52 Books in 52 Weeks: Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers

Cover of  The Stick Soldiers, BOA Editions, 2013, 103 pp., ISBN 9781938160066.

Robin McCormack's book challenge continues. (Reports are due every Sunday.)  This week a poetry book about the war in Iraq comes with my highest recommendation.


Hugh Martin signed on with the Army National Guard in June 2001 for a standard six-year hitch.  The twin towers of the World Trade Center came down in September.  By 2003, he was attending Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.  In an essay for the New York Times ten years later, he writes,

The war began for me while I was sitting on a couch in a living room. Like many people, I watched it all commence on television. At a friend’s house on campus, I sat with a few college friends and drank Bud Ice from bottles. We weren’t drinking beer because of the war; we were drinking simply because, being in college, it was something we often did. White smoke from an explosion would burst up from the cityscape of Baghdad as the sound echoed through the dark. Yellow tracers from antiaircraft fire sprayed randomly into the sky. The ticker on the bottom of the screen euphemistically summarized what was happening (while adding some alliteration and a subtle rhyme): “Large explosion rocks Iraq’s capital.” 

By 2004, Martin was withdrawing from school, when his unit deployed to Iraq. These poems recount his time in basic training, his preparation for Iraq, his experience withdrawing from school, his time in country and his return home to Ohio. Hugh Martin went on to finish his degree on Muskingum in 2009,  obtained an MFA from Arizona State University in  2012 and that fall became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.  This month, he started  as a lecturer in the English Department at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Photographer Roger May: Broadening the View of Appalachia

Map from Appalachian Regional Commission via Roger May.

Roger May's new collaboration with other photographers and writers Looking at Appalachia: 50 Years After the War on Poverty.  His definition for the project is the area funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  I might quibble with that, as it leaves out Roanoke and includes some areas that aren't exactly in our mountains and valleys.  As Rudy Abramson and my friend Jean Haskell write in their introduction to , the Encyclopedia of Appalachia,

At the beginning, as ever since, the federal map reflected the exigencies of congressional politics as much as economic need, geography, or culture. Many inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New York were surprised to learn that the government in Washington considered them Appalachians, and some were opposed to the very idea. Newly elected New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had taken up a deep interest in the region during his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign, led the effort to make the southern tier counties of his adopted state part of the federal region. Similarly, Mississippi was included largely due to the influence of Representative Jamie Whitten, a powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee. On the other hand, a number of Virginia mountain counties that were Appalachian by any standard except political were left out because their representative, Richard H. Poff, was opposed to the 1965 bill.

But maybe Roger's geographical definition makes sense in that his reference point is the War on Poverty.  He writes in the overview,

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in the United States and nowhere was this war more photographed than Appalachia. A quick Google image search of “war on poverty” will yield several photographs of President Johnson on the porch of the Fletcher family home in Inez, Kentucky. Many of the War on Poverty photographs, whether intentional or not, became a visual definition of Appalachia. These images have often drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the intended cause, but unjustly came to represent the entirety of the region while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes. In an attempt to explore the diversity of Appalachia and establish a visual counter point, this project will look at Appalachia fifty years after the declaration of the War on Poverty. Drawing from a diverse population of photographers [and now writers] within the region, this new crowdsourced image archive will serve as a reference that is defined by its people as opposed to political legislation. 

Then again, "as defined by its people" is hardly as defined by ARC funding.

I'm happy to report that Roger has now added a written component:  Notes on Appalachia, to include us writers of prose and poetry, as well as storytellers.

...[W]e’re looking for your notes, thoughts, stories, hopes, dreams, interviews, and more about your section of Appalachia. Due to the incredible generosity of the folks at Field Notes, we have 13 sets of their “County Fair” edition notebooks that we’re itching to get into your hands! Your narratives will provide a rich context to the visual representations of Appalachia that have been submitted to the project. Here's the scoop – one notebook will be mailed to a point of contact in each of the project’s 13 states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. From there, that person will initiate sharing the memo book throughout the counties in their respective state. When it’s full, the memo books will be returned to Roger May...and new ones will be dispatched....The memo books will be scanned and shared on the project site... and will possibly be included in a print exhibition of the project photographs beginning next year. 

And for my fellow Virginians, here are the photograph from our state as of this evening:

Lauren Pound (of Athens, Ohio) Richlands, Tazewell County
Chris Jackson (of the Eastern Panhandle of WV), Covington, Alleghany County
Joseph Oliver Shay (location not listed) Buena Vista and Glasgow, Rockbridge County
Katie Currid (Staunton, VA) McDowell, Highland County
Jeremy M. Lange (Durham, NC) Patrick County
Pat Jarrett  (Shenandoah Valley of VA)  Lexington, Virginia

I know I'll be writing my state contact (Salvador Barajas) and I hope you will, too.  Here's the list of state contacts (or if one is not listed, consider filling the position.  If you have questions write Roger.  His email is also at that link.

Ethelbert Miller's in his Fifth Inning

Photo of Miller by Shyree Mezick used by permission. Ethelbert Miller (blog, website) gave a reading at Volume II Bookstore September 10th, 2009, after which I interviewed him via email over a couple of  days from 9/30 through 10/1 and wrote this draft.. A version of the interview was slated to appear in 16 Blocks, but never made it, so once I confirmed that I published it today. Ethelbert's poem here, "Hitless and Crying at the Plate" is from April 2009 collection from Curbstone, On Saturdays, I Santana With You. He chairs the board the Institute for Policy Studies and directs the African American Resource Center at Howard University. He has authored of nine books of poetry and two memoirs and edited four anthologies.

~

Do you see yourself as a "cultural worker." Is being a poet and memoirist part of this?

I haven't used the term "cultural worker" to define myself since the early 1980s. Back then I was doing work that placed me in touch with people from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chile. I saw my poetry and activism being responsible for connecting communities with different cultures and interests. One person I admire, who used this term was singer Bernice Reagon, one of the Freedom Singers and the founder of Sweet Honey In The Rock. When I think of Paul Robeson, I think of the definitive cultural worker. Today I'm more comfortable with the label "Literary Activist." I keep the door open for the words poet and memoirist. I define being a literary activist as working with publishing, promotion and preservation.


So, "cultural workers" connect communities with different cultures and interests...you don't use the term to describe youself anymore, but when you were here in Blacksburg you spoke of going to the Middle East?

I've been fortunate to travel to a number of countries in the Middle East. I have visited Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and Israel.

Earlier this year I was invited to Abu Dhabi for the release of a collection of my poems (At Night We Are All Black Poets) that had been translated into Arabic. I think it's important to visit Arab nations in order to gain a better understanding of Islam. The major adjustment I've had to make is around issues of gender. I'm concern with the status of women in the Muslim world. I feel that the segregation of people by sex is no different than keeping people apart by race. I can't see a society or nation reaching its full potential unless everyone is treated equally. I'm respectful of cultural differences but I think there are limitations to the tolerance of oppression in its various forms. Lately I've been looking at societies in which "joy" is openly expressed. I feel life is to be celebrated. What type of God would prevent one from dancing?

As a literary activist you're involved with "promotion and preservation" Would you tell us a little about your work on Langston Hughes?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project coordinated by Poets House (in New York). They sent me to a number of public libraries around the country to give lectures on Langston Hughes. It was fun reading Langston's work and sharing it with adults and children. I've always enjoyed his work since it is so accessible to the reader. His book, The Big Sea is a personal favorite. I like the fact that Langston Hughes was a man of letters and he traveled around the world. I've been fortunate to visit some of the same places he went to. It's unfortunate that much of his work represented in American poetry anthologies are from his early years as a writer.The radical Hughes of the 1930s is often not discussed in classrooms. When he was alive he was censored not for his racial work but for his poems that dealt with religion. I think it's important to acknowledge the full career of Langston Hughes. His children books, the work that he translated and the plays he presented on stage, all provide a different perspective of a man who was loved and should be viewed as a literary genius. Hughes should be viewed not just as a black writer but also as an experimental voice in American literature. One can see this in a book like Ask Your Momma.

When you read in Blacksburg you included work by other poets. What's your philosophy behind that...

I read poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and Liam Rector [and] Pablo Neruda. I like to underscore my appreciation for poetry by reading the work of other poets. I also like to show how what I'm attempting to do complements what is already in the canon. I read Liam's work because I want to keep his memory alive. Hopefully good poetry can defy death. There are so many voices the average reader and lover of poetry need to know about. I try to turn my readings into forums of discovery.

When I listened to you read the first anecdote about your father in your first memoir Fathering Words, I was struck by how the cadence still was something like a poem. How is the process of writing memoir different than writing poems.

I define myself first as a poet. I hope that when I sit down to write prose or creative non-fiction I don't leave something behind. I want to infuse the poetic sensibility into everything I do. While writing [the first memoir] Fathering Words, I would read passages aloud for the sound and the taste of it. I wanted to produce a book that people would read and underline a passage, a sentence or two. I wanted the reader to return to my memoir the way a person returns to a poem. The second and third reading becoming a sweater or shawl to keep a person warm.

I didn't do any major revision with Fathering Words. I gave the book to my editor at St. Martin's Press and it was accepted. I don't know if I could have gone back and revised my memoir. I don't think I had the discipline to do that back then. The writing process was much quicker for me. I wrote my first memoir using a computer. Many of my ideas for poems are still written down on paper. Writing poetry is a much slower process for me.


The second memoir, The Fifth Inning often uses baseball as a metaphor.  Can you talk about your relationship with "home plate?"

Baseball is a game that begins and ends at home. You bat. You try to touch all the bases and return home. In The 5th Inning I take the reader into the home I tried to create for my wife and family. I think I failed to provide the type of place my wife would have liked. That's why early in the memoir I describe all the apartments we lived in. Notice at the end of the book, I'm getting ready to leave VCCA and my wife Denise is coming to take me home. It was important to have this type of ending. Memoir is also storytelling. I needed to present the reader with a degree of light after writing what many view as a dark or sad book. I'm reminded of what my friend Julia Galbus mentioned (and I included in the book) about many baseball games ending because of darkness and perhaps a storm. I'm aware of that but I needed to be positive in terms of the importance of home, especially in a spiritual sense.


What did you want to leave with your readers? What did you discover in the process of writing the book.

I wanted to leave the reader aware of his or her own shortcomings. I wanted to make someone who is forty or in their fifties aware of how quickly everything can end. I also wanted people to hit and pitch better in their own lives. Even when I compiled an honest list of the many things I can't do, maybe a reader might stop and do the same thing. I think I've also given the reader a short book. A book that physically can fit into a bag or case. A bullpen book. Something to read as the game of life is played around you. Turn a page and never known if it's your turn. Somewhere a manager beckons to the bullpen - time for you to get ready. Are you ready?

~

Hitless And Crying At The Plate by Ethelbert Miller (For Reetika)

Are you crying? There's no crying in baseball. -Manager Jimmy Dugan to outfielder Evelyn Gardner
in A League of Their Own. 1992.

By the way, you should know that every time
I wear a baseball cap while working, I
Ask John, Guess who I am?
He says, I don't know- who?
I say Ethelbert: - A letter from Reetika Vazirani, July 3, 1991.



STRIKE I.

The year Sammy Sosa
Corked his bat is the year
You took your life. We all felt cheated
You like our hero standing
In the batters box alone.


STRIKE II.

Why do poets
Try to change the rules of the game?
Why is death America's pastime?


STRIKE III.

Sometimes I fear the blues
Is a curveball breaking
Near my head.

On Saturdays, I Santana With You, Curbstone, 2009.

Irene McKinney, ¡Presente!

Photo of of Irene (right), Denise Giardina and Jayne Anne Phillips at the 2010 West Virginia Book Festival accompanied Greg Moore's Charleston Gazette post:  "Live blog: Sunday at the West Virginia Book Festival."


This will be brief and I'll write more later.  I just wanted to let folks who loved Irene know, if they hadn't heard the sad news. The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine hasn't even posted the news yet at her bio, as I write this. The service is 11 a.m. Wednesday at Talbott Funeral Home in Belington,, WV (Barbour County), where Irene was born and grew up on her family's farm. That's about 2 1/2 hours from Charleston, 4 hours from here.


Phillips, who comes from Buckhannon, WV--where McKinney taught--told the Charleston Gazette,

She is a great loss to the state of West Virginia...She made West Virginia real, sensory and important in all its timeless variety, the land, farms, the people and animals, the rituals. She knew the meaning of home place.

I last saw Irene McKinney that Sunday in October 2010. Before her reading, she sat next to me on one of the benches in the cavernous Charleston Civic Center, talking about how excited she was to start a new low residency MFA Creative Writing Program at West Virginia Wesleyan and asked if I had any suggestions for faculty. I told her about Katie Fallon, whom I knew from her time at Virginia Tech. Irene's announcement followed the first week in November.

The program offers interested writers the opportunity to explore the connection between place and identity, focusing on their home area, one of the field study destinations, such as Ireland, or the Appalachian region itself. The program will officially launch in July, 2011 with a three-day literary festival, and the deadline for applications is March 1, 2011.

Irene was so approachable, so enthusiastic, treating folks as her equal. Outspoken and ironic, she often repeated the words which can be found penned in the introduction to the 2003 anthology "Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia."

I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet, and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.

Or in the poem "At 24",

"I don't know who I am, but you can't have me."

I had only met Irene once before, when I got to participate with her and Denise Giardiana as part of Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition's West Virginia Writers MTR project. I already knew Denise from Hindman and Jeff Mann from VirginiaTech, as well as Chris Green and Edwina Pendarvis, who had edited an anthology that included one of my poems, as will as Diane Gillam Fisher, whom I had just met that March at the Appalachian Studies Association conference. The project was where I met Katie, Bob Henry Baber and Rob Merritt.

UPDATE 2/7/2012  Good Night, Irene

Nikki Finney's Remarkable Head Off and Split Takes National Book Award

Affrilachian Poets  member and UK English Department prof  Nikky Finney wins National Book Award for Head Off and Split. I was wowed when I got to hear her read at the  Symposium on Affrilachia  @ UK in March.

In a November 11 interview with WUKY, Finney explains the title of her collection:

When I was a girl, my mom would send me to the fish monger. I would go in, choose the fish, hand it over to him. He would inevitably say, "Head off and split" question mark.

I went back five years ago. The same phrase was said to me. I'd heard it a thousand times. I thought, wow, that's a great metaphor for what we dismiss or cut away or don't want to see. The cold grey eyes, the scales, the fins, and then we're handed over the succulent fish without all those nasty details.

I wanted to bring that in to talk about how, as a culture and a community and a country, that I think we have to stay involved in all the details. We can't hand the fish over and just get it back with the succulent fish. I think we're in a time where we really we have to sort of get our hands in there and do the dirty work and not hand it off to somebody else.

Here's Finney reading some of her poems:

"Left" (pdf of poem)

"Condoleeza Suite"

"My Time Up with You"

"Red Velvet" [about Rosa Parks]

"Dancing with Strom"

And a long reading at the New School (starting @ 12:20) starting with her recounting the story of when Nikki Giovanni came to Tallladega College.

There's  an interview available at Oxford American and one at Poets & Writers for the February-March 2011 issue which you will have to read at the library, if you don't have a copy of the magazine..  The Virginia Festival of the book doesn't have its schedule up yet for March 2012, but announced via facebook that Finney is one of its readers.

Here's her acceptance speech (@16:50)
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18565428  (I couldn't embed because evidently only YouTube works with Blogger.

Hollins Literary Festival

Photo of Molly Peacock by Marc Royce (email, bio)


Photo of David Payne (uncredited)



Photo of Valerie Martin by Murdo Macleod (website) in September 20, 2009 Guardian interview.

Novelist David Payne and 2010 Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence (Back to Wando Passo), poet/memoirist Molly Peacock (The Second Blush) and novelist Valerie Martin (Property) will be the featured writers at tomorrow's Hollins literary festival with readings and a panel in the auditorium of the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center (next to the Dana Science Building and across from Moody Center.)

10:30 a.m.--David Payne (bio, email)
11:30 a.m--Molly Peacock (bio, email)
2:00 p.m--Valerie Martin (bio, email)
3:15 p.m.--Poetry panel discussing student-submitted work

There will also be a 12:45 p.m. luncheon in the Moody Dining Hall (pay at the door) and a reception in the lobby of the arts center at 4:15 p.m.

Here's a poem by Molly Peacock from her 2002 collection Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton)

Don't Think Governments End The World

Don't think governments end the world. The blast
the burnings, and the final famine will
be brought on by mistake. "I'm sorry," the last
anxious man at the control panel will
try to say, his face streaked with panic, red
hives rising on his neck. He'll have been a jerk
all his life, who couldn't get through his head
that his mother couldn't love him. Work
at the panel would give him the control
that she had denied him again and again.

Thus the world will burn through the central hole
of his being. He won't really be sure-again,
having never been assured of her- of what
he is supposed to do. That is, he'll be sure
at every exercise until the shut
blank door of the final moment injures
his gerrybuilt control and BANG, BANG, BANG.

It won't be his fault, his childish mother's fault,
or the fault of what produced her or what
produced what produced her back through the vault
of savage centuries. If he'd just known what,
he'd have done it to please. He might have known himself
through what he'd felt, and thus might be clear.
She might have said, "That's nice, dear,"
and we wouldn't be dead.

Aren't you scared of your life in his hands?
But of all the men whose hands you'd hope to be in,
Name the one you're sure of. The history of nations
is cold; the world burns by generations.

Grace Bauer: "Oh, baby. Boom or bust."

Cover of the Fall 2009 issue of Prairie Schooner.

~

I've know poet Grace Bauer (email, some of her poems) back from the time when she taught at Virginia Tech along side others such as Ed Falco, David Graham and Jeff Mann. Since 1994, she's been at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she has stepped in for Hilda Raz (email, webpage) to edit the Fall 2009 issue of Prairie Schooner.

As she explains in an introductory essay, "Baby Boomer Issue(s),"

Maybe it was all the recent news stories about the very first baby boomers on the verge of retirement—and the warnings about the financial havoc this was bound to wreak upon Social Security and the national economy, which was already in pretty dire straits. Or the headlines, one after the other over the last few years, announcing that cultural icons ranging from Ginsberg's Howl to Motown Records to the peace sign—even the ever youthful Barbie—had hit the half-century mark. Maybe it was the ads for Barneys NY in a December 2008 New York Times Magazine, wishing the world a "Hippie Holiday"—complete with DayGlo-colored images of those fifty-year-old peace signs and a declaration that the store was "having a COUNTER-CULTURE moment" "remembering 1968 forty years on." Or the advance reviews in the Arts & Leisure section for the reopening of Hair on Broadway. Maybe it was because the daily reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were sounding vaguely like the reports on Vietnam more than thirty years ago (which is maybe why they are restaging Hair). Maybe it was the recent election of Barack Obama, which reminded at least some people of the election of JFK—not since then had they seen so much youthful exuberance and idealism so unabashed it even led to "an open apology to boomers everywhere" from Gen X'er Heather Havrilesky on salon.com, where she said "We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years"—though she couldn't resist mentioning those of us who might be wearing socks with sandals or smelling like we'd "been on the bus with Wavy Gravy for the last three decades." Maybe it was just that, to paraphrase a boomer-era song, "something's in the air"—which is maybe just my own personal sense of "time's winged chariot" (disguised, perhaps, as Wavy Gravy's bus or a compact SUV) drawing nearer. But when Hilda Raz asked me once again to stand in as acting editor of Prairie Schooner while she enjoyed a semester of well-earned leave, and asked further if I might want to do some kind of special issue, I immediately said "Baby Boomers!" A bit self-serving, no doubt, since I'm a writer who was born in the midst of that boom, but I wanted to see what such a gathering might look like, and so I set out to see.

On line, you can find excerpts from the Fall issue:

• Marly Swick's story, "Nothing Extra"
• Albert Goldbarth poem, "W"
  
• A. E. Stringer's poem, "Evolution of Rock and Roll"
• David Wojahn's poem, "Mix Tape to be Brought to Her in Rehab"
• Marianne Boruch's essay, "The Lincoln Boys"
• Charles Bernstein's poem, "On Election Day"
• Stephen Gibson's poem, "Ghazal on a Reading by a New York City Poet"
  
• Judith Ortiz Cofer's poem, "The Arrival of the Heavenly Corps"
• Ai's poem, "A Cigar Is, Oh Never Mind"
  

There are also poems from her former colleagues Graham, Falco, and Mann, plus Naomi Shihab Nye, among others (contributors' notes). The blog for the magazine indicates there will be an interview with Grace about the Fall issue here.

And speaking of permalinks, due to magazine's method of assigning links, all of the above will be broken once the Winter 2009 issue comes out. But you can still find them by substituting in the url "archives/fall09" for "current". James Engelhardt, the magazine's managing editor wrote to let me know that he's passing on a suggestion to change the linking, but it's up to the IT guys at the College of Business Admin which hosts the site.

Happy 250th Robbie

Portrait of Robert Burns from The Scotsman.

And there's a hand my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o thine,
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne

A sesquicentennial is the 150th anniversary. (Half again a hundred.) A bicentennial is the two hundredth anniversary. Apparently the 250th is the semiquincentenary. And to celebrate, the Brits have just issued the third set of Robbie (or in the Scot's spelling Rabbie) Burns stamps.

With the issue of the set, the Telegraph reports,

Scotland's national bard will overtake Winston Churchill, who has been honoured with two special editions of stamps, while William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens have only received one each.

The night was marked all over the world with dinners in the bard's honor (even in Lawrence Kansas.) And if you want to plan a Burns Supper for next year, Bennett Fischer of Brooklyn, N.Y. has the recipes. Hugh Porter last year explained all about haggis for Time Magazine in "The Bacchanal of Burns Night." Of course he was writing from London, so he maunna be thought of as tha gowd standard.


The BBC has coverage of the celebration in Scotland here. Everything you wanted to know about the Scottish Bard can be found here.

The Inauguration: the address, the poem, the benediction

Photograph by AP's Ron Edmonds of poet Elizabeth Alexander reading her "Praise song for the day" at the inauguration of Barack Obama. The photograph accompanied "Poet Elizabeth Alexander, Bridging a Nation's Past, Present and Future," Bob Thompson WaPo story on the web tonight which will appear January 21, 2009 in the paper on page C10.


Praise song for the day by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. A chapbook edition will be published on February 6, 2009 by Graywolf.

(With a hat tip to Mark Doty for giving the proper lineation.)

I was one of about five hundred folks who turned up at the Lyric Theatre today with staples for the food pantry in exchange for a screening of the inauguration of our 44nd president ( or I should say presidency, as Grover Cleveland gets counted twice for non-consecutive terms in 1885–1889 and 1893–1897, thus being the 22nd and 24th president.)

The address as prepared for delivery is here
The benediction by civil rights veteran, the Reverand Lowery is here

I like Alexander's poem (unlike Adam Kirsch of the New Republic who called it "bureaucratic" or Erica Wagner who found it "unmemorable.") Maybe not as coherent or disciplined as it could have been, but it's hard to write for an occasion (as Jim Fisher pointed out in Salon) and to write in language and images that can be perceived on first hearing by a wide audience.

To me, Alexander summonsed up ordinary Americans moving forward, in a poem appropriate for the occasion. Could it be a southern thing, finding this poem perfectly fine, as did poets interviewed in the Ashville area? And the folks at Split This Rock had thoughtful things to say-- Melissa Tuckey and Ethelbert Miller (with more at his blog, here) plus Sarah Browning and Joseph Ross in the comments.

Update: Joel Dias-Porter takes a close look at the poem here.

Word of the Day: Archaea

Photo of Pattiann Rogers from the Vermont Studio Center, where she will be giving a reading in October 2009.

I wasn't familiar with the term "archaea" and looked it up after reading the lovely poem by Pattiann Rogers found below (website, email), which first appeared in the September 2005 issue of Poetry. (hat tip to Amy Grier (email). Archaea are a

unique group of microorganisms classified as bacteria (Archaeobacteria) but genetically and metabolically different from all other known bacteria. They appear to be living fossils, the survivors of an ancient group of organisms that bridged the gap in evolution between bacteria and the eukaryotes (multicellular organisms).

The name Archaea comes from the Greek archaios meaning ancient.

From MedicineNet, the authors of the Webster's New World Medical Dictionary. See also the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology exhibit, Life's Extremists. Archaea can live where othres wound not survive, for instance in the hot springs at Yellowstone.

Address: the Archaens, One Cell Creatures

Although most are totally naked
and too scant for even the slightest
color and although they have no voice
that I've ever heard for cry or song, they are,
nevertheless, more than mirage, more
than hallucination, more than falsehood.

They have confronted sulfuric
boiling black sea bottoms and stayed,
held on under ten tons of polar ice,
established themselves in dense salts
and acids, survived eating metal ions.
They are more committed than oblivion,
more prolific than stars.

Far too ancient for scripture, each
one bears in its one cell one text--
the first whit of alpha, the first
jot of bearing, beneath the riling
sun the first nourishing of self.

Too lavish for saints, too trifling
for baptism, they have existed
throughout never gaining girth enough
to hold a firm hope of salvation.
Too meager in heart for compassion,
too lean for tears, less in substance
than sacrifice, not one has ever
carried a cross anywhere.

And not one of their trillions
has ever been given a tombstone.
I've never noticed a lessening
of light in the ceasing of any one
of them. They are more mutable
than mere breathing and vanishing,
more mysterious than resurrection,
too minimal for death.

The Spring 2008 issue of the Georgia Review featured an interview with Rogers by Gordon Johnston, Breaking Old Forms: A Conversation.

DC Poet Judith Harris

Photo of Judith Harris from her website.

From Ted Kooser, D.C. poet Judith Harris (website, see also her work at Beltway Poets of which I am also a member,


Gathering Leaves in Grade School

They were smooth ovals,
and some the shade of potatoes—
some had been moth-eaten
or spotted, the maples
were starched, and crackled
like campfire.

We put them under tracing paper
and rubbed our crayons
over them, X-raying
the spread of their bones
and black, veined catacombs.

We colored them green and brown
and orange, and
cut them out along the edges,
labeling them deciduous
or evergreen.

All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom,
with its cockeyed globe,
and nautical maps of ocean floors,
I watched those leaves

lost in their own worlds
flap on the pins of the bulletin boards:
without branches or roots,
or even a sky to hold on to.

Thomas Lux in the WaPo: Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

Photograph of poet Thomas Lux (email) from Georgia Tech, where since 2002, he has held the Bourne chair and directed the Poetry at Tech program.

*


December 7, Mary Karr picked this Thomas Lux poem from his "New and Selected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin, 1997) for her column, "Poet's Choice 2008. Here's a 1999 interview with Lux from the Courtland Review.

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

For some semitropical reason

when the rains fall

relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise

bright and scary

arachnids. They can swim

a little, but not for long

and they can't climb the ladder out.

They usually drown -- but

if you want their favor,

if you believe there is justice,

a reward for not loving

the death of ugly

and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,

rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then

you would leave a lifebuoy

or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning

you would haul ashore

the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them

back to the bush, and know,

be assured that at least these saved,

as individuals, would not turn up

again someday

in your hat, drawer,

or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even --

when your belief in justice

merges with your belief in dreams --

they may tell the others

in a sign language

four times as subtle

and complicated as man's

that you are good,

that you love them,

that you would save them again.

"Tarantulas on a Lifebuoy" is from .

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

Philip Levine: Our Valley

Still from PBS Video of poet Philip Levin, one of my favorites, reading "Belle Isle 1949" for the PBS project, Poetry Everywhere.

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

Here's Levine's page from the Academy of American Poets and a poem from the November 2008 Poetry:


Our Valley

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Philip Levine

Lannan Literary Awards

Photograph of poet Mark Doty from the LA Times whi won the National book award for Fire to Fire, his new and selected poems from Harper Collins (2008.)

Jordanian poet Islam Samhan arrested

Photo by Salah Malkawi for The National



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7683643.stm
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081006/FOREIGN/619470860/1011/ART
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081020/FOREIGN/240700909/1135

Virgina Literary Awards

Acccording to tomorrow's uncredited story in the Richmond Times Dispatch, which I'm guessing may be a press release reprint, Shenandoah editor R.T. Smith, who received the Library of Virginia 2002 poetry award for Messenger is again the recipient of the poetry prize for Outlaw Style: Poems which the of judges hailed as offering

a brooding understanding of both the riches and horrors of Southern culture.

He won out over other poetry finalists Blessings and Inclemencies by Constance Merritt and Littlefoot: A Poem by Charles Wright.

Wesley C. Hogan, assistant professor of history and co-director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginia State University, won the non-fiction award for Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America which

explores how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee broke open the caste system in the South and offers new insights into the internal dynamics of SNCC as well as the larger civil-rights and black-power movements.

The judges felt that ...[she] reminds us of the ongoing quest for democracy while highlighting its complexity and fragility and thatHogan's voluminous research and graceful style engaged the reader from beginning to end.

The other finalists for the nonfiction prize were Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and Peter Wallenstein for Cradle of America: Four Centuries of Virginia History. Honnorable mention went to What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning.

For the first time since the inception of the Library of Virginia Literary two awards for fiction to creative wrting professors. George Mason University's Helon Habila for Measuring Time and Old Dominion Universaity's Janet Peery for What the Thunder Said, are winners for the best work of fiction. The judges felt that the literary styles of both, though different, were

equally impressive and equally worthy of the award. "Measuring Time" plays with our conceptions of history, showing it as something lived and told rather than documented. In "What the Thunder Said," the language and structure of the novel appear effortless, the judges said, the narrative voice is authentic and evocative of the Depression during the Dust Bowl years and Peery's prose is beautifully lyrical.

This year's other fiction finalist was The Rope Walk by Carrie Brown, who won the category in 2005 for Confinement and in 2001 for The Hatbox Baby.
. . .

The winner of the People's Choice Award in the fiction category is Puss'n Cahoots by Rita Mae Brown and in the nonfiction category, Unruly Americans by Woody Holton. The finalists for these awards are selected by a panel of independent Virginia booksellers and librarians from the list of books nominated for the Library's Literary Awards and winners are decided by readers voting online and in libraries.

David Wojahn, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and directs its creative writing program, received the Weinstein Poetry Prize. His first book, "Icehouse Lights," won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. He is the author of six collections of poetry. The Weinstein Prize winner is selected separately from the Library of Virginia's Literary Awards by a special board of curators.

Pamela Duncan Edwards was honored for "The Old House," winner of the second annual Whitney and Scott Cardozo Award for Children's Literature.

Rita Dove is the recipient of the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award. A former Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, Dove is the youngest person -- and the first African-American -- to receive this highest official honor in American letters. She held the position for two years. In 2004, then-Gov. Mark R. Warner appointed her Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a two-year position. Dove is Commonwealth Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia.

Poet and critic Hayden Carruth dies at 87

Photo by Ted Rosenberg of Hayden Carruth from his obituary at the Washington Post. His page at the American Academy of Poets is here.

Prepare for Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth

"Why don't you write me a poem that will prepare me for your
death?" you said.
It was a rare day here in our climate, bright and sunny. I didn't feel like
dying that day.
I didn't even want to think about it -- my lovely knees and bold
shoulders broken open,
Crawling with maggots. Good Christ! I stood at the window and I saw
a strange dog
Running in the field with its nose down, sniffing the snow, zigging and
zagging,
And whose dog is that? I asked myself. As if I didn't know. The limbs
of the apple trees
Were lined with snow, making a bright calligraphy against the world,
messages to me
From an enigmatic source in an obscure language. Tell me, how shall I
decipher them?
And a jay slanted down to the feeder and looked at me behind my glass
and squawked.
Prepare, prepare. Fuck you, I said, come back tomorrow. And here he
is in this new gray and gloomy morning.
We're back to our normal weather. Death in the air, the idea of death
settling around us like mist,
And I am thinking again in despair, in desperation, how will it happen?
Will you wake up
Some morning and find me lying stiff and cold beside you in our bed?
How atrocious!
Or will I fall asleep in the car, as I nearly did a couple of weeks ago,
and drive off the road
Into a tree? The possibilities are endless and not at all fascinating,
except that I can't stop
Thinking about them, can't stop envisioning that moment of hideous
violence.
Hideous and indescribable as well, because it won't happen until it's
over. But not for you
For you it will go on and on, thirty years or more, since that's the
distance between us
In our ages. The loss will be a great chasm with no bridge across it
(for we both know
Our life together, so unexpected, is entirely loving and rare). Living
on your own --
Where will you go? what will you do? And the continuing sense of
displacement
From what we've had in this little house, our refuge on our green or
snowbound
Hill. Life is not easy and you will be alive. Experience reduces itself to
platitudes always,
Including the one which says that I'll be with you forever in your
memories and dreams.
I will. And also in hundreds of keepsakes, such as this scrap of a poem
you are reading now.

--from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press.

The Cows at Night

(According Betty Smith-Mastaler in her tribute on Vermont Public Radio, Carruth told the audience at a reading in 2002 that this was as good a poem as he had ever written when he was in "his bucolic mood.")

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, taking my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them - forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

*

While most people know the story of poets turning down an invitation from Laura Bush because of their opposition to the war, Carruth turned down the Clintons in 1998, writing,

This is to acknowledge your invitation to attend a "Millennium Evening" at the White House in celebration of American poetry on April 22nd. Thank you for thinking of me. However, it would seem the greatest hypocrisy for an honest American poet to be present on such an occasion at the seat of the power which has not only neglected but abused the interests of poets and their readers continually, to say nothing of many other administratively dispensable segments of the population. Consequently, I must decline.

Dodge Poetry Festival Attracts

Poster for the 12th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

*
Wish I was in New Jersey! September 25-8, $78 will get you and 19,999 others into Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey to hear readings by:

1. Janet E. Aalfs (whom I met at Split This Rock)
   
2. Joy Harjo
   
3. Brenda Shaughnessy
4. Chris Abani
5. Ken Hart
6. Vivian Shipley
7. Debra Allbery
8. Robert Hass
9. Evie Shockley
   
10. Simon Armitage
    
11. Brenda Hillman
12. Charles Simic
13. Renée Ashley
14. Edward Hirsch
15. Patricia Smith
16. Coleman Barks
    
17. Jane Hirshfield
18. Tracy K. Smith
19. Jan Beatty
20. Susan Jackson
21. Lisa Starr
22. Coral Bracho
23. Charles H. Johnson
24. Madeline Tiger
25. Lucille Clifton
26. Ted Kooser
27. J. C. Todd
28. Peter Cole
    
29. Maxine Kumin
30. Skye Van Saun
31. Billy Collins
32. Joseph O. Legaspi
33. Paul Violi
    
34. Mark Doty
35. Betty Bonham Lies
    
36. Peter Waldor
37. Thomas Sayers Ellis
38. Jeffrey McDaniel
39. BJ Ward
    
40. Martín Espada
41. Naomi Shihab Nye
    
42. Luke Warm Water
    
43. Beth Ann Fennelly
44. Sharon Olds
    
45. Joe Weil
46. Sarah Gambito
47. Linda Pastan
48. C. D. Wright
49. Forrest Gander
50. Patrick Phillips
51. Franz Wright
52. Aracelis Girmay
53. Robin Robertson
54. Kevin Young
55. Patricia Goodrich
56. Steve Sanfield
57. Nina Israel Zucker
58. Kate Greenstreet
59. Roger Sedarat
60. Luray Gross
61. Ravi Shankar