Allan Peterson: "Superstition"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “Superstition” by Allan Peterson, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Allan Peterson’s second book of poetry, All the Lavish in Common, won the 2005 Juniper Prize and was released by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2006. Anonymous Or won the Defined Providence Press competition and was published in 2002. He also is the author of four chapbooks of poetry. His journal publications include Adirondack Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Natural Bridge, Perihelion, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, and West Wind. In adition, Allan Peterson has been awarded fellowships from the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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.

David Bottoms: "Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt"

As many Americans find themselves once again watching the World Series this week, I know I’m not the only one reminded of the frequency with which baseball has been subject or setting in poetry throughout the decades. Indeed, the Poetry Foundation is currently running an article about this topic by Levi Stahl, “Baseball and Verse, from Tinker to Evers to Big Papi,” at its web site. Baseball seems the most popular sport for writers of all literary forms in the last century, and many fine examples of works about the national pastime easily come to mind.

Nevertheless, as I listened a few nights ago to a sportscaster lament the lost art of bunting, particularly in this era of the American League’s designated hitter (a development hated by many traditionalists, especially when imposed upon visiting National League teams during the fall classic), I recalled one specific gem of a poem about playing on the baseball diamond.

I have long admired the David Bottoms poem, “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt,” first published in his 1982 collection, In a U-Haul North of Damascus. This brief poem presents a message from a son to his father about how he has at last learned the importance of sacrifice, the necessity sometimes to forego the glamour and individual glory of swinging for the fences in order to move along a teammate with a potential winning run. The emphasis on “the strict technique” in execution and on discipline, the “whole tiresome pitch / about basics never changing,” once lost on an immature boy, now appears crucial to the grown man after “years passed, three leagues of organized ball, / no few lives”:

SIGN FOR MY FATHER, WHO STRESSED THE BUNT

On the rough diamond,
the hand-cut field beneath the dog lot and the barn,
we rehearsed the strict technique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.

Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,
no few lives. I could homer
into the garden beyond the bank,
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing,
and I never learned what you were laying down.

Like the hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

“Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt” wonderfully exists as a recognition of the careful coaching and traditional advice for life offered from one generation to another by the father, belatedly appreciated by a more mature son who now may find himself at a corresponding age and in a similar situation, perhaps himself a father as he speaks in the poem. The narrator acknowledges always maintaining respect for his father (“I admired your style”), but only recently gaining an understanding of the father’s example as one who relinquishes his opportunity to obtain acclaim or personal gain so that another, perhaps his child, might succeed. Bottoms closes the poem with a sign as symbolic as any “hand brushed across the bill of a cap”—the poem itself a signal of tribute to the father in an elegiac fashion—“let this be the sign / I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.”

David Bottoms reprinted “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt” in a collection of selected poems, Armored Hearts (1995), reviewed with his 1999 book, Vagrant Grace, in Volume I, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2000 issue) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. A review of his more recent volume, Waltzing Through the Endtime (2004), appeared earlier this year in the February 14 post for “One Poet’s Notes.” Readers can view a video of David Bottoms reading “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt” at the New Georgia Encyclopedia web site.

[By the way, I am especially pleased to present this poem as a personal sign of appreciation today since it is both my birthday and the birthday of my father, who once coached me in baseball and who would praise any player’s ability to bunt the base-runner over by gently gripping above the handle as if in the act of catching the ball with the barrel of the bat, but who, more importantly, through words and deeds also taught me the value of sacrifice.]

Daniel Tobin: "The House"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “The House” by Daniel Tobin, which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poetry, Where the World Is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005). Among his awards are The Discovery/The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, was published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin also has recently edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). He is Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.

A review of The Narrows appeared in “One Poet’s Notes” in January of this year. In addition, to hear Daniel Tobin read a sample of his poetry, I direct readers to an audio clip at Cortland Review.

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.

Jeff Friedman: BLACK THREADS

The following paragraphs represent the beginning of Celia Bland’s review of Black Threads by Jeff Friedman, included in Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 1) released earlier this week.

* * * * *

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Jeff Friedman is a master ventriloquist and Black Threads, his fourth collection of poetry, an anthology of entwined yet disharmonic voices. Many poems in Black Threads are from the perspectives of mythic figures, family members and strays of all kinds. These poems entrust themselves to the reader like confidences whispered in a willing ear. In describing impediments impossible for people to overcome—the entropy they endure and call their lives—Friedman displays a political consciousness that takes as its subject those who live among “the alien corn” (as in the poem “Miriam”), the exiles who can’t speak the native tongue, longing for home. Friedman’s poetry gives them voice.

The collection begins with “The Golem in the Suburbs,” in which the legendary golem,

. . . raised . . .
from the dust, from four letters
of the alphabet repeated in the right

sequence seven times
from the secret names of God . . .

is described like any teenage boy spawned by an uncaring father, roaming a housing development. This golem, however, has killed his maker and the loneliness of the monstrous is conveyed in unadorned details:

I stumble through the suburbs, looking
for someone I can talk to, but no one
comes out of the silent wood houses.

The poet delicately balances the fantastic and the banal, the ordinary and the magical. Friedman is writing poems that are fully realized by the details of grief or displacement. The poet blesses his characters, as Coleridge described it, “unawares”—unbidden and unthanked but with a deep understanding. These people—“Dorothy / who still drives, but only to the synagogue for free lunches” (“Clocks”); the salesman “thumbing through / a thumb-size version of the Testament and marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim” (“The Long Heat Wave”); and the fallen angel, who speaks the language of his new home, “in the streets or in the stores, but only / with great effort, and . . . they mocked him” (“The Surviving Angel”)—are members of the silent majority to use Nixon’s famous phrase not to refer to obdurate conservatives but to the stolidly suffering. The unwilling survivors . . ..

* * * * *

I recommend that readers visit the new issue of VPR for the rest of Celia Bland’s review. Also, the new issue of VPR includes a sampling of Jeff Friedman’s poetry, “Night of the Bat.”

Kay Mullen: A LONG REMEMBERING: RETURN TO VIETNAM

The Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review includes Janet McCann’s review of A Long Remembering: Return to Vietnam by Kay Mullen. The following excerpt drawn from the opening paragraphs of the commentary indicates some of what readers will find in Mullen’s fine book.

* * * * *

In 1975, Operation Babylift brought more than 2000 orphans or abandoned children for adoption into homes all over the world. It had a tragic beginning. The first military evacuation flight, a cargo plane loaded with over 300 crew, children and adult escorts, crashed shortly after takeoff, and many of the babies and their escorts were killed. This tragedy raised awareness of and sympathy for the project, and many successful evacuations followed. Operation Babylift passed into history, but not for those babies who were brought up by their adoptive parents, and not for these parents themselves. Kay Mullen has written a tender and beautiful book of poems about her return to Vietnam with her adopted son, now a young man, and his meeting with the land of his birth, and about the impression his land made upon her, a visitor.

A Long Remembering is Kay Mullen's second collection of poetry; her first was Let Morning Begin (2001). Her sensitive eye for detail and her knowledge of human relationships provide for spellbinding poetry. Her sympathy for her son's viewpoint blends with her own vision. Past blends into present. The details are rendered in swift, telling strokes, and they are rich with symbolic suggestion. Many of us have only the vaguest image of rice paddies when someone says the word "Vietnam." This book is rich with the culture of the country and the tortured history of its inhabitants.

The poems are not about the Babylift only, clearly, but examine ideas and feelings about what home means. They look at the devastation war causes—and become quietly powerful arguments against war. Human and spiritual values are invoked and explored in a non-dogmatic, open-hearted way. These poems have a generosity of spirit that communicates itself to the reader . . ..

* * * * *

I invite readers to examine the entire review, as well as a poem by Kay Mullen, “An Dinh Palace,” also included in the new issue.

John Balaban: "Finishing Up the Novel After Some Delay"

To mark yesterday’s publication of the Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, the VPR Poem of the Week is “Finishing Up the Novel After Some Delay” by John Balaban, who is the issue’s featured poet.

This new issue also includes Evan Scott Bryson’s interview of John Balaban, as well as a pair of essays about Balaban and his work: W.D. Ehrhart’s “Words for John Balaban” and H. Palmer Hall’s “John Balaban’s Vietnamese Translations.” In addition, “Exquisite Music: John Balaban’s Path, Crooked Path,” my review of Balaban’s most recent collection of poetry, appears in the issue. Furthermore, I recommend listening to a reading by John Balaban and a conversation he had with Michael Silverblatt at the Lannan Foundation website.

John Balaban is the author of five collections of poetry (including After Our War, Blue Mountain, Words for My Daughter, Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems, and Path, Crooked Path), three books of translations (most recently, Cao Dao Viet Nam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry), two nonfiction books, and two volumes of fiction. His books of poetry have received various awards, including the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series selection, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. A past president of the American Translators Association, he is poet in residence and a professor of English at North Carolina State University.

Next Tuesday “One Poet’s Notes” will return to highlighting 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: Fall/Winter 2007-2008 Issue

I am pleased to announce publication of the Fall/Winter 2007-2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

CONTENTS

Featured Poet: John Balaban

Additional Poets: William Aarnes, Sheila Black, T. Alan Broughton, Michael Catherwood, Nick Conrad, Barbara Crooker, Michael Dobberstein, John Drexel, W.D. Ehrhart, Laura Davies Foley, Jeff Friedman, Andrew Frisardi, Kate Gale, H. Palmer Hall, Penny Harter, Randall Horton, Christa Mastrangelo, Kay Mullen, Andrés Rodriguez, Barry Spacks, William H. Wandless, Lesley Wheeler

Interview: Evan Scott Bryson interviews John Balaban

Essays: W.D. Ehrhart and H. Palmer Hall on John Balaban

Poets Reviewed: John Balaban, Kathleen Flenniken, Jeff Friedman, Kay Mullen

Cover Art Commentary: Gregg Hertzlieb on John Swanson

Margot Schilpp: "The Fish Channel"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “The Fish Channel” by Margot Schilpp, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue (Volume I, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Margot Schilpp’s two books of poetry are The World’s Last Night (2001) and Laws of My Nature (2005), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She has been granted residencies at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

Schilpp was the featured poet for the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, which also contains a review of The World’s Last Night by Marianne Poloskey. In addition, Laws of My Nature was reviewed earlier this year in “One Poet’s Notes.”

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.

Gary Gildner: "First Practice"

Last week Gary Gildner visited campus for a reading and meetings with my poetry writing class as well as other students in the creative writing program. Gildner has been to Valparaiso University in the past, and once again his relaxed conversational style of discussing the writing process appeared appealing. During his meetings with students, he emphasized how his poetry often includes narrative or implied narrative. Likely, this approach results from his beginnings as a journalist and fiction writer. Indeed, in addition to his numerous volumes of poetry, among his nearly twenty books Gildner has written two collections of short stories, a novel, and two books of memoirs.

Gildner also promoted the importance of voice in his works of poetry, whether that of the poet as narrator or of a persona within the poem. Commenting upon the way he writes, Gildner revealed how his natural and informal voice frequently commands his poetry. Nevertheless, he also noted how he occasionally enjoys introducing personae into his poetry, much the way characters come and go in his prose pieces. In these poems the personalities of the individuals allow alternate perspectives or serve as examples of differing attitudes toward subjects treated in Gildner’s works.

While providing background information about himself, Gildner spoke to students of his original intentions as a young man whose first endeavors included athletics, initially as a high school pitcher who threw a no-hitter in his debut game and was scouted by major league teams until he damaged his arm by throwing too many curveballs, and then as a university scholarship basketball player in the Big Ten conference. One of Gildner’s nonfiction books, The Warsaw Sparks, concerns time he spent as a baseball coach in Poland in the 1980s.

Gildner related the excitement and the pressure felt by young athletes, especially when engaged in dramatic experiences that could be crucial to future opportunities for success, and how they often are prodded by coaches, fans, or family members who expect so much from the young players. These issues surely have supplied plots for a number of popular movies over the years about all sorts of sports, but especially in football with films ranging from All the Right Moves to Saturday Night Lights.

“First Practice,” the title poem of Gildner’s premiere collection of poetry released in 1979 and still one of his best-known poems, seems to display some of what Gildner discusses in his conversations about poetry. This may be the finest poem about high school football since James Wright’s wonderful “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” in which the “sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.” (Listen to James Wright reading the poem.) In fact, I thought of Gildner’s poem again over the weekend as the local high school football season moved toward its most significant stretch and the region’s newspapers were filled with long accounts of Friday night’s contests. Indeed, the extended section of Saturday’s newspaper devoted to prep football even crowded out major league baseball playoffs and filled more pages than the national news.

The coach’s voice in Gildner’s poem rings true to the memories of many men remembering their high school days of playing sports. My high school coach was a former military man who demanded much from his players and ran practices as if he were still a drill instructor. Although I attended a Catholic prep school that already required conservative dress in a jacket and tie, as well as short groomed hair, my coach also insisted that all who made the team must get a boot camp buzz cut to symbolize the military mentality.

Gildner’s poem sounds simple and straightforward; however, closer examination uncovers ways the narrator characterizes and cleverly casts aspersions on Clifford Hill. The poem’s overtones of war and violence suggest a theme lurking beneath the surface that is more notable than school sports or adolescent initiation. One wonders if this first practice even serves as an introduction into aspects of later life as much as it is simply the opening act of an athletic season. Certainly, a vast gap opens between the first stanza’s ending with the word “now” and its appearance as the final shouted command of the second stanza.

FIRST PRACTICE

After the doctor checked to see
we weren't ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.

No one
left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don't want to see
any marks when you're dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

I suggest readers visit the Michigan Writers Series web page to hear an interview of Gary Gildner and a full presentation of his work.

Billy Collins: "Fiftieth Birthday Eve"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “Fiftieth Birthday Eve” by Billy Collins, which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Billy Collins is the author of a number of poetry collections, including She Was Just Seventeen (2006), The Trouble with Poetry (2005), Nine Horses (2002), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Picnic, Lightning (1998), The Art of Drowning (1995), Questions About Angels (1991), The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), Video Poems (1980), and Pokerface (1977). A recording of Collins reading thirty-three of his poems, The Best Cigarette, was released in 1997, and it is currently available online for free download.

Collins has been the recipient of various honors and awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A video of Billy Collins giving a reading upon being named the U.S. Poet Laureate, a post he held for two terms, is available online at the Library of Congress 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.