In honor of summer’s not-yet-ending, let’s have a drink, courtesy of poet Jennifer Chang. Her poem “River Pilgrims” appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of KR.

Each year, Jennifer puts her cocktail-slinging skills to the test at the close of Kundiman’s Asian American poetry retreat. Here is her account of this year’s summer concoction:

“For five years now, Kundiman has hosted an Asian American poetry summer retreat at the University of Virginia. Emerging poets from around the country apply for eighteen fellowship spots to study with three master poets. Fellows and faculty alike spend all day—often from 9am to 9pm, often in 90 degree weather—in workshops, craft talks, mentoring sessions, spark exercises, poetics lectures, and professional practicuums. By the end of four days, we are all sleep-deprived, giddy with community spirit, and delirious on poetry, and yet we are all ready to test the limits of our exhaustion with a dance party. So two years ago, on behalf of the staff, I decided to start a new tradition and invent a cocktail to honor our hard-working fellows and faculty, who make the experience not only so very rewarding but also so very jubilant. This one came to me as Sarah Gambito and I were getting lost in one of Charlottesville’s massive grocery stores. She wanted to name it after a Chinese word from a Tan Lin poem that only Bei Dao could pronounce correctly. I can’t even remember what the word meant. But since I was pouring the drinks I named it after a fellow, a marvelous poet and dear friend, who was sadly absent this year and who was such a big help with the cocktail I invented at last year’s retreat, None of Your Goddamn Business. (I’m not being cheeky—that’s the name of the drink, which is in fact none of your goddamn business.)”

The Matthew Olzmann
official cocktail of the 2008 Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat

¼ cup Absolut Pear Vodka
¼ cup pomegranate juice
lemon-lime soda
a wedge of lime

Fill a lowball glass with ice and combine vodka and juice. Top off the glass with lemon-lime soda and garnish with lime.

—

Jennifer Chang’s first book, The History of Anonymity, recently arrived from the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series from the University of Georgia.

[Photo by Simon Weaver]

This week my son is saying his first words, or we’re hearing them at least: he chases the cat around the house, “dat! dat! dat!,” and he stops us from eating a banana without him simply by naming it.  This is the beginning, though honestly I’m a little sorry for it.  Before we began to bring him into our house of language he had his songs, tuneless, vowel-crazy, his own untethered calls.  He spoke all the time but not within the limits of sense, and that full range is narrowing now in the interest of talk.  Now each thing is gathering its word, and soon he will watch things until we name them, and then walk away in search of the next unnamed.  I am sad for the label on the box, sad that it will be harder for him to see things purely now that they will sit inside their names, and that all his funny songs will be collared into words. Read the rest of this entry »

In recent years (since my time in Providence, fittingly) I have run into small pockets of luck. I find 20-dollar bills in public bathrooms. I find outstanding apartments through Craigslist. The D train always seems to pull up when I reach the platform. Just last week I dropped and shattered my new iPhone, went to the Apple “Genius Bar” two hours later, and the Genius gave me a new one. Yes, gave me. For free.

Through yet another grand gesture of providence, I have been shuffled into the path of playwright Michael Weller, who hired me as his assistant on his upcoming play at New York Theater Workshop. Playwright’s Assistant positions are not overly common in the theater world, although assisting is a standard step on the path for upcoming directors. But Weller has two shows going up in New York this fall, NYTW’s BEAST and an Off-Broadway production of his levelling two-hander FIFTY WORDS, and so is required to be in two places at once. I serve as his approximate shadow in rehearsal, reporting on rough spots in the script as exceptional director Jo Bonney hefts this strange and beautiful piece to its feet.

To assist at a 35-year-old Off-Broadway theater like NYTW is fortuitous in any scenario–for a new playwright it’s incredibly illuminating. It presents a clear image of a production standard to work for; NYTW attracts the best theatrical talent the city has to offer. But my fortune is especially good in this situation; I’m in the room every day with a gorgeous, difficult, moving, and dangerously political new play, with a mentally agile and enormously perceptive director, and with an unusually generous playwright at the height of his craft.

For the next few weeks I’ll be chronicling the development of this project here, looking at the ways the rehearsal process affects and informs this tricky text, and vice-versa. But to give you a snapshot of where we are in the process: since our first read-through two weeks ago, the play has been rewritten day by day in response to the actors’ and directors’ work. Just today, between 10 AM and 1 PM, we’ve received two new drafts of Scene Six. Yet the actors are remarkably stable on this constantly-shifting ground– I’ll talk more about them next week. Technical problems are being solved–at this moment, Bonney has gathered a knot of tech and production people on the apron of the stage, solving an issue regarding live flame (curious? Come see the show)– and the set is skeletal but already imposing. Things are gearing up for the next phase of rehearsal that will lead us into two weeks of previews, another period of change for a new play.

Which leads me to what I’ve found most immediately striking about a production at this level: the practical issue of time. We early-career playwrights most often explore our work through staged readings and workshop productions (bare-bones production with limited runs, usually a few nights). For these, design elements are simple, if they are used at all; rehearsals and performances can occur in a range of small spaces, from conference-type rooms to university halls to small “black box” theaters to each other’s living rooms; the time the artists commit is often a donation to the project itself. Our rehearsal periods vary from two hours a day for a few days to about four hours for a couple of weeks. I’ve seen amazing theater created in this amount of time. But BEAST’s team is able to convene for eight hours a day, six days a week. And the difference this makes is not found so much in the raw quality of the work, but in the depth of it. Each theatrical moment can be dug into, examined, unfolded, decoded. We swim in the script for hours, day after day, excavating vast amounts of information hidden in the folds of this new play. I wonder if the result of a true, time-intensive rehearsal process constitutes a different theatrical form from the workshops I’m used to, like the difference between a sketch and the painting that a sketch becomes. It makes me want to push harder as a writer, to pay my dues, to earn this wealth of time with artists of this caliber, so I can see what my plays are hiding inside of them.

At the beginning of every semester, I ask my students to be diligent and earnest in their reading and research. “Go into the library,” I say. “Smell the books. Use them as resources.”

But according to this article in The Atlantic, it may be increasingly difficult for my students–and all the rest of us–to appreciate text the way we did in the years before the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Below, you’ll find a moving tribute to Darwish written by Fady Joudah, followed by reprinted poems from Darwish (translated by Joudah) and Joudah, excerpted from earlier issues of KR. This work will also appear on KRO in the coming week, in a more printer friendly format.–TM

* * * * * * * * * *
I was five years old when I first memorized your poems in exchange for coins my father would give me. I would memorize and forget you, tuck you in deep hiding places of my soul, as if I were slowly saturating my being with your seas…sea, that word that also stands for prosody in Arabic. Or perhaps I stored you like vintage wine, red and white, which you knew well and drank with pleasure.

And I forgot you there until America, through your absence in it, reminded me you were still here, and slowly you began to rise in me like a day, and you returned to my mirror, a scheming Narcissus at times, and other times a frail boy. And your anemones and jasmine and almond blossoms opened within me. How could I have known I would be one more birth for you, you who loved perpetual rebirth in your poems and life? How could I have known I’d be one more shadow for your grave?

Do you remember the first time I called you: I forgot how old I was? The second time I woke you up from a jet-lagged sleep and you lost your temper then apologized. And for four years after that our phone calls never ceased. And when my father visited you in your elegant but humble apartment in Amman, you told him: Your son asks me questions about my poems I’ve never thought of. And my father laughed.

Did I ever tell you how much more I loved you when I heard your voice for the first time? It was a villager’s voice, a kindhearted villager without shame, as you said in your beautiful poem. And I did not tell you I took your books with me to refugee camps in Zambia and Darfur with Doctors Without Borders: I would read and translate you there, merge your seas with mine. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s worth adding that a major part of L. Rust Hills’ literary legacy came in his having kept Norman Mailer in the pages of Esquire during one of Mailer’s tetchy periods. Here, from Carol Polsgrove’s history of Esquire in the ’60’s, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun:

“It was Rust Hills who brought Norman Mailer back to Esquire, adding volume and resonance to the magazine’s new voice. About a year after Mailer left [after an editorial dispute over the title of perhaps the most famous non-fiction piece Mailer ever wrote, ‘Superman Comes to the Supermart,’ which he adamantly demanded be called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket’–DT], [legendary editor in chief Harold] Hayes and Hills had been riding home together in a cab and had fallen to talking about Mailer’s self-interview in The Paris Review. Good stuff, they thought, and a real shame they had not gotten it. Hills said they ought to try to get Mailer back… Hills said he wouldn’t mind [asking Mailer]. So he did, promising, as Hayes recalled it later, ‘that the magazine would kiss Mailer’s ass in Macy’s window if that should be what it took to make amends.’”

Polsgrove goes on to report: “Hayes once called Hills ‘a fidgety and charming man who always managed to see more sides than existed to any question.’”

In addition to the writers mentioned in the New York Times obituary of Hills, Polsgrove tells us that Hills was integral in bringing work by Saul Bellow (he published an early excerpt of Herzog in the magazine) and Bernard Malamud to Esquire. Just more evidence of what a towering figure Hills was.

As a book reviewer, I get sent a lot of books. I read as many of them as I can. Here I present what to me are four great books I read this year that didn’t get nearly the attention they deserved. I present them in the form of a list, with very brief descriptions.

1) Gyorgy Dragoman, The White King. Beautiful modernist prose by Hungary’s most promising young novelist about life before the Iron Curtain fell. A must-read.

2) Bryan Mealer, All Things Must Fight to Live. Currently the definitive account of war-torn Congo in the past decade by an intrepid, insightful reporter [and, in the interest of full disclosure, a former colleague of mine at Esquire Magazine]. You probably read some of these stories when they appeared in Harper’s.

3) Salvatore Scibona, The End. Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim. (Also further proof– after Per Petterson and Benjamin Percy and Ander Monson– that Graywolf puts out some of the best, and best looking, literature today.)

One more after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

In my continued mission to reclaim some lesser-known parts of Kenyon’s literary history, today I’ll put my vote toward the most underrated literary alum: L. Rust Hills, who died Tuesday at the age of 83.

As literary editor of Esquire Magazine during its time as the biggest magazine in the land– in the ’60’s, when he was a major force there, Esquire was publishing as much or more relevant fiction than the New Yorker and selling as many magazines as Life– Hills established himself as one of the great editors of his time, Esquire’s answer to William Maxwell (they both edited John Cheever, after all). He edited Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.” He edited Delillo and Ann Beattie. And he came out of a Kenyon College where John Crowe Ransom was teaching English. So now when we mention Doctorow, and Gass and Lowell and Tate and Peter Taylor, maybe we should mention one of Kenyon’s great literary products along with them: Rust Hills.

I spent some months in Paris recently, and I found myself frustrated at not being able to be angry in French, although I know the language well. This might seem silly: feelings are feelings and should translate. But they don’t, if you don’t have the words for them. In French, I never felt there was enough time to fully articulate my anger between verb tenses and choosing interjections. I feel as if I’m always “running alongside” my foreign-language anger, without ever being fully able to catch up to it.

This sensation of “running alongside” and growing-ever-closer is the similar to our frustrations as writers. We chase after our interior feelings, trying to commit details to paper, trying to translate an experience for a different audience. Many times, it just doesn’t get close enough.

When I was a student in Paris, I was having a picnic on the Seine with some girlfriends when a young man passing by stepped over me when my back was to him and moved his pelvis in a vulgar way. My friends stared at him, agape at this buffoon standing over me, while I smiled on, oblivious. When they signaled to me, wide-eyed and mute, I stood up quickly and turned to him, but the man strode along the cobblestones away from us, laughing. What I would have given for a quick way to express how angry I was, to thrust some expletive at him that I hadn’t prepared quick enough. I was mute and mad, and the man was gone. The Seine flowed on. Read the rest of this entry »