A Way of Happening

Fit for a Sermon?

2011-11-22T19:00:00.001-05:00

Today I was looking on Google for a link to a radio recording of one of my poems when I happened across two sermons that use that poem. I'm honored, but also humbled, and mostly I feel like these people should read my other poems -- or better, actually meet me -- and then they'd realize that I'm not a saint or a fitting sermon example. But the sermons are worthwhile in their own right, so here they are, by Revs. Jessica Rowley and Amanda Hendler-Voss, respectively.

http://scfhomilies.posterous.com/forgiveness-amidst-the-pieces

http://landoftheskychurch.org/sermons/2011-sermons/the-cry/

The Paris Review Poetry Purge: Update

2011-11-08T15:13:00.001-05:00

The Writer's Chronicle featured my article
on The Paris Review "poetry purges."

In 2010, The Paris Review "un-accepted" poems originally slated for publication in the magazine when new editors came on board. This caused an uproar among writers and editors, and I was among those who thought this was an unethical action. The editors eventually agreed to a compromise and offered to publish the "un-accepted" poems on the TPR blog. Many of the "Purgerati," as they came to be known, have now appeared on the blog and the posts are grouped under the category "Poetry" (click "Older Entries" as well). The Purgerati poems are easy to spot because they each have an introduction by either Meghan O'Rourke or Dan Chiasson:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/category/poetry-2/

The Result of the Police Investigation Is . . . Anybody's Guess

2011-11-08T13:29:00.000-05:00

In August, I received the letter below in response to my complaint about the police officer who responded on the scene at the assault I experienced in July. The officer (a) did not file a report and (b) did not interview a witness who was standing with me. (See my earlier posts here and here for more details.)

What the letter indicates is that since this is a "personnel action" no information can be released about the results of the investigation. I have to take it on faith that they did the right thing and took appropriate action. What it boils down to is that the police department has no external accountability for its actions, and the public has to trust that their internal investigations are ethical, just, and sufficient.

This does not instill confidence.

P.S. - Steven is my first name, though I go by Luke. Also, the address is not current.

Art in a Time of War

2011-11-02T17:15:00.001-04:00

"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso

A perennial question among artists is What is the function of art in a time of war? Art has historically served both the propagandistic purposes of the state as well as the protestations of dissenters. Much of this art, of course, has been and continues to be overtly "political." We are in an age in America in which it seems that--when they do produce overtly "political" work--artists rarely produce work favorable to the wars of the state. It's not a popular stance among literary types, to say the least.

In my mind, it is completely appropriate for artists to be aligned against the purposes of war, and I would argue that, generally speaking, this stance is faithful to the age-old function of art.

The state's message in a time of war is a message of dichotomy. The language and images of the state, the military, and the media are focused on differentiating the enemy from us. It is the state's goal to subtly convince the public of essential dissimilarity between us and them.

Consider the ever-present lauding of "democracy" in American political speech in times of war and "military action." Politicians speak of democracy as a good in and of itself in an attempt to justify the imposition of it on other nations, as if democratic nations had never committed atrocities of their own (e.g., the U.S. fire bombings and nuclear bombings in Japan, which targeted civilian children, women, and men, killing between 500,000 and 1,000,000 civilians).

The tactic of the state, the military, and the media (in general) is to present us with simplistic, easy-to-swallow lies about ourselves and about the other. These lies boil down to plain dichotomies: We are virtuous. The enemy is evil. We are reasonable. The enemy is unreasonable. We have a superior political system. The enemy's political system is fundamentally flawed.

The artist, on the other hand, most often does the opposite -- that is, the artist bears witness to the essential similarity between one human and another, and by extension, between all humans. Joseph Conrad beautifully expressed this idea in his famous "Preface":

"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation -- and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

While the state, the military, and the media are engaged in oversimplification, the artist is engaged in complexities. Again, here is Conrad:

"[A]rt itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential -- their one illuminating and convincing quality -- the very truth of their existence. [...] [T]he artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities -- like the vulnerable body within the steel armour."

In fulfilling this vision of art's function, the artist need not write overtly about political matters or about the war(s) at hand. It is the empathy itself and the acknowledgment of both fundamental similarity and unsoundable complexity of the the other expressed in the artist's work that performs this function, regardless of subject or setting.

Yeats, in his poem "On Being Asked for a War Poem," seems to disparage the idea of writing a poem about war (also see Robert Pinsky's interesting recent post about misremembering this poem):

On Being Asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

The possibility that Yeats seems to have overlooked in this response, however, is the possibility that a work of art need not overtly address the positions or policies or statements of the state -- instead, pleasing that young girl or that old man might itself be the function that counteracts the machinations of the state.

If Charles Dickens Wrote a Review

2011-09-30T20:00:00.000-04:00

It is a far, far better song Death Cab for Cutie sings than they have ever sung before; it is a far, far better album they've made than they have ever made before.

My Poem on the NPR Program "Being"

2011-09-23T19:29:00.000-04:00

(photo: The Consumerist/Flickr/CC-BY-2.0)

A poem I wrote after experiencing a physical assault this July will air nationwide on the NPR program "Being" this weekend (check http://being.publicradio.org/stations/ for your local time) following the interview with Rabbi David Hartman, but the entire show, including my poem, is available now on the website. Krista Tippett's introduction to my poem begins at about minute 46:25. Listen here: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/opening-up-windows/

The poem and my introduction can be read on the "Being" blog here: http://blog.onbeing.org/post/8640670635/hate-crime-a-poem-of-grace-and-gratefulness

Troy Davis's Last Words

2011-09-22T07:40:00.000-04:00

Troy Davis's last words: "I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent. The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask [...] is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth. I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight. For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls."

Ave Atque Vale, Troy Davis

2011-09-21T23:45:00.000-04:00

Ave atque vale, Troy Davis, a hero. He said in his open letter, "I have been spiritually free for some time." I hope it was so even at the end.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/troy-davis-execution-stay-denied-supreme-court/story?id=14571862

2011-09-21T16:48:00.005-04:00

Troy Davis is about to be executed (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/opinion/a-grievous-wrong-on-georgias-death-row.html?ref=troydavis). Call: Judge Penny Freesemann (912-652-7252) or Larry Chisolm District Attorney 133 Montgomery Street Savannah, Georgia 31401. Phone: (912) 652-7308 Fax: (912) 652-7328 or (912) 447-5396. LCHISOLM@chathamcounty.org

He will refuse his last meal: http://yourblackworld.com/2011/09/21/troy-davis-to-refuse-his-last-meal-this-meal-will-not-be-my-last/

Weak Devotions Now Available

2011-09-09T15:15:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to announce that my first book of poems, Weak Devotions, is now available for purchase here.

Art by Makoto Fujimura.

ABOUT WEAK DEVOTIONS

"Luke Hankins' poetry shimmers with intellect and craft. However, what is most surprising about it, especially in our time, is that it wrestles with the issues Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, Vassar Miller, and countless others also found worthy of their most impassioned work. Hankins' voice, which, even in the midst of a religious meditation, can be irreverent and secular, is neither out of date nor irrelevant to the lives of millions. But one need not be religious to be moved by poetry as finely wrought as is found in his brilliant title poem and elsewhere in this book."

-John Wood

"There is great compassion in these poems, most especially for the vicissitudes of childhood, when the mystery of life is first unfolding. But Hankins understands that 'there are few words left sufficient to this world' to explain or console or lift up as praise, and that even the loveliest poem may prove a weak devotion. Still, Hankins does not give in to uncertainty or despair. Rather, in masterfully wrought poems, he exhorts us to 'abandon ideas and concepts of beauty' and 'be part of it,' a natural and blessed part of life's great dance. In the beautiful poem 'Wisteria,' the poet convinces us that it is in fact possible to give oneself over to the mysterious 'sweetening sun,' like a vine-wrapped tree that becomes 'what rises through it.' Such brave surrender is, I think, what gives these heartfelt poems their clarity, power, and grace." -Richard Jones

Hate Crime in Asheville: Recording of "The Way They Loved Each Other"

2011-09-05T11:22:00.001-04:00

My commentary and reading of my poem about the attack I experienced is now available online at the WCQS website:

http://www.wcqs.org/wcqs/station-highlights/wnc-poet-on-thursdays-morning-edition

The Lion Lies Down With The Lamb

2011-09-03T17:09:00.000-04:00

Maybe I'm a sap for posting this, but how can we not be moved by the lion lying down with the lamb? And how can we not be outraged at the willful disregard of fellow humans?

Hate Crime in Asheville: Perpetrators Found

2011-07-20T02:59:00.004-04:00

http://www.wlos.com/shared/newsroom/top_stories/videos/wlos_vid_4963.shtml

Hate Crime in Asheville: Mountain Xpress Article about My Assault

2011-07-18T23:56:00.000-04:00

The Mountain Xpress has posted an article about the assault I underwent last Thursday:

http://www.mountainx.com/news/2011/apd_looking_for_suspects_in_hate_crime_assault

You may report license plate numbers of any vehicles in Asheville that match the description to me at lukehank [at] yahoo.com and I will pass them on to the police.

You can also see my poem about the incident here.

The Way They Loved Each Other: A Hate Crime in Asheville

2011-07-15T00:51:00.001-04:00

"Blue, Green, and Brown, 1951" by Mark Rothko

I was assaulted at 12:30 am this Thursday in a parking lot at a local grocery store by 4 teenagers for no other reason than that they thought my shorts were too short and that I looked like a "faggot." Swollen face and jaw, black eye, was up all night with nausea and roiling emotions, then threw up at 4:30 am. Went to the ER. 3 fractures in my face.

Below is a poem I wrote about the incident. I don't feel any anger against the perpetrators, only confusion and pity and sadness. I do want them brought to justice and to face the consequences of their hatefulness and violence, but not because I hate them.

The Way They Loved Each Other

What to be more astonished at:
my calm as the fist made contact
and I saw a flash of white
and the world went silent
as if I had stepped out of it
momentarily, only to be brought back
with a rush of sound and visible objects --
the way I asked them to help me
find my glasses, expecting them
(even as they taunted me,
even though they had just assaulted me)
to feel underneath the violent tribal urge
the obligations of empathy --
the way even as one of them found my glasses
and smashed them again on the ground
I refused to believe that was really
what he wanted to do -- the way
they loved each other
in the most primitive manner
but loved each other nonetheless
despite feeling the need to punish a "faggot"
who did not dress like them, because
he did not dress like them --
the way tears and nausea overwhelmed me
nightlong much more than had the blow itself --
the way such small suffering can feel
unbearable -- the way no strength is found
for what seems to have no explanation,
a troubled mind more harmful
to the body than fractured bones.

My Review of Ashley Anna McHugh's Into These Knots

2011-06-08T16:29:00.003-04:00

My review of Ashley Anna McHugh's first book, Into These Knots, is now online in Contemporary Poetry Review:

http://www.cprw.com/masterful-variations-luke-hankins-on-ashley-anna-mchugh/

A Battle Cry to Treat this Absence: Son Volt and Harold Camping

2011-05-24T12:41:00.000-04:00

Harold Camping has been on my mind lately, for obvious reasons (see my previous posts here and here). The song below, "Back into Your World," by one of my favorite bands, Son Volt, strikes me as incredibly apt. It sounds like it could have been written for Harold Camping:

You should have known
what is real by now.
Let the judges meet their maker.
Can't slow down,
burning that four-barrel speed,
a battle cry to treat this absence.

Let me back into your world.
At the blink of an eye,
no uncertain terms.
Let me back into your world.

Dean Young on Morning Edition after Heart Transplant

2011-05-24T00:43:00.000-04:00

Poet Dean Young talks with NPR's "Morning Edition" after his heart transplant and reads three beautiful poems here.

A Poem for Harold Camping

2011-05-22T15:50:00.001-04:00

James Tissot (1836-1902), "Peter and John Run to the Sepulchre"

Faith

dedicated to Harold Camping

Now he will have to face
the breathing machine,
the morphine, the ordinary
death, the humiliation
of having thought himself
bestowed with a rare place
in the ecclesiastical annals,
a soul privileged
to see the Lord
returning on the clouds,
to meet him in the air.
At 89, he at last
encounters his mortality
and trembles, wondering if
his faith, too, will prove mortal.
“Sue,” he says to his daughter
on the phone as the hour
of his rapture passes,
“I’m a little bewildered.”

Note: See http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rapture-20110522,0,5118540.story

Reading John Wood and Thinking of Harold Camping

2011-05-22T02:59:00.003-04:00

Pieter Pourbus, 1551

Yesterday, as the hour — time zone by time zone — of Harold Camping's prediction that the rapture would occur passed, I began to feel great pity for Camping. I imagine that the failure of his delusion must be utterly devastating. His "prophecy" and preaching has done great harm to many (incredibly) credulous people, but I think it cannot have been a malicious act on his part, but a sincere attempt to live up to a delusion that he firmly believed. Here is a fascinating brief view into this man and his family's life from an article on the Los Angeles Times website, with a quote from Camping's daughter, Sue Espinoza:

On Saturday morning, Espinoza, 60, received a phone call from her father, Harold Camping, the 89-year-old Oakland preacher who has spent some $100 million — and countless hours on his radio and TV show — announcing May 21 as Judgment Day. "He just said, 'I'm a little bewildered that it didn't happen, but it's still May 21 [in the United States],'" Espinoza said, standing in the doorway of her Alameda home. "It's going to be May 21 from now until midnight."

"I'm a little bewildered," we hear the 89-year-old, who has apparently staked all of his life's energies and hopes on this one day, say to his daughter at the failure of his prophecy. It is utterly sad.

Thinking about these things, I was reminded of a long poem by John Wood about the Hoadeites, a mid-nineteenth-century religious community that believed Jesus would return in 1857. Here is one section (from Wood's Selected Poems):

from "The Gates of the Elect Kingdom"*
by John Wood

XVI: Waiting for Jesus

They waited from New Year's to Year's End
as expectation and disappointment rose to fill each day,
rose like the ripe sweet stench of silage
that hovered over the farm all summer.
Most thought it would be New Year's;
then that it would be Easter; and then, and then,
and on and on till finally at last on the Year's Eve
at midnight's wide eye's twinkling, they knew
in that sparkled turning He would descend
star-like upon the fields with light falling about Him
and night turning morning, and years and time all falling away
as clocks and calendars began again at noon in the year One.
And so they prepared the greatest feast they'd ever set:
pieces of comb were broken from the hive
heavy with honey and big as hands;
pigs were roasted and glazed rosy
with the jam of sweet plums from last canning;
and hot cabbage in wide wooden bowls
was shredded and sweetened and studded with caraway;
and jars of peaches, pickled and smelling of clove
and cinnamon stick, were opened and set out;
and the long table looked as it never had looked.
And the sisters went about their work
asking the questions they'd asked all year:
"What will you say to Him?" "What will you do
if He looks at you?" "What if He touches your hand
when you set His plate before Him?" And they worried,
"Will I be able to say, 'More cabbage, Lord? More pork?
Some cider for your cup?" And the men rehearsed their lines, as well:
"We've waited a long time, Lord; thank You for coming."
"Do You plan to shift the seasons, turn winter back,
to begin the planting now?" "Do You need a dray, Lord,
or will Your plow furrow through fields at Your touch?"
And "Forgive us our stupid questions, but this is so now, Lord;
we don't know how it is to work with You, or if we even need to speak."
But by six in the morning discontent and anger had set in,
the pork was cold and covered with a caul of grease,
the women had fallend asleep round the long table,
and von Tungeln, one of the original twelve,
said he'd had his doubts, that Hoade was false,
and he and his were heading westward. And rage broke out
like a fire in the corn and faces were dark as bruises
and others said they'd go with von Tungeln
or would just go. And they did and the end began,
and all Winkler's words couldn't stop it:
"Even prophets can misfigure,
but the Vision's still true.
Christ's still coming.
Why leave; life's good here."
But Winkler had no voice for prophecy
or magic and could hold few for long--
and finally none but his own, and they worked
what acres they could and still believed,
still waited, still sometimes picked up
the bright, sweet scent of vanilla on the air.

*Reproduced by permission of the author from Selected Poems: 1968-1998 (The University of Arkansas Press, 1999)

Featured Artist: Bruce Bond

2011-04-27T20:38:00.001-04:00

Caravaggio's Narcissus, which graces the cover of Bruce Bond's book, The Throats of Narcissus.

Bruce Bond's poem, "Jon Faddis and the High Note," was awarded second prize in the first annual Asheville Poetry Review William Matthews Prize, selected by judge Sebastian Matthews from a stellar group of finalists, and will appear in the 2011 issue of Asheville Poetry Review. Bond will be participating in a reading along with the 1st- and 3rd-place winners (Michael White and Mary Makofske, respectively) at Asheville Wordfest on Saturday, May 7th at 4:00 at the YMI Cultural Center in Asheville. In anticipation of that reading, I have asked Bond's permission to reproduce "Echolalia," an amazing poem from his book The Throats of Narcissus, here.

Bond's mastery of metaphor and phrase is ubiquitously evident, as, for example, when he compares the sound of a spoken phrase, though it be a question, to "the wraith of answers," which is in turn compared to "the bucket returning with air from the bottom." This poem is a powerful exploration of the ways we somehow find comfort within the comfortless reality of mortality--it should be impossible, but nevertheless it happens--and Bond's poem is one such impossible source of comfort for me.

Echolalia*

by Bruce Bond

Late in the day's contagion

of patients, my mind consumed

in my body's problems, my difficult heart,

I see a girl on the waiting-room carpet

crouched in her invisible house.

She is fitting a red plastic hammer in the hole

a doll's head should be,

pounding a nonexistent nail

into the eye of her shoe,

and to my own quiet surprise I ask

What's wrong? What's wrong,

she says, word for word in a colder music,

as if speaking were her way

of listening, of passing my question on.

I'm not the only one between us

lost in translation, unlocking the voice

inside the voice, each voice a doll

split from another doll's belly;

whatever I say is her tongue's gospel;

she would make herself small for me.

And since she's not my child,

I'm bound to ask again, compelled

like the lonely confessor on a bus.

We could be talking to our own bodies—

our stunned pulse, a frozen hand—

waiting for replies in pins of feeling.

Heaven knows what lies there

coiled in her ear, breaking my English

down into an ever quieter English,

if what she hears is a query

descending, a little drier on her lips,

or the wraith of answers, released:

the bucket returning with air from the bottom.

It reminds me of the malice of children,

how they mimic one another into madness,

though I know better. That night I catch

my breath in the stairwell.

With every step a fading stutter of feet.

It's a story so foreign I feel mine

pale where hers begins, with a doll

whose head pounds the daylights

into the cold bright nail of sleep—

what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong.

I too want a way out, to make a person

of my problems and so survive them,

my heart stronger, clearer. I want to unlock

the hole in her throat with my words in it,

and I keep going there, stair after stair,

a stranger's breath on my own tongue.

*Reproduced from The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas Press, 2001) by permission of the author.

David E. Anderson on Welsh Poet R. S. Thomas

2011-04-24T21:10:00.001-04:00

David E. Anderson's interesting article on the wonderful religious poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000):
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/by-topic/r-s-thomas-poet-of-the-cross/8661/

Portraits by George Terry McDonald

2011-04-22T04:23:00.003-04:00

Here is a very cool flyer featuring artwork by George Terry McDonald for the translation event I'll be participating in at Asheville Wordfest on May 6th. (More details here and here.) I've included a few of the portraits in original size below the flyer.

Heart Found for Dean Young

2011-04-15T09:10:00.000-04:00

A heart has been found for poet Dean Young, who has been awaiting a donor, and he was in surgery today. It sounds like things have gone well so far: http://isak.typepad.com/isak/2011/04/breaking-a-heart-for-dean-young.html

Featured Artist: William Pitt Root

2011-04-07T18:59:00.001-04:00

William Pitt Root was one of the featured poets at the First Annual Asheville Poetry Review Reading Series (along with Marilyn Kallet and Pamela Uschuk), and he shared the marvelous poem below, which I have reprinted from his book White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West with his permission. He told the audience that he saw a video of slugs mating on a television nature program and was mesmerized. This poem is the result. I have also included a video of slugs mating below the poem. It is truly incredible, and Bill's poem is a moving and fitting tribute to this wonder of nature.

Slugs Amorous in the Air
by William Pitt Root

"The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
...
A small thing,
Singing."

-Theodore Roethke

On mucous films they glide,
gracefully monstrous:

slick misbegotten whales,
halved, cast out onto land,

shrunken, left to cross forever
the shoreless sea of earth.

Indifferent to us,
these constant voyagers

detecting in each other clues
of readiness--who knows how?

They soar like gradual
eagles up a bank of tree

out onto a dark current
of limb, then dangle

from a single length
of shared umbilicus

high in clear blue
air, spinning

slowly in the globe
of their own motion,

two beings intent
upon each other

as only lovers are,
each laved by the liquid other

in bodylength embrace.
Like darkly pairing tongues

or the sundered halves
of Leviathan

trying bright reunion
in the sea of air,

they hang in that whole kiss
while we look on

radiant with disgust and envious,
pitching toward awe

as from each head
organs emerge unfurling

like silk parachutes
exquisite with awareness,

each coddling its exact
other in the counterfeit

with a long careful touching,
numinous as saint,

unutterably lewd
as they merge

in a bright soft lock
joined as orchids

might join if animated
by desire, trembling

blossom against blossom,
slow pulse

matching slow pulse
as these doubly sexed

beings will do,
continuing an hour

and more,
each gross shape further

extending (from the chill
of what should be

its head) the lucent
figure of an organ

wholly sexual as angels,
male and female brilliance twinned.

And what passes
between them

in this urgent healing
sought by the never whole

passes slow as nectar
shining in the deepest

flower we know
and multiplies

into these glistening miracles
we who grow gardens

in our annoyance
never guess.

*Reprinted from White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) by permission of the author.

A Xylophone Played by Gravity and a Wooden Ball

2011-04-04T00:20:00.002-04:00

This is the kind of thing that is possible when people are devoted to beauty:

The Poem as Devotional Practice

2011-03-29T17:38:00.001-04:00

My essay on the devotional mode in poetry, looking particularly at the 17th-century Metaphysical poets and at the contemporary poet Franz Wright, is now available online at Contemporary Poetry Review: http://www.cprw.com/the-poem-as-devotional-practice-luke-hankins-on-the-metaphysical-poets/

An excerpt:

Although it is, of course, impossible to know, based on the text of the poem alone, to what extent a poet did or did not have the conclusion of the poem in view during the act of composition, we can say this much, at least: Some religious poems (like Herbert’s “The Search”) dramatize a mental or spiritual struggle; other religious poems (like Donne’s “Holy Sonnet X”) do not purport to dramatize a current struggle, and instead explain or explicate a struggle that happened prior to the composition of the poem. In the latter case, the entire poem functions as a conclusion; even if there is some dramatization, as there is in Donne’s poem (a speaker personifying and addressing death), there is no uncertainty in the rhetoric since the conclusion is foreknown and stated or implied from the beginning. This kind of poem engages the reader the way a sermon or an essay might. On the other hand, the rhetoric of a poem that dramatizes a struggle in the literary “present,” as Herbert’s poem does, proceeds with uncertainty and thus engages the reader the way a play might. This effect is intensified to the extent that the reader senses that the poet’s composition of the poem proceeded in uncertainty—not only of the literary or formal outcome of the nascent poem, but also the spiritual outcome of engaging the poem’s idea.

Keith Flynn & The Holy Men perform Philip Levine's poem, "They Feed They Lion"

2011-03-20T13:19:00.002-04:00

Keith Flynn & The Holy Men perform Philip Levine's poem, "They Feed They Lion."

all seeds & blues: A New Collection of English Poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

2011-03-13T11:54:00.002-04:00

all seeds & blues, by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

CW Books has just released all seeds & blues, a new collection of English poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu (she also writes in Romanian and French, and I translate her French poems). An excerpt from my review of her English work appears as a blurb on the new book (you can read the entire review by clicking the text of following quote): "Radulescu is skeptical, but unrelenting, in her pursuit of mystery. In her unrelentingness, she reminds me of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets, while stylistically she is clearly a descendent of the Surrealists and Modernists. She has melded disparate traditions seamlessly in her poetry, and the precise mixture of elements in her work is perhaps unique in American poetry, and our poetry is richer for it."

For sample poems from all seeds & blues and to order, see http://www.readcwbooks.com/radulsescu.html

From My Memoir: Exorcism

2011-02-19T18:41:00.006-05:00

"Night Comes On"; photo collage by Erich Ferdinand; used under Creative Commons license.

These are the opening paragraphs from the memoir I've begun writing.

*Let me also note here, in response to some comments I've received, that the exorcism itself was frightening and embarrassing and confusing for me, yes, but it was really the beliefs of that religious culture in a broader sense that have troubled me. I would not call the exorcism itself traumatic, and it pales in comparison to the fears I dealt with on a daily basis throughout my childhood. All of these people loved me, and I knew that then as I do now. I only tell the story to give a portrait of that religious culture and how foundational it was for me. I don't blame anyone for the belief system or for my fears and anxiety -- it's just that when you're born into a religious sub-culture, it is very primal for you and those beliefs don't change easily. Later in the memoir I'll talk about my eventual loss of faith, and much of the reason why that was so traumatic is the fact that I had been born into a belief system that formed the fabric of reality for me for 25 years. I think that in the larger context of the memoir, these things will be apparent. But since this excerpt stands on its own here, I think it's important to note these things.

Having made that clarification, here are the opening paragraphs:

When I was young, about 8 or 9, my pastor performed an exorcism on me. It was late one night after my parents called him in what I suppose must have been either desperation or frustration during another of my innumerable episodes of terror. I woke them almost nightly for years, ashamedly but desperately creeping into their room to shake an arm or touch a leg, hoping my dad would come and sit with me as I cried, as he often did, while I struggled for breath, panicked and sickened yet again at the thought of death and—more than that—of hell. I was tormented, and I don’t say that lightly.

After calling the pastor to ask him to meet and pray with me, my parents drove me to the church, where we met him and his wife in the empty sanctuary (as some Christians call the room where services are held). It seemed huge to me at that age, especially when it was empty, and especially that night, enveloped in darkness as it was, possessed suddenly of a hushed and nocturnal aspect previously unknown to me.

The four adults “laid hands on me” and prayed for me. Then Pastor Bob—we did call him “Pastor Bob,” and I don’t remember anyone ever referring to him by his last name—decided to have me stand up and asked the others to step aside. He stood in front of me with a little jar of oil. He asked me to stand with my mouth open. I remember being confused and scared, not to mention embarrassed, and I felt I might cry at any moment. This made keeping my mouth open difficult, and I felt vulnerable and foolish standing there, mouth hanging open. But I did trust this man, a major symbol of authority—of God’s authority—for me, and I trusted my parents. So I tried to follow his instructions carefully.

Pastor Bob began to wet his fingers with the oil and to sprinkle oil over my body from a distance of five feet or so, and he began to call out in a loud and commanding voice, speaking to the supposed demon in order to ascertain whether there was actually one there. I remember his words, at least roughly: “I command you, evil spirit, in the name and in the authority of Jesus Christ to speak your name. What is your name?” He had instructed me to just keep my mouth open, but not to speak purposely, so I stood there, waiting fearfully for a phantom voice to rise from my own throat.

He was insistent and persisted at this for several minutes. Finally, he told me to speak the first word that came to my mind. There was nothing there. I felt like something was going wrong. I didn’t know what to do, but I felt that I had to say something. I made up a word, a sound that was not a word. The adults left the room briefly to discuss this utterance and determine whether it was meaningful or revelatory. They returned, having concluded that it was not the name of a demon, and that I could rest in the certainty that I was a child of God and that I no longer needed live in fear. Pastor Bob’s wife gave me a toy police badge that I was to keep in order to remind myself that I was a child of the King, a deputy in God’s kingdom, and that I could take out that badge whenever a spirit of fear came over me. I remember crying a lot, and I don’t know what particular emotion caused it, I was experiencing so many—relief, fear, exhaustion, disorientation, doubt, embarrassment, hope, all simultaneous in me.

Benefit for Dean Young in Asheville

2011-02-18T01:44:00.000-05:00

A benefit reading, "We Heart Dean Young," will be held at Grateful Steps in Asheville, NC, Saturday, April 9.

Dean Young, one of America's most beloved poets, is currently on a waiting list for a heart transplant. All proceeds from the event will go directly to the fund established for Dean at the National Foundation for Transplants (www.transplants.org/donate/deanyoung).

The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. A $20 donation is required at the door. In addition, a silent auction will help raise more funds; donated items will include autographed books by poets C. Dale Young and Jim Daniels, two issues of Poetry International, as well as several rare books published by Random House. All guests are encouraged to bring their favorite Dean Young poems to read; the open mic will last for most of the event. Complimentary wine and beer will be served to those guests with valid ID.

Dean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Strike Anywhere (1995), Skid (2002), Elegy for Toy Piano (2005), Embryoyo (2007), and Primitive Mentor (2008). His latest collection, Fall Higher, will be published this April. Dean currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas-Austin. He is married to the poet Laurie Young.

Grateful Steps is located at 159 South Lexington Avenue in Asheville.

Contact: Laura Hope-Gill at laura@gratefulsteps.com or Justin Bigos at justinbigos@hotmail.com.

A Reading to Celebrate the Late William Matthews and the Publication of New Hope for the Dead, a Collection of His Unpublished Work

2011-02-10T17:49:00.000-05:00

I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness

2011-02-01T01:15:00.004-05:00

I Was Afraid of Vowels Their Paleness, a chapbook of my translations of French poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, is now available from Q Avenue Press:

http://qavepress.com/Q_Ave_Press/Chapbooks.html

Hoyt Rogers, translator of Yves Bonnefoy (The Curved Planks, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), says, "Like seashells with light shining through, these poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu express the tough fragility of being; in his lucid translation, Luke Hankins mirrors perfectly their deftness and their strength." For sample poems from the chapbook and an interview with me at Connotation Press, follow this link: http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/690.

The chapbook is bilingual and features original cover art created specially for this chapbook by Marie-Thérèse Pent.

TO ORDER

Price: $10.00

If you see me on a regular basis, you may purchase a copy directly from me by simply sending me an email, and I will deliver a copy to you personally. Otherwise, you may order through Q Avenue Press by mailing a check (specifying "I Was Afraid of Vowels...") to:

Q Avenue Press
Attn: Sebastian Matthews
Po Box 9594
Asheville, NC 28815

New England Review Update

2011-01-28T01:01:00.003-05:00

It is heartening to see the many supporters of New England Review listed in the new issue. (Note that these are only those who had donated by the end of 2010.) The magazine faces the loss of its institutional (Middlebury College) funding and has been in danger of having to cease publication. Here's hoping the magazine has a long life ahead of it! It's truly one of the best.

From Blackbird: Patrice de La Tour du Pin, translated by Jennifer Grotz

2011-01-27T12:04:00.004-05:00

This is a real discovery for me. I have never before read the work of French poet Patrice de La Tour du Pin, but thanks to the translations published in the current issue of Blackbird, I will now seek out his work. Even in these few poems, the depth of this man's spiritual struggle and devotion is evident. I can't wait to read all of his work. Here are some sample lines from Jennifer Grotz's translations:

From "Psalm 6":

If my dream is laughable, Lord,

extinguish it, for it consumes me.

[...]

One must be able to hear the cry of others, to do nothing but

empty the self for the sake of a common call.

To hear in the voices of others your love cry and your lament:

so I go silent: you hold me.

From "Psalm 18":

I waste my efforts translating the ineffable:

my rendering of life will never achieve clarity.

Who would believe in my caverns, in my trees?

Who will take my stones as real?

From "Psalm 31":

The one who wanted to understand too much,

you struck him endlessly to be understood:

for a Lord, you come down hard when you decide to.

He wasn’t defying your intelligence,

he was only stretching his branches up to you:

you weigh so heavy for a God of light.

From "Psalm 33":

If it’s still to you that I cry out my anguish,

I’m sickened by the halting realization:

isn’t it you who tolls my heart like a funeral bell?

[...]

Why did you burden me with such a desire to praise

before you made me an angel,

why invest in someone who must be torn apart?

Max Borders on Art

2011-01-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

Max Borders has some interesting and succinct thoughts on art at the blog Ideas Matter in a post called "What is Art? A Question of Meta-aesthetics." Also have a look at my previous post on the same subject.

Nathaniel Perry Wins the 2011 APR/Honickman Book Prize!

2011-01-19T21:42:00.000-05:00

Nathaniel ("Neil") Perry is one of the absolutely finest poets I know, with a formal dexterity that is exceptionally rare. (Just have a look at three of his poems from storySouth for a sample.) I was in school with him for a bit at Indiana University, and let me tell you that this guy is the real deal--as a poet, as an editor, as a critic. So I am thrilled to hear that he has won the 2011 APR/Honickman Book Prize. His work deserves this.

Abolition of the Self?

2011-01-06T02:24:00.000-05:00

Some spiritual practitioners and artists and poets like to talk about transcending or abolishing the self. What an ironic thing to talk about! As soon as you say it, it can no longer be true. But, in any case, I don’t hold transcendence of the self as the ideal. I am in my poems, both in the writing of them and in their finished states, and I don’t try to take myself out. To do so would be to deny my humanity and would therefore undermine the very foundation of art. And in moral terms, if the self ceases to exist, how can I love my neighbor as myself?

I do seek transcendence and I do have transcendent experiences, but I think it's a mistake to think of transcendence as the state of being freed from one's selfhood. Transcendence, for me, means being freed from my absorption or obsession with my self, yes, but not being freed from my identity as my self. One can blessedly rise momentarily above pride, fear, pain, confusion, and suffering, but in doing so one does not lose the self, rather one discovers it more fully. What was hindering full selfhood falls away, and one can become, briefly, a more fully realized self. And that is a powerful pathway to love for other selves.

Daniel Nester Announces a Contest

2011-01-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

Daniel Nester, who originally broke the story of the most recent Paris Review poetry purge (also see my article here), has announced The Robyn Creswell Bouts-Rimés Contest! Follow the link to his post at We Who Are About To Die for details. I love Nester's sardonic tone in this announcement. Here's a sample:

Yes, the very same Creswell who required a new broom to unaccept 40-50 poets’ work to make room for his chance to define his own section, will be talking about publishing poetry. It’s winter break, after all, and so it should be convenient for Creswell, a student in NYU’s comparative literature PhD program, to make this event.

[...]

The “list of words that rhyme” we will use comes from poetry editor Robyn Creswell's only published poem to date, “Foreign Correspondent”....

Put your satirical wit to the task and have fun with this!

Patrick Donnelly on Chronic Illness, Art, and the Spiritual Life

2010-12-30T12:18:00.003-05:00

A beautiful interview with poet Patrick Donnelly on chronic illness, art, and the spiritual life, at the blog Loving With Chronic Illness.

A Review of Field Knowledge by Morri Creech

2010-12-29T03:21:00.003-05:00

*This review originally appeared in Lyric Poetry Review.

Morri Creech. Field Knowledge. London and Baltimore: Waywiser Press, 2006. £6.99 paper (ISBN 10: 1-904130-23-2, ISBN 13: 978-1904130-23-9), 80 pp.

Reviewed by Luke Hankins

Morri Creech’s poetry is unabashedly a poetry for those who read. When he’s not speaking of what seems to be his own life, he invades the consciousnesses of the dead or mythic. In various ways, he conjures Orpheus, Job and his wife, Primo Levi, Giotto, Leonardo DaVinci, Isaac Newton, Blake, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Marx, Matthew Arnold, and Simone Weil, among others. Field Knowledge, chosen by J. D. McClatchy for the 2005 Anthony Hecht Prize and nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, certainly evinces knowledge of historical and literary fields, and assumes the same knowledge-base for its readers. Don’t get me wrong – I find this refreshing. It seems in no way presumptuous to suppose that those who love poetry love to read. This assumption has only recently fallen away from poetry in a large-scale way. As J.D. McClatchy notes in the foreword, instead of reverting merely to “private memory,” Creech “prefers more amplitude, and draws on a range of classical and biblical allusions, on the choreography of rhetoric, on the complexities of science and nature.” Creech’s poetry, then, is distinct from much of what is written in America today. Yet, for all its learnedness, his poetry is not obscure or “difficult” in the pejorative sense. Creech’s primary field is not myth, or history, or literature – it is the human experience and the human condition. The "field," in fact, is a recurring image in this collection, symbolic of the world in which we all participate, at once physical and symbolic, difficult and beautiful, practical and mythic. The field is the physical world acted upon, emblematic of the human drive to discover and to create significance. “Listening to the Earth,” a poem reminiscent of Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet,” imagines a people who are used to hearing the cries of a biblical prophet, and are, frankly, sick of it. But soon they begin to sense a loss, an emptiness. Here is the final stanza:

And in the plain streets we listened

for those syllables that once conjured the cold,

fathomless swells of Leviathan-haunted seas,

the fabled bush ablaze on hallowed ground,

and snowflakes’ mythic treasuries,

transfiguring our ordinary fields.

The task of the prophet is the task of the poet, the task that Creech takes up in his masterful second collection. Creech transfigures ordinary human fields – physical fields, as in the title poem, and figurative fields, as in “Some Notes on Grace and Gravity” – into messengers speaking specially for us. We would do well to listen, lest we forget the “things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken,” as Richard Wilbur put it. If we attend closely, we may find, as Newton finds in Creech’s book, that even “gravity […] becomes a kind of grace.”

Magnanimous Despair: A Poem and Thoughts on Advent at Being Blog

2010-12-24T17:33:00.001-05:00

Happy Christmas Eve to all! Here is a link to my poem, "Weak Devotions," and my introductory thoughts on Advent at the blog of the NPR program "Being" (formerly "Speaking of Faith"). Click on the painting below by the wonderful artist Grace Carol Bomer to go to the post at Being Blog.

"We Wait Bowing I" by Grace Carol Bomer (used by permission of the artist)

Paradise Re-Lost: A Review of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife

2010-12-23T11:26:00.001-05:00

by Luke Hankins

Late Wife, Claudia Emerson. Louisiana State University Press, 2005. 54 pp.. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8071-3084-1

It had to have come up from the cool underbelly

of the first old house we rented, climbing

pipes like branches to make a nest of the rusty

sink-cabinet drawer where I kept the silverware.

I opened it, and the snake lay coiled, brooding

on its bed of edges—blades and tines....

[...]

...I let the snake

escape, drain back into the house, and for years

I told at that same table what I had to tell,

how it disappeared the way it came.

-from “Natural History Exhibit”

With these lines from the first poem in the collection, Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife thrusts the reader immediately into a familiar but freshly-rendered postlapsarian world in which the natural world inevitably insinuates itself into the house, the human-made dwelling, and sometimes also finds a home there, though the human occupants remain ill-at-ease with its presence. There are spiders and termites, for instance, in “Rent” (“spiders—seasonless—survived the broom / to live in every corner,” and a queen termite “pale and thick / as my thumb, invalid, being fed the house”); in “Waxwing,” a bird takes up temporary residence in the house, then is released after several weeks (“What had we saved // for a world so alien, the waxwing / must have believed it had died in those rooms...?”); in “Metaphor,” a bat enters the house, and the speaker’s husband kills it (“I wanted // you to do it—until you did.”) Many of the poems in this book, primarily in the first of the three sections, but also throughout, are built on this primal dilemma of recognizing our connection to the natural world while defending ourselves against its encroachment into the house, the human-made space. For this reason, the speaker in the opening poem allows the snake to lie on the silverware, but vigorously washes all of it once the snake has moved—and the speaker later regrets not having killed it (“I know now I should have killed the snake”). But she did not kill it, and it has sunk back into the house. And indeed, if Emerson had not allowed the snake, sinister and at home in the bowels of the house, to live in the poem, to dwell in the interstices of the house, there would be no book and we would be deprived of its understated beauties and complex emotions.

To frame the book this way is to postpone discussing the book’s more obvious subject and storyline. In the aftermath of Eden, it would seem, the speaker of these poems endures a divorce, then marries a man whose first wife has died. The second of the book’s three sections combines explorations of the psychological upheaval caused by the speaker’s divorce with evocative reminiscences from her childhood. The third section, however, is the most subtle and formally deft of the three. It opens with a sonnet that explores the primary motif of the book: the house and the objects that make up the household. Many of the poems thus far have dealt with the speaker’s houses, but now “Artifact” deals with her new husband’s house, along with the objects he has kept from the house he once shared with his late wife:

...and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—

small things. Months after we met, you told me she had

made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft

and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath

her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

And the rest of the book does indeed move beneath the shadow of her death, along with the shadow of the speaker’s divorce—two smaller shadows within the great shadow of The Fall itself. Whereas the speaker’s marriage seems to have ended because of frustration in the relationship, her new husband remained devoted to his first wife to the end. This lends great psychological complexity to this section, so that when the speaker’s husband tells her about his first wife’s illness or when her possessions show up—a daybook, a photograph, a glove—the reader feels the speaker’s conflicting emotions. The speaker desires to know who this woman was, and perhaps even to love her somehow as well, since she was beloved, but this task is ultimately impossible, so there is a gulf that remains between her and her husband. The speaker must also feel confusion as she lives with someone who loves her, but will never stop loving a former wife as well. In “Old English,” one of the finest poems in the collection, the book’s many strands suddenly coalesce in the space of seven lines:

I buried the sheepdog for you, trying

to save you from that grief, dug through muscled

roots, past rain-wet earth to harder, drier

soil that did not cling, but scoured the shovel.

Even the expected, smaller death recalled

the other. I transplanted sedum from the garden

to mark the place and obscure it.

In context of this third section, the reader will emphasize the word “that” in the second line far more than one normally might, which lends an incredible emotional potency to the line. Again, in context of the section and of the book, “the other” death referred to in the second stanza must refer not only to the death of the husband’s first wife, but also to the entrance of death itself into the world in Genesis. And finally, a plant is brought out of the garden to paradoxically “mark” the place and to “obscure” it. This is a post-Edenic setting in which the natural world is both kept at bay and tended, a world in which beautiful plants feed on the rotting flesh of beloved animals and in which relationships are predicated on loss.

Before judging this collection to work within too-familiar territory, one would do well to read it through. Emerson casts her narrative within the ancient allegory of The Fall with formal deftness, tonal subtlety, and psychological acuity, such that the reader can almost hear the flaming sword guarding the entrance to Eden flicking back and forth off in the distance, as if that blade were the source of the light in which these poems cast their shadows.

Phil Metres: Advent Poems

2010-12-18T19:17:00.002-05:00

Phil Metres has posted a video of a reading of his wonderful series of Advent poems, interspersed with music. Phil writes that "the psalms and readings and prayers I heard as a child in Mass were among my first experiences of poetry—a language that draws us into its song, that claims us, even when we don’t understand all its meanings. The longer I write, the more I admire the durable language of Scripture. Despite its translations from distant languages, its vivid evocation of the sacred flows in and between the lines. I am still awed when I read the poetry of Isaiah:

The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue,
That I might know how to speak to the weary
A word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
He opens my ear that I may hear…"

Watch the video here:
http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/2010/12/happy-advent-everyone-poems-music-in.html

Radulescu Translations at Connotation Press

2010-12-16T01:58:00.000-05:00

My translations of four poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, along with an interview with me, are now up at Connotation Press:

http://connotationpress.com/poetry/690-stella-vinitchi-radulescu-translated-by-luke-hankins-poetry

Turning a Language of Death into a Language of Life: An Interview with Richard Jackson

2010-12-10T23:18:00.004-05:00

Interviewed by Luke Hankins

*This interview originally appeared in Asheville Poetry Review (vol. 17, no. 1, issue 20, 2010).

Richard Jackson is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Resonance (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010). His other collections include Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (Autumn House, 2004); Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (Ashland, 2003); Heartwall (UMass, 2000 Juniper Prize); Svetovi Narazen (Slovenia, 2001); a limited edition small press book, Falling Stars: A Collection of Monologues (Flagpond Press, 2002); and several chapbooks of translations. His own poems have been translated into a dozen languages. He has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry: The Fire Under the Moon and Double Vision: Four Slovenian Poets (Aleph, 1993). He edits Poetry Miscellany and mala revija, and an eastern European chapbook series. He is also the author of a book of criticism, Dismantling Time in Contemporary American Poetry (Agee Prize), and Acts of Mind: Interviews with Contemporary American Poets (Choice Award). His several dozen essays and reviews have appeared in Georgia Review, Verse, Contemporary Literature, Boundary 2, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other journals, as well as in anthologies such as The Planet on the Table: Writers Reading (2003) and John Ashbery (ed. Harold Bloom, 2004). In addition, he has written introductions to books of poems by four different Slovene Poets for various presses and for a special Slovene issue of Hunger Mountain (2003). He has also edited a special 50-page section of Poetry International (2004) on William Matthews with an introductory essay. Jackson was the recipient of the 2009 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, awarded by the Association for Writers and Writing Programs. In 2000, he was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans by the President of Slovenia and has also received Guggenheim, NEA, and NEH awards, 2 Witter-Bynner and Fulbright fellowships, and 5 Pushcart Prizes. In addition, he has won teaching awards at UT-Chattanooga and Vermont College (MFA program).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Note: This interview combines material from exchanges in 2005 and 2010.

Luke Hankins: Your poems are often filled with facts, or “facts”—sometimes the reader isn’t quite sure, especially when you write things like “There are only two things I’ve made up / in this poem”! In that same poem (“Personals,” from Resonance), you write, for instance: “To testify meant originally to swear by holding / your testicles,” “21% of frogs in suburban CT / have become hermaphrodites,” and “The emperor moth smells a female at seven miles.” What is the role of facts and statistics, and the accompanying mix of certainty and uncertainty that the reader probably feels, in your poems? Why are you drawn to them? Where do you gather them? Do you make many of them up? Or is this question meant to be left unanswered?

Richard Jackson: I started out in science—in engineering—and later changed first to economics, then philosophy, then English. I still read a lot of science journals and books and find interesting facts there. Science IS metaphor: pure science can be reduced to math, but when you expand it to explain the concepts you have to use a language that is not structured to describe what you want to say. For example, when I was in high school we had this picture of the atom that was modeled on the solar system, with the nucleus like the sun and electrons like planets, but that isn’t what it looks like. In fact, now some scientists use a metaphor of strings to describe basic particles, or a flexible table top to describe the universe. When I use those facts, and they are true, I mean for them to be analogous to the emotions: the poems use a language of science to talk about emotions and an emotive language to talk about science so that the two types of language become metaphors for each other. Sometimes the science terms come from a similar phrase in an emotive phrase, or just the opposite. I remember seeing something like this in the Czech poet Miroslav Holub. But also I remember the way Alexander Pope used names, references and places as metaphors for emotional states. And the way people like Newton and Einstein used metaphors to describe the undescribable. In that poem, by the way, the science is all real, but some of the emotive contexts were made up, though the general situation was true. I was in fact waiting in a hotel room, for example.

LH: Even a cursory look at your books reveals one thing—most of your poems are long. Is the fact that your poems are on the long end of the spectrum of contemporary poetry important to you? How is the length an asset and how is it a drawback?

RJ: When I began writing my poems were small—short, imagistic poems dense with similes and metaphors. After a while I took up photography and began to see that the pictures were doing a better job at capturing images. I was also having more fun at the time writing essays. As a result of those two things I started to write discursive poems, first by combining shorter ones that would now be sections. I had Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” as a sort of model. The way I have always thought has been to counterpoint things—so instead of counterpointing images I started to counterpoint discursive bits, narrative fragments. When you start to do that, use one fragment to define another, things start to build, get longer. But it also starts to lead you to see things in a larger way, to see contexts you didn’t see before. I don’t really see length as an asset or drawback: the poem has be the right size to deal with whatever presents itself. I have a whole book of Petrarchan sonnets, for example. Now, most of my longer poems work faster despite their length in that they counterpoint, often in a surreal way, images, but unlike the images that were in the earlier poems, they make a sort of subtext story, a narrative of images.

LH: Was the experience of working in received form while writing the poems in Half Lives noticeably different for you? The idea of end-rhymed lines, for example, seems particularly foreign to your typical technique.

RJ: First, I would make a distinction between form and format. For example, a Shakespearean sonnet is defined as 14 lines of iambic pentameter rhymed a certain way, but Shakespeare has a 12-line sonnet in tetrameter, a couplet sonnet, etc. So either Shakespeare didn’t know what a Shakespearean sonnet was or something else is going on. And there is Gerald Stern with his American sonnets, and Robert Lowell with his unrhymed sonnets, both rather loose variations on line numbers and rhyme. Those definitions are what I would call format; form, on the other hand, is the way something moves from beginning to end. A Shakespearean form has an opening and two variations that then end up with a small section, often a couplet, that either turns back into the poem or takes off into the stratosphere: the whole movement tends to be metamorphic, one image starting to redefine another. A Petrarchan sonnet moves in terms of either/or, cause/effect, before/after—some sort of duality where the parts remain, usually, pretty distinct. When we talk about rhyme we usually mean end rhyme, but that is a narrow sense of what poetry can do. We have assonance and consonance, vowel and consonant echoes, and they can be at the beginning, middle or end of a word or a line: the result is about 18 different possibilities, and end rhyme is only one of those. In the so-called free verse poems there is a lot of echoing of various types, and in the rhymed Petrarchan variations there are also a number of other kinds of sound echoes.

LH: What is your approach to line breaks in general, and how did you have to adjust that when writing the sonnets? In your mind, does the line in your sonnets have a quality that is primarily similar to or distinct from that of the line in your free verse poems? Also, do you think you might attempt another formal project like Half Lives? Why or why not?

RJ: In English we have a unique system. If we scan a line as they tell us in school, say an iambic line like Keats’ “The PO-e-TRY of EARTH is NEver DEAD,” we have a typical iambic pentameter line, but it would sound silly to say it that way. Instead, we’d say, “The POetry of EARTH is NEVer DEAD,” almost eliding the words poetry and never. There is a difference between the spoken rhythm (like a lead guitar) and the school-taught meter (the base guitar or drums), and that is an incredible asset in our language. It’s why Wordsworth can end a poem “the difference to me” where we expect by the school-taught rhythm to have 3 syllables on difference, whereas we speak it with only two. It’s why most of Milton’s iambic pentameter lines in Paradise Lost read like four-beat lines, an echo of our natural rhythm from Old English.

So, to answer your question, my sense of the line in the sonnets and the other poems is pretty much the same. My sonnet lines are longer than Petrarch’s 11-syllable lines, partly because his sound longer in English than they are in the Italian, but also because it reflects my adaptation of his voice. In the case of my own poems, I don’t think of them as free verse: there is a principle in each one, often varying 5–7 beats per line. In addition, I have a sense of the line break as a hesitation—not a pause, and certainly not that sort of upwards line ending sing-song some poets recite their poems to. It is more like a sense that the writer is searching a tenth of a second for the next word, so that the line break—like Emily Dickinson’s dashes—gives us a sense of the process of thinking that the poet wants us to engage in. The lines are generally longish because of the density of materials and because I want the echoes to appear often on one line. Sometimes the end of one sentence and the beginning of another occur on the same line—and make sense as one sentence in itself.

I have had a similar experience when translating Pascoli (a just completed project for a book to appear from Red Hen Press) with two other translators: I was always the one arguing to keep the sense of the line he had, and even his word order where possible, because a poem gives us a sense of pacing and timing, rhythm on a larger scale, and the order in which we receive information—words—is part of that. I had the same issue in translating Preseren from Slovene, also using rhyme. I have also been toying with the idea of going back and translating some of Pavese’s very early poems—no one has done that yet.

LH: How does this sense of the line affect how you look at poems by other poets? Or in workshops and teaching?

RJ: I am fascinated at how a poet like Denise Levertov could get such incredible results with her short lines, and how C. K. Williams does it with Whitmanesque lines—so different and yet both so wonderfully exciting. When I read others I don’t have a preference, and I don’t subscribe to any “school” of poetry.

I am very suspicious of workshops and have changed how I operate in them. For one, we read probably 2/3 of the time and discuss students’ poems 1/3 of the time. This has been very successful. If it’s any measure, every undergrad who applied in the past 25 years received multiple MFA fellowship offers and over 25 former undergrads have published over 35 books. At least that means they have continued and are productive. In the “workshop” part of workshop we always begin with asking where a poem ends and then where it began: if there isn’t a difference, then the poem is static and all the words in the middle are wasted. If there is a difference, then good, now we can look at the arc, HOW the poem moves from beginning to end—that sense of pacing and structure that appears in the poem as a whole and on down to line and phrase. Once we have investigated that and described it, then we can move on to look at the usual workshop questions, usually in the context of the reading we have been doing.

LH: Your poems are full of the consciousness of war and suffering in the world. You say, in “The Head of the Devil” from your book Alive All Day, “whoever you are, / there is no sense trying to escape this world.” Do you think that our society tries to “escape this world,” and if so, in what ways? What role should the poet play in such a society?

RJ: I think our society is very naïve. A few million children around the world die each year from preventable sickness. There are a few dozen wars in the world at any given time. Terrorism, torture, oppression exist in all parts of the globe. Poverty affects hundreds of millions. When I worked with the PEN peace Committee in Slovenia I learned about things like this that would turn your stomach. We escape this so easily: just look at the ads on TV, so unreal. Here we are worried about what the new car models will look like, or the most convenient way to package a new food, the newest fashions. Our ethical system in many ways is based upon materialism, upon gaining material things. There’s a TV show called “Survivor” which, given all those things I mentioned above, is simply obscene. Or the MTV “Real World”—those kids haven’t the slightest idea of what the real world is.

What role should the poet play? In our materialistic world the poet doesn’t have as much as a role as in, say, South America, or Europe, where poets become spokespersons, even heads of state. That’s hard to imagine. At a poetry conference I went to in Macedonia, in former Yugoslavia, two years ago, there was an audience of 10,000. 1,500 were crammed into a huge auditorium, and they had multi-screen TVs, like at Riverbend [a street festival in Chattanooga, TN], scattered around the banks of a river outside! The audience included ambassadors and other politicians.

I think in America we have a creeping dark force, and that is materialism. Too often we measure our values by who has how much—just today there was a list of the ten richest, an article in the paper that took precedence over the slaughter going on in the Sudan. What does that say about us? But there is the hope that maybe writers can offer some vision that is different. I think that is why Oprah Winfrey has that book program: she realizes how important it is. This is why, for instance, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz writes: “whoever wields power is also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of censorship but also by changing the meaning of words. A peculiar phenomenon makes its appearance: the language of a captive community acquires certain durable habits; whole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have no name.... Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search of reality is he dangerous.” It is not just subject matter, then, but the very nature of poetry that is the issue here. Robert Hass, the American poet, writes: “Because rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is power. And power is political. That is why rhythm is always revolutionary ground. It is always the place where the organic rises to abolish the mechanical and where energy announces the abolition of tradition. New rhythms are new perceptions.” And here is Stanislaw Baranczak, another Polish poet: “regardless of theme and specific address, poetry is always some kind of protest....That’s why all the metaphors and rhythms—it’s just a way of putting the world’s chaotic gibberish in some meaningful order and restoring the original weight to abused words. That’s why all the concreteness and conciseness—to resist the engulfing power of the world’s empty abstractions and statistical generalities. That’s why all the speaking in first person singular and seeing things from a strictly individual perspective—it’s poetry’s way of standing up to the world whenever it tries to elbow the individual aside and off the stage.” And so, as Joseph Brodsky, the 1987 Nobel Prize-winning poet, has written: “With a poet, one’s ethical posture, indeed one’s very temperament, is determined by one’s aesthetics.”

LH: I’m not sure of the context Brodsky was speaking in, but it seems to me that perhaps he’s put it backwards. Couldn’t it be said that one’s aesthetics are determined by one’s ethical posture? Isn’t that the kind of revolution that needs to happen—having people consider the ethical implications of their aesthetic engagements? (I’m speaking even of consumerism as a kind of aesthetic engagement, or as the arena in which this country’s primary aesthetic engagements take place.) That seems like our only hope, because if our ethics are determined by our aesthetics, as you’ve clearly noted, this country—our culture—is in permanent trouble.

RJ: I suppose it could go either way—maybe, in fact, it must go either way. As much as I love this country, I also fear for its future: so many people from the new and even older generations can’t or don’t read, don’t have an awareness of what is going on in the world, don’t care for much of anything beyond what momentarily satisfies them. All this makes them very easy to manipulate, as so many politicians do today, and these people don’t understand how they are being manipulated. Ironically, they often vote or speak against their own self interests and against the interests of society as a whole because they have not been taught to think, to question, to argue, but only to shout or ignore. No, this isn’t everyone, but it is certainly an alarming tendency. When we look at our ads and the lifestyle and values they project we see a pretty self-centered worldview. Will poetry change this? Of course not. The problem is huge. We have people who don’t know the geography of their own region, never mind the country or the world, and so how, for instance, can they judge about a foreign policy that has implications well beyond our borders but will inevitably reflect back on them? The basic problem is education: more and more our educational system sounds like that described in Dickens’ Hard Times: “facts, facts, facts.” Our testing systems and teacher evaluation systems are moving more and more to this at the sacrifice of thinking and questioning skills. In a way we have become soulless despite all our religious banter: I once had a hope in religion, but so much of what we see today has been infected by a materialistic brand of religion.

Arnold said poetry was a form of religion, and I think he was right, if we take it to mean the kind of engagement with a writer’s thought processes as I described earlier. What that does is let us understand another point of view, another perspective, and we can grow, become more tolerant, and also more curious about the world and the values of other peoples. Of course, any of the arts can help us do this. I am not being idealistic, and I understand that some very evil people have loved art, but I would also question if they loved art or the idea that loving art made them appear cultured and therefore superior—something I think the Nazi art lovers we hear about felt about art, for example. Anything can be misused.

LH: In your poem, “Objects in This Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear,” from your book Heartwall, you write, “Maybe we can love / / not just within the darkness, but because of it….” Will the reader find an essentially hopeful philosophy underlying your poetry’s vivid, realistic picture of our war-filled world?

RJ: No matter how horrible the things that get mentioned in a poem, it is not the subject per se but the process of thinking, the structure, that is most important. I think the very fact that one CAN write about such things means someone has come to grips with them, understood them, and this is the first way of dealing with them. In that poem, which was modeled on an ode by Horace, the speaker tells first the horror story, then turns to his wife and remembers some things between them, and about his father, stories that counter that horror, and with that, hopes that some same sort of humanity might be infused into such a horrific situation. So the poem tries to fight its way through some sort of depressing ending. That to me is a pattern meant to show a way out of a hopeless situation. It is a way of turning a language of death into a language of life.

LH: You’ve been involved with Slovenian poets for a long time. How did this get started? What are some of the most significant influences of your experience with them and their country?

RJ: I was a Fulbright Exchange poet to former Yugoslavia, Serbia really, in 1986. I went back the next year, took some students, and have gone back each year with more students, but mostly to Slovenia, where I met a bunch of writers who immediately seemed like old friends, and Croatia. There are two conferences, one in May and one in September, that I go to most years in Slovenia by myself. I’ve also traveled a lot to Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, usually for literary reasons, and England, Germany, Austria. I get to Italy at least once a year in connection with my translation projects. I really love Slovenia and Italy: the mountains of Slovenia—I stay in the Alps on an alpine lake—and all the culture and art in Italy. Experiencing another culture, living in it for a bit, really broadens one’s view of the world, of one’s writing. The Slovenes are a very literate society: it would be like going into a Bi Lo and asking the cashier about Emily Dickinson, and then having her recite a few poems. All their statues are to writers, scientists, artists, musicians, philosophers, religious thinkers—no politicians or military people. A lot of the places and the stories around them have entered my poems, my teaching, my way of thinking.

LH: Where do you think poetry is headed in the 21^st century? Are you optimistic about the overall direction of poetry, as you perceive it? Do you see a lot of talent and originality? Have you noticed any major trends or practices that are disturbing? Any that are reassuring?

RJ: American poetry, despite the fact that few in America read it, is influential around the world. More people from around the world read our poets than from within our own country, easily. It is a rich poetry with numerous influences—geographic, ethnic, gender-wise, philosophical, mythic, narrative, formal, etc.—and at its best all these rich melting pot influences make for a deeply resonant poetry. Yes, it’s true that sometimes some in these groups listen only to themselves, but that’s not true of the better poets. This richness of vision is a valuable export our country has, but which our country doesn’t realize. Some of our best poems have a sense of justice, equality, and morality that is the basis for what this country was founded on, and it’s too bad that isn’t better exported. I was in Prague this past summer and you could sense that—the people were really amazed at some of our poets. I think our younger poets, the ones still in graduate schools and just starting out, are doing a lot of interesting things. The only poetry I feel doesn’t do anything like this is the so-called “language poetry,” which is mostly hermetic and about itself.

LH: Do you find it necessary to discipline yourself in order to get your writing done? If so, what are some of the things you do to make sure you’re productive?

RJ: I’m as lazy as anyone, and my main weakness is old movies, the history channel and Law and Order. There, it’s out. I also love music—classical, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass—and opera—a bit of everything—sort of like my poems. I am always taking notes, though, and I translate a lot, mostly from Italian, especially when nothing of my own seems to be coming out. Or I read, or do a book review or essay. Teaching usually fires me up, gets me thinking imaginatively, so I sort of feed off these things.

LH: A friend of yours, the late William Matthews, was also a poet whose love of music, particularly jazz, was evident in his writing. Here at Asheville Poetry Review, we’ve tried to bring more attention to his work over the years, and I think our readers will be interested in your thoughts about him and his work. Can you describe the nature of your friendship and any influence, whether personal or literary, that Bill Matthews has had on you?

RJ: Bill was one of the most generous people I knew. I remember seeing him sitting at Bread Loaf with a group of famous writers, and anytime a student would come by he’d pull the person in and make the person feel an equal part of the company—and this happened wherever he was. He had an incredible ability to make everyone around him feel important.

He could also be incredibly witty in a helpful way: one student in Chattanooga, a graduating senior who already had a few MFA offers, had a conference with him, and it turned out he talked about the proper care and feeding of the goose. He was talking about the poet’s life and playing off the fairy tale story of the golden goose, which the student immediately recognized. She said it was perhaps the best conference she ever had. That was at a little festival we have every semester at UT-C which he sometimes came to for serious money, sometimes for very little, and once just for a bottle of wine. In other words, he understood that sometimes schools don’t have much to spend and he’d be willing to make up for that.

When I was trying to start my Petrarch riffs, he had finished translating Martial and was wondering what next. We were sitting on my porch in Chattanooga and he was encouraging me to go ahead with the project and I in turn suggested Horace, the letters or the satires, and he took me up on that and later published his Horace. Another time I was worrying over how to trim down Alive All Day and he was working on a Selected Poems: he suggested we each cut 20% out of the other’s book, something that worked pretty well. He’d occasionally send poems, often with a question, and I’d send some back, but most of the time we talked generally and avoided going into any commentary other than some general description.

He was incredibly smart and seemed to have a photographic memory for some things—we played scrabble several times and he won, I think, on the first turn 3 or 4 times, sometimes teasing, “Oh, you don’t know the name of that part of the antelope’s foot?” And he loved to sit and talk about everything—the range of subjects was enormous. He’d spend a good deal of Sunday morning reading, I should say digesting, the New York Times.

As generous and gregarious as he was, I think he was also incredibly lonely. Sometimes I felt that all those ideas, the talk, the jazz, the opera, the many friends he had for dinner and conversation were desperately needed. He’d call at night sometimes and we’d mumble a few things back and forth, but we both felt pretty alone in the last few years of his life. That’s not to say that he didn’t have a wonderfully close relationship with his sons and with his love—he always bragged on his two sons literally every time we talked—just that some people are inherently lonely. I think this explains a lot about him, and maybe it allowed him to see more of other people’s needs than most people I know. So many things were about the future, too—and his last words to me were one night a few nights before he died, “I think Patrick (Ewing) is going to do it this year.”

LH: Who are some of your favorite poets, both living and deceased? Which have had the greatest influence on your writing?

RJ: For me the greatest poet of all time was Ovid, because of the technical things in his poems, the depth of the psychology in them, and the breadth of what he did—an epic, love poems, letter poems, a play (lost), various satires. I also love Horace and Propertius from those times, Dante and Petrarch, Ariosto—and of course all the greats in English. I keep going back to Rilke, Pavese, Montale, Stevens, Williams, Millay. My list of favorites changes daily, especially for the current poets, but I do find myself going back again and again to Gerald Stern, Phil Levine, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Tomaz Salamun. Dean Young and Mary Ruefle and Dara Wier are three other names. I read eclectically and could go on here forever. Neruda may have been the best poet of the last century, some say Anna Akhmatova, both great poets. Maybe Lorca. See what I mean?

LH: Do you think a writer like Ovid or Horace would be considered among the greats if they were living and writing today? Would their writing have an essential quality that would mark it as their own and that would be recognized as high art, or are writers too thoroughly products of their own time for that? I use these two merely as examples.

RJ: In those two cases I think they would—Ovid is so cosmopolitan and Horace so urbane—and both have great range. Ovid especially, who I think is the best poet who ever lived. I think they both transcend their age and would be among our more famous poets today. Horace had a great influence on James Wright and Bill Matthews, two very different poets, which shows Horace’s strength and range. And Ovid has had a great influence on Kenneth Koch and poets after him like Mark Halliday and Dean Young.

Unfortunately, today most students in creative writing programs don’t read much that is earlier than 1990, or at best the twentieth century. I remember David Wojahn complaining that some grad students didn’t know Jarrell and Berryman, not even Lowell or Bishop! So often they end up doing what has already been done but in a tired way. Poets like Matthews and Wright looked to the past, saw what others did, and that opened up yet other, more original possibilities when combined with their own imaginations. Look what Levine does with Lorca and Machado, or what Stern does with Whitman. Look at what Marvin Bell does with William Carlos Williams, James Tate with Stevens, Charles Simic with Vasko Popa. It’s interesting that a situation like that doesn’t occur in art or music, where one studies the history of the art. It goes back to education, what we were talking about earlier, where students are taught early on that poetry is just like a personal private journal and all you need is a pencil, not a knowledge of the art.

Today so many look to the hackneyed reviews of the New York Times Book Review section, and great attention is paid to the newest flashy poet much like to the newest building put up in place of a demolished one. Then in a few days the poet is forgotten. It isn’t the poets’ faults—they are being mistreated by getting such early lavish praise—like the record industry of late. The problem is our culture that values the new and different over everything else, and that value system is seeping into the arts, at least into literature.

At the recent AWP conference, one of my students was enthralled with one of these poets she had just read, and went to hear him read, then came back with the knowledge that he was cliché-ridden, juvenile, and just plain boring. But granted, on the surface he seemed to be doing something different at first glance. It’s a shame, because this poet has gotten enough over-attention to probably not progress much, at least for a while.

LH: Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to these questions. I have one last one for you. Asheville Poetry Review put out a special issue in 2000 called “10 Great Neglected Poets of the 20th Century,” and we hope to cover 10 more in a future issue, so we like to ask poets we interview if they have any suggestions. Are there any 20^th-century poets that you feel have been underappreciated or neglected, in comparison with their peers? If so, do you have any theories as to why they’ve been neglected?

RJ: They are neglected because of that fascination with the new. We ran a panel at the AWP conference on forgotten and neglected poets for several years. One especially is the Canadian poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, a fantastic poet who died early from the results of alcohol, a real loss. One of our great poets has been William Meredith, and I think he’s been overlooked because he wasn’t “flashy.” Edna St. Vincent Millay is read perhaps more by a popular audience than poetry students. Two others are Sara Teasdale and Elinor Wylie. Of course Weldon Kees. When you look around, there are hundreds of poets worth reading. There’s a kind of wonderful renaissance going on in American poetry today. We have a wealth of different poetries that converse with one another across race, gender, geography, poetic principles. It seems I discover another voice every few days, though I still keep reading the older ones. My only fear, and I see this occasionally, is that a poet of one of these subdivisions start to write only for those in that subdivision and argue that anyone else writing about that material has “appropriated” his or her material. This is an incredible narrowing of an art that is supposed, as I take it, to reach out beyond boundaries, to be the inclusive art that Whitman dreamed of. At our best moments I think our American poetry does that.

Cover Mock-up for My Chapbook of Translations

2010-12-01T21:34:00.003-05:00

Here are the front and back cover mock-ups from the publisher for my forthcoming chapbook of translations, I Was Afraid of Vowels Their Paleness (Q Ave Press, Jan. 2011), poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, translated from the French by yours truly! The artwork was created specially for the chapbook by Marie-Thérèse Pent. Blurb by Hoyt Rogers, poet and translator of Yves Bonnefoy's The Curved Planks (FSG, 2006), among many other works.

Update from New England Review: NEA Grant

2010-11-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

New England Review has posted an announcement on its website about the grant it's been awarded from the National Endowment for the Arts: http://www.nereview.com/NEA_announcement.html

This is wonderful news for a publication that is faced with the loss of its institutional (Middlebury College) funding at the end of 2011. NER is still seeking financial support to ensure its viability for the future. Please support them if you can (see my earlier post).

Keep New England Review Alive

2010-11-26T23:01:00.004-05:00

Recent years have been even harder than usual on print-based literary magazines. Some have gone out of print, while others are currently putting up a fight to stay alive. New England Review is one of the latter, and it's hard to think of a more quintessential literary magazine than NER. As a young college student growing more serious by the day about literature and writing, I spent a lot of time in the university library reading a certain few literary magazines, the ones that seemed to me to be publishing the most consistently engaging work. NER was at the top of that short list. To this day, it has never flagged in its excellence.

NER recently published a translation of mine--a great honor for the boy who used to spend so many hours in the library with NER in hand!--and the degree of engagement from both Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler in meticulously reading the piece and working with me to improve it has only increased my respect for this publication and my sense that they are doing the kind of devoted editorial work that sadly seems rare these days.

NER is now faced with the loss of its funding from Middlebury College at the end of 2011, and we are in danger of losing one of the country's finest publications. A recent update and request for support mailed out by NER highlights both some good news (subscriptions up 25% from last year; 120 new donors) and the amount of funding still needed ("less than halfway toward making NER pay its own way"). Their goal is to increase their existing endowment to such an extent as would secure the financial viability of the magazine not only for next year, but for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, they must make their appeal for help to a historically un-wealthy demographic: poets, writers of literary fiction, and scholars. I myself am among the most un-wealthy of the un-wealthy in this demographic! But I know that there are some of you out there who can afford to help sustain one of our country's finest literary institutions. I urge you to consider helping NER continue publication.

Mail support to:
New England Review
Middlebury College
5 Court Street
Middlebury, VT 05753-6014

**UPDATE (11/29/10)**
Just announced on NER's Facebook page: "just received notice that the magazine will receive its first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- $10,000 toward publishing and promoting great new writing through 2011."
Great news! They still need our support. Please consider helping.

Final Posthumous Collection of William Matthews' Work

2010-11-22T00:35:00.005-05:00

The last of poet William Matthews' (1942 - 1997) uncollected work, New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews, edited by his son Sebastian along with Stanley Plumly, is now available from Red Hen Press. This volume includes not only uncollected poems, but short stories, essays, letters, interviews, and recipes. The two previous posthumous collections of Matthews' work are Search Party: Collected Poems (Houghton Mifflin) and The Poetry Blues: Essays & Interviews (University of Michigan Press), both edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly.

Below are two links for the new collection, one to Amazon and one to the Red Hen Press site. Unfortunately, the Red Hen Press site doesn't have much information about the book up yet, though it is listed and you can purchase it directly from them, which I encourage. (Support literary presses!)

http://www.amazon.com/New-Hope-Dead-Uncollected-Matthews/dp/1597091626/

http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalogView/type=books;bookUUID=2B7386AF-7239-C869-E95A-7F2346B5F68E

Featured Artist: Emilia Phillips

2010-11-21T13:16:00.002-05:00

Photo by Patrick Scott
Vickers, 2010

Emilia Phillips is a young poet you should know. She is my second "featured artist" (the first was photographer Meghan Rand), and with her permission I have selected three of her poems to reprint here as an introduction to her work. Her poetry is evidence that she is finely attuned to the intricacies of individual thought and feeling and to the complexities of human relationships. She is a maker of beautiful phrases, a discerning teller of small but powerful stories, a writer who at the end of her poems leaves the reader in a state of meditation. It is a testament to her abilities that perhaps her finest poem is quite a long one--"Honeymoon Hiking," the last poem in my selection below.

Emilia is the current Lead Associate Editor at Blackbird and she is a student in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received a BA in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her poetry has appeared in 42opus, The Adirondack Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Poetry Miscellany, Sixth Finch, Unsaid Magazine, and elsewhere. She was named the 2009 Discovery Poet by Cutthroat. Her chapbook of poems, Strange Meeting, was published by Eureka Press in March, 2010. Her chapbook can be purchased by contacting Eureka Press at eurekapress@gmail.com.

All poems reprinted by permission of the author.

Creation Myth*

for Bill Root

I wouldn’t drink from the creek next to my house
that runs like a vein of old blood
to the Tennessee. Somewhere in Kentucky,
a poet is leading his congregation
in a service for the Church
of Elkhorn, but there’s no god,
just a low mist standing in for the Holy Ghost,
just kayaks and wet suits on Sundays, and the day’s
collect taken from Byron or Shelley. I ought to be
thy Adam, the creature says to Frankenstein,
but the creature was never as pretty as the Adam
on the walls of the Church of the Holy Trinity
in Hrastovlje where a fault line waits beneath
its stone, waiting to open the earth like a bloom.
As a child, my grandfather ate dandelion
sandwiches, just weeds placed between Wonder
bread, when there was nothing else. I sat in chapel,
as a child at an Episcopal school, watching the rain, wanting
the school to flood until we were stuck there living
off of communion crackers and paddling the halls
in canoes made of church pews. Even now,
as I sit on the bank of the creek, I root my feet
into the cool sludge and mud and touch
the healed rib that was broken years ago.

*originally appeared in Asheville Poetry Review; reprinted from Strange Meeting

Impressions*

I.

The technician, in training,
pulls a blade through a blue bar
of soap, carving to the size
of a bullet, then the fine
etching—the exact angle
of a lingual ridge, the precise
contour of a right maxillary
cuspid’s cingulum. To know
human anatomy one must
recreate it, little by little:
porcelain tooth, glass
eye, artificial heart.

II.

When the blue tray arrives in the lab
bloody, craters of teeth gummed up
with a patient’s breakfast of Total, eggs
over easy, he begins sterilizing, cleaning,
spraying COE on the impression
as his father, the doctor, comes in
saying the patient is HIV positive.

Before lunch, wash your hands several
times or wear an extra pair of gloves if
it’ll make you feel better, he says and sling-
shots his glove into the biohazard bin
as one of the guys on finishing turns
the radio up and the blood thins
in the water going down the drain.

III.

As a child, he never wanted to lose
his teeth, so his older sister used to pull
them because she said it was gross
when one fell from his bottom row
like a collapsing thumb puppet. She forced
him into the bathroom after school, locked door,
a paper towel printed with flowers and ribbon
in her hand, stomped on his toe so he’d open
his mouth to yell. That’s when she snagged
the tooth, the root giving way like loose
thread from a school shirt his mother let out
because he was getting so big now, but he cried,
his tongue in the tender gap until sleep, until the next
morning, under his pillow, he found money
that smelled of his father’s leather wallet.

IV.

The tech hands the impression off
to the modelers to begin their recreation
of what a human mouth should look like,
and he sneaks into the office, peeks
into the room where the patient waits,
easing out of the gas. She raises her head,
her thin neck strung with a bib painted
brown with blood, and she smiles. Her teeth,
what’s left of them: black, soft, jagged.

*reprinted from Strange Meeting

Honeymoon Hiking*

St. John, USVI

We’ve seen the donkeys, their white
brutish heads through our rented Jeep

window, snuffling for Reese’s Pieces
in the door handle, and the goats

that stand in the middle of undular
mountain roads, billies knocking

heads, sound like clapped stones,
or steel striking flint. We saw Carnival in Cruz

Bay: torches, masquerading women,
pasty stands, and spits of pig, lobsters laid

whole on the grill, red shells scarring with flame,
and now we go for the Taino’s

petroglyphs, only two miles down
the Reef Bay trail. A steep gully, path laced

with darting lizards, their brown bodies blending
with leaves. My feet in sandals, cinched

tight—I didn’t expect hiking on my honeymoon.
No boots in my bag, or awkward ankle

brace, Velcro and laces, holding
my gait together unsexily. Sweating,

short of breath, we climb over roots, rocks.
My ankle turns, once and then again,

pull of old surgery scars, ache of two screws
in my left heel, steel heads visible beneath

skin. We find the dry waterfall, the pool
that stays the same depth all year through

rainy season and drought. Mosquitoes feast
on us, their buzzing burrowing in our ears.

The carvings rim the pool,
reflect off the still green, reflect on the Tainos’

belief in duplicity, parallel worlds, earth
and sky, gully and mountain. Unseen birds

open their throats. My ankle swells to the size
of breadfruit and I sit on the rocks

near empty Park Service cages, bars
gone rusty, metal skeletons spurred

with the waterfall’s mineral deposits. A sign that reads:
Please do not touch, feed, or release this animal. I swat

a mosquito, a splatter of blood. Two nights before,
drunk on dark rum

housekeeping left in the ice bucket and stoned
on the green bought off the shuttle driver,

Roger (who pronounces his name more
Like Rah-juh, so we kept singing songs

In a fake accent, lyrics like “Rah-juh, the coolest fuck-uh
on this whole island”), my husband cut his foot wide open

on shell or dry coral. He didn’t notice.
It was dark, he couldn’t feel pain—

blood soaking into the white
sand, puddling on the tile of our room floor

when he went in for the Cruzan. Three donkeys
slept underneath seagrapes that lined

the beach. I went in when my husband
passed out on an Adirondack

chair. I nearly slipped on the blood, my heart opening
to a faster pumping, and ran outside

to wake him. One donkey raised his head,
lowered again, hot breath stirring

sand. I helped my husband in to see the blood—
Where was it from? But, as he walked, stumbled

ahead of me to the bathroom for tissue, his foot,
his heel, left a new trail.

I made him recline on the bed,
Though he asked if he was back on the boat

to Virgin Gorda, and I poured the rest
of the rum into the gully of muscle on his sole,

jagged skin, gone white. We hardly slept
that night, his nerves slowly growing

resonant to the pain, and me, unable
to sleep with the birds that call all

night—voices like warnings,
voices mating in song.

*reprinted from Strange Meeting

A Second Experience: A Review of Two Books by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

2010-11-13T14:24:00.001-05:00

by Luke Hankins

*This review originally appeared in Asheville Poetry Review (issue 19, vol. 16, no. 1).

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu:
Insomnia in Flowers. Plain View Press, 2008.
Diving with the Whales. March Street Press, 2008.

Novice poets often make the mistake of putting most of their effort into evoking the feeling of experience rather than first practicing a more objective, concrete description of experience. If something is highly emotional, highly subjective, then to them it automatically qualifies as good poetry. They don’t realize it yet, but they are trying to take a shortcut to eliciting emotion in the reader. If the poem contains an overabundance of emotion, then how can the reader not have an emotional experience? The problem is that witnessing emotion or being told about emotion is not at all the same as having an emotional response to a firsthand experience. And I don’t think, when it comes to poetry, that this is a failure of sympathy. What happens is that, without a participatory experience on the reader’s part, any emotion in the poem is likely to remain unconvincing at best, or to seem like a gimmick at worst. The inexperienced poet does not yet understand that it is impossible to create emotion without creating experience for the reader—and that is precisely what all good poetry must do, rather than simply chronicling an emotional response to some other experience. The experience that a poem creates may be of any kind: realistic, fantastic, linguistic, rhetorical, philosophical, propositional, etc., etc. But if the poet is unaware of the need for creating an experience of one kind or another for the reader, he or she is not likely to succeed very often at doing so, merely by chance.

What Stella Vinitchi Radulescu does most expertly is to create an experience for the reader of her poems. The nature of the experience of reading a poem of hers is most often surrealistic, achieved in a sparse, fragmentary style. In many of her poems, she is also concerned with creating a meta-level linguistic experience. It is clear that many of her poems do chronicle emotional responses to various experiences, but she writes her poems with the inherent understanding that they must create a second experience that is not merely a retelling of the original. The opening poem of Radulescu’s collection, Insomnia in Flowers, is a fine example of this:

a room

in the room

my flesh in yours thank you mother

thanks for taking me back for the fresh leaves

the language I speak once a year when the sun

digs you out cherry trees in blossom again

rehearsing a new death

spelling loud your silence

a short yes

flowers for teeth

teeth for flowers

(from “Spelling Loud”)

What we can notice about Radulescu’s poem is that it is not a retelling of experience, but a distillation of experience. Thus the fragmentary images and thoughts—only those things that will be most vital for the reader’s second experience. She is also unafraid of defying the original experience for the sake of the second; in other words, she makes something new out of the material of the original experience, and is willing, even eager, to shape and distort the raw material. This way, she achieves a surrealistic effect, conflating the cherry trees with the mother, such that the blossoms begin by “spelling loud” the silence of the dead mother—in other words, simply reminding the speaker of her mother and of her death—and then morph to actually take on physical characteristics of her, to become her: “flowers for teeth / / teeth for flowers”. I would contend that this second experience that the reader has is not the same experience the poet (or the speaker of the poem) had, and yet, perhaps because the poem is not an attempt to simply recreate the same experience, and it is also not an attempt to convey emotion divorced from an experience of the reader’s own, it succeeds in conveying the emotional quality of the original.

Other poems of Radulescu’s seem less likely to have arisen from a single identifiable original experience, and yet are no less adept in creating an experience for the reader. We can see this in “Scream,” which I reproduce here in its entirety:

I went too far, too far in the woods. The tree

was there, the body hanging

from a branch.

It was yesterday, I was looking for God.

Free from gravity, his legs in the wind

right, left…

a creepy balance between shadows and light.

Too far on Earth, too far into night… I touched

the corpse, it went away in flames

and dust.

He is still here in the declining moon some words would fit

his skull

And I was scared, the scream

took my whole body with it, I thought I was flying…

But no, there I found myself stuck on the ground

from scream to scream building

an altar of silence.

This poem is more propositional than “Spelling Loud.” Even the fact that there are capital letters, as there rarely are in Radulescu’s poems, indicates that this is a narrative, discursive mode, rather than primarily an imagistic mode. Here, we have the idea of mystical pursuit taken too far. The poem seems to indicate that seeking God can be dangerous, when one is attempting to exceed the bounds of human knowledge and experience. And yet, the traumatic experience ultimately results in worship: “from scream to scream building / an altar of silence.” In this poem, Radulescu is proposing an idea rather than simply recounting an experience, and yet, it is through the reader's imaginative experience that the idea arrives so forcefully and so convincingly.

Oftentimes, in true Surrealist form, Radulescu's poems ask the reader to see combinations and juxtapositions of things that would not be possible in “the real world.” These surrealistic images and scenes create yet another kind of experience, akin to that in “Spelling Loud,” and yet distinct, because the surrealism in that poem can be read as psychological metaphor. It is not so easy to categorize other poems of hers this way, poems which are more fully surrealistic. The final stanza of the poem “If I Remember,” from Diving with the Whales, is a fine example:

lavender evening

ghosts approaching the shore

I follow their footpath I almost

hit a star

In “On Turtles and Death,” from Insomnia in Flowers, Radulescu combines her fascination with language itself with her surrealistic style:

the high tide leaves more verbs on the beach

I draw them all over my feet they whisper

The title poem of Insomnia in Flowers contains these wonderful lines:

my house floats backwards on the river

a child in the garden opens

black wings

And Radulescu can be more playful as well, combining artistic or literary allusions to create unforgettable images:

sky was a joke in our late conversation

a man lighting his blue cigars

with Stevens' tie

(from “Stars are like Children,” Insomnia...)

It seems to me that Radulescu’s basic concern is spiritual investigation, and carrying the reader along, to the extent that it is possible, in her mystical pursuit. In “Starting Point,” from Diving with the Whales, she writes about seeking understanding, and says, “and what if I fail and what if I don’t,” acknowledging the fearfulness of each possibility—either perpetual uncertainty, or revelation that is too much to bear (as in “Spelling Loud,” quoted above). She goes on to say, in the third section of the poem:

the answer is in our hands

but we don’t understand a long time ago

we named things at random

now we are paying for it

we don’t see a soul like we see the moon rising

we don’t understand simple facts

where are we going

why do the seagulls cry I have these words

sometimes I feel like touching their flesh

the roundness

and then I let them fall

one by one into your mouth, Mr. Nothing

make me an offer

I will buy your big and burning eyes

Those burning eyes of Mr. Nothing tell it all—Radulescu suspects that there really is no answer to the mystery of existence, no ultimate meaning. And yet, in personifying and speaking to that nothingness, the poem gives nothingness form and refuses to accept nihilism. The only way, for Radulescu, of approaching the mystery of existence, is words themselves. Notice how she makes them tangible: “I have these words / sometimes I feel like touching their flesh...”. And then they become the bargaining chips with which she will “buy [the] big and burning eyes” of Mr. Nothing by dropping them into his mouth. Radulescu is skeptical, but unrelenting, in her pursuit of mystery. In her unrelentingness, she reminds me of the 17th century Metaphysical poets, while stylistically, she is clearly a descendent of the Surrealists and Modernists. She has melded disparate traditions seamlessly in her poetry, and the precise mixture of elements in her work is perhaps unique in American poetry, and our poetry is richer for it. The reason her poetry is so successful is that it has the ability to offer the reader powerful experiences by which he or she can participate in the mystical pursuit that is the fundamental characteristic of her work.

Two Paintings

2010-11-12T12:24:00.004-05:00

These are two small paintings I did last year during a long period of intense anxiety and depression. I decided to keep them, and they're now on the wall in my room. They've become precious to me, though I don't have any delusions about my abilities as a painter (that is, the lack thereof).

#1. Acrylic on cheap, crappy canvas board. 5"x7".

#2. Acrylic on cheap, crappy canvas board. 5"x7".

Brief Notes on a Sufjan Stevens Concert

2010-11-08T01:51:00.005-05:00

Sufjan Stevens in concert ~ Thomas Wolfe Auditorium, Asheville, NC ~ November 7, 2010

Please excuse the quality of these photos. I'm not a photographer, I don't have a fancy camera, and my seat wasn't terribly close to the stage. Still, I hope these images convey something of the experience.

Talking to the audience, Sufjan paraphrased Whitman: "Walt Whitman said that we contain multitudes. If so, I think we should also exhibit multitudes. That's just to explain my aesthetic a little bit."

Animated projections incorporated art by Royal Robertson, a paranoid schizophrenic artist from Louisiana. Sufjan summarized Robertson's life and explained that he was the inspiration for much of his latest album, "The Age of Adz" (pronounced ah-dz).

You can hear Sufjan's recent EP, "All Delighted People," for free in its entirety here. I especially recommend the final track, "Djohariah."

Some of the most enrapturing projections were points of light that fell like snow, then coalesced like swarms of stars articulating new constellations: swans, bedroom windows, and landscapes.

Retro dancing craziness . . . in a glowing diamond.

The costumes and the visual effects have been put aside for the encore. They played several songs, then Sufjan performed his final song alone on stage, an older song of his about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. It is a harrowing song. But perhaps the most shocking moment comes last, when the song ends quietly with the lyrics, "And in my best behavior / I am really just like him. / Look beneath the floorboards / for the secrets I have hid." It seemed an astonishing gesture toward humility and confession--hyperbolic, yes, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to claim of more popular musicians that they suffer from an excessive sense of humility rather than the opposite?

A Review of Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven

2010-11-07T14:31:00.003-05:00

*This review originally appeared in Indiana Review (31.1).

Stephen Haven. Dust and Bread. Cincinnati, OH: Turning Point, 2008. $17.00 paper (ISBN: 978-1932339024), 96 pages.

Reviewed by Luke Hankins

Stephen Haven’s Dust and Bread opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson’s poem #575: “An Awe if it should be like that / Upon the Ignorance steals—.” In this collection, Haven’s poems present ignorance as a pathway to awe. The tourist or visitor is the primary metaphor in the first section of the book, a metaphor which resonates throughout the collection as a way of thinking about all situations in which one feels dislocated, unknowledgeable, or inexperienced. And in a larger sense, the metaphor comes to address the fundamental human condition.

In “Blossom,” the speaker, an American visiting the Summer Palace in Beijing, wonders, “What can a tourist know? The past / is made of stone.” It is clear that we are being presented the humble tourist, one who acknowledges his limitations regarding a history and a culture other than his own. This is the model Haven would hold up for the reader as a paradigm for life in the broadest sense. Humility of this kind—a willingness to admit and accept ignorance—bears much resemblance to Keats’ idea of negative capability. This collection can be seen as an explicit exploration of what Keats described as a capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The first section of the book explores (presumably) Haven’s own experience as an American visiting Beijing, which is the setting for deep complexities and conflicts in his experience of the world. In Beijing, he both witnesses the birth of his child and meditates on the Tiananmen Square massacre, which some members of his wife’s family experienced firsthand. In “Ultrasound,” Haven addresses his daughter while she is still in the womb, as her mother sings at her family’s home:

Only one young uncle falls asleep,

his face gone purple with grief and baijiu,

his one son lost shoveling coal

at the Beijing Duck Hotel,

then biking home, after dark, past

Tiananmen, June 4th.

Anniversary of absences,

song of a night to be sad.

Someone recalls, now, on his birthday,

in prison, your mother’s father was given

one boiled goose egg.

[...]

[T]he moon refuses to show,

masked in clouds and the earth’s shadow,

its power magnified behind a shroud.

Begonias of violence, man-powered stars

burst their last cartwheels

in a long rumor of dawn.

This is not a situation that begets certainty, and it is only within his experience of a conflicted world, in which he must ultimately admit ignorance, that any certainty arises. Here is the birth of his son (Haven’s biographical statement says that he lives with his wife “and their many children”), a moment of revelation—but one which depends on accepting ignorance:

we knew right then just what we were,

knew it was religion,

its work, its aspiration,

the body broken, breaking,

the blood poured out

eternity itself—

or something like it—

glinting in and out of view

in the double black-brown crystal,

the deep translucence

of a one-day old.

This is one of the purest moments of awe in the collection, and awe is only possible when revelation is offered to one who waits in an attitude of humility and ignorance.

The collection moves through three additional sections, each, like the first, containing nine poems—a formal parallel to Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, described in the first section as “a times table,” the floor of each level being made up of slabs in multiples of nine. Haven also flexes his formal muscle with a few poems in received form: a sestina, a couple poems in blank verse, and a villanelle. Haven moves seamlessly into and out of traditional form, and indeed, the sestina is one of the finest poems in the collection—a young boy’s account of a Catholic bishop’s three-day stay at his house during a snowstorm. The poem starts with a somewhat trepidatious tone, but then the bishop begins to seem like part of the household:

...something uncommon was in our home,

where we dealt the Queen of Spades, dark cousin of the snow,

the Bishop in my father’s robe, his new maroon pontificals.

We hoped it would snow and snow, that he wouldn’t go away.

A sestina requires the repetition of the end-words of each line in each stanza, but in a masterstroke of craftsmanship, Haven drops the word “pontificals” from the next, penultimate stanza (substituting “ponderous, fickle,” no less!), because for the boy, the bishop is no longer a symbol of the church, but an actual person. The word “pontificals” returns in the final stanza, but only as “the shock of his pontificals” in the snow as he leaves the house—a shock not only because of color, but because the man has been dissociated from his church office in the boy’s mind. This poem wonderfully describes a child’s process of unlearning, of entering a state of blessed ignorance that allows him to see the Bishop as a person for the first time. Here, as throughout Haven’s collection, we see the paradox of ignorance serving as a vital kind of knowledge.

The book’s title comes from a wonderful poem, “Summer in a Large House,” from the last section. Here, a woman who thinks she hears ghosts at night is comforted by her husband:

he held her when she asked, pressed into her

the rote illusion of some distant mass,

the only prayer he knew, of love and dust

and bread, and she recited it after him

though neither one could say to what or whom.

And still it pulled, born of one breath

that bent above them the cypress’s silhouette

and drifting, drifting, unseen everywhere,

pitched forever, it seemed to them forever,

dark and near in the warped old eaves of the ear.

It is in the state of uncertainty, both acknowledged and confessed (“he held her when she asked”), that what might be called awe is possible—awe at finding oneself a part of something incomprehensible, unfathomable, about which one must admit ignorance, and awe at finding oneself with one—ultimately, with many—who are capable of sharing both the ignorance and the awe. Dust and Bread is clear evidence that Haven is learned in the ways of ignorance, and that ignorance itself has taught him an abundance of beautiful things, not the least of which being a receptivity to revelation and the awe that can attend it.

Paris Review Purgerati Update

2010-11-05T12:17:00.003-04:00

Two of the Paris Review Purgerati have been published thus far on the TPR blog:

Michael Snediker:http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/08/19/poem-the-golden-bowl/

Allan Peterson: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/28/two-poems-%E2%80%98the-expected%E2%80%99-and-%E2%80%98what-we-lose-at-night%E2%80%99/

Carl Phillips: A Review and an Interview

2010-11-04T13:29:00.004-04:00

I am posting the following interview and review partly in response to James Rother's hatchet job on Carl Phillips at the usually stellar Contemporary Poetry Review. I won't go into much detail here, but Rother seems to entirely miss both the pleasures and the significance of the syntactical and rhetorical difficulties of Phillips's poetry. His review is full of witty locutions intended to elevate the writer of the review in the eyes of its readers, but for all of his bluster, the essence of what he writes is that he's upset that Phillips doesn't use end-rhyme or the kind of traditional prosody Rother would like to see and that his poems are bad, which is supposedly obvious to anyone who reads the quotes Rother offers from Phillips' poems ("Anyone who claims not to be able to detect a significant difference between these two passages of verse should, in my view, recuse him- or herself forever from considerations of what does or does not constitute poetry.").

I offer the following two pieces as a response to Rother's review.

Riding Westward: An Interview with Carl Phillips

*This interview originally appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, vol. 15 #1, issue 18.

Luke Hankins: I have a friend who once said that T. S. Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative has been taken to an extreme in contemporary American poetry, has become an aesthetic doctrine that has ceased to be effective because of such strict insistence upon it. (Looking at Eliot’s poetry, especially his late work in “The Four Quartets,” don’t we see how little his concept of the objective correlative really applies to his own poetry?) This discussion reminded me of your collection of essays, Coin of the Realm, in which you say that we are today in danger of losing our ability to engage with abstraction (because of an over-dependence on a concrete “objective correlative,” perhaps), and that this handicap is wrapped up in an aesthetic or cultural posture which discounts beauty and authority. How might poets—and how do you—try to address this danger? Do you feel that these tendencies are continuing, or are they showing signs of suffocating themselves?

Carl Phillips: For me, it’s instinctive to grapple with abstraction – I wouldn’t say that I am consciously trying to address the dangers of discounting beauty and authority. I suppose that, merely by writing the way I do, about the things I write about, I’m offering a counterweight of some kind. Part of what seems to lie behind a resistance to beauty is the fear of nostalgia and naïve sentiment, I think; and of course, a healthy distrust of authority seems essential. But that shouldn’t mean that we can’t have a sense of an opinion from our experiences – that’s authority, but not fascism. There’s a difference. Without authority, I can’t believe what a poet is telling me. And without an acknowledgment of beauty in its various forms, a poem doesn’t speak to me of the real world.

LH: As we have touched on, in the opening essay in Coin of the Realm, you remark upon a resistance among contemporary American poets to the idea of beauty (and abstraction in general). One cause of this resistance is, you claim, a mistaken view of beauty as “inorganic—without the capacity for evolution.” I wonder if there isn’t also another problem, which the idea that beauty needs to evolve belies—and that is the fact that modern and contemporary poetry and theory operate largely upon the assumption that humans today are significantly different than humans a millennium or even a few centuries ago. It can make one sick at heart to hear people talk or write about being modern (or, indeed, postmodern, or post-post...), people who seem to have gotten it into their heads that they are too advanced, or else too traumatized by a “fragmented” modern world, to experience genuine wonder in the presence of things that have always provoked that reaction in us. We are not suddenly beyond beauty—not even beauty in the same things that were beautiful four thousand years ago—are we?

CP: No, we are not beyond beauty, whether it is the beauty of centuries ago, or of the present moment. I’m not even sure what it would mean, to be beyond beauty—to have outgrown it? To be somehow too wise for it? The world may be fragmented—actually, it always has been, nothing new about that—but who said there wasn’t beauty in the shards? I was out working in the garden yesterday, when the cathedral bells started ringing—it seemed to me a beautiful moment. That doesn’t change the fact of suffering in the world, it coexists with that fact. I think people worry that a concern with beauty is a form of being blind to the realities of life, modern or otherwise. But beauty is one of those realities of life.

LH: All writers have precursors, aunts and uncles that they have grown up with and admire who influence their internal sense of music. You have referenced John Donne and George Herbert before as influential for your work—two uncles that perhaps show their influence most in your grappling with paradox, your devotion to mystery, and in your willingness to make authoritative statements. However, your poetic line—in its length, in its linebreaks, in its rhythm—often seems influenced by other, more recent aunts and uncles. If I were to trace a formal lineage backward, I would do so through the Black Mountain School (particularly Robert Duncan, tonally, and Robert Creeley, structurally) to William Carlos Williams. How do you tend to trace your lineage? Can you talk about particular ways the poets I’ve mentioned, or others, have influenced your work, formally or thematically?

CP: My poetic lineage is a little uncharacteristic, I think. The writers you mention—Williams, Creeley, Duncan, Herbert, Donne—are writers with whose strategies I see certain affinities, but I can honestly say I hadn’t read any of them until I had already written my first book. Actually, I had read Williams’s selected poems, and I remember being astonished that one could write about such seemingly ordinary things in a seemingly easy, clear way. Other than that, and an addiction to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (in that order) in college, I think I had read no "contemporary" poetry. My syntax comes, I believe, from my having studied Greek and Latin, and German—all of them inflected languages—from very early on. I really think those languages influenced the way I think, so that my sentences tend to come out the way they do in my poems quite naturally—I don’t spend time trying to twist things around, I just instinctively hear them that way. And the line seems to get informed by the syntax, somehow… Thematically, I think the Greek tragedians had the most influence over me, initially—the ways in which they grapple with the irresolvability of so many kinds of human conflict—the ways in which the seemingly impossible becomes possible: murdering one’s children, say, or finding oneself married to one’s mother… Many years later, I found a used anthology of the metaphysical poets—that, and studying them with Geoffrey Hill, led to my fascination with the tension between the sacred and the profane. But I have to admit, my interest in the sacred and profane was also something I was pondering, thanks to an unlikely combination of reading Iris Murdoch and becoming fascinated with Madonna when she first started appearing on the pop music scene.

LH: The title poem of your latest collection, Riding Westward, describes a tragically comic cowboy, trying but failing to conform to all the clichés (“standing there, / like between his legs there’s a horse”), and singing old, well-worn songs:

he starts up singing again,

same as every night, same song: loneliness

by starlight, miles to go, lay me down by

the cool etc.—that kind of song, the kind

you'll have heard before, sure, somewhere….

Earlier in the poem, the cowboy writes in the dirt “lines, circles / that stop short, shapes that mean nothing.” With these references to singing and writing, it’s hard to read this poem without thinking of it as a portrait of the poet. Is this indeed a kind of portrait of the artist? Also, how does this cowboy relate to the speaker of the Donne poem (riding a horse, yes, but no cowboy) from which your poem (and the entire collection) derives its title?

CP: Yes, I did intend the poem “Riding Westward” to be a self-portrait. Not at first, but I soon realized I was doing a sort of self-parody, which seemed appropriate after a book of poems that spend so much time agonizing about guilt, suffering, sexual restlessness. Contrary to what many might think, I have a sense of humor, especially about myself, and I found it amusing to do the parody. Of course, it ends up being a little more serious at the end – and that’s when the title came to me, from the Donne poem, as you mentioned. With that title, it seemed that the poem also became a bit of a comic way of thinking about devotion and the self – comic, in the way that Donne can be comic… I mean for the poem to be a kind of contemporary echo of Donne’s poem, to get at the idea that the wrestling for the meaning of devotion – and the human resistance to certain kinds of devotion – are resonant in contemporary life. For what it’s worth, whenever I imagine an alter ego for myself, it’s always a toss-up between a cowboy and a sea captain.

LH: Many of the poems in Riding Westward seem to indicate that your poems are transitioning to a more sonnet-like form. Compared to your earlier collections, the layout of the poems in Riding Westward is often less fragmentary, there are fewer poems with short (trimeter or tetrameter) lines, and many of the poems are basically shaped like a sonnet. Now, I’m simply using the sonnet as a point of reference—I know what sonnets are, and that you’re not writing them—but I don’t think it’s insignificant that many of these poems physically look like sonnets on the page. The new poem published in this issue of Asheville Poetry Review, “Lighting the Lamps,” is a good example of what I mean: there are, the way I count them, 15 lines, which are written roughly in pentameter (give or take a beat here and there). It’s interesting in this context that the poem speaks overtly about form, about pattern: “Doesn’t pattern require – to be seen / as pattern – not just repetition but, as well, eventually, / the interruption of it?...” Are your poems starting to interrupt the sonnet pattern?

CP: I think I stumbled into something different, stanzaically, when I wrote my poem “Custom,” which appears in The Rest of Love. It’s 13-line poem, with these lines that gradually expand and then contract toward the end of the poem. And it’s a single stanza. After that poem, I began writing more poems around that line length, and also got more interested in the "dropped" line, where a line continues, but is broken and then dropped below. I have become increasingly impatient with fixed stanzas, especially the short-lined tercets that I used for so many years. None of this has been conscious, just an evolution – one that gives me hope, since I worry that my poems don’t change that much from book to book. My obsessions, anyway, remain my obsessions.

LH: Seamus Heaney has an essay about Wordsworth and Yeats in which he describes two approaches regarding the way a poem’s music is crafted. Wordsworth, according to Heaney, allows his internal musical impulse to govern and drive his lines, so that they become mesmerizing and incantatory, whereas Yeats wrestles with that flow, struggles upstream against it. Do you feel that this framework applies to your composition process? Do you identify more with the Wordsworthian or Yeatsian approach?

CP: Hmm, tough question. On one hand, I’d say I fall into the Wordsworth side of that description – there’s definitely an internal sense of sound or music that drives the lines into looking the way they do. But there is a stream – not of sound, I think, but of what I’ll call moral stance, or notions of what one’s moral stance "should" be – that I am constantly wrestling with. It has more to do with what I write about, rather than with how I write it… Although it’s true that maybe that wrestling is partly behind the wrestling that is involved in negotiating the syntax of some of my lines…

LH: Guilt is a recurring theme in your poems, and “Hymn” (from Pastoral) is one of your poems in which the speaker feels guilt. At the end of the poem, the speaker uses the metaphor of a stone to describe his condition:

And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps

should ask pardon.

My fears—when I have fears—

are of how long I shall be, falling,

and in my at last resting how

indistinguishable, inasmuch as they

are countless, sire,

all the unglittering other dropped stones.

Guilt, here, seems an almost impossibly complex situation. There is at once guilt (“should ask pardon”), resistance to guilt (“a little bit, perhaps”), and accusation (“dropped stones” being dropped by someone, or some One). The speaker’s ambivalence raises the question of who is being addressed, and whether that “sire” is ironic, sarcastic, or utterly sincere. I think the poem’s power relies on the uncertainty the reader feels—on the simultaneity of these various attitudes. Is this part of your strategy when dealing with the concept of guilt in your poems?

CP: Well, you give me a lot more credit than I deserve, for having a strategy at all. I really don’t go into the writing of a poem with any strategy, except maybe that I have a line or a few words written down, and I intend to build a poem around them. The uncertainty that you speak of – I think it’s entirely reflective of my own uncertainty, on the fact that there is a simultaneity of various attitudes inside me, when it comes to an abstraction like guilt. I think this is the kind of thing that I must have gotten from those Greek tragedies – so often in them, guilt is without clarity, without resolution. No one is entirely wrong, but no one can seem to do right without simultaneously causing offense. To go back to your question, this isn’t a strategy on my part – but I do think it is an example of how a poem can have authority about an abstraction, namely, by avoiding taking a single stance on such a complicated issue…

LH: Can you talk about the speaker or speakers of your poems? Do you consider your poems to be in the voice of one consistent speaker, or does the speaker change from poem to poem? How much does this matter, one way or the other, for your writing process and for readers of your poems?

CP: I’d have to admit that the speaker is probably almost always myself at some level in my poems, as the addressee often can be. If there is change from poem to poem, from book to book, it’s the change that would be reflected by my sensibility as it evolves over time. At the same time, though, I’m very conscious, at the point of revision, of the need to make sure that a reader could in a sense become the speaker, could have access to that lens and have the chance to see the world credibly through it, if only for a moment.

LH: In one of his essays, Christian Wiman discusses prose written by poets as a means—conscious or no—of staving off “silence.” Do you identify at all with this description of the function of writing prose as a poet?

CP: No, I don’t find that my own prose is written as a means of staving off silence. Every one of my essays has been written as an assignment given to me – a lecture I had to deliver, a request to contribute to a book on George Herbert, etc. Far from staving off silence, I find that writing prose all but renders me silent. I have never enjoyed writing prose, and I balk at it each time, even though I continue to say yes when asked. Masochism, I guess. A benign form of it.

LH: In 2000, Asheville Poetry Review printed a special issue that highlighted “10 Great Neglected Poets,” and we’re working on another one for 2010. Are there any poets from the past century or so that you feel are neglected? Why do they deserve more attention and recognition?

CP: This may seem odd, but I think Marianne Moore is very neglected. It’s as if people find her antiquated—and yet I find her to be pretty radical, doing what she does with syllabics, the risks she takes in terms of being so sophisticated in terms of sensibility—she risks seeming inhuman, at times… I also think Louise Bogan is hugely neglected. The poems are so spare, and can seem almost clever – maybe that’s what people resist, along with her underlying belief in something like true love, even as it eludes her.

LH: Thank you for this conversation. As a parting word, can you offer us a quote from one of your favorite poets?

CP: It’s part of a much longer line, from Howard Moss’s poem, “Rules of Sleep”:

…intimacy is only another form of separation.

A Review of Riding Westward

*This review originally appeared in Indiana Review, vol. 30 #1.

Carl Phillips. Riding Westward. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. $12.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-374-53082-2), 53 pages.

Reviewed by Luke Hankins

Carl Phillips has long written poems that ignore contemporary American aesthetic doctrines, and that fact alone is heartening. He is entirely comfortable with abstraction, often building his poems on lofty language, and he is unafraid to “tell” as much as he “shows.” His poems speak in the tone of one speaking to an intimate about shared experience, without the kind of sarcasm we often call irony. Consequently, the poems tend to allude to experiences in a fragmentary way, as if the reader has prior knowledge of them and needs only small reminders. What is more, the reader is seldom sure where or when the situation described by one of Phillips’s poems is occurring. Because of these qualities, the poems in Phillips’s latest collection, Riding Westward, may at first confound readers who are used to so-called accessible poetry. In fact, “accessibility” is one of those contemporary doctrines I mentioned above—one which Phillips thankfully ignores. The following lines from “Erasure,” the first poem in the collection, are a good example of these qualities:

Above us, the usual branches lift unprophetically or not, depending:

now spears; now arrows. There’s a kind of tenderness that makes

more tender

all it touches. There’s a need that ruins. Dark. The horse

comes closer. […]

Here, we have “the usual branches,” as if they are usual not only to the speaker of the poem (and to the “him” mentioned earlier in it), but to the reader as well. We have fragments of a scene: branches lifting, darkness, a horse referred to with a definite article as if we already knew it was there—but the scene remains fragmentary throughout the poem, and we never quite know where or when we are situated. The above lines also illustrate Phillips’s propensity to “tell” as well as “show,” his refusal to shirk from making authoritative pronouncements: “There’s a need that ruins,” and “There’s a kind of tenderness that makes more tender // all it touches.” However, the tone of this poem is quite complicated, because not only are we assumed to understand this fragmentary scene, but we are presented with a speaker who makes both authoritative statements and equivocations: “the usual branches lift unprophetically or not”—in this case, an equivocation intensified by the double-negative construction. Double negatives recur throughout the collection, working as semantic counterbalances to the authoritative tone of the speakers of the poems, as their logical clumsiness has the effect of undermining what might otherwise be effortless pronouncements.

Another potentially disorienting aspect of these poems is the fact that the titles often have nothing overtly to do with the poems or their dramatic situations. There is “Bright World,” which does not describe brightness at all, or even the world very much; there is “The Way Back,” which is about “the urge to make meaning”; there is “The Smell of Hay,” which is about memory, but mentions no situation involving either hay or the sense of smell; there is “The Cure,” which describes a dying tree, which ends up as a metaphor for history, and light falling through it, a metaphor for human lives—but no sign of a cure anywhere for the dying tree or the human lives tumbling through its branches. These are only a few examples of titles that are not linked to their poems the way we typically expect them to be, since they are not descriptive of the poems’ content. Instead, the titles function evocatively: their effect is to create mood by association. In the same way, his poems are anything but descriptive of the world or of life—they do not set out to paint a clear picture of the world or of experiences, as we have largely come to expect poems to do. Phillips’s poems are far too abstract and fragmentary to do that. But they do something equally important by letting the reader’s imagination participate more fully with the speakers of the poems. While reading this collection, one often finds oneself unconsciously repositioning oneself imaginatively in order to create, along with the poem, the story to which the poem alludes. The fact that this is effective is a testimony to the power of this collection—it is not something a lesser poet could achieve.

One way to describe Phillips’s poems is to acknowledge that they function more evocatively than descriptively. What I mean is that they are not by any means about life, which would be no accomplishment at all; rather, they are of life, out of it, and convincingly so, which is a great accomplishment indeed. His poems are informed by and allude to experience without having to entirely create or recreate experience, and this is the source of their undeniable authority. In “Turning West,” Phillips himself makes a similar distinction when he mentions “a distance like that between writing from a life / and writing for one…” (Phillips’s italics). Writing for a life might mean writing in order to have a life, to create one out of a paucity of living or being present in the world. This is decidedly not the kind of writing Phillips does. It is clear that his poems are from life. The evidence of this is the powerful effect they have on the reader who is willing to lay aside expectations for simply “accessible” poetry and who is willing to imaginatively engage, as with an intimate, in these evocative, allusive conversations.

Philippe Jaccottet Translation in New England Review

2010-10-30T16:40:00.002-04:00

My translation of a lyric essay by Philippe Jaccottet, "Blazon in Green and White" ["Blason vert et blanc"], is in the latest issue of New England Review. Please get your hands on a copy if at all possible! Jaccottet's meditative work is amazing -- elegant, weird, and enchanting.

http://www.nereview.com/31-3/31-3contents.htm

Translations of Poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

2010-10-24T18:35:00.002-04:00

Some of my translations of poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu are now available online in the Asheville Poetry Review archives: http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/2010/issue-19/special-feature-stella-vinitchi-radulescu

My review of two of her English poetry collections is also available: http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/2010/issue-19/a-second-experience

(Four more of my translations of Radulescu's poems are forthcoming in Connotation Press.)

Kanye West Replaces His Bottom Teeth With Diamonds

2010-10-20T01:39:00.001-04:00

Kanye West Replaces His Bottom Teeth With Diamonds

In the meantime,
there are people who can't pay
to see a dentist or doctor,
people who work overtime
at horrible jobs,
people who are homeless
or starving. And Kanye
is installing diamond teeth
in a skull that will one day
rot in the ground, leaving
exactly one half
of an obscene
and hedonistic smile,
a crown for worms,
bling for the dust of the earth.

Luke Hankins

The Paris Review Poetry Purges: Some Ethical & Professional Considerations

2010-10-15T20:12:00.006-04:00

by Luke Hankins

*This article originally appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, October/November 2010.

---

When Daniel Nester broke the story of what he termed “The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010” on the blog We Who Are About To Die in July of this year, a flurry of online discussion quickly followed. Lorin Stein and Robyn Creswell had recently been instated as Editor and Poetry Editor, respectively, of The Paris Review, and shortly thereafter they “de-accepted” poems that had been accepted for publication by previous editors. A wide range of opinions regarding this de-acceptance was expressed in online forums, predominantly on blogs, but also in such venues as the New York Observer and Canada’s National Post. The responses ranged from basically saying “Tough luck” to calling for punitive measures against the editors.

Renewing the zeal of commenters was the eventual revelation that this poetry purge was in fact not the first event of its kind in the history of TPR. A number of poets have reported that they had their poems “purged” in 2005, including Joel Brouwer (again, see Daniel Nester’s coverage, which includes interviews with several de-accepted poets—or “Purgerati,” as they have come to be known) and my friend and colleague Keith Flynn. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Robyn Creswell himself was a victim of the previous purge. Stein indicated the following to me [1] : “Robyn—when he used to write poems—had one accepted by Richard Howard and killed when Richard was fired. We both laughed it off at the time as a bit of bad luck. (...) I do understand that others would see it as an injustice—but it simply didn’t occur to either of us back then.”

Lorin Stein’s justification for “killing” previously accepted poems in the most recent purge was “to give Robyn (Creswell) the scope to define his own section,” as he put it in his de-acceptance e-mail to the Purgerati (reproduced in one of Nester’s articles). Another complicating factor became clear over time: Stein and Creswell were facing a large backlog of accepted poems (roughly a year’s worth), so that the influence of the newly appointed Poetry Editor would not have been felt for quite some time if they had published them all. Some online commenters saw this fact alone as justification for the “purge,” and preferred to lay blame on the previous editors who had built up such a sizeable backlog. Others pointed out that there was no signed contract with any of the Purgerati, in any case, and thus no legal obligation to publish the poems. Still others noted that a “kill fee” is sometimes offered for pieces that are cut from newspapers or magazines, and suggested that such a fee would have been a more appropriate way for Stein to handle the situation.

I think, however, that there is a more fundamental ethical issue involved in this situation that none of the above perspectives address. The most basic assumption underlying my perspective on the ethics of the poetry purges is that an editor is not commensurate with the publication he or she represents. An editor (and, by extension, an entire editorial staff) is a representative of a larger entity, in a position of service to a purpose that extends beyond the person or persons acting in editorial capacity. In the case of a continuous publication (i.e., a publication with a history and, theoretically, a future as the “same” publication, under the same name), while an editor does and should exercise control over the content of the publication, he or she should also honor any commitments that the publication as an institution has already made. The implications of such a view have obvious relevance to the most recent poetry purge: The poems that Stein de-accepted had already been accepted not by any individual as merely an individual, but by a person representing TPR as an entity. Thus, TPR remains obligated to publish the work that has been accepted even by previous editors.

As a result of my stance, I created a “group” on the social networking website Facebook that I called “Conditional Boycott of The Paris Review.” I outlined my views regarding the poetry purge and the conditions of the boycott in the group’s description. The group was never large—there are currently fifty-two members—and includes a former TPR Poetry Editor (currently an Advisory Editor), at least one past TPR contributor, and several other prominent poets and editors. I created the group on principle, with little hope that it would even be noticed by the folks at TPR. However, the group did end up playing a part, along with many other sources of protest and debate, both private and public, in attracting the attention of Stein and convincing him to make amends with the writers he had treated poorly.

I wrote a private message to Stein outlining the group’s position. That message read in part: “The ‘de-accepted’ writers had contractual [agreements] (verbal contracts should be honored in a just society) with The Paris Review, not with any individual. Your current editorial position is actually irrelevant to the fact that their poems were accepted by previous editors on behalf of The Paris Review.” I also invited Stein to join the group himself in order to engage in discussion. To his credit, he did join, and he responded to my message and to the group’s stance publicly on the group’s “wall” and “discussion board.”[2] He said, in part, “I have to say, I agree with you entirely. I feel a strong duty, as the new editor of the Review, to shape the magazine as best I can, according to the lights of our new staff. But having heard powerful arguments from several of the poets whose work we cut (and having read the posts of Daniel Nester’s blog), I’m also persuaded that we have a lasting obligation to every poet whose work was accepted by the editors who came before us. I’m about to write to these poets personally, to express my apologies and to offer the full fee that we owe them.”

As it turned out, Stein offered more than he at first indicated he would. Nester reported from primary sources on his blog that Stein offered not only an apology and the full fee owed the poets, but also publication on The Paris Review Daily, the magazine’s blog, with an introduction for each poet by one of the former Poetry Editors (now Advisory Editors), Meghan O’Rourke or Dan Chiasson. As a result of this news, after consulting with the members of the boycott group, I officially ended the boycott (though the group still exists as a forum for discussion and as an archive). Stein’s engagement with the boycott group and response to the Purgerati is admirable, especially considering the small size of the boycott group, which, in all honesty, did not pose a real threat as a boycott.

In personal correspondence, both Meghan O’Rourke and Dan Chiasson expressed to me their appreciation for the efforts of the literary community to convince Stein and Creswell to make amends with the Purgerati. “I’m glad you did this [created the boycott group], and glad it seems to have made a difference,” Chiasson said. “As you can see,” he added, “Lorin’s a good guy, great mind, great skill and unprecedented gift as an editor, amazing energy for the paper; I just disagreed with his decision about poetry.” It’s clear that O’Rourke and Chiasson both disagreed with Stein’s decision to de-accept poems (see Nester’s coverage for a statement by O’Rourke), and they undoubtedly played a role in his eventual decision to seek to make amends. It seems clear that, thanks to the literary community, including his friends, his colleagues, online reporters and commenters, and the boycott group, Stein came to be genuinely convinced about the unethical nature of his decision. Writing to me, Stein said, “I’ve learned a bunch of lessons from the last week. Your very well-reasoned letter was the final clarification for me. All of which is to say, thanks.” Stein’s willingness to apologize, to make amends with the Purgerati, and his expressions of gratitude toward those of us who protested his decision all seem to demonstrate that Stein recognizes that his action was a mistake and genuinely intends to behave fairly.

The most important aspect of the TPR poetry purges is the fact that they have raised ethical and professional issues relevant to editorial practice at literary publications. This is a rather isolated practice in the world of literary publications. But the fact that such an event has happened at least twice at TPR alone, not to mention any unreported instances there or elsewhere, is good enough reason to carefully consider the ethical and professional implications for editorial practice.

In a post on the boycott group’s discussion board, Keith Flynn shared some of his thoughts on the ethical issues involved in the poetry purges. He wrote that he joined the boycott group and offered his opinions “not because I have been treated shabbily by The Paris Review, but because as editors we have a personal responsibility as caretakers of the journals we create to treat with tenderness all the folks who trust us to comment upon, to judge, and support their hard-won efforts in the small but immense minority that is the poetry community.” Regarding the de-acceptance of his poem in 2005, Flynn remarked, “In my thirty-year career as a poet, musician, and editor, this is the only time this has happened to me… (W)e as editors have a particularly poignant mission to treat every submitted work with the same respect as we hope to receive when other editors contemplate our own carefully constructed poems. It is basic human fairness, but sometimes it is all we have.”

Calling it an issue of fairness may be the best way to describe what is, ultimately, a very simple ethical issue. So many literary publications today operate entirely on a good-faith basis that it has become a standard practice—a kind of “honor system” that no one expects to be broken. This is evidence that editors in general have agreed that they, as editors, have a good-faith obligation to honor even verbal contracts because, as Flynn noted, “It is basic human fairness.” In other words, we operate this way not because we are forced to by law or by any outside agent, but because we wouldn’t dream of treating people unfairly—and we have faith that others will behave likewise.

In cases in which an instinct for fairness does not prove sufficient, such as the most recent “poetry purge,” I would emphasize the principle that I have suggested above: An editor is not commensurate with his or her publication, and acts as a representative of a larger entity with a life that extends both before and after the editor’s tenure. Thus, it makes sense to think of the publication itself as engaging in certain obligations. These obligations might indeed prove impossible to fulfill for financial or practical reasons, but that is not the case with the “poetry purge” at TPR. This was simply an instance of a difference of opinion about the merits of certain poems. For the sake of their aesthetic opinions, Stein and Creswell were willing to break the obligation of TPR to the poets whose work had been accepted by previous editors. In my mind, this is not sufficient reason to break an obligation, as Stein himself seems to have admitted.

It is interesting that so many literary publications these days subscribe to a set of written ethical guidelines for any contests they hold, and yet few, if any, have thought it necessary to instate written ethical guidelines for their general, everyday editorial practices. (Some publications make brief remarks about “considering each submission carefully,” but that is typically the extent of it.) The reason for this is most likely the fact that, as noted above, the “honor system” has worked most of the time for many years. The popularity of written ethical guidelines for literary contests is due in large part to the exposure over the years of certain questionable or outright unethical practices on the part of contest judges (e.g., awarding prizes to friends or former students). It will be interesting to see if a similar phenomenon takes place in response to the poetry purges at TPR. Perhaps more literary publications will begin using written contracts for each poem (or prose piece) accepted. Perhaps many will continue to operate on the “honor system,” which has worked perfectly well in the majority of cases. Still others might find it advisable to adopt written ethical guidelines in order to be transparent about their professional practice, which is standard practice in a number of other professional fields. This last measure, in any case, could easily be implemented by any publication, regardless of whether they use written contracts. What is certain is that the best way to maintain respect as a literary publication is to behave fairly at all times, and editors would do well to invest time in considering, developing, and articulating their views of what it means to do so.

Luke Hankins

NOTES

1. Permission from the correspondents has been obtained for all quotes from private correspondence in this article.

2. The group page still exists, and all content, including Stein’s complete posts, are viewable by anyone with a Facebook account.

Announcing Asheville Poetry Review's William Matthews Poetry Prize

2010-09-10T21:42:00.004-04:00

Beginning September 1, 2010 through January 15, 2011, Asheville Poetry Review will be accepting entries for the first annual William Matthews Poetry Prize.

First Prize: $1,000, publication in Asheville Poetry Review, and a featured reading at the nationally acclaimed Wordfest Literary Festival
Second Prize: $250, publication, and a featured reading at Wordfest
Third Prize: Publication and a featured reading at Wordfest

Final Judge: Sebastian Matthews (poet, memoirist, and son of William Matthews)

The final judging process will be “blind” (all identifying information will be removed from the poems).

All submissions will be considered for publication.

Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2011

Send 1-3 poems, any style, any theme, any length, with a $20 entry fee (payable to Asheville Poetry Review) to:

William Matthews Poetry Prize
c/o Asheville Poetry Review
PO Box 7086
Asheville, NC 28802

Those Who Wield the Pen Must Also Wield the Scalpel: Installation #1

2010-08-27T22:40:00.003-04:00

There are many well-known poems that have enjoyed wide recognition despite (what I consider) fairly obvious weaknesses that could have been remedied by a good editor. I will offer a short poem as my first example, with other examples to follow in future installations in this series. So, allow me to offer for your consideration the oft-anthologized poem "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand. For copyright reasons, I refer you to the link attached to the poem title instead of reproducing the full text here. I love this poem, but I think there is a definite weak point. My suggestion for improving the poem is simple: Cut lines 4-7. Read it that way. What do you think? These lines seem overly-explanatory and redundant. They say in a less interesting way what is already said better by the other lines of the poem. The economy of the language in this poem also begs for eliminating all superfluities. Moral of the story: Those who wield the pen must also wield the scalpel.

Poetry at The Pulp: A New Monthly Poetry Event in Asheville

2010-08-16T16:09:00.000-04:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More poetry