Floyd Skloot: "Labor Day Party"

The Poem of the Week is “Labor Day Party” by Floyd Skloot, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Floyd Skloot has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was a recipient of the 1996 William Stafford Award, the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the 2004 Independent Publishers Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. He has published five collections of poetry: Music Appreciation (University Presses of Florida, 1994), The Evening Light (Story Line Press, 2001), The Fiddler’s Trance (Bucknell University Press, 2001), Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press, 2005), and The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). The Evening Light received the 2001 Oregon Book Award.

His works also have appeared in numerous literary journals, including American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. Virginia Quarterly Review awarded him the Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry for 2000, and one of his poems appeared in The Best Spiritual Writing 2001. In addition, he has published novels, memoirs, and a book of essays about the illness experience. Some of his essays have been included in The Best American Essays, The Art of the Essay, and The Best American Science Writing.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Major Jackson: HOOPS

There comes a point when reading Hoops, Major Jackson’s second collection of poetry, where one wonders what to make of this poet’s seemingly large leap from the relatively shorter hard-edged urban portraits that open the book to a lengthy letter-poem written in rime royal that fills the final 60% of the volume and is composed as an address to Gwendolyn Brooks, a significant figure among the poet’s idols. This nearly schizophrenic book of poetry practically invites readers to treat the parts as individual entities, a duo of units nevertheless designed to be considered separate from one another. Indeed, one sometimes feels as if Jackson has combined a pair of poetry manuscripts under one cover, offering two looks at his work for the price of one.

Consequently, one’s first instinct upon concluding this book may be to regard the collection as jarring to the senses, as if while moving smoothly through the early poems one suddenly has somehow encountered a speed bump or a more diverting detour, has unexpectedly been forced toward a different direction by the author. I must confess I had to shift gears when arriving at “Letter to Brooks,” and it took a few pages before I could comfortably cruise through the rest of this extended exercise. In fact, I initially wished this 75-page poem had been published in isolation from the other works, as a book-length poem, where it would receive sole attention and the two sections of this collection would not trespass upon one another or distract from each portion’s great merits.

Indeed, some poems in this collection’s first section are expanded or extended versions of poems previously seen in Major Jackson’s premiere publication, Leaving Saturn (2002), which had been a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Therefore, the poems in this volume preceding “Letter to Brooks” appear to some degree as if they are complementary addenda or supplemental works more easily attached in readers’ minds to the earlier collection.

Hoops begins with a prefatory poem, “Selling Out,” which quickly indicates the intensity one will discover in some of Jackson’s taut lyrics on incidents in urban living. The narrative concerns the past tense chronicling of a suspenseful twist taken during an attempted drug deal by two teens after their double shift of work at McDonald’s. The speaker and his friend found themselves held at gunpoint, their brief lives threatened: “each breath bursting to explosive fog / in a dead-end alley near Fifth, where on / my knees, with my fingers laced on my head / and a square barrel prodding a temple, / I thought of me in the afterlife.”

Jackson has a talent for portraying the moment, evoking emotions through his depiction of atmosphere. Here, the speaker offers the scene with an engaging use of language: “a single dog barked his own vapor, / an emptiness echoed through blasted / shells of rowhomes rising above, / and I heard deliverance in the bare / branches fingering a series of powerlines / in silhouette to the moon’s hushed / excursion across the battered fields / of our lives.” Since the situation is related in past tense and the voice of the narrator remains identifiably poetic, the poem’s closing lines appear even more appropriate as the speaker survives “to arrive / here, where the page is blank, an afterlife.”

In the book’s title poem Jackson meticulously describes with lyrically rhythmic lines containing alliteration or internal rhymes an urban scene of street basketball: “Elbows posed like handlebars, / he flicks a wrist, the pill arcs / through sunlight glare, / & splashes the basket’s // circle of air. A Boom Box bobs / & breaks beats on a buckling sea / of asphalt;—the hard, / driving rhymes of BDP, // rousing that rowdy crowd / of hustlers tossing craps, waging / fists & dollar bets, only louder— / & one more enraged // promises to pistol-whip / the punk who doesn’t pay.”

For many in the city’s neighborhoods—including Hank Gathers, the basketball player whose immense ability and tragic death are heroic legend, and to whom Jackson dedicates this poem—sports, particularly hoops, represent an opportunity and an escape from poverty or other hardships. But for the poem’s speaker other heroes, literary lights, provide guidance: “The ceiling in my room / a projector’s canvas, the moon / a flurried cone of light / to which I recite Brooks, // Frost, Hughes.” For some seeking rapid riches, the roads toward gang violence and drug money are tempting paths to follow: “Below bunk my cousin / stacks tens, twenties,— / pacing corners till twelve, // he & the Ooh-mob Gang / slinging plastic vials / of crack, the cursed slang / of death: ‘I’m gonna buy // a Gucci watch, Air Nikes, / the hypest gear to look Fly.’ / dazed he says then cocks / a Wesson.”

However, the poet knows the consequences when those paths lead literally to a dead end: “A darkness spreads— / at first as clouds float // -ing like this craft’s spirited / march, then arise / faces of friends resting / in caskets: Deshaun, // Darnell, Lil Mike, / Shantel, a slide show / whose carousel double-quick / click ricochets shots // across this elegiac.” Once again, as in “Selling Out” and elsewhere throughout the collection, the narrator’s self-image as a poet and a consciousness of language help shape his response. For instance, he notes the parenthetical dates accompanying news of another early death: “R.I.P. // & the too few years hemmed / between the cupped hands / of parentheses.” Additionally, as Jackson closes this poem, he mentions his poetic way of remembering those he once knew, presenting them in these stanzas of elegy: “The legions of lines my fist / inscribes calls back your days.”

As one might realize, Major Jackson frequently presents poems that connect the cityscape and its inhabitants with literary allusions or writers. He also likes to bridge autobiographical elements with images or stories drawn from literature. The poet begins “Bum Rush” with a couple of stanzas recalling his reading of Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery”: “how a small town piled stones, / the size of cannonballs and pelted // a mother, like yours or mine, wearing / her faded housedress and favorite pair / of slippers when she had drawn the black, / spotted paper from a splintered black box.”

In his mind he views the fictional character’s “clumps / of blood mingling with dust / when she fell in the garden of stones.” Yet, by the final stanzas of the poem, Jackson makes a transition to the last time he saw his mother, a night in which he “mumbled / through the evening, kicking / and biting back at the inevitable.” Even today, the speaker confides: “I stare at heaps of potatoes, fearful / of reliving that walk in the snow / away from her grave.”

A variety of Jackson’s fine images of city life and autobiographical memories occur in the sequence of poetry vignettes titled “Urban Renewal,” which continues from its appearance in Leaving Saturn. These numbered pieces seem at times as vivid as the striking book-jacket painting on the front cover of Hoops. In one canto Jackson tells of how his grandfather kneeling, “stabs his shears into earth” to plant beans, attempting to grow something from among the “ruins” of the city: “Forty years / from a three-story, he has watched the neighborhood,— / postwar marble steps, a scrubbed frontier / of Pontiacs lining the curb, fade to a hood. / Pasture of wind-driven litter swirls among greasy / bags of takeouts. Panicles of nightblasts / cap the air, a corner lot of broken TVs empties / and spills from a suitcase of hurt. Life amassed, / meaningless as a trampled box of Cornflakes.”

“Letter to Brooks” steps beyond even the autobiographical recollections or personal observations contained in the poetry that opens Hoops. In this ambitious and wide-ranging work fashioned as an intimate address to Gwendolyn Brooks, a poet admired by the young Jackson when he was still an aspiring writer, Major Jackson strips away layers of language or the buffers offered by personae to speak in an unmistakably candid and frank manner. As one might expect in a 75-page poem that puts forth opinion on a vast array of topics—9/11, the Columbine shootings, slavery and contemporary race relations, the Internet or other electronic communication systems, music, differing schools of poetry, etc.—the monologue can become tedious or tangential at times.

The speaker labels his poem an “epistolary chat,” and the poet displays both an entertaining charm and an engaging intelligence; nevertheless, the voice occasionally supplies moments that may exasperate some readers with its appearance of meandering from one subject to another. Apparently addressing Brooks, the speaker states: “I’ve set the task of bringing up to date / All the news down here; the current state // Of poetry, what’s in and what’s out, sports, / Fad diets and more.” In one stanza the speaker acknowledges and perhaps worries: “I tend to be long / winded.” However, for others (like myself) Jackson’s language that allows allusions to Robert Lowell and The Cure in the same sentence could be seen as daring and delightful.

Jackson divides the poem into 15 parts, each written in stanzas of rime royal and titled with the name of a Philadelphia train station, as if the poet is leading readers along a personal trip, internal as well as external, through thoughts or neighborhoods that are familiar and meaningful territory to the author. As a result, those personal comments can become obscure for a number of readers. In a section titled “North Philadelphia,” he humorously notes moments from attendance at an AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference, where Jackson proposes: “Many wear their scorn / On their sleeves and talk of chopping folks / At the knees.” Later in the same section, the poet notes: “Helen V. sizzles in the frying pan; / Poor Alice Q. takes it on the chin; / Rita voodooed to a doll of pushpins.” But the following stanza concedes: “This feels a little too insiderish, / A little too gossipy, a little / Too off the beaten.”

Whether or not most readers will recognize Helen Vendler, Alice Quinn, and Rita Dove, or the poetic issues in question, this contrasts substantially with a more somber stanza in the section titled “Erie”: “Paradise is a checkpoint of virgins / For which a vest of bombs body-strapped / Blasts shrapnel eyes into martyrdom. / So they tell us a river of honey maps / Fluted glasses of desire. On a raft / Float children of Columbine and Palestine, / Bypassing their lives for an ocean of wine.” Indeed, while I admire and am entertained by Jackson’s honesty in offering takes on his own poetic preferences (“I put a premium on rhymes . . . “) and others’ poetic approaches (“Reading habits like Top 40 I fear / Make what’s fashionable soon dreary, / E.g., L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry”), I find parts that discuss topics other than poetry more powerful, and I can imagine that would be felt further by those readers who cannot make out all the poetry business allusions.

An exception must be made, however, for the section titled “Wyoming,” in which Jackson recounts a time when he drove Gwendolyn Brooks from Philadelphia to her poetry reading in New York City.: “We pulled over. Nice! The Plaza Hotel, / Central Park South. A black-caped doorman / Jaunted curbside, opened your door, ‘Welcome / Back Ms. Brooks.’ His words allayed fears / You’d be hurt while in my care.” The young Jackson is then surprised by a kind gesture Brooks offers him: “you could / Have amicably thanked me for the ride, / Extending your elbow-length glove, you could / Have disappeared in that opulent façade, / Instead you asked if I’d read alongside / That night.”

Perhaps with that gesture Gwendolyn Brooks welcomed Major Jackson into the world of poetry as a practitioner of the art for which he has demonstrated great affection. (Moreover, Jackson’s demonstrated affection for poetry links this poem’s speaker with those in the earlier sections of Hoops and argues for a connection between the book’s parts.) In return, maybe Jackson now offers his tribute to Brooks as a poetic form of thanks. However, readers should be grateful as well for Brooks’ symbolic invitation to Jackson and her encouragement, especially since with his first two books of poetry he has firmly established that his presence as a compelling and compassionate poet is well deserved.

Jackson, Major. Hoops. W.W. Norton, 2006.

Cyril Dabydeen: "Anaconda's Doubt"

The Poem of the Week is “Anaconda’s Doubt” by Cyril Dabydeen, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945 and migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of over fifteen books, including eight collections of poetry, five volumes of short stories, and three novels. He also has edited two anthologies. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Asia, and the Caribbean. He is a former Poet Laureate of Ottawa, where he teaches at the University of Ottawa.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Robert Lowell's Voice

During recent days Critical Mass, the blog for the National Book Critics Circle board of directors, has been examining Robert Lowell and the last collection of his poetry, Day by Day, published just before the poet’s death in 1977. This focus on Lowell begins a promising ongoing series, “In Retrospect,” intended to revisit past works that were National Book Critics Circle award winners and finalists.

The past week’s posts have included an Adam Kirsch essay on Day by Day, a letter from Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop written as he was completing that collection, some valuable links to other sources, a personal reflection by Nicholas Christopher about his experiences as Lowell’s student at Harvard, and Michael Hofmann’s brief response to Day by Day. The handful of posts presents an admirable beginning to this series, and at the same time offers another example of how literary blogs might be more useful for such close and extended considerations of books than would be possible in a newspaper’s book review section.

In fact, as I read the posts mentioned above, I was persuaded to pick up again my copy of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. As I reread many of the nearly 1200 pages in this volume, I recalled the range of reactions it received upon its release. Some suggested the weight of this collection finally matched the heft of Lowell’s importance to American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which he may have been the nation’s unofficial poet laureate. Others reviewed once more the development and changes so apparent throughout Lowell’s career. Discussions arose over the balance of Lowell’s merits as one of our finest poets and the great influence he exerted on other individual poets, as well as his impact on the direction taken by many American poets at the end of the century, particularly the emphasis on free verse poems concerning personal incidents and intimate relationships.

Although Lowell disliked the label of “confessional poetry,” originally placed upon his work by M.L. Rosenthal as an unflattering characterization, certainly that term has been coupled with many of Lowell’s poems through the decades and has become a point of contention for many conversations on the appropriateness of personal or private revelations as a tactic that could draw the reader more fully into the poet’s actions, as well as his unique observations. A few have questioned the continuing relevance in much of Lowell’s most personal poems since their immediacy seemed to rely upon the circumstances and individuals related within the stanzas. When Lowell’s Collected Poems was published, one colleague even asked me if his work still held importance for today’s poets or was as eagerly read by my students.

Like numerous poets of my generation, I must acknowledge my own debt to Robert Lowell’s poetry. Although I have a bit of difficulty with those poems in which he seemed to abandon his best poetic sense in order to bare raw moments from his private life (causing considerable pain to loved ones and others close to him), when Lowell wrote poetry that balanced his urge to confide intimate details with his artistic imagination and his gift with language, he seemed to illuminate a productive way for poets to venture forward.

In 1999, I spoke of this in an “Inaugural Lecture” at my university, a presentation traditionally delivered to the community upon attaining full academic rank. In an excerpt from that paper (later published as “Writing Poetry: Art, Artifacts, and Articles of Faith”), I commented: “three writers who have greatly influenced my writing of poetry are Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell—my literary trinity. The three ‘Bobs’ I like to call them. (My wife insists that if I were complete in my list, I would add Bob Dylan as well.) Though I would be the first to admit the following is a much too general characterization, one might say I have learned the use of nature as metaphor from Robert Frost, the ambitious use of language to express emotion from Robert Penn Warren, and the integration of personal experience with art from Robert Lowell.”

In my writing I further connect the three:

Frost described “the figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” In a more comprehensive description, Frost declares writing of a poem “begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and it ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

Frost says elsewhere, “we enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.” And isn’t there great truth in this? A twisted walking stick made of a broken branch is just as effective as a straight store-bought cane, but so much more interesting. Likewise, one might suggest readers enjoy the journey to the end of a piece of literature as much as they feel rewarded by the goal eventually achieved at the conclusion of that work of art. I always try to keep this in mind when writing my poems.

Robert Penn Warren, in his important essay on poetry, “Pure and Impure Poetry,” appears to complement Frost’s statement. Warren suggests: “Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not want to be pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end.”

Throughout his writing, Robert Lowell seems to suggest those contradictions and elements that are “impure,” in the sense that Warren identifies them, exist in poems exactly because the best contemporary poetry reflects life, which is itself an impure process. In his poem “Night Sweat,” Lowell writes: “one life, one writing.” Those elements in poems which reflect experiences or emotions from our lives are what I refer to as “artifacts”—the manmade objects which act as reminders of moments in personal or social history.

Consequently, I have enjoyed the invitation by the writers at Critical Mass to look back once again at Robert Lowell’s poetry, and I recommend readers also take a moment to listen to Robert Lowell’s voice. Wonderful readings by Lowell of his poems, “Skunk Hour” and “Dunbarton,” are available at the Salon page, “Robert Lowell: The Voice of the Poet.”

Jesse Lee Kercheval: "Bang"

The Poem of the Week is Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “Bang,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She also was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Wisconsin.

Kercheval has published two full-length collections of poetry, World as Dictionary (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999) and Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Chartreuse (Hollyridge Press, 2005) and Film History as Train Wreck (Center for Book Arts, 2006). She also is the author of two short story collections, Alice in Dairyland (2007)—which won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was published by the University of Nebraska Press—and The Dogeater (University of Missouri Press, 1987), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction. Space (Alonquin Books, 1998), a book of memoirs, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. A novel, The Museum of Happiness (2003), was published by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of the Library of American Fiction.

Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Research and Study Center at Harvard, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Corporation of Yaddo, and James A. Michener and the Copernicus Society. For further information about Jesse Lee Kercheval and more writing samples, readers are encouraged to visit her website.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Richard Hugo's Letter to Charles Simic

Since last week’s announcement by the Library of Congress that Charles Simic had been appointed the nation’s latest Poet Laureate, I have enjoyed browsing through the many pieces in newspapers, as well as online literary sites and poetry blogs, about Simic and his work. Indeed, because the Library of Congress kindly listed in its official release my previous commentary in “One Poet’s Notes” examining Simic’s most recent collection of poems, The Noiseless Entourage, as the sole source for an online review of that book, this blog experienced record levels of traffic in the past week. I am pleased to witness all this attention in the media devoted to poetry, and I am grateful for the numerous visits to this web page by new readers, many of whom I hope will return for future visits as well.

However, as I looked through the various articles about Simic, I noticed only a sentence or two usually remarked upon his childhood in Belgrade during World War II. Almost all the articles correctly concentrated on the quality and distinctiveness evident in Simic’s body of poems. Some even suggested a seemingly extensive shift in styles represented by the change of laureates from Ted Kooser to Charles Simic could be meaningful, signifying a contrast in the way Simic may view his role. I appreciated this focus, not merely as an example illustrating the wide range of possible poetic perspectives currently available in contemporary poetry, but also for the ongoing discussion about poetics such contrasting approaches could generate.

Nevertheless, I must admit one of my first thoughts upon hearing Charles Simic had been selected as Poet Laureate concerned another figure whose work has had a significant impact on a number of contemporary poets. With word of Simic’s appointment, I must acknowledge I remembered Richard Hugo, whose poetry and teaching had an important influence on a certain segment of poets who were first seeking their voices during the time I was a student. Although their styles of writing are so different, these two poets always are linked to one another in my mind.

Indeed, I clearly recalled the Friday night in late October of 1982 when some of my classmates and I in the graduate writing program at the University of Utah gathered at a seedy bar for pitchers of beer, eight ball, and loud music from a jukebox—as we did every Friday evening—and word spread that Hugo had died at the age of 58. My friends and I considered it most appropriate that the news arrived while we were in one of those local bars throughout the west that he might have included in any of his poems. Amid expressions of sadness were many celebratory toasts to Hugo or his writings, which we knew would persist with an impact on others well into the future.

In fact, Hugo’s slim yet enormously persuasive collection of lectures or essays on poetry and writing, The Triggering Town (W.W. Norton, 1979), continues to offer clear and entertaining guidance for beginning poets nearly thirty years later. In my creative-writing classes I still recommend Hugo’s wise advice and insightful observations on the process of poetry composition. In addition, during my poetry-writing course or my course on poetic forms, I frequently assign a particular letter poem by Richard Hugo from his 1977 collection, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. Hugo’s letter poems offer young poets an opportunity to discover how one’s personal and distinctive voice can be more naturally compelling and how one may take advantage of aiming at a specific identifiable individual as the immediate audience for a poem rather than writing for a faceless multitude.

The example I like to highlight is titled “Letter to Simic from Boulder,” and this work came to my mind again, along with the triggered memory of the night Hugo died, when I heard the news Simic had been chosen Poet Laureate. The poem grows from a chance first encounter between Hugo and Simic in a San Francisco restaurant during a literary gathering in 1972. Simic writes about this meeting in his book of memoirs, A Fly in the Soup (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and I recommend a very engaging excerpt, with wonderful accompanying photographs from Simic’s childhood years, available online and located in the Spring, 2001 issue of UNH Magazine.

The excerpt from his memoirs powerfully recounts some of the harrowing incidents Simic experienced and survived as a young boy in a war zone. He speaks of the time when he was three years old and his neighbors’ buildings were destroyed by Nazi bombing during which thousands of citizens in Belgrade were killed, including a family with a small boy who lived across the street: “I was told again and again what a nice family they were and what a beautiful boy he was and how he even looked a little bit like me.”

Simic was once blown out of his bed by a bomb blast, and he still sees himself “on the floor with broken glass all around.” His mother hurried to take him up in her arms, an image Simic maintains along with a “vague memory of bright flames and then developing darkness as I was being rushed down the stairs of our building into the cellar.” Elsewhere, Simic comments upon other times when the German Gestapo rounded up townspeople, including his father, and about an attempt by Simic and his pregnant mother to escape Belgrade, how she once pulled him to the ground and covered him with her body while a volley of bullets were fired and “whizzed by.”

Another central incident in the memoirs concerns the bombing of Belgrade by British and American planes beginning on Easter Sunday in 1944. Simic reports the good fortune of a dud explosive: “a bomb landed on our sidewalk in front of our building. It spun around but didn’t explode.”

When he met Richard Hugo, Simic mentioned Belgrade during their initial conversation. In response, Hugo proceeded to draw an accurate outline of the city’s features “on the tablecloth among breadcrumbs and wine stains.” However, when asked by Simic when he’d visited the city, Hugo replied: “I was never there. I only bombed it a few times.” Upon learning Simic actually had been a boy among the people on the ground being bombed by Hugo’s squadron: “Hugo became upset. In fact, he was visibly shaken. After he stopped apologizing and calmed down a little, I hurried to assure him that I bore no grudges.” Simic characterizes Hugo as “a man of integrity, one of the finest poets of his generation.”

Five years later, Hugo published his piece about that chance encounter with Simic, a magnificent letter poem enhanced even more today by knowledge of Simic’s history and by his own eventual emergence as a celebrated poet, including now his position as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Letter to Simic from Boulder

Dear Charles: And so we meet once in San Francisco and I learn
I bombed you long ago in Belgrade when you were five.
I remember. We were after a bridge on the Danube
hoping to cut the German armies off as they fled north
from Greece. We missed. Not unusual, considering I
was one of the bombardiers. I couldn't hit my ass if
I sat on the Norden or rode a bomb down singing
The Star Spangled Banner. I remember Belgrade opened
like a rose when we came in. Not much flak. I didn't know
about the daily hangings, the 80,000 Slavs who dangled
from German ropes in the city, lessons to the rest.
I was interested mainly in staying alive, that moment
the plane jumped free from the weight of bombs and we went home.
What did you speak then? Serb, I suppose. And what did your mind
do with the terrible howl of bombs? What is Serb for "fear"?
It must be the same as in English, one long primitive wail
of dying children, one child fixed forever in dead stare.
I don't apologize for the war, or what I was. I was
willingly confused by the times. I think I even believed
in heroics (for others, not for me). I believed the necessity
of that suffering world, hoping it would learn not to do
it again. But I was young. The world never learns. History
has a way of making the past palatable, the dead
a dream. Dear Charles, I'm glad you avoided the bombs, that you
live with us now and write poems. I must tell you though,
I felt funny that day in San Francisco. I kept saying
to myself, he was on the ground that day, the sky
eerie mustard and our engines roaring everything
out of the way. And the world comes clean in moments
like that for survivors. The world comes clean as clouds
in summer, the pure puffed white, soft birds careening
in and out, our lives with a chance to drift on slow
over the world, our bomb bays empty, the target forgotten,
the enemy ignored. Nice to meet you finally after
all the mindless hate. Next time, if you want to be sure
you survive, sit on the bridge I'm trying to hit and wave.
I'm coming in on course but nervous and my cross hairs flutter.
Wherever you are on earth, you are safe. I'm aiming but
my bombs are candy and I've lost the lead plane. Your friend, Dick.

When I heard about the selection of Charles Simic for the post of United States Poet Laureate, once more I was amazed at the unpredictable twists and turns of fate. I wondered what Hugo would have said on such an occasion, and again I raised my glass as a toast—this time to both Richard Hugo and Charles Simic.

Laurence Lieberman: "Angel at the Helm"

The Poem of the Week is Laurence Lieberman’s “Angel at the Helm,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. A review of Lieberman’s poetry by James Finn Cotter appears in the same issue.

Laurence Lieberman has published more than a dozen collections of poetry and three volumes of essays or literary criticism. His poetry has appeared widely in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. He has received the Jerome J. Shestack Prize awarded by American Poetry Review, an NEA Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and Grant, and a William Carlos Williams Citation from the Poetry Society of America. Lieberman is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, where he has served as poetry editor of the University of Illinois Press since 1971.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

VPR's Nominees for "Best of the Net, 2007"

Sundress Publications currently is considering nominees of poems published in online journals during the last twelve months for its annual “Best of the Net” anthology. Earlier this year Sundress published its first edition, which included many remarkable works displaying both the wide range and fine quality of poetry now appearing in a multitude of Internet magazines during 2006. The editors of Sundress deserve praise for correctly bringing greater recognition to the developing presence of quality poetry online.

When invited in 2006 to submit candidates from Valparaiso Poetry Review for the anthology, I reluctantly withheld participation merely because I maintain a high regard for every poem selected to be in VPR, and I felt uncomfortable—as the editor who accepted all the poetry—choosing some pieces to be honored over others. Indeed, as an editor I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR much the way a writer relies upon each letter of the alphabet for a full expression of self. Yet, I also regretted not being able to allow VPR and its deserving poets an opportunity to reach a larger audience through possible inclusion in the anthology.

Therefore, this year I decided to note the numerous comments (concerning poems appearing in the new issues) that I have received in correspondence from readers or submitting poets throughout the past twelve months. In this way, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in VPR’s pair of recent issues in Volume VIII (Fall/Winter 2006-2007 and Spring/Summer 2007), which are eligible for the upcoming 2007 edition of the Sundress “Best of the Net” anthology. Based upon a compilation of those observations by VPR’s readers, I have been able to offer the editors of Sundress three poems for consideration from each of the two issues in Volume VIII of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:


Volume VIII, Number 1: Fall/Winter 2006-2007

Nick Bruno: “Malinconia”

Jared Carter: “Prophet Township”

Frannie Lindsay: “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea”

Volume VIII, Number 2: Spring/Summer 2007

Michelle Bitting: “The Exterminator’s Wife”

Anne Haines: “Swallowed”

Diane Lockward: “Temptation by Water”

I would like to extend my congratulations to each of the nominated poets. At the same time I wish to express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this last year, as well as in past years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving. In addition, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers during its eight years of publication, and I look forward to much more good poetry in the future from other contributors I hope readers will find equally as entertaining, engaging, and enlightening as those they have chosen to compliment in their past correspondence.

Addressing Dana's Address

As chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia has been an active advocate encouraging education and accessibility of the arts. Gioia’s ability to persuasively promote all aspects of art and the artists who produce new works probably arises partially from his background as an advertising writer and partially from his poetic sensibility. Indeed, when Gioia addresses general audiences about art he usually does so in a plainspoken yet eloquent manner, with his demeanor appearing to be both energetic and enthusiastic.

Despite misgivings I’ve seen expressed by some in art circles, probably due to perceived differences in political or aesthetic positions, I’ve considered Gioia’s tenure as NEA chair both compelling and constructive, even (or especially) when he takes to task individuals in the arts or academia. I have attended presentations by Gioia at the annual Associated Writing Programs conference, where his skill at communication appeared impressive, but I’ve also witnessed the polarization his comments can create among fellow poets.

Nevertheless, I believe Gioia’s personality makes him an effective representative for awakening a greater awareness of the fine arts among Americans and for initiating further conversations about art. In fact, some of the same characteristics that have contributed to Gioia’s becoming a somewhat controversial figure among many poets over the years most likely have helped him as an administrator who hopes to generate thoughtful discussions about the proper place of art and the prestige of artists in today’s society.

Although I never agreed completely with Gioia’s assessments on the state of contemporary poetry, I greatly enjoyed the issues and questions raised in his essays. Similarly, I find myself generally admiring Dana Gioia’s latest commentaries on American culture and art, even while I disagree with some of the reasoning or evidence he offers, as well as a few of the conclusions he draws.

In recent weeks one of Gioia’s opinion pieces, “The Impoverishment of American Culture (and the need for better art education),” appeared on the editorial page (7/19) of The Wall Street Journal and initiated a number of responses. As the article notes, this presentation represents a slightly abbreviated version of Gioia’s June 17 commencement address at his alma mater, Stanford University. [The full speech remains available at Gioia’s personal web page.] The thrust of Gioia’s position appears reasonable, the easy access and vast influence of various entertainments in popular culture can overwhelm potential attention to the fine arts, especially among younger members of society, and a renewed emphasis on arts education in our public schools seems necessary as a counteraction.

Still, Gioia’s argument seems flawed from the beginning when he uses anecdotal evidence and tries to contrast today’s cultural environment with that existing when he was growing up. Gioia suggests “a cross-section of Americans” today may be knowledgeable about athletes and American Idol finalists, but would be hard pressed to name living American artists in any number of fields, from poetry to painting to classical music, and would even be unable to identify “living American scientists or social thinkers.” Gioia claims the results would be much different if such a survey were conducted fifty years ago. He proposes that American culture was “smarter then.”

Gioia’s premise develops from his memories of watching Ed Sullivan as a boy, when the Sunday night fare would include classical musicians, opera singers, and jazz greats among the guests. In addition, he recalls encountering literary figures “on general-interest TV shows.” In contrast, he writes: “Today no working-class kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.”

Despite the admirable intent in much of Gioia’s presentation, possible flaws in his argument may weaken its impact. I am only a year younger than Gioia, and I remember watching the Ed Sullivan show every Sunday evening as well. However, I remember the selectivity with which many viewed the show. Not everyone, working class or from another economic level of society, paid equal attention to each segment of the show. Many tuned out when the comedians, jugglers, or singers left the stage. Indeed, especially among younger viewers, the common practice would be to watch the first five minutes and the last ten minutes of the program because Sullivan often led with a song by a hot rock group, then promised they would return at the end of the “really big show,” sometimes for two additional numbers. In between those segments of the program, my friends and I rarely paid attention if we even remained in the living room.

One might detect a sense of nostalgia in Gioia’s statements that somehow taints memory or clouds the facts a bit. Perhaps Gioia did first encounter literary figures like “Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general-interest TV shows,” though he doesn’t elaborate which ones. However, wouldn’t he have learned about these individuals in his classroom? What was the state of his arts education back then? Although he doesn’t paint a Norman Rockwell picture of his classroom, Gioia boasts: “I am old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.”

Also, Gioia notes the absence of arts figures from shows like “David Letterman or Jay Leno.” However, Gioia’s claim that such exposure to literary figures has been eliminated in our national culture doesn’t match the facts at a time when Oprah Winfrey introduces her large audience to new novels every month, and she airs interviews with the authors, even the reluctant Cormac McCarthy, or engages in controversial literary topics, such as the use of fictional elements in memoirs. Elsewhere, Charlie Rose regularly includes conversations with authors on his PBS program, just to name another example.

In addition, although Gioia has dismissed the continuing influence of the Harry Potter phenomenon in popular culture, citing an unreleased report by the NEA, I wonder how even an engaging class could engender any more lasting interest and enthusiasm for reading than a decade of Potter books, hundreds of millions sold, could create. Indeed, just as Gioia’s article appeared in the newspapers, other newspaper articles reported record sales of the latest Potter novel. The number of Harry Potter books now in print tops 350 million copies. If one contends the influence of the Potter books on reading habits may only be negligible, I don’t believe any arts or literature class would work to greater effect.

A July 11 New York Times article quoting Gioia also attempts to dampen the expectations for reading due to Harry Potter by claiming the percent of young people who “read for fun” drops from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade. However, eighth graders may be reading more books—including novels, plays, and poetry—for classes, but those do not count as “read for fun.” In fact, another survey cited in the article seems to contradict the gloomy statistics, reporting “51 percent of kids aged 5 to 17 polled said they did not read books for fun before they started reading the series. A little over three-quarters of them said Harry Potter had made them interested in reading other books.”

At the same time, Gioia’s reference to 1956 television raises other questions. When Ed Sullivan included various forms of entertainment on his program, only three or four networks competed for the American audience, and the selective exposure on his show represented just about all the arts that families could receive in their homes. Gioia reports that classical musicians or opera singers on Ed Sullivan would “captivate an audience of millions with their art”; however, what Sullivan enjoyed was more like a captive audience with little alternative avenues for entertainment or enrichment. In addition, one must remember many rural areas of the United States were unable at all to receive transmission of the television shows.

Today, cable or satellite television in the majority of American homes allows viewers the opportunity to access hundreds of television stations, with many devoted to specialty programming, including the fine arts and other aspects of culture: at any time I can turn to A&E, The Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Science Channel, National Geographics, as well as the four PBS stations in my region, which include shows involving arts, literature, and classical music. C-SPAN devotes much of its weekend programming to books and authors that frequently stray beyond political content, such as when readings by National Book Awards nominees in fiction and poetry are broadcast.

In addition, the high speed Internet permits all to search information about the arts at anytime from their own homes or local libraries. If one wants to view a classic painting displayed in a museum anywhere around the world, its image arrives in seconds. The poems of Robert Frost or Walt Whitman are obtained just as easily. Rather than arts being eliminated from popular culture, we witness today a historically unprecedented availability of the arts and art commentary. In fact, Gioia’s original presentation addressed Stanford University’s graduating class, who presumably had all the educational advantages Gioia recommends, and the following article appeared on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, most likely consisting of a particular highly educated readership. One might suggest only in the popular culture medium of the Internet has his piece received widespread distribution to a potentially larger and more diverse audience.

Eventually, Gioia shifts his focus to his fellow “artists and intellectuals,” as he charges: “Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society.” I wonder when it was that most American artists, intellectuals, and academics did converse with everyday people. Limiting myself momentarily to poetry, the field Gioia and I know best, I’m curious whether the poets of the past were more engaged with ordinary middle-class citizens outside the arts or academia. Gioia asks artists to “reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public.” Which American poets about fifty years ago would he suggest to serve as models—Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Lowell, Bishop, Plath? Even the poet Gioia quotes, Robert Frost, often seemingly presented only a genial and entertaining façade to the general public.

Gioia bases his conclusions upon data from a report to be released in October by the National Endowment for the Arts. However, in my examination of the NEA’s previous 2004 report, “Reading at Risk” (available on the Internet), I discovered the material there not to be as alarming as Gioia would lead me to believe. In his elegant preface to that study, Gioia described it as a “bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture.” He further categorized the situation as “dire” and “a vast cultural impoverishment,” heightened language similar to that in his recent address. He seemed to place blame on the electronic media: “most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audience, and indeed require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.”

However, that report’s own summary suggests Gioia may be taking liberties that could cause misleading moments in his description, perhaps using his poetic license, and there actually may be little or no real impact of electronic media on reading: “Literary readers watch slightly less TV each day than non-readers, and frequent readers watch only slightly less TV per day than infrequent readers.” The report also quotes a Gallup survey showing “that regular computer users spent 1.5 hours per day using the Internet and 1.1 hours reading books. However, those who did not regularly use a computer also spent 1.1 hours per day reading a book.” Indeed, another position could propose popular culture and the electronic media at times really feed contemporary art and literature with new material or novel allusions.

The survey further indicates reading literature “is clearly an important component of Americans’ leisure activities,” comparing favorably to a number of other options: “the proportion of people reading literature is higher than participation in most cultural, sports, and leisure activities . . . only TV watching, moviegoing, and exercising attract significantly more people than reading literary works.” The 2004 report notes: “the book industry published 122,000 new titles and sold a total of 2.5 billion books, a number that has tripled over the past 25 years.” (According to The Writer’s Chronicle, Bowker’s Books in Print reported 292,000 new titles and editions in 2006, and there were nearly 5,500 poetry titles published in the last year.) Approximately “25 million adults” read poetry, a respectable number when compared to numbers for other alternatives in leisure enjoyment. Without trivializing the importance of reading literature, I find all of this sounds much more positive than portrayed by Gioia.

Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, the 2004 NEA report acknowledged its data, collected for a year beginning in August 2001, may be deeply flawed because the time period coincides with the 9/11 attack and its aftermath, a time during which most Americans were preoccupied by the historic events playing out on their television screens (with additional information in newspapers or magazines, and nonfiction books, none of which qualifies as “literary reading” in the survey): “post September-11 developments and the war in Afghanistan may have hindered literary reading during the survey year.”

Perhaps the new NEA report this fall will include more convincing information to support Gioia’s description of dire circumstances in reading. I look forward to reading it. Certainly, I also welcome and encourage an ongoing discussion of this issue, and I thank Dana Gioia for initiating such conversation. However, early definitions I have seen of the forthcoming survey indicate it will compile results from government agencies, presumably including references to the data from the flawed 2004 survey, and according to the director of the research, Sunil Lyengar, it will include similar questionable measurements as previously cited, where the fuzzy standard is set at “reading for fun” among kids of different age groups.

In any case, despite my continuing admiration for Gioia’s advocacy attempts to highlight reading of literature, particularly through the many NEA Big Read grants that have allowed a multitude of communities to participate constructively in city-wide book programs involving classic novels, and his endorsement of greater public arts education (although I place higher emphasis on an optimal home environment for reading and the wise guidance by parents), I’d still like to see a little less finger pointing at cultural entertainment and an end to making a scapegoat of the electronic media. I believe an eloquent argument that nevertheless seems somewhat misleading and possibly incomplete in its formation of facts, or simply contends the obvious—high art sometimes loses when in competition with popular culture—will not be persuasive enough for me to believe the dark and alarmist interpretations offered, no matter how poetic their presentation.