About ten years ago my father, who was living, took me in a car from Seattle to Iowa City so I could study poetry. The program took two years; I stayed four, doing a range of post-MFA labor that, while various (delivery driver, office temp, bookstore clerk) was narrow next to the resumes some friends accrued, suitable for a colorful author’s note: “Young Poet has worked as a grilled cheese vendor, a bodyguard, a medical actor, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and a distinguished visiting professor.”
I wrote much of my first book, Full Catastrophe Living, while working those jobs. My first affiliation with The Kenyon Review, for instance, came when the magazine accepted a poem I wrote during a warehouse stint, jotting on boxes, mumbling through the day. Jobs I didn’t like then and wouldn’t want now. But, after graduate school, there was an essential sovereign intensity to the period, which I remember as a rollicking montage of poetic training. A week I woke very early to read Shakespeare before work. Carrying a manuscript to the post office, mailing it, and, many times, immediately understanding its flaws. Quitting a job and granting myself a poetry fellowship for a week or so. Eating all the hummus.
I’ll be back in Iowa City this Wednesday to read at Prairie Lights Books with Hannah Brooks-Motl, whose stellar first book of poetry, The New Years, is about to debut. On Thursday, I’ll join Jennifer H. Fortin and Nate Pritts in Rock Island as part of the Spectra Series, coordinated by the Midwest Writing Center. And Friday in Madison with Monsters of Poetry. Saturday in Chicago at the Dollhouse Reading Series. I’m giddy for the travel. Will I meet you after the reading? Will we talk about poetry at George’s and Le Tigre Lounge?
If you run in literary circles—especially if, like me, you’re susceptible to internet skidding—a lot can seem tiresome, like when a New York-based magazine (winkingly?) calls New York City “literature’s largest stage” (everyone knows literature’s largest stage is actually the pupal stage) or when whatever else happens that, because you love literature inordinately, annoys you. But then you remember people hosting readings around the country.
In the spirit of that hosting, of honoring some of the forces that increase and uphold one’s inordinate expectations for imaginative presence, I’m pleased to present the final batch of Century Swept Brutal / Black Ocean Awards in Excellence to poet Brad Richard, the arts collective Napoleon, and St. Louis’s delightfully rambunctious City Museum. As detailed in an earlier post, these awards seek to illuminate the peripheral literary (and extraliterary) connections that surround a book of poetry.
Brad Richard
Brad was my friend’s first poetry teacher; when I’ve worked with high school writers in The Kenyon Review’s Young Writers Workshop, I’ve found that Brad is the first poetry teacher of many talented younger writers. (Educators interested in writing and creative writing pedagogy can work with Brad this summer in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for Teachers.)
And although I don’t think Brad will be at Le Tigre Lounge this weekend, I’ve often had the pleasure of seeing him—for conversations equally brief, memorable, and fond—at poetry events in New Orleans, where he teaches and co-directs the New Writers Literary Festival. What was I saying above about “peripheral connections?” Brad proves that such connections are not peripheral but essential to current literature’s importance to education, communities, friendship. What’s worth inordinately loving depends on them.
For his teaching, conversation, and years of meaningful literary service, and for his lushly honed books of poetry (including 2011’s Motion Studies and 2012’s Butcher’s Sugar), I’m glad to honor Brad Richard with this award.
Lines from Century Swept Brutal I dedicate to Brad Richard: “The sheets literate, in the street / breezes correct for us, We move preceded by a vowel”
Napoleon
I first became familiar with Philadelphia’s Napoleon, a “collectively-run project space” that hosts exhibitions and events by the collective’s members and others (including work found through a solo-show open call), when they invited me to contribute an essay to “As first as exactly,” an exhibition of collaborative works extending from Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” My essay is one of many that explore the lyrical, aesthetic, or historical resonances surrounding the collective’s shows, much as I hope these awards surround my new book.
Napoleon’s contribution to the “unique, DIY, free-from-the-market kind of energy” of Philadelphia’s art scene has been celebrated in Flash Art, and its work has been praised by the Knight Foundation and others. For its inventive model, collaborative enthusiasm, and impressive, absorbing catalog of past shows—including an “exhibition of mosaics composed of woodcuts and materials used in the process of making a print,” including the installation “Gay, Jewish, or Both”—hey, Napoleon, I’m glad to present you with this award.
Lines from Century Swept Brutal I dedicate to Napoleon: “a kite of cardboard and / twined. I tell him the snake is air if you step on it. / I tell him the elephant’s tusk extends all the way up / its face to the eye, it is an optic / nerve-tooth”
City Museum
I’ve tried to describe it. Playhouse for adults, as though designed by Russell Edson? Or in their words: “an eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel made out of unique, found objects.” I can’t imagine being sad in St. Louis’s City Museum, not sad in an unchanged way, at least. If the imagination is presence that is also elsewhere. If you feel stuck in places where the eye can starve. If you long for exuberant mirabilia. Here’s one kind of circus I had in mind when writing Century Swept Brutal. I’d like to write poems that wouldn’t sound absurd—that is, that would sound appropriately absurd!—among the jugglers, caverns, turtles, old airplanes, wall made of milk bottles, huge slides of you, City Museum.
Lines from Century Swept Brutal I dedicate to the City Museum: “I keep / my hand in / my / pocket because my / finger is stuck / in a tiny / priceless vase”
Today’s awardees join the Olympia Film Society, the Richard Hugo House, Open Books, Frank Sherlock, Danielle Dutton, Elizabeth Robinson, the Sutliff Bridge and Tavern, HAWN, and Flying Object. All recipients will receive a copy of the book and at least one surprise. Thanks to my publisher, Black Ocean, for sponsoring these awards. It’s been an honor to suggest a small map by them.