted cauliflower, with curry sauce and coppa ham. (That morning, the chef had also carved a duck from a whole pear, which then roamed the length of the bar. Not for sale.) These two places, staffed by enthusiastic 20- and 3o-somethings, have only been open a matter of months. I hope they thrive.

I came to Iowa with no expectations. I leave thinking I could live here.

"Pigs" by Les Murray

Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.
We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow,