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A few weeks ago I was wondering if there was anything worse than a bad poetry reading–sitting captive in a low-ceilinged room in an uncomfortable chair listening to words that don’t seem to relate any meaning. The person I was complaining to asked why I go. I go for the kind of experience I had on Thursday, listening to Dana Gioia read his work at Falkirk House (the wonderful historic building where I read last summer) in San Rafael, courtesy of the Marin Poetry Center. I’ve written here before of Dana’s excellent critical prose, and of a “Verse,” a critical homage to Donald Justice that Dana told me last night will now be an ebook.

His rendering of whatever he’s reciting or reading is engaged, lively, dramatic. It’s a performance of the first order that makes you remember the magic of rhyme and meter, the delight of the spoken word. He read a long narrative poem, a sort of ghost story with a twist, which was perfect for the Victorian charm of the venue. I think this will appear in a new book to be published by Graywolf Press.

Not all his poetry is rhymed or metered verse, although it is all accomplished. He told a story about this poem. He was asked to write a New Year’s poem for some public event (I can’t remember the occasion or who asked). He wrote a 36 line poem that he later edited to a 28 line poem then a 24 line poem, then a sonnet then 12 lines, the 8, and finally this 6-line poem that has nothing to do with New Year’s. It was one of my favorites of the poems he read:

Unsaid
So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

You can find this and more in his current book, Interrogations at Noon.

–This blog can also be found on Meryl’s blog page:
www.dactyls-and-drakes.com/

A psychedelic watercolor by artist Luis Coig called Fertile Field is apt cover art for this fertile spring issue of Postroad. Like the other full-color plates in the portfolio drawn from Coig’s 2007 work, “Tiny American Paintings” stapled into the center of the journal, Fertile Field evokes the artist’s early impressions of the “enchanted land” of Ecuador where he came of age–––with its “colorful traditions and fabulous biodiversity.”

There’s plenty of literary diversity in Postroad. Produced by the Boston College Department of English, Christopher Boucher, Managing Editor, Postroad includes, in addition to the standard fiction and poetry, folios for theatre, criticism, recommended readings, and selections by  guest editor Paul Mariani. This issue opens with Emma Cline’s haunting “Golden State,” conjuring the landscape and social milieu of a Sixties commune, “hen-house […] papered with pages from Rolling Stone,” and nubile girls growing “corn in the high heat of summer and [canned] peaches for the winter, drying sheets of lemon verbena under the noonday sun, jam bubbling hot and dark in cast-iron pots.”
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The poet/speaker in many of the poems in Franz Wright’s new book, Wheeling Motel, is like the speaker in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “half in love with easeful death,” or its cousin, oblivion, the “beforelife”––to use the evocative title of Wright’s seventh book––or simply into the world of unconscious, inert things. Wright’s professor who quips to a student, “. . . did you know the snail sometimes sleeps for a year?” laments, “How I envy the snail.” [“Professor Alone During Office Hours”]. Death is easeful, too, in “Happy Oblivion,” where “closed eyes/and lips . . . open hovering/on the verge of speech, the final//breath. . .” [“Happy Oblivion,” 52]. In poem after poem, the poet confronts the split between world and consciousness of world. This split is at the heart of modern poetry as text or subtext, and his concern with it places Wright squarely in the modern tradition. But in other ways, Wright has like his contemporaries moved beyond the nominalist concerns (‘no ideas but in things’) of modernism and its wariness of outright statement. It is the poetic act of utterance that brings Wright‘s poet/narrator back from the edge of oblivion:  “In bed again composed/a line of verse then dreamed/ . . . it was something/about the word cloud ineluctably/ billowing. . ./. . .sailing/without seeming to billow or move. . ./. . . across the sky;/it had to do with falling/into the o/of devour, the i/in flight . . .[“Triptych,” 24]
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Ordinary Ghosts
By Zara Raab

When the murdered peddler who appears in “Maggie Fox Speaks” [41] started rapping from his grave under the floorboards on the Fox family house, “the Spiritualist movement that swept nineteenth century America” began, Shipers’ note to the poem tells us. Ordinary Mourning, which takes its title from a Victorian stage of grief, is much taken with 19th Century Spiritualism and with ghosts, particularly ghosts as they appear on the lonely stretches of prairie in the middle of America. Chosen by the poet Mark Halliday for the First Book Prize from ABZ Press, Ordinary Mourning owes to the poet Ted Kooser (whom Shipers thanks for “feedback”) its plainspoken, folksy diction, a diction that does not vary much whether the poem’s persona is a Victorian housewife or a 911 responder, but owes to Frost its touches of darkness.

These are simple narratives in a mild, unambitious style, the descriptions rendered lightly, often deftly. The scenarios and settings include graveyards, coal mines, caskets, hospitals, séances, lonely stretches of highway, empty prairies, the parlors and sitting rooms of the recently deceased and the long dead, even the Winchester Mystery House. Shipers’ dead, more lively than the living, speak to each other, complaining about the living and reporting on the other side. One ghost “expected mist or fog drifting, not this hard/Hopper light. . .” For the dead, the ground slowly unfurls as they walk toward the horizon. Some dead continue working, “truckers with phantom rigs; miners of closed shafts; farmers who ply the fields in which they died.”
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Fables of Contemporary Life
By Zara Raab

Among the hundreds of poets publishing each year, some are most at ease in the Zen master’s or rabbi’s chair, slyly considering and distilling a fresh urban folklore, suitable to the 21st Century, or offering hymns of praise or comfort in grief. The thematic patterning of these books, and of Jacqueline Berger’s The Gift That Arrives Broken, invoke family—parents, children, spouses, ex-spouses—and their entailments—desire, disappointment, reconciliation, loss, grief in domestic settings––kitchens, bedrooms, parks, patios, cars, restaurants, sometimes in the classroom, often in the past. You can sometimes tell them by their titles, like Chana Bloch’s Mrs. Dumpty, which chronicles in keenly perceptive ways the breakdown of a husband and a marriage. 

Rich in sensory details, Jacqueline Berger’s new poems present scenarios that invite us to think about their meaning, and suggest ways we should think about them, see them afresh. The poems do all this effortlessly, much as a parable might, not offering simple prudential morality `a la Aesop, but demanding reflection on the earthly role of human beings, on language, on randomness and purpose in the universe. Indirectly, in thoughtful, sometimes humorous, sometimes sardonic ways, they inculcate virtue without seeming to insist or dictate. 

Jacqueline Berger, a San Francisco poet and winner of numerous literary prizes, is one poet who succeeds very well in the loosely defined genre I am describing here. In The Gift That Arrives Broken, Berger takes moral storytelling to a new level. Here she’s a rabbi telling midrash––subtle, epigrammatic and wise. The first section centers on the poet’s parents “holding the last handful/of their years” [11], and by extension the poet’s own death. Facing the loss of her mother, she says:
		Years later, I’ll still think of things I want to tell her
		And I’ll have to stop myself mid call,
		The fingers carrying the memory of numbers
		Though the combination no longer connects. [21]
She warns us, early on in the book, of the limitations of language. Using a concrete narrative in a classroom, she asks us to think about an abstract idea—and suggests that language will fail us if by success we mean reprieve from the inevitable [5-6]. She uses a similar device—concrete situations described in sensory terms––to set the reader thinking about the philosophical idea of a random universe, and observes, “it’s good to treasure the gift, but good/to see that it wasn’t really meant for you./The feeling that it couldn’t have been otherwise/is just a feeling.” [“Why I’m Here,” 17] 

Steering through the social wreckage of middle class America, Berger charts the turns and the toll family life can take, how “in this world/we sit in the shade of a grafted tree./. . . Contentment leans its soft flesh/against the spine of dread.”[46] 	In this age when few of us can rely on conventional societal precepts to guide us through the treacherous waters of relationship, we’re offered new or validating ways of thinking about love and family. In “Gin,” about happy hour with her husband, the poet says, “In some moods we’ll fight about anything/just to make the other/carry the weight of anger/we lug all day through our lives” [63] And teaching her husband to swim, the poet points out that “in the delicate economy of marriage”
		Giving costs less than receiving,
		The thin wire of power
		Threaded through the soft body of need. [68]

Even when she’s slyly giving a moral directive, Berger’s language is smart and original: “It’s good to have a great love of your life,” she writes, “but marry someone else./Good to keep this great love/in the weedy outfield of the mind/to alternately worship and despise.” [65] French women have been saying this for centuries, but when have American wives been given this kind of sensible advice? Using recurrent canine metaphors, she writes, we are each “like a dog/straining at the end of a leash.”[31]
		…desire is a dog
		that’s bred to kill,
		but we let him in the house
		and love him. [38]

In these sophisticate poems, details of a story or incident are hewn away to emphasize a blend of moral, psychological, philosophical and spiritual truth. Moderate and sensible where love and marriage are concerned, Berger shares a willingness to acknowledge the eddies and flurries the mind inevitably undergoes in its zen like way while the body is being faithful. Berger goes into a Proustian interlude with her hometown, where
		. . . there’s the modesty of trees
		Undressing the dark. Like matrons,
		They let down their hair, unhook
		What holds them in, bend at the middle,
		Lean into each other. [12]

Berger avoids the rarified verbal strata of John Ashbery or Milton, an atmosphere only a few can abide. The rest of us take in the quips, allusions, metaphors and slogans around us the way we breathe––naturally, almost without effort. Some of this verbal culture entertains, some of it influences behavior—and changes the culture. The moral nature of the material delicately shapes the contours, the line and stanza breaks as the poem scrolls down the page––reflecting and confirming certain aspects of American culture––individual, tolerant, skeptical, organically shaped and evolving.
--

Zara Raab writes about the fault lines between city dwellers and the poor, rural towns people to the north. Her poems and articles has appeared in Arts & Letters, White Ink, West Branch, Nimrod International Journal, Poetry Flash and elsewhere. Her book, Swimming the Eel, will be out next year from David Robert Books. She lives and writes in San Francisco.

In this period of intimate, personal American poems, tending toward dramatic monologues or dream reenactments, it is a relief to discover a poet who uses rhetoric as unabashedly and skillfully as Bruce Cohen. At its best, Cohen’s satire––with it erratic and subversive narration, appealingly dopey scenarios, and inventive, playful, vivid language––belongs very much to the poetic style of the moment. In one of my favorites, “An Honest Man’s Profile for Internet Dating,” for example,

In a more darkly satiric piece entitled “Spam Scam,” the narrator maintains his altitude above the plot, supervising the story of how he imagines he would abet a scammer, “a high ranking diplomat’s widow, confined by house arrest/In an obscure African village, heir to a privileged and ancient aristocracy,” who has sent her pleas for cash to his in-box. “Curious how lonely the lonely have to be to respond,” the narrator wonders,

                                   ....[W]hat if you
Actually begin liking the mark? Develop compassion? Or fall in
        love?
...
Would you be content in just knowing that someone completely
       trusted you?
Dear Mrs. Abgani, just yesterday I saw a moth struggling in the
       toilet,
Flapping its wings in the water, and I flushed, so what can I do
       to help? [35-36]

Cohen is adept at capturing lightning fast shifts of mood, from fragile appearance of normalcy to outright mania in such pieces as “Top Banana.” Here hyperbole, excess, and flagrant exaggeration demonstrate our culture’s particular forms of madness, in the tradition of Swift’s admonition to imperialist Englishmen to go ahead and flay the Irish alive, as their skins would be useful for sail-making, and while you’re at it, why not eat the Irish babies orphaned by famine?

In certain poems, Cohen is skittish about delving too deeply into a story or committing himself to a narrative. “Still Life,” for example, cobbles disjunctive experiences, as

The overripe mango in your fruit bowl might be a man napping in a hammock
Attached to invisible trees in a breeze that seeks out women’s dresses.

Your phone ringing in the middle of night might be your imagination

And some poems seem to cohere mainly as lists of absurdities around an abstract theme:

A hair weave, prosthetic arms & legs, erectile dysfunction
Medication, bleach skin, a box in his throat so he can talk
     [25, “Racism”]

But for the most part, the poems, full of vivid, absurd, self-mocking characters––men whose wives won’t go shopping with them anymore; boys who stay up around the clock watching Jerry Lewis telethons; panhandlers trying to sell their idea for a time machine to kids in Starbucks; crude one-time Leather Necks dining on sushi at the Japanese buffet—all rendered in up-to-the-minute Americanisms.

I wouldn’t swerve to miss them, nor should you.

“Swerve to Hit” first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of Book/Mark.

  --Zara Raab’s poems appear in West Branch, Arts & Letters, Nimrod, Spoon River
  Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her Book of Gretel came out this spring. Swimming the Eel is due out in 2011. She lives and writes in San Francisco.

Reprinted courtesy of The Adirondack Review

In his teens and twenties, Philip Levine worked in Detroit’s factories, and that working class world–– the grinding poverty, dysfunction, drunkenness, violence, as well as the courage, stoicism, and longing––became his great subject, as Chicago was Carl Sandburg’s subject, and the stuff of seventeen books and numerous prizes and awards. Weaving in and out of his vivid, unswerving portraits of working class life in America at mid-century are the elements of his own essential American story: turn-of-the-century, immigrant grandparents; Yiddish-speaking grandfather; solidly middle class family wrenched from its moorings by the Great Depression, American jazz, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, anarchism.

Levine is primarily a poet of images skillfully crafted into narratives maintaining an even distance between poet and his material. The embodiedness of his images create the excitement of his poetry and demonstrate a deep psychic intelligence. Image and richly detailed narrative are Levine’s primary poetic strategies. There is little of Steven’s rhetoric, flamboyance, or excess of imagination; no significant variety of tone or the playfulness with diction of Frank O’Hara in Levine’s work. But within his narrow range, lucid yet at times intricate, Levine achieves results of some power. His narrative––hierarchical, sequential––demonstrates Levine’s commitment to stories and his passion for the possibilities of poetic depth. In “Closed,” he writes:

The diner was closed. The two brothers stared through the window & could see no one behind the counter. One small light burned over the cash register . . . . Max, the huskier brother in a checked mackinaw, suggested they find another dump. “If Teresa’s ain’t open, nothing gonna be open,” Bernie, his taller, wiry brother said. “There’s the Greek,” said Max, “come on, it’s close.” The Greek was actually Yervan, an Armenian who’d opened a small grocery store that sold delicatessen across from the transmission plant. Bernie thought of lighting a joint on the short walk but realized he was too tired for that. “What you got today, Nick?” Max said. “What you want?” said the Greek. “Coffee & two eggs over easy with crisp bacon & whole wheat toast,” said Bernie. Yervan told them to try Teresa’s because this wasn’t a restaurant. “You call Teresa’s a restaurant?” said Max. “For eight hours I been thinking of nothing but breakfast,” said Bernie. “This has spoiled my whole weekend, maybe my whole life.” By this time the sun had cleared the stacks of the transmission plant & broken thorough the dusty window of the deli. The Greek shielded his eyes a & knew it was going to be a long day. . . . “I got coffees & fresh milks,” he said, “those little pies you guys like.” “Okay,” said Bernie & put both bands on the counter & leaned in to them. “If I had anything left in me,” he said, “I’d cry.” [42]

Echoes of Carl Sandburg live in Levine’s narratives of city life in the ear-splitting, filthy, perilous, machine-drive factories of the Mid-west. But more than Sandburg, Levine’s poems have a pressing undertow of loss and defeat. The metaphor of the closed diner resonates throughout the poem. What these young working class men seek in life is closed to them; they are shut out; all that’s on offer after an eight hour shift is cold pastry. “This has spoiled my whole weekend, maybe my whole life” says how just how beaten down these working class brothers are.

But Levine’s is an American gloom, at mid-century still with some hope in it; other pieces in this new collection capture an American exuberance that seems more 1990’s than 1930’s, as in the title poem, in which the poet and his companion make their way, as tourists, to Andorra, a tiny country high in the eastern Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France. There they find “what we’d come for: the perfect radio.” The shop owner, a communist who’d fled Germany in the 1930s and stayed, tells them he can get them anything they wish for. “Anything?” the poet asks. “A Cadillac?” The shop owner could have it that very afternoon. Only an American film star will take a little longer. [44]

Levine captures the struggle, the occasional bitter-sweet triumph, of an earlier time: “I had to put one foot in front of another,/hold both arms out for balance, stare ahead,/breathe like a beginner and hope to arrive.” [61, “Magic,” News of the World] Octogenarian now, Levine finds even in death the thought of freedom and release: “Think of it,/my name, no longer a portion/of me, no longer inflated/or bruised. . .a tiny me taking nothing, giving/nothing, empty, and free at last.” [58, “Burial Rites,” News of the World].
Levine’s perennial theme of fraternal solidarity recurs in this new book. In “Dearborn Suite,” he imagines a decrepit, sleepless Henry Ford coming down to his factory:

		The old man, King Henry, punches in
		for the night shift with us,
		his beloved coloreds and Yids,
		to work until the shattered
		windows gray. There is a justice
		after all, there’s a bright anthem
		for the occasion, something
		familiar and blue, with words we
		all sing, like “Time on My Hands.” [20-21]

Some reviewers focus on Levine’s anarchistic political beliefs and his lack of sentimentality. I have found in Levine a religious poet whose narratives, interwoven with society and politics and class struggles, give meaning to the working class experience of life and express a religious view in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 18th century Enlightenment understanding of the concept as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Levine’s work acknowledges how

	 . . . people rose one
	by one from cold beds to tend a world
	that runs on and on at its own sweet will.
				[18, “Sweet Will,” Sweet Will, 1985]

What makes Levine’s work religious, besides such reveries on the power of the universe, is his grace, unconsumed by bitterness, rancor or regret in the face of loss.

Levine is a also poet of memory, ‘”stewing/in a rich compost of memory/or the simpler one of bone,” [58, “Burial Rites,” News of the World], so it is natural that family memory enter his poems, the grandfather crossing the ocean:

	Yusel Prisckulnick,
	I bless your laughter
	Thrown I the wind’s face
	Your gall, your rages,
	Your abiding love
	For money and all
	It never bought,
	For your cracked voice
	That wakens in dreams
	Where you rest at last,
	For all the sea taught
	You and you taught me:
	That the waves go out
	And nothing comes back.

Levine spurns futility and fantasy, and emphasizes instead the ways of ordinary living over abstract beliefs. In an earlier poem, “Jewish Graveyards, Italy” (from Sweet Will), the poet had written,

	I . . . bend to the names
	And say them as slowly as I can.
	Full, majestic, vanished names
	That fill my mouth and go out
	Into the densely yellowed air
	Of this great valley and dissolve
	As ever the sea dissolves beating
	On a stone shore or as love does
	When the beloved turns to stone
	Or dust or water [54-54]

Levine’s poems recognize our dependence on each other as well as the world: “Manhattan is not an island,” he writes–

In News of the World, Levine sustains his production of well-mannered, well-proportioned poems that still rumble and groan with a certain passion. Like the products of a factory, Levine’s poems roll out on schedule, one much like the next in formal qualities, in size, diction, and metrics. Like the cars from an assembly line at the General Motors plant, where Levine worked as a young man helping to make the cars he admits to driving joyously in his youth, the poems provide the undeniable pleasures of a good ride, sturdy and compelling their forward movement. Yet how unlike the standard manufactured product!
How earthy and perceptive they are, and how complex.

  --Zara Raab’s poems appear in West Branch, Arts & Letters, Nimrod, Spoon River
  Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her Book of Gretel came out this spring. Swimming the Eel is due out in 2011. She lives and writes in San Francisco.

At the registration table for the annual California Poets in the Schools conference a couple of weeks ago, we were handed registration packets and a copy of “The Working Poet” – with a smile. Yes, first, there was warmth and a wonderful welcome.

The backdrop for the conference was the 200-acre breathtakingly beautiful Institute for Noetic Sciences in Petaluma. Set on a hilltop overlooking Sonoma County, the facility offered CPITS teachers a 3-day opportunity for rejuvenation and inspiration.

Our keynote speaker, Mary Korte, a CPITS teacher for over 40 years and Earth First! Activist delivered a beautiful and poignant talk on why we do what we do – and why we need to keep doing it. Many of us were deeply moved by Mary’s comments that “poets are the soul of the culture. They are the keepers of the stories, the preservationists,” and, on poets in the classroom: “At a time when children are being pressured into categorizing, memorizing and labeling everything with the pressure of being tested, the poet enters the classroom to blow everything apart, to give the student a chance to think in words and images. And there are no tests.”

The annual conference is organized to give working poets time and space to write, share their teaching successes – and discuss the business aspects of running a residency. This year, conversations were animated by frustration. With cutbacks to schools, the California budget in a dismal state, and private funding being sliced and diced a thousand ways, funding residencies is becoming increasingly difficult.

That said, these are working poets, and so of course, creativity abounded when it came to brainstorming ideas. The bottom line is that CPITS, the oldest continuously running statewide arts program not just in California, but, according to the CPITS board director, in the world, is struggling, but alive.

To learn more about the conference, presenters, and CPITS or to make a donation: see www.cpits.org

Wow, just back from a dynamite reading by Mathew Zapruder and Graham Foust (no relation) at the Marin Poetry Center.

Until hearing Foust, I’d not fully appreciated the rich sonic qualities and formal underpinnings of the wildly original poems I’d been reading in his new book, A Mouth in California. Foust also read a new, not-yet finished poem, and Zapruder opened by expressing his excitement at being “in the presence of language that is re-activated.” Then he proceeded, in his own reading, to re-animate language again, especially in poems from his new book Come On All You Ghosts (September Release) like “Poem for John McCain,” with an absolutely killer, darkly redemptive last line, the chilling “Pocket,” and “April Snow” which re-invents language to transform a mountain of cell phones into something slant and strange.

The unexpected bonus of the evening was the long Q &A afterward-two brilliant, funny, and definitely-not-on-a-pedestal poets riffing on craft (e.g., the uses-or not-of fixed forms) and theory (Who are poets writing for? Why are some readers threatened by language that takes unconventional directions?) Lucklily for us, Zapruder will be continuing the discussion along with Brenda Hillman and Charles Harper Webb at the MPC Panel Discussion on Accessibility and Difficulty in Poetry on April 15-don’t miss it!

Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright
New York: Knopf, 2009
91 pp., cloth, $26.95.

Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio
New York: W.W. Norton, 2009
89 pp., cloth, $23.95.

	The novelist Denis Johnson said of an earlier collection Franz Wright’s poems, "They're like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts." I think of them as thimbles of raw carrot juice, intense and flavorful––experiences served up to us straight, pulled from the dream worlds of sleep or altered states, and grated to juice, like the bright orange carrot juice behind the glass refrigerated case in my favorite organic yoghurt store on Fillmore Avenue in San Francisco. Wright’s poems are a quick drink with a short shelf life. Yet they retain an undisputed place in our vast, complicated cannon of the lost soul, as raw slices of American life in the waning days of empire.
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