Norbert Krapf: "The Blueberry Bush"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Norbert Krapf’s “The Blueberry Bush,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Norbert Krapf has written or edited 21 books, two of which are his translations from the German. Sixteen of these books are collections of his own poetry, including Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins (1993), Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany (1997), and Looking for God’s Country (2005), all available from Time Being Books, and Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island (2000) and The Country I Come From (2002). In 2006, Indiana University Press published Invisible Presence, a collaboration with Indiana photographer Darryl Jones.

Krapf is the editor/translator of Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia (1988), a collection of folk tales set in his ancestral region, and Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1990). He is also the editor of Under Open Sky: Poets on William Cullen Bryant (1986). In December 2007, Acme Records released Norbert Krapf and jazz pianist-composer Monika Herzig’s CD, Imagine—Indiana in Music and Words. Krapf’s honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. For 34 years he taught at Long Island University, where he directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center. Earlier this year, Norbert Krapf was named the Poet Laureate of Indiana.

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.

An Elegant Epigraph: T.S. Eliot on Contemporary Poets and Poets of the Past

T.S. Eliot was born on this date (September 26) in 1888. Eliot’s significant presence as a poet was formed by his adaptation of traditionally recognized poetry, but he also altered the direction of poetry in the twentieth century with his innovations. Perhaps the composition of his work and the impact of his influence on others who followed provide an excellent example of his belief in the relationship between “tradition and the individual talent.” Here, Eliot explains his views concerning the contemporary poet’s place among those poets of the past.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.” —T.S. Eliot

—From “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay included in T.S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Methune, 1920).


[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Paul Nelson: "Busy"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Paul Nelson’s “Busy,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Paul Nelson’s is the author of five books of poetry, including The Hard Shapes of Paradise (University of Alabama Press, 1988), Days Off (University Press of Virginia, 1982), Average Nights (L’Epervier Press, 1977), and Cargo (Stone Wall Press, 1972). A new collection, Sea Level, is due this week from Main Street Rag Press. Nelson’s poems also have appeared widely in various literary journals, including Colorado Review, Cortland Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, North American Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Willow Springs. Paul Nelson is the retired Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Ohio University.

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.

John Coltrane, Michael S. Harper, and Amiri Baraka: Jazz Music and Poetry

In Jazz Is, his collection of reflections on jazz musicians, Nat Hentoff describes John Coltrane: “Coltrane, a man of almost unbelievable gentleness made human to us lesser mortals by his very occasional rages. Coltrane, an authentically spiritual man, but not innocent of carnal imperatives. Or perhaps more accurately, a man, in his last years, especially but not exclusively consumed by affairs of the spirit. That is, having constructed a personal world view (or view of the cosmos) on a residue of Christianity and an infusion of Eastern meditative practices and concerns, Coltrane became a theosophist of jazz. The music was a way of self-purgation so that he could learn more about himself to the end of making himself and his music part of the unity of all being. He truly believed this, and in this respect, as well as musically, he has been a powerful influence on many musicians since.”

As we approach John Coltrane’s birthday tomorrow (born September 23, 1926), this occasion offers another opportunity to recognize the close associations between jazz and poetry during the last half-century. Perhaps no example displays the merging of these two art forms better than Michael S, Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” the title poem from his 1970 collection that responds to Coltrane’s music, particularly his magnificent 1965 recording, A Love Supreme. (A rare film clip of Coltrane performing an excerpt of “A Love Supreme” appears above.) Harper explains his poem actually was written just before Coltrane’s death in 1967, yet the poem’s later publication and its content certainly lend a sense of elegy to the work.

DEAR JOHN, DEAR COLTRANE

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father's church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin 'tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick
you couldn't play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you'd concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme—

—Michael S. Harper

Some of Harper’s own comments on John Coltrane, jazz, spirituality, and this poem inspired by Coltrane’s music or biographical details are engaging and enlightening:

Black musicians have always melded the private and the historical into the aesthetics of human speech and music, the blues and jazz. The blues and jazz are the finest extensions of a bedrock of the testamental process. Blacks have been witnesses victims; they have paid their dues. “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” was written before John Coltrane died; its aim is the redemptive nature of black experience in terms of the private life of a black musician. Coltrane’s music should be seen as a progression from the personal to incantation and prophesy. It is a fusing of tenderness, pain, and power in their melding, and the [furbishing] is at once an internal and external journey or passage: to live with integrity means “to live”—“to create”; its anthem—“there is no substitute for pain”—The poem is a declaration of tenderness, and a reminder to the reader of a suffering beyond the personal and historical to the cultural, that there can be no reservations fixed to sensibility, that personality gives power through the synthesis of personal history and the overtones of America in and by contact. The poem begins with a catalog of sexual trophies, for whites, a lesson to blacks not to assert their manhood, and that black men are suspect because they are potent. The mingling of trophy and Christian vision, Coltrane’s minister-father, indicates an emphasis on physical facts—that there is no refinement beyond the body. The antiphonal, call-response/retort stanza simulates the black church, and gives the answer of renewal to any question raised—“cause I am.” It is Coltrane himself who chants, in life, “a love supreme”; jazz and the blues, as open-ended forms, cannot be programmatic or abstract, but modal . . .. Coltrane’s music is the recognition and embodiment of life-force; his music is testament in modal forms of expression that unfold in their many modal aspects. His music testifies to life; one is witness to the spirit and power of life; and one is rejuvenated and renewed in a living experience, the music that provides images strong enough to give back that power that renews. . ..

Len Lyons, in The 101 Best Jazz Albums: A History of Jazz on Records, has written about Coltrane’s music: “A Love Supreme, recorded in December, is a remarkably warm, hopeful, and energetic outpouring. Coltrane was explicit about the religious inspiration of the music in his poem which serves as the album’s liner notes. John once told his mother that he had experienced visions of God while preparing the music, which was ominous to her because she felt that ‘when someone is seeing God, that means he is going to die.’”

Although obviously not demonstrating the quality of Harper’s poetry, John Coltrane explicitly indicated his own understanding of the interaction between poetry and music with the inclusion of his poem as guidance to listeners in the liner notes for A Love Supreme:

A LOVE SUPREME

I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
God is. It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all.
Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses.
Thank you God.
In You all things are possible.
We know. God made us so.
Keep your eye on God.
God is. he always was. he always will be.
No Matter what . . . it is God.
He is gracious and merciful.
It is most important that I know Thee.
Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions—time—all related . . .
all made from one . . . all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves—heat waves—all vibrations—
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.

His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious.
it is merciful — Thank you God.
One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God . . . everything does.
Thank you God.
Have no fear . . . believe . . . Thank you God.
The universe has many wonders. God is all.
His way . . . it is so wonderful.
Thoughts—deeds—vibrations, etc.
They all go back to God and He cleanses all.
He is gracious and merciful . . .
Thank you God.
Glory to God . . . God is so alive.
God is.
God loves.
May I be acceptable in thy sight.
We are all one in His grace.
The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement
of Thee O Lord.
Thank you God.
God will wash away all our tears . . .
He always has . . .
He always will.
Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.
Let us sing all songs to God
To whom all praise is due . . . praise God.
No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God.
With all we share God.
It is all with god.
It is all with Thee.
Obey the Lord
Blessed is He.
We are all from one thing . . . the will of God . . .
thank you God
I have seen God—I have seen ungodly—
none can be greater—none can compare to God.
Thank you God.
He will remake us . . . He always has and he
always will.
It is true—blessed be His name—thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely . . .
so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet,
it is everything.
Thank you God.
ELATIONS—ELEGANCE—EXALTATION—
All from God.
Thank you God. Amen.

In the liner notes to the Coltrane retrospective album released by Rhino Records in 1993, The Last Giant: The John Coltrane Anthology, poet Amiri Baraka reported on the inspiration for his poem dedicated to Coltrane and imitative of Coltrane’s music: “The poem ‘I Love Music’ was written to recall when I was locked up in solitary confinement after the Newark rebellions in 1967. I sat one afternoon and whistled all the Trane I remembered. And then later that afternoon they told me he had died. But I knew even then that that was impossible.” (A recording of Amiri Baraka performing “I Love Music” is available as an mp3 at the University of Pennsylvania archives.) As Baraka suggested then, and now as we remember this significant musician on his birthday, John Coltrane’s spirit remains alive in his recordings, as well as in the music and the poetry later composed by the many he influenced or inspired.

Donald Hall: Sound and Sense in Poetry

In a recent piece concerning my article on poetry and place, “Landscape and Lyricism,” I quoted a brief statement by Donald Hall on the importance of location for writers from his collection of essays and notes on poetry, Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird (University of Michigan Press). Today, on the occasion of Hall’s 80th birthday (born September 20, 1928), perhaps the best way of paying tribute to Donald Hall would be to enjoy listening to him as he entertainingly reads his own poetry during a 2007 presentation at the University of Virginia.

With that in mind, I’d also like to return to that book of his commentary for the poet’s reflections on the lyricism of poetry as suggested by its language, particularly when spoken aloud. Donald Hall considers sound and sense essential when evaluating the effectiveness of a poem. In “Poems Aloud,” a section of Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird that first appeared as liner notes for an album titled The Pleasures of Poetry, Hall presents opinions on how poetry ought to be experienced:

People used to argue about where a poem exists: on the page, or in the ear? The answer is neither: the poem exists in the whole of the body of the person absorbing it, and most particularly in the mouth that holds the intimate sounds touching each other, and in the leg that dances the rhythm. The ear and the eye, listening and reading, are devices for receiving signals that are dispersed throughout the body. The poem happens out-loud, even if you are the fortunate reader who can hear the syllables while he reads silently. The poem is its sounds, and its sounds—mouth pleasures, dance pleasures—are the code which allows the mind to slip back into old and poetic ways of thinking: ways of fantasy, ways of magic, transformation, metaphor, metamorphoses.

In the more than half century since his first collection of poems, Exiles and Marriages, appeared in 1955, Donald Hall has published fifteen books of poetry. He also has written more than twenty books of prose. Among the honors Hall has received are the Frost Medal, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2006, Donald Hall was selected to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007.

Amanda Auchter: "Wasteland of Parts"

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

Amanda Auchter is the author of Light Under the Skin (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Her writing has appeared in Antietam Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Blue Unicorn, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Evansville Review, Homestead Review, North American Review, Pennsylvania English, Smartish Pace, Tampa Review, Willow Review, Writer’s Journal, and others. She is the recipient of the 2004 Howard Moss Poetry Prize, the 2005 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize, and the 2005 James Wright Poetry Award. Amanda Auchter is the editor of Pebble Lake 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.

Poetry and Place: "Landscape and Lyricism"

For many poets a sense of place plays an important role in the initiation of images or offers a contribution to the establishment of tone during the composition of a poem. Richard Hugo labeled a location that sparked his lines of poetry as a “triggering town,” a term he used as the title of his well-known and influential book of essays. Donald Hall once wrote about this issue in his book of essays and notes on poetry, Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird (University of Michigan Press), when he stated: “For some poets place is golden, and the golden place like the golden age is usually unattainable—either because it is in the historical past or because it is in the biographical past of the poet, or both. (Such doubling is a poetic habit.) The poem wishes to attain—perhaps does attain, for a moment—a rare condition of blessedness, which the place sponsors.” Among the most famous poets associated with place, Hall lists Wordsworth, Thomas, Eliot, Whitman, and Pound. Certainly, one easily could create a roster of writers who depend upon place for inspiration and examination that continues far beyond that handful of writers.

I have always regarded a sense of place as an essential element in much of my writing. Within descriptive passages I usually find my lines of lyricism and the language tools used to subtly allude to various issues or to learn further about a few of my own reemerging concerns. Like many before me, I enjoy employing aspects of landscape for symbolic or connotative purposes. Therefore, when I recently was asked to submit a group of poems and a prose commentary to Segue for that literary journal’s current issue, I chose to focus upon examples from my new work that illustrate my emphasis on place as subject matter or that use setting to some extent in order to promote the poem’s main topic. As I observe in the following excerpt from my essay, “Landscape and Lyricism,” I believe a combination of landscape and literary techniques in lyrical poetry frequently provides opportunities for poets and usually proves to be a pair of compelling complementary components in contemporary poems:

Charles Wright has remarked that all of his poetry involves recurring concerns: “There are three things, basically, that I write about—language, landscape, and the idea of God.” Yet, when pressed, he confides everything begins with landscape and one’s surroundings: “Landscape, like form, is everything to me.” Wright employs vibrant images of landscape in lyrical language to initiate associations or memories that lead toward forming more thoughts and a succession of events: “Narrative does not dictate the image; the image dictates the narrative.” Similarly, almost all of my poems originate in natural images, actually glimpsed or merely imagined, that introduce emotional responses and elicit contemplation concerning experiences or observed incidents drawn from my memory or my imagination.

Like Wright, I have a great fondness for landscape artists, particularly those painters whose works evoke difficult universal issues commonly confronted by humans—the inherent temporality of life or the transience often witnessed in natural beauty, the acceptance of change and the acknowledgment of one’s own mortality . . ..

I thank Eric Melbye, editor of Segue, for the invitation to contribute as the featured author in volume 7 of his fine journal, and I believe readers will agree with me that the issue’s table of contents displays I am in excellent company in this current issue. I urge all to check out Segue and browse through each of the issues in its archives. I especially present this recommendation to those who have not yet encountered the magazine. I am sure such readers will find a valuable new source for good literature.

Remembering Reginald Shepherd

Yesterday, as news about the death of Reginald Shepherd spread from one literary blog to another, I spent some time revisiting his prose and poetry. When I began writing posts for “One Poet’s Notes,” I had hoped to maintain a certain degree of serious study of poetry and poetics, even while striving to write pieces readers might find engaging and entertaining. Reginald Shepherd was one of the authors of critical commentary and personal essays on a regular poetry blog whose contributions to literary discourse I admired greatly and hoped to complement with my own offerings. Indeed, an article I posted to “One Poet’s Notes” in June of 2007 about the apparent demise of Parnassus specifically cited Shepherd, with his work and his presence on the Internet, as one of the online critics whose blog usually contained interesting perspectives or intelligent perceptions, helping to fill “the gap created by the absence of Parnassus” and the loss of book review sections in newspapers across the country.

Reginald Shepherd’s blog was among those I have bookmarked and to which I have subscribed for immediate updates. Each time I received notice at my Google Reader page of a new entry on his blog, I looked forward to reading his words. Since Shepherd also discussed every aspect of his life with honesty and openness, all of his readers were aware of this poet’s serious health problems, as well as the ongoing pain or difficult medical procedures he endured. In fact, he was so frank when confiding with his readers that I am tempted to refer to Shepherd by his first name as any friend might do. However, I never had an opportunity for the good fortune of personally meeting with him.

A little more than two weeks ago, Reginald Shepherd wrote again of his continuing health battle, beginning his August 26 blog post as follows:

I am in the hospital for the fourth time in the past five months, this time for excruciating abdominal pain that turned out to be due to a partial bowel obstruction which has still not cleared up. I have had a tube down my throat and have been unable to eat for over a week. I spend most of my days trying to sleep through the pain and nausea.

In the course of the various tests to try to determine the cause of the obstruction, my surgeon found several large masses on my liver which, after a blood test and a liver biopsy, have turned out to be a fast-growing resurgence of my colon cancer. Thus I am in the hospital cancer ward for the foreseeable future, starting chemotherapy again (it had been on hold during my assorted medical crises of the past few months), before I have had time to fully recover from my recent illnesses and surgeries.

Nevertheless, Reginald Shepherd continued in the post to present a marvelous excerpt from an essay on the poetry of Alvin Feinman that had been published in his recent book of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx, released just this year by the University of Michigan Press. Shepherd characterized his commentary in the blog post as his “final tribute to my recently deceased mentor Alvin Feinman.” Sadly, that was the last post on Shepherd’s blog, and I now include reference of it to recommend it as part of my final tribute to him.

Reginald Shepherd was first and foremost a poet. Besides the blog entries or numerous essays he produced, Shepherd and his work might be better appreciated through reading his five books of poetry: Fata Morgana (2007); Otherhood (2003); Wrong (1999); Angel, Interrupted (1996); and Some Are Drowning (1994). As a sample of his poetry and an invitation to further seek his writings, in which his voice continues and evidence of his remarkable life remains, I provide the following example from Fata Morgana:

HOW PEOPLE DISAPPEAR

If this world were mine, the stereo
starts, but can’t begin
to finish the phrase. I might survive
it, someone could add, but that
someone’s not here. She’s crowned
with laurel leaves, the place
where laurel leaves would be
if there were leaves, she’s not
medieval Florence, not
Blanche of Castile. Late March
keeps marching in old weather,
another slick of snow to trip
and fall into, another bank
of inconvenient fact. The sky
is made of paper and white reigns,
shredded paper pools into her afterlife,
insurance claims and hospital reports,
bills stamped “Deceased,” sign here
and here, a blank space where she
would have been. My sister
said We’ll have to find another
Mommy.

And this is how
loss looks, my life in black plastic
garbage bags, a blue polyester suit
a size too small. Mud music
as they packed her in
damp ground, it’s always raining
somewhere, in New Jersey,
while everyone was thinking about
fried chicken and potato salad,
caramel cake and lemonade.
Isn’t that a pretty dress
they put her in? She looks so
lifelike. (Tammi Terrell
collapsed in Marvin Gaye’s arms
onstage. For two hundred points,
what was the song?) Trampled
beneath the procession, her music.

Pieces of sleep like pieces of shale
crumble through my four a.m.
(a flutter of gray that could be
rain), unable to read this thing
that calls itself the present.
She’s lost among the spaces
inside letters, moth light, moth wind,
a crumpled poem in place of love.

—Reginald Shepherd

Wislawa Szymborska: "Photograph from September 11"

On this date, seven years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I am reminded about a lingering emotion of loss and a mood of mourning throughout the nation in the following months just as the lower layers of rubble from the World Trade Center towers continued to burn. Indeed, four months later, the halftime show by U2 presented at the Super Bowl in the beginning of 2002 provided one of the memorable and moving tributes to the victims of 9/11. Even today, I recall feeling stunned from the impact left by the unrolling of victims’ identities above the stage, particularly when I noticed the last name “Byrne” listed a couple of times.

Additionally, in the past seven years there have been some poignant poems concerning 9/11 and its aftermath, such as Stanley Plumly’s “The Morning America Changed,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review and was included as the "VPR Poem of the Week" last September 11 in “One Poet’s Notes.” However, American poets have not been the only ones to offer effective responses to those 9/11 images witnessed by the world. Indeed, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska—winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature—included a compelling poem, “Photograph from September 11,” in her 2005 collection titled Monologue of a Dog.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM SEPTEMBER 11

They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

—Wislawa Szymborska (Translated by Clare Kavanagh and Stanisław Baranczak)

Adrianne Kalfopoulou: "Holy Agony"

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

Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s first full-length collection of poetry, Wild Greens, was published by Red Hen Press in 2002. Fig won the 2000 Women’s Poetry Chapbook Contest from the Sarasota Poetry Theater Press. Her book of nonfiction, Broken Greek: A Language to Belong, was released by Plain View Press in 2006. Kalfopoulou has also written on 19th- and 20th-century texts by Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson for various scholarly journals, and she has published a volume of criticism, The Untidy House: A Discussion of the Ideology of the American Dream in the Culture’s Female Discourses. Her journal publications include poems in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Elixir, and Verse Daily, as well as in Kindred Terraces, an anthology of American poets in Greece. Adrianne Kalfopoulou teaches creative writing and literature in Athens.

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.

Sonny Rollins and Philip Levine

Saxophonist Sonny Rollins was born on this date (September 7) in 1930. for more than half a century, since his days in the beginning of the 1950s with the Modern Jazz Quartet and his recordings with Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk, Rollins has been an influential individual in American jazz. In addition, his life story has taken on the aura of legend. From his early years involved in crime and drug abuse, through a couple of periods of self-imposed exile from public performance, and on to his stature as a mature and sophisticated representative of jazz mastery, Sonny Rollins frequently has presented himself as a mysterious and enigmatic figure.

One of the puzzling periods in his life occurred at the close of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, when he stepped away from the spotlight of public performance for a few years, hoping to rejuvenate and expand the scope of his playing. According to the well-known narrative, Rollins practiced regularly at night in isolation under the structure of the Williamsburg Bridge. As he has stated: “I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time.”

Philip Levine has written of this experience in his poem, “The Unknowable,” which appeared in Levine’s 1999 collection, The Mercy. Levine often has focused upon figures from jazz music for whom he has expressed admiration and with whom he has identified to some degree. As I suggested during the following excerpt from a previous post on “One Poet’s Notes” reviewing Philip Levine’s recent volume of poetry, Breath, the connections detected between Levine and his jazz heroes can be quite revealing:

When I reviewed Philip Levine’s The Mercy in the first issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review back in the fall of 1999, I concluded my comments with a quote from one of the poems, “The Unknowable,” a tribute to jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. I suggested some of the lines, including the closing ones, could prove just as fitting for a description of Levine: “a man who stared for years / into the breathy, unknowable voice / of silence and captured the music.” Therefore, when I noticed the title of Levine’s next collection and read the book’s epigraph (“Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song / in my own breath”) drawn from the first lines of its final poem, “Call It Music,” a similar tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker, I smiled.

My smile showed not only from a recognition of the repetition in images that bridges the two volumes, but also from a sense of fulfillment, a feeling that Levine, too, was acknowledging some greater degree of identification with the musicians he admires so much, those figures of jazz such as Bird, with his “breath of genius / which now I hear soaring above my own.” Like those bebop musicians—including Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk—Levine lauds in his deceptively plain-spoken yet lyrical lines, the poet has developed a distinctive sound over the past few decades that preserves well the mood and atmosphere of particular times or places now lost. As well, the poet’s characters, many long dead, appear as presences kept alive a little bit longer by lingering elegiac lyrics, each phrase sounding like a breath of expression blown into a wind instrument or notes from some old piano riff held forever on tape from a recording session more than half a century ago.

In his endnotes to The Mercy, Philip Levine comments: “’The Unknowable’ owes everything to the life of Sonny Rollins.” On this day, Levine’s poem seems particularly appropriate to share with readers.

THE UNKNOWABLE

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge
hour after hour, “woodshedding” the musicians
called it, but his woodshed was the world.

The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins
that could fill a club to overflowing
blown into tatters by the sea winds

teaching him humility, which he carries
with him at all times, not as an amulet
against the powers of animals and men

that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace.
No, a quality of the gaze downward
on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan.

Hold his hand and you’ll see it, hold his eyes
in yours and you’ll hear the wind singing
through the cables of the bridge that was home,

singing through his breath—no rarer than yours,
though his became the music of the world
thirty years ago. Today I ask myself

how he knew the time had come to inhabit
the voice of the air and how later
he decided the time had come for silence,

for the world to speak any way it could?
He wouldn't answer because he’d find
the question pompous. He plays for money.

The years pass, and like the rest of us
he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great
shoulders narrow. He is merely a man—

after all—a man who stared for years
into the breathy, unknowable voice
of silence and captured the music.

—Philip Levine

VPR Nominations for BEST OF THE NET 2008

The time of year has arrived once more when Sundress Publications considers nominations of poems published in online journals during the last twelve months for its annual “Best of the Net” anthology. As I have observed in the past, the editors of Sundress deserve praise for continuing to draw greater recognition to the presence of quality poetry online. Sundress already has released two earlier editions of the “Best of the Net” anthology, each including a number of remarkable works displaying both the wide range and fine quality of poetry now appearing in a multitude of Internet magazines. Readers can examine past selections at the Sundress Publications web page.

As I have suggested in previous posts to “One Poet’s Notes,” I maintain a high regard for every poem selected to be among those listed in the construction of a table of contents for each issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. In fact, as the editor who accepted all the poetry, I feel placed into a difficult position when asked to choose some pieces over others to be nominated for any honor. Indeed, as an individual who has repeatedly expressed appreciation for every contribution to Valparaiso Poetry Review during nearly a decade of reading submissions, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR, many of whom I have come to know well and have admired over the years. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge and accept occasions that allow VPR’s deserving poets an opportunity to reach a larger audience through special recognition or possible inclusion in an anthology.

Therefore, I again have decided to adhere to the process I followed when making nominations last year, which includes noting the numerous comments (concerning poems appearing in VPR’s pair of recent issues) that I have received in correspondence from readers or submitting poets throughout the past twelve months. In this manner, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in the two issues of Volume IX (Fall/Winter 2007-2008 and Spring/Summer 2008), which are eligible for the upcoming 2008 edition of the Sundress “Best of the Net” anthology.

Aided by those observations from VPR’s readers, I offer the editors of Sundress six poems for consideration selected from the two issues in Volume IX of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

John Balaban: “Finishing Up the Novel After Some Delay”

Lynnell Edwards: “Suite for Red River Gorge”

W.D. Ehrhart: “Coaching Winter Track in Time of War”

Brent Goodman: “Monona Bay”

H. Palmer Hall: “Vietnam Roulette”

Kay Mullen: “An Dinh Palace”

I would like to extend my congratulations to the nominated poets. At the same time I wish to express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this last year, as well as in past years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving.

In addition, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers during nearly a decade of publication. I look forward to much more fine poetry in the future from other contributors I hope readers will find equally as entertaining, engaging, and enlightening as those they have chosen to compliment in their past correspondence.

Barbara Crooker: "In the Late Summer Garden"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Barbara Crooker’s “In the Late Summer Garden,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Barbara Crooker’s Radiance won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. Diane Lockward’s review of Radiance appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Crooker’s second full-length collection of poems, Line Dance, has recently been released by Word Press. In addition, she is the author of ten chapbooks, two of which won prizes in national competitions: Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001 and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Barbara Crooker’s poems also have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Christian Century, Christian Science Monitor, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Nimrod, Poetry International, Smartish Pace, and Tampa 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.

Labor Day Music: Bob Dylan's "Workingman's Blues #2"

An appropriate song for Labor Day: Bob Dylan’s “Workingman’s Blues #2” from Modern Times, released in 2006.