George Garrett's Generosity

When I learned this week that George Garrett had died Sunday night at the age of 78 after an extended battle with bladder cancer, I was saddened, as many others were, at the loss of this extraordinary writer, someone whose work has meant much to a few generations of readers. However, the sorrow I felt also had to do with an important personal memory involving Garrett. Three decades ago as I was advancing towards an MFA degree in creative writing, I received the first acceptance for one of my poems to appear in a significant publication. I had submitted a few pieces to be considered for an anthology of works by students in creative writing programs across the country. The Liar’s Craft (an entry in the Intro series brought out by the Associated Writing Programs), which would be published by Doubleday/Anchor Books, proved to be the anthology’s title, and the editor of this recognition for young writers was George Garrett.

Previously, I hadn’t even dared to mail any of my poems to national magazines or literary journals, since I regarded myself as an apprentice who had been convinced one needed to wait a long time and to allow work to ripen before sending it out. I had been counseled wisely by a couple of my teachers that poems were better left on one’s desk a period of time for repeated efforts at revision before the author permitted others to consider them. Consequently, I confess that when I mailed the poetry submission, I didn’t expect an acceptance. However, when I received word that one of my poems had been selected for inclusion in the collection, I was even more surprised—and perhaps almost as pleased—at the manner in which I obtained the news.

My self-addressed stamped envelope arrived thick with paper, which I immediately assumed would be the returned poems and a rejection form. Instead, enclosed within the envelope containing two copies of a standard contract form, George Garrett had composed a three-page handwritten personal letter on yellow legal-pad pages. In an informal and friendly tone, Garrett thanked me for contributing to the book, and he complimented my poetry with a special emphasis on citing specific details from the lines of the accepted poem, as well as praise for the pair not chosen. He also commented about how he considered it a pleasure to have an opportunity to introduce the anthology’s readers to a group of new writers rising from the ranks of creative writing programs. In fact, he remarked that he was grateful the project had brought my poem and the writings of the other young authors to his attention. By the close of the three pages of carefully written double-spaced cursive script, I felt my work had been embraced by an editor whose generous language conveyed interest in the poetry and inspired my confidence in it.

Indeed, after reading the acceptance note by George Garrett, I had gained enough faith in my work that I started submitting regularly to literary journals and began accumulating a steadily increasing record of publications. Garrett certainly could not have known how influential his letter had been in the development of my self-assurance as a writer. From what I later learned about Garrett’s expressions of sincere humility in interviews and his modest manner of behavior with others, I also am sure he would not have acknowledged any individual credit for the self-assurance I suddenly experienced or for any publishing success I gradually achieved as a consequence of that confidence.

Although he was an author of nearly three-dozen books in every sort of genre—novel, short story, poem, play, biography, and essay—as well as the editor for nearly 20 anthologies or for various literary journals and publishing houses, almost every newspaper article or magazine profile ever written about George Garrett has related his many years as an encouraging and enlightening educator of young writers, many of whom have become accomplished authors and effective teachers of creative writing in their own right.

Garrett’s great generosity and continuing support for young and aspiring authors has been chronicled over the years by testimony from a number of his former students. In numerous instances his assistance extended beyond his lessons in the classroom or his role as a mentor for former students. On some occasions Garrett would arrange financial support for a struggling young writer, and he would champion the works of others, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Garrett apparently arranged for the publication of former student Henry Taylor’s first book by recalling his own scheduled book by the same publishing house that had only room in its catalog for one more publication that year.

George Garrett developed the creative writing program at the University of Virginia, and he was among the few who promoted creative writing programs at universities throughout the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, Garrett’s role as an active ambassador for literature was enhanced by his service as a founder of the Associated Writing Programs and the president of AWP in the organization’s earliest days, just to name a couple of the positions among the many he held that allowed him to offer substantial contributions to literary societies or educational institutions. Indeed, Garrett also furthered public interest in the written word during his two-year tenure as Virginia Poet Laureate.

Consequently, a few years ago the AWP instituted an annual prize, The George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, which the association describes in the following language:

By bestowing the George Garrett Award, AWP hopes to recognize a few of those individuals who have made exceptional donations of care, time, labor, and money to support writers and their literary accomplishments. This award is named after George Garrett, who made exceptional contributions to his fellow writers as a teacher, mentor, editor, friend, board member, and good spirit. George Garrett served for many years as the editor of Intro, an annual anthology of work by emerging writers; he served as one of the founding members of the AWP Board of Directors; he taught creative writing and literature for more than forty years; and he is the author of more than thirty books. As a writer, teacher, mentor, editor, or inspiration, George Garrett has helped many young writers who are now major contributors to contemporary letters.

One might conclude that Garrett’s generosity towards young and aspiring writers emerged as a result of one of his his own experiences as an apprentice poet. In an interview of George Garrett once conducted by Madison Smartt Bell, another of his successful former students, Garrett responded to a question about his beginnings as a poet:

I got a lot of readings when I was still in college, which was kind of a new thing. But it didn’t even occur to me to try to publish that stuff. My first exposure was reading out loud to an audience, and I did that for quite a little while before getting anything published. That was always the primary basis of everything—the oral. And that makes for a different kind of poem, in a way.

Early on, in some kind of collegiate contest, Marianne Moore was one of the judges, and she got to be a friend. That was in her reclusive stage. She was asked to introduce a younger poet that she liked the work of at the Museum of Modern Art, and since she didn’t know anybody else, she introduced me. In those days, I thought that was perfectly natural: of course I would be taken to the Museum of Modern Art and introduced by Marianne Moore. I went on the fumes of that a long time.

Similarly, when I received George Garrett’s remarkably kind letter accompanying the acceptance of my poem about thirty years ago, I had no idea this example of generosity, support, and enthusiasm—especially for an unknown young writer—was not perfectly natural. Ever since, I have been amazed that such a busy and accomplished author invested so much time and energy as an editor discovering new voices. Although I have had a number of excellent relationships with editors over the decades, and some have become good friends, that initial acceptance letter received from Garrett remains among my most treasured memories.

As George Garrett described the kind gesture toward him by Marianne Moore, Garrett’s act of generosity toward me represented in the language of his letter fueled my ambition as a beginning writer, and I moved forward on the fumes for a long time afterward. Additionally, as a teacher of creative writing encouraging young authors and as an editor of literary journals, I frequently have recalled the lessons learned through Garrett’s stellar example. Indeed, one of my pleasures as an editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review has been the opportunity to introduce new writers to a wider audience of readers that I believe their work deserves.

A funeral for George Garrett will be held June 7th, and he will be buried in the University of Virginia Cemetery. The University of Virginia also will conduct a formal memorial service when students return to classes in the fall semester. Nevertheless, today I’d like again to express my appreciation—as I do every semester when I teach a George Garrett work in the syllabus of my literature classes or creative writing workshops and I relate the story of my first acquaintance with this generous man—for the contribution to literature represented by his tremendous body of work and for his benevolent spirit that often voiced support for other writers, especially young or unknown ones yet developing their own distinctive voices.

Miriam N. Kotzin: "Remission"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Miriam N. Kotzin’s “Remission,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Miriam N. Kotzin teaches literature and creative writing at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where she is Director of the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. Her poetry has been published in a number of magazines, among them: Boulevard, Confrontation, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Plum Ruby Review, Poetry Niederngasse, Pulpsmith, Segue, Small Spiral Notebook, Snow Monkey, and Southern Humanities Review. Kotzin’s forthcoming book of poetry, Reclaiming the Dead, will be released by New American Press in the fall of 2008. She also is a co-founding editor of the online literary journal, Per Contra.

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.

Memorial Day Memories

When I was a small boy just learning about the world around me, my grandfather often served as a guide for walks on the streets of Brooklyn. Already an older man who to my surprise had been born more than a decade before the beginning of the twentieth century, he and I had formed an odd bond that others in my family recognized as unique. Indeed, in later years as my grandfather entered his eighties then nineties, and his personality seemed to recede into reticence, he and I still were able to engage in long conversations nobody else shared. Sometimes, the tales he told me were ones I had heard numerous times before, but I never let on that I knew the stories. In fact, each time I would again ask questions and press him for further information, knowing he’d forgotten to include a few details he had related with relish in previous narrations.

Once, when I was probably about three or four years old and walking along Flatbush Avenue with my grandfather, he and I came upon an enormous street-corner construction site surrounded by a tall wooden wall with several little oval openings through which passersby could view the huge excavation where a multi-storied office building was planned. The peepholes were at eye-level height for an average adult, so my grandfather (still strong, not yet frail) hoisted me on his shoulder to lean forward and glimpse the fenced-off area filled with earth-moving equipment, cement mixers, and dozens of helmeted men oblivious to the observers outside their workspace. When I asked my grandfather, who himself had at times done such labor and admired the skills necessary, what the workers were building on the other side of the barrier, he simply replied: “They’re setting a foundation for the future work.”

For nearly a year, each afternoon when we passed that intersection with the corner under construction, we’d mark the progress of what I had come to regard as “the future work,” and I would picture its ultimate appearance in my mind. (Since then, I have always associated that series of peepholes lined along the wooden wall, allowing quick glimpses at a growing structure taking shape, with ways to examine beyond the present using one’s imagination.) I looked forward to witnessing the finished building. Indeed, my grandfather and I noticed the tentative dates for completion and a grand opening ceremony optimistically had been stenciled on the wall for all to read. On one occasion, as the calendar pages turned closer to the advertised date, my grandfather jokingly remarked to me about how then the future would become the present, and the peepholes, no longer needed, would be gone.

Nevertheless, even nowadays as construction continues on a large campus building rising beside my own office building, I repeatedly have stopped the last two semesters to peek through the peepholes along the safety barriers (although these openings are shaped more like elongated slots) and to gauge the growth of the structure on the other side, keeping in mind my grandfather’s words of wise advice (once spoken to me as the site we visited approached completion) suggesting that we need to appreciate everything presented to us. When I expressed frustration at the slow development of the construction and an eagerness for the end product to be part of the present, he counseled patience and recommended to always remain amazed by the days already given, as well as thankful for those that yet may lie ahead. Considering my obsession on the present, he held one hand in front of my eyes and snapped his fingers, advising that was how long the present lasts, while our past remains forever in our memories and our future extends ahead until the day we die.

My grandfather’s attitude toward life might have been fashioned during his service in World War I. As an infantryman in the famous Fighting 69th, a New York unit known for its ranks of soldiers with Irish heritage, my grandfather fought in some of the most difficult battles in Europe. Although the regiment, like all others, technically had been renumbered (as the 165th Infantry), tradition and pride among the men held on to the Fighting 69th title, which had been instituted during the Civil War when a volunteer force of Irish-American New Yorkers was formed. As part of the 42nd Rainbow Division, my grandfather’s company saw some of the fiercest fighting and suffered some of the highest numbers of casualties. Many of the men have been memorialized as heroic figures, including “Fighting” Father Duffy, who waded in the midst of battle to comfort the soldiers though remaining unarmed himself because of his religious convictions. Other legendary men among the 69th included William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the company commander, and Joyce Kilmer, the celebrated poet who was killed in the Battle of Reims during the summer of 1918.

When my grandfather recounted the conflicts he experienced, he frequently would reference those three as men he was proud to fight alongside. However, he also would speak of others who were wounded and died, some of whom he never could remember their names, yet described their features as if they were freshly planted in his memory. In addition, my grandfather would relate the situations in which he had been wounded. The first time he was caught in a cloud of mustard gas and so overcome by the chemicals that not only were inhaled, but also became absorbed by a soldier’s uniform and seeped into his skin. He recalled the swelling, the blisters, the burning sensation, and the difficulty breathing, as well as the horrible sickness that lingered for weeks.

Still, when well, my grandfather returned to the front to fight once more alongside the men in his regiment, only to be wounded again. The bullet that struck my grandfather went clear through his left leg near the knee, leaving an entrance hole and exit wound that eventually remained as everyday reminders for my grandfather the rest of his life; however, after a period of recovery, he joined his unit a third time at the front.

The bullet holes had shaped themselves into little circles of scars, one slightly larger than the other, and my grandfather would lift his loose pant leg to display them when telling his account of the action. Each time he would point to where the bullet had entered, he’d try to smile through his slight grimace (as if feeling the sharp pain again), and I felt as though the wound represented a metaphoric peephole permitting me a tiny glimpse into his past.

In addition, when he shared with sadness and with pride his stories about the war, my grandfather would pull a small box from a cupboard drawer to show me the ribbons and medals he’d received. Carefully extending his hand as he reached toward me, he explained each one, indicating the meaning of the colorful stripes or the engraved images. As well, he would gently rub his thumb over the raised inscription on the back of the Purple Heart: “FOR MILITARY MERIT: John J. Gilroy.” He’d ask me to hold them in my hands, and I would cup them as if they were sacred objects, much the way as an altar boy I’d seen the parish priest curve his hands around the host when blessing it during communion at Sunday mass.

A number of times I attended parades on Eastern Parkway and elsewhere in which my grandfather marched among fellow veterans of World War I on Memorial Day or for the Fourth of July. The Fighting 69th has been the subject of lore in various forms, including a 1940 film starring James Cagney that my grandfather and I had once watched together on his old black-and-white television. There have been documentaries filmed about the regiment and its most famous men, like Father Duffy and the Fighting 69th’s three World War I Medal of Honor winners. A contemporary song, “The Fighting 69th” by the Dropkick Murphys, can even be heard on YouTube.

My grandfather died at the age of 93 as I was taking the last test of my week-long Ph.D. exams. I had already published a couple of collections of poetry, and I had enjoyed mentioning that to my grandfather. Although by the end of his life an acute awareness of the world around him had lessened due to deteriorating health, whenever we met I’d remind him I was writing poems the way Joyce Kilmer—the poet-soldier who lost his life fighting alongside my grandfather—had done. He’d nod as if in understanding and in approval.

I have always connected the coincidence in timing of my grandfather’s death as it was tied to my completion of the Ph.D., which to me seemed like the last step in the process of establishing a foundation for the future work toward which I had been building. Oddly enough, an area of investigation in my doctoral studies involved appraising the ways poems tinkered with time, especially the elegy, which employed memory and served as an opening permitting a momentary view into the past, or the brief imaginative lyric poem, which acted as the little peephole with magnifying glass in a front door allowing us to safely perceive what occurs in the wider, and sometimes wilder, world on the outside of our own existence.

This weekend, as I do each Memorial Day, I again hold in my hands the ribbons and medals my grandfather had earned in World War I, including his Rainbow Division patch and his Purple Heart adorned with an oak leaf cluster representing the valor of one who went back into battle and suffered a second wounding. The ribbons and medals awarded to my grandfather also remind me of the stories he told during the wonderful times I spent with him, about which I once wrote the following elegiac poem that appeared in one of my books ten years ago:

IF APPROACHED, HE MIGHT RECOGNIZE ME

He sits wearing an undershirt on the soft
sofa, half asleep and curved in a pose

that resembles the arched outlines of the oak
trees beyond the orchard fence, and fingers

the metal-rimmed glasses still not quite
powerful enough. He holds no grudge,

is not yet eccentric, and though he doesn’t
admit this frail body is any longer his,

seems confused by the strange single-minded
satisfaction he receives when he opens

the shutters to watch the workmen fill in
the trenches exposed at the edge of his clean

evening. If approached, he might recognize me.
With a subtle gesture he’d call me closer, tell me

of an encounter in France, the singed forests,
or the elegant fountains of Paris. He might

even recollect a song, the names of victims,
or the pain of lungs in a gas cloud. Then

with a faint smile, crouching to touch below
his knee, he’d point to the entry wound still visible,

and, once again, I’d glimpse into that peephole.

[“If Approached, He Might Recognize Me” appeared in East of Omaha, published by Pecan Grove Press in 1998.]

Hart Crane: THE BRIDGE

Having been raised in Brooklyn, I knew the image of the great suspension bridge spanning the East River to Manhattan for many years before I ever read Hart Crane’s famous long poem, The Bridge. Inspired by that imposing structure the poet could see from his boardinghouse window in 1923—forty years after the Brooklyn Bridge’s opening on May 24th of 1883—Crane began writing his tribute in verse, creating a metaphor for various aspects of American power and excitement. Influenced by works of Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, Crane’s poem itself served as a bridge between nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetic sensibilities, connecting the past with the present, introducing the Romantic spirit and an emotional optimism to the complex intellectual or technical elements of modern poetry, joining ambition with ambiguity.

Crane’s vision of the modern city as depicted by the bridge linking Brooklyn with Manhattan could be seen as a complement and a contrast to Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which had envisioned the same scene a decade before construction of the bridge began in 1869. One might also attach Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge to T.S. Eliot’s London Bridge in The Waste Land, while noting the differing tones presented by the two poets in their depictions of modern society.

As a boy, already I associated the extended steel cable strands and familiar stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge with visits to Manhattan. Although Brooklyn and Manhattan are both boroughs of New York City, my friends and I always referred to family trips across the river as journeys into “the city.” When we were children, we would imagine what sort of different and magical existence people experienced among those towering buildings looming on the other side of the river. We frequently considered the Brooklyn Bridge as some mysterious entrance into a distant world of wealth and sophistication.

Only in history classes would we learn about the drama and difficulties encountered during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Designed by John A. Roebling—who died in 1869 due to an on-site accident before the actual assembly began in 1870—and with work subsequently supervised by his son, Washington Roebling, the process from excavation to erection of the bridge took nearly fifteen years and cost almost thirty lives, apparently including that of an Irish immigrant named Matthew Byrne. Washington Roebling also suffered injuries and poor health from working on the site when he experienced caisson disease (decompression sickness), and he had to oversee the last stages of construction as an invalid watching, as Crane later would, from a bedroom window overlooking the river.

Like the construction of the bridge, Hart Crane’s composition of The Bridge required a number of years to complete. Crane’s original inspiration and initial writing of lines occurred in 1923; however, the sequence of sections that make up the long poem was not finished until 1930. In addition to serving as a striking image symbolic of America in Crane’s poem, with its beauty, grace, and subtle strength the Brooklyn Bridge has continued as an icon of the nation it represents and repeatedly has held an emotional appeal for the American people and American artists, whether seen in a Joseph Stella painting or within a Woody Allen film. Additionally, the Brooklyn Bridge has appeared as a familiar and appealing backdrop in all other areas of creative expression or commercial enterprise throughout the twentieth century (and now, beyond into the twenty-first century), almost always evoking from audiences an array of sentiments, including admiration, awe, and affection.

As the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge is upon us, perhaps this is an appropriate moment for readers to revisit The Bridge, beginning with the following proem Hart Crane offered in his extended work:

TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Carol Frith: "Figures on the Street"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Carol Frith’s “Figures on the Street,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Carol Frith co-edits the poetry journal Ekphrasis. Her chapbook, Moving Like a Blue Flame, was the winner of the 2001 Medicinal Purposes chapbook competition. Never Enough Zeros was co-winner of the 2001 Palanquin Press chapbook competition. Another chapbook, In and Out of Light, was published by Bacchae Press in 2002. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, California Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Cumberland Review, Cutbank, The Formalist, Midwest Quarterly, New Laurel Review, River Oak Review, Seattle Review, Smartish Pace, Sundog: the Southeast Review, and Umbrella.

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.

Summer Reading Poetry List: VPR

Like the figure above in Pablo Picasso’s Young Girl Reading a Book on the Beach, many soon will be dipping into their summer reading. Therefore, as the spring semester of classes has now concluded and graduation ceremonies are held this weekend, I thought this might be a good time to remind everyone each issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review contains a “Recent and Recommended Books” page for suggestions of poetry collections and books containing prose about poets or poetics.

Below readers will find those books that were listed with the current Spring/Summer 2008 issue (Volume IX, Number 2). Perhaps some of them will provide apt suggestions for summer reading.

GILBERT ALLEN:
Body Parts, Stepping Stones Press
MAUREEN ALSOP:
Apparition Wren, Main Street Rag
NIN ANDREWS:
Sleeping with Houdini, BOA Editions
SIMON ARMITRAGE (Tr.):
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, W.W. Norton
CYNTHIA ATKINS:
Psyche's Weathers, CustomWords
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN:
Goat Funeral, Sheep Meadow Press
ANGELA BALL:
Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, University of Pittsburgh Press
MARY JO BANG:
Elegy, Graywolf Press
SANDRA BEASLEY:
Theories of Falling, New Issues Press
JAN BEATTY:
Red Sugar, University of Pittsburgh Press
MICHELLE BITTING:
Blue Laws, Finishing Line Press
EAVAN BOLAND:
New Collected Poems, W.W. Norton
BRUCE BOND:
The Anteroom of Paradise, Silverfish Review Press
MARIANNE BORUCH:
Grace, Fallen from, Wesleyan University Press
BREYTEN BREYTENBACH:
Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems 1964-2006, Harcourt
KIM BRIDGFORD:
In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, Contemporary Poetry Review Press
HELÉNE CARDONA:
The Astonished Universe, Red Hen Press
TINA CHANG, NATALIE HANDAL, & RAVI SHANHAR (Eds.):
Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, W.W. Norton
ROB COOK:
Songs for the Extinction of Winter, Rain Mountain Press
LEIGH ANNE COUCH:
Houses Fly Away, Zone 3 Press
JIM DANIELS:
In Line for the Exterminator, Wayne State University Press
KWAME DAWES:
Gomer's Song, Black Goat Press
ROBERT D. DENHAM:
Charles Wright: A Companion to the Late Poetry, 1988-2007, McFarland
PERCIVAL EVERETT:
The Water Cure, Graywolf Press
BETH ANN FENNELLY:
Unmentionables, W.W. Norton
EDWARD FIELD:
After the Fall: Poems Old and New, University of Pittsburgh Press
J.M. FITZGERALD:
Telling Time by the Shadows, Turning Point Books
JEFF FRIEDMAN:
Black Threads, Carnegie Mellon University Press
LAVERNE FRITH:
Drinking the Night, Finishing Line Press
DAVID GALEF:
Flaws, David Robert Books
BRENDAN GALVIN:
Ocean Effects, LSU Press
REGINALD GIBBONS:
Creatures of a Day, LSU Press
ERIC GREINKE:
Wild Strawberries, Presa Press
H. PALMER HALL:
Coming to Terms, Plain View Press
KATHLEEN HALME:
Drift & Pulse, Carnegie Mellon University Press
MAUREEN HARDY:
The Headless Saints, New Issues Press
PENNY HARTER:
The Night Marsh, WordTech Editions
VICKI HEARNE:
Tricks of the Light, University of Chicago Press
EDWARD HIRSCH & EAVAN BOLAND, Eds:
The Making of a Sonnet, W.W. Norton
EMMA HOWELL:
Slim Night of Recognition, Eastern Washington University Press
MARK JARMAN:
Epistles, Sarabande Books
FADY JOUDAH:
The Earth in the Attic, Yale University Press
LAURA KASISCHKE:
Lilies Without, Ausable Press
ADAM KIRSCH:
The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, W.W. Norton
ANDREW KOZMA:
City of Regret, Zone 3 Press
NANCY KRYGOWSKI:
Velocity, University of Pittsburgh Press
MAXINE KUMIN:
Still to Mow, W.W. Norton
NICK LAIRD:
To a Fault, W.W. Norton
LAURIE CLEMENTS LAMBETH:
Veil and Burn, University of Illinois Press
DORIANNE LAUX:
Superman: The Chapbook, Red Dragonfly Press
DANIEL E. LEVENSON:
Are These My Lions?, Literary Comments Press
JEFFREY MCDANIEL:
The Endarkenment, University of Pittsburgh Press
CLAY MATTHEWS:
Superfecta, Ghost Road Press
COLLEEN J. MCELROY:
Sleeping with the Moon, University of Illinois Press
JOANNE MCFARLAND:
Fossil Fuel, Gold Leaf Books
SANDRA MCPHERSON:
Expectation Days, University of Illinois Press
HONOR MOORE:
The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir, W.W. Norton
HELENE PILIBOSIAN:
History's Twists: The Armenians, Ohan Press
JON PINEDA:
The Translator's Diary, New Issues Press
STANLEY PLUMLY:
Old Heart, W.W. Norton
STANLEY PLUMLY:
Posthumous Keats, W.W. Norton
LAURA VAN PROOYEN:
Inkblot and Altar, Pecan Grove Press
JAYNE PUPEK:
Forms of Intercession, Mayapple Press
PHILIP RAMP:
Keen, Shoestring Press
GREG RAPPLEYE:
Figured Dark, University of Arkansas Press
ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE:
Awaiting Permission to Land, Cherry Grove Press
ELISAVIETTA RITCHIE:
Real Toads, Black Buzzard Press
KATRINA ROBERTS:
Friendly Fire, Lost Horse Press
LEN ROBERTS:
The Disappearing Trick, University of Illinois Press
FRANCISCO SANTOS (Tr. & Ed. BRIAN CAMPBELL):
Undressing the Night: Selected Poems, Editorial Lunes
PHILIP SCHULTZ:
Failure, Harcourt
DAVID SCHUMATE:
The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press
JAN EPTON SEALE:
The Wonder Is: New and Selected Poems 1974-2004, Panther Creek Press
MARTHA SERPAS:
The Dirty Side of the Storm, W.W. Norton
ELAINE SEXTON:
Causeway, New Issues Press
OMAR SHAPLI:
Them, Twenty Three Books
LEO SHELTON:
Rhythms: Poetry and Muse, Tucson Press
DOUGLAS P. SMITH:
The Window at the Top of the Door, Outskirts Press
R.T. SMITH:
Outlaw Style, University of Arkansas Press
YOUNG SMITH:
In a City You Will Never Visit, California Institute of Arts & Letters
CATHY SONG:
Cloud Moving Hands, University of Pittsburgh Press
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER:
The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985-2005, University of Pittsburgh Press
LISA WILLIAMS:
Woman Reading to the Sea, W.W. Norton
CHARLES WRIGHT:
Littlefoot, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
DEAN YOUNG:
Primitive Mentor, University of Pittsburgh Press

[Readers also are invited to visit the archived lists of Recent and Recommended Books from past issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

Publishers or authors are encouraged to send review copies of new poetry collections or volumes on poetics to the address below:

Valparaiso Poetry Review
Edward Byrne, Editor
Department of English
Valparaiso University
Valparaiso, IN 46383

Valparaiso Poetry Review also welcomes for consideration submissions of reviews or essays of critical analysis concerning any of the listed books. Those interested in submitting reviews should examine the VPR submission guidelines page.

Jasper Johns: Painting, Poetry, and a Sense of Life

This week’s news about the death of Robert Rauschenberg, so closely associated personally and professionally with Jasper Johns, and my noting that today is Johns’s birthday (born May 15, 1930), brought to mind some miscellaneous memories and assorted thoughts about art and poetry.

I frequently have written about my interest in art, particularly in its relationship to literature. In a number of essays I have commented on the connections between painting and poetry, how even Ernest Hemingway once remarked that at times a writer could obtain information about perception and scenery by observing an oil on canvas in ways one might not gain when reading another author’s prose: “I learn as much from painters how to write as from writers.” In addition, I have enthusiastically reviewed collections of ekphrastic poetry and individual pieces in poetry volumes that have been inspired by visual artworks. Moreover, I always recommend my creative writing students investigate in their journals or poems those experiences they have when visiting an art museum or local gallery. My own ekphrastic poems have served as enjoyable opportunities to describe and explore subject matter by borrowing images and imagined perspectives adopted from artists as personae.

My curiosity about art, especially modern and contemporary works, and its relationship to writing or writers initiated when I was still a creative writing student in classes taught by two poets, Mark Strand and John Ashbery, whose varied views on an integration of art with poetry or prose influenced and encouraged me. Elsewhere, I have chronicled John Ashbery’s well-known reputation as a critic and commentator on art, whether when working as a journalist in Paris for the Herald Tribune or as an editor at Art News in New York. In addition, Ashbery’s most famous poem continues to be his meditation involving the artist Parmigianino in the title work from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, that award-winning collection released at a time when I was a student in Ashbery’s class. Likewise, I also have reported on Mark Strand’s beginnings as an art student, his enrollment at Yale to study with Josef Albers and earn a BFA, and the evidence of his continuing interest in art, whether as one who has produced artwork (as for his book covers) or who has published engaging essays and books about favorite artists, such as Edward Hopper and William Bailey.

Although I had always lived in New York City and visited the various art museums often, even as a young boy from Flatbush who would slip away from Prospect Park and walk through the Brooklyn Museum on rainy days, my true introduction to compelling contemporary art occurred when I attended the extensive “Jasper Johns Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum in the end of 1977. I recall especially being taken by the way familiar icons and certain other objects were rendered across a canvas and assembled within a collage or constructed as a sculpture. As others had done, Johns appeared to be depicting everyday images—such as bull’s-eye targets or American flags—in a context that forced observers to regard them in a fresh manner; however, his ability to present physical items in an abstract fashion seemed to me an admirable adventure in perception, especially when the work focused upon individual symbols extracted from any context, like letters of the alphabet or numbers. Those were forms I normally identified with printed material and considered abstractions in themselves, figures that only conveyed messages about the concrete world around us when linked with additional letters and numbers.

At the same time, I realized that by often placing his figures on a flat and solid field in different tints or even bleached of color, as he would do with the flag, Jasper Johns was stripping away many of the characteristics commonly associated with these representations, encouraging exhibition visitors to imagine inventive and innovative contexts or to reconsider traditional connotations the symbols sometimes carried for viewers. Similarly, when numbers or letters were isolated from a narrative context, they became more pliable in such a presentation, and interpretations of their significance could vary for each individual, adding intriguing layers of ambiguity or multiple possibilities of understanding.

The novelty of using widely known and seemingly simple images to invite imaginative interpretation or to communicate with unexpected complexity appealed to my idea of what I like about certain works of literature, especially poetry. On that early winter afternoon in 1977 as I strolled though the rooms of the Whitney Museum, the notion that art and poetry were uniquely related became more convincing. Those odd and almost unassuming paintings of Jasper Johns with their modest subjects set in a nearly self-effacing display persuaded me of the sometimes intertwined nature of the tangible and the abstract, the physical and the intellectual. I concluded the same could be said for the more powerful lyric poems I had read: mere images portrayed by linear black markings on a page related both a physical narrative and an allusion to the abstract; clearly comprehensible descriptions of concrete scenes evoked more complicated concepts for readers to consider.

Certainly, such concerns about the relationship between representation and abstraction or the ability of imagery to evoke emotion were not new, nor had they been left uninvestigated by me in my previous studies of literature. Nevertheless, like a key piece of impressive evidence revealed in a court case along with an extensive narrative and methodical summary to cement a jury’s verdict, the imagery in that Jasper Johns exhibit was convincing. At that moment, the depictions of targets, flags, and other objects were persuasive, and surprisingly they sealed the deal for me about how poetic language equally can create images filled with ambiguity and allusion that are just as suggestive for readers.

Of course, I also was aware of the existing links between Jasper Johns and literary figures like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. The social circles for artists and writers overlapped significantly in New York City, and Frank O’Hara’s position as both poet and art critic, as well as serving as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, provided a bridge between the two. In fact, O’Hara had been a good friend of Ashbery when they were both students at Harvard, and the two became central figures in the New York School of poetry.

Additionally, as David Lehman indicates in his fine account of the era, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, O’Hara, Ashbery, and the other poets in their group seemed more in tune with Jasper Johns: “In place of the high seriousness that engulfed the Abstract Expressionists, they opted for aesthetic pleasure. They were ironists, not ecclesiasts. They favored wit, humor, and the advanced irony of the blague (that is, the insolent jest or prank) in ways more suggestive of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg than of the New York School painters after whom they were named.” Similarly, in the introduction to her 1997 edition of Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, Marjorie Perloff has concluded: “O’Hara's aesthetic is closer to the conceptualism of the John Cage-Merce Cunningham-Jasper Johns-Robert Rauschenberg circle of the fifties and sixties (a circle of gay, if notably closeted and discreet, artists) than to the openly emotive and expressive gestures of Action Painting or Black Mountain or Beat aesthetic.”

Indeed, in a review of a Jasper Johns exhibit that John Ashbery wrote for The New Republic in 1968, “Working Toward the New,” the poet contributed complimentary comments, and the words seemed to hint at a kinship between the two. Ashbery described Johns’s pieces as works that attract attention, but also cause quizzical responses: “One may puzzle over his pictures, but one does not escape them.”

Furthermore, when David Bergman wrote an introduction to Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987, John Ashbery’s collection of reviews and essays about art, he offered an opinion that Ashbery may have identified with the approach Johns took toward his work and any acceptance by audiences. Both take “delight in throwing off their admirers.” Bergman continued: “Ashbery is at pains to show how one can admire Johns without claiming to have assimilated him, that appreciation need not be consumption. But Johns and Ashbery are linked in another way. Ashbery asserts that he is ‘one of the few people’ who have ‘shared . . . enthusiasm’ for Johns’s latest work. The critic like the artist must go it alone, following a private aesthetic journey.”

Frank O’Hara met Jasper Johns in 1957, and he dedicated a handful of his poems to Johns. When O’Hara was first asked about Jasper Johns’s paintings, he recommended to the director of the Museum of Modern Art that some of the works be purchased for their collection. In an interview with John Yau, Johns has indicated that he initially became interested in poetry in 1949 when he heard a radio recording of an Edith Sitwell reading, and his interest apparently grew when he encountered other poets in readings, including Frank O’Hara.

In New York during the 1950s and 1960s, poets and painters usually provided each other with an enthusiastic and encouraging audience. Jasper Johns produced various artworks referencing O’Hara and his poetry, including Skin with O’Hara Poem, 1963-65. One of the most direct connections between Johns and O’Hara can be witnessed in the above painting, In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara (1961), which is titled after an O’Hara poem. In 1967 Jasper Johns, along with a number of other artists who knew Frank O’Hara, contributed a similar illustration to the Museum of Modern Art’s book, also titled In Memory of My Feelings, that honored O’Hara after his untimely death, caused by an accident the previous year, and was edited by Bill Berkson.

Aa I was writing the reminiscences included here, I remembered how Frank O’Hara would draw readers into his poems by imitating the natural speech spoken when relating everyday events to a friend or recording one’s daily details in a journal entry. In “The Virtue of the Alterable,” Helen Vendler’s essay on O’Hara that stands as a chapter in Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets, she describes the poet’s process: “O’Hara, in his fundamental prescinding from the metaphysical, believes neither in problems nor in solutions, nor even in the path from one to the other. He believes in colloquies, observations, memories, impressions, and variations—all things with no beginnings and no endings, things we tune in on and tune out of.” Nevertheless, in the end O’Hara’s best poems eventually appear compelling, even in their spontaneity, and their details seem essential, unavoidable, and indelible.

Looking back at my initial impressions of Jasper Johns’s work more than thirty years ago, I find in his paintings a parallel pattern to O’Hara’s poetic process. To me, then Johns’s art often appeared straightforward, perhaps at times even arbitrary, offering an illusion of simplicity to the viewer. Yet, each piece contains necessary elements allowing the possibility of one conjuring complex reactions that remain with the observer. As Jasper Johns has stated in his perception of art, which also could be a working definition of poetry for my creative writing students or an apt description of O'Hara's poems: “I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion . . . has to be, not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying.”

Ricardo Pau-Llosa: "Flight to L.A."

The VPR Poem of the Week is Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s “Flight to L.A.,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa's sixth book of poems is Parable Hunter by Carnegie-Mellon University Press (2008), which also published three previous titles, Cuba (1993), Vereda Tropical (1999), and The Mastery Impulse (2003). His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, including American Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Manoa, New England Review, North American Review, Ontario Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. In addition, his work has been included in various anthologies, such as The Norton Introduction to Literature (Norton) and Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (University of Iowa Press). As an artist and critic, he also has published a number of art books and exhibition catalogues, and his commentary has appeared in various art journals.

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.

Mary Cassatt's MOTHER AND CHILD (and a Mother's Day poem)

Perhaps no other American artist has been more closely associated with emotional images of motherhood than Mary Cassatt. During her career as a painter, Cassatt produced a number of portraits depicting children in intimate instances with their mother. Due to her training as an Impressionist and her habit of presenting subjects from a perspective that appears personal yet unsentimental, Cassatt created compelling scenes that captivated viewers’ attention while maintaining an appropriate sense of separation between the artwork and its audience. In this manner, the artist allows all to share a mother’s tender moment with her child, though no accompanying discomfort at having intruded upon someone’s privacy exists. Indeed, the figures in the portrait often are so involved with one another that they do not even seem capable of being conscious of anyone else’s presence.

When observing Mary Cassatt’s portraits of women and children, usually engaged in typical incidents of domestic activity, one might be surprised to discover an important influence of Edgar Degas on her work. Certainly, the family settings in which we observe most of Cassatt’s female characters differ greatly from those portraits of women Degas depicted in his paintings—ballet dancers, bathers, prostitutes—that frequently seem voyeuristic and intrusive. Where one normally finds innocence and serenity in a Cassatt portrait, one sometimes uncovers in Degas offerings the hint of a degree of debauchery or decadence that appears almost cynical and sinister, if not deliciously sinful. Nevertheless, the influence and friendship of Degas—who first invited Mary Cassatt to display her paintings with the Impressionists (then considered a controversial group with whom he frankly did not feel the closeness he subsequently enjoyed with Cassatt)—helped direct Cassatt’s development as an artist.

Mary Cassatt defied expectations for her as the daughter in an affluent American family during the middle of the nineteenth century when she decided to attend art school, even if it was the elite Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Against the wishes of her businessman father, Cassatt departed further from her family’s plans for her when she chose to travel overseas to Italy and France for additional training and experience as a novice artist. She had previously visited Europe accompanied by her mother, acquiring a taste for the creative atmosphere and artistic community she witnessed there. By the time she found herself in Paris during the mid-1870s, Cassatt apparently had determined her future included existence as an exile practicing her craft among some of the most significant painters in Europe, including fellow expatriates like John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. However, after an initial period of rejection, her infatuation with the work of Edgar Degas, as well as his eventual return admiration for her painting, proved crucial in Cassatt’s establishment as an artist whose magnetic portraits drew viewers toward the fully formed physical presence of their figures, particularly the women and children.

In addition to being an American in Paris, Cassatt also stood apart from most of her contemporaries because of her gender. Among the Impressionists at that time Berthe Morisot was the only other female artist regarded to have standing alongside her male counterparts. At times rivals and at times good friends, Morisot and Cassatt confronted inevitable attitudes of resistance and resentment. A female among professional painters faced formidable obstacles and endured difficulties due to prejudice male members of the Impressionists never encountered. Yet, both Morisot and Cassatt earned respect from their peers and praise from some critics, especially for their contributions of feminine sensibility when depicting women working in the home and mothers interacting with their children.

Although a few at the time might have viewed such subject matter as limited and narrow, Cassatt and Morisot overcame that perception by achieving stature beside the other Impressionists when their paintings appeared on the walls in gallery exhibitions or in salon competitions. Surely, as women in that era Cassatt and Morisot were restricted by social mores and norms of gender roles so that they could not venture to Parisian scenes as widely or as easily as the male painters. Some locations were considered out of bounds for women. Even when she visited the theatre, unlike Degas’ portraits of the extroverted female performers in a revealing costume or nude in their dressing rooms, Cassatt’s paintings depicted demure women fashionably attired, seated and observing from the audience. Perhaps as a consequence of their social position, Cassatt and Morisot more often explored and exploited images of routine domestic events and family relationships to which they had access and for which they evidenced empathy.

After settling in Paris, Mary Cassatt resided in France the rest of her life, even though she became blind in her late 60s and could not produce new paintings during the final dozen years leading up to her death at age 82; yet, her work served as a bridge for European art to her native land when she exhibited in the first Impressionist shows on U.S. soil in the late 1800s. In addition, despite her later movement away from identification with the group when she grew a fondness for Japanese art whose influence seeped into her own work, Cassatt’s nationality assisted in Impressionism belatedly gaining greater popularity in America during the early twentieth century. Ironically, though she never had any children, Cassatt forever will be identified with some of the most expressive images of motherhood ever painted, and they are viewed repeatedly every Mother’s Day as emblematic of the occasion.

I admit my own admiration for Mary Cassatt’s portraits of mothers with children subconsciously might have influenced the following poem, a work inspired by my wife and son soon after his birth. On this Mother’s Day, I am pleased to present the poem once again, although this time in the company of Cassatt’s Mother and Child.

SUMMER IDYLL

She is still there, sitting
in the irregular
shade of a willow tree,
holding a slumbering
child some have come to know
as her first-born, a son.

Strollers pass this woman
bent over her bundle
beneath low-sagging limbs;
the solitary tree
looming beyond vast fields
burned brown by summer sun.

Although the warm August
winds sifting through the leaves
above do not disturb
the two figures below,
a few cumulus clouds
have begun to drift by,

shifting in from the south.
Their dark, ragged edges
graze a distant skyline
of spruce and Douglas fir.
Underneath these massive
mounds, which appear to brush

lightly the far-off hills,
offering brief basins
of shade to the valleys
they cross, momentary
relief from the midday
heat seems to be noticed

no more than the noonday
light has been, as mother
and child both continue
in their consummate bliss
to ignore the brilliant
world that whirls around them.


—Edward Byrne

[“Summer Idyll” appeared in one of my collections of poems, Words Spoken, Words Unspoken, published by Chimney Hill Press in 1995.]

Gary Snyder: A Natural Selection

When I was an undergraduate student, I began my college career as a chemistry major and math minor. Although during my high school years I had an equal interest and about as much aptitude in English and writing, I originally had been convinced my path to a profitable profession lay in the pursuit of these studies for which I had registered at freshman orientation. However, in my sophomore year when I entered an introductory creative writing class that I had chosen as an elective course, I discovered a renewed enthusiasm for literature and poetry writing, and I switched my major to English.

Indeed, I remember the first book assigned that semester by my teacher, poet and fiction writer Steve Katz, opened my eyes to an appreciation and understanding of contemporary poetry that I had not yet known. The volume, Gary Snyder’s Regarding Wave, seemed to reveal a relationship between language and the land, the spiritual and the physical, humans and nature, that proved aesthetically pleasing while accurately rendered. I remember admiring how the poet’s combination of concern for humans with an apparent affection for his environment—delivering to readers a celebration of the natural world—could be created in such a way by a blending of personal perspective (though never confessional or self-centered) and persuasive expression.

With his background as an individual who once worked as a merchant seaman or in logging camps, and who labored among the elements of nature he described, Snyder’s related experiences contributed to an authentic and convincing tone in his poetry. In addition, Snyder’s seeking to integrate into his writings an awareness of other beliefs (as in his devotion to Zen Buddhism) or behaviors witnessed in different cultures (such as Japanese, Chinese, or American Indian) offered a fresh approach one would not find elsewhere. In her book of criticism, Soul Says, Helen Vendler has stated: “Snyder is one of the many modernist poets to have brought English lyric into conjunction with Chinese and Japanese poetry. The long history of Western fascination with ‘the Chinese written character as a medium of poetry’ (Pound out of Fenollosa) has reached its apogee with Snyder, if only because Snyder (unlike Amy Lowell, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Rexroth, and others) really knows Japanese and Chinese.”

In fact, his biographical acquaintance with a diverse set of principles and his participation in a wide variety of activities seemed to add to the scope of his poetry. Perhaps for those reasons I often found it difficult to readily group Snyder among the Beat poets, as most critics appeared to do. Instead, for me Gary Snyder’s work remained unique, even though his connections to Jack Kerouac (who depicted Snyder as a fictional character in The Dharma Bums), Allen Ginsberg, and the other Beat writers were frequently cited—including Snyder’s reading with Ginsberg at the Six Gallery (in San Francisco in 1955, when “Howl” startled listeners) where, in the minds of some, the Beat movement may have been born.

In the decades since that crucial initial encounter with Gary Snyder’s poems, I have maintained my respect for the consistent characteristics evident in his consciousness of a fragile ecology, his display of a moral conscience, his explorations of self, and his continuing care for craft as exhibited in the fine writing. Shortly after my introduction to Snyder’s poetry, his next collection of poems, Turtle Island, which many may consider his most significant book, won the Pulitzer Prize. For a couple of decades, Snyder’s new poetry appeared sporadically (although a collection of selected poems, No Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992) and his reputation as a poet seemed to be solidified mostly by those earlier poetry volumes.

However, in 1996 Snyder published Mountains and Rivers Without End, a book-length poem uniting personal and universal themes that he’d begun forty years before in 1956. This work won a number of awards and garnered great praise upon its release. Additionally, its long and at times elevated explanation or interpretation of humans’ relationship with nature exposed Gary Snyder’s poetry to a new audience—including a number of my students, as I now recommended they read his work, just the way I had been advised to engage Snyder’s poetry when I was an undergraduate.

In 2004, for the first time in a couple of decades, Gary Snyder released a collection of completely new individual pieces of poetry within Danger on Peaks. And only a few weeks ago the Poetry Foundation announced Gary Snyder as the 2008 winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the lifetime achievement award that carries a $100,000 purse, which will be presented at a ceremony later this month. The choice of Gary Snyder for this recognition seems like a natural selection, logical and laudable.

In the press release noting the granting of this award to Snyder, the Poetry Foundation’s judges (Eavan Boland, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Christian Wiman) reported: “Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there’s no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we’ve been reading Robert Frost.” Wiman, editor of Poetry, remarked: “His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.”

Gary Snyder was born on this date (May 8) in 1930. Today, as an acknowledgment of Gary Snyder’s birthday and as an indication of appreciation for his work, I extend the recommendation of his poetry—which I received as an undergraduate thirty-five years ago and that I now repeat to my students each semester—to all readers who wish to discover poems celebrating our regard for nature’s great beauty, or its correspondingly immense power, even while conscientiously confronting us with a complementary sense of personal and social responsibility.

A Vote for Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas"

Yesterday, as I voted in the Indiana primary, I was struck by how pleased voters and officials at the polling place seemed to be that they were involved in a presidential primary that still mattered. Since Indiana is always among the final states on the primary calendar, rarely has the national race for either party remained undecided so late. In recent weeks, the region has been a favorite location for presidential candidates’ campaign tours. This is the first time my wife, a lifelong Hoosier, has had an opportunity to vote while a crucial presidential primary contest continued. I have lived in Indiana nearly twenty-five years, and throughout all those election cycles voting for a national candidate in the primary has always been nothing more than a formality for the residents of this state. In fact, four decades have elapsed since the last significant primary vote in a presidential race occurred in Indiana.

Therefore, when I witnessed the energy and enthusiasm expressed by many of my neighbors, no matter which candidate or party they supported, I was reminded of the simple wisdom and interesting history of the American democratic process, even in the frequent instances when it has proved a bit messy. I also recalled once again one of my favorite documents about the intersection of democracy and literature. In a post last July Fourth, I recommended readers revisit a few nineteenth-century writings about American political and artistic independence, including an interesting and invigorating essay investigating philosophical perspectives on political and literary democracy, Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas.” Readers are encouraged to examine the entire essay, perhaps much of it admittedly an argument for Whitman’s own poetic presence even while he focused on the future, but today I would like to quote the opening paragraphs of that extensive work:

As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress. If a man were ask'd, for instance, the distinctive points contrasting modern European and American political and other life with the old Asiatic cultus, as lingering-bequeath'd yet in China and Turkey, he might find the amount of them in John Stuart Mill's profound essay on Liberty in the future, where he demands two main constituents, or sub-strata, for a truly grand nationality—1st, a large variety of character—and 2d, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions—(seems to be for general humanity much like the influences that make up, in their limitless field, that perennial health-action of the air we call the weather—an infinite number of currents and forces, and contributions, and temperatures, and cross purposes, whose ceaseless play of counterpart upon counterpart brings constant restoration and vitality.) With this thought—and not for itself alone, but all it necessitates, and draws after it—let me begin my speculations.

America, filling the present with greatest deeds and problems, cheerfully accepting the past, including feudalism, (as, indeed, the present is but the legitimate birth of the past, including feudalism,) counts, as I reckon, for her justification and success, (for who, as yet, dare claim success?) almost entirely on the future. Nor is that hope unwarranted. To-day, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring. For our New World I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come. Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of lasting power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deferr'd, the democratic republican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance. Who else, indeed, except the United States, in history, so far, have accepted in unwitting faith, and, as we now see, stand, act upon, and go security for, these things?

But preluding no longer, let me strike the key-note of the following strain. First premising that, though the passages of it have been written at widely different times, (it is, in fact, a collection of memoranda, perhaps for future designers, comprehenders,) and though it may be open to the charge of one part contradicting another—for there are opposite sides to the great question of democracy, as to every great question—I feel the parts harmoniously blended in my own realization and convictions, and present them to be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim and assertion modified and temper'd by the others. Bear in mind, too, that they are not the result of studying up in political economy, but of the ordinary sense, observing, wandering among men, these States, these stirring years of war and peace. I will not gloss over the appaling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the people's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay. I shall use the words America and democracy as convertible terms. Not an ordinary one is the issue. The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time. Not the least doubtful am I on any prospects of their material success. The triumphant future of their business, geographic and productive departments, on larger scales and in more varieties than ever, is certain. In those respects the republic must soon (if she does not already) outstrip all examples hitherto afforded, and dominate the world.

The wonderful wealth-producing power of the United States defies and sets at naught the grave drawbacks of a mischievous protective tariff, and has already obliterated, almost wholly, the traces of the greatest of modern civil wars. What is especially remarkable in the present development of American energy and success is its wide and equable distribution. North and south, east and west, on the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, along the chain of the great lakes, in the valley of the Mississippi, and on the coasts of the gulf of Mexico, the creation of wealth and the increase of population are signally exhibited. It is quite true, as has been shown by the recent apportionment of population in the House of Representatives, that some sections of the Union have advanced, relatively to the rest, in an extraordinary and unexpected degree. But this does not imply that the States which have gain'd no additional representatives or have actually lost some have been stationary or have receded. The fact is that the present tide of prosperity has risen so high that it has overflow'd all barriers, and has fill'd up the back-waters, and establish'd something like an approach to uniform success.

Admitting all this, with the priceless value of our political institutions, general suffrage, (and fully acknowledging the latest, widest opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper than these, what finally and only is to make of our western world a nationality superior to any hither known, and out-topping the past, must be vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures, perfect personalities and sociologies, original, transcendental, and expressing (what, in highest sense, are not yet express'd at all,) democracy and the modern. With these, and out of these, I promulge new races of Teachers, and of perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth-stock of a New World. For feudalism, caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating from political institutions, still hold essentially, by their spirit, even in this country, entire possession of the more important fields, indeed the very subsoil, of education, and of social standards and literature.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses—radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish'd, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote—and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?—(and this to suggest them.)

View'd, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes. Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway'd the most, and whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance,) of American democracy . . ..

[I hope readers will note the portrait of Walt Whitman accompanying this post. This rare likeness of Whitman is the earliest painting of the poet, completed in 1860 by Charles Hine, and I am pleased to report the original exists in the Archives and Special Collections section of the library at Brooklyn College, an alma mater of mine.]

Kevin Pilkington: "Capri"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Kevin Pilkington’s “Capri,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2005-2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, where he was the featured poet. The same issue also contains an interview of Pilkington conducted by Linda Simone.

Kevin Pilkington, a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of five collections of poetry, including Spare Change, winner of the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award, and Ready to Eat the Sky, released by River City Publishing as part of their poetry series selected by Andrew Hudgins. His poetry also has been published in anthologies—such as Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Contemporary Poetry of New England, and Western Wind—as well as literary journals, including Boston Review, Columbia, Confrontation, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Iowa Review, Louisville Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry.

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.

Frederic Edwin Church: MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE

Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford, Connecticut on this date (May 4) in 1826. Church learned his craft as a student landscape painter under the tutelage of an already well-known master and leader of the famed Hudson River School, Thomas Cole. After Cole’s death, when Church was still in his early twenties, the pupil assumed his mentor’s role by becoming a representative among the new generation in the Hudson River School, developing into a skilled creator recognized for vivid and idealized American landscapes on canvas. Later, Church traveled extensively, expanding his vision and producing remarkable landscape paintings of other lands as well.

The reverence with which Church approached the human presence among elements of nature’s terrain appropriately reflected similar attitudes revealed in the literature introduced by nineteenth-century Romantic poets who frequently wished to engender an attitude of awe in their readers towards a sacred nature. His immense and powerful paintings that stretched sometimes almost as wide as ten feet—such as Niagara, which established his fame, and Heart of the Andes, which sold for an amazing amount of $10,000 in 1859—signaled Church’s intention to use such a large scale to contrast nature’s power over a fragile humanity, usually minimally illustrated within nature’s impressive splendor, as well as to overwhelm viewers with the natural grace and grandeur of the countryside scenery he presented.

By the time he reached his forties—during the same period when Walt Whitman was depicting an authentic portrait of America and its natural vista in his poetry—Frederic Edwin Church had matured into an acclaimed American authority whose paintings displayed intense moralized landscapes that seemed to elevate nature and unite it with a spiritual essence, as if his wide skies with ominously dark or richly tinted clouds riding above extended horizons filled with lush features exhibited an ethereal beauty integrating heaven and earth.

I am pleased to note that one of Frederic Edwin Church’s magnificent panoramas—Mountain Landscape, surprisingly painted on the limited surface of a smaller canvas—appears as the cover art for Valparaiso Poetry Review’s latest issue (Spring/Summer 2008: Volume IX, Number 2). I invite visitors to view this artwork and to read an elegantly expressive essay—by Gregg Hertzlieb, Director of the Brauer Museum of Art—which contains commentary about this wonderful oil on canvas composition by Church and also is included in the new issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.