Halloween Treat

A presentation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” read by Christopher Walken.

Carolyn Forché on Politics and the Poetry of Witness

In the final week before Election Day, “One Poet’s Notes” offers a daily series of diverse and differing views expressed in the past by well-known poets about the relationships they perceive between politics and poetry. For ages, connections between these two arenas of interest have been central to many debates concerning the proper place for poetry and other arts in discourse regarding decisions influencing actions responding to contemporary circumstances surrounding social or political issues, whether local or national.

Perhaps Walt Whitman’s famous line from the opening section of “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass remains a perfect starting point for any such examination and still stands as a succinct summation:

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

Nevertheless, disagreements over the appropriateness or effectiveness of artists—particularly poets—engaging in overt political observations and recommendations (perhaps seeing such activity as an obligatory part of their professional position) or promoting political agendas in their works (maybe even if accomplished more subtly) continue with each round of elections, as well as during every controversial political occurrence or crucial social event that arises.

Some suggest poetry may be unable to address the most horrendous acts of our times, such as the Holocaust. Indeed, George Steiner and Theodor Adorno appeared to declare the atrocities of Auschwitz beyond the reach of poetry. Other figures agree with the line in W.H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” that claims “poetry makes nothing happen”; yet, readers also recall Auden authored the magnificent poem of social and political reflection, “September 1, 1939.” Of course, William Carlos Williams seemed to respond to Auden’s sentiment when he presented his opinion on the essential nature of poetry: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Today’s commentary by Carolyn Forché comes from her essay, “El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire,” which appeared in Poetry and Politics, an anthology of essays edited by Richard Jones and published by Quill Press in 1985.

There is no such thing as nonpolitical poetry. The time, however, to determine what those politics will be is not the moment of taking pen to paper, but during the whole of one’s life. We are responsible for the quality of our vision, we have a say in the shape of our sensibility. In the many thousand daily choices we make, we create ourselves and the voice with which we speak and work.

From our tradition we inherit a poetic, a sense of appropriate subjects, styles, forms, and levels of diction; that poetic might insist that we be attuned to the individual in isolation, to particular sensitivity in the face of “nature,” to special ingenuity in inventing metaphor. It might encourage a self-regarding, inward-looking poetry. Since Romanticism, didactic poetry has been presumed dead and narrative poetry has had at least a half life. Demonstration is inimical to a poetry of lyric confession and self-examination, therefore didactic poetry is seen as crude and unpoetic. To suggest a return to the formal didactic mode of Virgil’s Georgics or Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura would be to deny history, but what has survived of that poetic is the belief that a poet’s voice must be inwardly authentic and compelling of our attention; the poet’s voice must have authority.

I have been told that a poet should be of his or her time. It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.

[Visitors are urged to read an alternative opinion voiced in a previous commentary in this series, a perspective that was drawn from an essay by Howard Nemerov. Saturday, “One Poet’s Notes” will present an additional view on the relationship between poetry and politics by Muriel Rukeyser.]


Other voices in the Poetry and Politics series:

Robert Pinsky
Stanley Kunitz
Howard Nemerov
Muriel Rukeyser

Howard Nemerov on Poetry and Politics

In the final week before Election Day, “One Poet’s Notes” will offer a daily series of diverse and differing views expressed in the past by well-known poets about the relationships they perceive between politics and poetry. For ages, connections between these two arenas of interest have been central to many debates concerning the proper place for poetry and other arts in discourse regarding decisions influencing actions responding to contemporary circumstances surrounding social or political issues, whether local or national.

Perhaps Walt Whitman’s famous line from the opening section of “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass remains a perfect starting point for any such examination and still stands as a succinct summation:

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

Nevertheless, disagreements over the appropriateness or effectiveness of artists—particularly poets—engaging in overt political observations and recommendations (perhaps seeing such activity as an obligatory part of their professional position) or promoting political agendas in their works (maybe even if accomplished more subtly) continue with each round of elections, as well as during every controversial political occurrence or crucial social event that arises.

Some suggest poetry may be unable to address the most horrendous acts of our times, such as the Holocaust. Indeed, George Steiner and Theodor Adorno appeared to declare the atrocities of Auschwitz beyond the reach of poetry. Other literary figures agree with the line in W.H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” that claims “poetry makes nothing happen”; yet, readers also recall Auden authored the magnificent poem of social and political reflection, “September 1, 1939.” Of course, William Carlos Williams seemed to respond to Auden’s sentiment when he presented his opinion on the essential nature of poetry: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Today’s commentary by Howard Nemerov comes from his essay, “Poetry and the National Conscience,” which first appeared in Reflexions on Poetry & Politics, published by Rutgers University Press in 1972.

Poets have often behaved, and do now often behave, as though they were, if not a national conscience, at least some kind of capital C Conscience, looking upon the doings of others as surely accursed and bound to lead to eternal perdition in the end. Some poets have made quite a good living at it, for prophecy is powerful magic that can be worked by anyone having sufficient hubris or chutzpah. It’s almost too easy. Prophets always predict disaster, and disaster unfailingly happens; far as I remember the only exception was Jonah, who succeeded in convincing the people of Nineveh to repent, and therefore failed as a prophet; the city was not destroyed. Jonah was furious, too, and that failure is almost undoubtedly the reason that his book is so much shorter than, say, the book of Isaiah, all three of him.

What fails to be observed in all this is that the world does not respond to these eloquent chidings by getting better; and in view of the continuing state of the world it would be simple prudence for poets to disassociate themselves from the conscience-keeping job entirely and at once, before somebody notices what a complete and utter failure they’ve been at it.

[Tomorrow, “One Poet’s Notes” will present an alternative view on the relationship between poetry and politics by Carolyn Forché.]


Other voices in the Poetry and Politics series:

Robert Pinsky
Stanley Kunitz
Carolyn Forché
Muriel Rukeyser

Cheryl Lachowski: "Looking West"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Cheryl Lachowski’s “Looking West,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Cheryl Lachowski teaches at Bowling Green State University. Her poetry collection, Homing, was the winner of the 2001 Bluestem Poetry Award. Lachowski’s poems also have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, including Carolina Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and Sou’wester. She has released a CD of poetic voice-overs of Tim Story’s Beguiled album, titled Beguiled Improvisations. “Looking West” is an improvisation on music by Peter Buffett.

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: Sylvia Plath on the Act of Writing

Today, celebrating my own birthday, I already look forward to the following day, as I do every year, toward recognition of Sylvia Plath’s birthday. Plath was born on October 27 in 1932. During her short life she kept extensive journals, a habit begun at the age of eleven, many of which are now available to readers. Among the daily reports and reflections included in her journals, Plath frequently reveals intimate thoughts and personal perspectives that are both informative and insightful. The language employed and the topics explored range widely from expressions of private concerns confiding an emotional state filled with anxiety and fear, as well as love and hope in more positive times, to sophisticated considerations about the subjects of literature and creative writing.

Her entries are engaging and enlightening, whether she is describing an array of feelings experienced during a first date, as written in a journal entry when she was nineteen:

Walking back alone in the raw March wind, we passed the streets, full of taxis, waiting, waiting, empty, empty. Then the road was bare and wind-swept, and the air like gulps of cold water as it blew across our mouths. Street lights chiseled out clear areas of light out of dark. My hair whipped back in the wind, and the white circle of net billowed and hushed and shushed about my silver feet. Stride and stride and stride and stride. Freely, walking, hand in hand. No people; no parties; no warmth; no blur of lights, voices, flesh, wine. Two of us, strong and together along the streets. Stride and stride. Then stop. Heads tilted back to the stars . . .

or a half dozen years later when Plath, after creating a group of poems about which she was proud, projected toward the possibility of her place among other well-known women poets:

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). Who rivals? Well, in history—Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Chriistina Rosetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all dead. Now: Edith Sitwell & Marianne Moore, the ageing giantesses & poetic grandmothers. Phyllis McGinley is out—light verse: she’s sold herself. Rather: May Swenson, Isabella Gardner, & most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich—who will soon be eclipsed by these eight poems: I am eager, chafing, sure of my gift, wanting only to train and teach it—I’ll count the magazines & money I break open by these best eight poems from now on. We’ll see.

Because Sylvia Plath died so young, by suicide at the age of thirty, one sometimes can forget that she might have lived to still be writing today. After all, other poets slightly older or younger but roughly of her generation—such as John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Frank Bidart, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Stanley Plumly, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Charles Wright—have continued to produce fine poetry in recent years. In addition, when encountering Plath’s expansive, easily readable, often interesting and even gripping journal entries, one does not have to take too large a leap to imagine her as someone who might have been comfortable and popular as a blogger had the Internet existed as an outlet for her regular ruminations—whether examining and contemplating personal issues as a writer, daughter, wife, and mother, or deliberating upon various topics relating to writing, as she does in the following excerpt, today’s “elegant epigraph”:

“Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as to a person, a philosophy, a religion, a flower: they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not. It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money. Money isn’t why you sit down at the typewriter. Not that you don’t want it. It is only too lovely when a profession pays for your bread and butter. With writing, it is maybe, maybe-not. How to live with such insecurity? With what is worst, the occasional lack or loss of faith in the writing itself? How to live with these things?

The worst thing, worse than all of them, would be to live with not writing.” — Sylvia Plath

—From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (Anchor Books, 2000).


[“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.]

Brendan Galvin: OCEAN EFFECTS

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 2008-2009: Volume X, Number 1) Russ Kesler reviews Brendan Galvin’s latest collection of poetry, Ocean Effects.

Brendan Galvin is the author of fourteen previous poetry books, including Place Keepers (2003) and The Strength of a Named Thing (1999). Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005, was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award in 2005 for Galvin. His work also has appeared in hundreds of journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, New Yorker, and Poetry. Among his many honors and awards are the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation, and the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation.

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Ocean Effects, Brendan Galvin. LSU Press, 2007. ISBN: 0807132675 $16.95


In an essay published in the journal Ploughshares in the late 1970s, Brendan Galvin decried a type of poem he called the “Mumbling Poem,” one that “substitutes odd imagery for direct statement, and a maundering tone for real feeling.” The authors of such poems, he said there, fail to “write out of a sense of place, a location, a concrete set of external circumstances which might tempt concentration on something other than their own cerebrations.” Galvin asserted that in these poems, “rarely does the reader feel the rhythms of experience as one does in Lawrence’s animal poems or in Frost’s poems about work, for instance.” Statements such as those, though they might come across as prickly and a bit too self-assured, firmly place Galvin in the ranks of poets to whom an acute understanding of the natural world—the wonders of its workings and of human interaction with it—are of first importance.

Over the course of more than a dozen previous collections, Galvin has written about the land and waters of coastal New England, and Ocean Effects finds him still walking the dunes and forest roads, the beaches and pond edges that hold him in thrall. His passion for specific naming of the biota and animal life he encounters is present always . . ..


[Visitors are invited to read the rest of the review of Brendan Galvin by Russ Kesler in the new Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

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In addition, readers will find poems by Galvin and Kesler in past issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review:

Brendan Galvin in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue of VPR: “A Neolithic Meditation”

Russ Kesler in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of VPR: “From a Fifties Childhood”

Russ Kesler in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of VPR: “Self Portrait”

Reginald Gibbons: "Refuge"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Reginald Gibbons’s “Refuge,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

This week Reginald Gibbons was named one of the five finalists for the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry on the basis of his latest book of poems, Creatures of a Day (LSU Press, 2008). He has published eight poetry collections, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems and Homage to Longshot O’Leary. He also has translated or co-translated books by various poets, including Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda and Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments. Gibbons has received numerous honors, such as Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry. He is a columnist for American Poetry Review. Reginald Gibbons co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books, and he teaches at Northwestern University.

About Creatures of a Day, LSU Press reports “Reginald Gibbons presents intense encounters with everyday people amidst the historical and social contexts of everyday life. His poems are meditations on memory, obligation, love, death, celebration, and sorrow. Some of them show how the making of poetry itself seems inextricably enmeshed with personal encounter and with history. This new collection includes five odes woven from interactions with others, thirteen shorter poems, and ‘Fern-Texts,’ a kind of biographical and autobiographical essay in syllabic verse on the parallel decades of the English 1790s and the American 1960s. Using quotations from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Fern-Texts’ interweaves the dilemmas of love, ethics, and political engagement in Coleridge’s life when he was in his twenties and in the poet’s own life when, at the same age, he lived in California.”

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.

Jennifer Yaros: "Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver"

In the recently released Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review, Jennifer Yaros examines how prominent women poets in American literature have approached the topic of nature. Yaros—particularly through her exploration of poetry by Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mary Oliver—discusses developments and discoveries readers have found in the works of these impressive women writers. Indeed, this essay included in the new issue of VPR offers observations and conclusions like the following:

Dickinson, Bishop, Plath and Oliver represent American women poets in a comprehensive and reflective way. Dickinson begins the tradition of how females utilize nature in their poetry. Her uncompromising perspective propelled her into a world that persistently questioned the presences filling nature. Her pursuit of answers might not have led to a full understanding of life, but her persistent process did embody fulfillment through her ability to participate in the quest. Bishop’s approach toward nature also questioned the physical and mystical attributes of the natural world, and her inquiries included treating herself as an outsider. While her technique earns her the praise of fellow poets, Bishop’s poetic personas are stronger than her own in real life. Her ability to create a landscape populated with unnatural or unreachable entities demonstrates the poet’s own feelings of being disconnected. Similar to Bishop, Plath treats nature as possessing something she wants but can’t have. Again and again, Plath’s speakers migrate through her scenery, enjoy being close to nature but ultimately feel rejected because of physical life. Plath separates the self and nature as a way to parallel the life and death choice she herself faced. Finally, Oliver is most similar to Dickinson in her reverence for the environment; however, in the poems presented, Oliver’s speakers don’t follow such a strong path of investigation or treat death as a satisfying end because of answers. In fact, the personas in Oliver’s poems are able to enjoy nature for the beauty it offers, even though it does leave much unanswered. Also, while her lines of demarcation aren’t as sharp as Bishop’s and Plath’s, she does recognize the ultimate union via death. She is the only poet in this group still living, and her poems continue a timeless tradition.

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Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver


The importance of the natural world can be traced through time within the context of many disciplines, including science, religion, and literature, to name a few. Not only do humans rely on nature for survival, but many have learned to depend on nature for inspiration. During the early nineteenth century, American literature, under the influence of Romanticism, depicted nature as a source of “knowledge,” “refuge,” and “revelation” (Reuben). Works by male authors of the era—such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman—became instrumental in shaping contemporary and future writers’ ideas about nature. Specifically, American women poets of the nineteenth century and beyond have used nature to orient the poet’s place in the world by seeking the wisdom and escape that the natural world offers. Major female poets—Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mary Oliver—all use nature as subject matter in a variety of ways, and a common link between these poets is their use of nature as metaphor in relation to the self.

Similarities exist in how each poet develops message and content. For instance, word choice, symbols, and images provide several examples of how a reader can link these authors, with some associations stronger than others. However, a reader can reference each poet’s biographical information in an effort to unravel particular styles and stances. Whether or not the authors intended for their personal lives to line the poems like shelf paper, connections between the personal and poetic undeniably exist. Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver share a common treatment of nature as metaphor that parallels biographical details about their lives. In addition, each poet portrays a distinctive desire to merge fully with nature in a way impossible to achieve while physically alive. A close reading of selected poems will result in a progressive portrayal of the American female poetic mind grappling with issues of spirituality, a sense of place, and identity as explored through nature.


Emily Dickinson: 1830-1886

Emily Dickinson led a unique life, held unconventional viewpoints, and spent the bulk of her later years devoted to writing poetry. She received an education from both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where her ideas about religion and society molded into those much different from the norms of her community. This nineteenth-century poet wrote much of her work under the unusual circumstances of seclusion, and Dickinson did not aspire to publish, even though she wrote over 2,000 poems and communicated with a select few about her work. She wrote in an experimental, original style, and her content complemented the form. Her poetic power lay in her ability to use an everyday backdrop to present complex ideas in sharp-edged, compact stanzas often following a rhyme scheme.

Dickinson continually questioned and searched for meaning, and her poems can leave a reader with many unanswered questions. Throughout her poetry, she isn’t afraid to approach the world with honesty: “Despite Dickinson’s fanciful image and allegories, her poems insist on their own kind of uncompromising realism. They speak of the universal human effort to imagine experience in reassuring terms, but they do not suggest that reality offers much in the way of assurance…” (“Emily” 1042). While the poetic legend didn’t shy away from exposing nature’s unforgiving, unsentimental qualities, she also felt free to approach the subject with perpetual awe, trying to breach the boundary between human life and eternal knowledge. In a number of poems, she uses nature as metaphor for something separate from the self, ultimately exposing an illusive and invisible borderline. The qualities of the natural world she identifies and interprets are represented in varying tones through interesting symbols and word choice. She mirrors the ambiguity of nature in her own writing by leaving much unsaid and unexplained to the reader. She uses the uncertainty to her advantage in her sustained search for nature’s many revelations . . ..


[Visitors are invited to read the rest of the essay by Jennifer Yaros, as well as other works, in the new Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

Marianne Boruch: GRACE, FALLEN FROM

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review Claire Keyes reviews Grace, Fallen From, the latest collection of poems by Marianne Boruch, as can be seen in the following excerpt and accompanying link to the complete review. Keyes reminds readers of ways they may find Boruch’s poetry appealing: “While Marianne Boruch’s poetry is most often grounded in the real world of observable fact, she gives us the poetry of the mind in the process of coming to its understandings. In this respect, her poems join in the modernist poetic of poets such as Jorie Graham and C. K. Williams.”

Claire Keyes, Professor Emerita at Salem State College, is the author of The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, Georgia Review, Orbis, Rattle, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. A new book of poems, The Question of Rapture, will appear in fall 2008 from Mayapple Press.

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Grace, Fallen From, Marianne Boruch. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. ISBN: 0819568635 $22.95


The title phrase of Marianne Boruch’s sixth book of poems comes from a line in “Snowfall in G Minor,” a poem more than halfway through the volume:

snowfall—as in
grace, fallen from,
as in a great height, released
from its promise.

The image of the snow as being “released from its promise” suggests an emergence into reality, of no longer being simply the “promise” of snow, but the actuality. “Grace, fallen from” also suggests a world of the unredeemed—a relief for the poet because it allows her to create her own world through the power of her thought, her words, her imagination.

In the Blue Pharmacy (2005), her collection of essays about poetry, contains a statement about Elizabeth Bishop that might serve as a guide to understanding the nature of Grace, Fallen From. She praises Bishop for showing us “the whole moving direction of the mind.” While Marianne Boruch’s poetry is most often grounded in the real world of observable fact, she gives us the poetry of the mind in the process of coming to its understandings. In this respect, her poems join in the modernist poetic of poets such as Jorie Graham and C. K. Williams.

Boruch’s approach is low-key. She speaks with a quiet intimacy and openness of the ordinary events of life: waiting for an elevator, writing words on paper, overhearing someone on a cell phone. In a poem titled “Lunch” she considers a visit to the zoo, its animals, its visitors all “very matter of fact” until it’s time for lunch:

the animals
look up. Something is about to happen. Food
does that. In this saddest of worlds, think
lunch and an ocean of hope
rides over us. Is it hope? And too cheap? This
metaphor filling the moment? the mind?
the life finally and exactly?

The kind of world Grace, Fallen From inhabits is, of course, “this saddest of worlds.” The poet invites us to think about lunch as an event providing “an ocean of hope.” Questioning her thoughts about the ordinary becomes Boruch’s strategy throughout this volume.

Even when she takes on a subject as profound as “What God Knew,” in a poem of that title, her approach is tentative and questioning: “When God / knew nothing it was better, wasn’t it? / Not the color blue yet, its deep / unto black. No color at all really . . ..” And this is what she gives us in many poems—the creative sense of un-knowing . . ..


[Visitors are invited to read the rest of the review, as well as other works, in the new Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

Elise Paschen: "Cicadas"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Elise Paschen’s “Cicadas,” which appears in the just released Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I invite visitors to read additional poems, “Moving In” and “Hive,” by featured-poet Paschen in the current pages of VPR.

Elise Paschen is the author of Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. A new collection, Bestiary, which will include the poems in VPR, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in the spring of 2009. Her poems also have been published in New Republic, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America; A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women; Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, and The POETRY Anthology, 1912—2002. She is editor of The New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks Expanded, Poetry Speaks, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. Elise Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

CICADAS

Forty years ago this night (a whir now
with the cicadas’ never-dying thrum)
inside the rambling family beach house,
you slept, the stone sleep of an eight-year old,
until the sirens wrenched the house awake.

Years ago, trains freighted cattle in cars
headed to the Chicago slaughter yards,
but your Uncle Charles, a meat-packing heir
and bachelor, who owned this once-estate,
stabled his Jersey cows behind blue-tinted

glass, providing milk for his weekend guests.
Our rented house, built on the site of grass
tennis courts, remains flanked by aging sycamore,
hemlock. A map displays the summer gardens,
Rabbitry and Ornamental Bird Pond.

That night your mother had declined the offer,
made by a friend, to take the children out
for ice cream treats. Instead, she tucked each child
safely in bed. The crash of waves lulled you
to sleep, but then you heard the sirens racing

down Red Arrow Highway. The speeding pickup,
chased by a police car, killed instantly
the young mother and her two children
crossing the road for ice cream. Their car radio
drowned out the police car’s alarm.

We search for sleep, but the crescendo
of the cicadas, clustered in the leaves,
swells and distends, a train that never reaches
its destination. An Amtrak train blasts
its horn while the cicadas clatter on.

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

VPR: Fall/Winter 2008-2009 Issue

I am pleased to announce the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Vol. X, No. 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review has been released today, beginning the 10th year of publication for VPR.

Contents include the following:

Featured Poet: Elise Paschen

Additional Poets: Crystal Bacon, Walter Bargen, J. P. Dancing Bear, Michelle Bitting, Deborah Bogen, Karen Carissimo, Jared Carter, John Estes, Stacia Fleegal, Ann Hostetler, Joseph Hutchison, Rhoda Janzen, Claire Keyes, Athena Kildegaard, Al Maginnes, Molly Mellinger, Julie L. Moore, Steve Myers, Mil Norman-Risch, Tad Richards, Steven D. Schroeder, Nic Sebastian, Peter Serchuk, Vincent Spina, Alexandra Teague, Larry Thomas, Susan Varnot, Valerie Wallace, Jennifer Yaros

Interview: Edward Byrne interviews Elise Paschen

Essay: Jennifer Yaros on "Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver"

Poets Reviewed: Deborah Bogen, Paula Bohince, Marianne Boruch, Barbara Crooker, Brendan Galvin

Cover Art Commentary: Gregg Hertzlieb on John James Audubon

Thelonious Monk and Yusef Komunyakaa

Thelonious Monk was born on this date (October 10) in 1917. In the early 1940s, Thelonious Monk presented himself on the jazz scene at clubs, like Hinton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where innovative sounds could be heard. Monk provided guidance for a number of those seeking a revolutionary direction for jazz through Bebop. Nevertheless, to most listeners at the time, Monk’s experimental style of playing piano proved odd and his technique appeared quirky, if not awkward. Critics considered Monk’s compositions confusing and his manner of playing hardly artistic. Monk’s music relied upon repeated patterns of notes offered with a rare sense of rhythmic originality. In the accompanying clip, Monk plays his classic composition, “Epistrophy,” which resembles the literary term of “epistrophe” referring to a repetition of words in clauses or sentences and could be defined as a melody repeated in varying intensity or pitch to build momentum and musical traction.

Monk’s music wasn’t immediately accepted easily by everyone who came across it. For years, Monk was dismissed by some listeners even as his influence grew among those musicians who were receiving widespread praise. As Grover Sales notes in his book, Jazz: America’s Classical Music: “Of all the Bebop pioneers, Thelonious Monk was the last to enjoy the recognition given Christian, Parker, Gillespie, and Bud Powell, all of them deeply influenced by this strange figure who created a unique body of music that struck many as outside the mainstream of Bebop in the mid-1940s.” In response, Monk once commented: “I say play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants—you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”

Due to his scheduling habit of infrequent playing dates and then a six year absence from nightclubs, banned from the music scene due to an arrest for drugs, Monk had to restart his career in the 1950s, and his distinct style finally found receptive audiences and critics. As Ted Gioia writes in his History of Jazz: “Much of Monk’s genius lay precisely in this ability to juxtapose the simple and complex, a skill that also showed in many other ways: in his telling sense of silence and of space; his alternating use of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ chords; his manner of incorporating wry humor into the often self-serious atmosphere of modern jazz.”

Thelonious Monk’s idiosyncratic and even eccentric personality drew attention but also created a sense of distance between himself and his audience. Indeed, by the time Monk reached the later years of his career, he isolated himself somewhat. In 1972, after a European tour, Monk retreated into silence, rarely speaking and refraining from playing the piano, when he moved into the home of a friend, Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter (who had cared for Charlie Parker at the time of his death in 1955), where Monk remained for a decade until his death in 1982.

Few poets approach the subject and style of jazz as frequently and as accurately as Yusef Komunyakaa, and his elegiac look at Thelonious Monk seems most appropriate today:

ELEGY FOR THELONIOUS

Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonious is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.
Damn the alley cat
wailing a muted dirge
off Lenox Ave.
Thelonious is dead.
Tonight’s a lazy rhapsody of shadows
swaying to blue vertigo
& metaphysical funk.
Black trees in the wind.
Crepuscule with Nelly
plays inside the bowed head.
“Dig the Man Ray of piano!”
O Satisfaction,
hot fingers blur
on those white rib keys.
Coming on the Hudson.
Monk’s Dream.
The ghost of bebop
from 52nd Street,
footprints in the snow.
Damn February.
Let’s go to Minton’s
& play “modern malice”
till daybreak. Lord,
there’s Thelonious
wearing that old funky hat
pulled down over his eyes.

— Yusef Komunyakaa

“Elegy for Thelonious” originally appeared in Komunyakaa’s collection, Copacetic (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), and was reprinted in Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

David Bond: "At the Annual Thresherman's Show"

The VPR Poem of the Week is David Bond’s “At the Annual Thresherman’s Show,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

David Bond works as the manager of Interlibrary Lending and Borrowing at the Morris Library on the campus of Southern Illinois University, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Black Dirt, Farmer’s Market, Karamu, Mobius, National Forum, Rhino, Sou’Wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Windless Orchard. His honors and prizes include an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award.

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.

Best of the Web Nominations

I am pleased to announce Valparaiso Poetry Review’s nominations for the upcoming Best of the Web anthology from Dzanc Books. The publisher describes its annual anthology as “representing in book form the best literary writing online magazines have to offer.” The editors consider up to three works selected for submission by each online literary journal. As noted in a recent post, two poems that first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review—“Prophet Township” by Jared Carter and “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea” by Frannie Lindsay—were honored by being chosen for publication alongside nearly sixty other works in the recent issue of the anthology, Best of the Web 2008.

As I mentioned previously about nominating work from the journal for special distinction, I have a high regard for every poem selected to be in VPR, and I am uncomfortable—as the editor who accepted all the poetry—choosing some pieces to be honored over others. I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editors to bring attention to the growing number of fine works being published in online journals. Also, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for a few of VPR’s splendid poets to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through possible inclusion in the anthology.

Therefore, once again, I have relied on the numerous comments concerning poems appearing in VPR’s most recent issues that I have received in correspondence from readers throughout the past year. In this way, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in VPR’s pair of issues in Volume IX (Fall/Winter 2007-2008 and Spring/Summer 2008), which are eligible for the 2009 anthology by Dzanc Books.

Based upon a compilation of those observations by VPR’s readers, I have been able to offer the editors three poems for consideration from Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

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

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

Lynnell Edwards: “Suite for Red River Gorge”

The works by Balaban and Ehrhart appear in Volume IX, Number 1 (Fall/Winter 2007-2008), and the Edwards poem appears in Volume IX, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2008).

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

Wallace Stevens and His Influence

When I was an undergraduate student writing the initial poems I would eventually see in publications, Robert Bly visited my university for a reading. After his presentation a few classmates and I had an opportunity for a conversation with Bly, and I asked about how to proceed and to progress as a poet. One of the first well-known authors I had met, Bly responded with friendliness and frankness, encouraging me and the other new young poets in my class but recommending more careful readings of some figures from the past. Indeed, Bly offered one main piece of advice: he urged all to read Wallace Stevens’s premiere poetry collection, Harmonium, and then return to read it again and again . . each time more closely than before.

Even though I already admired Wallace Stevens and felt familiar with Harmonium, I followed Bly’s suggestion and revisited Stevens’s book. Eager to learn as much as possible, I discovered a renewed and greater appreciation for Stevens and his poetry, as well as an increased understanding of the innovative ways one might play with language and the line in poetry.

The Academy of American Poets includes the following comments among those on its web page devoted to the collection, “Groundbreaking Book: Harmonium by Wallace Stevens (1923).”

Now considered one of the great contributions to Modernism, Harmonium was not fully recognized until the last years of Stevens’s life when a volume of his collected poems was published. Harmonium is also unusual in being entirely lyric rather than narrative, a mix of pure, rational, philosophical thought, and imaginary nonsense-verse.

Harmonium’s great strength is in its diversity. Some of its famous short lyric poems, full of imaginative detail and attention to sound, include “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” which are notable for their imagistic intensity and unusual turns of phrase and logic. “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” and “Sunday Morning” are longer, more philosophical, and perhaps autobiographical poems that carry the weight and importance of epic poetry without leaving lyric territory. Perhaps the most famous poem in the collection is “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which takes cues from the haiku tradition.

Critics Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, among others, have chronicled the important influence of Wallace Stevens on many modern and contemporary poets. Indeed, the roster of poets who admit owing much to Stevens for the direction taken in their own poetry would include names too numerous to list. Although the content or tone of my own poetry usually does not markedly resemble the characteristics normally associated with Wallace Stevens, ever since that conversation with Robert Bly so many years ago, I too have felt a subtle influence of Stevens has assisted me in shaping the lines in my poems and emphasizing the lyricism in their language. One recent example of my poetry, “Invoking a Line by Wallace Stevens,” included an obvious nod of recognition and a signal of respect aimed at Stevens. Consequently, The Wallace Stevens Journal was the first journal in which I sought to place the poem for publication. Fortunately, I was honored by an acceptance, and I was pleased to see the poem appear in a location devoted to honoring the great poet.

Wallace Stevens was born on this date (October 2) in 1879. Therefore, noting my own gratitude to Stevens for the guidance his poetry displayed and for the continuing connection to his work I have felt from the time I began writing poetry, I thought today would be an appropriate moment to revisit this poem and again acknowledge indebtedness.

INVOKING A LINE BY WALLACE STEVENS

. . . the seeming of a summer day . . . .
—WALLACE STEVENS, “Description Without Place”


Just before dusk, the parched men and women
begin drinking gin-and-tonics as they sit on porches

with white wicker chairs and ornamental planters
still filled with wiry stalks of withered annuals.

Every evening, under the constant hum of insects
and buzz or crackle of a bug lamp, their conversations

chronicle another summer drought. They speak
about scenes that seem evidence of timelessness,

indifference, or rather more distressing, loss:
how for weeks even a screen of storm clouds

could not cool the hot contours of those two lanes
curving through this blistered countryside; how

for many mornings smoke drifting from brush
fires blotted the distant sky; how otherwise each noon

horizon disappeared in glare like a bleached absence
dotting the view on an overexposed photograph;

how by late afternoon a mirage of heat ripples
would waver over bare asphalt at the drive-in diner;

or simply how the air was often empty of chirping
birds that now stayed quiet all day as they perched

in patches of cross-hatch darkness under shade trees.


—Edward Byrne

Additionally, on this day I urge readers to listen to Wallace Stevens reading his work by visiting the Academy of American Poets web page containing audio of the poet reading “The Idea of Order at Key West”:

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.


—Wallace Stevens

[“Invoking a Line by Wallace Stevens” first appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal and will be included among the poems in Seeded Light, my forthcoming collection from Turning Point Books.]

Hayden Carruth: "Ray"

Upon hearing about Hayden Carruth’s death on Monday at the age of 87, I thought of this video in which Carruth reads a poem dedicated to his old friend Raymond Carver and reminisces about the time when he heard of Carver’s death. The reading of “Ray” is drawn from a presentation by Hayden Carruth this past spring at Marlboro College. Carruth’s poor health may be apparent, but so is his lively wit and lovely spirit.