TextFlows

Poets.org has partnered with TextTelevision to offer TextFlows, an alternative approach to reading and experiencing poetry. By converting text dynamically into Flash animation, poems are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, and at a pace controlled by the reader. The simplified words and crisp motion fixes one's attention on the subtleties of language, increasing involvement, engagement, and understanding.You can learn more about TextTelevision online at www.textflows.com.

Slice Magazine

SLICE, A BROOKLYN-BASED NONPROFIT PRINT MAGAZINE, is the brainchild of two book editors with a firsthand view of how difficult it is for new authors to have their voices heard. We aim to spark a dialogue between emerging and established writers. In each issue, a specific cultural theme becomes the catalyst for short stories, articles, interviews, and poems from renowned writers and lesser known voices alike. 

Featured authors have included Salman Rushdie, Nam Le, Kathryn Harrison, Andrew Sean Greer, Junot Diaz, Steve Almond, C.K. William, and graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. Slice is published twice each year, in March and September. 

http://www.slicemagazine.org/

http://slicemagazine.org/blog/

How To Offer Comfort and Support To Those Who Are Grieving

Six Writer-Friends Complete Book 
for a Dying Author/Friend

When Elizabeth Aleshire was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack last sum mer, she fully expected to recover and complete her book, 101 Ways You Can Help: How To Offer Comfort and Support To Those Who Are Grieving. But that was not to be.  A second heart attack dimmed the prospect of recovery, and Ms. Aleshire expired at the age of 59 with a third of her book unwritten.

While still in the hospital, Ms. Aleshire received daily visits from six writer-friends, all of whom had met over the years at the International Women's Writing Guild's annual “Remember the Magic” summer conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Ms. Aleshire had taught in each of the past 25 years.

When it became clear that Ms. Aleshire would not recover, the six writer-friends offered to complete her manuscript posthumously. Permission was granted by both=2 0the author and her publisher, Sourcebooks, and the team went into “emergency mode” to write the unwritten chapters in time to meet the book's publication deadline.

The book, 101 ways You Can Help: How To Offer Comfort And Support To Those Who Are Grieving,will be in bookstores by the end of April.

On Sunday, April 19, the six friends and co-authors—Kathy Barach, Marsha Browne, Zita Christian, Judy Huge, Paula Scardemalia and Anne Walradt—will tell the story of com pleting their friend and teacher's book as part of the International Women's Writing Guild's 57th Big Apple Conference's “Meet the Authors” Open House at the Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue (near 38th Street) in New York City.

The “Meet the Authors” Open House will be followed in the afternoon by a “Meet the Agents” Open House where writers have the opportunity to briefly discuss their work with literary agents.

“Many writers have found their agents at this event,” says Hannelore Hahn, the IWWG’s Executive Director who founded the nonprofit organization in 1976.& nbsp; “Actually, some 4,000 books have been published by IWWG members since we started more than 30 years ago.

But publication has never been our only goal,” she adds. “That is why we always begin our twice-yearly Big Apple Conference weekends with a memoir-writing workshop. Writing from personal experience is immensely important for both the writer as a writer and the writer as a person.” 

This year’s Big Apple Conference begins on Saturday, April 18, with Lisa Dale Norton's all-day writing workshop, “The Compassionate Memoir: Using the Process of Memoir to Change the World.”

For further information, please contact Hannelore Hahn at the IWWG’s New York City office by telephone (212-737-7536) or email (dirhahn@aol.com).

 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Day in Autumn

BY RAINER MARIA RILKE

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time

to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials

and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.

Direct on them two days of warmer light

to hale them golden toward their term, and harry

the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;

who lives alone will live indefinitely so,

waking up to read a little, draft long letters,

and, along the city's avenues,

fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

TRANSLATED BY MARY KINZIE

“The Queen of Nôm Poetry”

Wasps

BY HO XUAN HUONG

Where are you wandering to, little fools

Come, big sister will teach you how to write verse

Itchy little wasps sucking rotting flowers

Horny baby lambkins butting gaps in the fence

TRANSLATED BY MARILYN CHIN

Alexei Tsvetkov

Leaving Prague: A Notebook

On stalking ostriches, the hot new generation of Russian poets, and the greatest Czech ever.

BY ALEXEI TSVETKOV

The city is losing its sparrows. It has been weeks since I last saw one, and that was in New York. 

This is not a figment of my imagination: I heard a program on Czech radio during which various experts in the field acknowledged the problem and, after weighing the probable causes, came to a consensus: sparrows are disappearing for some unknown reason. Something similar is happening all over the world to bees, and our best minds are hard at work to save them, since bees have economic value. Sparrows have none; they are just part of  the ambiance. 

These sturdy and unassuming birds have been with us since we learned to distinguish ourselves from the apes, with little mutual 
inconvenience. Well, actually the Chinese under Mao tried to exterminate their sparrows for reasons I don’t immediately recall, but it came to nothing. Not native to the New World, sparrows were the true discoverers of America, where they now prosper. Air without their worthless chirping seems void, like distilled water. I’d rather have them back. 

I am not a born birdwatcher, and my natural grace is such that if I try to stalk an ostrich it will probably fly away. But whenever I sit down to write something without a clearly-formed intention, by default it turns out to be about birds, and I do notice the birds. There’s no way to avoid noticing pigeons: year after year their attempts to squat on my balcony end up in some ugly massacre, feathers and eggshells floating in a puddle, the drain hopelessly clogged. This tragedy unfolds from the first romantic encounter, usually reported by my cat. Pigeons are nature’s kamikazes; yet somehow they multiply and generally prosper. 

Also, there seem to be plenty of falcons, which is not what you would expect in a sizable city. I suspect that they are intentionally cultivated to take care of the pigeon problem. If so, the solution has failed miserably. Most of the time they ignore the pigeons, except when they practically fraternize with them, joining the daily air show over the National Museum. Have the falcons found sparrows to be easier fare? 

Sparrows turn out to be one of evolution’s indisputable successes, unlike tigers or lions who seem to be destined to survive only in computer databanks: in the future they will probably make cartoons about cartoon lions. I can also imagine future classical philologists trying to figure out the double entendre in Catullus’s treatment of the male genitalia: what kind of  bird was that mythical passer ? 

I have never seen a tiger or a lion in the wild, but life without sparrows is eerie, as if there’s a hole in it. 

* * *

The city is still pretty densely populated by Czechs, which may seem far from obvious to its numerous foreign visitors searching for the magical Prague that never was. The most prominent native son of  Prague for the tourist crowd is apparently Franz Kafka, and the local supply of  Kafka T-shirts and marionettes is inexhaustible. This is, of course, part of the city magic: who would betray the secret that the actual Kafka, a German-speaking  Jew, hated Prague, and his posthumous commercial fame is as preposterous as any of  his plots? Unlike Rilke, another Prague native, Kafka never escaped, just kept on dreaming. 

Actual Czechs are eminently practical, nothing magical or mystical about them, as befits the people who drink the most beer in the world. Their most curious feature, which they keep to themselves and of  which the tourists know nothing, is a collective sense of  humor. Consider Jára Cimrman, by popular opinion the greatest Czech who ever lived. A few years ago a Czech TV channel asked its audience to name the most beloved native son. Jára Cimrman came first, ahead of Václav Havel, founding president Masaryk, and the Emperor Charles IV. Even the fact that Cimrman was explicitly disqualified in advance did not hurt his chances. This year, when a popular Internet site angled for an alternative to the current President Václav Klaus, Cimrman, disqualified again, came second. An obvious handicap was the fact that he was allegedly last seen alive in 1914. 

Jára Cimrman is, of course, a fictitious character, the brainchild of a small group of writers and actors. In the Czech version of Wikipedia he is introduced as “one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, musicians, teachers, adventurers, philosophers, inventors” and many other things. Some of his achievements include inventing the Paraguayan puppet show, almost becoming the first man to reach the North Pole (he apparently missed it by seven meters), and conducting a voluminous correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, who never deigned to respond. 

Well, that’s funny enough, but the most striking thing about Cimrman is the favor he has found with his people. Having failed to elect him the greatest Czech ever, his countrymen succeeded in giving his name to a tiny asteroid. This year one of the leading radio stations undertook another attempt to immortalize him by launching a campaign called “The People’s Choice, Jára Cimrman.” The idea is to give this hero’s name to one of the mountains in the Russian Altai range. Funds were collected and a group of mountaineers was even dispatched to investigate the rocky candidate. It will probably come to naught since Cimrman is a born loser, no matter how dashing and well-loved. Still, I never heard of a nation mocking itself in such a charming way. 

* * *

I am about to leave this city, where I have spent twelve years. There’s no other place on the face of the earth that I have lived in so long. Yet Prague has always remained somewhat impenetrable to me. By now I know the language well enough to follow radio and TV broadcasts without difficulty; I can read the papers, novels, even poetry. I understand the fragments of conversation that reach my ears when I take the bus to work or sit in a café. Many years ago a similar experience in the United States put me on the road to assimilation. But here it doesn’t work. I am forever stuck halfway between the natives and the tourists. 

Maybe it has something to do with my age — most of my expatriate colleagues here, those of a more geriatric persuasion, remain stuck in self-imposed isolation, unwilling or unable to reach out. Still, unlike them, I seem to have all the tools to establish contact; and yet I never really did. Perhaps it’s my personal history that prevented me from going native. Decades ago I emigrated from the Soviet Union to the US, and Communism is forever associated in my mind with the cinderblock hell of my childhood. It is unimaginable that something similar ever existed in this fairy tale city, although I know otherwise. There are, of course, neighborhoods in Prague where Communism would be perfectly at home and where tourists are rare guests, unless they go for really cheap hotels and hostels. But the castle and spires conceal the tenements and dissociate themselves from my childhood; they are pieces of the puzzle that never fit. And although I see the faces of the current unreformed Communists on TV almost every day, they appear to be holdovers of the invading horde whose offspring I am myself. The actual natives still remain a bit of a mystery, even though I’ve drunk their beer and talked their talk. It took me far less time to figure out the Americans. 

Jára Cimrman is consequently a secret I share with the Czechs, something that an outsider will never have an access to. He will remain with me as proof that I was actually more than a tourist here, although never a proper settler. 

In the end some people here will probably miss me, but not many, not too much, and not for long. 

* * *

And yet I spent a dozen years on this magic mountain, a fifth of my life so far. What do I have to show for it apart from the stubs of my paychecks? 

When I first came here, it had been years since I’d written a poem. I stopped writing poetry without a clear explanation of why it happened. Later on I came up with lots of convincing reasons: one of the best, as I recall, was the turmoil in my erstwhile homeland, Russia. In some way poetry, no matter how private, is always addressed to an audience, and when a level of noise in that audience exceeds a certain value, the exercise becomes pointless. It is possible to imagine an opera star performing to an empty hall but not to a full and noisy one. There’s an old saying: when guns talk, the Muses fall silent. But that’s wrong: Cicero was talking about laws, not Muses. When people talk, especially when they talk feverishly, the Muses definitely shut up. 

I remember at the time I could not figure out who it was that Joseph Brodsky was addressing in his late verse — it still seems to me driven largely by inertia. Brodsky’s best poetry is the voice of someone who deliberately positions himself between and above two mighty empires: it’s a running commentary on their perceived decline. When one of  those empires suddenly collapsed, he was left groping. We will never know how he would have regained his internal balance. 

When I lost mine, I came to Prague voiceless. Brodsky died soon after and, however shocking, the news seemed fitting: the last universal voice fell silent, leaving the stage in full possession of the noisy nativist crowd. 

By now Russia has calmed down, at least in the acoustical sense; it has also become leaner and meaner in an all-too-literal sense. These are still not the good times and I doubt that good times in any acceptable sense will come during my lifetime. Yet amazingly, it has turned out to be a bumper crop time for poetry. It’s not my coevals whom I have in mind, even though some of them are still going strong. It’s the younger generation, those in the thirty- to forty-year-old range, who have suddenly burst into bloom, the children of the perestroika — or one should say the orphans, since their alleged mother went missing long ago. 

Poetry is a perishable commodity — Russian imports to the US are presently negligible. Universities keep their self-assigned watch with a predictable lag of ten or fifteen years if not more, and the magazines spend too much energy on personal connections to be really dependable. So I’d better name some names for the record. Yuly Gugolev, Evgenia Lavut, Fedor Svarovsky, Boris Khersonsky, and Denis Novikov, who died too soon — these are just a few of the new star crop. Curiously, many crossed the Atlantic long ago but are still under the radar of academics. Vladimir Gandelsman, one of the best, has for decades now been supporting himself with odd jobs in New York City. Alexander Stessin, another New Yorker, is finishing medical school. Some are better known, like the publishers of Fulcrum, Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, who both write in English. 

I guess we’ll never know the real reason for this embarras de richesse from a country that, in my view, is still stuck in search of a post-Soviet identity. More to the point, Russian humanities in general are in a sorry state, prose writing being nothing special and literary criticism abominable. But the wind blows where it will, and I strongly believe that this new generation of  Russian poets is going to redeem what is redeemable. 

* * *

All this transpired while I was biding my time in Prague, going to work, trying to enjoy the beauty of the town whenever the Kafka-obsessed tourist crowd deigned to give me an opening. Over time I discovered that the only practical way for a resident to like the city is to pretend that he is one of the tourists — an opportunity that presented itself every time I had visitors. When you live, say, in Grand Rapids, your typical visitors are likely to be the in-laws, if any. When in Prague, though, the pool becomes much larger. Pretty soon I learned to tell the Charles Bridge from the Municipal House and the knedlikifrom the spekacki (the latter two, with a generous helping of sauerkraut, basically exhaust the scope of  Bohemian cuisine — this is definitely not a culinary Mecca). 

Somehow, even in my Bohemian exile, people found me. With my corporate e-mail address exposed, I kept receiving messages addressed to my former self. Now that I was silent, many beginning poets, considering me inoffensive, like a caged fox, eagerly presented me with their premature fruit. It was not all bad — this was how Philip and Katia discovered me, and we became online friends — and a year or so later Katia knocked at my door. 

There must have been a reason why I never learned to feel at home in Prague. It was probably supposed to be a halfway house, a place where you wait for something to happen. One day I found myself writing a poem — about seventeen years after the previous attempt. 

Oddly, I feel no urge to explain to myself or anybody else why I picked up the pen — well, keyboard — again. On the other hand, there’s no one asking, myself included. Vanity, craving for public attention — such things are universal, somehow implicit. We don’t ask people why they leave their houses in the morning dressed to kill and neatly groomed — but try wearing your pants backwards and you become an object of curiosity. Actually, I was planning to beat Rimbaud at his own game and quit once more after publishing  just one last book. Now there are two, with a third in the making, and no trace remains of my former resolution. 

The interrupted journey continues apace. Yes, there was some secret terror at first: too many decrepit prizefighters crawl out of 
retirement only to be beaten back into it. A poet, on the other hand, does not have a face-to-face rival; it’s only too easy to miss the moment you are knocked out. Somebody will have to tell me when I lose. 

* * *

Actually, I do have some thoughts about why I returned to poetry. 

I had wondered what it was good for. Orpheus, based on his experience as a zookeeper, might have disagreed with Auden about it making nothing happen. Brodsky was fond of quoting that famous bit of Auden, yet in his Nobel lecture he spoke of the purportedly pacifying qualities of  Dickens, which may be related to the poems by Orpheus that charmed wild beasts: “for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens.” I wonder if  he ever read Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. 

Poetry definitely used to make things happen. Homer, whoever he was, probably sang in the twilight of the Heroic Age, but the tributaries of that river flow from a time when poetic bloodshed directly stimulated the real one. The Vikings used their skalds in a similar way. It wasn’t always a bad thing: there are many examples of other noble passions benefiting from poetry. Still, the noblest of all was courage, and the best display of that was dispatching an enemy to Valhalla. 

The Romantic era was, to an extent, a remake of the Heroic Age, minus most of the bloodshed. People raved about poetry. We cannot exactly pinpoint what it was that Lord Byron changed in the world, but it was plenty. Longfellow, traveling abroad, was recognized by people in the street. Teddy Roosevelt knew “Evangeline” by heart. 

Poetry is apparently an emotional amplifier, one that is almost neutral, morally. In fact, it flourished in times that few of us would like to see repeated. Still, many of the best poets have tamed it in the manner of Orpheus, and it appears to have lost much of its force together with its menace. Hence Auden’s observation — as well as Brodsky’s halfhearted rebellion. 

Is any of this relevant to my current situation? I don’t think so, and in fact I’d be the last person to inspire valor in the troops. When I abandoned poetry, I went on to dabble in various other genres hoping I’d get closer to the truth. Well, I didn’t, of course, the truth remaining as distant as ever. But I have now rediscovered what poetry is good for. It is the only way I know how not to lie — provided, that is, I stay far enough away from the halls of  heroes. 

* * *

By now I can find my way through Old Town with my eyes closed, so long as they keep the tourists penned up for a while. The Charles Bridge is being restored, and its usual pedestrian bottleneck is worse than ever. If you’d rather turn right, through the spectacular Old Town Square, you get to the Parizska Street, the finest collection of the Jugendstil (similar to Art Nouveu) houses east of Paris and west of Vienna — this is what they had in mind when they called it Parizska. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was Jozefov, the Jewish ghetto, and though by now Czechs have earned themselves the reputation of a peaceable nation, in the past  Jozefov was the stage for many a pogrom whenever the natives felt irritated for some reason, most notably during the Hussite Wars. 

The synagogue is still standing, said to be the oldest in Europe and adjoined by the  Jewish Museum, which lists on its walls the names of every  Jew from Bohemia and Slovakia who perished in the Holocaust. Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, was reputedly almost brought to tears by finding the names of her lost relatives there. Apparently, she never before suspected that she had been born Jewish, even though a cousin who remained in Czechoslovakia repeatedly urged her to come for a visit and face reality. 

In the ancient  Jewish cemetery behind the museum lie the remains of  Rabbi Lev, allegedly the creator of the Golem. The purported likeness of the Golem is on sale nearby in several sizes, but the original, animated or not, probably never existed since the rabbi was of a strictly rationalist bent and such wizardry would have been an offense to his convictions. He lived in the time of the mad Emperor Rudolph, protector of alchemists and seeker of immortality, who alone is largely responsible for Prague’s fake fame. 

In reality it was always a city of merchants and artisans, one of the richest commercial centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — something its beauty attests to, since the Imperial capital moved elsewhere after Rudolph. Between the wars, independent Czechoslovakia was one of Europe’s power engines; but decades of Communist slavery reduced it to mediocrity. When I first came to Prague in 1995, it was still shabby and unkempt as if awakening from a long sleep. Now it sparkles like a jewel in the gorgeous Indian summer. 

Decades ago I was walking the streets of Moscow for what I thought was the last time. In my youth I loved Moscow desperately and could not imagine anything more beautiful. Perhaps I simply didn’t know any better. They used to say that Russian writers wither from nostalgia in exile, but I only missed my friends and considered the city one of  them. Moscow isn’t a friend anymore. I go there quite often now; some old friends still survive and there are plenty of new ones. But I have a feeling that my city has been razed and a new one erected in its place, like the fake spic-and-span capital of some oil princedom — which happens to be the truth. 

Somehow, it’s Prague that has became my home away from home. It is here that I returned from a journey to the desert where for seventeen years I wandered like the failed prophet in Pushkin’s poem — even though I can’t claim any revelation. But much was left unsaid during those years, and I am trying to make up for them. 

* * *

Prague has risen from its Communist ashes, and it really is a  jewel of a city. In a few weeks, following the sparrows and the Jews, I will leave it for Washington DC — a city which is also beautiful in its stately way, though who would have the temerity to call it a  jewel? 

Will I ever go back? Curiously, my employer bought me a return ticket with an open date — it’s cheaper than a one-way. I can visit the city again if  I wish. But then I’d have to buy another return ticket to DC, which would start a veritable vicious circle. Never is more like it. Space is huge and time is short, or whatever they used to say in the antiquity. This essay originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Poetry.

Samuel Beckett

Cascando

BY SAMUEL BECKETT

1.

why not merely the despaired of

occasion of

wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden

they will always start dragging too soon

the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want

bringing up the bones the old loves

sockets filled once with eyes like yours

all always is it better too soon than never

the black want splashing their faces

saying again nine days never floated the loved

nor nine months

nor nine lives

2.

saying again

if you do not teach me I shall not learn

saying again there is a last

even of last times

last times of begging

last times of loving

of knowing not knowing pretending

a last even of last times of saying

if you do not love me I shall not be loved

if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again

love love love thud of the old plunger

pestling the unalterable

whey of words

terrified again

of not loving

of loving and not you

of being loved and not by you

of knowing not knowing pretending

pretending

I and all the others that will love you

if they love you

3.

unless they love you

Samuel Beckett, “Cascando” from Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. IV. 

Neko Case

My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum  by Neko case

When I was asked by Poetry to write an article for them I was ecstatic. I was flattered. I felt important! I agreed immediately. About twenty minutes after sending my e-mail of acceptance I paused to triumphantly sharpen my claws on the bookcase when I noticed the blazing, neon writing on the wall. It said: YOU'VE NEVER EVEN PASSED ENGLISH 101 AND EVERYONE WHO READS THIS MAGAZINE WILL KNOW IT. Why do I care? I'm not sure. I think it's because I don't want to let poetry down. Poetry is such a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress. I am an awkward, heavy-handed mule of a high school dropout. I guess I just need permission to be in the same room with poetry. 

I think the fear began in about fifth grade. Right off the top they said poetry was supposed to have "form." Even writing a tiny haiku became a wrestling match with a Claymation Cyclops for me. (I watched a lot of Sinbad.) We aren't too cool for poetry; it's the other way around. At least that's the impression I took from public school. The fact that these feelings would remain into adulthood is ridiculous. We all have the right to poetry! How could I still think it's for other people? Smarter people. What's doubly confusing is I don't have the same reservations when poetry is accompanied by music. Perhaps I feel that way because there is music all around us — it's the wallpaper of our lives. It's not considered precious in American culture unless a symphony is performing it. 

I do know when a string of printed words busts my little dam and the tears spill over and I sponge them up with my T-shirt. I couldn't give you that formula before it happens, it  just hits me like a bat to the face. That's a sweet, hot, amazing, embarrassing moment. It even makes me feel a little included, as if  I have to be "ready for the poetry" for it to be happening. 

I can't choose which kind of poetry I like best. Sonnets? Prose? I don't know the terminology. I just blurt out some fragmented gibberish into the vast, woodsy country of poetry. It freezes in midair. Here come some examples now . . . 

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus haunts me. Aaron's death speech is veiled, venomous gospel music. I read it over and over even though I've already memorized it like a teenage girl in love. W.H. Auden scares me under the couch (even when he's being funny). I hold my flashlight on "The Witnesses," with its haunting "humpbacked surgeons/And the scissors man," until my arm shakes, my trusty dictionary in my other hand. Dorothy Parker makes me manic! I can't even make it through the first three lines of "The Godmother" without bursting into tears. Lynda Barry and Sherman Alexie save my life constantly. They battle identity crisis with a sense of  humor and a language that speaks so hard to me because they came from my home, in my own time, and they talk to me in our special parlance. They tell me I'm not crazy because they remember it too. It really is the old Washington State that created my personal brain-picture ABC's. (D is for "Douglas fir.") The same Washington State I can never go back to. Barry and Alexie volunteer to go in my place. Their memories make friends with mine. I can't live without them. 

What do these poets have in common? They don't write sycophantic, roman-numeral-volumed postcards to God. They don't get all "love-ity-love-love" either. I get the sense they imagine their audience and want to comfort them. They are so good at it they even have the ability to comfort us with scariness. Sadness too. I think that is a powerful magic. They don't just write poetry either; they are playwrights and painters and singers and novelists. 

How can we help them out? I guess we keep on needing them, even if it's kind of a secret. If the poets handed out anonymous comment cards for us shy poetry lovers to fill out so they could get a better idea of what we needed, I would direct them to the Osbourne Brothers' bluegrass classic, "Rocky Top." They say in two lines what poets and writers "Anna Karenina" themselves to death to convey, about a girl who's "wild as a mink, but sweet as soda pop/I still dream about that." If those lines were written about me I could lie down and die. It is perfection. Uncool Perfection. 

This essay originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Poetry.

Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was an English poet and novelist. Not Waving but Drowning Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

Naeem Murr

Enough with the Poetry Already!

Click on the title above to listen to a reading by Naeem Murr from his essay "My Poet." From the July / August issue of Poetry. 07.26.07

Naeem Murr's most recent novel, The Perfect Man, has just been published by Random House. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book of Europe and South Asia. Photo by Alan Cross.

John Brehm

Over and Under

BY JOHN BREHM

So sexy to slide under-

neath a river,

to sit inside this

snakelike sub-

marine-like

subway car and

freely imagine

the world above—

the Brooklyn

Bridge invisibly

trembling with the

weight of its

own beauty,

the East River

still guided by

the grooves

Walt Whitman's

eyes wore in it,

the bulldog tug-

boats pushing the

passively impressive

broad-bottomed

barges around,

and the double-

decker orange

and black Staten

Island ferries,

with their aura

of overworked

pack-mule

mournfulness,

and beyond them

the Atlantic Ocean

which I lately learned

was brought here

by ice comets three

billion years ago,

which explains

a few things, like

why everybody

feels so alienated,

and of course

the thoughts being

thought by every

person in New

York City at

this moment—

vast schools of

undulating fish

curving and rising

in the cloud-swirling

wind-waved sky,

surrounded by

the vaster emptiness

of non-thought

which holds them

and which they try

not to think

about and you

lying in bed in

your sixth-floor

walk-up sublet

on St. Mark's Place—

such a breath-

taking ascension!

imagining me

rising now to meet you.

John Updike

Three Short Poems

Click on the title above to listen to three very short poems by John Updike, Emperor Hadrian and an anonymous erotic Sanskrit poem. 04.07.06

John Updike (1932 - 2009) An acclaimed and award-winning writer of fiction, essays, and reviews, John Updike has also been writing poetry for most of his life. Growing up in Pennsylvania, his early inspiration to be a writer came from watching his mother, an aspiring writer, submit her work to magazines. In an interview Updike stated, “I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form.” In his teens, he was already publishing poems in magazines.  Though he knew that he would not make a living by writing only poetry, he has said that his writing career began in 1954 whenThe New Yorker accepted one of his poems, followed by a short story. His first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), was a collection of poems.  Updike’s career as a writer has been remarkably prolific and varied. In addition to poetry, his work has included novels (The Witches of Eastwick, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit, Run), short stories, music criticism (Concerts at Castle Hill), and essays on art (Just Looking: Essays on Art) and golf (Golf Dreams: Writing on Golf). His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (for both Rabbit Is Rich in 1981, and Rabbit at Rest in 1991), the American Book Award for fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for both fiction and criticism.  His poetry, starting as light verse, encompasses a variety of forms and topics. He has been praised for his wit and precision, and for his ability to focus on common subjects and on places near and distant—from Schilling, Pennsylvania (the town of his childhood), to Venice, Italy. His collections of poetry include Facing Nature: Poems, Collected Poems: 1953–1993, and Americana and Other Poems (2001). -Taken from Poetry magazine

Molly McQuade

Molly McQuade is writing a letter to Edgar Lee Masters as part of her job as a columnist for the American Library Association. Her books include Barbarism, a collection of her poetry; Stealing Glimpses, a collection of her essays about poetry; and By Herself, an edited anthology of essays about poetry by contemporary women poets.

- Taken from Poetry magazine

Rose Thorns

BY MOLLY MCQUADE

Why do roses need their thorns?

Some things are little known.

But thorns of roses

spring and seize the surface

of  fey airs

before the roses come.

I’ve seen thorns huddle in a harmony alone,

hunkered down on green, wiry canes,

smoothed blades of whipping rose stalks,

and curl their polished tridents

to night’s call.

They are like stars

digging into firmament

with such desire,

you don’t quite get it,

and so healthy that

they almost have to wound,

or like bodies that can’t be argued,

borrowed, tamed.

The touch of a thorn

is a wry, deep telling

of the senses not to bloom

without a wish to,

without belief  in pain

to hold us true.

Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson is an American poet who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Late Wife. She is a professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is a contributing editor of the literary magazine Shenandoah.

from "Girls' School" 

The Physical Plant as Prologue

Everything here measures: weight, effort, sin—

and everything costs in this seclusion

of daughters, the place an ark—its hold

all of a kind in an archaic, combed

order: straightened teeth, trained spines, the chapel's

benches in rigid rows before crimson

kneeling pillows, slim beds in dormitories,

the muted ticking of practice rooms, the stalls

just-mucked, the halls humid with breathing.

And in the brushes, their hair—enough to line

the nests of a hundred generations of birds.

Fire Drill

Bells sound them from sleep, and their imaginations

rise, recite all they have been told: the curtains

of fire, the beds, nightgowns, their hair, their hair.

They've practiced this escape before

and know to close the windows last, descend

the darkened flights of stairs in practiced wordlessness

to line up, barefoot, on the dew-wet lawn,

face the building, pretend to watch it burn.

Beginning Sculpture: The Subtractive Method

The girls sit before the assignment—identical

blocks of salt—and from tall, precarious stools,

look down into blank planes of possibility. In the end,

though, the only choice is to carve something

smaller. So they begin. Rough chunks like hail

fall before the rasps and chisels' beveled

edges. Salt permeates this air as it has

for years, the floor gritty, their hands, eyes,

even the skylights made opaque with it—

disappearing not unlike the way it is

subtracted from similar blocks, in the fields,

before the tongues of the horses.