Alice Friman: "This April"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Alice Friman’s “This April,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Alice Friman is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006) and Zoo (University of Arkansas Press, 1999), winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. A new book of poems, Vinculum, is forthcoming from LSU Press. Friman’s poetry also has appeared widely in literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and many others. In addition, she has had work in numerous anthologies, such as Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribner), and Red, White, and Blues (University of Iowa Press). Alice Friman, the Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University, is currently a visiting writer at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, 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.

Celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 90th Birthday

Today, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) celebrates his 90th birthday, readers may enjoy the above presentation by the poet in 2006 at the Morrison Library of the University of California, Berkeley in the 10th year of the Lunch Poems series of readings.

Sylvia Plath and Nicholas Hughes: Mother and Son

When I heard the sad news yesterday about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the 47-year-old son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, I found it difficult to connect the man that had become a successful ecologist—who specialized for more than two decades in studies of salmon behavior and their patterns of feeding or who held a position as professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks—with the images of him depicted as the infant son in the Plath volumes on one of my bookshelves. Like many others, until now my familiarity with Nicholas Hughes existed solely from information in Plath’s poetry and her journals.

Frequently, my students and I discuss the ways poets might still moments in their works and preserve timeless images, mostly for beneficial results. Additionally, we often discuss the ethics and consequences of writing about family members or friends, usually engaging in conversations that constantly raise issues never fully resolved, especially when the individuals about whom they are writing might be identifiable in the poetry. Even when the work does not contain material obviously painful or embarrassing, the effects on those who are subjects of the poetry sometimes remain unpredictable.

In the unique case of someone like Nicholas Hughes, whose parents’ poetry and personal relationships have been legendary in the ongoing chronicles of contemporary literature, such a situation must have been extremely challenging. The intimate circumstances surrounding Sylvia Plath’s own 1963 suicide—including the proximity of her small children in an adjoining room and the history of her husband’s blatant infidelities, as well as the eventual suicide of his mistress, who also took her child’s life—have caused continuing conversation and debate now for nearly half a century. Indeed, the life and death of Sylvia Plath were portrayed in a Hollywood film starring Gwyneth Paltrow in 2003.

Nevertheless, upon learning of Nicholas Hughes’s death, I chose to return to those books on my shelves written by Sylvia Plath, hoping to find a moment when she and Nicholas were just mother and son—a time when Sylvia, Ted, and their newborn son provided a degree of joy for one another. In her journal from 1962, Plath describes the birth of Nicholas:

“Here he is!” I heard Ted say. It was over. I felt the great weight gone in a minute. I felt thin, like air, as if I would float away, and perfectly awake. I lifted my head and looked up. “Did he tear me to bits?” I felt I must be ripped and bloody from all that power breaking out of me. “Not a scratch,” said Nurse D. I couldn’t believe it. I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet, with a cross, black frown and oddly low, angry brow, looking up at me, frown-wrinkles between his eyes and his blue scrotum and penis large and blue, as if carved on a totem. Ted was pulling back the wet sheets and Nurse D. mopping up the great amounts of water that had come with him.

Then the nurse wrapped the baby up and put him in my arms. Doctor Webb arrived. It had happened at 5 minutes to midnight. The clock struck 12. The baby squirmed and cried, warm in the crook of my arm . . ..

Plath continues in her journal to narrate frankly a hesitancy in her immediate responses to the infant’s presence. “We had a son. I felt no surge of love. I wasn’t sure I liked him. His head bothered me, the low brow.” However, after her doctor explains the baby’s odd-shaped brow as a temporary state caused by the birth process, and she seems relieved, Plath writes: “Everything was beautiful and neat and calm. The baby washed and dressed in his carrycot, so silent I had Ted get up and make sure he was breathing. The nurse said goodnight. It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise.”

Writing on the following morning, Plath declares she feels “wonderful,” and she describes admiring her new son: “I felt very proud of Nicholas, and fond. It had taken a night to be sure I liked him—his head shaped up beautifully—the skull plates had overlapped to get him through the boney door, and filled out, a handsome male head with a black brain-shelf. Dark, black-blue eyes, a furze of hair like a crewcut.”

Perhaps the poem, “Nick and the Candlestick,” which appeared in Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection, Ariel and Other Poems, supplies a better-known piece by Plath concerning the birth of her son. Eileen M. Aird suggests in Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, edited by Linda W. Wagner, that the poem “encompasses the painful world of the creative imagination and the potential dangers of the man-made world but is able to move beyond both in the affirmation of the mother’s love for the child.” She observes the poem’s structure, “where each image, almost each word of the first half, finds its echo in the second half and the joy of the ending does not evade the pain of the first half—baby and mother have not escaped from the subterranean cave, only hung it with soft roses; and the mercuric atoms still drip into the terrible well.”

The poem is read with passion in the video above and briefly commented upon by Seph Rodney, who chose “Nick and the Candlestick” in the Favorite Poem Project begun by Robert Pinsky as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1999.

NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK


I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

—Sylvia Plath

Readers are invited to examine previous posts at “One Poet’s Notes” and in Valparaiso Poetry Review concerning Sylvia Plath: “An Elegant Epigraph: Sylvia Plath on the Act of Writing,” “Jennifer Yaros: ‘Nature and the Self: Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver,’” and “Sylvia Plath: ‘New Year on Dartmoor.’”

Luminists: John Frederick Kensett and Mark Strand

Celebrating the first weekend of spring, with its accompanying gradual shift to warmer weather and longer periods of daylight, by marking the birthdate (March 22, 1816) of John Frederick Kensett seems most appropriate. American Luminists—as represented by a group of mid-nineteenth-century painters, including Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, and Kensett—stilled moments, usually involving a quick glimpse of wilderness or a seascape scene, frozen in particular times of dramatic atmospheric lighting with the hope of evoking a tone one might regard as meditative, almost spiritual.

These artists expressed emotions through their subtle use of illumination by displaying hazy midday sunshine, dying sunset, shadowy twilight, or stark moonlight, sometimes filtered by varying degrees of cloud cover or contrasted with the darker sky of an approaching storm. In addition, reflective elements, such as an ocean’s smooth surface and waves breaking on the shoreline of a bleached sandy beach or a river’s nearly calm current could create a greater sense of variety in light intensity on the canvas. These images advanced by the Luminists frequently struck viewers with their clarity and close attention to details of ambiance or weather indicating the transitory characteristics of time’s movement through days and seasons as they halted all those changes pictured within the frame of their study for everyone to appreciate.

Often observers discover in the Luminists’ art a careful representation of specific angles of light or depths of shadows associated with a particular hour of the day during a given season. These American artists arrested an ideal and tranquil, yet momentary, glance at an aspect of this nation’s nature, perhaps as a measure of meditative pleasure, in much the same way Ralph Waldo Emerson recommended in his well-known essay, “Nature,” written in the late 1830s: “In the pleasure of nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says—he is my creature, and maugre all impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields in tribute to delight, for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.”

Walt Whitman turned to similar scenery in his verse for consolation and comfort in works like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” written in an attempt to comprehend and cope with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: “With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, / With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, / In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, / With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows . . ..”

Indeed, how great the extent to which the Luminists’ perceptions of serene and quiet scenes of nature, usually spare landscapes uncluttered by the complicated lives of humans, initiate emotional response can be questioned; however, the influence of their methods may be seen in numerous works of art, as well as literature, even into the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. One could suggest much of modern or contemporary lyric poetry dealing with nature, frequently developing arrayed shades of color or contrasting depictions of light and dark in the imagery, has incorporated somewhat similar portrayals, even if not directly indebted to the Luminists.

One obvious and excellent example would be Mark Strand’s poem appropriately titled “Luminism,” which appeared in his 1990 collection, The Continuous Life. In this poem Strand, who once studied at Yale as an art student under Josef Albers and has written commentary about other artists—such as Edward Hopper, William Bailey, and Giorgio de Chirico, figures interestingly engaging light and shadow in the subtle instances stilled in their paintings—humbly pays homage to the Luminists, just as he plays a bit on the word luminism, a term that also evokes emotional and spiritual illumination, as well as intellectual enlightenment through thought or luminous writing.

Mark Strand has long been a poet known and admired for work focusing on contrasts of light against dark while he presented brief incidents in succinct language inviting internal reflection or expressing moments of quiet contemplation, even though some nowadays seem to suggest such poems of quiet contemplation are something for which the poet should almost be apologetic. In fact, in a piece titled “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” from his aptly named collection of essays and “poetic inventions,” The Weather of Words, Strand writes: “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with a certain light or the look of a terrain. Landscape incorporates and suggests, and its horizons are never final. It represents an escape from particularity of the sort associated with limited settings, cities, say, or interiors.”

Within this poem Mark Strand alludes to the Luminists, masters of landscape and exterior natural surroundings, while cleverly turning his attention more toward an urban cityscape, as well as inward upon himself and others among the living room furnishings around them.

LUMINISM

And though it was brief, and slight, and nothing
To have been held onto so long, I remember it,
As if it had come from within, one of the scenes
The mind sets for itself, night after night, only
To part from, quickly and without warning. Sunlight
Flooded the valley floor and blazed on the town’s
Westward facing windows. The streets shimmered like rivers,
And trees, bushes, and clouds were caught in the spill,
And nothing was spared, not the couch we sat on,
Nor the rugs, nor our friends, staring off into space.
Everything drowned in the golden fire. Then Philip
Put down his glass and said: “This hand is just one
In an infinite series of hands. Imagine.”
And that was it. The evening dimmed and darkened
Until the western rim of the sky took on
The purple look of a bruise, and everyone stood
And said what a great sunset it had been. This was a while ago,
And it was remarkable, but something else happened then—
A cry, almost beyond our hearing, rose and rose,
As if across time, to touch us as nothing else would,
And so lightly we might live out our lives and not know.
I had no idea what it meant until now.


—Mark Strand

My extended review of poetry by Mark Strand, “Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of Words,” appeared in the Spring/Summer 2001 issue (Volume II, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. For further personal commentary in “One Poet’s Notes” about Mark Strand’s poetry, readers are invited to visit the following pages: “Mark Strand: ‘Lines for Winter,’” “Mark Strand: MAN AND CAMEL,” “Marking Mark Strand’s Birthday,” “Mark Strand: ‘Poem After the Seven Last Words,’” and “Giorgio de Chirico: Painting Poetic Images.”

March Madness and B.H. Fairchild's "Old Men Playing Basketball"

Some of us busy filling out our regional brackets for the office pool might have seen this week a New York Times sports column focused on one aspect of the NCAA’s annual basketball championship tournament that supplies much of the excitement and surprise involved in “March Madness.” The article (“Breaking Down the N.C.A.A. Tournament Upset” by Adam Himmelsbach) highlighted past stunning victories by lower-seeded teams that have set the standard for today’s underdog squads to follow. The report points to a memorable and instructive example supplied by Valparaiso University’s last-second win over Ole Miss in 1998.

Quoted by Himmelsbach about the close of a tight game where an upset might be in the making, Valparaiso Coach Homer Drew offers: “You need a guy who can create and make big shots when the shot clock is running down.” Certainly, Coach Drew has a well-known example he can display, as seen in the video above, one that has been replayed on television sets during every tournament since the event happened just more than a decade ago. The New York Times explained: “Drew’s son Bryce drained a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to send the 13th-seeded Crusaders past fourth-seeded Mississippi, 70-69, in the 1998 tournament.”

However, those of us at Valparaiso never need to be reminded of “the shot” by a video. The end of that game, especially the final play (named “Pacer” and run by the team at practices throughout the season), is replayed in our minds every March when tournament time rolls around. Even now, eleven years later, the images remain vivid and the emotions of that moment when luck combined with skill for a fortunate result are easily recalled. Nevertheless, sometimes one finds it difficult to believe more than a decade has already passed since then. Indeed, when the game occurred, the initial issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review would not appear for another year and a half.

In the last couple of seasons Valparaiso University has held reunions of the team members—last year for a tenth-anniversary celebration and this year to induct the team into the university’s athletics hall of fame. Recently, watching the players return to their home court and stand at the center line while being recognized during halftime by applause from the fans, I noticed how those of us in the crowd still see in these mature men the younger individuals they once were, and how we yet reminisce about the thrills the players had provided as a team.

The scene brought to mind one of my favorite poems about basketball, a work with which many older men who have played basketball as boys or young athletes might identify—B.H. Fairchild’s “Old Men Playing Basketball,” which coincidentally appeared in his 1998 volume of poetry, The Art of the Lathe. Though the members of Valparaiso University’s 1998 team have not yet reached the age of the poem’s players, as my friends and I have, I imagine perhaps some day they too will find something in common with the participants described in the poem.

OLD MEN PLAYING BASKETBALL


The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,

rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone

and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love

to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing

to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,

radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,

gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.


—B. H. Fairchild

B.H. Fairchild’s Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest won the National Book Critics Circle award. He also is the author of The Arrival of the Future, Local Knowledge, and The Art of the Lathe, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the California Book Award, the PEN Center West Poetry Award, and an award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Additionally, Fairchild has been the recipient of the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Capricorn Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Readers will find additional information about Valparaiso University basketball in a previous post (“Indiana Basketball, Homer Drew, and ‘Jumpshots in the Dark’”) that appeared on “One Poet’s Notes.” In addition, visitors are invited to examine an earlier article at “One Poet’s Notes” (“B.H. Fairchild on Art, Craftsmanship, and Poetry”), as well as a review of Fairchild’s poetry (“A Necessary World: B.H. Fairchild’s Local Knowledge”) that I wrote for the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

St. Patrick's Day and Irish American Poetry: Hayden Carruth's "Her Song"

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I remind readers of an impressive anthology, The Book of Irish American Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Tobin and published by the University of Notre Dame Press (2007). The collection includes poems from over 200 individuals in a volume extending more than 900 pages. As I noted in a previous post, Tobin compiled the anthology in an effort to address a specific question raised in the book’s introduction: “What does it mean to be an Irish American poet?” The book jacket copy suggests the anthology “answers this question by drawing together the best and most representative poetry by Irish Americans and about Irish America that has been written over the past three hundred years.”

In fact, in that previous article on this topic I observed: “since the book explores Irish American poetry rather than just Irish American poets, Tobin’s editorial reach is extensive, as one finds within the volume’s covers a wide array of poets who claim Irish ancestry or who write pieces about Ireland and the Irish: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Thomas McGrath, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Charles Olson, Galway Kinnell, X.J. Kennedy, Jean Valentine, Alan Dugan, Maureen Stanton, Brendan Galvin, Billy Collins, Susan Howe, Michael Ryan, Irene McKinney, James Schuyler, Maureen Owen, John Logan, Joan Houlihan, Walt McDonald, Eavan Boland, and many others.” I am pleased to report my own work is represented as well by a pair of poems in the anthology, including “Homecoming.”

Additionally, Daniel Tobin includes in the anthology a poem (“Her Song”) by Hayden Carruth, whose death at the age of 87 last September 29 was reported in a “One Poet’s Notes” post with an accompanying video of the poet offering his poetry. The presentation was taped during an appearance by Carruth at Marlboro College only months before his death, and it displays Carruth reading “Ray,” a poem dedicated to his old friend Raymond Carver, and poignantly reminiscing about the time when he heard of Carver’s death. I encourage readers to revisit the video.

Today, as we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, seems an appropriate time to share with everyone Hayden Carruth’s lovely poem, “Her Song”:

HER SONG

She sings blues in a voice that is partly
Irish. But “music is international.” Singing
With her blue eyes open, her auburn hair
Flung back, yes, searching a distant horizon
For a sometime beacon or the first glimmer
Of sunrise. She sings in the dark. Only her own light
Illuminates her, although in the shadows
Are dim shapes, motionless, known to be
The tormented—in the bogs of Ireland, in
The bayous of Louisiana, relics of thousands
Upon thousands who suffered unimaginably
In ancient times. And in her husky contralto
They are suffering still. Knowingly she sings.
Music is anthropological. This is a burden,
For in her song no one can be redeemed.

—Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth published more than thirty books during his career of about 50 years, including Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (2006) and Doctor Jazz: Poems 1996-2000 (2001). Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 (1996) earned the National Book Award for Poetry, and Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (1992), received the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Carruth also authored a number of nonfiction books and collections of critical essays, as well as a novel. At various times, Hayden Carruth held fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Literary Foundation. Among his prizes and honors, Carruth won the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He taught at Bucknell University and at Syracuse University.

The Painter and the Poet: Grace Hartigan and Frank O'Hara

"How can I explain my love and respect for the poets who have enriched my life? Poetry is the most pure of the arts. It is non-utilitarian. The expression does not give the creator power, prestige or money. It tells us what life is about, what it is to feel, to think, to question." —Grace Hartigan

In recent weeks I have been repeatedly reminded by a number of readers about how much they appreciate the links they see between poetry and painting. Indeed, in the nearly ten years of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s existence, among the various encouraging responses from readers regarding the poetry and prose published in the journal, many have expressed interest not only in a variety of ekphrastic poems appearing in VPR’s pages but also in the commentary offered by Gregg Hertzlieb on each issue’s cover art. Additionally, a number of readers have written with kind words concerning the assortment of articles about poets and painters that have been part of the repertoire in posts to “One Poet’s Notes.”

I have not been surprised by readers’ reactions to the essays on individual artworks written by Gregg Hertzlieb. After all, in addition to serving as Director of the Brauer Museum of Art, Gregg is accomplished as both a painter and a poet. I am always confident readers will find in his writing careful observations about art communicated in exact and eloquent language, whether he is examining paintings by David Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Stuart Davis, Frederic Edwin Church, or any other artist’s work. My own interest in including links between poetry and painting can be traced back to my time as an apprentice poet studying under John Ashbery and Mark Strand, both of whom throughout their careers have contributed art commentary in addition to their poetry. Also, each often emphasized to students the connections between poetry and painting in classroom discussions or during individual conferences on composition.

Indeed, Ashbery’s well-known background as an art reviewer or editor and Strand’s beginnings as an artist studying at Yale under Josef Albers certainly influenced their own poetic vision, as well as formed each poet’s skills as a mentor for young poets. Consequently, I always recommend my creative writing students investigate in their journals or poems those experiences they have when visiting an art museum or local gallery. Even Ernest Hemingway once remarked that at times a writer could obtain information about perception and scenery by observing an oil on canvas in ways one might not gain when reading another author’s prose: “I learn as much from painters how to write as from writers.”

An excellent example of the mutual influence existing between a poet and a painter can be witnessed when examining the close-knit relationship once exhibited by Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan. In November upon hearing about Grace Hartigan’s death at the age of 86, I wrote an article recognizing her art, including celebration of it as among the notable contributions by Abstract Expressionists in the early 1950s, and the influence of her links with figures from the New York School of poets, particularly Frank O’Hara, with whom she had a great friendship: “Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara.” At the time I mentioned: “Hartigan’s closest connection to the New York School of poets materialized in her personal relationship with Frank O’Hara throughout the ‘50s and the collaborative poem-posters they created, particularly a series of one dozen Hartigan artworks concerning text by O’Hara and with the words incorporated into the paintings. The series was titled Oranges.”

At the head of my “One Poet’s Notes” post, I included an artwork Hartigan had produced shortly after O’Hara’s tragic death in 1966. The piece, titled The Day Lady Died after the famous poem by O’Hara written about his hearing of Billie Holiday’s death, had been Hartigan’s contribution to a memorial volume, In Memory of My Feelings, a collection (edited by Bill Berkson and published by the Museum of Modern Art) filled with memories about O’Hara by his many friends in the art and literary worlds of New York City.

Much has been written about the close association between Hartigan and O’Hara. The two friends inspired one another and created collaborative works during the early days when the art scene and literary circle eventually to be known as the New York School were still in their formative stages. Looking through black-and-white photographs capturing the creative atmosphere and social setting in the early 1950s, one frequently will notice Hartigan surrounded solely by males—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, and others. Although Hartigan was accepted by O’Hara and the various members of their group—as was Jane Freilicher, another female artist regularly included in the clique—occasionally she apparently felt uncomfortable or worried about being unappreciated as a woman artist among the many men. Indeed, in the beginning of her career Grace Hartigan displayed some of her art under the name “George Hartigan” as an attempt to assure her works were treated equally by viewers. However, Hartigan and other women of her generation eventually opened paths for later female artists to follow. In fact, by the late 1950s Hartigan was highlighted with a few contemporary female art figures in a photographic profile by Life magazine labeled “Women Artists in Ascendance.” The magazine referred to her as “the most celebrated of the young American women painters.”

Despite the fact Grace Hartigan produced a variety of paintings that focused upon her fellow artists and literary friends as models, often in individual portraits and sometimes as groups—as in the well-known Masquerade, painted in 1954 and featuring O’Hara, Ashbery, Freilicher, Hartigan, and others appearing in costumes—perhaps the most interesting pieces from the time involving her ties to a friend can be seen in the series of paintings titled Oranges, which Hartigan created in collaboration with O’Hara. In an excellent and extensive 1993 article in Art Journal, “Questions of Identity in Oranges by Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan,” Terrence Diggory describes the pieces: “Oranges, a series of twelve paintings based on texts by Frank O’Hara, marks the beginning of Hartigan’s work with poets and a decisive moment in determining the identities that both the artist and the writer assumed in their later work.”

Recently, I received correspondence from a couple, the Herzbach-Wied’s, who had viewed and appreciated my previous post on Grace Hartigan and kindly forwarded to me images of Oranges No. 3 (“What Fire Murmurs Its Seditions . . .”), one of the paintings in the Hartigan series. According to one email message from Mike and Julie, this individual piece might be the most famous of the works in the series due to attention it received from art critic Irving Sandler. The artwork currently is held in the couple’s collection, and they generously offered me permission to use an image of the painting (seen above).

Marjorie Perloff also speaks of Grace Hartigan and this art piece in her wonderful book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (University of Chicago Press, 1998): “ . . . painters and painting provided O’Hara with one of his central subjects. Consider the role that Grace Hartigan, whose life was closely bound up with Frank’s from the early fifties to 1960, plays in the poems. By her account, painter and poet would often use the same image as starting point. Thus, when Grace Hartigan painted Oranges, the series that corresponds to O’Hara’s twelve pastorals by that name written some years earlier, she used the poet’s words in the most ingenious ways, sometimes crowding a whole poem onto a corner of the canvas, sometimes spreading just a few words of text across the surface so as to create patterns of great tension and excitement. Words are played off against semiabstract, suggestive shapes of dazzling bright color, as in What Fire Murmurs Its Seditions, in which the entire text of the third prose poem, partly in script and partly in large and small block print, is scattered across and around the reclining nude figure of the poet.”

Adding to the significance of the poetry series and Frank O’Hara’s collaboration with Grace Hartigan, one of O’Hara’s most famous poems, “Why I Am Not a Painter,” explains the origins of his concentration on oranges for a sequence of poetry:

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that's left is just
letters, “It was too much”" Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

—Frank O’Hara

Now comes welcome news about the publication of Grace Hartigan’s personal journals written during those most interesting years of the early 1950s: The Journals of Grace Hartigan 1951-1955, edited by William T. La Moy and Joseph P. McCaffrey, with an introduction by Terrence Diggory (Syracuse University Press: 2009). The official publication date for the book is listed as April, but Syracuse University Press has made the collection of journals available in March, nicely coinciding with Hartigan’s birthdate later this month (March 28, 1922). The publisher’s description of this volume, which also includes nearly 50 color or black-and-white illustrations, invites readers interested in the artists and poets of the time period in New York:

Grace Hartigan emerged during the 1950s as a leading representative of the “second generation” of the New York School of abstract expressionist painters, a movement that achieved international standing for American art. In 1958, Hartigan was the only woman and one of only two artists under forty chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for a show on that school. Entitled “The New American Painting,” the show traveled to eight European countries and included such artists as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Published for the first time, Hartigan’s journals offer readers an intimate chronicle of the vibrant artistic and literary milieu of the times. Hartigan's interactions with many of its leading artists, and her close association with such New York School poets as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, make for fascinating reading.

Commenting in Bookforum, Linda Nochlin describes in her review, “Rules of Abstraction,” Hartigan’s journals as a “combination of exaltation and depression; constant worry about money, prices, and payments or the lack thereof; complaints about fellow artists; snide or admiring comments about friends (often poets or literary figures); frequent, penetrating accounts of what she is reading (Rilke, Frank O’Hara, Woolf, Jacques Barzun on Berlioz) and what she is looking at (Goya, Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning); discussions of fraught relationships; worries about art-world politics; and harsh words about unfriendly critics like Clement Greenberg.” Nochlin goes on to explain how Hartigan sometimes in the pages of her writings revealingly confides her experiences and her concerns about being treated differently as a woman in an art world dominated by men, where she occasionally feels so alone.

Today, as my spring break draws to a close, I already am looking forward to the end of the semester when, like many others, I can start going through the reading list I have begun compiling for summer vacation. For those of us interested in poetry and painting, as well as various connections between the two, particularly during the legendary early days of the New York School, I believe this book containing the journals of Grace Hartigan will serve as a perfect item to be placed near the top of anybody’s list.

Readers are invited to view other articles at “One Poet’s Notes” with commentary, audio, and video concerning Grace Hartigan or Frank O’Hara: “Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara,” “Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara,” “Frank O’Hara: Having a Coke with You,” and “Frank O’Hara and Jackson Pollock.”

Pi Day: Lee Slonimsky's "Pythagoras Goes to Work"

On this date (3/14) recognized as Pi Day by enthusiasts of mathematical figures, I offer the above song about pi by Kate Bush (in which she apparently errs, one reader has informed me in the past) and a poem below, “Pythagoras Goes to Work” by Lee Slonimsky that references pi, which first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2005-2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. As I mentioned in an article, “Pi Day and the Nobel Prize Poet,” posted at “One Poet’s Notes” on the last Pi Day in 2008 (which also included commentary and a poem titled “Pi,” written by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature):

For fans of numerical information or the history of mathematical discoveries, March 14 represents a day of celebration. Since the date may be written as 3-14, the digits correspond with 3.14, the opening series of digits associated with “pi.” (The pi moment during the day is at 1:59:26, more fully reflecting the start of pi: 3.1415926.) This irrational number—one that never can be stated exactly because its decimal sequence continues to infinity—always has amazed mathematicians and held a primary position of curiosity for many non-mathematicians.

Perhaps the best known and most fascinating of figures for those concerned with calculations, pi has been a center of attention for centuries. Indeed, the computation for pi is implied in a passage of the Old Testament. Its exact determination has been a riddle for all civilizations, including the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks of ancient eras. Not until the sixteenth century were European scholars able to compute pi to as many as a couple dozen decimal places.

In fact, only in recent decades has pi been calculated with great precision, as the mid-twentieth century invention of computers took over for humans, at first figuring pi to thousands of digits. By the 1980s calculations of pi extended to hundreds of thousands of digits. Now, super computers have stretched the stated sequence of known digits to millions, then to billions, and on to more than a trillion decimal places. Beyond serving as a source of trivia and fascination, pi has contributed greatly to solving a profusion of previously puzzling problems in mathematics and science, enabling the contemporary understanding of many various scientific equations, including those explaining the DNA double helix.

In her poem, Wislawa Szymborska remarks about her fascination with the figure: “The caravan of digits that is pi / does not stop at the edge of the page, / but runs off the table and into the air, / over the wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, the clouds, straight into the sky, / through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness.”

Lee Slonimsky’s collections of poetry include Talk Between Leaf and Skin (SRLR Press, 2002), Pythagoras in Love (Orchises Press, 2007), and the forthcoming Logician of the Wind, also from Orchises Press. Pythagoras in Love contains an extended sequence of sonnets—such as “Pythagoras Goes to Work,” the piece that first appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review—on the life of the famous Greek mathematician and philosopher from the sixth century BC. Slonimsky’s poetry has been published in various periodicals, including Asheville Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Carolina Quarterly, Cold Mountain Review, Connecticut Review, Denver Post, Iambs & Trochees, The Lyric, The New York Times, and Poetry Daily.

PYTHAGORAS GOES TO WORK

Triangulate the sun’s ascent. Two oaks
the baseline on this steel-chill winter’s day.
Diversion, suddenly now, in the way
a hawk bisects low triangle of sky
as if she lectures on geometry
to clouds that hover close. The more he looks
the more he calculates a feathered Pi
that multiplied by gold reveals the light
the hawk explains in her wind-scything flight
to audience of fluff and haze. But soon,
no warning, hawk dives for its prey below,
a transitory scholar only; now
a blur of angling talons, wings; that’s how
the mind is ruled by blood. The dawn’s lesson.


—Lee Slonimsky

As both a poet and a stock market advisor or investor, Lee Slonimsky seems to share with Pythagoras the importance in understanding how numbers and mathematical patterns are integrated into the natural world. Describing Slonimsky in an interesting profile of the poet readers are urged to examine, Bloomberg, the business publication, reported: “Walt Whitman, Pythagoras and famed stock trader Jesse Livermore have all influenced Lee Slonimsky's dual life as a hedge-fund manager and poet.”

Friday the Thirteenth: Allan Peterson's "Superstition"

Today represents a rather rare occurrence since the thirteenth of any month seldom happens on a Friday, normally only once a year; however, this day seems even more unusual because March stands as the second consecutive month containing a Friday the Thirteenth, a quirky combination occurring for the first time in the new century. In the minds of many, no day has closer associations in superstition with lore of bad luck and tragic circumstances than Friday the Thirteenth. Indeed, a significant percentage of the population still holds superstitious beliefs concerning Friday the Thirteenth.

Large portions of the public are leery of the number 13, possessing a fear known as triskaidekaphobia. In addition, Friday often has been connected in history and mythological tales with difficult events or the arrival of bad news. Consequently, in legend and in elements of popular culture, particularly films like those in the Friday the Thirteenth series, dread of days like today has been furthered. In fact, the fear of Friday the Thirteenth is known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, a psychological term, or friggatriskaidekaphobia, a term named for Frigga, the Scandinavian goddess of Friday, considered by some to be a witch.

Fear of Friday the Thirteenth crosses various Western cultures, but it is more prevalent in Christian societies. Christians think of the fact that thirteen individuals were present at the Last Supper, Judas representing the thirteenth person and the one who would betray Jesus, leading to his death. For this reason, many have considered it bad luck to have thirteen diners at a table. Additionally, Christ was crucified on a Friday. Others suggest the great flood in the Bible came on a Friday. In Great Britain, folklore further provides a link in the suggestion of Friday as an ominous day, since public executions often occurred on Fridays and there were believed to be thirteen steps leading to the hangman’s noose at the gallows.

In any case, the general public’s distrust and continuing wariness of engaging in activities on Friday the Thirteen exists as perhaps the main superstition in contemporary culture. Therefore, today seems the perfect occasion to reintroduce readers to Allan Peterson’s “Superstition,” a poem that first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

SUPERSTITION

I believe in the hot & dry, that’s why Florida.
I try circle for possession
and Far East, though that’s impossible for globes,
and something from the sky.
Meteors, nickel-filled, crystals as fragments
of a solid throne
because of heaven being ice, and shattering
despite some wishes,
I wear topaz for heat, strewn in my iris like straw,
lark’s eye wrapped in a wolf skin.
Thursdays I wear no rubies and put my watch aside,
add up my lucky days
avoid the rain and the ice saints, the uneven.
I am interested how nothing
is the fault of the afflicted, the malady is just
their bad shadow dragging them down.
How moth, a messenger, jimmied the house and died
by the light without telling us anything.


—Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson’s second book of poetry, All the Lavish in Common (2006) was selected for the Juniper Prize and published by the University of Massachusetts Press. His first collection, Anonymous Or, won the Defined Providence Press competition and was released in 2002. Peterson’s numerous journal publications include Adirondack Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, Natural Bridge, Perihelion, Prairie Schooner, and West Wind, among others. His poetry also was selected by Ted Kooser as a feature in 2007 of the American Life in Poetry series sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Poetry Foundation.

Davi Walders: "Dr. Levi-Montalcini's Passion"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Davi Walders’ “Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s Passion,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Davi Walders' poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals, including The American Scholar, Crab Orchard Review, JAMA, Potomac Review, Seneca Review, and Washington Woman, among others. Her poetry also has appeared in various anthologies, such as Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press), Visiting Frost (University of Iowa Press), Women, Philanthropy, and Social Change (University Press of New England), and Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall).

Walders developed and directs the Vital Signs Writing Project at NIH in Bethesda, MD, which was funded by The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Maryland State Artist Grant in Poetry, a Luce Foundation Grant, as well as fellowships to Ragdale Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been choreographed for performance in New York City and elsewhere, and Garrison Keillor has read her poetry on Writer’s Almanac.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, 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.

The Face of William Shakespeare

Methinks no face so gracious is as mine . . .




SONNET LXII

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.

Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.

But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.

'Tis thee (my self) that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

—William Shakespeare

John Ashbery: "Forties Flick" (Contemporary Poetry Series)

In a past “One Poet’s Notes” article, “Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns,” explaining my views on that remarkable generation of poets born between the end of World War I and the end of World War II that may be credited with redirecting the course of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, I listed 50 individuals of some significance and influence who contributed to the collective effect that group has had on American literature. In my article, I suggested: “Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others.” At the time, I wrote:

I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

Consequently, I have decided to present a regular series on “One Poet’s Notes” exemplifying poetry by the 50 individuals mentioned above. Over the course of time I intend to display a sample piece from each author as an introduction and an invitation for readers to seek further works by the poet featured. For lack of a better title, the series simply will be known as the Contemporary Poetry Series. The poems I will choose may not represent the most famous or most highly regarded pieces by every one of these poets, because many of those might already be well-known poems to readers or too long for adequate presentation in this space; however, I hope the selections will offer a feel for one style of writing or concentration on subject matter readers might find characteristic in each poet’s collected work.

Since the article that began my compilation was initiated somewhat by a discussion about John Ashbery, I will begin with him and his poem, “Forties Flick,” the first sample work proposed for consideration in the “One Poet’s Notes” Contemporary Poetry Series:

FORTIES FLICK

The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus on the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.
‘In bra and panties she sidles to the window:
Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself,
With wafer-thin pedestrians who know where they are going.
The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly titled up.

Why must it always end this way?
A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair
And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her
Into the silence that night alone can’t explain.
Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad,
But we didn’t have to reinvent these either:
They had gone away into the plot of a story,
The “art” part—knowing what important details to leave out
And the way character is developed. Things too real
To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page,
The indoors with the outside becoming part of you
As you find you had never left off laughing at death,
The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch.

—John Ashbery

Readers are urged to listen to John Ashbery reading “Forties Flick.”

John Ashbery is the author of nearly two-dozen books of poetry, the latest release being the Library of America publication, John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (2008). Other recent volumes by Ashbery include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), A Worldly Country (2007); Where Shall I Wander (2005); Chinese Whispers (2002); Your Name Here (2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautrémont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); and April Galleons (1987).

Over the years John Ashbery has won almost all the major American awards offered for poetry. A Wave (1984) was honored with the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Some Trees (1956) was selected as a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He also has been awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from Poetry, the Modern Poetry Association, and the American Council for the Arts; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University Library; the Harvard Arts Medal from Harvard University; and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Among a number of awards offered by other countries, such as France and Belgium, last year John Ashbery was the International Prize winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada.

Additional articles concerning John Ashbery on “One Poet’s Notes” may be found at the following: “John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock,” “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: 'My Philosophy of Life,'” and “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”

Poetry News and the New Media

The Poetry Foundation announced yesterday (March 5) the beginning of a major project, the first undertaken by the new Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, to consider innovative ways that might enhance the placement and promotion of poetry through elements of the new media. In recent years the well-funded Poetry Foundation—which was founded in 2003 as an evolution of the Modern Poetry Association that had been initiated in 1942—has made impressive advances in distributing poetry and engendering discussions of poetics through the use of its helpful web site, a companion to the Poetry Foundation’s publication, Poetry magazine.

In addition to posting daily news concerning poetry and making available online a vast archive of valuable poems sorted by author as well as various other categories, the Poetry Foundation web site provides podcasts, audio and video presentations by poets, reading guides for selected poems and poets, a poets’ blog, and the contents from individual issues of Poetry magazine, among other features. For many poets and readers of poetry the Poetry Foundation’s home page has been an everyday location to visit during browsing when checking the Internet for information about poetry, poets, poetics, or news and events related to the art of poetry.

The announced initiative now further fulfills an ongoing goal of the Foundation suggested in its original mission statement: “The Poetry Foundation works to raise poetry to a more visible and influential position in American culture. Rather than celebrating the status quo, the Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry. In the long term, the Foundation aspires to alter the perception that poetry is a marginal art, and to make it directly relevant to the American public.”

As mentioned on “One Poet’s Notes” a number of times in recent articles, the growth of an audience for poetry on the Internet has been significant over the past decade and continues at a rapid pace. Likewise, the number of online publications or hybrid journals, which appear in both print and electronic form, has increased dramatically in recent years. Indeed, due to economic necessity and the variety of advantages allowing for an immense potential audience, Internet presence has become something all sorts of publications have found inevitable to carrying on as vital sources for readers.

When Valparaiso Poetry Review offered its premier issue as an online poetry journal in the fall of 1999, few knew how quickly acceptance and recognition of electronic literary magazines would occur. However, as VPR prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, much has happened in terms of the larger quantity and higher quality of poetry appearing in online publications. In addition, the readership for poetry has blossomed in the new media, from online journals to podcasts to videos of poetry readings, etc.

The initial issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review appeared online in 1999 with no history and little promotion, appealing to a literary audience wary of online publications; consequently, readership the first month did not exceed five hundred viewers. In contrast, during just the first two months of 2009, the statistics for visits by readers to Valparaiso Poetry Review and the editor’s blog page, with its numerous audio and video links to readings of poetry or documentary material about poets, have counted about 50,000. Some other web sites, online journals, or literary blogs that also concentrate mostly on poetry can boast an even greater readership. Indeed, Ron Silliman’s blog, regularly containing a multitude of amazingly informative bits with news “focused on contemporary poetry and poetics,” passed the 2-million mark in total visits this past January. Even the extent of the public controversy and follow-up conversations across the country involving Elizabeth Alexander’s historic reading of poetry at President Obama’s Inauguration a couple months ago testify to the continuing interest and emotional investment many maintain for the art.

Because of the brief nature and self-contained shape of most poems, the genre seems perfectly suitable for exposure to a mass audience by electronic means through Internet publications or online readings, podcasts, and videos. Perhaps longer prose forms of nonfiction and fiction, such as the novel, are less likely to find as many readers online, although the advent of an instrument like Kindle, with its combined advantages of mobility and storage space, offers great promise as an electronic alternative for those works.

With the increased interest in poetry by readers and the greater possibility for poets to reach large audiences, domestic and worldwide, through publication online or by use of one of the other aspects of new media, this appears to be the ideal time for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute to study the phenomenon of poetry and the new media, as well as to reexamine how the presence of poetry might be better developed in old media venues on television or radio. Additionally, I have known for a couple months that Katherine Coles (poet laureate of Utah, former head of the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature) would be the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute’s director, and I am confident the start of such an important new program could not be in better hands than Kate’s.

An open letter by Coles released this week spoke of some concerns the project intends to address: “audience development; a perceived reduction of publication and distribution opportunities; the relevance of poetry in a new-media world; problems facing translators of poetry; and both the importance of education and the challenges of teaching poetry in classrooms.” Moreover, Coles reported that the Poetry in New Media project would seek to offer recommendations regarding “the preparation, distribution, and reception of poetry through new-media platforms, including not only those with which we are already familiar (radio, television, the Internet, podcasting, and so on) but also those that are now emerging and that will emerge in the future.”

In yesterday’s announcement by the Poetry Foundation, the members of a working group given the task of moving this project forward were named, and the list seems impressive, filled with very capable individuals who will help Kate and her advisors, Jaune Evans and Beth Allen, launch this initiative: Michael Collier (poet, professor, and poetry editor for Houghton Mifflin), Wyn Cooper, (poet and lyricist), Rita Dove (poet, playwright, professor, and former U.S. poet laureate), Cornelius Eady (poet, professor, playwright, and co-founder of Cave Canem), David Fenza (executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs), Kate Gale (editor, writer, and founder and managing editor of Red Hen Press), Kimiko Hahn (poet and professor), Lewis Hyde (poet, essayist, professor, and MacArthur Fellow), Fiona McCrae (publisher and executive director of Graywolf Press), Robert Pinsky (poet, critic, professor, translator, editor, and former U.S. poet laureate), Claudia Rankine (poet, playwright, and professor), Alberto Ríos (poet and professor), Don Selby (co-founder of the Poetry Daily website), Rick Stevens (computer scientist and professor), Jennifer Urban (director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic at the University of Southern California), and Monica Youn, (poet and counsel in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law). More complete biographies of the participants are available at a Poetry Foundation web page.

The project’s official statement declares: “the guiding principle of the project is the idea that securing the interests of poets and their publishers, and with them those of their audiences, is key to the successful emergence of poetry in any medium, including electronic media. Consideration of the needs of poets and their publishers, including fealty to the original sources of poems, fair remuneration, broad distribution, and accurate crediting, will be a cornerstone of this inaugural HMPI project.” The announcement released yesterday promised that the poetry panel will investigate “issues related to the distribution of poetry through new-media platforms.” The project’s participants also will be asked to “address the distinctive needs of poetry as an art form and to consider these needs in developing its recommendations about how best to bring poetry to audiences now being reached by new media. The project will concentrate not only on the current distribution of poems over the Internet but also on the evolving nature of technology and new media in order to develop recommendations that simultaneously serve varied electronic distribution platforms.”

As the editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review, I welcome this exciting exploration of possibilities for poetry on the Internet and elsewhere in the new media. I regard this as another indication that online publications and the presence of poetry evident in various forms of new media have matured, may even have come of age. I look forward to monitoring the progress of this intriguing project, following its findings, testing its conclusions, and eventually reviewing its recommendations.

Also, I believe this initiative ought not trigger negative responses by those of us who prefer the printed page and will always hold fond feelings for print publications. Although I remain a devoted reader of poetry in book form and an advocate for print journals, my opinion persists that new media may inevitably invite more readers to discover again the satisfaction attained when encountering literature in print publications, particularly small press productions, such as book-length collections of poetry.

Readers who spot appealing new and lesser-known poets online or develop interest in sample works located among the new media will most likely wish to follow-up such an introduction by ordering and inspecting a whole volume of poems. As Valparaiso Poetry Review has proclaimed on the “Submissions Guidelines and Correspondence” page since its premier issue ten years ago: “this electronic journal has been meant to serve as a complement to print issues of literary magazines and poetry collections, not as a replacement for those traditional and greatly valued publications.”

John Updike and John Cheever

I recall Cheever’s uncertainty as he spoke to me in that rather unusual but striking accent of his, confiding that he hoped he’d opened doors for others, and how he felt a bit optimistic some of the younger writers might find acceptance and publication as a result.

The current issue of the New Yorker contains a review by John Updike of Blake Bailey’s new John Cheever biography (John Cheever: A Life) released by Knopf. As I read Updike’s reactions to the latest chronicle of Cheever’s life, appearing only about five weeks after Updike’s death, the connection between these two literary figures one last time seemed appropriate. Frequently during their careers, Updike and Cheever had been paired in the minds of readers, had been compared and contrasted in commentary written by critics, and even at times had viewed one another as a rival as well as a friend. Their close association with the New Yorker and the repeated similarities in their choice of subject matter linked the two writers in the eyes of many.

Certainly, ever since my introduction to their fiction in novels and short stories when I was an undergraduate, I have continued to think of the two as authors who offered complementary portraits of the world they perceived around them. In addition, both writers often composed prose that appeared poetic to me—Updike with a sophisticated language and crisp descriptions, Cheever with his distinct tone and establishment of atmosphere. Indeed, when Updike died near the end of January, I found it difficult to believe more than a quarter-century had passed since Cheever’s death in 1982 had separated the men I remembered seeing together in photographs like the one above or famously on the Dick Cavett television talk show only months before Cheever’s death. For myself as a student writer, the pair appeared to represent an epitome of American literature, particularly in their elegance and the eloquent way they carried on conversation with one another. [The entire episode of Cavett’s conversation with Updike and Cheever is currently available again at a New York Times web page.]

Just a few years before Cheever’s death, when I was working in Manhattan at the New York Public Library after finishing my master’s degree and considering the start of my Ph.D. studies, I attended a 1979 literary event featuring John Cheever. Fortunately, I had an opportunity for a brief conversation with the author, and I enjoyed our discussion, which involved entertaining the possibility of an increased interest in the short story form among publishers and the public now that his volume of collected stories had just achieved so much attention and acclaim. (The Stories of John Cheever had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979.)

The conversation occurred exactly three decades ago and lasted not more than five minutes; it still remains a vivid memory. I recall Cheever’s uncertainty as he spoke to me in that rather unusual but striking accent of his, confiding that he hoped he’d opened doors for others, and how he felt a bit optimistic some of the younger writers might find acceptance and publication as a result. He mentioned a couple of emerging fiction writers whose work he admired and encouraged. The important thing, he advised, was that one must continue to write as well as one can, produce innovative and imaginative stories with a regard for integrity in the way one presents the plot or portrays the characters, without too much worry of eventual publication or recognition by others.

He also joked about his age and how long it had taken for him to receive the recognition of the recent prizes for his short stories, and therefore felt less inclined to speak knowledgeably about the conditions facing beginning authors. Although seemingly surprised by the tremendous success of his book of short stories and appreciative of the widespread attention it had obtained, he hoped the public would warm to others’ short story collections as occasional alternatives to novels for entertaining reading. Nevertheless, he still believed best-selling books of short stories unfortunately would remain rare.

When Cheever mentioned his age, I was struck by the gap in years between Updike and him, something I hadn’t really considered before, and as a student of creative writing I realized the possibility that Updike might regard Cheever as much as a mentor as he did see him as a peer. At the time, I appreciated Cheever’s friendly manner toward me, and I was unaware of the extremely difficult personal circumstances he was undergoing—tribulations concerning family matters, alcoholism, sexual conflict, and health concerns—that have since been detailed, sometimes painfully and embarrassingly, in a few books about him as well as in the excerpts of posthumously published journals Cheever had kept most of his life and apparently had approved for publication after his death. In his review of Bailey’s biography, Updike refers to Cheever’s journals as “an embarrassment of riches and a richesse of embarrassment.” This week, as a spring break indulgence, I have returned to Cheever’s journals (The Journals of John Cheever: Knopf, 1991) and read through those entries concerning certain dramatic or traumatic experiences of his personal history.

Lately, I confess I have discovered a renewed interest in reading volumes of authors’ journals, memoirs, or letters. In some ways I sense the ease with which I now approach reading and writing blog entries perhaps has given me an added appreciation for the regular ruminations and reflections included in such prose. I also am pleased to note the usually more informal and sometimes even intimate voices evident in the everyday accounts preserved by these individuals; nevertheless, I’m delighted also to observe many passages read so well that they resemble the finished pieces one might see in the author’s fiction or poetry, as in the case of my recent rereading of Sylvia Plath’s journals. Such is the case when encountering sections of John Cheever’s journal that echo moments captured in his fiction.

One sample from a late entry to his journal that seemed particularly moving narrates an incident in which Cheever witnesses the entrance of a woman at the radiation and chemotherapy ward of the hospital where he had been receiving treatment for cancer in the last months of his life. Susan Cheever describes this time frame in Home Before Dark, the 1994 biographical memoir she wrote about her father: “Sometimes the doctors were discouraged—they changed the chemotherapy treatments twice, and it was clear that this was because the treatments weren’t working—but usually they were optimistic. There would be weeks when my father seemed a little better, but he slowly and steadily got worse.” In the midst of this painful and terrifying occurrence, Cheever reports the following remarkable scene in a couple of paragraphs from one of the final portions of his journal:

This morning I would like to write about victory. It was in the big hospital, and in one of those rooms where we waited, twenty or thirty of us, either to see if our various organs were strong enough to withstand the rigorous medicines that would be prescribed or to get applications of the medicines themselves. The reproductions on the walls had been chosen with that anxious and sensitive care that I had found in all the rooms. There was a Hopper, a Redon, a Grandma Moses, and an Andrew Wyeth; there was something for almost everyone. On the tables were the usual litter of magazines reminding one of the fact that the weekly periodical seems to have a less natural place in things—seems to enjoy less endurance—than the leaves that fall to the ground in autumn. Here on the covers were yesterday’s faces, some of them already forgotten, some of them assassinated, and a few of them crowned.

We were a mixed company of about twenty—some of us in street clothes but most of us in those ragged hospital overalls. We held the large key rings and crude wooden tags that would make it impossible for us to lose or purloin our locker keys. The music tape being played was simply banal. A woman came in from the street, a well-dressed, good-looking woman. It has seemed to me, in my long life, that all well-dressed, good-looking women share certain fundamentals. There is to such a woman’s carriage, to the cut and hang of her clothing, an inimitable naturalness that is close to classical. The stranger enjoyed this. She gave the congregation a light and general smile and took off her coat and her hat. She was as bald as an egg. So were at least a third of us, but her beauty dramatized her loss. It was not the baldness of this stranger that was most striking, however; it was the look of absolute victory on her face. She had been infected by cancer; she had scourged the infection; and she had simply returned for a checkup. The look on her face, her air of having bested the tumors and carnage of the disease were beautiful. She was called in before the rest of us and politely explained that she was here for a checkup. It was very brief. “Thank you for waiting,” she said when she put on her coat and then her hat, resuming her beauty and her ordinariness. It may have been a turning point in my own cure that I saw this victorious woman.

Sadly, Cheever did not succeed in his search for a recovery of his health, and he died soon afterward, only a little more than a month after accepting yet another honor, the National Medal for Literature bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In one of his final journal entries Cheever looked ahead to receiving the award and prepared his speech. His comments reflect the man’s ambitious expectations and high hopes for the reach or influence of our best literature: “What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say, and Exodus, I think, is what I have in mind. In the speech on the 17th, I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess, and that its role as a consciousness must inform us of our inability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power. Literature has been the salvation of the damned; literature, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair, and can perhaps, in this case, save the world.”

Commenting on the new biography that stretches nearly 800 pages, John Updike declares: “this biographer’s zeal makes a heavy, dispiriting read, to the point that even I, a reader often enraptured by Cheever’s prose and an acquaintance who generally enjoyed his lively company, wanted the narrative, pursued in methodical chapters that tick past year after year, to hurry through the menacing miasma of a life which, for all the sparkle of its creative moments, brought so little happiness to its possessor and to those around him.”

I teach works by John Updike and John Cheever in my classes each year. However, if there is a separation between Updike and Cheever today, such a split is possibly most recognizable in the heavy presence of Updike on university course reading lists and a relative lack of such a presence by Cheever. Indeed, while offering a summary of the content one might find in John Cheever’s finest works, Updike also expresses regret that Cheever’s books are now absent from many college curricula and syllabi: “no wonder Cheever’s fiction is slighted in academia while Fitzgerald’s collegiate romanticism is assigned. Cheever’s characters are adult, full of adult darkness, corruption, and confusion. They are desirous, conflicted, alone, adrift. They do not achieve the crystalline stoicism, the defiant willed courage, of Hemingway’s. Cheever was not a stoic; he was for most of his adult life a regular, indeed compulsive, communicant at Episcopal morning Mass. His errant protagonists move, in their fragile suburban simulacra of paradise, from one island of momentary happiness to the imperilled next.”

With Updike’s words printed this week on the life and work of John Cheever, appropriately appearing in a New Yorker review, and recently reviewing Updike’s own life and works myself in the wake of his death, I am struck once more by the loss to American fiction now that these two significant literary figures are gone. Surely, I look forward to revisiting many of their stories that I will place on my personal reading list this summer.

The big red volume of The Stories of John Cheever, now heavily annotated, still maintains a prominent position on an office shelf, and it frequently tempts me to open its covers, though I regret as a student I was too reluctant to ask the author to sign it when we met that one time thirty years ago. I also am tempted again by the advice Cheever offered young writers in our brief conversation three decades ago, something I repeat to my students in creative writing classes each semester I teach, that one ultimately must continue to write as well as one can, produce innovative and imaginative stories with a regard for integrity in the way one presents the plot or portrays the characters, and one ought to do so without too much worry of eventual publication or recognition by others.