THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER

The End of Poetry Month

As we head into the final hours of National Poetry Month, I thought we could look back on some of our favorite posts from the past few weeks. 

Charles Bernstein, Maureen N. McLane, and Don Paterson each shared their favorite poets and collections.

Louise Glück shared some pointed words about poetry month: "The idea of National Poetry Month is that it would be better to have a bigger audience. But I think poetry has always found an audience, and that audience makes up in passion for what it lacks in numbers. And that’s fine."

Henri Cole undertook a literary pilgrimage to James Wright's Martin's Ferry.

Adam interviewed some of the best and brightest poetry editors, including Meghan O'Rourke (Paris Review), Christian Wiman (Poetry), and Robert Casper (jubilat).

Our friends at Graywolf Press ruminated on the terrible hydra known as the poetry reading.

While poetry month is a great reason to collect all of the together, of course we publish and discuss poetry year round. Personally,I'm pretty excited about Magrelli's Vanishing Points in July. 

We've been thinking about periodically updating The Best Words in Their Best Order after April. What do you think? Is there anything in particular you'd like to see more of?

Thanks for stopping by,

-Ryan

Jonathan Galassi on the State of Poetry

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

Everything is going on. From very formal poetry to poetry that's indistinguishable from prose. There's multimedia poetry. Spoken poetry that's meant to be consumed that way. The auditory aspect of poetry is much more a part of the game. There's Dominique Raccah's site, poetryspeaks.com: they're doing exciting work.

It's about diversity. It's about multiple channels of expression. As the culture gets more unitary in certain ways, there has to be a countervailing freedom. Poetry is a place where that happens. I think there are a lot of affinities between that freedom in poetry and the Internet. The openness. Poetry is ideally suited to the Internet. It's easily digested, it's short, it’s easy to share. 

An Interview with jubilat's Robert Casper

Alyson and I are big fans of jubilat, a poetry journal published at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, so we reached out to cofounder and publisher Robert Casper to chat about the magazine. In addition to his role as publisher, Rob also serves as Program Director at the Poetry Society of America. 

Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, jubilat has gained a following for its distinctive aesthetic and unique combination of genres. In the words of the magazine itself: “jubilat has aimed to publish not only the best in contemporary American poetry, but to place it alongside a varied selection of reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists. Rather than section off these varieties of work, the magazine creates a dialogue that showcases the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, and how experiments with language and image speak in a compelling way about who we are." 

I spoke with Rob on the phone Wednesday, and he elaborated on the magazine’s goals and editorial process—as well talking about the type of work that, as an editor and reader, continues to excite him. 

// Adam Eaglin

Tell our readers a bit about jubilat.

jubilat started ten years ago, when I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. I started it with two other graduate students, basically out of our conversations arguing about poems with each other and drinking a lot [laughs]. I found those conversations deeply engaging and surprising and felt we could make a magazine that would somehow represent them. At the time of the magazine’s inception, we had just taken a class called “Form and Theory in Contemporary American Poetry” with Dara Wier . . . What was striking was that [Wier] framed contemporary poetry in historical terms, and included all these texts without explaining why she did so. In that spirit the editors of jubilat and I started the magazine by publishing reprints, found works, interviews with non-poets, and the like, and instead of quartering off or sectioning off, put them alongside contemporary American poetry. We sought to illustrate the way that contemporary poetry does not exist in a vacuum, but instead connects us both to literary history and to our life experiences. The work of the present is continually in conversation with the past, as well as itself . . . Plus, we wanted a magazine that almost fit in your back pocket.

An Interview with The Paris Review's Meghan O'Rourke

As a successful poet, critic, and magazine editor, Meghan O’Rourke has a uniquely three-dimensional perspective on the publishing world of poetry and literature. We thought she’d be the perfect person to talk with for our editor interview series.

Formerly a literary editor at The New Yorker, Meghan now serves as a culture critic at Slate and as a poetry coeditor at The Paris Review. A book of her poems, Halflife, was released in 2007, and a memoir, The Long Goodbye, will be published by Riverhead in 2011.

Meghan kindly answered questions about her current projects, her varying roles as editor and writer, and the editorial process at The Paris Review. // Adam Eaglin

Can you tell us a bit about your role at The Paris Review?

I’m one of two poetry editors, which means I select poems (with my fellow editor). We read the “slush” pile of unsolicited poems, and we also solicit work from poets we admire. Sometimes we make suggestions to the poets about the poems. The job is pretty much like any other poetry editor’s job, except for the fact that there are two of us, so we have to agree. The idea is that together we create a bit of check and balance, so that we can try to be objective about the work. It also makes sure the poetry doesn’t stay too similar, I think. First I worked with Charles Simic, now I work with Dan Chiasson. In both cases our tastes overlap somewhat but not entirely, which means each of us sometimes champions and publishes a poem the other might not have gone for. I find it extremely illuminating to do this work with another writer—it’s like getting an intimate tour of another writer’s mind.

At TPR, do you feel an obligation to publish younger (or “emerging”) poets?

Booktalk with Henri Cole

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: In March, the poet Henri Cole answered questions from staff members at Ohio State University, where he is a professor, for their website feature "Booktalk." Cole's latest book, Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, was published by FSG in March. In the interview, which can be read in full here, Cole talks about his favorite books, his least favorite books ("those sickening vampire love stories"), what he thinks of The Catcher in the Rye, and which works of literature have most helped him in his life. // Adam Eaglin

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read?
I’d want them to read the ancient myths. There are some very nice illustrated editions. I’d want them also to read lots of poetry to appreciate the English language. I wouldn’t want them to read those sickening vampire love stories.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?
You’ll hate me, but I didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn’t a normal teenager.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why?
My feelings are hurt that you didn’t mention poetry. I like poetry and editions of letters.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?
The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Bon Appétit and The New York Review of Books.

What books have helped you most in your career?
“Career” is not a word I like. Books that have helped me in my life are James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now, William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, and David Plante’s The Francoeur Novels. They all transcribe something of what it is to be a young homosexual in America.

Related: If you're in or around Seattle, you can catch Henri Cole at the Elliott Bay Book Company on May 7. 

Below, Henri Cole reads the poem "Twilight" from his previous collection Blackbird and Wolf.

All That Glitters Is not Costume Jewelry: Alan Gilbert Interviews Charles Bernstein

ALAN GILBERT: You’re the author of over a dozen books of poetry containing a wide variety of styles—from rigorous avant-garde techniques, to a form of disjunctive lyricism, to rhymed doggerel. How did you go about selecting the work for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, which stretches across more than thirty years, beginning with a poem from 1975?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Jackson Mac Low called his 1986 selected poems from Roof Books Representative Works: 1938–1985. The idea was that each included piece represented a particular structure or form he used. I think of All the Whiskey in Heaven as a sampler or array. It’s a constellation of approaches to poetry. Beyond the experience of the poems themselves, I hope the book brings to mind the possibilities of poetry. I’ve done only one other collection of otherwise published work, Sun & Moon’s 2000 book, Republics of Reality: 1975–1995, which brought together the full texts of a number of out-of-print books and pamphlets, plus one new series, “Residual Rubbernecking.” Rubbernecking is when you slow your car to peer at an accident; residual rubbernecking is when you stop and stare at the site of an accident no longer present. So I guess you could say that All the Whiskey in Heaven is a product of my residual rubbernecking.

Don Paterson's Recent Favorites

Guest blogger Don Paterson is a poet (Rain) and editor at a publisher in the UK.

I read Jamie McKendrick’s versions of the contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli when they came out in the UK, and I was delighted to hear that FSG is publishing them in Vanishing Points. Refracted through JM‘s bone-dry wit, Magrelli reads like an Italian Charles Simic—which is just about the world’s classiest arrangement, in my book. Also check out Magrelli’s Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper, which has a subversive little poem on everything from the bar code to the small ads; trust me, The New York Times will never look the same again.

Is it really more than nine years since Gjertrud Schnackenberg published The Throne of Labdacus, and can someone have her speed up just a little? GS really is a glory of a poet, and one of the most shamefully underrated in your country, if you’ll forgive a Scot for telling you so. Supernatural Love is never far from the bedside table. If you’ve somehow missed out on her, go read Two Tales of Clumsy, and wake at 3 a.m. to the sound of your own screaming. I know I did. On the subject of underrated Americans, I try not to miss an opportunity to rave about the late Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems, still not published in the United States. Yes, he was a dear friend of mine, and yes, we published him in the UK—but I’m pretty sure that even if that hadn’t been the case, I would have still claimed he was one of the great poets of the age. We all did; he was a huge influence on a whole generation of UK poets. Like Frost, he sounds light but reads dark, and his poems open up slowly to reveal themselves as constructions of staggering complexity and ingenuity. They’re like little self-winding clocks, built with all their fixed and moving parts completely interdependent, something Donaghy learned from Paul Muldoon. They’re also full of wisdom. I never fail to be amazed by his work.

What else is great? Everything by Kay Ryan and Anne Carson. Charles Wright’s Sestets. Mark Doty’s Theories and Apparitions. From the British poets, look out for Paul Farley’s indispensable selected, The Atlantic Tunnel. Also Alice Oswald’s Weeds and Wild Flowers, and a lovely, quiet, wise book called Grain by John Glenday.

—Don Paterson

Related: Don Paterson's aphorisms

The Art of Recitation

For those of you in Washington D.C. we recommend checking out the National Recitation Contest, currently underway at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium. The contest, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the NEA, showcases high school students with an often unremarked talent. It's not slam poetry, it's not a monologue, and it's not debate.

I remember a friend in eleventh grade memorizing Shakespeare's "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" speech from Julius Caesar. The stunt seemed to me an act of extraordinary skill. Perhaps this is because my own recitation skills end at phone numbers (forget area codes). Even today I think the only work I've memorized would be Pound's "In the Station of the Metro," which doesn't really count. So I put the question to our readers: is there a poem you've memorized, or would like to? 

You can watch video of last year's finalists here, and learn more about the 2010 competition here.

Derek Walcott and T.S. Eliot

Nobel laureate Derek Walcott published White Egrets with FSG this spring - some of you have seen selections in our Daily Poem Emails - and we're thrilled by the recent writeup in the New York Times Book Review.

Karl Kirchwey compares Walcott to Eliot, noting several parallels in their work and approach. He also writes, "All the more striking, then, is Walcott’s new book, ...for it is both visionary, in the best sense of that word, and intensely personal, even autobiographical. It is an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth; and it is a book of stoic reckoning."

You can read the full review here, and pick it up in print this Sunday.

Related Audio:
Derek Walcott reads Selections from The Bounty and Joseph Brodsky's "Lullaby" and "Love Song"

Jonathan Galassi: What Is Poetry? What Is Fiction?

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

There's a lot of convergence in the arts that's very fruitful and interesting. A lot of crossover. I've always felt that Lydia Davis's stories are poems. We often talk about the “poetic” qualities of prose, which I think means a very concentrated language, where the intensity of the words is packed with multiple meanings. Some prose is more open, where the forward thrust is what matters. But Lydia's prose is packed with significance.

The time may be coming when it will be difficult to tell what’s fiction and what’s poetry.

As a publisher, it's undeniable that it's easier to sell something labeled as prose. The system assumes that it's more digestible, that more people are open to it. So we sell Lydia Davis as a prose writer. But to me, Lydia Davis is a great poet in the sense we've been talking about.

Sometimes I say that one of our jobs perhaps is to "put really good books over on people." Publish books as more accessible than they really are. There's a lot going on in some of these books, but you keep quiet about it, let people discover it on their own.

Take Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey—that's a poetic book. It doesn't work like most fiction. It's self-aware, it's indeterminate, it's mysterious, it has a certain dispassionate quality to it. There's a strain of that in fiction, but it's not what we're normally used to. That mathematic quality behind the book is in a way a poetic quality.

We're calling it a novel, but it's not really a novel. It's a piece of writing. That's true of Henri Cole too. We package Pierce the Skin as poetry, which it is, but it's a piece of writing. There's a cross-fertilization among genres that's interesting.

Related: The Believer interview with Lydia Davis by Sarah Manguso

Henri Cole on Visiting Martins Ferry, Home of the Late James Wright

Today we're featuring another guest post from poet Henri Cole, whose collection Pierce the Skin FSG published in March.

Ohio sure knows how to do spring. Everywhere the trees are blossoming-white, pink, and purple—making me feel how abruptly life can begin again. 

 

Yesterday, I drove two hours with my student Ben and his pretty wife Lily to Martins Ferry, Ohio, where the poet James Wright was born in 1927 and graduated as valedictorian from the local high school.

 

 

Martins Ferry—which Wright called “my home, my native country”—is one of many steel-producing towns along the industrialized upper Ohio River Valley. 

 

 

Even in hopeful April, I thought of Wright’s bleak lines immortalizing his blue-collar hometown: 

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

 

On the town’s lower plateau, we crossed Ohio State Route 7 to see the stadium—where Wright portrayed the local boys galloping “terribly against each other’s bodies”—and then we visited the Martins Ferry Public Library on James Wright Place. 

 

There was a book sale and Lily bought a cookbook for one dollar. The library director, Yvonne, greeted us warmly and showed off a handsome framed portrait of Wright, taken by his brother Ted, displayed in the main reading room.

With Yvonne, we walked down the street to see the town’s new historical plaque honoring Wright.

And she pointed out that it faced the library, rather than Dutch Henry’s, a popular bar across the intersection, telling us that this fact delighted Annie, the poet’s widow.

Driving along the Ohio River, we encountered a family on the railroad tracks collecting cans in plastic shopping bags. “The beautiful river, that black ditch of horror,” Wright called it in one of his radiant poems.

At a nearby restaurant, we sat in a booth and Lily ate chili while Ben devoured a delicious greasy hamburger with fries. The Martins Ferry ambulance squad was there eating lunch, too.

Later, driving home, we listened to a CD of Wright reading in 1978. He was introduced by Mark Strand, who praised Wright’s poems for their sincerity and lack of melodrama. “It may sound at times like despair, but ultimately it’s not,” Strand said eloquently, “for its very utterance is a victory in which the inner world of the poet is given substance and the outer world of things is given meaning.”

—Henri Cole, April 19, 2010

Fady Joudah on Translating Mahmoud Darwish

The incomparable Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish passed away in 2008, but English-speaking readers continue to be introduced to new work as more of his poetry comes into translation. Last November, FSG published If I Were Another, the second collection of Darwish's poetry translated by Joudah. The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize from the Society of Authors in the UK.

Beloved by critics and readers alike, Mahmoud Darwish won numerous awards and is considered one of the greatest poets of his generation.

Upon the release of If I Were Another, BOMB magazine spoke with Joudah about his lifelong connection with Darwish's legendary work, from hearing it read as a child in Libya to meeting with the man himself only five days before his death. The full interview, from which the following was excerpted, can be read on BOMB's website.

Susie DeFord: What was your first introduction to Mahmoud Darwish’s work?

Fady Joudah: I must have been six or seven years old, in Benghazi, Libya, listening to my father or uncle recite Darwish’s newly published poems in Palestinian Affairs and memorizing them to recite them back, sometimes for pocket change.

SD: Why is Darwish’s work significant to you?

FJ: In a simple sense his is one of the first poetic cadences I heard. So he resided in me from such a young age as a memory I could only recognize many years later as my bond with poetry took hold. He is also a unique phenomenon in Arab and world poetry. It’s an amazing experience to have been his contemporary, this poet who has already defeated death and achieved artistic immortality, without needing the usual test of time. And of course there is his lifelong dialogue with identity, with self and other, with place as passion and as exile, as time and as ruse.

SD: You mention meeting Darwish in your introduction to If I Were Another. What was that like?

FJ: It was certainly packed with the anxiety of knowing, as he put it, "this could be the last time." But it was a pleasant morning and afternoon. We had a good lunch, good wine, and talked for hours in a place at the edge of the mall, where he would not venture deeper, because he thought it resembled a chicken coop. He was brilliant with satire, loved humor. I think he knew all along that those were his last days. He said goodbye in such a beautiful way to almost all those who were part of his life. I had the added strangeness of being a physician, and knowing the extremity of the situation.

Paul Muldoon on Ke$ha

This video's been making the rounds lately, and at first I didn't know what to make of it. Ostensibly it's Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon discussing pop star Ke$ha's lyrics. But like so many intersections between "high" and "low" subjects, it's difficult to determine how tongue-in-cheek it all is. I'm going to err on the side of very tongue-in-cheek. See for yourself.

-Ryan 

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Tonight there's two great events to choose from in New York City. We couldn't decide which to attend, so we flipped a coin. (It came up tails!)

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney at Hunter College
The Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series

6:30 pm, Hunter College Assembly Hall, North Building 1st Floor
69th St., between Park Ave & Lexington Ave.

Event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

A Celebration of James Schuyler's Other Flowers at the Poetry Project
Featuring Other Flowers editors Simon Pettet and James Meetze, as well as an incredible lineup of readers: Anselm Berrigan, Tom Carey, John Coletti, Bill Corbett, Elaine Equi, Jonathan Galassi, Vincent Katz, Eileen Myles, Charles North, Arlo Quint, Stacy Szymaszek, Susie Timmons, Geoffrey Young and Anne Waldman.

8pm, at St. Marks Church
131 E. 10th Street

Details

Editor James Meetze on Discovering Schuyler's Other Flowers

I Am That Creep, Pleased to Meet You.

I was reading the lively conversation between Jonathan Galassi and Eileen Myles in Vice, and Eileen says, about living in San Diego, “There was a way in which you were really alienated from where you lived. There wasn’t a lot of conversation and there wasn’t a lot of encounter.” This reminded me of the feeling I had upon discovering Schuyler’s poems, those that became Other Flowers, which “live” in San Diego.

Here is the life’s work of this poet I’ve always loved and always known to be both intimate and exclamatory, his poems often about or because of conversation and encounter—even being the encounter itself—and his poems and things reside now in this city where everyone is alienated by design and is thus forced to make encounters happen. That feeling I’d had was initially one of some cruel irony. But as I thought of Schuyler, it began to make sense. In a way, he was always alienated and made his own encounters, whether with a Fairfield Porter painting, the first bud of spring, his gossipy friends, or the poems of Leopardi.

Now, two reviews of Other Flowers have — appropriately, mind you — mentioned Schuyler’s “prophetic” lines from "A Few Days": “when I’m dead, some creep will publish [my notebooks] in a thin volume called Uncollected Verse.” I am that creep, pleased to meet you. Having long been a devotee of Schuyler’s work, I was very much aware of these lines and duly considered them before spending four months wearing white gloves in a stuffy room, and five years of my life working on this volume, so that these poems might reach the audience they deserved, something I could not have done without the intrepid collaboration of my dear coeditor, Simon Pettet. It is my belief — and one that appears to be shared by a great many participants in this project — that, while there is no “The Morning of the Poem” or “Hymn to Life” in this collection, these poems are a necessary addition to the James Schuyler oeuvre we already know and love. I think he would be pleased.

—James Meetze, April 19, 2010

Related: 

Letter Excerpt, read by John Ashbury
Money Musk, read by John Ashbury
Salute, read by Lawrence Joseph

In the Company of Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein is a poet and essayist. FSG published his most recent book All the Whiskey in Heaven in March. 

Robert Creeley liked to call those of us who shared his life in, and commitment to, poetry company. Over the last few years, I find the company I keep ever harder to keep up with, just in terms of the sheer and exhilarating range of work. Still, there is nothing I like more than making my way through the wealth of new poetry books, both by younger poets and so many of the poets who have formed my poetic horizon.

In the last few months there have been new poetry books by three of my favorite poets: Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone), Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] (Wesleyan), and Myung Mi Kim's Penury (Omnidawn). And in the last few years there have been collected poems by Jack Spicer (Wesleyan), Barbara Guest (Wesleyan), John Ashbery (Library of America), and Philip Whalen (Wesleyan); a collected poems and essays by Robin Blaser (California); as well as selected poems by Nicole Brossard (California), Frank O'Hara (Knopf), and Creeley (California); not to leave out Lydia Davis's Collected Stories (FSG), which may not be poetry but oughtta be (I included a few of Davis's short works in 43 Poets (1984), an anthology published as a special issue of boundary 2).

Louise Glück on Poetry Month

For National Poetry Month, Elisa Gonzalez at the Yale Daily News sat down with Louise Glück, author of A Village Life. They talked about such diverse topics as Louise's teaching at Yale and her personal fashion sense (there's talk of leather and Mick Jagger). We've excerpted Louise's thoughts on poetry month (spoiler: she's not a fan); I'd recommend the rest of the interview for Louise's funny, smart responses. // Adam Eaglin

Q: What do you think of National Poetry Month?

A: I don’t like it. And the reasons are myriad. It describes itself as being a celebration of poetry, but really it is a kind of hawking and forcing of an art, as though without that push from publicity, the art would not survive. So it seems to me demeaning, insulting and misguided. I think the art will survive. It always has. The idea of National Poetry Month is that it would be better to have a bigger audience. But I think poetry has always found an audience, and that audience makes up in passion for what it lacks in numbers. And that’s fine.

A Poetry Giveaway

This year we've partnered up with GetGlue to give away a few of our favorite poetry titles to a couple lucky readers. If you're not familiar with GetGlue, it's a service and browser plugin that allows you to recommend books, movies, and music to your friends no matter where you are online. For instance, if you review Words in Air on Amazon, and your friend sees the book on Goodreads, GetGlue will tell your friend about your review. You can sign up and find out more info here.

GetGlue has devised a system where the biggest fans of a given topic - say, poetry - are deemed "gurus" and instantly qualify for our little giveaway. If you're a web-savvy reader of poetry, consider this a reward.

On Discovering Elizabeth Bishop

Joelle Biele is the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, to be published by FSG in 2011. We highlighted a few letters from the book earlier this month.

Sitting outside my poetry professor’s door, I noticed that the students from her advanced class were still reading the pink book. I had seen them, seniors probably, carrying the book before, through the corridors of the English department and onto the quad. Clearly, they had read a lot, had sophisticated tastes, and I was a student in the beginning class, hoping to find my way out of the dark and snowy rail stations of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel but unsure what to read in its place.

Each week my poetry professor passed out thick packets filled with poems, poems like “My Cat Geoffrey,” “Directive,” and “Howl”—poems that completely floored me, as had the essays by Eudora Welty and E. B. White she'd assigned in Composition the year before. Anything she had us read was good, and these students still carried the book, which meant it was doubly good, so I had to spot the title without being too obvious. There was a certain coolness factor, after all. A student came out of her office, another went in, and we all shifted seats. The girl next to me rifled through her bag, and there it was, the pink book with the light green picture and the plain black letters: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979.

Either later that week or the week after, I took the bus to Harvard Square and bought the book I still read now, excited to have what I thought of as my first real book of poems. I was eager to sit down and read, eager to see what I might discover, if it would be the kind of book I would want to read in one sitting, and if I would want to carry it, too.

-Joelle Biele

On Joshua Beckman

We asked our editorial team if they wanted to write about a particular poet they consider underrated. Today's guest post is written by Dan Piepenbring, editorial assistant for Sarah Crichton Books.

Joshua Beckman’s Take It, a slim and remarkably agile collection, was published last spring by Wave Books, where Beckman is an editor. His poems impress variously and enduringly, but it’s their range that astonishes foremost. In sixty-two pages—and with plenty of white space leftover—Beckman runs a dizzying gamut of images and motives. He’ll conjure his inner curmudgeon only to banish him in the next couplet. He’ll wax rhapsodic and then sardonic about love, children, the state of the nation, seventies cult classics, bananas. You want brio? He can do brio, but he’ll just as soon collapse under exhaustion. Beckman’s no schizoid; he’s just talented, is all.

It’s impossible to cite his formal dexterity in the course of a brief blog entry—better to demonstrate how wholly he inhabits the modes of his choosing. The collection’s twenty-first poem (all of them are untitled) has lines as good as any:

Desert stylists were convening on
Port Washington for a vacation and
in a hotel room one sat me down
and began to discuss his wristwatch
as if it had a fundamental and symbolic
existence, a pattern of unified time
as little 2’s march along or something.
I feel, no, I am certain, that right now
thieves are breaking into my apartment,
I must go. But this convinced him not.
[ . . . ]
God has made this hotel in his image.
The fluctuations of life. Yes. Yes,
I understand folly, we’re the creatures
he explained that to.

Maureen N. McLane Highlights a Few Recent Discoveries

We asked poet, essayist, and critic Maureen N. McLane to tell us about some of the poetry she's excited about right now. Maureen has written two collections for FSG, Same Life and the forthcoming World Enough. She currently teaches at New York University. You can find audio of her reading her own poetry here.

I am, in a way, still in recovery from the poetry of 2009—or rather, still metabolizing the work of several incredibly strong poets, some very established and some newer, at least to me. Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 is clearly a, and perhaps the, towering work of the moment: his “Kill Poem,” from a few years ago, still makes my hair stand on end—a ruthless diagnosis of the spirit of the age. He is so knowingly, funnily, evilly brilliant that his power can be measured by the force of his detractors as well as by the intensity of his admirers. He is, thank god, inimitable. “I’m a liar with a lyre. Kiss me, life!” (“Pain Management”): youza! Seidel is our great poet of (among many other things) masculine abjection and authority, their mangled and mangling embrace.

Other work I’ve been absorbed by: Louise Glück’s A Village Life, with its stunning collective wager, its slowly and profoundly etched portrait of individuals in community; Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents (Wave Books), an intriguing, vertiginous, ingathering counter, if you want one, to Seidel’s sense of where we live now; Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Wesleyan), continuing her lyric scything; Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another (translated by Fady Joudah), an overwhelming volume that will take a long time to settle fully in me—and one that proves the urgency and necessity and gift of translation.

On the translation front: I am immersed in, and fascinated by, Jonathan Galassi’s translations of Leopardi’s Canti (forthcoming from FSG in November 2010), and I look forward to assigning some of these rigorous, fluent, wholly modern lyrico-critical poems (as well as the illuminating, elegant introduction) to students next year.

Other volumes exciting me now: Ange Mlinko’s Shoulder Season, just out from Coffee House Press: I’d seen some individual poems in magazines, and it’s terrific to have the whole volume. The wit, musicality, and careening intelligence here are a boon: consider “Babyclothes made of camo— / There should be a Lysistrata in the forsythia” (“Camouflage”). Or “It’s hard to know whether today or yesterday was the full moon; / excitement isn’t rigorous. It’s just river-silvering / blent with the odor of silt where the roofs spike / along a repurposed waterfront” (“Children’s Museum”). Mlinko seems to be taking James Schuyler’s kind of precisely rendered urban pastoral and bringing it elsewhere—American English sings differently in her lines and mind. Then, too, certain poems are stationed elsewhere—perhaps in Beirut, or Paris, or Croton-on-Hudson, all alert to “the realpolitik / of utilities.”

For all the praise-and-blame hooplah around National Poetry Month, I am glad to see individual poems appearing fresh and savage and singing in various magazines and on websites: Cathy Park Hong’s “Ballad in A”; Robyn Schiff’s “H1N1”. And, as usual, I am permanently excited about Sappho, Anne Carson (have not yet seen her new book, Nox), Shelley, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.

-Maureen N. McLane

Seamus Heaney Reading in New York City

We're very excited about this: for the first time since 2006, Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney will be reading and answering questions in New York City.

The Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series
Wednesday, April 21, 2010; 6:30 pm
Hunter College Assembly Hall, North Building 1st Floor
69th St., between Park Ave & Lexington Ave.

Event is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.

While we're on the subject, here are a few poems read by the man himself:

"Keeping Going"

"Tears" 

"The Strand"

Jonathan Galassi: Poetry Inhales the Atmosphere

Throughout the month, FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

The value of the work accrues over time. What Frederick Seidel wrote thirty, forty years ago, is still as fresh, as relevant, as current as what he wrote yesterday. It matures like wine; it becomes more meaningful over time. We still read Keats's poems with wonder two hundred years later. Poetry is out of time in that way: a great poem maintains its relevance.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." That's Dickens, and that's prose, but these phrases encapsulate an era, and there's magic there. The poetry inhales the atmosphere and preserves it. Like a time capsule.

That's certainly true of Seidel. George Packer said the other day, "Seidel is the poet of our time." Seidel's attitude and way of expressing things encapsulates how we feel. It's like Baudelaire. It exudes our moment.

Related: Frederick Seidel reading "The Owl You Heard"

Momku, Liloku and Other Hybrids

If there's poetic one form with continual resurgence online, it's the haiku. Last year Kevin Guilfoile brought us his tongue-in-cheek LiLoKu poetry, wherein Lindsay Lohan quotes are rendered in verse. Not 5-7-5 exactly, but you get the idea. 

Recently Alana Reynolds has created "momku" on Twitter: daily haiku on the topic of motherhood. 

An example:

I'm Catholic, husband
is Jewish. So our kids are
being raised Guilty

See more momku here.

-Ryan

Don Paterson

Don Paterson has written four previous collections of poems: Nil Nil, God’s Gift to Women, The Eyes, and Landing Light, which won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He lives in Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland.

You can read more about Don Paterson here, and read all blog posts about him here.

Don Paterson's Brief and Complete Waste of Time

We've recently published Don Paterson's Rain, from which we've already featured "Two Trees" in our Daily Poem. If you're not familiar with Paterson, "a writer of surface gorgeousness who is nevertheless right at home in the dark" (The New Yorker), he's an accomplished aphorist in addition to his talents as a poet. We've highlighted below a few of his lines from Graywolf's Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death.

-Ryan

"The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time."

***

"Some people achieve their humility by prayer and fasting, some by great charitable works. My own method is to behave like a complete moron every three months or so."

***

"Writers often end up humorists if they read in public too often. Barring the odd and worthless snort of self-congratulation, laughter is the only audible response we can ever elicit. The silence of the unbearably moved and that of the terminally bored are indistinguishable."

***

"Whenever he saw someone reading a bible, he would spoil it for them by whispering, 'He dies in the end, you know.' I'm always tempted to do the same to anyone I see consulting their diary."

***

"The present tense in English is too sibilant to be of much use to poets."

***

"By the age of eleven, I was finally exasperated with my parents. I knew I had been left with no alternative but to fuck myself up."

***

"No email for an hour. The bastards."

More: The New Yorker review of Rain

FSG Poetry Book Covers from the Archives

Lining the FSG hallways and conference rooms are copies of every book we've published. It's fun to take a break from present duties every now and then to skim the spines. We pulled a few of our poets' books from the last few decades to give you just a sample of the archive's breadth.

-Ryan

Designed by Guy Fleming

 

Designed by Charles Skaggs

 

Louise Glück and Dunya Mikhail at 92nd Street Y

On April 8th, one of our favorites, FSG poet Louise Glück read at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y along with Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. (You can find a listing of all their upcoming readings here.)

Reading first, Dunya was introduced by her editor, Jeffrey Yang, who spoke of the importance and special role of Dunya’s poetry, in Arabic and now in English. "In Iraq, there are no editors because they have censors," Dunya joked, before she read her first poem, "Larsa," after her daughter.

Fellow FSG poet Henri Cole gave a very personal introduction for his friend Louise. “Her poems have now cast a spell on three generations of readers,” he said, speaking of his first encounter with Louise’s poetry as a “young man,” and adding that he now teaches her work to his own students. “A poem for Glück is like a message in a shell for one ear.”

Henri spoke tenderly about visiting with Louise in her second-story home in Cambridge, M.A., where she writes all her poems on an old typewriter.

Louise read entirely from her latest book, A Village Life. Louise is a powerful reader with a very distinctive reading style, and to hear the poems in her voice—especially those from her newest book, with their longer, slower lines and phrases—brings out fascinating layers of emotion. She read seven poems: “Tributaries,” “At the River,” “Before the Storm,” “First Snow,” “Walking at Night,” “Crossroads,” and ended with the title poem, “A Village Life."

To hear Louise read two poems from A Village Life, we'd recommend “At the Dance” and “In the Café” at Slate.

To learn more about Dunya Mikhail, you can visit her site here. 

 //Adam Eaglin

Jonathan Galassi on Discovering New Poets

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

People ask me where FSG finds new poetry to publish. We get manuscripts from all over the place. We hear about people from other poets and other publishers. I wouldn't say there's any one channel. The poetry world is concentrated enough that you can tap into the conversation if you're open to it. Especially in translation, it often takes a long time for a poet's work to have gelled to the point where it makes sense for it to be published here.

If the poetry is really significant, its luster will only increase over time. Its importance will emerge. I think about that a lot with the publishing of poetry. Or publishing anything, really. We publish a lot of books, many of which are very important in the time they're being published. But only a few of even the best of what we publish will carry over into the future. There's a winnowing process that's always involved. And poetry is a place where the lag time is long. That's a good thing.

Related: Jonathan Galassi and Eileen Myles talk about their early experiences with poetry in Vice magazine.

Poems from Frederick Seidel's Evening Man

For its 2009 celebration of poetry month, FSG featured an exclusive giveaway of Frederick Seidel's Evening Man, a chapbook produced in a limited edition and signed by the poet. Although the chapbook never appeared in stores, the poems were also published in Seidel's collected Poems 1959-2009. Since we all love Seidel (a poet Jonathan Galassi calls "dazzling, memorable, scathing, uncomfortably honest, and monumentally tender"), we wanted to reprint a few of those poems from that limited edition chapbook. Below you'll find the title poem and two others.

Henri Cole on the Moment of Reckoning

On March 9, 2010, FSG published Henri Cole's Pierce the Skin, a collection of poems selected from his body of 25 years' work. Henri tells us a bit about the difficult process of choosing the poems that appear in the collection.

Last month I published my selected poems, Pierce the Skin, containing sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years. While putting it together, I used the selected poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney as my models.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Selected Poems was published in England in 1967, and until a friend gave me a copy two Christmases ago, I didn’t know it existed.  At just over a hundred pages, it is a model of self-restraint.  Though some of my favorite poems from her first three books – “The Weed,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” “The Unbeliever,” “Chemin de Fer,” and “Anaphora” – are not included, I found this unexpectedly liberating. Time would correct things, it seemed to say, if I made my own mistakes. 

Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (which I bought when I was a young man) showed me the way to excerpt from long lyric sequences, letting parts represent the whole, as ash in an urn can represent the body. So with these two books on my desk, I was strict with myself while excerpting my own six books. The manuscript I submitted was only about 125 pages.

The fact that neither Bishop nor Heaney included new poems in their books seemed to support my choice to hold back new work for my next collection, which I hope to turn in soon. If I’d included a handful of new poems, I feared they might never belong anywhere, like geese left behind on the pond after the seasonal migration.

I think publishing a Selected Poems can be a moment of reckoning. I hope readers will see that I’m here to stay. My book is dedicated to Jonathan Galassi, my editor, because I feel he’s kept me on the map of American poetry, in whatever classroom or skyscraper it hangs. 

– Henri Cole, April 5, 2010

Jonathan Galassi Interviewed in Poets & Writers

In case you missed it, Jonathan Galassi gave a long interview to Poets & Writers magazine last summer. Here are a few choice excerpts.

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn't get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There's luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don't get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don't get the right reviews, or if books aren't in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl's biography of Frank O'Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don't know if that's a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.

Click here for the full interview.

30 Videos in 30 Days for Poetry Month

Sometimes the simplest ideas are also the most clever. Diesel Bookstore in California has created one poetry video for every day in National Poetry Month, which they're unveiling each morning on their site. So far they've covered a broad spectrum of work, from Rumi to Rimbaud to Wallace Stevens. Some poetry just comes alive when read aloud (ahem); I can't wait to see what's on tap for the rest of the month.

Two highlights:

Check out the rest here.

Graywolf Guest Post: The Poetry Reading

...is a very distinct animal. A decade or so ago, at a celebration of the poetry reading series at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge Askold Melnyczuk (then editor of Agni magazine) drew both horrified and gratified gasps when during his tribute he dared to claim that, “Most of us do not like poetry readings.” Was he right? In part, I fear he was. Below are my top five warning signs that a reading might get into trouble. 

1. Hair awry—you end up being transfixed throughout the reading by the constant dance between hand, hair lock/s, and head toss.
2. When the poet talks about how little time he/she has, it is a sure sign they will run over. “Just six more,” they say, as if to reassure us.
3. The throat clearing that presages multiple water gulps throughout the reading; exacerbated by water being placed in an inconvenient spot so the poet has to disappear from view (behind lectern) to retrieve it.
4. The unprepared reader—papers all over the place, multiple copies of books toppling off the podium, which leads to a painful running commentary on the progress in finding the next poem, or worse, an awful embarrassed silence during the frantic search for the poem.
5. Poetry voice—why, when it comes to reading poetry aloud, do so many poets adopt a pseudo-religious incantatory voice that actually serves to flatten the meaning into a single-toned chant that numbs the senses and the mind?

Of course, Askold was joking. He knew he was addressing a crowd who always hoped for the best from an evening of verse. For a good poetry reading is truly memorable, a gift to be treasured. A single poem well read can bring a crowd to silence and awe. Just last month, for example, Tony Hoagland read at The Loft here in Minneapolis. His poems ranged from humorous to serious, sometimes within a single verse, and Hoagland’s audience of more than 225 people hung on his every cadence. I can still remember a reading James Tate gave in New York several years ago, read in a completely authentic voice that was still distinctly “poetic.” One of the most precious poetry evenings I experienced was when Seamus Heaney read to a rapt crowd at the Guthrie Theater; he knew just how much to explain his poems and how much to let the poems speak for themselves. Readings by such poets as Molly Peacock, Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky, and Yosef Komunyakaa are always a treat. These poets let their poems soar. I relish the younger Graywolf poets who can hold an audience—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Catie Rosemurgy, Tracy K. Smith, to name a few. In the deepest sense of the word, the best poetry readers know they are entertaining. Their performance honors the audience, and the audience knows it, and responds gladly with its most precious gift: attention.

Fiona McCrae is the director and publisher of Graywolf Press.

Charles Bernstein Reads

Last month, FSG released Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, a long-awaited thirty-year collection of poetry from “America’s most ardent literary provocateur” (Paul Auster).

In a February reading dedicated to his daughter Emma—who took the beautiful cover photo—the poet read a selection from his book. Also a literary critic, Charles Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. // Adam Eaglin


Reading | Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

CHARLES BERNSTEIN is the author of forty books, ranging from large-scale collections of poetry and essays to libretti. He is the Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

You can read more about Charles Bernstein here, and read all blog posts about him here.

Q & A with Christian Wiman, Editor of Poetry Magazine

Since its creation in 1912, Poetry Magazine has held a uniquely influential role in the conversation and culture of poetry in the English-speaking world—having published or discovered some of the 20th century's greatest poets. Since 2003, the magazine has seen a bit of a reinvention with a $200-million donation by Ruth Lilly and a new editorship under poet Christian Wiman.

In the first of an ongoing interview series, we asked Wiman—whose next book, Every Riven Thing, will be published by FSG—about his editorship and the magazine. Read below for Wiman's thoughtful responses on Poetry, "new" poets, National Poetry Month, and his upcoming book. // Adam Eaglin

Despite a perception that Americans’ interest in poetry has steadily declined, Poetry’s circulation has grown during your tenure as editor. What do you attribute that to?

I think there are multiple reasons for this.  For the first time ever, Poetry has had enough money to aggressively promote its excellent poets and prose writers, and new readers have responded.  We’ve also changed things quite a bit—spiced up the prose section, redesigned the magazine, introduced many new features and poets—and this has brought back some of the old audience that had fallen away. 

Both of these increases, though, ought to make us (and I include myself, as it’s an assumption I’ve shared) question whether Americans’ interest in poetry has in fact steadily declined.  Maybe there’s plenty of interest out there, latent or not, and we’re just not always finding the right ways of reaching people.

What do you see as Poetry's role in the conversation and culture of American poetry?

This changes depending on the circumstances.  When I first took over, I thought the reviewing culture needed a jolt, so I simply rounded up the smartest young critical writers I could find and gave them a free rein. Too free, some people thought, and for a number of months fiery letters came screaming into the office like missiles.  It still seems to me a necessary thing to have done, and of course we still run some sharply critical pieces at times (I’m baffled by some people’s belief that there should never be negative reviews of poetry), but that particular energy has mostly been directed into other things at this point.

April Poetry Events: Additions

We have a few additions to the line up of poetry events throughout the month:

April 6th - Cambridge, MA: Derek Walcott at Lesley University (Details)

April 13th - Syracuse, NY: Seamus Heaney at Syracuse University (Details)

April 14th - Rutgers, NJ: Derek Walcott at Rutgers University (Details)

April 20th - Princeton, NJ: C.K. Williams at Princeton Public Library (Details)

April 21st - New York, NY: Seamus Heaney at Hunter College (Details)

April 27th - Philadelphia, PA: C.K. Williams at Philadelphia Free Library (Details)

Jonathan Galassi on Jenny Holzer

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

This is a Jenny Holzer piece using the work of Henri Cole. She projects their words onto buildings. She and Henri are close friends.

 

And down the hall in the FSG offices is another, with lines from "Smoke" by Adam Zagajewski. 

 More on Jenny Holzer

Carl Phillips on Newshour

I wanted to highlight Carl Phillips' Speak Low for a couple reasons. First, to congratulate the poet on his selection as a 2009 National Book Award finalist. The citation reads: "His poems offer us hope through the constellation of the body and soul, suffering and salvation, and, ultimately, many truths."

Second, Phillips was featured on Newshour: Art Beat last April, where he read some of his work.

-Ryan

“Certain aspects were uncalled for,” Or, Graywolf poets invade a high school near you

We've invited our friends at Graywolf Press to contribute a few posts. Enjoy.

In early 2008 we launched a program called the High School Book Club. The gist is simple: Graywolf donates 35-50 copies of a new poetry book to a high school class, usually an advanced English course, and the poet visits the class to discuss the book and the glamorous world of poetry. I was not involved with the initial planning of the program, and I’ll admit that I was a bit skeptical. We knew (hoped) that our authors would enjoy the experience, and we hoped (really hoped) that the students would, but, I mean, poetry? For high schoolers? Right. Isn’t poetry, you know, kind of totally not cool? What I took away from my high school experience is that poetry ceased to be written after 1950. Expect for my poetry, of course, which rhymed and talked a lot about how Scott Miller was a jerk. I loved my English teachers—they’re the reason I pursued a degree in English, and ultimately why I ended up in publishing—and I am very thankful for their guidance. But the truth is that contemporary American poetry was simply not on the syllabus.

So when Tony Hoagland, whose wonderful collection Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty came out in February, came to Minneapolis for an event at the Loft Literary Center, and we arranged for him to visit a local high school, I was nervous. He’s far and away one of our bestselling poets of all time. He’s won major awards—the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Mark Twain Award, the James Laughlin Prize—and nearly every intern we’ve ever interviewed lists Tony Hoagland as the reason they’ve heard of Graywolf. Tony Hoagland is the reason I heard of Graywolf. His poem “Grammar” bowls me over every time I read it. But what if the students didn’t like his poetry? What if they passed notes and whispered and didn’t pay attention? What if they said that poetry is useless, just like the argument I made for calculus way back when?

I didn’t give the students (or Tony, who is whip-smart and has a wit not to be reckoned with) enough credit.

Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker

 Elizabeth Bishop -- a prolific and artful letter-writer, in addition to her obvious talents as a poet -- composed an astounding number of letters in her publishing years with The New Yorker. In 2011 FSG will release a collection of these letters, Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Joelle Biele. 

Below you'll find a handful of letter excerpts concerning the publication of Bishop's poem, "Crusoe in England." // Adam Eaglin

(Photography courtesy of Alice Methfessel) 

March 25, 1965

Dear Howard:

            Richard Kelly flew up to New York last night, and by the time you get this you probably will have received a samba record and a letter from me. I think he said he'd met you...

            Before he left, he handed over a lot of odds and ends, the way our visitors usually do—match-folders from the Yale Club, extra US cigarettes & Kleenex, paper-backs, etc.—and also the March 13^th New Yorker.  My own copy of course hasn't got here yet, and won't for several weeks.  If he hadn't given me that March 13^th one, and I hadn't looked at it last night, instead of this letter you'd be getting a long poem called CRUSOE AT HOME...  It is a bit unnerving, isn't it...  Or is it just "great minds," even so far apart?  Well, they aren't really exactly alike, because mine is in the first person, more realistic and un-organized, etc.  I'll send it someplace else, and I'll send you a copy when I have time to make copies.

            Yours ["Robinson"] is very lovely—the cork image particularly fine, I think.

            I re-read Crusoe not long ago and found it morally appalling, but as fascinating as ever.  Have you ever read the travel memoirs of Woodes Rogers, the young captain who picked up Selkirk?[i]  The parts about him are brief, but very moving.

Telepathically yours,
Elizabeth

 

{More after the jump.}

Louise Glück in Conversation

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: In issue 36 of American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets, former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück spoke with Dana Levin about her most recent collection, A Village Life, a 2010 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Glück is considered by many, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, as “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing." Because she only rarely gives interviews, Glück's conversation with Levin allows unique insight into the mind of one of our great poets. The full version of her interview, “For a Dollar: Louise Glück in Conversation,” can be read here. // Adam Eaglin

 

Dana Levin: What did [A Village Life] teach you aesthetically?

Louise Glück: I think I won't even know until I try to do something else. I remember talking to Richard Siken after Averno. I wasn't writing, and I was beginning to fret about it. I go through periods—long periods—of not writing. And sometimes that's not the focus of my anxiety. It's not that I am without anxiety, it's that my anxiety is in some other place; then all of a sudden I become preoccupied with my silence and quite panicky. I was entering that period and Richard said, 'Your next book has to be completely different, just sort of playing in the mud.' And that was exactly my feeling, that I had done everything I could do at the moment with poems operating on a vertical axis of transcendence and grief. And this new manuscript had to be more panoramic, somehow, and casual, with a kind of unbeautiful surface. So it taught me how to write an unbeautiful surface. What a triumph. [sardonic laugh]

Just to be able to write a longer poem, I think, was interesting... I had tremendous pleasure writing these poems. I loved being in that world. And I could get there almost without effort. Well, for a short period. You know, now I can't go...

DL: You can never go back to Brigadoon.

LG: No, never! I can't go back to any of these places. None of them. I never re-read my old work, so I don't even know what I think of it.

{More after the jump}

April Poetry Events

There's much to do, see, and hear during Poetry Month. Here are a few events we're looking forward to:

April 1st - New York, NY: Academy of American Poets Reading at McNally Jackson
Henri Cole, Ed Sanders, and Kimiko Hahn (Details)

April 1st - Portland, OR: Nick Lantz at Lewis and Clark College (Details)

April 3rd - New York, NY: Poets House Reading of "Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry" with Camille T. Dungy, Sean Hill, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Evie Shockley (Details)

April 3rd - San Francisco, CA: Nick Lantz at The Green Arcade (Details)

April 6th - Cambridge, MA: Derek Walcott at Lesley University (Details)

April 8th - New York, NY: Louise Glück and Dunya Mikhail at the 92nd St Y (Details)

April 8th - Philadelphia, PA: Charles Bernstein at Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania (Details)

April 13th - Syracuse, NY: Seamus Heaney at Syracuse University (Details)

April 14th - Rutgers, NJ: Derek Walcott at Rutgers University (Details)

April 15th - New York, NY: D.A. Powell at Columbia University (Details)

April 17th - Philadelphia, PA: Catie Rosemurgy at the Free Library of Philadelphia Festival of the Book (Details)

April 18th - Philadelphia, PA: Free Library of Philadelphia Book Festival feat. Charles Bernstein (Details)

April 20th - Princeton, NJ: C.K. Williams at Princeton Public Library (Details)

April 21st - New York, NY: Seamus Heaney at Hunter College (Details)

April 21st - New York, NY: Other Flowers: A Celebration of James Schuyler at The Poetry Project (Details)

April 21st - Chicago, IL: Nick Lantz at the University of Chicago Bookstore (Details)

April 21st - Iowa City, IL: Joanna Rawson at Prairie Lights Books (Details)

April 21st - Oberlin, OH: D.A. Powell at Hales Annex, Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse (Details)

April 22nd - Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Independents: The Graywolf Poets
Catie Rosemurgy, Matthea Harvey, and Tom Sleigh at the Brooklyn Public Library, Central Branch (Details)

April 22nd - Cleveland, OH: D.A. Powell at Cleveland State University (Details)

April 27th - Philadelphia, PA: C.K. Williams at Philadelphia Free Library (Details)

April 27th - Collegeville, PA: Catie Rosemurgy at Ursinus College, Unity House (Details)

Jonathan Galassi on Poetry in Translation

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

A lot of the recent poetry we've published has been about extending our range: working with some younger poets, or publishing selected poems by poets from traditions other than our own central tradition. It's fun to do those books, but it's also challenging.

I finished the Giacomo Leopardi translation, it's coming out this fall. I feel a great sense of relief because I've been working on this for ten years. It was the most difficult thing I've ever done. It has all sorts of problems, frustrations, and insoluble conundrums. But, you know, I'm excited to be finished, to be letting go of it. It was an education for me. Also this fall, we're publishing Valerio Magrelli. He's the first contemporary Italian we've translated in a long time.

There’s If I Were Another, by Mahmoud Darwish. And Durs Grünbein is a wonderful contemporary German poet. We're doing his essays The Bars of Atlantis. We can only do a few of these things. But I think it's important to seed the ground, to turn over the earth. To bring new voices into the conversation.

Mitzi Angel is doing very interesting things on the Faber list that, again, extend our range but are consistent with the Faber ethos. There’s Paul Farley’s The Atlantic Tunnel. Don Paterson’s Rain could've been either FSG or Faber, he is in many people's minds the leading younger poet in Britain today. Plus he's been published by Graywolf Press; you could say he's already in the family. I love his work.

Publishing Anglo-Irish and Australian poetry is interesting because it's our language but also represents other cultures. There's a kind of dual thing going on there. They're writing about things going on in our own language, but they also hook in other cultures' attitudes and traditions. We've always published Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, they're both from the "empire of English," and they're poets who've had a big impact on American writing. Internationalism is a part of the FSG poetry tradition, so we're trying to continue that in a different way.