Foster Dickson's Blog, page 65

the #newschool: “Look back! March forward!”

In late June, at the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s SUPER Teacher Institute on “Sense of Place” in Alabama, I was among a group of teachers and scholars who spent one of our weeks away from the classroom examining our state’s culture. Using a historical lens to survey literary and artistic creations both by and about Alabama, the institute’s scholars pointed out the realities, shared their insights, made noteworthy remarks about what all of it should mean. But there were two of those insights that really stood out to me.

The first came from Dorothy Walker, director of the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery, who reminded us that historical preservation is not about reviving the past, but about remembering it. The way she put it: Noah didn’t take every animal into the Ark, but he did save two of each kind. In similar fashion, we don’t necessarily need to save every single thing from the past, but we do need to save indicative examples so that future generations have those connections to the past that allow for cultural continuity.

The second came from Randall Williams, editor-in-chief of NewSouth Books, who was talking to our group about his collection of Alabama slave narratives, Weren’t No Good Times. As he was introducing the narratives themselves, Williams remarked that he was among the last generation of Alabamians who had picked cotton by hand, working all day in the hot sun, not because he wanted to get out there to see how it felt, but because he needed the money.

Williams’ remark cut me deep, and I had to ask myself, how could I, as a man who has never picked cotton all day in the hot sun, ever teach my millenial students what it means to pick cotton all day in the hot sun, something that generations of Alabamians – white and black – did every year from the early 1800s through the late 1900s? I struggled with that question. And I struggled with it some more. I have devoted much of my time, as a writer and an editor and a teacher, to helping others to understand Alabama’s past. But I had to wonder whether I understand it.

No, I concluded, I don’t, not completely. Because I never lived it. Yet, that can’t be held against me. Even if I were to cast off my college degrees and my teaching job, cast off my wi-fi and my air-conditioning, cast off my store-bought clothes and shoes, and move out to the country to farm cotton with a mule and live in a two-room shack . . . I still wouldn’t understand completely. Because the times and the culture have changed; the laws, the markets, and the economy have changed; and because I would always have a privilege that all those generations of families on those cotton farms didn’t have: I could give up cotton farming and go back to my nice, comfortable life.

I have long heard older generations speak with pride (and humor) about the hardships of bygone days: loading firewood into a potbelly stove, drawing water from a well, pulling feathers from a dead chicken, walking barefoot in the woods. (In fact, one of my favorite essays in I’ll Take My Stand is Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit,” in which he forcefully extols the virtues of “agrarian” living over participating in the modern “money economy.”) However, going back to the old ways isn’t all appealing. Not too long after that teacher institute, I was reading CD Bonner’s I Talk Slower Than I Think, and in one of the vignettes, he explained that the first chore he ever had as a young child was emptying the chamber pots into the outhouse every morning. That part sounded terrible.

No, I never picked cotton by hand, never started a home-fire before dawn, never milked a cow as the sun was coming up. I was raised in Montgomery, Alabama from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, with indoor plumbing and air-conditioning. I’ve never killed an animal out in the yard to carry inside for my mother to cook, and I’ve never drawn water from a well. I spent my youth riding my bicycle on paved suburban streets, drinking from people’s garden hoses without asking, reading books from the public library, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and playing front-yard football. The closest I got to that old country way were periodic camping trips when we cooked dinner on a Coleman stove. And you know who decided that I would grow up that way? My parents and grandparents, who had experienced those old ways and had given them up— willingly!

My generation – Generation X – came up in a world of relative material comfort, but that lifestyle was chosen for us, so I ask: if toting water from the well was better, why weren’t we still doing it when I came along? I’ve never picked cotton because I needed the money— but I did cut plenty of grass because my parents wouldn’t give me any.

Over the years, I’ve helped out in various ways with Civil Rights commemoration projects, and one of the refrains that comes up is: “Look back! March forward!” Those older generations who participated in the movement are right that we must look back. But we must also march forward. Like Dorothy Walker said, it has to be about remembering, not reviving. I respect the hell out of the people who used to work so hard to accomplish basic daily tasks, but I also won’t be sorry that I didn’t live that way. As a matter of fact, even these extreme-green types, like homesteaders and tiny-house seekers, pack modern conveniences into their supposedly back-to-basic lifestyles. And when I see that, I know what our current culture’s attitude is: Look back! March forward! It’s wise to embrace the best of the old ways, while also preferring the new ways that work better.

An understanding of the past and acknowledgment of the hard work of our forebears is vitally important to our culture. We don’t need to be a culture of eye-rollers when older people describe their struggles. When Randall Williams made his remark about picking cotton, instead of getting defensive, I thought a lot about the point he was making. In Alabama, we especially don’t ever want to lose our connections to that rural farming heritage. I definitely want to know about the lives that my ancestors lived on small farms all over Alabama’s Black Belt. But . . . I also have no intention of trying to get back there completely, to a way of life that they left behind on purpose.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Education, Generation X Tagged: Alabama, farming, Generation X, poverty, the Deep South

Alabamiana: Isaac Ross, 1764 – 1821

It was a Tuesday during my last week of summer break. My children and I had already spent about eight weeks together, and we were sulking around the house, looking for things to do. When we all three get that way, I like to suggest a good hike in the woods. It doesn’t involve a screen or the internet or even air-conditioning, and a lot of trails have either a small fee or none at all. Some of our favorites are the Deadening Alpine Trail and Cherokee Ridge Alpine Trail in Tallapoosa County, Chewacla State Park in Auburn, and Fort Toulouse in Wetumpka. We didn’t really want to drive very far this time, so we headed for Fort Toulouse.

After we got there and paid our small fee to the lady in the lonely little visitor center – $2 for me and $1 for each of them – we started on our usual route, the Bartram Nature Trail. There’s been a lot of rain lately, and it’s exceptionally hot in July in Alabama, so the mosquitoes and gnats were bad— but as we walked the path into the woods, so were the numerous (and very large) garden spiders, some of which had a span as wide as the palm of my hand.

We were plodding along, following the outlined route that leads to the open meadow where the fort is, when I noticed a gray stone off to my left on a short path that leads to the shed where their work equipment is kept. I’d never noticed the stone before, since we don’t go that way, but this time I did and walked over.

[image error]It was a headstone, an old one that had broken and been repaired, for a man named Isaac Ross, born in 1764, died in 1821. I stood for a moment and wondered, why on earth was this man’s grave in the middle of the woods at Fort Toulouse? However, I couldn’t stand around for long and indulge my curiosity. My children kept saying, “Dad, come on!” since they were being eaten by bugs!

Isaac Ross, who is buried in the woods along a nature trail outside of Wetumpka, Alabama, was born in Camden, South Carolina more than a decade before the Declaration of Independence. The few disparate records that appear for him online say that he married a woman named Parthenia Brown, who was from Virginia. She died in 1833, about a dozen years after her husband, in Alabama, but she is not buried beside him.

Some of the best clues to Ross’s life come on the mauve-colored sidebar on his page on the Find A Grave website. (If you’re not familiar with the website, it’s not as moribund as its sounds.) The researcher who put the page together did quite a good job of pulling tidbits from various sources: Isaac Ross appears to have served in the Revolutionary War under the “Swamp Fox” Francis Marion, owned land near Tallassee in eastern Alabama, and had seven children. The last small paragraph relays that the area around Fort Toulouse was once part of a plantation, which might explain the odd placement of the grave, as the place is now arranged.

Yet, the Montgomery Genealogical Society offered a little more:

“As early as 1815, Isaac Ross arrived here with his son William from Camden, SC. It is said that he had a grant of 742 acres. In 1816, he engaged Gen. John Coffee to lay off a town for him at Fort Jackson (formerly called Ft. Toulouse). He hoped that it would someday become Alabama’s capital.”

As for the strange placement of his grave, one archival document from Elmore County, Alabama explains that “at one time, several of Andrew Jackson’s men were buried here but they were moved to Federal Cemetery in Mobile.” Why poor old Isaac was left there, I never did find out.

One of the reasons that I take my children on these excursions, instead of passing time a a mall or a Rockin’ Jump or a Chick-Fil-A playground, is to teach them this: if our eyes are open, we stumble upon history everywhere we go. Even in the spider-infested woods outside of the relatively unimportant small town of Wetumpka in central Alabama, where, if you make that unassuming turn off Highway 231 and go a few miles down a two-lane road, you’ll be standing on one of the more important sites in the formation of this American nation, where Native Americans lived and died during the years that Europeans call the Middle Ages, where French and British colonial forces later fought over a strategically advantageous bend in the river, and where men like Isaac Ross came to build the place we now call Alabama.

Filed under: Alabama, Local Issues, The Deep South Tagged: Alabama, Alabamiana, Fort Toulouse, Wetumpka

#thestack (IV) (which is to say: four)

You probably ought to read the first post “#thestack” before this one.

[image error]I read almost the entire fourth issue in the stack – the now-faded purple and neon-green November/December 2004 issue with John Ashbery’s wide-eyed spooky face on it – while I sat in the garden at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, waiting on my children who were seeing “Mary Poppins.” A friend gave us two tickets he couldn’t use, and rather than choose which child to take, I gave them each a ticket and told them I’d wait outside. I hadn’t realized that the show’s runtime was nearly three hours, so I had a lot of time to kill. It was a humid Sunday afternoon in early July, and twice, the sky darkened, rumbled, then showered, causing me to retreat into the mosquito-infested straw-roofed hut in the middle of the small garden.

When I sat down with this issue of American Poetry Review, I had already done my browsing. This copy of APR interested me particularly, because I’ve been fascinated by Ashbery’s somewhat quizzical facial expression. Moreover, something prompted one of my students to ink a Salvador Dali mustache and a few chin whiskers onto his face, making the image less odd and more comical with the addition of that age-old high-school prank.

However, Ashbery wasn’t the only prominent poet featured in this issue. Jane Kenyon figured in heavily, too. In addition to being a poet of some repute, Kenyon, the much-younger wife of poet Donald Hall, died of leukemia in her forties in 1995, and this 2005 issue contained two tenth-anniversary tributes. Though I had heard of Jane Kenyon, I wasn’t familiar with her poetry, so these essays about her last days – one by widower Hall and another by Liam Rector, a friend of the couple and the founder of the writing program at Bennington – were my introduction to her life and work. Sitting in the hot Alabama sun on a summer Sunday afternoon, reading about a deceased poet – and wife, and friend – was an odd place to do this, but I found myself pulled in to the deeply sentimental narratives about her illness, death, and legacy.

While Donald Hall’s memorial to his late wife was full of the minute details of her passing that brought it into concrete reality for someone who wasn’t there, Liam Rector’s was more accessible to me, as someone with little knowledge of Jane Kenyon’s work. Rector alluded in the first column to the “luminous particular,” a lovely phrase, the idea of which he described as “TS Eliot’s objective correlative meets James Wright’s deep image and imagines, notates, and produce an experience in and of itself.” But it was another discussion of students and “masters” that Rector wrote about, which grabbed me as a teacher:

Students often balk at the idea of a “master.” They assume one must be a slave in response. But the role of master to apprentice has been an old and venerable one in literature, and it has been a passage through which most of the strong poets I know have passed many times, with many masters, as a kind of variant of serial monogamy.

Many teachers ask questions of their students, but not many teachers are able to withstand, and indeed modulate a silence when no answer from students is immediately forthcoming.

There are two ideas here: one comments on the wisdom of yielding to instruction or training from a more experienced mentor; the other remarks on a rare ability in few teachers to allow students to be students, to fumble and wonder and knit their brows, to swim around in not-knowing . . . in order to learn that they don’t know. Kenyon, Rector wrote, was one of those rare teachers.

Though I started at the end this time, the issue began with John Ashbery, first with a couple of pages of his poems, which were followed by two pages of Michael McClure poems titled “Suite for John Ashbery.” (I was glad to see McClure, one of the Beat poets I like, and because he had a very smiley author photo!) The first three of Ashbery’s eight were  prose poems – I use that term to describe rather than classify them – with a structure built on paragraph-like stanzas. Among Ashbery’s phrases, I particularly liked the section in “Where Shall I Wander” that read “Alas for our foreshadowing, / for though we wander like lilies there are none that can placate us, or not at this time.” And in the third of the prose poems, I learned another new word: ataxically.

I first became familiar with John Ashbery’s poetry when my wife’s stepsister came home from New York City for Christmas, quite a few years back, and gave me a copy of A Wave. From it, I teach the poem “Landscape (After Baudelaire).” After reading the ones published here, I might take another look at “Capital O” when it comes time to teach poetry this fall.

Continuing to flip through, there was Martha Ronk, who looked like she had the flu, followed by a long essay by Charles Dickens about “Philadelphia, and Its Solitary Prison.” I’ll confess freely that, between the heat of the summer afternoon, the heaviness of reading about a brilliant poet who died too soon, and the dour-ness of Ronk’s expression and Dickens’ subject, I didn’t really give either more than a quick glance. By that point in the afternoon, I was checking my watch often and was mainly trying to stay engaged to pass time more quickly. I read and liked Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poem “The Unemployment Office: Dismissed by the Machine,” then skipped James McConkey’s essay “The Telescope in the Parlor,” did some perfunctory browsing among Jean Follain’s fifty-nine poems in the Supplement section, and read parts of Derek Walcott’s “two excerpts from The Prodigal.” From Walcott, I learned another new word – aureate – and found this passage that I liked:

Along the smouldering autumnal sidewalks,

the secretive coffee-shops, bright flower stalls,

wandering the Village in search of another subject

other than yourself, it is yourself you meet.

Though I’ve only ever been to Greenwich Village once, I knew exactly what he meant.

As the afternoon wore on and it got closer to dinnertime, I moved into the shade of a patio near the theater building, at least partially hoping that the show might let out a little early. And that’s when I found Lucia Perillo’s essay “Fear of the Marketplace.” Frankly, I was pretty burned out with reading, but when I realized that it was about one of my favorite subjects – poetry’s seeming inability to connect with modern audiences – I had to read it, and that sentiment was urged forward when I saw that she had block-quoted one of my favorite poems, the only poem I have memorized: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow . . . ”

Perillo’s two-and-a-half page essay began by invoking her squalid fear of selling, which began for her as a Girl Scout, then she quickly moved on to that god-awful feeling that most published writers know: I’ve got this book, and now I have to convince people to buy it. Not just read it— buy it. There’s a heavy expectation that we will give them away – to friends, to other writers, etc. – because certainly we want people to read our books. That’d be wonderful. But to do that, they have to buy them. Herein lies the rub:

. . . what has lost its cultural worth is the kind of print- and page-directed arrangement of words that expects a sustained engagement from its readers.

Yes, poetry requires a reader to stop everything else and pay attention. Therefore:

If looked at without any romantic attachments to the art, one might say that this kind of poetry has a negative value in the esteem of most citizens. Were even the most idiotic reality TV show to be interrupted by a public broadcast of TS Eliot reading “The Waste Land” (recently voted [by poets] the greatest poem in English of the last century) mayhem would ensue.

She’s right. Hundreds of thousands of people will watch basketball players’ wives act ugly to each other week after week, but those same people wouldn’t dream of giving fifteen minutes of undivided attention to even the best of poems.

Why? Perillo offered quite a few ideas. One, “our culture has lots its habit of respecting graceful instances of speech.” Amen. Two, “poets are an insular tribe.” Amen. Three, “if we’re to continue in our work we’ve got to convince ourselves there is some sort of value attached to it.” Amen.

Perillo then asked the tough question:”what if poetry really is something most people don’t want— what if they’d rather see advertisements for products they might use instead of the poems that civic arts organizations are always trying to foist on them on the city bus?” It’s a legitimate thing to ask, considering the near-total absence of poetry from our mainstream culture today. By the end, Perillo, who still has books to sell, has to acknowledge the difficult truth: booksellers won’t stock a book that isn’t in the system, and other poets (perhaps a poet’s only readers) expect copies for free. Plain and simple, selling poetry is a real bitch.

By the time my children got out of the show, I was hot and tired and ready to go home. When the doors opened and the crowds trickled out, I was reading poems by Leonard Gontarek, whose author picture was taken in front of a graffiti-covered dumpster for some reason. Unfortunately, I didn’t ever read Elizabeth Alexander’s one short poem in the issue. I remembered her from Barack Obama’s inauguration and had intended to see what she had there.

Interestingly, on the day after I had sat and read in the Shakespearean garden, The New York Times ran an opinion piece called “Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think.” First one friend then another tweeted out a link to it, then I saw it on Facebook, too. I’ve been sifting through these issues of American Poetry Review, running into quite a few poems that I don’t get, and the title caught my attention. Maybe I could learn something. The author, Matthew Zapruder, began:

Do you remember, as I do, how in the classroom poems were so often taught as if they were riddles? What is the poet really trying to say here? What is the theme or message of this poem?

Then he goes on to relay what I’ve said to so many students: Focus on the text itself. Know that the language is meant to add beauty and meaning, not to trip you up. Look at what the words say— all of the things I’ve been doing myself in reading these magazines. And many of the poems I still don’t get.

But it doesn’t bother so much because I know now what I didn’t know as a student. Though I don’t want to be wrong, certainly, I no longer feel a duty to the poet to receive the message he or she intended. If you ask me, literary works are like children in that we create them, form them, nurture them, and send them out into the world, and nobody looks a child and asks, what were the parents really trying to do here? No, the poem must stand on its own and can’t be followed around by the poet, no matter how badly he or she wants to be understood.

In one of these issues of APR, I read that a person who loves words may well have some success as a poet, though a person who writes poems to be understood likely will fail at both writing poems and being understood. I read poems to get out of them what I intend to get out of them, which is what a reader should do. My attitude: if the poet has done his or her job, then I will get what he or she intended for me to get. I don’t read poems for the poet’s benefit; I read them for mine.

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, Reading Tagged: American Poetry Review, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, poetry, Summer Reading

The #newschool: #civics in #Alabama

We have, in Alabama, students and parents who are upset by the passage of Sen. Arthur Orr’s SB32, which will require Alabama’s high school seniors to pass a civics exam to graduate, starting in the 2018 – 2019 school year. In a state with lagging educational achievement, the addition of any new graduation requirement will produce ill-will in certain sectors of the population. To be frank, I have to wonder whether someone who is upset by an added graduation requirement is someone who isn’t sure his child can meet it.

I have been pleased with Sen. Orr’s bill since it was pre-filed and am even more pleased that it passed and is now law. In Alabama, we need civics education badly, because Alabama needs a massive annual infusion of informed young voters.

As for why high school seniors need this, I have two anecdotes to share. First, shortly after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, I overheard a student tell her classmates (who were unhappy with Bush) that, if they weren’t going to vote Republican, they shouldn’t bother voting at all, because Alabama was a “red state.” Incensed by the inaccuracy of her statement and by the bad taste involved in dissuading anyone from voting, I questioned her about how “red” our state could be, considering that Democrats had (at that time) controlled our state legislature since the end of Reconstruction. She had no idea that was the case.

The second instance happened more recently: after the passage of SB32, I had a group of students who were decrying the new requirement about taking the civics exam. Their main concern was for themselves; they didn’t want to take the test to graduate. At first, I kept quiet, but I did choose to speak up after a few moments of listening to them. The bill in question was so brief that it would have only taken minutes to read it and find out the truth: they would graduate before the new requirement took effect.

We need civics education in Alabama.

For any ire directed at Alabama’s Republican leaders for our state’s voter ID law, for the driver’s-license office closures, and for the recent redistricting plan that was rejected by a federal court, this bill sponsored by a Republican senator is right on the money. With as many political problems as Alabama has had, Alabamians should be happy about any effort to educate young voters to make good decisions.

Personally, I’d like to see civics education go even further. I would like to see civics coursework became part of our nation’s “correctional” system. I would like to see voter-registration officials make visits to high schools like military recruiters and college reps do. I would also like to see PSAs, like Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill,” to start running during children’s programming again.

For any claim that schools today don’t teach kids what they need to know to function in the real world, Sen. Orr’s SB32 flies in the face of that criticism. While civics may not be a job skill, it is a life skill— one that too many people don’t have.

the #newschool is a column about ideas for improving society and the lives of all people. New posts are published on the first and third Sundays of each month.

Filed under: Alabama, Civil Rights, Critical Thinking, Social Justice, Voting Tagged: Alabama, Arthur Orr, civics, SB32, voting, voting rights

#thestack (Trois.)

You probably ought to read the first post “#thestack” before this one.

[image error]When it came time to peruse the March/April 2005 issue of American Poetry Review – the third one in the stack – I was greeted by the pretty and pleasant face of Stephanie Brown on its pale-blue and bright-red cover. I had never heard of Ms. Brown, and the other names in red on the cover weren’t the same ones I had seen in those first two issues. Nice, I thought, a little variety. 

My hope were high as I started flipping pages, since Stephanie Brown’s author photo lacked the weird awkwardness of some I’d seen – she seemed to be saying, please do come in. – but this issue didn’t have many author pictures! Where are all of the author pictures? Of the five in this issue, including the cover, three featured the writer in a Glamor Shots-like pose with face-resting-on-fist. In the other two, poet Paul Hoover looked a lot like cheesy radio host John Tesh, and Brian Clements’ face superimposed onto a laptop screen reminded me of main character Dante Hicks in Clerks.

To the poems! (And the essays.)

Starting at the beginning, I really liked Stephanie Brown’s poems— and not just because she’s pretty. “Library” jumped nicely from subject to subject without being confusing; the three-section “Education” was poignant; “The Satanists Next Door” was funny; and “The Devouring Father” was frightening and sad. From “Education,” I also learned a new word: incunabula, which is an “early printed book,” usually from before 1501.

There seemed to be a lot of ads in this issue, so I almost flipped past Christopher Janke’s five “psalms,” which were next, but I did notice them, stop, and read. They were very short, but being Catholic, I didn’t think were psalms at all and didn’t have a sense of why he titled them that way. I’m accustomed to the Psalms being used in Mass, having a response for us parishioners to repeat, usually something about God’s love or mercy. Maybe that’s a prejudice of mine that APR‘s editors don’t share.

And then there was Donald Hall, looking better in this author photo than he does on the cover of his more recent Essays After Eighty book. “Knock Knock II,” he explained, was a revival of a column that he used to write – the title based on a knock-knock joke told him by Richard Wilbur – and then I learned another new word: bouleversed, which is the French verb for “to upset.” (I understood why he didn’t just used the word upset: bouleversed has a ring to it— like being nonplussed or some such.) Unfortunately, the first part of Hall’s revived column got on my nerves, with too much name-dropping, so I almost didn’t keep reading . . .

But there, at the very bottom of the third column, on the right-hand side of the page, right above the page number (9), Hall began the discussion that grabbed me: “Poetry out loud is never quite so beautiful as poetry read in silence.” Hall went on to describe the differences between poetry and performance, which aren’t the same thing. While he did note one very real problem that I’ve seen/heard too many times:

Too many poets, reading aloud, ignore their own line breaks or chew consonants like gristle or drop into inaudibility at the ends of lines.

In the very next sentence, Hall was also remarking upon this:

There seems to be confusion between the sound of a poem and the performance of a poem, and between the value of a poem and the response of a live audience.

I’ve also seen this more times than I can count: an audience that cheers – not for the poetic skill, but for the popular message – so the poet takes the applause as evidence that the poem itself is good. Not necessarily so. People who likely don’t know much about the art or craft of poetry, and who only hear the poem once, can’t rightly be trusted as judges of a poet’s work. They’re cheering because they like what they heard.

A short ways down, Hall also shared this idea:

In slam poetry speed is valued over slowness, as humor and attack are valued over emotion and thought. The beauty of sound – which exists independent of feeling or idea – is absent.

Yes, sir, exactly. Slam poetry isn’t necessarily about the recognition of beauty; it’s about getting an audience riled up and keeping them entertained.

As Hall ended, he again resorted to the name-dropping that annoyed me in the beginning, but it seemed more appropriate as he made his summation:

Although we publish ten times as many books as we used to, and have ten times as many magazines, we have a thousand times as many poetry festivals and readings. But even the best contemporary work lacks the sound beauty of Milton and Keats, Hopkins and Pound, Lowell and Roethke.

Yes, sir again, Mr. Hall. I’ve loved poetry for a long time, most of my life. I began my first attempts at writing it in my teens, and as a high school senior, rather than writing my year-long thesis project on some gimme topic, I wrote on Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” proposing that Satan was an Aristotelian tragic hero. I wrote on that subject partially to piss-off my Bible Belt, private school teachers, but also because we had read an excerpt from “Paradise Lost” and, left unsatisfied, I wanted to read (and study) the whole thing. Even though I was a Generation-X teenager in Montgomery, Alabama, John Milton’s late-Renaissance poetry was and is beautiful to me. And I also agree with Hall about Keats, Pound, and (Amy?) Lowell, whose works I teach, though I’ll admit that I’m less familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins and Theodore Roethke, the latter of whom Hall also mentions in the beginning of the column— maybe I ought to give him another look . . . 

In each of these issues of APR, I’ve found one work that has really reached me, and in this issue, Donald Hall’s essay – the second half of it – was that one. I read Hall’s statements about the problems of performance, pondered them, and wondered to myself whether it is even possible to bring something as beautiful as finely crafted poetry to an audience who have come out in the evening to be entertained. Years ago, I went to a Li-Young Lee reading at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and though Lee is a fine poet, it was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen.

Now, about the rest. Maybe the other two essays in this issue were good ones, but I’ll never know. After reading Hall’s comments and mulling heavily on them, I just didn’t want to read page after page about “Louise Bogan in her Prose,” nor Kulik’s essay that accompanied Robert Desnos’ poems, several of which I liked. Desnos, whose work I didn’t know before reading it here, had that nuanced element where words spring up in places I didn’t expect them to be, creating a surreal kind of surprise that kept me reading. And Garcia-Lorca, whose style I like particularly, the same. It may sound strange, but I liked Desnos’ and Garcia-Lorca’s poems enough not to want to write about them here. I’d rather let them be, as some things I enjoyed, rather than attempting to break them down.

Among the rest, Paul Hoover’s poems were unimpressive: “Driver’s Song,” which was a real stinker, and “Reality and Its Antecedents: Fifty Statements on Life and Art,” which was a numbered list that struck me as a pretty trite and not terribly original.

To be frank, this issue contained some real clunkers, poems that I read and went, Okay . . . Most of the poems were short, so I did re-read them, thinking that maybe I had missed something, but each time I felt the same way. I know this must seem like I’m bashing the poets and the editors, but I’m not trying to.

This issue ended with an interview with Quincey Troupe, done by Jan Garden Castro. In the interview, Troupe, an African American poet from New York, dealt heavily with issues of race and the under-representation of black people in media and the arts, and he was highly critical of the mostly white establishment in those fields. Although Troupe made some very good points and hit on some difficult truths about which voices get heard and which don’t, I was still swimming around mentally in Donald Hall’s sound/beauty/poetry essay and found myself unable to give Troupe’s ideas my full attention. I could see his point but by the end of the issue, I was tired.

However, one thing in the introduction to the Troupe interview shot out at me like a ray of light. The first sentence in the article read: “Quincey Troupe has been featured on two PBS television series on poetry.” I’ve written about this twice before – once about the lack of poetry on TV, the second time about the lack of poetry on Roku – so I had to wonder, what series are those? I went digging online and found one PBS series called Poetry Everywhere that I’d never seen before; it was available online and through the App Store and iTunes. But I saw nothing about a second PBS series on poetry. I still say that if someone were to create a mainstream news-magazine style TV show about poetry – something like “Entertainment Tonight” or “CBS Sunday Morning” – I know that people would watch it and poetry’s audience would grow. If you ask me, there’s an audience out here, waiting.

Filed under: Generation X, Poetry, Reading Tagged: 2005, American Poetry Review, Donald Hall, poetry, Stephanie Brown

The #newschool: #solutions are better than #complaints

Right after he hits Luke with a blackjack for wise-cracking in front of the crew of dirty inmates who have been assembled in their ditch to regard the now-chained escapee, the warden says in his nasally drawl:

What we’ve got here is . . . failure to communicate. There’s some men you just can’t reach. And that’s the way he wants it. Well, he gets it!

Cool Hand Luke Jackson represents a distinct type of anti-hero that was all over pop culture in the middle and late twentieth century: a man who stands boldly against a society whose “rules and regulations” he can’t stomach. Think of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Clyde Barrow in Bonnie & Clyde, Wyatt (Captain America) in Easy Rider, John Shaft in Shaft, Ducky in Pretty in Pink, JD in Heathers, D-Fens in Falling Down.

These anti-heroes are exciting to watch, as they flaunt their willingness to defy authorities, but one major problem remains: they have questions, but no answers. Though Luke Jackson is compelling, handsome and whimsical, at once aloof and mischievous, he is snuffed out with relative ease by the Man with No Eyes, after having changed almost nothing. There truly are some men you just can’t reach.

We see from these characters how hard it can be to stand up against something— but real life shows us daily that it is far simpler than standing for something. Finding flaws and pointing them out to others doesn’t take much. Life is chock-full of inconsistencies and imperfections in the way we do things. But offering an alternative for what could work instead— that takes ingenuity, thought, work, fortitude, and patience.

In recent years, I’ve watched small social-justice movements rise and then fizzle because of this. Some group has our attention for a moment. They have their fingers on the pulse of what is wrong. But as time goes on, first one protester then another packs up the tent and goes home. Eventually, the news media moves on, too. Why? Not because the wrong became any less wrong, but because the group had no workable alternatives.

Unfortunately, many of us have turned into Luke Jackson, standing in the rain, waving our tools and shouting at the clouds to give us answers or leave us alone. Others into Holden Caulfield, wandering aimlessly from one unsatisfactory experience to the next and imaging occupations that don’t exist, but probably should. Still others have become JD or D-Fens: gun-wielding mad men whose twisted ideals lead to violence.

Me, I’m worn out with people who have complaints but no answers, who proclaim what isn’t working but wait on others to find what does, who bicker and malign because they don’t understand legitimate politics. Man-versus-The-World might be interesting in film, but it isn’t in real life. It really isn’t in politics. Our governmental system was designed to prevent one person from garnering control. Instead, the system balances and coordinates disparate perspectives from states and peoples with widely varying interests. Yet, we’ve managed to mire even that in strategic redistricting, exhaustive polling, and disingenuous campaigning. This version of “politics,” which is marked by election strategies not solutions, is a toxic mixture of either-or accusations, denials, and counter-accusations— and the politicians it produces are not leaders at all.

That’s what I see as the problem, and here’s my suggestion for a solution: Americans need to vote with a focus on obtaining true representation, instead of voting against the candidates (or parties) we’ve been convinced to despise and distrust! Our current divisions are rooted in campaign rhetoric that tells us: “My opponent is an awful person with terrible ideas. I’m your other choice.” We can beat those mind games, but only if we recognize them for what they are, and then do what Luke Jackson never did: find meaning in our own lives, and then focus on what we’re for, not what we’re against.

Filed under: Critical Thinking Tagged: Cool Hand Luke, Pack Mule for the New School, positive social action, solution, The New School

Old ’90s Weirdness, Revisited

Since I read last month in the Wall Street Journal about the return of “Twin Peaks,” I’ve re-watched the original two-season series on Netflix. I didn’t even want to glance at the new one until I’d spent the time to remind myself what happened back in the early 1990s. Back then, I was catching the show in fits and snatches – and re-runs – since I was in high school and seldom at home in the evenings, but I remember being enthralled by the show— mostly by the weirdness.

“Twin Peaks” was one part soap opera, one part murder mystery, one part psychopathic horror-fantasy, one part 1950s kitsch, and one part quirky humor, all of which are enhanced by some seriously good character acting, an array of ironic stereotyping, and a dash of noir here and there. The show’s multiple interwoven plot lines, which are laced with backstabbing and double-crossing, carry the viewer first through the search for who killed Laura Palmer, a teenage beauty queen whose dark side led her into an underworld of drugs and kinky sex, then through the aftermath of what her death exposed. To the casual tourist or fisherman passing through, the remote town of Twin Peaks in Washington State was a simple place near the Canadian border, where Big Ed’s Gas Farm, the RR Diner, and the Great Northern hotel made for good places to stop. However, the town’s grotesque underbelly was uglier than ugly could be, chock-full of extramarital affairs, shady business dealings, secret government projects, and above all . . . a long-haired demonic psycho-killer named Bob.

The twenty-six years since the series originally aired have apparently dulled my memory a bit. I had remembered Special Agent Dale Cooper’s warm-milk-at-bedtime sensibility and Deputy Hawk’s unsmiling omnipresence and the midget dancing in the red room, but not Emory Battis’ role in sending perfume-counter girls to One Eyed Jack’s or Windom Earle’s obsession with chess. Bobby Briggs was just as much of a self-righteous, scattered little prick as I remembered, though his friend Mike’s affair with the delusional 35-year-old cheerleader Nadine, which I had forgotten, was downright funny this go-round.  Somehow I hadn’t remembered Leo Johnson at all, though he plays a significant role in the plot, and this time I knew enough about David Lynch to get his loud-talking supervisor character. Simply put, this 21st-century thing called Netflix enables a whole new kind of viewing – and comprehension – that weekly episodes on ABC didn’t allow. Back then, if you missed it, you just did. Today, you can watch and re-watch.

And re-watch I did: all eight episodes from season one and all twenty-two from season two, as the simpleton Sheriff Harry S. Truman, full of wide-eyed goodwill, tries to keep up with a string of crimes and odd occurrences that would dizzy any normal law man; as old weird Pete ambles along behind his wife Catherine; as Ben Horne melds from a diabolical businessman to a bumbling Civil War obsessive to a possibly reformed environmental activist with no idea how to be good; as Lucy bounces back and forth between the aw-shucks deputy Andy and the charlatan clothing salesman Dick Tremaine; as first one then another character assumes the evil spirit of Bob: the one-armed man, Leland Palmer . . . and eventually Agent Cooper himself, left banging his head against the mirror and howling with laughter.

Though I enjoyed re-watching the show, a few things bothered me this time. The main one: James Hurley The teenage biker just left. James was a major player of most of the plot, then after he had his affair with the wealthy seductress – a plot twist that didn’t go anywhere – he got on his Harley and that was that. I also found the recording session in Donna’s living room completely out of place in the story. Beyond that, in the first few episodes, the high school figured prominently into the introduction of the story – since Laura, Donna, James, Audrey, Bobby, Mike, et al. – went to small-town school together and that’s how they knew each other. But within a few episodes, the fact that these characters were in high school all but disappeared.

However, for any storytelling flaws, the final episode revealed something to me that I never could have remembered: when the black-clad, blue-eyed, screaming-demon version of Laura Palmer proclaims in the red-curtained Black Lodge to Agent Cooper: “I’ll see you in 25 years.” That was then . . . and this is now. Twenty-five years later, and “Twin Peaks” is being resurrected!

For anyone who has never seen the series, it makes a lot more sense if you watch the film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” first. Though, even that has its own David Lynch twist: the series ran in 1990 and 1991, and its movie-length prequel came out in 1992. I remember finding the movie in the video store in Normandale Mall, watching it, and going, Ooooooooh, so that’s what was happening. Watching “Fire Walk With Me” is like getting to see how the magic trick is done after it wowed you.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, I was enthralled by David Lynch’s work. I can’t even remember how I came across it – video-rental stores, probably, since I doubt if any of Lynch’s movies came on TV  – but “Wild at Heart” became one of my favorite films of all time. “Wild at Heart” seemed to go where Lynch couldn’t in “Twin Peaks,” working for ABC, since that film had many of the same actors and themes: double-crossing love affairs, a strange sexual underworld, and extreme caricatures of American coolness. Later, “Lost Highway” re-exploited Lynch’s penchant for double-identities by connecting a distraught LA jazz saxophonist to a teenage car mechanic via a creepy little guy in black clothes. Though, by the time of “Mulholland Drive,” in 2001, I’d grown a little weary of his double-identity/possession motif. I don’t know whether my tastes had changed with age or whether I had just seen what David Lynch would do, but after “Mulholland Drive” I lost my enthusiasm for him. (I never did watch his collection of short films.)

I’m looking forward to seeing what season three of “Twins Peaks” holds. I can’t imagine where Lynch will go with the story, since he left us with Agent Cooper with possessed by Bob. Maybe a middle-aged James Hurley will come back and sing another 1950s loves song in that girly overdubbed voice. Maybe the Audrey will own the Great Northern and her daughter will spy on her by removing the slat in the wall. Maybe Leo will still be holding that string in his mouth . . .

With David Lynch, one never knows. He has had twenty-five years to plan this out.

Filed under: Film/Movies, Generation X Tagged: 1990s, David Lynch, Netflix, TV, Twin Peaks

#thestack (Next!)

You probably ought to read “The Stack: Getting Started” first.

[image error]My first thoughts on seeing the next American Poetry Review in the stack was: Allen Ginsberg! Great! Instead of using a black-and-white photo of bald, crazy-bearded Ginsberg, the editors chose a Robert La Vigne painting of young Ginsberg for the cover of the March/April 2006 issue, and I approved of that decision immediately. The second thing I thought as I glanced at that goldish-yellow-and-blue cover was: Ira Sadoff wrote a part two to “On the Margins”? Maybe I should go back and read part one. The third thought: That Shinder guy with the mom-rectum poem is in here, too?

Before I were to read though, I had to do my browsing thing. On first glance, there seems to be more here that I will read. I can’t read Reginald Shepherd’s poems, because of his frowny author photo. (I read his “On Difficulty in Poetry” in Writer’s Chronicle years ago, and it didn’t incline me to seek out more of his work.)  But I know off the bat that I will read the commentary on Ginsberg, and the essay “This Working Against the Grain,” and John Koethe’s poem “Proust,” and I will definitely read JoEllen Kwiatek’s “Study for Necessity,” since I agree with her statement in the first paragraph: “To be literate as a writer is to have cultivated a writing process; that is, a relationship with time.”

This issue dedicated to Ginsberg’s “Howl” celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the poem’s 1956 publication by City Lights. Ginsberg was one of my early favorite poets. At eighteen, I had read Kerouac’s On the Road (and then Dharma Bums and then Subterraneans and then Desolation Angels), and an inquiry into Kerouac – via Nicosia’s Memory Babe – led me to some real names behind the pseudonyms: Carlo Marx = Allen Ginsberg. And I was off to the races in my late-teen/early-twenties Beat phase! After finding the little black-and-white Howl and Other Poems at a now-gone independent bookstore called The Bookmonger and devouring its contents, I found that I actually liked “America” and “Supermarket in California” better than that lengthy tirade against mid-’50s America.

And what was contained in that commentary on Ginsberg in that 2006 issue of APR furthered my comprehension how not-alone I was in that discovery: a young non-conformist, possibly artistic, definitely dissatisfied, living in a cultural backwater . . . who then read Ginsberg and went, This is awesome! For me, it was in the early 1990s. For Vivian Gornick and Mark Doty, who actually got see and meet Ginsberg, it was in the late ’60s. For Amiri Baraka, who was his long-time friend and one of the original “beats,” it was the post-war 1950s.

After skipping Shinder’s intro piece, mainly because I am already familiar with the history behind “Howl,” The first really interesting thing I read was in Vivian Gornick’s discussion:

Like Leaves of Grass, it is an ingenious experiment with the American language that did what Ezra Pound said a great poem should do: make language new. Its staccato phrasing, its mad juxtapositions and compacted images, its remarkable combining of the vernacular with the formal – obscene, slangy, religious, transcendent, speaking now in the voice of the poet, now in that of the hipster – is simply an astonishment.

Agreed. Then Mark Doty’s passages alluded heavily to Ginsberg’s openly gay attitude toward transcendence and his freewheeling attitude. After describing his experience attending a Ginsberg reading at the University of Arizona while he was still in high school, where “people clapped and laughed and shouted approval,” Doty asked, “Can you imagination gay liberation as a religious juggernaut? Probably not.” Then Baraka rounded out the homage, followed by a short catalog of blurbs, and finally a piece by Ginsberg himself, writing in the 1980s, who apprised the reader:

Blocked by appearances, love comes in through the free play of the imagination, a world of art, the field of space where Appearance – natural recognition of social tragedy & world failure – shows less sentience than original compassionate expansiveness of the heart.

Allen Ginsberg has been gone for twenty years – He died in April 1997. – and as I finished the seven-page section on his most famous poem, I was thinking about how we could use more people like him these days: a self-promoter with a sincere message whose goals didn’t seem to have anything to do with sales. Thinking as a teacher, sometimes I lament that I can’t teach “Howl” in my creative writing classes as one of the modern American classics, but then again I don’t think I should anyway. “Howl” isn’t for everybody; it’s something that just the right person has to discover for himself.

Moving on, I knew I wanted to read John Koethe’s poem “Proust,” but I ended up reading that and his other one, “16A,” too. “Proust” is really a biographical narrative that centers on the speaker’s readings of the novelist’s monumental and notorious series, Remembrance of Things Past. The poem had more name-dropping than I liked, but I looked up Koethe and wasn’t surprised to see that he’s a very distinguished professor, Guggenheim recipient, etc. Maybe the guy was talking over my head about authors I’ve never read and places I’ve never been. It sucks sometimes being an Alabama yokel who don’t know nothing.

Browsing through more of the poems: I got distracted trying to read Alfonsina Storni when I saw an ad on the opposite page for Samuel Delaney’s book About Writing, and thought, I ought to look into that one. I spent some real time with Michael Burkhard’s poems in the Special Supplement section, and really liked “aha: shadows of confessions,” though I’m not sure I understood it, and also liked the final lines in “‘I talk to your father but only by telephone’—Bernadette Mayer,” which preceded it. Burkhard’s poems had a strong sense of wordplay that made his poems like moving targets. Of Donald Hall’s four poems, “Safe Sex” was poignant, but the ending of “Usage” didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the poem, and “The Master” was something of a gimme.  I didn’t give DW Fenza’s allusion-heavy “My City” much time or attention, and Elliott Figman’s poems— I didn’t see the point in either one. Though, I particularly like Phoebe Zinman’s poem “Patience” about “the baby, the cat, / the deaf girl, / the man who wasn’t sure he loved me.” Thankfully, that wishy-washy suitor became “the man who was slow to love me” and I was very glad for Ms. Zinman, whose author photo made her look like a cute 1960s receptionist.

After trying to the read the poems in the American Poetry Review, I went back and read JoEllen Kwiatek’s essay “A Study for Necessity,” which briefly goes into a writing habit that I know well myself: I may not look like I’m working to you, I may be “staring straight ahead while eating a bag of Doritos on my sofa,” but I also may be working— composing, drafting, ror evising in my head. Yes, I agree, Ms. Kwiatek, with your fist on your chin and your pensive expression, that the “process of writing has become for me more and more unobtrusive, like eating, taking a walk, or opening a cupboard or a drawer; that is, it takes place in real, in daily – voracious – time.” Amen.

Last but not least, I had to tackle Reginald Gibbons’ essay “This Working Against the Grain.” I’ve already explained that I browse first, and Gibbons seemed long. Call it laziness, it might be. At first, I did what my students do when I hand out a reading: I flipped ahead and counted the pages. Trying to avoid getting started, I Googled Reginald Gibbons, and dammit!— another one of these accomplished types with professorships and Guggenheims and things like that. I told myself that it was going to be okay, and I got started reading.

Though I really want to block the lengthy passage near the beginning of the essay that cut straight to my bones, I’ll spare that and simply explain it. Wait— no, I won’t . . . because for this to make sense you need to know what he wrote:

Almost any moment in a life of writing – whether early or late – can seem a crucial reckoning, an opportunity or an obligation to challenge one’s feelings, to rethink, to choose to continue as before or to change, to commit oneself definitively to what one is writing and how one is writing it, or to throw it aside (or try— this isn’t easy to do). I question my ear; I wonder in what book of poems, in what novel, I will find the key to what and how I might write. I middle age now, and despite my sense that I seem to be who I am, and despite what I know of myself, and the many traces of myself that I have left in my own writings, I cannot fully remember who I was, and must wonder still who I may have been, and who I may be yet— feeling a little disappointed in myself if I must continue to be who I think I am, just as I am, till the end.

Then down the page, a bit he wrote,

And yet, despite not wishing to stand still, I am also apprehensive about leaving this place that I don’t even fully know. It familiarity is reassuring (even when it is disappointing).

His words struck me to the core. Of the rest of the essay, which delved into a poet named Donald Davie and the French feminist Heléne Cixous and the Greek writer Heraclitus and “intertextuality,” nothing was as impressive to me as the passage above . . . because . . . I too deal with these issues.

Now in middle age myself, when I consider the person who I have been – a complicated and elusive subject, an entangled mixture of unseemly actions, withheld justifications, and decisions based both on unrecognized ignorance and vague principles about righteousness, freedom, and value – I also have to consider whether the person that I have been is in any way the person who I am now. Could I even draw a line from the sweet, pleasing little boy to the distraught, troublesome pre-teen to the lost, reckless teenager, and then to determined young man who followed a vague dream, and then to the young husband-turned-father who made the best of what little he had— and now to the reflective middle-aged writer-teacher who wonders what mix of fate and accident landed him here? And I’m thankful to Reginald Gibbons for sharing his experiences with this desperate uncertainty before he went down his own literary rabbit-hole, which was of little consequence to me.

What the hell happens to us? When I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty, and reading the Beats and Henry Miller and Arthur Rimbaud, I pictured an artist’s life, an outlaw’s life, a life in constant motion – my life has been anything but, having lived it all in my own hometown – and I wonder why, for two adult decades, I let the dream of a foolish young past-me, who knew nothing about any of the things he wished for (high-speed trans-American travel, dire poverty in Paris, communal bohemian degradation) dictate my image of a writer’s life, the life my older self hasn’t lived up to. Though I now recall my fondness for Ginsberg with fondness of a different kind, I know I can’t be him, nor Kerouac, nor Henry Miller, and I wouldn’t dream of trying. Me, I’m a semi-failed poet from a middle-sized city in a state best known for backwardness, hate, and oppression. I’m an accidental teacher with no education degrees, a somewhat accomplished writer with no MFA, a wannabe professor with no Ph.D.— in short, the living result of a twisted but fruitless path to becoming what I once admired, built from effort I put it in when I still believed that was possible.

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, Reading Tagged: Allen Ginsberg, American Poetry Review, poetry

the #newschool: looking for the #truth in an age of #fakenews

In the South, there’s an old saying, “The Devil is a liar.” It is used in a lot of different contexts, but it is mostly used when a situation is turning sour. What the saying means generally is: when someone has to resort to disinformation, there’s probably something bad at the core of what’s going on. Lies and deception are – and have always been – tools for manipulating people into allowing what they otherwise would not and into acting in ways that are contrary to what they know as good and right. Even in a super-fast world where quality is measured in gigabytes, this age-old concept lies at the heart of the “fake news.”

Last week, the PBS NewsHour ran a story about teaching students how to recognize “fake news.” I knew it would be my kind of reporting when Judy Woodruff led off by clarifying that, by “fake news,” she meant “false information disguised as a legitimate news story, not reporting that people dislike for political reasons.”

During the report, third-grade students read news stories from the 1940s and identified rhetoric used to perpetrate the Japanese internment camps during World War II. They were shown by their teacher how to pick up on language that insinuates and castigates. Even children this young, ages 8 or 9, must be taught to see how language can be used to convince fearful people to set aside their principles and come along.

Then, we listen as a young Democratic state senator extols the virtues of honesty in government. This young politician has worked to pass laws in his state that will urge forward an honest and transparent comprehension of the issues. He said,

Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, right or left, we want people to go into the voting booth educated and prepared to make the best decision for our communities. And if people can’t discern fake information from real information, that really corrodes the basic institutions of our democracy.

As a teacher myself, I respect that we have to frame our lessons (and our laws) using modern terms, like “media literacy” and “critical thinking” and “fake news,” which students recognize as relevant to their own lives, but this issue of “fake news” goes deeper, to the most fundamental ideals expressed in the most ancient lessons, like “The Devil is a liar.” No matter one’s modern political leaning, we all have a duty to discern the truth from lies, because the thought processes and choices involved in that duty go to the heart of valuing what is good in human life: peace, civilization, safety, cooperation— all of which require honesty.

Filed under: Critical Thinking, Schools, Teaching Tagged: Critical Thinking, Education, fake news, media literacy, news, PBS, teaching

#thestack

People regularly donate books and magazines to my classroom. They come unsolicited from friends’ caches of review copies and cast-offs, and they come from requests that I make, to fill a need. Once, I put out a call for old National Geographics, and I got so many that I had to turn people away. One man gave us every issue from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, in pristine condition, organized chronologically into boxes by decade.

Even though my students are digital babies, I’m a print guy myself, and I like for the room to be filled with a variety of materials, from big tabloids on newsprint to perfectbound paperbacks. It matters to me that the room has publications with matte lamination and with gloss. I keep art books for their spot varnish and hardbacks for the ragged edges on the signatures. And because I’m a print guy among digital babies, I’m about the only one who really looks through some of the multitudinous print publications that we receive: The New Yorker, Garden & Gun, Black Warrior Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and The Atlantic, even other high schools’ folded-and-stapled literary magazines.

Among those donations is a stack of literary magazines, mostly American Poetry Review and Writer’s Chronicle, that has rested ignominiously on top of a black metal bookshelf near the classroom door for most of a decade. Recognizing the value of their content, I can’t bring myself to throw them away. Every spring, I blow the dust off of them and move a different issue to the top, hoping to incite interest.

But that hasn’t been happening.

[image error]So I decided, as I was cleaning out at the end of a school year, to dive into the stack myself.  Starting with the one on top: the purple and neon-green 33rd anniversary issue of American Poetry Review – November/December 2005 – which featured good ol’ Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson on the cover. Some long-gone school secretary had scrawled my last name in permanent marker above the address label, probably so the student aide in the office — who is about 30 by now — would know whose mailbox to put it in.

Although I wouldn’t design a publication of my own in this way, I do like American Poetry Review for the uniqueness of its big, unwieldy format and its two-column text that clusters groups of poems by author. Current expectations have moved many print editions to adopt the matte-laminated, letterhalf-sized, perfectbound style – one poem per page, often in a Roman font that’s set too small for comfortable reading – with younger staff members maintaining a similarly designed online presence. Today’s cleanly laid-out literary journals give us lots of white space around the poem— but not APR. They pack it onto the page!

I also like APR for the author photos on the covers, which can range from elegant to downright bizarre. On the odd end, we have the November/December 2004 issue featuring a wide-eyed John Ashbery who looks like someone just walked in on him in the bathroom again, or the November/December 2014 issue with Maureen Boruch, who looks like she’s about to climb into her shirt. But then there’s March/April 2014, with Mihaela Moscaliuc striking the pose of the flirty mom at some kid’s birthday party, or the kindly looking, hand-on-chin Robert Hass from September/October 2007. When I look at these images, part of me wonders what expression I would have, if I were to grace the cover of APR . . . What an uncomfortable thought.

After an ad for a reading of Emily Dickinson poems by Meryl Streep and a pair of poems by Uncle Walt, the 33rd anniversary issue moves right along to an English translation of a critical essay by Tzvetan Todorov, whose 2017 obituary in The New York Times describes him as a “Literary Theorist and Historian of Evil.” What a moniker. The heady essay begins by asking what we would have if we took “verse” out of poetry, essentially: what would poetry be without musicality? To end his very first paragraph, Todorov asks,

Is there such a thing as transcultural and transhistoric “poeticity,” or are there only localized solutions circumscribed in time and space?

A brilliant guy, I can already tell— but I’m not going to keep reading.

Since I decided not to fool with Todorov the Historian of Evil,  thumbing through the issue before deciding what to read led me to a picture of Dorianne Laux sitting in a ladder-back chair in a small, cluttered office, holding her knees to her chest and her hands to her face. She looks exasperated beyond redemption. Nope. Then the author photo of Maxine Kumin looked like the archetype of your best friend’s mom, inviting you to come back anytime. Meh.

I do this, with every magazine I pick up: I first flip through like I was in the doctor’s office waiting room. I look at the headlines, deciding what to read, and at the pictures, about which I make up little stories. Like in this issue: on page 17, James Grinwis’ weird John Ashbery stare led me to believe that he had also been surprised in the restroom, and on page 45, Rex Wilder looks more like the owner of a surf shop than a poet. I will actually read some of the poems in the issue, but I have to do this first.

After that whimsical perusal, I settle on reading Gerald Stern’s long poem, “The Preacher,” which the introductory note explains is rooted in the Book of Ecclesiastes, my favorite book in the Bible. I’d been treading lightly on some of the shorter poems, since I encountered Jason Shinder’s “The Rescue,” on page 31, which began: “When the doctor inserts his two fingers / into my mother’s rectum”— Wait, what? The rest of the poem made little sense to me, but probably because I was flustered by the way it began, and I gave up on Mr. Shinder pretty quickly.

“The Preacher” was refreshingly not about someone’s mother with fingers up her butt. Over five two-columned pages, Stern weaves, with sparse and unorthodox punctuation, through a highly cerebral conversation with a man named Peter about a crazy squirrel that eats daisies, dead trees, the beauty of frogs, the author of Ecclesiastes, holes torn in the fabric of the world, jazz great Charles Mingus, winding conversations, former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, ugly acts of war, the movie The Greatest Story Ever Told, Kant and Schiller, hell, rabbis, fog, buckets, all kinds of stuff. After reading through the poem twice, I found that it was one of those poems I could read often and keep finding new things. I particularly liked Stern’s sense of humor in spots, and the phrase “the dull folk I hate so well,” and the lines “‘I always look at the end / of a poem,’ he said, ‘and what I did I like / though I can’t paraphrase it, you’d get it wrong / the same as me if you tried.” He’s right: I was looking at the end of “The Preacher,” and I can’t paraphrase it either.

Among the other works there, Susan Stewart’s “shadowplay” stood out with its juxtapositions of bird and hand imagery, but her “red rover” seemed like an obligatory space-filler. I couldn’t bring myself to read James Grinwis’ only poem because I didn’t want to stay on the page with that wide-eyed glare. I skipped Ira Sadoff’s essay, “On the Margins,” but read Bianca Tarozzi’s poem “A Face,” which is about her mother’s death. I used to get aggravated by poetry and creative nonfiction about parents’ deaths, but since my father’s death, I’ve understood why writers harp on those things.

By that time, I’d had enough of the 33rd anniversary issue of American Poetry Review. On the final pages are fifteen Emily Dickinson poems, I glanced at some of them, with Gerald Stern still swirling in my head. He probably will be for a while.

Filed under: Literature, Poetry, Reading Tagged: American Poetry Review, literary magazine, poetry