Roots & Branches: From What Twig This Bright Leaf?
July 23, 2010
Poet Kiki Petrosino, who has been tweeting as @harriet_poetry for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog, tweeted a question this morning:
I’ve thought about this question over the years, but started to visualize it a bit in reaction to Kiki’s (or Harriet’s?) question.
My poetry is rooted in what Robert Hass called the “strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two.” (Hass, Introduction to Best American Poetry 2001)
I studied with Hass and with Gary Snyder, along with the late Walter Pavlich, and have had some great guidance along the way from poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Donald Hall, Colette Inez, and Karen Swenson, along with a cast of other friends, both poets and poetry readers.
If I look at poetic influences — teachers by example, rather than in person — Elizabeth Bishop, and by extension, her Hopkins, Herbert and even Moore, could be counted among mine.
But also Pound, Rimbaud (in the Varese translations), the two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, at various times, especially in my early days; the Robert Lowell of Life Studies, and novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje.
I’d have to add to that list a trio of Irish voices (tenors?), including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. And while we’re on the British Isles, let’s not forget Geoffrey Hill, John Clare and, of course, “the Bard,” Robert Burns.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose “Mariner” was given to me by my Aunt Gladys, directly influenced my first “serious” poem (now lost, thankfully) about my great grandfather, a whaler who sailed out of New Bedford.
There’s also a curious group of more experimental influences from Anne Carson and Mina Loy to Lorine Niedecker and Jorie Graham. Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa, and Allen Ginsberg, all great experimenters themselves, were also part of my early poetry reading education.
It’s an eclectic, multi-branching tree, to say the least. I’m not sure one can see the influence of any one more than another in my work — someone once wrote that the influences of Bishop and Hall were most evident — but it would be a rather spectacular looking tree, should one chose to design it.
One could get easily lost in such a forest.
FilmPoems by Alastair Cook
July 17, 2010
I recently discovered the work of photographer and filmmaker Alastair Cook through Anon Magazine (we both appear in Anon7). He wrote about a project he calls FilmPoem, which are short films he’s made based upon contemporary poems.
“The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one,” writes Alastair. “For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker, a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of a text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor.”
His project reminds me (in spirit if not in style) of some films I made in Super 8 back in the mid-1980s — I called them “cinepoems” — two of which were shown at an independent film show at Cleveland State University in 1985. One was based upon Kenneth Patchen‘s “I Went to the City” and the other was called “Through the Glimmerglass (And What We Saw There).” (I really should digitize those films and make them available.)
I have always been fascinated by the combination of film and poetry and it’s great to discover Alastair’s work. Here is his film “Adrift,” based upon a poem by the fabulous Juliet Wilson (whose work also appears in Anon7):
Adrift from Alastair Cook on Vimeo.
Sirens Rising, Capri and Norman Douglas’s “South Wind”
July 14, 2010
August 2, 1990. I’m on a boat heading from Naples to Capri. We’ve just learned that Iraq has invaded Kuwait and the United States will likely declare war on Iraq. The world will soon be changing.
I’ve just had an article published in the Naples daily newspaper, Il Mattino, and have been praised and regaled by all sorts of Napolitanos about it. (It seems everyone reads the papers here!) Similar treatment awaits me on Capri, the home island of my friend Francesco Durante (now editor of Corriere del Mezzogiorno).
On the trip, I’m reading SOUTH WIND, a 1917 novel set on Capri (Nepenthe in the book) by Norman Douglas. (The Bishop of Bampopo is a central character.)
Capri is an intoxicating place, I can see why writers flocked there or settled there over much of the last century: Shirley Hazzard, Graham Greene, Norman Douglas, among many others.
The heady combination of my local celebrity, limoncello, the scirocco (the south wind itself), and the island’s many delights, inspired me to write my poem “Siren’s Rising,” which was published in the journal SLANT nine years later, and then translated into the Italian by Francesco Durante for Almanacco Caprese. Here is the poem:
Sirens Rising
Isla Capri, Italia
“O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Romans, 7:24
I.
Like Tiberius I’m torn
between the flesh & its blood.
Like him, too, I’m of this island’s
dark side facing the sea.
You can languish here, succumb
to the madness this island provokes,
or you can flee, denying
your venereal appetite.
Night after night, I give in
to the relentless lure of Pan.
The raucous Neapolitan song
calls to me, instructing my lust,
filling my ears with its chaos.
I am full of life, full of limoncello;
blood hurries through my veins,
as if it had some destination–
beyond circulation.
I chase the Roman beauties:
sloe-eyed enchantresses
with slate-black hair and aquiline noses
and arched brows of la seduttrice.
Their spry and conclusive limbs
stretch from capricious figures
–they are entanglers.
I may as well be on all fours,
as I creep from taverna to piazzetta.
Together, we fall to my bed,
oozing sweat: couple, come away,
con amorosa cura.
We are sargassum
drifting in a pelagic daze.
In the wretched heat,
the moon is as still and cold
as a marble floor.
II.
Sister Serafina,
the unassuming saint of this island,
once induced the prince of darkness
into an adoration of the Savior.
With me, her task is doubly difficult, I’m afraid.
She tries to inveigle me to the Grotta Azzurra
–that knife-wound across the ribs
of Capri’s beguiling torso–
for she knows the blue grotto yields up
not the bagno where Tiberius
cooled his erotic fires,
nor the relentless lust of legend,
but the Madonna’s bluest robes
–the color of sanctity.
It’s too late.
I’ve already gone over the edge,
like the Bishop of Bampopo,
I turn a chaste eye to murder
and drink the sweat of my lovers
in an evaporating recline.
“How shall that come out of man
which was never in him?” the Bishop proffered.
I defile the flowers of Capri,
and search for the power of wild beasts,
deep within the grottoes, dank with sea-wrack.
The dizzy swirl of heaving breath echoes
from every corner of the cyanic cavern.
“Sono io, sono io,” they claim.
“Sono io!”
The Sirens respond to the cry:
“We will succor your willfulness.”
“We will cater to your whim–”
Once again I go to them,
into the depths of an endless night.
They lure me with their dancing
as exquisite as their song
–daughters of Terpsichore!
III.
Within sight of Vesuvius,
I follow the trail of obscure desire,
rounding the mealy stone groin
of Arco Naturale. I grow fins,
am lost.
Atop the Salto di Tiberio
and his Villa Jovis,
Tiberius revels in my plight.
He is the dragon of Capri,
whose fiery breath still infects the island.
I see, as if for the first time,
the island’s bone-white prominence,
rising above the loam-dark sea.
Grey-pink tufa crags, white limestone,
tender mauve reflexes
upthrusted in pulpy stillness.
And I am born of salt
scorched from the sea’s clutch;
the scirocco dashes the island
with its dry spite.
Born of desire,
I return to desire–
The heat
renders my body viscous,
my skin a rubbery porpoise-armor.
I leap from the sea
to plunge to its depths;
the Sirens guide me down
like pilot fish.
I am blessed by their bodies’ charms,
their sea-feathers slicked back
by my expert tongue, their breasts
rouged the color of pomegranates
from my rough beard.
“Possess these shores,” they whisper.
It’s more likely they’ll possess me
the Sirens,
in their pagan trinity:
Persuader, Brightface, Bewitcher.
IV.
The piazza is a droning blur
at this hour.
The handsome waiters are busy trafficking
caponata and spaghettini alla puttanesca.
Women are smoothing their dresses and reapplying
lipstick and rouge, between sips
of dry gin with lemons.
The brackish aroma of homemade wines
and barrels of oil-cured olives,
mingles with the tourists’ perfume,
which trickles down their salty cleavage
–intoxicating mist!
I am seated, most nights,
at the table nearest the bar.
It’s the closest thing
I’ve had to home.
This place for a brief time mine.
Leviathan among the Siren victors
–my life, their spoil.
(For Francesco Durante & Alessandra Carolla)
–Scott Edward Anderson, SLANT, Spring 1999
A Poet’s Work at the Condensery
July 12, 2010
I signed off of Twitter Saturday night with this note:
“Goodnight from my condensery…”
A friend saw it and wrote to ask what I meant by “condensery,” which seemed to have to do with making milk, not poems.
I was working, revising some poems, and meant “condensery” as a reference to the poet Lorine Niedecker.
It is an interesting choice of words, because condense means “to make denser or more compact; especially : to subject to condensation,” according to Merriam-Webster, which perhaps connotes compactness rather than concision. Concision, cutting away or making more concise, is probably closer to my method of revision. (I try not to make my poems more dense as I revise; and I rarely, if ever, can get as compact as Miss Niedecker did in her poems.)
Niedecker called her desk a “condensery,” in part to connote her process and in part to make it clear that, for her, her desk was a physical place of genuine, creative labor. Making poems is real work.
Here is Lorine Niedecker’s poem “Poet’s Work,” from which the phrase comes, in its entirety:
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoffs
from this
condensery
##
You can read more about Lorine Niedecker and her poetry at Poets.org
Her collected poems are available here: Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works.
Mary Karr’s “Poetry Fix”
July 7, 2010
Years ago, I had an idea for a “Poetry Channel”: an all-poetry cable network featuring poets and celebrities reading poems, poets being interviewed, and films about poets or based on poetry.
I didn’t pursue the idea because, well, because my idea for the “Disaster Channel” got shelved and that was how I was going to back my poetry idea.
But I recently stumbled upon Mary Karr’s “Poetry Fix,” which brings to life the kind of programming I had in mind.
Here’s Mary Karr and co-host Christopher Robinson reading and talking about Robert Hass’s “Old Dominion”:
You can check out more on Mary Karr’s YouTube channel. It’s a great series that’s just started and worth following as it develops.
Merwin Is the Right Choice for U.S. Poet Laureate
July 1, 2010
Some folks will say W. S. Merwin is too old, too establishment, too difficult to be Poet Laureate. They’ll be wrong. Merwin is the right choice at this moment in time.
Not only has he revitalized his own writing at such a late stage — 82 years young — but he continues to inspire younger poets and readers of poetry around the world.
What’s more, in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Merwin brings his considerable appreciation and concern for the planet to the post.
I applaud the choice of W.S. Merwin as the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate.
Related articles by Zemanta
- William S. Merwin named 17th US poet laureate (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Poet Laureate Announced: William S. Merwin Named 17th U.S. Poet Laureate (huffingtonpost.com)
- W.S. Merwin Named Poet Laureate (slog.thestranger.com)
- W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate (nytimes.com)
Robert Hass and sharing poetry among generations
May 31, 2010
A curious thing happened to me yesterday in New York City. Robert Hass read at Poets House and gave a program for children in the morning. I took my six-year-old son, Walker, with me because he’s started writing poems (he’s got me beat by 3 years!) and we spent the day in the City alone together.
Bob Hass reading Walker's poem
When I told Walker we were going to see and hear one of my poetry teachers, he said, “That’s cool, because he taught you and now you’re teaching me and when I have children I’ll teach them…it’s like we’re keeping it going.”
Indeed, it felt like that when I introduced Bob to my son. Bob has grandchildren Walker’s age and it wasn’t lost on me that there was something transpiring between our three generations.
Walker brought one of his poems to share with Bob and handed it to him in an envelope. During the program, in which Bob was reading poems by children from his River of Words project, he pulled out Walker’s poem and asked if Walker wanted to read it. Walker shyly declined and Bob asked for permission to read it to the audience. Walker beamed. (So did I.)
Bob read Walker’s poem and declared, “This is a real poem.” We both smiled. It was a magical moment to have a mentor appreciate the work of your son. I was really feeling blessed that morning.
Bob and Walker
Later, after wandering around Tribeca and the wonderful riverside parks along the Hudson, Walker and I sat on the rocks behind Poets House in the newly opened South Teardrop Park and listened to Bob and his wife Brenda Hillman read their poems into the late afternoon. What a magical day.
Here is Walker’s poem, “The Snow I’ve Been Waiting For”:
The Snow that crunches beneath my feet.
Oh the wonderful snow, snow, snow.
The snow that tastes so wonderful.
The snow, the snow, the snow.
The snow I’ve been waiting for all along,
The snow I’ve been waiting for all year.
The snow, the snow, the snow.
The Snow I’ve been waiting for.
–Walker Anderson, 6
Related articles by Zemanta
- On Poetry: Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire (nytimes.com)
- Editorial Notebook: Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader (nytimes.com)
- Poets House Launches New Poetry Project At Five Major Zoos Across America (prweb.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
For the past 13 years I’ve been sending out a poem-a-week email during National Poetry Month. Each week, I introduce a poem to readers on the list, which is now over 300 strong.
At month’s end, I’m always asked to extend it beyond the month of April. In lieu of that, I think I’ll publish poems from the series here from time to time, as long as I can get the poets’ permission.
(If you’d like to subscribe to the list for next year, send me an email at greenskeptic[at]gmail[dot]com.)
#
My friend Lee Kravitz — whose memoir, Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things, comes out next month — is a great reader of poetry.
So when he handed me a book of poems at Thanksgiving last year, I knew it would be worth reading.
He told me two things about the book: it was written by another good friend of his and she was an intensive care physician in Washington, DC.
The book was Night Shift by Serena J. Fox. And one thing you quickly learn from her poems is that Dr. Fox is no Dr. Williams making house calls in a small, northern New Jersey community. She started her career in the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital in New York City, one of the busiest ERs at the time – the early era of AIDS.
(I had an experience at Bellevue in the early 80s – probably while she was in residence there — involving an attempted suicide by a neighbor. It was not a fun place to be back then.)
As a poet, Fox has an uncanny ability to apply her poetic sensibility to the reality she witnesses through her work. I admire the way she seamlessly weaves medical terminology – a rare gift that perhaps only Jane Kenyon mastered before her – and the harshness of life as she sees it into a poetry that transcends reportage.
Fox tackles a variety of forms and styles from traditional lyrics to fragments and more experimental sequences. And she is equally adept at short and long forms — her long poems, including the title poem, “Northeast Coast Corridor,” “Blood Holies,” and “551,880,000 Breaths” are remarkably varied and sustained collages of images and information, stories and voices overheard.
How glad I am that Lee introduced me to her work and pleased that I can introduce a sample of it to you here.
Here is Serena Fox’s poem,
The Road to Çegrano, 1999
(with Patch Adams and Clowns, Skopje, Macedonia)
Pinpricks of poppies
Populations
Of them—
Supra-oxygenated
Arterial
Oblivious to
Camps and tents
Of no interest to
Scythes
Unregulated
Flaunting bright
Points in
Grass and fields—
The other side of
Fences.
In the camps
Children
With blackbird
Beak eyes
Scavenge trinkets
Touches
Kisses from
Strangers—
A busload of
Ferocious
Clown-doctor
Revolutionaries
Carrying
Medical
Supplies and
Angry
Armloads of
Peace.
One-on-one
With the villagers—
Six thousand here
Thirty-nine thousand
There—
Dust
Is the only
Accumulation—
Rust-colored
Covering the tents
And doctors
Without borders.
The clown-doctors
Come armed with
Red rubber
Noses
Electric-blue hair.
The kids riot for
Stickers
Attention.
They quiet for
Bubbles
Blown gently
Balloons
For the boy
Leg in a
Cast
Group photos
Promises to send
Pictures.
Thank G’d the
Fighting
Stopped.
What would they have
Done in winter
Summer?
But where to send
Them?
Back to the
Burning?
Over the fence
The fields?
Out toward the
Mountains—
Bubbles
Balloons
Boys, girls, bombs,
Poppies?
–Serena Fox, from Night Shift
(Copyright Serena Fox. Reprinted with permission of the author)
——————————————————–
Serena sent me this note about the poem: “In May of 1999 I joined Patch Adams for a one-week trip to Macedonia and the refugee camps holding thousands of people who had scaled snow-covered peaks to get out of Kosovo. We were an eclectic assortment of clown-doctors who had traveled with Patch before and others like me who hoped to contribute in some small way to soothing the chaos going on in the former Yugoslavia.
I thought I was going to deliver intravenous supplies and help set up a clinic outside the camps for women. I also ended up roving the camps with children of all ages and forgoing my usual reserve for my first red rubber nose and a blue wig. As usual the people I met gave me infinitely more than I could ever give back. I was impressed by the efficiency and cleanliness of the UN sponsored camp.
The most vivid sensory memory is that of the foothills covered with poppies, women in the fields wielding scythes, the slowing of time and the redness of the poppies which had the exact quality, for me, of arterial blood.” –SJF
5 Books of Contemporary Poetry I Can’t Live Without
March 23, 2010
Thanks to Peter Semmelhack, who asked for poetry recommendations via Twitter, I made a list of the 5 books of “contemporary” US poetry I can’t live without:
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Donald Hall, Kicking the Leaves
What are the 5 books of poetry you can’t live without?
Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, Hilarious
June 23, 2009
If you missed poet Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, including the poet and Stephen Colbert reading Muldoon’s poem “Tea,” you must watch it now:
Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report
Colbert is doing more for bringing poetry to a wider audience than just about anybody. Shall we compare Stephen Colbert to a Summer’s Day?
Scott Edward Anderson
Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog 