National Poetry Month: Your Questions Answered

Here we are, midway through National Poetry Month, and so far, no posts from me about the best 30 days of the year. But, I know what you're about to ask: What are some great poetry sites on the web to help be celebrate National Poetry Month with both panache and alacrity?

What a fantastic question! As it happens, there are a number of standard options and others that will be new to some of you. Here is a short list:

- San Francisco's own The Rumpus is publishing a new poem every day in April for National Poetry Month.
- Poets.org. This is the site of the Academy of American Poets, and it is the best first stop on the Web for all things poetry.
- Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Both are fantastic sites. The former is run out of Mountain View, California, and it, like its brother, highlights a new poem every day.
- Poetry Bear. Nothing on the web is better.
- Poetry Magazine. This portal for the venerable literary magazine lets you peruse past issues back to 1912, provides information about the magazine, and has links to its very good Harriet Blog.
- Poem of the Week, not surprisingly, highlights a different poem (or selection of poems) by a single author every week. It is run by Los Angeles poet and professor Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Another great weekly poetry feature is the one by Sharkforum.

- There are also dozens of excellent blogs about poetry, too many to keep up with, really, but here are a few of my favorites:
Ron Silliman's Blog: Probably the most influential poetry blog.
The Best American Poetry Blog: (also influential and very cool).
The The Poetry Blog: Great reviews; smart writing.
Eyewear: The best British poetry blog.
Chicks Dig Poetry: Enough said.

- An increasing number of online publications feature poetry or publish only poetry. The list of good ones would be far too long, but here are some to consider: DMQ Review, Slope, Failbetter, Linebreak, 32 Poems, and La Petite Zine just to name a few. Two new journals from the upper Midwest, Jet Fuel Review and Wake, promise to make a splash as well.

- Readers interested in specific writers can access a lot of poems and other documents on particular sites devoted to those poets. There are some great sites devoted to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and others.

- For those interested in hearing emerging poets, check out the fabulous From the Fishouse. One of the founders is San Francisco poet Camille Dungy.

Ask A Poet

TWR TEAMS UP WITH Kristen Hoggatt, whose advice column, "Ask A Poet," is both smart and funny. In the spirit of National Poetry Month, we asked her why a poet makes a good advice columnist.

Her response:

In his essay “The Poet and the Audience,” poet Michael Ryan asserts that the poet was traditionally the central figure of a tribe, the “shaman-healer.” Because she was much closer to the gods, her “divine madness” kept the tribe together through her songs and chants. I don’t assume all readers are in the same metaphorical “tribe,” that all look to the same poet for guidance, which is why I use multiple poetic voices to give advice. The other poets have already done all the work, and being a devoted poet myself, I have studied them and continue to study them every day. I know where to look.

But before this gets too dry, let me take Ryan’s essay one step further: The poet, being much closer to the gods, is most likely always right, meaning, of course, that one should always listen to her — and “the poet” is a flexible term, a transcendent state that could also be called the speaker of a poem. Frank O’Hara was a poet, but he also drank too much, so one likely should not have listened to everything he said. But one should listen to what his speaker says in “Ave Maria”:

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!

Please enjoy the rest of Poetry Month responsibly. • 27 April 2009

To visit Hoggat's site or to ask the poet a question, just go to The Smart Set

My Favorite Recent Books of Poems: Human Dark with Sugar

NEXT TIME THE WAITRESS asks you if you want sugar with your Human Dark, say yes. You won't be disappointed.

That would probably be a better last line for this review than a first line. It has a kind of salutary ring to it; it signs off more than it turns on.

But, then again, I'm writing about Brenda Shaughnessy's smart collection of poems, Human Dark with Sugar, one of my favorite books of poems from last year. One reason I like this collection so much is because she turns everything around, yet it all makes sense.

For example, she begins her poem "Drift" with a line that could have come straight out of a TWR post: "I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me."

Wow. I say that to myself every day.

And yet, nothing happens.

The difference between Shaugnessy saying that to the reader and me saying that to me, is that in her world things do happen. The world's messiness a) opens up; b) feels less messy; and c) seems funny rather than threatening. That's pretty much a poetry trifecta.

See, for example, "First Date and Still Very, Very Lonely:"

Today

is a sacred day. A date day.
An exception to the usual
poor me, poor me!

I'm not poor and I'm not me.
I remember both
states as soon ago as last week.

The poetic persona has both fallen out of fashion and had a falling out with falling out of fashion. We are taught--or many assume we are taught--to read the "I" in contemporary American poetry as "the writer." We presume the confessions are not those of an invented persona but of the actual person. Troy Jollimore plays with this distinction, but Shaughnessy blurs it. She wants the reader to feel uneasy, to wonder if the laments and desperations of the speaker are "Brenda Shaughnessy's" or the hip construction that witty female poet named Brenda Shaughnessy invented.

The question is: do we care? And, who is this we anyway?

Around 4:30 am, when my 5-month old son woke up hungry, a very funny final line for this review came to me as I was stumbling to the bathroom. I was so pleased with myself because it worked as a closing sentiment, but it would also feel like an opening gambit. This morning though, when I awoke, it was gone--an experience Shaughnessy writes about in "Magician." Her final line in that poem speaks, I guess, to my 4:30 epiphany and, perhaps, to the question of persona vs. person: "Nothing ever really happens."

Or is it that everything always happens?

National Poetry Month: My Favorite Recent Books of Poems

NOW THAT APRIL IS National Poetry Month, April Fools Day
takes on an entirely new significance. In honor of this month and its poemtryness, TWR will devote all of its April posts to favorite recent books of poems.

"Recent" doesn't mean this year, but it does mean this millennium. Books could mean chapbooks; poems could mean prose poems. It will not mean song lyrics, nor will it mean quotes from Donald Rumsfeld.

It will include Tom Thomson in Purgatory, the beguiling book by 50's film star Troy Jollimore. Okay, he's not really a 50's film star, but he sure has the name of one. Between that moniker and the fact that the cover plugs an intro by Billy Collins, it seems impossible not to like the book.

In fact, it is impossible not to like this book.

Simply saying the poems in it are funny does the author a disservice, but the poems in this book are funny. Or, put more directly, the character of Tom Thomson is funny. Jollimore's project is a strange one in that his book is really two books. The first part, entitled "From the Boy Scout Manual," has great fun with the earnest manuals of the eras of 50's film stars, while the second, called "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," features series of sonnets written in what I will describe as "high slang." Take the opening two stanzas, for example, from "Tom Thomson in Vogue"

With Pyramids behind, and with a glass
of some bright liquid sharp with fissioning sheen
in hand, he small talk make with shiny babe
as Photo Man for Hot New Magazine

the shutter clicks, and captures cover shot.
His stock is rising. What's he saying though?
Ain't no one listening to a word -- and him,
he listening least of all. But cares he? No.

The off-rhyme and near-dialect remind, of course, of John Berryman and his Dream Songs, but Jollimore's persona is less dark than Berryman's, not as severely developed and more overtly playful. But, like The Dream Songs, the Thomson sonnets are, despite their humor, profoundly sad. It's that veiled sadness, squeezed into sublimated humor, that keeps the poems from being self-indulgent or self-mocking. What's fun about these pieces is how the poems become less about Thomson and more about the nameless speaker. Thomson is just a prop; the speaker is the real protagonist.

Jollimore is not as funny as Collins, but he's also not as silly, which should make these poems both accessible and rewarding for casual reader and the poetry devotee. Their engagement with popular culture will also please reader skeptical about poetry's "relevance."

Tom Thomson may be in purgatory, but readers of this book certainly won't be in hell.

The Final Day of National Poetry Month Post: The Salt Earthworks Series

SINCE I BEGAN NATIONAL Poetry Month with a post on poetry and race, it seemed fitting to end with that topic as well. This time, though, the subject is a series of books, rather than a single collection. Salt Publishing, a great press whose main office is located in the U.K., recently launched a poetry series devoted to contemporary American Indian poetry. Edited by poet and scholar Janet McAdams and featuring books by LeAnne Howe, A. A. Hedge Coke, Heid Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Deborah Miranda, Gordon Henry, and Carter Revard, the Earthworks Series has emerged as the most important poetry series in the United States this century--maybe the most significant since the Pitt Poetry Series began three decades ago.

There are many things to celebrate about this series.

First, it establishes contemporary American Indian poetry as a canon-making genre. A potential criticism of the series might be that it further segregates poetry by Anglo writers and writers of color, but I would argue that this series, when taken as a whole, offers a panoramic view of recent Native poetry, enabling readers not familiar with such work to better see how it may fit in to the larger sweep of "American Poetry." Stumbling across a random book of poems by an author here or there may not tell you much, but this series allows Native poets to paint in broad strokes on the canvas that is Native discourse.

Second, Salt keeps its books in print and never charges reprint fees for other publications and anthologies. This last point is, in some ways, the most important. As someone who has to reprint a lot of poems for various publications, paying copyright and reprint fees can be prohibitive. Since Salt allows those publishing anthologies and criticism to publish Salt works free of charge, I predict more and more poems from this series will find readers.

Additionally, the series is just cool. The covers are artistic, evocative, and metaphorical without stereotyping or sentimentalizing. Several of the books have won or been shortlisted for awards. LeAnne Howe's hilarious Evidence of Red, won the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. (Bonus: a trip to the website, (click above) takes you to the Salt page where you can view a photo of Howe receiving her award while doing her best impersonation of her stoned undergraduates). Heid Erdrich's book, a meditation on love, family, and maternity, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. Most importantly, the series introduces new writers by publishing young poets whose names are not yet well known, like James Thomas Stevens, Cat Ruiz, and Phillip Carroll Morgan, whose collection, The Fork-in-the Road Indian Poetry Store won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award.

Down the road, it will be important for someone to write about why this collection exits, what, exactly, its contribution is to American Letters, what, if anything, the totality of the books argue about American poetry and Native American realities, and why a series of Native American poetry is published by a British Press. But, for now, with the ghost of National Poetry Month settling in for a long nap, we should just celebrate that this fine collection is out there working this earth.

The Poetics Of Miscegenation: How Poetry Can Speak To Issues Of Race

IN THE PAST MONTH, race has strolled down the red carpet of American popular culture in recognizable but surprising garb. On the one hand, the overwhelming popularity of the website Stuff White People Like has foregrounded the icons of bourgeois whiteness through humor and self-mockery. On the other hand, Barack Obama's candidacy for president, the views of his pastor, and the various comments and strategies by Senator Clinton, her husband, and their staff, have lit America's preoccupation with race from a different angle. Most of the time, Americans tend to turn to journalism, history, or sociology to get a better glimpse of the nuances of race, but with National Poetry Month around the corner and with a recent release of a special gift edition of Natasha Tretheway's 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, Native Guard, this seems an appropriate moment to explore the matrix of poetry, American culture, and race--especially the nearly taboo issue of miscegenation.

Senator Obama has talked a great deal about being a child of an interracial marriage, and his prominence has made the issue of mixed relationships and miscegenation part of a national discourse for the first time in decades. One of America's greatest writers, Langston Hughes, asks important questions about miscegenation and misogyny in his daring 1927 poem, "Mulatto:"

O, you little bastard boy
What's a body but a toy?
The scent of pine word stings the soft night air.
What's the body of your mother?

It would appear that one of the goals of Tretheway's book is to answer Hughes' provocative questions. Tretheway, whose father is white and whose mother (now deceased) was black, explores the tensions and violence at the heart of mixing races. In her short but powerful poem "Miscegenation," she maps the transgressions of her parents as they leave their home state of Mississippi to marry:

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong--mis in Mississippi.

Though her parents no doubt believed they were engaged in a kind of exodus of liberation and love, Tretheway can't help but hear the resonances of foreboding (sin and mis) in their escape, as if the long-armed ghosts of history were the puppeteers of her parents' relationship.

Indeed, for Tretheway, miscegenation is all about crossing borders, sometimes, even the border of the body (as Hughes suggests). Tretheway's mother was murdered by her second husband, and though Tretheway does not draw a direct line between her murder and the legacy of violence against the bodies of African American women, one senses through poems like "What The Body Can Say," "What Is Evidence," "Myth," and "After Your Death," that the poet may see her death as the culmination of a chain of events that began with that first exodus from Mississippi. When Hughes asks, "What's the body of your mother?," one wonders if Native Guard is Tretheway's probing and deeply felt answer. That said, Tretheway masterfully avoids making easy assumptions or tying off the narrative with over-simplified palliatives; instead, she leaves it up to the reader to connect the dots of history, land, violence, and love.

Though no one would expect a book of poems to unlock the complex problems of race in America, Native Guard does provide some measure, some lineament of understanding of the effects of racialized America on an individual. It may also allow Americans to see the person who could very likely be their next president through a different and clearer lens.