Aime Cesaire Dead at 94

An obituary appears here.

The Amazon.com page for his wonderful book, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, appears here. It's also available at Amazon.co.uk, but that page has no description or reviews.

How to trivialise women's poetry

Eva Salzman's piece of this title is on the Books Blog at The Guardian.

NaPoWriMo Day 13

It's day 13 for another forty minutes, and I'm 15 for 13, i.e. 15 poems for 13 days. I've been glad to receive poems and comments on progress via email, but I'd prefer people posted them here so everyone can benefit.

The difficulty I've struggled with lately is between I Must Write to This Standard and I Must Write in Ambition. By ambition I mean striving for originality, maintaining absolute rigor, not settling for more than a complete and accomplished poem.

Writing that, I remember what my partner's sister said when she spent Christmas with us in 2006. I don't remember how it came up, but I said something like, "I try to do everything to the best of my ability," to which Amanda responded, "No wonder you're so tired!"

Anyway, tonight I wrote an okay piece (I Must Write to This Standard) and I was a little frustrated with myself for not going for more, though I knew I hadn't the energy for it. I think the trade-off of writing more poems is that while maybe I'll write more "good" work, I'll write less "superior" work.

Am I hard on myself? Should I settle for anything less?

An Ideal Bookstore

Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastracht, Netherlands

There's more information here.

NaPoWriMo, Day Five

How are others doing? I received quite a few emails the first three days, then little the last two. Is it getting to be more of a struggle?

I wrote a good deal the first three days, yesterday I wrote something rather scrappy late, and today I think having to write another poem made me feel like I could play. So I wrote a poem that plays around with large spaces within the lines, between fragments, 2-3 fragments per line, and had fun with it. Nice.

Denver Quarterly 42.2 (2008)

Yesterday afternoon I was flipping through a British poetry journal, and after reading seven or eight poems by different poets, the question came: "Why isn't anyone even trying to be interesting?" Every poem felt calm, perfectly linear, well contained, and without any spark of originality or vigor.

That night, as a remedy, I settled in with Denver Quarterly's latest issue. I've been reading and loving DQ for at least a decade now, maybe fifteen years, and I wish I had a subscription, though I catch up with it whenever I return home, as Illinois State University's Milner Library subscribes. I picked up this issue at the AWP in New York.

I've been dipping in and out of the issue for a few days now and reached the end last night, having skipped a piece here and there when it didn't look like what I was in the mood for, to go back to later. Here are some excerpts from what I did read (mind, the spacing's often incorrect as I don't know how to do that on here).


the apostrophe she wakes into
each morning

Christina Hutchins, "Her Father's Death in Her Body"

And we each had a sister
who had been a bird crawling out

of each of our dusk-filled chests.

George Kalamaras, "From the Book of Tongues (2)"

Each person braced for the next shock, and each shock reduced to an incident to report.

Carrie Bennett, "The skin, its willingness to burn" (prose poem)

she forms her shape to mine with little effort,
twining her legs around
when my mouth attaches to her neck like a little cup.

I must have twenty arms.

Michael Kiser, "Regeneration" (and that's the end of the poem)

The drug the need was made for cannot satisfy the need. Now I realize I was made for this half-consecrated world with its one hand running a comb through the stars.

Jennifer Militello, "Dear B," [Today, the rain] (prose poem)

...they decided a window was a way of singing when they tried mixing laughter through a catastrophe of light.

Jennifer Militello, "Dear B" [I knew] (pp)

the baby is eating stars, the stars are yellow like lemons.
they taste like lemonade and move down cold.

Deborah Poe, "Calcium (Ca)"

Like the windowpane
its moment already through
not unwashed or translucent

but like the poem, just barely
changed each time
it's looked through

Will Skinker, "The Last Photograph"

Nights resemble each other
in the way mug shots do

Sandra Stone, "Animal Grief"

Memories are the opposite
of dreams, which are placeless.

Janaka Stucky, "The Opposite of Dreams"

after all
that departure
the first Native American to visit Europe stayed forever. A fire
in 1727 destroyed the parish records, which included the location
of Pocohontas' grave, by nature, a door
is a gap
but a ceiling
wouldn't be offered in pieces or things that can't be divided, one cannot

for instance, offer another
a piece of fire or survival.

Cole Swensen, "Pocahontas (1595, Powhatan Confederacy - 1616, Gravesend, England)"
(nb, the spacing on this one is much different in the original)

Some poems in the issue I wish I'd written:

Carrie Bennett, "The machines knew to be careful this time"
Cynthia Cruz, "Cinderella's Self Portrait as Shane"
Chris Dombrowski, "Midst"
Cathryn Hankla, "Conquistadors in the Colonies"
Alessandra Lynch, "Bruise"
Sandra Stone, "Animal Grief"
Janaka Stucky, "Each a Threadless Distance from Crow and Lineament"
Cole Swensen, "The Ghost Heart," "Pocahontas," and "Toward the End"
Imants Ziedonis, "It's Hard for You to Understand" and "Don't Promise Me Anything Big"

Thank you, Denver Quarterly. Unwittingly you've been good to me.

NaPoWriMo, Day 1

Over the course of the day I've been heartened by how many people have joined the challenge. The mutual encouragement will certainly help.

I have written my poem for the day, 14 lines in couplets, and I would post it, but it's about a friend and it would be inappropriately revealing. As I've received a few poems and want to reply in kind when I can, I'm hoping to write another poem before the night's out--I'm on my third week of spring break and my workload has finally diminished a little, so this is the ideal time for me to start. How I'm going to write a poem on Friday the 11th, after teaching two long days in a row (especially exhausting with my jaw injury), with the MA workshop then a talk for the MAs on publishing that afternoon into evening, I can't yet imagine. I'm also going to Istanbul 21-28 April, so I'll only be able to check in occasionally, I expect--but I will write my poem a day, somehow.

NaPoWriMo

In the U.S., National Poetry Month is in April, and for some years now a number of poets have been writing a poem a day during the month to celebrate, hence the title of this post, National Poetry Writing Month or NaPoWriMo. Such sprees of writing have been very good for me in the past, so I've written to a number of poets I know, colleagues, former students, current students, etc., to ask who'd like to join me. The following have committed thus far, and I hope will drop in here from time to time to talk about the experience.

1. Cat Conway, London
2. Anna Robinson, London
3. Simon Reynolds, Bath
4. Catherine Hales, Berlin
5. Jenny Martin, Bath
6. Lynette Rees, Bradford on Avon
7. Barbara Marsh, London
8. Jude Rosen, London
9. Mo Gallacio, London
10. Annie McGann, Bristol
11. Lotte North, Bath
12. John Muckle, London
13. Rachel Lehrman, London
14. Matt Bryden, Bradford on Avon
15. Liz Skrbkova, Ireland
16. Jane Holland, Warwickshire
17. John Wheway, Bath
18. Rhona McAdam, Victoria, Canada
19. Julie-Ann Rowell, Totnes
20. Helen Pizzey, Freshford
21. Arleen Pare, Victoria, Canada
22. Abraham Anthony
23. Steve Smart, Melbourne
24. Ellie Evans, Llangatock, Wales
25. Barbara Pelman, Victoria, Canada
26. David Bryant, Bath
27. Kristina Close, Woking
28. Yvonne Blomer, Victoria, Canada
29. Claire Crowther, Kingston
30. Andrew Bailey, Chichester
31. Leslie Smith, Bath
32. Rebecca Preston, Devizes
33. Dikra Ridha, Bath
34. Rob A. Mackenzie, Edinburgh
35. Valeria Melchioretto, London
36. Paul Feldwick, Bath
37. Alex Jasiński, Prague
38. Harry Man, London
39. Ben Wilkinson, Sheffield
40. Cynthia Kerkham, Victoria, Canada

Ashbery and the lyric

In his thoughtful review of Ashbery's A Worldly Country and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems in the current issue of TLS, Stephen Burt writes, "Against a confessional model, in which we feel closer to a poet the more he reveals of his biography, Ashbery suggests that we see further into his soul the less we know about the person outside the poems: lyric poetry, of the kind that he writes, works not by telling us all about poets' documentable, material lives, but by revealing only the inner man."

This statement speaks equally for my own approach to lyric for the last eight or nine years. While I've occasionally written and published more patently biographical poems, my interest in writing them has been to understand something larger about the personal relationships presented rather than documenting or investigating the self. As it was well put by a poet from my London workshop, looking at a poem I'd written about what meals are like at the family home, the perspective was interestingly "anthropological," and that is generally my attitude toward the poems that go into the manuscript The Weather in Normal (such as "The Diagnosis" and "His Pantoum" from TLS last year).

But the bulk of my writing focuses on developing a lyric that uses metaphor, figurative narratives, etc. to investigate the interiority, the consciousness that accompanies certain events. Personal narrative that presents some insight as the ultimate gain of the experience/poem often limits the extent of the reader's participation by its biographical particulars, whereas I think a figurative narrative or structure more easily allows the reader to inhabit/extrapolate the experience of the poem to him/herself. It also facilitates a more nuanced understanding of what that experience may mean or represent. Or so I believe.

I'm 39?

On the one hand, it seems impossible that I am 39. On the other, when I think back over all I've done and experienced, it makes sense. I wouldn't have minded staying at 38, but no such chance in this world.