Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn

Billy Strayhorn, one of the unsung heroes of jazz, was born on this date in 1915. Strayhorn worked for decades as an arranger for Duke Ellington, and he composed or co-composed some of Ellington’s most famous pieces, including “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Lotus Blossom,” “Passion Flower,” and “Satin Doll.” Ellington once said, “It’s a wonderful thing, I mean, to bow after a Billy Strahorn orchestration. It’s one of the things I do best.”

Strayhorn, who died in 1967, remained mostly obscured by Ellington’s shadow throughout his life. However, in 1996, with the publication of David Hajdu’s Lush Life, titled after Staryhorn’s magnificent ballad and one of the best jazz biographies ever released, many music lovers discovered the depth of Billy Strayhorn’s contributions to jazz and understood the complexities of the man much more. In Ted Gioia’s fine volume, The History of Jazz, Strayhorn’s lovely works are described as “the closest jazz has ever approached to art song.”

[Readers are also invited to visit a previous post at “One Poet’s Notes” concerning Duke Ellington: “Duke Ellington and Quincy Troupe.”]

Happy Thanksgiving from Valparaiso Poetry Review

On this Thanksgiving Day, I pause to offer my gratitude for all of the good fortune that has occurred in the past year, and I once again express my appreciation to each reader of Valparaiso Poetry Review who has happened upon the valuable works included in the current tenth anniversary issue of VPR, as well as the marvelous materials accumulated in the journal’s pages in the twenty-one issues throughout its decade of publication.

Additionally, I am thankful to the large number of individuals who have visited this site in the last year and examined the articles at “One Poet’s Notes,” the editor’s blog for Valparaiso Poetry Review. I am amazed and honored by the tremendous growth in readership for this blog since its initiation in 2007, as the accumulated number of visits to the pages of “One Poet’s Notes” alone approaches 300,000, with monthly statistics now averaging nearly 15,000.

I am especially thankful to the many readers over the years that have sent messages containing complimentary comments and continually constructive statements about the content or form of both Valparaiso Poetry Review and the VPR blog. Moreover, I have been struck recently by the many supportive emails and facebook notes, particularly concerning the celebration of VPR’s tenth anniversary, as readers have favorably responded to the special fall issue with words of praise and have expressed respect for the ongoing efforts at Valparaiso Poetry Review during the past decade.

Therefore, I would like to acknowledge again the fine contributions by the hundreds of authors who have had their works appear in VPR since its initial publication in 1999. I wish all those writers, as well as each reader who generously decided to spend some time considering posts at “One Poet’s Notes” or browsing the poetry and prose among the thousands of pages of Valparaiso Poetry Review, best wishes for an enjoyable holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving!


—Edward Byrne, Editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review

A Happy Thanksgiving Treat: Cheers!

“We are not here to be thankful for strange things we can do with our bodies!”

“On this very special occasion, my mind goes back over the years to the people who have influenced me . . . Tielhard de Chardin, George Sand, Caravaggio, oh, Emily Dickinson . . .”

Deborah Bogen: "November"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Deborah Bogen’s “November,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Deborah Bogen’s book-length collection, Landscape with Silos (Texas A&M University Press), was a 2004 National Poetry Series finalist and won the 2005 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Jana Bouma’s book review of Landscape with Silos also appears in the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Bogen’s Living by the Children's Cemetery was selected by Edward Hirsch as winner of 
the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems and reviews have been published widely in magazines, including Crazyhorse, Field, Gettysburg Review, Margie, New Letters, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Shenandoah, and Verse Daily.

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

Jericho Brown: PLEASE

Hit it!—The Love Song of Jericho Brown’s Please
review by Susanna Childress

Too many times in the past few years I have finished a recently published volume of poetry and put it back on the bookshelf thinking, “Okay, okay, I get it: not only have you suffered but you’re really clever.” Jericho Brown’s Please not only led me away from this begrudging confession but allowed me while reading to become far more aware of the poems than of the poetry. That is, the book seems less a grand endeavor that orchestrates to bring attention to itself as such than a collected set of deliberate, sharply crafted pieces which reflect an unpretentious yet demanding batch of sensibilities—each poem is both gift and plea. Maybe I should put it this way: Brown’s debut volume avoids the self-conciliatory, self-congratulatory tone he might well have taken on, and that’s not because there’s nothing here to mourn or be proud of. The poems are smart and raw, but readers will recognize this as distinct from clever or pitiable, in part because the writer does not ask his readers to recognize them as such. Any insight, any complexity here is the result of intricate tonal and metaphorical maneuvering, crafting, nuance: questioning and requiring all at once, the way the word please is both a desire and a demand.

What makes avoiding self-conciliation and self-congratulation more of a feat is that, among poems that clearly employ personae and others that do so more opaquely, all are to varying degrees and by various means self-referential, and with lesser frequency but equal intensity, reader-referential. Brown opens the book with “Track 1: Lush Life,” a familiar scenario in what might be a jazz club but with such an unfamiliar and pointed analogy as to be applicable to the reader in both an eerie and endearing way:

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice. You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue…. She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.

Besides the layered tensions of intimacy and violence (readers may gloss over the lover’s tongue as leather belt, and vice-versa, as proverbial jest, but just when we’ve forgotten the literal possibility of such an intersection, it appears, and numerously, in later sections of the volume even while images of unjust beatings—often with belts—show up throughout), we also find the layers of reverence and intimacy as well as the paradox of request and demand as a unified gesture. Additionally, the line, “She does not mean to entertain / You, and neither do I,” does two things: readers are introduced to the speaker within or beyond the second-person point-of-view, which then allows us to recognize the perspective heretofore not as a “Gotcha!” but the complication of both holistic invitation and experiential impossibility, something of a “You think, reader, you can inhabit my world, and though you won’t, fully, ever, let’s go after it anyway—why not?” We understand, too, that this is not a door opened for our use of the poet, a way to be entertained, as Brown puts it. He will not be clever for us, to amuse or to dismay. Instead, the summons is more dangerous: the poet will sing, but readers best prepare themselves for harm, perhaps pleasurable in its torment, but injurious nonetheless . . . .

[Visitors are invited to read the rest of Susanna Childress’s commentary on Please by Jericho Brown, as well as her reviews of other poetry books by Stephanie Brown (Domestic Interior), William Greenway (Everywhere at Once), and Cathy Park Hong (Dance Dance Revolution) in the current issue (Fall/Winter 2009-2010: Volume XI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

VPR Pushcart Prize Nominations: 2009

Since 1976, editor Bill Henderson has brought added recognition to the many fine small presses and literary journals publishing quality material with his annual anthology, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In recent years, the nomination process for the Pushcart Prize has been opened to online journals and their editors. I have been pleased to see this acknowledgment of the quality of writing found in many electronic publications. Therefore, I am honored to offer the half-dozen works listed below as the 2009 nominees from Valparaiso Poetry Review for the Pushcart Prize. I hope readers will again view this action as an expression of VPR’s support for the inclusion of literature from online magazines for consideration in the long-standing tradition of this fine anthology.

As I have continually mentioned when nominating works from Valparaiso Poetry Review for the additional recognition of an award or further publication in any “best of” anthology, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR; therefore, such decisions are not easy. Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the Pushcart Press and Bill Henderson to bring attention to the excellent literary works found in small presses and journals, in print and online. Moreover, I am grateful when an opportunity arises for a few of VPR’s splendid poets to reach an even larger audience and find the greater recognition they deserve through possible inclusion in such an anthology.

I am proud to announce the six following poems represent the 2009 nominations from Valparaiso Poetry Review to be considered for inclusion in the next volume by the Pushcart Press, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XXXV, which is scheduled to be published in December 2010:

PUSHCART PRIZE NOMINEES FROM VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW

Alfred Corn: “Swiss Army Knife”

Kwame Dawes: “Among the Dithering Feathers”

T.R. Hummer: “Evening Report”

Allison Joseph: “Little Epiphanies”

Dorianne Laux: “Mine Own Phil Levine”

Brian Turner: “Molotov Cocktails”

I congratulate each of these poets, and I wish to express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR.


—Edward Byrne, Editor of Valparaiso Poetry Review

Alison Stine: "Marriage"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “Marriage” by Alison Stine, which appears in the special tenth anniversary issue (Volume XI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Alison Stine’s first full-length book of poetry, Ohio Violence, a winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, was published in 2009 by the University of North Texas Press. Kent State University published her chapbook, Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize, in 2001. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Poetry, and her awards include a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Currently, Stine is a PhD candidate at Ohio University.

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

Complementary Characteristics of Critical Classrooms and Creative Workshops

Last week, I was invited to attend a creative-writing class taught by one of my colleagues, Susanna Childress, the talented poet and an inspiring instructor. As preparation for the visit, most of the students had read a handful of poems copied from a couple of my earlier books. In addition, a pair of graduate students had carefully examined the contents of the books and designed a series of perceptive questions, which would be asked of me as an interview within the class period.

I enjoyed discussing the topics raised during this process, particularly those issues concerning the choices I’d made in the various stages of inspiration, composition, revision, and publication. As the students posed their questions about these areas of interest, I was reminded of an essay I had read only a few days before in the current issue (December 2009: Volume 42, Number 3) of The Writer’s Chronicle. The article, “Out of the Margins: The Expanding Role of Creative Writing in Today’s College Curriculum” by Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser, included a number of acute observations about the increased influence of creative-writing courses not only on apprentice writers in workshops, but also on students of literature in English departments.

As the authors remark, a large portion of students studying creative writing “elect to major in English, where classes tend to focus on literary history and the making of criticism.” Likewise, many English majors investigating different eras of literary history have decided to add creative-writing courses among the electives they take. Consequently, Davidson and Fraser suggest today’s students have begun to blend the distinct critical approaches taught in literature courses with the close scrutiny and inquiry involved in creative-writing workshops. The article explains that students exposed to theories of critical analysis—“new historicism, neo-Marxism, post-feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstructionism, and related interpretive approaches”—in literature courses find classes in creative writing “foreground the act of close reading.”

Furthermore, the authors describe creative-writing workshops as “laboratories in which students test their comprehension and presentation of language, with the frequent consequence that emerging creative writers develop a nuanced sense of language and its arrangement as rich signifiers of meaning. Creative-writing classes require scrupulous attention to a range of textual clues: stray connotations, sound textures, and all other extra-denotative factors. Students learn to approach the craft of writing as if it were sculpture, where language becomes concretized. They also learn to pay keen-eyed attention to the submissions of their workshop peers. This type of close scrutiny excites at the textual level, as practitioners learn to travel ‘inside’ language in pleasurable ways. And such discoveries prove beneficial not only in creative development but also in the arena of critical writing—especially in the act of locating textual phenomena that might remain invisible to many other students.”

Just as the sisters depicted in the Giorgio de Chirico painting above appear to display opposing characteristics, the two kinds of classes—critical and creative—frequently seem on the surface at odds in their tactics for reading literature. Yet, Davidson and Fraser applaud the contributions of each, and they urge a mixture of the methods: “Instead of validating an ‘either-or’ logic—where creative writers cordon themselves off from other disciplines—writers today increasingly adopt a ‘both-and’ mentality that encourages border crossings and cultural exchanges. How creative-writing courses may in turn influence and re-imagine the critical setting, however, has received less attention. The terms ‘creative’ and ‘critical,’ in fact, need not represent a binary within the academy. The schism can be overcome, the gap closed.”

Indeed, early in their essay, the authors advise such interaction between creative writing and other disciplines within the university’s arts and sciences can be a healthy development arising from the proliferation of creative writing programs: “Creative-writing teachers and students have begun to think increasingly in terms of cross-fertilizations between disciplines. Instead of seeing creative and critical classrooms as polar opposites, practicing writers and teachers of writing have begun to test out hybrid learning styles that draw on the strengths of varying discourses.”

My classroom conversation with the students in the creative-writing workshop I visited confirmed the connections between writing and other forms of art, as we regarded the influence of music and painting on my poetry, or I spoke about how some knowledge of sciences like geology or meteorology might lead to enhanced descriptions of nature. I also explained how specific words had been chosen for their connotative associations, phrases for their contributions to rhythm, or personal preferences of line lengths and breaks for their ability to supply a lyrical tone.

In addition, upon investigation of formal decisions and discussions about my experimentation with different styles, or appraisal of poets’ concerns about organization of manuscripts for publication, the students and I focused on an array of aspects to writing that most likely would not be primary items for study in a literature course. Our casual conversation delightfully highlighted for me a combined look at literature and the process of writing that I’ve seen reflected as well lately by students in the period courses of literature I also teach.

In fact, the opportunity for students in our English department to select a major or minor in creative writing has been a rather recent development. Nevertheless, in the years since such options have been available, and as the enrollment in creative-writing courses has increased, I have noticed some of the complementary characteristics of courses in literary criticism and workshops in creative writing evidenced in students’ classroom consideration of texts or seeping into the composition of term papers.

After I finished my stint as a guest speaker for Susanna’s creative-writing workshop, I started to think of the lesson plan for my literature course the following day, and I realized again how much my lectures in such classes also are influenced, usually subconsciously, by my awareness of the writing process and my teaching of creative-writing courses, particularly as I regularly emphasize that students ought to attempt an additional reading of works from the author’s perspective, especially conscious of the choices made or possibly rejected during the creation of the work.

I concluded, as the authors do in The Writer’s Chronicle article, that the crossover of coursework in the curriculum by English majors and creative writers has served to benefit all. As Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser write: “creative-writing workshops, because they tend to be text-based and focus primarily on student-generated work, complement largely context-based critical classrooms. Ultimately, for the students and teachers of such hybrid learning practices and pedagogies, the marriage of writing workshops with critical coursework offers a ‘win-win’ situation.”

Georgia O'Keeffe: RUST RED HILLS

Rust Red Hills
Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin on this date (November 15) in 1887; therefore, I believe today is an appropriate occasion for inviting visitors to read Gregg Hertzlieb’s splendid commentary on O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (pictured above), cover art for the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Since the Fall/Winter 2009-2010 issue (Volume XI, Number 1) celebrates ten years of VPR’s existence, I felt the anniversary publication deserved a dramatic and vibrant cover. Consequently, when making my selection, I could think of no better example than O’Keeffe’s painting, which is one of the most popular pieces among those in the permanent collection at Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art, where Gregg Hertzlieb serves as Director and Curator.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills from 1930 is one of the Brauer Museum of Art’s most beloved paintings, a masterpiece by the artist and a concrete example of the wisdom and prescience of the museum’s founding director, Richard Brauer. Brauer purchased the painting in 1962 for the museum’s permanent collection; at that time, the price was modest because American art had not yet become desirable for collectors and because viewers were still gaining an appreciation for O’Keeffe’s contributions and creativity. Rust Red Hills now stands as a monetarily and culturally valuable work, a true gem in the Brauer’s collection that dramatically depicts a New Mexico landscape that captured the artist’s imagination.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) endures as a key figure in the history of art, the history and development of modern art in particular. While Western art prior to the twentieth century primarily was preoccupied with representational or realistic goals, with artists striving to transcribe the scenes or subjects before them, modern artists of the twentieth century (in part reacting to the representational possibilities afforded by the camera and photography) sought instead to present in their works interpretive views that commented as much on the artists’ individual identities and states of mind as they offered literal likenesses of the selected subjects. For early modern artists, abstraction gave them opportunities to see the world in new and fresh ways, sharing through their pieces their attitudes about objects or scenes that prompted or inspired them, with the actual vocabulary of painting or art making providing additional vehicles for metaphor and commentary.

Early in her career, O’Keeffe explored the abstract possibilities of various natural forms, using them perhaps as commentaries on fundamental or primal states of being as well as investigations of coloristic and gestural effects. She also painted New York cityscapes of expressive color and stylization, with such grand scenes speaking to the size of her ambition for her art and impulse toward abstraction. O’Keeffe’s husband, the famed photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), encouraged her in her efforts, praising her innovation as he did other pioneering modernists whom he championed and who were connected with his influential Manhattan gallery, An American Place.

O’Keeffe’s marriage to Stieglitz faced significant problems, however, leading O’Keeffe to travel in 1929 without Stieglitz to New Mexico and the American Southwest. This setting fascinated the artist, leading her to return every year before eventually settling permanently in 1949 in the New Mexican village of Abiquiu. O’Keeffe’s discovery of the American Southwest as a source of lasting inspiration lies at the heart of a moving and inspiring story in art that continues to captivate viewers of her pictures and readers of her biography. Here is an example of someone who truly looked deeply within and without before finding a place that enabled her to realize herself . . ..

Readers are urged to examine the rest of Gregg Hertzlieb’s commentary on Rust Red Hills, as well as the other contributions to the special tenth anniversary Fall/Winter 2009-2010 issue (Volume XI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Recalling James Dickey's Poetry on Veterans Day

As Americans remember the service and sacrifice of military personnel throughout the nation’s history at celebrations or memorial events across the country on this Veterans Day, I’d also like to recall the war poetry of James Dickey, whose engaging work unfortunately may have faded from the memories of many in recent decades. In past articles I have spoken of my admiration for various poems by Dickey: I specifically commented upon “Sleeping Out at Easter” and “The Firebombing.” I also chronicled my own observations of James Dickey when he and I once shared a publication party at the Gotham Book Mart for our volumes of poetry published by BOA Editions.

When reflecting upon “The Firebombing,” I offered that Dickey may have “written more powerful poems about World War II than any other American poet.” Among those persuasive works by James Dickey responding to incidents experienced during combat, readers will find “Drinking from a Helmet,” which was included in Helmets, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1964.

The poet, an aviator during World War II, described in Self-Interviews (Dell, 1970), a collection of personal opinions and assessments, his intentions when composing “Drinking from a Helmet”:

I don’t think I wrote anything in Helmets about flying. I wrote about the war from the standpoint of the infantry where you have a much closer intimacy with what happens to the people in a war. For example, “Drinking from a Helmet” deals with being in the center of action, between the enemy and the graveyard. The incident occurred on Okinawa where we were fighting on Coral Ridge and the graves registration people were about two hundred yards in the rear laying out a cemetery that the fellows fighting up on the ridge would soon be occupying. This was one of the weirdest sights I ever saw. I wanted to write at least one poem about the kind of physical involvement istead of using the terrific and terrifying detachment of the combat aviator—I later wrote about that subject in a poem called “The Firebombing.”

Later in the same volume, Dickey expanded upon his thoughts about the difficult conditions and emotional stress endured by soldiers in a combat zone, as he explained his perceptions that shaped the writing of “Drinking from a Helmet”:

In World War II I was in some awfully harrowing action in the Pacific, and in some places I didn’t think it would be possible to survive at all. The result is that now, far removed from those scenes, places, and events, I view existence pretty much from the standpoint of a survivor—sort of like a perpetual convalescent. Someone wrote an article on me once which was called, “James Dickey, the Grateful Survivor,” and I can very well affirm that this is my attitude. It’s really the only personal philosophical implication of the war that I can think of, although there doubtless are a good many others I’m not aware of consciously.

I think physical courage is a very, very great thing, though. I’ve always thought so. Injuries are terrible. Anyone who will stand up to possible injury, either to help someone else or to perform some kind of mission is a great man to me. I feel very much as Malraux does or Antoine de St. Exupéry did. I’m not a worshiper of duty in the way that St. Exupéry was at all, but I very much admire dependability, which involves some degree of courage.

I’ve already said something about “Drinking from a Helmet,” a poem about being in war and close to destruction. The poem deals with a boy’s first inkling that his attitude is going to be that of a grateful survivor if he survives this day. He’s drinking water and identifying with the soldiers lying in the graveyard who have not been as lucky as he. He dedicates himself to survival and to looking up the brother of the dead soldier whose last thought he inherited by drinking from the dead man’s helmet and putting it on afterwards.

Dickey’s ambitious poem, “Drinking from a Helmet,” is written in nineteen numbered sections. I present below a sampling from the work, displaying the first four parts and the last four parts:

DRINKING FROM A HELMET


I

I climbed out, tired of waiting
For my foxhole to turn in the earth
On its side or its back for a grave,
And got in line
Somewhere in the roaring of dust.
Every tree on the island was nowhere,
Blasted away.


II

In the middle of combat, a graveyard
Was advancing after the troops
With laths and balls of string;
Grass already tinged it with order.
Between the new graves and the foxholes
A green water-truck stalled out.
I moved up on it, behind
The hill that cut off the firing.


III

My turn, and I shoved forward
A helmet I picked from the ground,
Not daring to take mine off
Where somebody else may have come
Loose from the steel of his head.


IV

Keeping the foxhole doubled
In my body and begging
For water, safety, and air,
I drew water out of the truckside
As if dreaming the helmet full.
In my hand, the sun
Came on a featherly light.

* * *

XVI

Enough
Shining, I picked up my carbine and said.
I threw my old helmet down
And put the wet one on.
Warmed water ran over my face.
My last thought changed, and I knew
I inherited one of the dead.


XVII

I saw tremendous trees
That would grow on the sun if they could,
Towering. I saw a fence
And two boys facing each other,
Quietly talking,
Looking in at the gigantic redwoods,
The rings in the trunks turning slowly
To raise up stupendous green.
They went away, one turning
The wheels of a blue bicycle,
The smaller one curled catercornered
In the handlebar basket.


XVIII

I would survive and go there,
Stepping off the train in a helmet
That held a man’s last thought,
Which showed him his older brother
Showing him trees.
I would ride through all
California upon two wheels
Until I came to the white
Dirt road where they had been,
Hoping to meet his blond brother,
And to walk with him into the wood
Until we were lost,
Then take off the helmet
And tell him where I had stood,
What poured, what spilled, what swallowed:


XIX

And tell him I was the man.


—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: ‘Sleeping Out at Easter,’” “James Dickey’s Last Lecture: What It Means to Be a Poet,” and “James Dickey: ‘The Firebombing.’”

Katharine Coles: "Hawks"

The VPR Poem of the Week is “Hawks” by Katharine Coles, which appears in the special tenth anniversary issue (Volume XI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Katharine Coles’ books include four collections of poetry—Fault, The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, A History of the Garden, and The One Right Touch—and two novels, Fire Season and The Measureable World. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, and a number of other journals. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN, among many other organizations. Coles teaches creative writing and literature in the English Department at the University of Utah. In 2006, she was named to a five-year term as Utah’s Poet Laureate. Katharine Coles is Director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.

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

Anne Sexton on Her Life and the Importance of Poetry

I live the wrong life for the person I am. —Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born on this date (November 9) in 1928; therefore, I thought today a good time to offer for viewing the rare film above of Sexton reading poems, responding to questions, and engaging with family members. In a letter Sexton wrote to Jon Stallworthy on September 24th of 1965, she described her life and the importance of poetry for her:

I am 36, fairly attractive, a mother, two girls are 10 and 12, a husband in the wool business. I live nine miles outside of Boston. I do not live a poet’s life. I look and act like a housewife. My daughter says to her friends “a mother is someone who types all day.” But still I cook. But still my desk is a mess of letters to be answered and poems that want to tear their way out of my soul and onto the typewriter keys. At that point I am a lousy cook, a lousy wife, a lousy mother, because I am too busy wrestling with the poem to remember that I am a normal (?) American housewife.

I led an average childhood of rather well-to-do parents. I did very badly in school because I was (is this an American expression?) too boycrazy to bother. I attended public school (free) until the last two years when I was sent away to boarding school (where there were no boys). At boarding school I spent my time writing to boys . . . (It’s rather dull isn’t it!) At any rate I eloped at nineteen and thought it a great idea. I am still married to the same man, by the way. Still . . . I wish I hadn’t married until 30. I wrote poems, a little in high school, but stopped and didn’t start again until I was 27. I knew nothing about poetry at the time. I had to start from the very beginning. My children were young at the time. I worked like hell, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning to type out years of bad poems.

My family tree goes back to William Brewster who came over here on the Mayflower. It goes back further to William the Conqueror, to Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, to Sir Edward Neville, who was beheaded in 1538, to Edward the Third who married Phillipa of Hainault, his mistress at age 15.

I live the wrong life for the person I am. I’m tall and thin and that’s all right with me, but my life is square and small and I wish I had a maid but that wouldn’t help. But only important part of the story is that I started to write, and it was a solitary act . . . One might add that interviews and life stories give me the horrors.

—From Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)

Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Doty, and the Berlin Wall

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched

With faces hidden while the walls were tightening . . .
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
—Bob Dylan

In recognition of the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s destruction, begun by citizens chipping at its structure with hammers and chisels on November 9, 1989, the New York Times invited a distinguished group of poets to write works inspired by this occasion. The authors contributing poems to an opinion piece, titled “What Fell Apart, What Came Together,” include Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ewa Lipska, Vera Pavlova, Tomaz Salamun, Zafer Senocak, Bruce Weigl, and C.K. Williams.

In an excerpt from Doty’s fine poem, “The Lesson,” readers are reminded of the scene many of us remember as transmitted on television screens and witnessed around the world that night twenty years ago:

. . . the night they first scaled the wall,

the people at the top reached down to pull
the others up, and shouted Come on,
Come on! When the guards turned the water cannons on them,

they sprayed back from open bottles of champagne.
Then the broken chunks appeared, in the hands of those
who had loosened them, fragments of concrete

glazed with spray paint inscriptions, scarred
with sledgehammer and chisel: instruments of union.

As I wrote earlier this year in an article, “Bruce Springsteen Sings Bob Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’ in East Berlin,” relating to the observed event, “the images of young folks opening the barrier between East and West piece by piece remain among the most exciting ever witnessed on television, as their courageous acts indicated a close to the Cold War was at hand. Today, my son possesses a piece of the Berlin Wall, which continues to exist as a concrete reminder of the value of freedom.”

In addition, I suggested readers celebrate the historic moment by revisiting the following video of Bruce Springsteen performing Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” to hundreds of thousands of dancing and clapping Germans in an East Berlin concert just a year before the wall crumbled.

Alfred Corn: "Swiss Army Knife"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Alfred Corn’s “Swiss Army Knife,” which appears in the special tenth anniversary issue (Volume XI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Alfred Corn has published nine books of poetry, a novel, and two collections of critical essays, the most recent titled Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007, published last year by the University of Michigan Press. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. He spends part of every year in London.

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

Baseball and Poetry: David Citino

Who in the world do you think you are?

Last night, while watching the World Series with my son, I recalled the famous photograph of Marianne Moore throwing a first pitch at Yankee Stadium, and I considered all the allusions to baseball I had seen in poems or essays by poets over the years, some of which are chronicled at one of the Poetry Foundation’s pages devoted to baseball and verse. I also remembered references to baseball as a metaphor for life lessons, including studying poetry, a perspective particularly offered repeatedly by the late poet David Citino, who died of complications from multiple sclerosis during the baseball post-season of 2005.

David Citino’s fondness for baseball could be found in his personal life as an avid fan and little league coach, as well as in his poetry and prose, particularly in a chapter, “I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back,” from his fine book of essays and memoirs, Paperwork (Kent State University Press, 2003), where Citino declares: “Poetry and baseball go way back. Walt Whitman filed what I like to think of as one of the first reports from spring training, in 1846. He happened upon ‘several parties of youngsters playing “base,” a certain game of ball.’ Whitman seems always to speak the truth with both clarity and exuberance. ‘The game of ball,’ he says, ‘is glorious.’”

Citino liked to note the ways baseball seemed to connect generations to one another, as when I watch the World Series with my son, and he enjoyed comparing poetry to baseball: “A poem and a baseball game have many similarities. Both involve skill and rules, talent and tradition, beauty and grace, the use of time and space. Everything matters between the lines.”

In a terrific collection of essays by poets that Citino earlier had edited—The Eye of the Poet: Six Views on the Art and Craft of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2002), which includes commentary by David Baker, Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Carol Muske, and Ann Townsend—Citino as well presented a piece he’d written with advice for beginning poets on obtaining knowledge about the art of poetry, “Tell Me How It Was in the Old Days: In Search of the Poet.” In the opening of his essay, Citino reminisces about a situation he also would repeat in Paperwork, a series of events that began when he’d been a fifth-grader wanting to discover how to pitch well and seeking out advice of an older kid at school:

I went to a ninth-grader to learn how to throw a curve ball. He showed me. “You grip the seams. You snap your wrist down, as if you held a match a second too long.” Then one day the coach of my little league team, with even more wisdom won from age, told me not to throw a curve at all until I reached sixteen and started to get my grown-up body, or I’d do irreparable damage to my elbow. (Perhaps there are moves, twists, and velocities that younger poets should wait to try. I need to investigate this further.)

Years later, an opposing coach, after his team had knocked me around quite smartly, my best pitches whizzing back past my ears, told me that he had alerted his team to the fact that, whenever I threw the curve, I tipped my hand by sticking out my tongue a little, as if I were concentrating.

“Son,” he said to me, “you have to learn, when you throw the bender, to keep your damn tongue in your mouth.”

Live and learn. I hadn’t known that the art is to hide the art. A pitcher or poet needs (I hope this doesn’t mix the metaphor too violently) a poker face, so as not to announce to the batter or reader his or her intentions. I’ve never forgotten this kindness extended to an enemy—nor have I forgotten the importance to the poet of having a reader with a good eye and ear. Those paunchy, grizzled men sitting in dugouts are there for a reason. Those poets—women and men—sitting on benches back in the mists of time also are there for a reason. It’s all about coaching and being able to take constructive criticism. The hardest lesson young pitchers and young poets have to learn is that their job is to listen, and to read, carefully.

The young have it over the older generations in everything but those degrees earned in schools of hard knocks. Many of the birds setting off on migrations and falling into the sea or getting lost under a maze of spinning stars—each year tens of thousands of birds never make it on their long and arduous journeys—are young ones who never made the trip before. Birds, baseball players, and poets need to find out what was in order to understand better what is. I tell student poets that the best way to develop is to read poetry of all ages and all cultures, to ask of every poet, Who in the world do you think you are? The answer varies of course from poet to poet (as it does from pitcher to pitcher), but also from poem to poem.

Readers are also invited to examine a previous post at “One Poet’s Notes” relating to this topic: “David Bottoms: ‘Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt.’”