Duke Ellington and Quincy Troupe

“I think all the musicians in jazz should
get together on one certain day
and get down on their knees to thank Duke.”
—Miles Davis

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, DC on this date (April 29) in 1899. Nat Hentoff once wrote of him in Jazz Is (Limelight Editions, 1992): “Ellington devised his own musical microcosm which had its own life, its own extraordinarily cohesive continuum. Like Bach, Ellington worked in a multitude of forms—stretching them, transmuting them, interrelating them all in a spectrum of expression with its own logic of evolution, expansion, continual generation. It was far and away the single most important body of work in the history of jazz.”

In his book, Jazz: America’s Classical Music, Grover Sales considers Duke Ellington the greatest composer in jazz, perhaps the nation’s greatest composer. Ted Gioia in his volume, The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1997), refers to Ellington as a figure that influenced jazz in ways no other musician had done, declaring that “no later composer has matched the breadth, the depth, the inspiration of Ellington’s impressive oeuvre. And even when one casts a wider net, searching through the ranks of popular, academic, and classical composers, Ellington still stands among a select handful of masters—Copland, Gershwin, Ives, Joplin, Sousa—whose achievements represent the finest flowering of American music.”

Duke Ellington’s influence extended beyond jazz, even beyond music to art and literature, particularly poetry, as can be seen in the following poem by Quincy Troupe, written about the occasion of Ellington’s death on May 24 in 1974.

THE DAY DUKE RAISED: MAY 24th, 1974

For Duke Ellington

1.
that day began with a shower
of darkness, calling lightning rains
home to stone language
of thunderclaps, shattering, the high
blue, elegance, of space & time
where a broken-down, riderless, horse
with frayed wings
rode a sheer bone, sunbeam
road, down into the clouds

2.
spoke wheels of lightning jagged
around the hours, & spun high up
above those clouds, duke wheeled
his chariot of piano keys
his spirit, now, levitated from flesh
& hovering over the music of most high
spoke to the silence
of a griot-shaman-man
who knew the wisdom of God

3.
at high noon, the sun cracked
through the darkness, like a rifle shot
grew a beard of clouds on its livid, bald
face, hung down, noon, sky high
pivotal time of the flood-deep hours
as duke was pivotal, being a five in the nine
numbers of numerology
as his music was one of the crossroads
a cosmic mirror of rhythmic gri-gri

4.
so get on up & fly away duke, bebop
slant & fade on in, strut, dance swing, riff
& float & stroke those tickling, gri-gri keys
those satin ladies taking the A train up
to harlem, those gri-gri keys
of birmingham, breakdown
sophisticated ladies, mood indigo
get on up & strut across, gri-gri
raise on up, your band's waiting

5.
thunderclapping music, somersaulting
clouds, racing across the deep, blue wisdom
of God, listen, it is time for your intro, duke
into that other place, where the all-time great
band is waiting for your intro, duke
it is time for the Sacred Concert, duke
it is time to make the music of God, duke
we are listening for your intro, duke
so let the sacred music, begin

—Quincy Troupe

Visitors can listen to Quincy Troupe’s reading of “The Day Duke Raised: May 24th, 1974” at the Academy of American Poets’ web page.

Amanda Auchter: "Photograph, April 1956"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Amanda Auchter’s “Photograph, April 1956,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

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

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.

Robert Penn Warren: "Pure and Impure Poetry"

Robert Penn Warren was born on this date (April 24) in 1905. Later this year will mark the twentieth anniversary of his death on September 15, 1989. Warren is best known for his fiction and poetry. Indeed, he is the only writer to have received the Pulitzer Prize in both genres—once in fiction for All the King’s Men (1947), and twice in poetry for Promises: Poems 1954-1956 (1958) and Now and Then (1979). However, Warren also excelled in expressing various significant perspectives in his essays of literary or social criticism. Furthermore, with Cleanth Brooks, he co-authored one of the most important and influential textbooks of modern critical study, Understanding Poetry, published in 1938.

Perhaps Warren’s most often cited passages of critical commentary are included in “Pure and Impure Poetry,” an article that began as a lecture in 1942, under the title “Pure Poetry and the Structure of Poems,” and appeared in the Kenyon Review the following spring. Later, it was included in Warren’s 1958 volume, Selected Essays.

“Pure and Impure Poetry” advocates in favor of an examination of concerns regarding conventional approaches to poetry. In this consideration of poetry, Warren asserts that the impure poem better reflects the complex conditions usually explored in examples of accomplished poetry. This perspective counters Edgar Allan Poe’s original notion of pure poetry, outlined in his essay titled “The Poetic Principle.” Poe believed that poetry ought to be compact and include only elevated language, and he suggested that long poems or poetry that does not limit itself to elegant language of lyrical intensity would be better presented in pieces of prose. Warren suggests the purity of poetry can be attained through poetic tactics that might be regarded as impure or appear contradictory to the notion of pure poetry. At the heart of Warren’s thesis, he states his case:

“Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not want to be pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then to conclude that neutral or recalcitrant elements are simply an index of human frailty, and that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems, which would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary. They are not even as pure as they might be in this imperfect world. They mar themselves with cacophonies, clichés, sterile technical terms, headwork and argument, self-contradictions, cleverness, irony, realism—all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection.”

Robert Penn Warren, one of the great figures of twentieth-century American literature, was the author of many impressive works, including sixteen collections of poetry, ten books of fiction, more than a dozen books of nonfiction, and a play. He received just about every honor an American writer could achieve, including three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Van Wyck Brooks Award, the Emerson-Thoreau Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Harriet Monroe Prize for Poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Hubbell Memorial Award from the Modern Language Association, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 1944 Warren was appointed as Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, and in 1986 he was selected as the first official Poet Laureate of the United States.

[Readers are invited to visit previous posts at “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Robert Penn Warren: “Robert Penn Warren ‘Birth of Love’” and “Robert Penn Warren: ‘The Nature of a Mirror.’”]

W.S. Merwin Wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Yesterday afternoon when the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes were announced and W.S. Merwin was named as the winner in poetry for The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press, the honor marked Merwin’s second time receiving the award. Immediately, I was reminded of this poet’s first Pulitzer-Prize-winning volume, The Carrier of Ladders (1970), and I recalled my own beginnings as a poet. In 1970, as a college freshman attending my first creative writing class, I was enjoying the thrill of discovery with each new poet’s work I read, and I was eager to encounter poems that presented different understandings in the use of the line, especially those examples containing novel approaches to free verse. Merwin’s deliberate blending of lines through thoughts and phrases tied to one another without punctuation seemed to test one’s notions of both sentence and sense, placing greater burden on the poet’s chosen words and demanding increased attention to the language by the reader.

W.S. Merwin, like many of his contemporaries, at first had published formal works with intricately knotted and ornate sentences in rhyming poetry, as evidenced in his initial collection, A Mask for Janus, which had been selected by W.H.Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952, when Merwin was only 24. Just as a number of other poets at the time eventually made the transition to the more open form of free verse during the 1960s, Merwin moved to his distinctive style of writing.

When asked by Daniel Bourne in an interview for Artful Dodge about his decision to adopt an absence of punctuation as a method of writing poems, Merwin responded: “I was trying to do things that I suppose poets always try to do. I was trying to write more directly, and in that sense more simply. One of the ironies of that was there were critics who immediately and for a long time called poetry hopelessly obscure. They thought it was simply willfully obscure and that I was trying to write incomprehensible poetry. I was really trying to make it more direct but at the same time more inclusive, to make it contain more experience and to transmit it more directly in words and do it in a way that carried more of the cadences of pure language, of speech.”

Since I was living in New York and working in Manhattan during my undergraduate and graduate years at Brooklyn College, I often had opportunities to attend poetry readings in the region, including a number of presentations given by W.S. Merwin at various locations around the city. Indeed, my introduction to the sound of his voice, offering the pauses and emphases not evident in the unpunctuated lines on the page, occurred at a reading he delivered in the intimate setting of the Gotham Book Mart.

As enjoyable as it was listening to the poet smoothly read his own work, I realized the tension on the page created by sentences running up against one another in the printed form sometimes actually increased opportunities for ambiguity and, at times, multiple rhythms. Merwin’s innovative line breaks witnessed on the page also frequently disappeared when the words of the poem were heard read aloud, lessening the surprise I experienced when following the poem’s progress down the page.

Therefore, impressed by the possibilities of W.S. Merwin’s experiment with form in his poetry’s written state, I employed similar techniques in my premiere book of poems, Along the Dark Shore (BOA Editions), where evidence of Merwin’s influence clearly exists. I delighted in the form’s ability to create lines and sentences that might be read differently with each effort by a reader, creating a variety of interpretations or differing degrees of significance due to alterations of stress and fluctuations of rhythm.

Perhaps Stanley Plumly—in “Dirty Silence,” a chapter from his book of criticism, Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (Handsel Books, 2003)—advances the best expression of the manner with which Merwin playfully engages readers’ expectations of line, sentence, and punctuation:

“That remarkable tension between how and why, the lyric and the dramatic, between lingering and needing to go on, between the horizontal rhythm of the line and the vertical rhythm of the story, with the balance always favoring the movement down, is what gives free verse its gravitational authority. The verse itself, the lyricism, lives in the phrase, the clause, while the freedom lives in that language that completes the sentence, that extends and connects it to the next. (W.S. Merwin, for example, a poet who has played with the abridgment of the line and the syntax of the sentence better than any of his contemporaries, writes of ‘St. Vincent’s’ that ‘its bricks by day a French red under / cross facing south / blown-up neoclassic facades the tall / dark openings between columns at / the dawn of history / exploded into many windows / in a mortised face.’ The line breaks are intended to excite as much as complicate the differences between ending, enjambment, and continuing—to make us move swiftly through the emphasis of phrase to the total structure of the stanza. The tension between breaking and entering the new line is supported by the need to go on, to complete, to make whole: a whole thought, a whole perception.) In that growth lies the dramatic voice, the voice unwilling to simply sing, but nevertheless demanding to be well heard. Yet a voice not simply speech. In the achieved free-verse poem we hear the formalization of a process, as well as a progress: we hear form itself, as an idiosyncratic language, being achieved. And the form speaks, in its dialectic of poetry against itself.”

ST VINCENT’S


Thinking of rain clouds that rose over the city
on the first day of the year

in the same month
I consider that I have lived daily and with

eyes open and ears to hear
these years across from St Vincent’s Hospital
above whose roof those clouds rose

its bricks by day a French red under
cross facing south
blown-up neo-classic facades the tall
dark openings between columns at
the dawn of history
exploded into many windows
in a mortised face

inside it the ambulances have unloaded
after sirens’ howling nearer through traffic on
Seventh Avenue long
ago I learned not to hear them
even when the sirens stop

they turn to back in
few passers-by stay to look
and neither do I

at night two long blue
windows and one short one on the top floor
burn all night
many nights when most of the others are out
on what floor do they have
anything

I have seen the building drift moonlit through geraniums
late at night when trucks were few
moon just past the full
upper windows parts of the sky
as long as I looked
I watched it at Christmas and New Year
early in the morning I have seen the nurses ray out through
arterial streets
in the evening have noticed internes blocks away
on doorsteps one foot in the door

I have come upon the men in gloves taking out
the garbage at all hours
piling up mountains of
plastic bags white strata with green intermingled and
black
I have seen one pile
catch fire and studied the cloud
at the ends of the jets of the hoses
the fire engines as near as that
red beacons and
machine-throb heard by the whole body
I have noticed molded containers stacked outside
a delivery entrance on Twelfth Street
whether meals from a meal factory made up with those
mummified for long journeys by plane
or specimens for laboratory
examination sealed at the prescribed temperatures
either way closed delivery

and approached faces staring from above
crutches or tubular clamps
out for tentative walks
have paused for turtling wheel-chairs
heard visitors talking in wind on each corner
while the lights changed and
hot dogs were handed over at the curb
in the middle of afternoon
mustard ketchup onions and relish
and police smelling of ether and laundry
were going back

and I have known them all less than the papers of our days
smoke rises from the chimneys do they have an incinerator
what for
how warm do they believe they have to maintain the air
in there
several of the windows appear
to be made of tin
but it may be the light reflected

I have imagined bees coming and going
on those sills though I have never seen them

who was St Vincent


—W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin has published nearly two dozen collections of poetry and twenty books of translation, as well as numerous plays and books of prose. In addition to the two Pulitzer Prizes, Merwin also has won the National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems, published in 2005. Furthermore, he has received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, the Governor's Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, the Tanning Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. W.S. Merwin is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.

[Readers also are invited to visit a previous post on “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Stanley Plumly, “The Morning America Changed.”]

Online Literary Journals: Coming of Age

The current issue (May/June 2009) of Poets & Writers Magazine contains “a special section on the here and now of literary journals” devoted to information about the process of submission, editing, and publication of literary magazines. Sandra Beasley contributes a timely and insightful essay, “From Pages to Pixels: The Evolution of Online Journals,” among the articles included in the “Lit Mag Moment” feature. The piece by Beasley addresses a number of concerns I have been considering quite a bit recently, especially since the release of the Spring/Summer issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review a couple of weeks ago, which completed ten years of publication for VPR, as well as the announcement of an upcoming special tenth anniversary issue of VPR to be released in the fall, marking publication of the journal’s initial issue in the fall of 1999. (Please see the sidebar of this page for further details about the contributors to the anniversary issue.)

Much has changed since the publication of Valparaiso Poetry Review’s first issue ten years ago. At the time, the concept of an online literary journal was still fairly new and relatively untested. Reputations of existing electronic literary magazines among authors and readers were spotty at best. As Beasley indicates in her article: “Online journals were a pale imitation of print, marred by amateurish fonts, garish backgrounds, and the lack of editorial accountability.” One wondered about the wisdom of publishing material in such venues where the environment might diminish readers’ responses to the work.

Indeed, in the early issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review I was particularly grateful to those poets and critics who contributed to the journal based solely upon their confidence that I would place their works in an atmosphere reflecting literary integrity. I appreciated their trust that I also would exercise editorial judgment that would reflect well upon all the contributions included in every volume of VPR. Over the ten years of the journal’s existence, I have endeavored to honor the privilege bestowed upon me by those writers who entrusted VPR with their poetry, reviews, and essays.

Additionally, I felt a responsibility to produce an online literary journal that would attain a certain amount of respect and contribute to the slowly growing overall reputation of electronic journals due to the efforts by a number of other editors at similar journals, who also were attempting to build a community of publications that would complement the numerous excellent examples in the world of print journals. I believe most readers of fine literature have been amazed in the past decade by the growth and sophistication of online literary journals. As further evidence of an increased respect for online magazines, I have been pleased to see the contents of online literary journals now display a wide range of well-known poets and fiction writers whose presence was limited to print journals only a few years ago.

Moreover, when I glance at the acknowledgments pages of new collections of poetry, I find myself noting how many titles of online journals, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, now are represented side by side with those titles of traditional print periodicals, all of whom seem to have adopted a degree of online presence as well. Some of the most prominent print magazines, such as Poetry or The New Yorker, even exist as a type of “hybrid” journal that publishes its content online as well as in print.

As Sandra Beasley mentions in her article, authors have discovered the advantages of online publication, particularly the extensive exposure to readers worldwide. Beasley writes: “For every reader who tracks down the Kenyon Review in his local bookstore, there are ten who don’t have access, don’t have money, or need a medium they can surreptitiously read at their office desks.”

Ironically, even print journals nowadays are being encountered in an electronic format by many readers as libraries across the nation rely on databases rather than stock on their shelves the hard copies of magazines. In a previous post on “One Poet’s Notes” about this issue, “The Gateway of the Database,” I commented: “Just as I am now pleased to be able to read nearly any newspaper from all geographical regions (something impossible in the past), I also am delighted that I have access from my laptop at home to so many journals, more than my library could ever afford in individual subscriptions.”

Remarks by Mary Flinn, editor of Blackbird, quoted in Beasley’s article include one statement, attributed by Flinn to Don Lee when he was the editor of Ploughshares, reflecting an attitude widely shared by editors of literary journals: “Ploughshares was offering all of its content online because our job—as editors and publishers—was to find as large an audience as possible for the authors that we publish, and the work that we love.” Similarly, one of the guiding principles of Valparaiso Poetry Review since its inception ten years ago, as presented in the opening paragraph of the journal’s submission guidelines set in the premiere issue of VPR, always has been to offer “another opportunity for more readers to discover young or established poets whose writings deserve an even larger audience.”

When Valparaiso Poetry Review was begun in 1999, I imagined universal acceptance of online literary journals would take a number of years, and I considered the possibility that a decade might pass before electronic literary magazines would come of age. With the general recognition today, by almost all poets and most short-fiction writers, of such journals as satisfactory locations for publication, as well as the nearly universal presence of print journals in some online form, perhaps the maturation of online journals has happened just as I had hoped would occur.

Further evidence exists of a possible parity between online journals and print journals. Sandra Beasley notes in her article: “Selections from online magazines are now regularly included in the Best American Series of annual anthologies. Online editors can nominate their contributors for the Pushcart Prize. The National Endowment for the Arts permits up to half of one’s qualifying publishing credits to be from online journals.” Additionally, universities now approve of online publications alongside print journals as credentials when faculty members apply for promotion or tenure.

Consequently, as Valparaiso Poetry Review completes its ten years of publication with the current issue, and as the upcoming special tenth anniversary celebration issue is prepared for its fall release, I’m gratified by what VPR has accomplished, and I wish to express my appreciation once more to all the contributors whose works have appeared in its pages. However, I also am pleased to witness the progress made by so many fine online journals within the last decade, and I am proud Valparaiso Poetry Review exists as a part of that community.

An Elegant Epigraph: Robert Pinsky on the Medium of Poetry

“The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

“Moreover, there is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an expert’s body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audience’s body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist’s medium is my breath. The reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.”— Robert Pinsky

—From Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

[“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.]

Remembering Deborah Digges

Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn't struggle?

—Deborah Digges

As sad news about the death of Deborah Digges by suicide over the weekend filtered though emails and blog posts yesterday morning, I heard words of praise for the woman many had admired, and I felt the emotion of sorrow expressed by those who knew Digges well for years, even decades, far beyond my one brief meeting with her. Some comments complimented her as a teacher and mentor, while others spoke of her as a good friend or caring mother. However, all of us who have read her wonderful poems in various collections or who have assigned to our students her anthologized poetry, works in which the poet’s intelligence and insight were always evident, realized how significant the loss to contemporary literature with the silencing of her lyrical voice.

Therefore, I believe listening once again to the poet read her own lines may be the best way to remember Deborah Digges. Consequently, I recommend readers celebrate her life and work by watching the above video of Digges offering a few of her poems at an event in Pasadena only one month before her death. I invite viewers to take this opportunity to observe her contribution to poetry once more and to share in the appreciation for her as demonstrated by the audience’s heartfelt applause at the close of her presentation. The reading was part of an event co-sponsored by Claremont Graduate University and Red Hen Press.

Deborah Digges was the author of four collections of poetry. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize. Late in the Millennium was released in 1989. Rough Music (1995) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Trapeze (2005) represented her most recent release. She was in the process of completing a fifth volume of poetry that had been scheduled for publication in the fall. Digges also wrote two compelling memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). In 1995 Digges translated Ballad of the Blood, poems by Cuban dissident poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela. Additionally, she had been the recipient of a number of impressive honors, including grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

James Dickey: "Sleeping Out at Easter"

When James Dickey introduced his first volume of poetry, Into the Stone (1960), he opened the collection with “Sleeping Out at Easter,” a poem he hoped would set a tone for those to follow. Dickey reported in his book, Self-Interviews (1970): “While I was writing Into the Stone, I was very much interested in experimenting with verse forms. I’ve always been a great admirer of Hardy and tried to take a lesson from him in inventing.” In “Sleeping Out at Easter,” Dickey tested different approaches to the poem and arrived at a discovery of form complementing content: “Gradually, over a period of several weeks, I worked on it, italicized the refrain, tried a few other things, and it came out the way it is. It seemed to me to be quite a lucid poem—at least more lucid than what I had written up to that time—and at the same time mysterious. On the one hand, the story seems very clear. It’s just about a man sleeping in back of his house and becoming another person on Easter through the twin influences of the Easter ritual and of nature itself. His rebirth is symbolized by nothing more or less than waking up in a strange place which is near a familiar place.”

Drafts of the poem reveal the method by which Dickey established the persona, point of view, and process of discovery about details in the poem. For instance, the earliest version carries a different title, “Sleeping Out in June,” which probably reflects the actual timing of the event initiating his writing of the piece. However, after including language indicating a spring incident, Dickey changed the title to “Sleeping Out in April.” But by the final drafts, where Dickey had presented particulars suggesting religious allusions and symbolism, the title became “Sleeping Out at Easter.” In his biography of the poet, James Dickey: The World as a Lie (2000), Henry Hart comments: “The poem that begins Into the Stone, ‘Sleeping Out at Easter,’ typifies Dickey’s ritual and mythic approach to the world. Significantly, the narrator does not go to church on Easter Sunday to pay homage to the resurrection of the crucified Christ. Like Wallace Stevens’s persona in ‘Sunday Morning,’ he conducts his own service on his own turf and in his own way. Having camped out in an army blanket, he groggily wakes on Easter morning believing that he is ritually reenacting Christ’s resurrection and, in turn, all renewals of life from death.”

Dickey described the activity inspiring the poem’s composition: “In the spring I did sleep out in a sleeping bag in a little pine grove behind my suburban house when I was in the advertising business in Atlanta. But I didn’t wake up feeling that I was Christ. That’s something I made up. Still. reading the poem again, I feel that I should have awakened on Easter thinking I was Christ, in the same sense that every man is Christ and Christ is every man, if you’re a believer.” As in a number of other poems by James Dickey, the lines combine a fascination with nature and a respect for religious metaphor. In addition, he mixes an acknowledgment of the spiritual with an emphasis on the physical. As Hart observes: “Dickey sings his worldly hymn, which is as sacred as it is profane.”

On this Easter Sunday, I recommend readers return once more to this poem that began James Dickey’s debut book of poems and announced the beginning of an exciting, sometimes controversial, career for an extraordinary individual and exceptional poet, whose work frequently influenced those among his contemporaries as well as some in ensuing generations.

SLEEPING OUT AT EASTER

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All Presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
Where my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

Put down those seeds in your hand.
These trees have not yet been planted.
A light should come round the world,
Yet my army blanket is dark,
That shall sparkle with dew in the sun.
My magical sheperd’s cloak
Is not yet alive on my flesh.
Put down those seeds in your hand.

In your palm is the secret of waking.
Unclasp your purple-nailed fingers
And the woods and the sunlight together
Shall spring, and make good the world.
The sounds in the air shall find bodies,
And a feather shall drift from the pine-top
You shall feel, with your long-buried hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking,

For the king’s grave turns him to light.
A woman shall look through the window
And see me here, huddled and blazing.
My child, mouth open, still sleeping,
Hears the song in the egg of a bird.
The sun shall have told him that song
Of a father returning from darkness,
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

All dark is now no more.
In your palm is the secret of waking.
Put down those seeds in your hand;
All Presences change into trees.
A feather shall drift from the pine-top.
The sun shall have told you this song,
For this is the grave of the king;
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

—James Dickey

Visitors are invited to view other pages at “One Poet’s Notes” with commentary and video concerning the poetry of James Dickey: “James Dickey’s Last Lecture: What It Means to Be a Poet,” and “James Dickey: ‘The Firebombing.’”

Good Friday: Mark Strand's "Poem After the Seven Last Words" (Canto One)

“Poem After the Seven Last Words,” which fills the final section of the three parts in Mark Strand’s 2006 collection of poems, Man and Camel, presents a sequence in seven cantos, each segment containing a lovely stanza concerning Christ’s crucifixion, all filled with lyrical and meditative language. The piece originally was commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet and written to accompany a performance of Haydn’s quartet opus 51. Last year on Good Friday, I offered an article introducing the sequence and displaying the dramatic sixth section, in which the poet writes of Christ’s death: “’It is finished,’ he said into a vastness / that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it / within him. He contained it all . . ..”

Today, I return to that powerful poem with a look at the thoughtful and evocative opening canto:

The story of the end, of the last word
of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.
We tell it and retell it—one word, then another
until it seems that no last word is possible,
that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero
of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are
the secret life of the story and, as long as his plea
is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story
continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,
becomes the next, and the next after that.

Readers are encouraged to consider the previous commentary about “Poem After the Seven Last Words” on “One Poet’s Notes.” In addition, I invite readers to examine my review of Man and Camel. To view a number of other articles at “One Poet’s Notes” regarding the poetry of Mark Strand, please use the “search blog” box above.

Ingrid Wendt: "Armistice"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Ingrid Wendt’s “Armistice,” which appears in the just released Spring/Summer 2009 issue (Volume X, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I invite visitors to read additional poems, “The Keeper of Secrets” and “True to Form,” by featured-poet Wendt in the current pages of VPR. The issue also includes an essay by Wendt and an interview with her by Barbara Crooker.

Ingrid Wendt, whose parents were each raised in German-speaking families in Valparaiso, Chile, and on a farm in southwest Michigan, spent the year 1994-1995 as a Senior Fulbright Professor in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, returning in 2004 and 2005 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. She has won the Oregon Book Award in Poetry with Singing the Mozart Requiem, the Carolyn Kizer Award, and the Yellowglen Prize for her 2004 book, The Angle of Sharpest Ascending. Her fourth full-length book, Surgeonfish, received the 2004 Editions Prize. Her other books include Moving the House (poetry); From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry; In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts; and Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Writing Poetry in the Classroom. She divides her time between Eugene and Seal Rock, Oregon, with her husband, poet and writer Ralph Salisbury.

ARMISTICE

“The strongest of all warriors are these two—Time and Patience.”
—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace


All their lives the girl studied the mother.
This was her favorite subject, the one she
was best in, there was nothing

about their history of battle the girl
did not remember: which words could turn into
land mines, how to keep distant and still

appear loving, look sweet, how much
of independent thought to sacrifice for
a truce that never would last, her heart

from an early age taking a break each time it was
called upon to perform, no allies in place
to protect it, no trench. After your death

I say it: I was that girl. You were that mother.
Now, the small unexpected bells of forgiveness
ringing, ringing, calling me

to attention: what made you
someone to love. All along. I loved you.
And was too busy practicing defense to see.


—Ingrid Wendt

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from 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.

VPR Spring/Summer 2009 Issue: Ten Years of Publication

I am pleased to announce publication of the Spring/Summer 2009 issue (Vol. X, No. 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. As in past years, release of the Spring/Summer issue of VPR coincides with the opening day of baseball season. In addition, the new issue available today represents the completion of ten years of publication for Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Contents include the following:

Featured Poet: Ingrid Wendt

Additional Poets: Pam Bernard, Christopher Cessac, Barbara Crooker, Christin Cuccio, Susan Elbe, Gary Fincke, Ann Fisher-Wirth, William Ford, Ellen Goldstein, Penny Harter, Norbert Krapf, Michael Meyerhofer, Kay Mullen, James Owens, Allan Peterson, Doug Ramspeck, Susan Rich, Suzanne Roberts, David Rothman, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Joanne Stangeland, Jeanine Stevens, Terese Svoboda, Alison Townsend

Poetry Collaborative: “Frequencies,” a half-crown of sonnets by Judith Barrington, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Julie Kane, Julia Lisella, D’Arcy Randall, Kathrine Varnes, Lesley Wheeler

Interview: Barbara Crooker interviews Ingrid Wendt

Essays: Edward Byrne on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, Ingrid Wendt on “Turning to Poems”

Poets Reviewed: Gwen Hart, Norbert Krapf, Philip Metres, Susan Settlemyre Williams

Cover Art Commentary: Gregg Hertzlieb on Abraham Rattner

I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers during the past decade of publication. I look forward to much more fine poetry and critical commentary in future issues that I believe readers will find entertaining, engaging, and enlightening.

In fact, I take this opportunity to also invite visitors to check the “One Poet’s Notes” sidebar for new information added today about an upcoming special 10th anniversary issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review, which will be released in October of 2009 and will begin a new decade of publication by celebrating the initial appearance of VPR with its first issue published in October of 1999.

Richard Hugo: "Death of the Kapowsin Tavern" (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 those 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.”

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, Alfred Corn, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Alvin Feinman, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, 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, Sandra McPherson, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Grace Schulman, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gary Soto, 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, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

Consequently, I have decided to present a regular Contemporary Poetry Series on “One Poet’s Notes” exemplifying poetry by the individuals mentioned above, displaying a sample piece from each author as an introduction and an invitation for readers to seek further works by the poet featured. The chosen poems might not represent the most famous or most highly regarded pieces by every one of these poets, because many of those are already well known to readers or are 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.

Today, I offer a poem by Richard Hugo.

DEATH OF THE KAPOWSIN TAVERN

I can’t ridge it back again from char.
Not one board left. Only ash a cat explores
and shattered glass smoked black and strung
about from the explosion I believe
in the reports. The white school up for sale
for years, most homes abandoned to the rocks
of passing boys—the fire, helped by wind
that blew the neon out six years before,
simply ended lots of ending.

A damn shame. Now, when the night chill
of the lake gets in a troller’s bones
where can the troller go for bad wine
washed down frantically with beer?
And when wise men are in style again
will one recount the two-mile glide of cranes
from dead pines or the nameless yellow
flowers thriving in the useless logs,
or dots of light all night about the far end
of the lake, the dawn arrival of the idiot
with catfish—most of all, above the lake
the temple and our sanctuary there?

Nothing dies as slowly as a scene.
The dusty jukebox cracking through
the cackle of a beered-up crone—
wagered wine—sudden need to dance—
these remain in the black debris.
Although I know in time the lake will send
wind black enough to blow it all away.


—Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo (1923-1982) served as a bombardier in Europe during World War II. After the war he studied with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, then worked for more than a decade as a technical writer at Boeing. His first book of poems, Run of Jacks, appeared in 1961. Among his many later collections of poems, readers might find such fine examples as The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), and Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1985),

Hugo began a new career teaching English and creative writing in the early 1960s at the University of Montana, where he remained for nearly two decades and developed a reputation as an extraordinary mentor for young poets. His poetry often reflects an appreciation for the Northwest region, especially those small-town locations or forgotten farmhouses that evoke a sense of loss or longing.

His teaching technique and his fondness for such settings combined in his production of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, a 1979 book containing practical advice for composing poetry that has influenced many authors in following generations. Indeed, in a previous piece about Richard Hugo on “One Poet’s Notes” I presented a section of his advice on triggering the imagination in which Hugo states: “I suspect that the true or valid triggering subject is one in which physical characteristics or details correspond to attitudes the poet has toward the world and himself. For me, a small town that has seen better days often works.”

Consequently, I select here “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,” which appears a perfect example demonstrating such a type of Hugo’s work. In addition, as I was preparing today’s page, I recalled the evening in October of 1982, still in graduate school at the University of Utah, when whispered words shared the news of Richard Hugo’s death. My fellow poets and I were at our usual Friday night spot, a dark and dingy tavern named The Twilite Lounge, where we would drink bad watered-down beer, shoot pool with our bets on the table edge, punch numbers on the jukebox for the same songs over and over, and discuss writing, often quoting Hugo’s lines of poetry or tidbits of advice, until closing time in the early morning hours or we were too groggy to continue. That night the pitchers of warm beer were all bought for repeated toasts to Richard Hugo in honor of his vision of so many places much like the one in which we found ourselves.

In “Richard Hugo: Getting Right,” a lovely essay from Dave Smith’s Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1985), Smith writes about the individuals from Hugo’s poems frequently found in Western taverns or saloons: “These are survivors. They gather in bars and cantinas within the fellowship of shared vision and frontier virtues: courage, loyalty, self-reliance, tolerance, affection—what one expects from home. Bars become, as in 'Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,' recognizably home as well as 'the temple and our sanctuary.'”

[Readers also are invited to visit other posts about Richard Hugo: “Richard Hugo’s Letter to Charles Simic” and “An Elegant Epigraph: Richard Hugo on Triggering the Imagination.”]

World Autism Awareness Day: A Poem by Barbara Crooker

On this date (April 2) recognized around the globe as World Autism Awareness Day, I’d like to remind readers of Barbara Crooker’s appropriate poem for the occasion, “Driving Under the Clerestory of Leaves,” which first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

UNDER THE CLERESTORY OF LEAVES

We drive to your special education preschool
under an arch of maples, half green, half turned to gold,
the dark branches bold as the ribs
of a great cathedral, flying buttresses
that bend the light.
You haven’t changed in the last two years,
developmentally delayed, mildly retarded,
school a struggle to stay in your seat,
say the beginnings of words,
point to colors and shapes.
While you wrestle with scissors,
daub with paste, I sit in the hallway,
trying to write, turn straw into gold.

When our two hours are spent,
we drive back up the hill toward home,
see the stand of mixed hardwoods
in full conflagration: red-gold, burnt orange,
blazing against the cobalt sky.
The architect who made these trees
was sleeping when he made this boy.
And my heart, like the leaves, burns & burns.


—Barbara Crooker

Readers also are invited to visit a previous post on “One Poet’s Notes” with poetry concerning this issue, “Autism and Poetry.”

Poetry Fools: Monty Python, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry

As we celebrate the beginning of National Poetry Month and April Fool’s Day, perhaps the comedy skit on poetry and poets in the video above by Monty Python is most appropriate.

In addition, I invite everyone to visit previous posts with two humorous videos by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry concerning poetry: “Hugh Laurie: Poetry for Modern Life” and “Poetry Prize.” Enjoy!