In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish

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.

Read the rest of this essay and read poems by Mahmoud Darwish and Fady Joudah.

Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams

In 1907, as Henry Adams began passing around copies of The Education of Henry Adams to a select group of friends and associates, the United States was in the early stages of its imperium. It had recently fought its first Southeast Asian war to suppress Filipino rebels who, understandably, anticipated that the U.S. defeat of the Spanish empire in 1898 would mean their independence. On July 4, 1902, President Roosevelt declared that the war was won, though guerrilla fighting continued throughout the archipelago for years. In 1907, Roosevelt dispatched sixteen ships of the U.S. navy—later dubbed the “Great White Fleet”—to sail around the world in a show of power designed to announce that the United States intended to be a player in international politics far beyond its immediate sphere of influence. The flagship was the recently commissioned USS Connecticut, a coal-powered battleship.

The ship’s length was 456 feet, 4 inches. It displaced 16,000 tons, and carried a crew of 827. A century after the appearance of Adams’s masterpiece, the United States appears to be somewhere beyond the apex of its imperium, and it finds itself seeking to extricate itself from its latest intervention into a foreign territory, this time in Iraq. On May 1, 2003, President Bush declared that the mission was accomplished in Iraq, that the shock and awe tactics of the short war had led to victory, though the succeeding years have witnessed persistent guerrilla warfare that threatens to spread throughout the country, if not the entire region. Bush’s declaration was made from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The ship’s length is 1,092 feet. It displaces 97,500 tons, and carries a crew of approximately 5,000.

What would Henry Adams say?

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Colleen Kinder - One Bright Case of Idiopathic Cranofacial Erythema

Brian Doyle - A Note on the Misuse of Adverbs

Alfred Corn - Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry

Kevin Stein - Death by 0s and 1s: The Fate of Paper Manuscripts and Drafts

Colin Cheney

Kevin Young

Vona Groarke

Shai Dotan

Nick Courtright

Catie Rosemurgy

Review of Peter Stanlis's Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher

Review of Brian Hall's Fall of Frost: A Novel

Review of Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir

Review of Daniel Hall's Under Sleep

For Form's Sake: X. J. Kennedy's In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 - 2007

Review of Richard Kenney's The One Strand River

Eric Vrooman - Hybrid Taxidermy

Kelly Ga-Lei Gilbert - Beatitude

Porcupine

First published in The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2, (Spring, 1998), pp. 82-83

Who are you
calling stupid, he growls,
wawling at the back door, snapping and snuffling, your old dog

pierced
like Saint Sebastian. We close
the pliers and make him wince, plucking the quills. What was it,

passing at night,
its helmet and javelin-rattle,
a secret animal dragging its quiver through the leaves? We see

its work, the boned
sapling slipped from its sugary sleeve,
the corner-post gnawed through letting the shed slump, and now

this gory dog,
the barbed spears working
deeper, the slow trajectory of arrows into the heart and lungs.

It is love,
this animal whine, our hands
bloodied, tugging the needles from his lips, his tongue? Is it

the roar of glory,
the headlong blind rush, the creature
cornered, backing toward him, quills bristling? What makes him

gnash, his face
smutched, puffy? What makes him
forget himself, and hound it down, and seize it in his mouth?

Read more poems from John Witte

Hikmet

i.m Nazim Hikmet

A little unknown folktale
is that Nazim Hikmet could tune
into radio transmissions using
the power of his heart alone.
Guards at Bursa Prison noticed
he used to stroke his breast
and a loud transmission
would start to come out of his
mouth. He liked to listen
to broadcasts of Shostakovich,
the news, underground speeches.
Months before he died guards
reported that he was curled up
in his cell, frantically trying
to tune into the weather report,
eager for news of thunder.

Read another poem by Christian Ward.

Review of Mary Jo Salter's A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems

Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95 (hardcover)

Reading Mary Jo Salter can be like taking a walk with a very bright friend who has a knack for the well-told anecdote, the vivid confidence. This effect is due in part to her narrative distance from her subjects, which is close to conversational. But above all, she is a skilled scene-painter, a crafter of poems in which the finest detail, finally, throws an aspect of experience into high relief.

The trick, as she writes in “A Case of Netsuke,” is “to tell the whole tale in a nutshell.” Netsuke are very small, elaborately carved sculptures that served as a kind of fastener in traditional Japanese dress; the word’s characters mean “root” and “to attach.” When Salter succeeds in telling “the whole tale” with the smallest stroke, it is a feat of attachment. “The Age of Reason,” for example, begins with a believable scene: a child’s birthday party, with the child unable to see the benefits of delayed gratification and adults casually recalling their religious educations. But when “the camera’s flash / captures a mother’s hand, all hope no blame, / saving [the child] from the flame,” a great deal more is suddenly at stake than we originally bargained for. The last detail holds perfectly to what came before, calling up the ways even secular parents inevitably worry for a child’s salvation. The close-up picture illuminates the larger situation.

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On Louise Glück and the Yale Series of Younger Poets

Ten years ago, Yale University Press prepared an anthology of poems selected from its Yale Series of Younger Poets, a prize that leads to the publication of a first book by an American poet under forty. In its early incarnation, during the years following the First World War, the Yale Series published a number of rather dull volumes of neoclassical poems espousing the virtues of patriotism. Its editors, all of whom worked at the press, ignored the more interesting and destabilizing work being done by American modernists at home and abroad. After some ups and downs, and the decision to invite well-known poets to select the prize winners, the series achieved true renown in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, the Yale prize was given to, among others, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine, and James Tate. (Its new relevance could in part be attributed to W. H. Auden, who, when displeased with the finalists, would cast about for a more interesting manuscript.) By the late 1990s, however, the series was hardly at its apogee. Its most recent editor, James Dickey, had grown ill, and was unable to devote his full attention to the duties of selection and editing; two of the books he chose were published after he died.

More than that, the aesthetic balkanization of the poetry world had led to a kind of tentativeness in the editorial stance of many of its editors. The selections lacked coherence, ranging from the unsentimental naturalism of Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago to the urbane, Europe-infused lyrics of Ellen Hinsey’s Cities of Memory. The editors now changed every four years, meaning that the structure itself was ill-suited to the establishment of a notable editorial vision. By 1997, the series seemed to have diminished in stature, even when it published interesting books.

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Organic Formalism and John Witte’s The Hurtling

Artifice, whether artistic or technological, comes naturally to humans; moreover, artifice is what paradoxically connects us to the rest of nature. Thus, poetic language, although distinct from nature, nevertheless has an analogous relationship to it; both language and nature occupy a complex middle ground between what Wallace Stevens calls “imagination” and “reality.” Language and nature, that is, are both culturally constructed (imagined) and wildly autonomous (real). The artifice of poetic form foregrounds the most “real” relationship we have with the rest of nature, which is simultaneously distinct and inseparable from us.

Much contemporary poetry resembles merely lineated prose, as if poets today are either suspicious of or intimidated by the restraints of form. Although one need not employ meter or rhyme to be formally rigorous, much free verse in the latter twentieth century has, as Robert Hass puts it, “lost its edge” (70). Even Ezra Pound, one of the instigators of the free verse movement, expressed reservations about the “dilution” and “general floppiness” to which much American free verse had already descended by the 1920s (qtd. in Carpenter 349). Still, most poets continue to take for granted Pound’s earlier conflation of organic processes in nature with free verse. Traditional “symmetrical” poetic forms, on the other hand, he considered too artificial to be associated with natural processes: “I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms” (9). Unfortunately, the consequence (that Pound himself later feared) of such a formulation has been not just a rejection of meter and rhyme but also a resistance to the patterns and symmetries of form in general. Contemporary ecopoets especially strive to write poetry that appears organic, like nature, although what they mean by organic lacks nature’s form. A. R. Ammons, for example, employs zigzagging lines in “Corsons Inlet” to emphasize the asymmetry and irregularity of the shoreline, which inspires him to leave behind the “straight lines” and “boxes” of symmetrical verse as it appears on the page:

                    . . . I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
          straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
          of sight
          . . . . . . . . . .
in nature there are few sharp lines . . . (5-6)

Actual Cost

	[Manhattan. Saturday. An almost empty subway car. IYANA, black, and B.T., white, both late twenties, sit next to each other, his arm is around her. Both are dressed nicely in business attire. She looks incredible. He looks uncomfortable in these clothes. He stares at her for a beat.]
B.T.	We should go back.
IYANA	I’m not going to be late. (beat) Honey, did you brush?
B.T.	Yes.
	[Beat. Annoyed, he pulls out gum. Pops it in his mouth. Chews.]
B.T.	Nobody will notice if we’re late. It’s a big church.
IYANA	Aunt Gwenny will notice.
B.T.	I’m getting off at the next stop.
IYANA	No. I’m not showing up alone, it’s a wedding.
	[Beat.]
B.T.	Then you’ll have to lend me twenty dollars.
IYANA	I only have—
B.T.	How about ten?
IYANA	You always—
B.T.	‘Yana—
IYANA	Why do you need it? (beat) So you can buy some cigarettes?
B.T.	I quit. You know I quit.
	[She smiles.]

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Ivan & Imelda

What he did then, this Ivan Carmody—a tall man, though bellied out to a good two-hundred, sixty pounds—he jerked open the passenger door of the car, got in, and said to the woman: “Get out of this car. I’m taking your car so get the fuck out.”

The woman—her name was Imelda Economy —stayed fairly calm, however.

With the sound track from The Phantom of the Opera coming out of her CD player the car was ripe with sound and Ivan Carmody thought at first she hadn’t heard him. In only a moment, though, and after turning down the stereo, Imelda quietly said, “I can’t.”

“You can’t?” said Ivan.

“Not quickly,” said Imelda, “and I’m sure you want things to go quickly here.”

Purposely, she did not look at this man sitting next to her. She’d read somewhere it was not a good idea to do that.

“Get out of this car,” Ivan repeated, “or I will shoot you in your head with this pistol gun.”

Ivan Carmody did indeed have a gun, Imelda noticed, a small revolver with a brushed chrome finish.

“Pistol gun?” said Imelda. “That’s an odd way to put it. Anyway, look at my legs, sir.”

Ivan looked under the steering wheel then and saw that Imelda’s legs were made of two metallic tubes going down to feet that looked like metal or maybe hard plastic boxes. They didn’t even look like feet or shoes at the bottom, something Ivan thought unusual. Most of the time they tried to make those things look real, didn’t they?

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