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APRIL 2016

FEATURING

Ben LernerOcean VuongLinda Hogan

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

April 2016

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE

volume ccviii • number 1

CONTENTS

April 2016

S P L I T T H I S RO C K

sarah browning 3 Introduction

ocean vuong 4 Toy Boat A Little Closer to the Edge

dawn lundy martin 7 Our Wandering

jennifer bartlett 10 From “The Hindrances of a Householder”

jan beatty 12 Stricken Asylum

reginald dwayne betts 14 When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

regie cabico 16 Daylight Saving Time Flies Like an Instagram of a Weasel Riding a Woodpecker & You Feel Everything Will Be Alright

dominique christina 20 Chain Gang

martha collins 25 Leaving Behind

linda hogan 38 When the Body Lost in the Milky Way

craig santos perez 42 Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015

aracelis girmay 44 to the sea From “The Black Maria” luam/asa-luam

O N N AT I O N A L P O E T RY M O N T H

academy of american 51 Jen Benka, Edward Hirsch, poets Olivia Morgan, Ali Liebegott, Amanda Johnston, Samantha Giles, P. Scott Cunningham, Jeff Shotts, Tyler Meier, Andrew White, Richard Blanco, Brenda Shaughnessy

T H E V I E W F RO M H E R E

mariame kaba 61 Imagining Freedom

meredith walker 65 Smart Girls Read Poetry

omar kholeif 68 To Speak with Many Tongues at Once

tilleke schwarz 73 Poetry Is Everywhere

C O M M E N T

ben lerner 81 From “The Hatred of Poetry”

michael robbins 92 Make the Machine Sing

contributors 97

Editor

Art Director

Managing Editor

Assistant Editor

Editorial Assistant

Consulting Editor

Design

don share

fred sasaki

sarah dodson

lindsay garbutt

holly amos

christina pugh

alexander knowlton

cover art by d.w. fair“Self-Portrait,” 2015

POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG

a publication of the

POETRY FOUNDATIONprinted by cadmus professional communications, us

Poetry • April 2016 • Volume 208 • Number 1

Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2016 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at JSTOR.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Media Solutions, Ubiquity Distributors, Small Changes, and Central Books in the UK.

SPLIT THIS ROCK

The poets in this portfolio will be featured at the fifth Split This Rock Poetry

Festival, a biennial national gathering in Washington DC, taking place in April.

To learn more about the festival and all of Split This Rock’s programs, please visit

SplitThisRock.org.

3SARAH BROWNING

sarah browning

Introduction

In the two years since the last Split This Rock issue of Poetry, climate change has accelerated at an unprecedented rate. Police have con-tinued to murder black and brown people with impunity. Violence against transgender people is unabated. Radical inequality has wors-ened, so that now sixty-two people own as much wealth as half the world. Public figures in the United States baldly echo their fascist forebears, urging us to refuse those fleeing wars of our own making, while calling for the branding of our sisters and brothers based on their religious beliefs.

Split This Rock is a national organization based in Washington DC that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. We’ve been encouraged and emboldened by the activists demanding change: in the streets, the universities, the halls of power, and the literary world. Our programs integrate poetry into movements for social justice and support poets of all ages who write this work, such as those we present here.

You’ll find in these pages poets crying out in horror and mourning, as Reginald Dwayne Betts asks how to raise Black boys, given “all the colors of humanity / that we erase in this American dance around death” and Dominique Christina considers the historic chain gang,

“The tender meat of palms / Pulped like plums.” You’ll read of webs of exploitation and injustice that bind us to-

gether, that feed our American hunger with the labor and suffering of others, as in Craig Santos Perez’s “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015.” Martha Collins’s long poem, “Leaving Behind,” is an elegy and reminder that historic tragedies are echoed in all our losses, as the heart breaks, day after day.

But you’ll also read of resistance and even celebration: “A human does throw off bonds if she can,” writes Linda Hogan. And Aracelis Girmay recommits us to the subversive act of giving life: “the beauty of it against these odds / ... / & so to tenderness I add my action.”

Every poem here, then, is a struggle for redemption, a voice of love against the howls of fear and hate. May you find comfort and challenge, both.

4 POETRY

ocean vuong

Toy Boat

For Tamir Rice

yellow plasticblack sea

eye-shaped shardon a darkened map

no shores nowto arrive — ordepartno wind butthis waiting whichmoves you

as if the secondscould be entered& never left

toy boat — oarless each wavea green lampoutlasted

toy boattoy leaf droppedfrom a toy treewaiting

5OCEAN VUONG

waitingas if the sp-arrowsthinning above youare notalready piercedby their own names

6 POETRY

A Little Closer to the Edge

Young enough to believe nothing will change them, they step, hand-in-hand,

into the bomb crater. The night fullof black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks

from shattering against her cheek, now dimslike a miniature moon behind her hair.

In this version the snake is headless — stilledlike a cord unraveled from the lovers’ ankles.

He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealinganother hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables

inside them. O father, O foreshadow, pressinto her — as the field shreds itself

with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a homeout of hip bones. O mother,

O minutehand, teach mehow to hold a man the way thirst

holds water. Let every river envyour mouths. Let every kiss hit the body

like a season. Where apples thunder the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.

7DAWN LUNDY MARTIN

dawn lundy martin

Our Wandering

If they would only just beat or shoot me, but they wanted soul substance, to harbor that like that, so I could never move from this place. So they reach crackled hands inside and hold it open for raking ...

We in a shit rustle, the way in ramble and camaraderie, brown hand of whose mother makes its smooth noise over my mouth?

The burden of saying some thing, a head-nodding, and I want to be in-side of your knowing. Who laid their head on the disappeared’s pillow?

One minute a person licks your ear, the next, you cannot see your own white breath.

We gotta head on over to the party wayout in Bushwick because we’re lost,

and our flesh is on fire. There’s a man walking behind us. And growing.

This is what I tell him:

I am not a boy in anyone’s body.

I am not a black in a black body. I will not kowtow inside your opposites.

8 POETRY

How the world blisters you.How hunger left you statued.

•

One falls past the lip of some black unknown, where time, they say, ends.

We got us a sugar- mouth, a bit feeding,walk in circles in circular rooms built so precisely for our shapes, hold the figure that is the body that is, of course, me.

I stroke the feather that feeds me, that lines my cage floor with minor luxuries,

I say “mama” in its wanting sugary mouth.

What is the difference between ash and coal,between dark and darkened, between loveand addiction on Dekalb at 2 am, and I fall drunk from a ruinous taxi, already ruined from before before, the absent weight screamsinto your breath, you are no good, no good ...

The space between I and It. Lolling.

The Ibibio man was not born in his cowboy hat. Even his throat must ache like tired teeth.

•

9DAWN LUNDY MARTIN

Look what I am holding! Not desire, but infinite multiplicity, the mouth of existence.

To sing the blue song of longing, its webbed feet along jungle floor. What of our mechanical arm, our off-melody? Purpose in the gath-ering, I know, dear self. It rains and we think, God, or we think Universe. I say, portent across the wind. When wind is wrought, whole song fallen from its lip, some black unknown, where they say, time ends. What speech into hard God breath just as night park is godless? What of a silver cube in the mouth? This is our wandering.

10 POETRY

jennifer bartlett

From “The Hindrances of a Householder”

Jennifer had a tendency to stop inthe street and listen to the neighbors’

problems. She was consoling to them.Jennifer would look for people in trouble

and offer help, even thoughher body was relatively weak, and

she could not carry groceries for the old people, really.

When the young mothers had issuesthey would come to Jennifer because they

knew that Jennifer also had had issuesas a young mother and would listen to them.

Now Jennifer had middle mother issues.

1 1JENNIFER BARTLETT

Everything can be illuminated by wateror most things.

The two women in the black of mourningknelt by the river in exact tandem, and they spoke softly.The film, like life itself, had minimal

plot and extraordinary beauty.The film, like life itself, was

slow and maniacal. And whenwe walked the village afterwards

in search of just the right martiniI thought of the same steps I had

taken years earlier in preparation for mourning, and I was not unhappy.

12 POETRY

jan beatty

Stricken

We’re sitting in Uncle Sam’s Subs, splittinga cheesesteak, when Shelley says:I think I should buy a gun.I look up at her puffy face, and she’s staring,her hands shaking. On medication forschizophrenia, she’s serious. I say, Tell me why you need a gun.Her voice getting louder: You know why.No, no I don’t, I say. In case I need it. I might need it to shoot somebody.I give her a hard look — You don’t need a gun.No one is after you.She stares back: You might be after me.I don’t know what to say — I never know what to say.I know it’s not her speaking, but it’s my friend,far away in some other stricken mind.What’s it like to know you’re right/you’re in danger — and the world says no? Every woman I know has lived that.I say: I would never hurt you. I’m not a threat to you.She laughs, says, Well, you might be.The laughing scares me. I want out of this place,this sub shop, to walk away,knowing she can’t walk out of her mind, leavethe illness behind. The long minutes, the long, long minutes. She says, What do you think?I think we should eat our sandwiches, thentake a walk, I say. What about the gun?Let’s talk about it later, I say,not knowing a thing.Not knowing a goddamn thing.

13JAN BEATTY

Asylum

After Roselia Foundling Asylum and Maternity Hospital, corner of Cliff and Manilla

This is the house I was born in. Look at it. Asylum.

Narrate it:Notice the sloping cornice, look at the curved windows, etc.

This is the house I was born in. The cast-iron balconies / not wide enough for bodies.

Look at the photos:3 stories, 8 front windows and a wide door.

Dark red brick / inlaid with brown stone.Women’s bodies / expelling / banishing /

Leaving the babies there.Look at the photos, include the photos.

14 POETRY

reginald dwayne betts

When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

in the backseat of my car are my own sons,still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols,though my rhetoric is always about what I don’tlike, not what I fear, because sometimesI think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weepingall another insignificance, all another way to avoidsaying what should be said: the Second Amendmentis a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstancethat says my arms should be heavy with the weightof a pistol when forced to confront death like this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortarof poetry, the moment when a black father drives his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the deathof a black boy that the father cannot mention,because to mention the death is to invite discussionof taboo: if you touch my sons the crimsonthat touches the concrete must belong, at some point,to you, the police officer who justifies the echoof the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justiceis a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bulletsbecause his mind would not accept the narrativeof your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of his humanity,and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed; the narrative must invite more than the children bleedingon crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,the black people who march, the white people who cheer,the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanitythat we erase in this American dance around death, as weare not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearnto see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear

15REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everythingabout him, even as his face, really and truly reminds meof my own, in the last photo I took before heading offto a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am boundto be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everythingthey see into a grave & make home the series of cellsthat so many of my brothers already call their tomb.

16 POETRY

regie cabico

Daylight Saving Time Flies Like an Instagram of a Weasel Riding a Woodpecker & You Feel Everything Will Be Alright

The giant Slinky of Spring approaches & I have nothing to sport after spendinga fortune on hooded sweaters that make me look like I’m searchingfor the Holy Grail.

Struggling with granola & soy milk, dental bills accumulatelike snow & the potatoesI forgot have rotted. I’m broke & broke & broke & broke & broke, a bowling ball spiraling downa middle-agedstaircase of doubt.

The night I crazilyfled for the gentrifiedgrids of 14th Street.A pinball, I landedin Playbill. I leftBrooklyn tossingtelevisions & futonslike bombsin the bowels of hipster bohemia. In the piano karaoke bar, I met Kevin, a Peter Pan

17REGIE CABICO

Tennessee man who spun quips & witlike pixie dust about me.A puckish chariot fueled by moxie, this lean tambourine of charms leaned over me, a hot flamingo in the midnight light & admitted his once-upon-a-time fetish for Laotian men in his youth. I wanted him to fall for me as if he stumbledinto the inside of an Oriental mansion shaking the tchotchkesin my heart, steeping my crush into sweet green tea.Kevin would be my modelof elegance, unabashed confidence, a dragon fierceness. He said, There’s more to RainbowPride than RuPaul & Stonewall kickball& I finally feltI belonged in DC. November, Kevin’s jaw ached. He showedup at The Black Fox mumbling jumble

18 POETRY

garble through tears. His feature canceled. After the first break from winter gray to blue,Facebook alerts Kevin’s wheeled to hospice, liver cancer.

I teach Donmikehow to make pancitnoodles. We become the curse of gossipingFilipina spinster aunts.How have we becomegiggling little lily padprincesses behind invisible hand fans, waiting forour potential suitors to make the first move?

I wonder whether you’re afraid my hug lingers a little too longafter I rub your feet or maybe you’re just a Scorpio expressing affection & I know I have 3rd world Daddyissues but I don’t want to bring up hopes& fuck ups.

19REGIE CABICO

Maybe I’m in love with you like that baby weasel riding the flying woodpecker’sback. It’s an Avatarmagical, sci-fi, unexpected flash of bliss when really,the woodpecker isfighting for his life.The weasel doesn’tknow what it’s gottenitself into but a thrillthat will never come again, something better than a feathered Baby Jane din-din. Tomorrow, you’ll want to go to Rehoboth & kite surf at the beach house of the guy who lusts after you. The priest’ssermon makes no sense: Forest Fires in the Bay, Water Well Maidens & “Let It Go” from Frozen.It’s not that I hate white people or that we’re soul mates.It’s that you’re beginning to wash off me like ashes in holy water.

20 POETRY

dominique christina

Chain Gang

This song is not a language,Not a thing to be remembered,The field-holler tradition ofTeeth and kneesCursing wind,A concert hall of bloody handsSpilling the earth,Strangling dirt,Sledgehammer cursesOf men busted open.

On Parchman FarmYou could hear it comingUp through the trees,The hammering pulpit ofCrooning men and sweat,The tender meat of palmsPulped like plums.

Them men gulped down theDawn dew air,Let it catch in their throats,Broke the sunrise up andSang hymns like hexes:

Be my woman gal, I’ll beeee your maaaaaaan ...

And the killing fields of MississippiFizzled down to juke joints andThe hothouse music of illegal clubsWith thick women they loved outright andPlayed cards with andGave bourbon to when their handsDidn’t hold sorrow likePickaxes and the railroad was

21DOMINIQUE CHRISTINA

Just a railroad, A way to ride north if you could Get your money right.

Redbone gals with rosewater sweat, When they lifted their kneesSunflower County was a heaven They believed in.

Stick to the promise, gal, that you maaaaaade meeeeee ...

Steady now,They turned back the clock on Their hard, hard hands,Let the memory of fresh linen andLadies’ slips like gossamer Wings, a parade of plump thighs,The juju thrust of furious bonesSpread like grease Across starched-white sheets,Midwife them out of ol’ Parchman Farm

And back to the cockfights and gambling,Back when they had ambition,Back when they had a sweet woman To hold, her fat wrists Soft as butter, Limp as rain.

When she walk, she reel and rock beeeeeehindAin’t that enough to make a convict smiiiiiiiiile.

Mississippi’s where the cock crowed,A hoodwink if ever there was one,But see how a man can make a

22 POETRY

Steeple outta his hands,

See how he can break away From his hurt and be GodIf he wants to,How he can keep his mind Wrapped in yesterday,Drown out memory Like rain drummingDown like hornets Yeahhhhhh.

Them Parchman men,Ants in single file,Draft dodgersDigging trenchesPounding concreteLaying tracksPretending it’s Christmas So they can keep their handsAway from the colic of axe handles, The sputtering earth Snarling under their feet.Warden says every man Gotta pay his way on Parchman FarmSame as the outside.

Yessuh. They remember what it was like to be a man,To know that didn’t mean put a gun in your handOr go lookin’ for somebody to take down, naw.They sang ’til the hurt was just an Experiment in forgetfulness and theyWere back in clean clothes makin’ plans and

23DOMINIQUE CHRISTINA

Tryin’ to get a little money To buy tobacco and A pint with a little left over To get somethin’ sweet For the women who were wetUnderneath them, crooning A tumorless midnight.

The moans of wild womenAre specific:A whisper of hell danced pinkBy the rosewater sweat and mewling,Questions they ask when Their clothes are off.

When you gon’ take me to the movies? We goin’ Saturday, babyWhen you gon’ get you a steady job? Workin’ on it everyday, babyWhy you love me anyway, man? Ain’t a man alive who could help it

The dance, you know, the dance of being a free manThat never shows its fullness to you ’tilIt’s stripped down and gobbled up By railroad tracks and guards in high towersWith rifles watching your back, Bend to question markUnder a sun that won’t mind its business,

When the only part of your living life leftIs in the things you remember About a woman who hung Pantyhose off her porch to Dry and made you peach cobbler

24 POETRY

In the middle of the night If you asked nice and Danced with you to songsWritten on the back of aWatermelon truck by folk whoKnew something about longing,And those are the songs you give her nowWhile you bust the earth open.

Cuz your heart is a burial plot So stony.

Can’t ask nothin’ of a grave.Everybody knows that.

So you dig and Pound and Snatch and Haul and Scrape and Lift and Tote and Hammer.

Lay it down, man! Pick it up again, man!

You’re knuckles andDreams deferred in a placeWhere every stone, Every goddamn stone Is important!

I go free, lawd, I goooooooo free ...

25MARTHA COLLINS

martha collins

Leaving Behind

November 2015

1

Open up for closeout soul-clothes every-thing has to go closing

down time call them allsaints souls my own gone

ones: Andy Marcia Mary AliceMary Anne cloud of all carried out

2

outside my window: locust, clothof gold on the ground: its yellow

tabs linden hearts sweetgum starslike cut-outs from the same ... paper-napkin ghosts in a tree nearthe house where a year ago my friend —

rust-colored chrysanthemums rust-colored door

3

door to door the angel no the Lordpassed or did not pass —

26 POETRY

the angel opened the prisondoor doors to pass through, outor in: our millions, more than any —

in the other story the Lordsaid: to put a difference between

4

between one and anothera gun: at one end it’s a good

gun because at the other’s a cellphone pill bottle toy gun nothing a

Trayvon Tamir Dontre MichaelLaquan Eric Rekia John: call

them out and the others, black and many

5

many thousand gone nomore auction block slaves gone

up north where I am goingagain, coppery oak leaves holdingon, overlaid with gold, then just rustabove the skeletal gray ...

chains gone, or gone before, more —

27MARTHA COLLINS

6

more new neighbors residingon these avenues: thousands in whitemarble: whitman harvey harris bliss —

past yellowing birch and weeping beechat the intersection of Larch and Oakwhitney spencer jewell: a startle

of Japanese maple spreading red

7

red shadow on palemoon: earth curtain

drawn slowly acrossquarter half almost

across: weeks ago, weeksof my small life, child-

sized life so little left

8

left them theremother fatherleft leaving their living

their death-days: his Labor, her June

28 POETRY

yellow circles of leaves beneath —

something left behind

9

behind all that isis not God: still, smallsilence of not beyondbeneath before but

no where name

blue sky gray cloud that is not there

10

There was a road, long,gray, with dotted line —

wanted to write old, I thought years agoyoung, and here it is: road

running out, gold gonenow, cut here cut to old

29MARTHA COLLINS

11

old vets: in 2012 the lastfrom the First, the Great, the warto end all wars, its Armistice honoredthe cause of world peace but there was

the Second, not even a million left and nowit’s all Veterans, suicides, homeless, paradesrained on today, our post-traumatic war

12

wars now, ten to watch: Syria/ISISUkraine S. Sudan Nigeria Congo Afghanistan

while the faithful debate: turn the other oruniformed Christ with gun, as in the First —

while boys spill toy soldiers, khaki and greenwith tanks and guns, from a plastic tub —

while leaves dry to khaki on our ground

13

ground covered with oak leaves, crispand tan, and others under, crushedinto brown, soon to be earth —

but sun still lighting the threadleafJapanese maples apricot plum

30 POETRY

sun still paling my pink-tinged skinblood showing through my thinned

14

thinned to spindly twigs with danglesof pods the once-gold locust —

thinner the ice and higher the seasand hotter the planet and what will be doneat the Paris talks to slow it Paris

where last night terrorists killed and Beirut —

to stop the killing the dying earth to turn

15

turn on red stoplight to go light

touch blood lovelight wrote mind-

field for mine- it’sa gold mine rising

into light field to go

31MARTHA COLLINS

16

go with me, my love, my oneinto that night where one will go

before the other but still our nightboat our bed our lovers’ tonguessongs in the night nor the moon

by night our little light night-

night my love by and by

17

by order of no exit except

the angel troubled the pool but

stubble before the wind just

two apples left on this tree —

cloud from clūd, rock, but

the stars we see are not stars but

light but cloud over light

18

lights out wars on lastdays end times reckoning left

32 POETRY

behind but which us them not onestone upon another nation against

mirror terror Jesus Isa no one knows buthurry it up faster let climate also be

a sign beginning of sorrows

19

sorrow sorrow my friend’s last bed

just five months after they said he ...

behind the rust-colored door

brown brown all leaves on the ground

requiem aeternam we sang together

year years all tumbled down

et lux perpetua light

20

light of sun on sweetgum leavesglisten of amber and green or

sudden light of gunfire, bombs:Nigeria now: two girls, oneeleven, strapped into suicidevests, and Mali, the world

33MARTHA COLLINS

lit with the light of darkness

21

darkness He called ... or darknesswe make, denying the fallen among,the recent threatened tortured escaped:

send them back send them to campsmake them register carry IDsclose down their mosques let only

Christians passing by on the other

22

other, the once-red Japanesemaple, bare now, gray but

see its great muscled limbsstretch out low, then curve up

as if to embrace, climb on a limband see in the cleft a small cluster,

as if arranged, of curling red

23

red heart pulse of —

red the fountain filled

34 POETRY

with Jesus’s blood, in anothercountry filled with martyrs’ —

red the last apple on the tree Icould reach if I leaned —

red that looks blue until it’s shed

24

shed skin feathers leaves water-shed dividing line deciding

time earth-age namedanthro- for us, our own doing ourundoing losing dying unless —

the most fit the worstfit for earth in all its ages

25

age mine day mine pastmy appointed night

mine full moon mourningmoon in a clear sky old

light: wanted to make an openingout from closing down but

enough to leave behind

35MARTHA COLLINS

26

behind them a mighty oceanaround them beasts and wilde men

after them us, closing our shoresahead of us, rising oceans

forgive us this day ourimmigrant past that isn’t even —

first which shall be last

27

last chance ditch effort gasp:

gone-before last and could-be last:how much can one elegy hold?

could this be it? a friend wrote, her lastwords — last lost it for all our earth?

but last night that moon, all the way home

— from Old English follow: to last beyond last

28

last night I woke and found my body-held living-for-now a piece of all —

36 POETRY

over the graves the beautifulskeletal: chalice and vase, tangleand dance, the white bonesof the birch, its vertical script —

over my bones, this living that is my

29

my life my living my being my loving

my friend my friends my one my love

the huge white moon, missing almost nothing

my love in my arms, in my bed again

the advent candle for earth for hope

this almost last this work these leavings

my blessings my many my thanks for these

30

these days and nights, these lineshave changed (you must change)my life my loving (my one) and

now this leaving behind this opening

37MARTHA COLLINS

out (the spaces between the darklines of the great unleaved) to where

the night is as clear as the day

38 POETRY

linda hogan

When the Body

When the body wishes to speak, she willreach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing rootwhich has little faith in the other planets of the universe, knowingonly one, by the bulbs of the feet, their branching of toes. But the

feethave walked with the bones of their ancestors over long trailsleaving behind the roots of forests. They walk on the ghostsof all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal, human,the bones of even the ones who left their horses to drink at thespring running through earth’s mortal body which has much to tellabout what happened that day.

When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tellsof how it pulled children back from death and remembered every

detail,washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips of the

girl,the vulnerable testicles of the son,the future of my people who brought themselves out of the riverin a spring freeze. That is only part of the story of handsthat touched the future.

This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say,one with the hum of her own life in a quiet room,one of the root growing, finding a way through stone,one not remembering nights with men and gunsnor the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body.

I must go back to the hands, the thumb that makes us human,but then don’t other creatures use tools and lift what they need,intelligent all, like the crows here, one making a cast of earth clayfor the broken wing of the other, remaininguntil it healed, then broke the clay and flew away together.

I would do that one day,

39LINDA HOGAN

but a human can make no claimsbetter than any other, especially without wings, only handsthat don’t know these lessons.

Still, think of the willowsmade into a fence that began to root and leaf,then tore off the wires as they grew.A human does throw off bonds if she can, if she tries, if it’s possible,the body so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elementsand anything that lived on earth where everything that wasstill is.

40 POETRY

Lost in the Milky Way

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grainas if prepared for the path of the spirit’s journeyto the world of all souls.

It is not an easy path.A dog stands at the opening constellationpast the great helping hand.

The dog wants to know,did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature,did you take a life you didn’t eat?

This is the first on your map. There is anothermy people made of the great beyondthat lies farther away than this galaxy.

It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means.After this first one,the next could be a map of forever.

It could be a cartographyshining only at some times of the yearlike a great web of finery

some spider pulled from herself to help you recall your true followingyour first white breath in the cold.

The next door opens and Old Womancounts your scars. She is interested in how you have beenhurt and not in anything akin to sin.

From between stars are the words we now refuse;loneliness, longing, whatever sufferingmight follow your life into the sky.

41LINDA HOGAN

Once those are gone, the life you hadagainst your own will, the hope, even the prayerstake you one more bend around the river of sky.

42 POETRY

craig santos perez

Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015

Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.The moon reflects bleached coral. Tonight, let uspraise the sacrificed. Praise the souls of black

boys, enslaved by supply chains, who carry bags of cacao under West African heat. “Trickor treat, smell my feet, give me something good

to eat,” sings a girl dressed as a Disney princess. Let us praise the souls of brown girls who sew our clothes as fire unthreads sweatshops into

smoke and ash. “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give mesomething good,” whisper kids disguised as ninjas. Tonight, let us praise the souls of Asian children

who manufacture toys and tech until gravity sharpenstheir bodies enough to cut through suicide nets.

“Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me,” shout boys

camouflaged as soldiers. Let us praise the souls of veterans who salute with their guns because only triggers will pull God into their ruined

temples. “Trick or treat, smell my feet,” chant kidsmasquerading as cowboys and Indians. Tonight, let us praise the souls of native youth, whose eyes

are open-pit uranium mines, veins are poisoned rivers, hearts are tar sands tailings ponds. “Trick or treat,” says a boy dressed as the sun. Let us

praise El Niño, his growing pains, praise his mother,Ocean, who is dying in a warming bath among deadfish and refugee children. Let us praise our mothers

43CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

of asthma, mothers of cancer clusters, mothers of miscarriage — pray for us — because our costumes won’t hide the true cost of our greed. Praise our

mothers of lost habitats, mothers of fallout, mothersof extinction — pray for us — because even tomorrowwill be haunted — leave them, leave us, leave —

44 POETRY

aracelis girmay

to the sea

You who cannot hear or cannot knowthe terrible intricacies of our species, our minds,the extent to which we have donewhat we have done, & yet the depth to whichwe have lovedwhat we haveloved —

the hillsideat dawn, dark eyesoutlined with the darksentences of kohl,the fūl we sharedbeneath the lime tree at the general’s houseafter visiting Goitom in prison for trying to leavethe country (the first time),the apricot color of camels racingon the floor of the worldas the fires blazed in celebration of Independence.

How dare I move into the dark space of your bodycarrying my dreams, without an invitation, my dreamswandering in ellipses, pet goats or chickensdevouring your yard & shirts.

Sea, my oblivious afterworld, grant us entry, please, when we knock,but do not keep us there, deliverour flowers & himbasha bread. Though we can’t imagine, now, whatour dead might need,& above all can’t imagine it is over& that they are, in fact, askless, areneedless, in fact, still hold somewhere the smell of coffee smoking

45ARACELIS GIRMAY

in the house, please,the memory of joyfluttering like a curtain in an open window somewhere inside the brain’s secret lusterwhere a woman, hands red with henna,beats the carpet clean with the stick of a broom& the children, in the distance, choose stonesfor the competition of stones, & the summerwears a crown of beles in her green hair & the tigadelti’swhite teeth & the beautiful bones of Massawa,the gaping eyes & mouths of its archesworn clean by the sea, your breath & your salt. Please, you,being water too, find a way into the air & thenthe river & the spring so that your waters can wash the elders, with the medicine of the dreaming of their children,cold & clean.

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From “The Black Maria”

The body, bearing something ordinary as light Opensas in a room somewhere the friend opens in poppy, in flame, burns

& bears the child — out.

When I did it was the hours & hours of breaking. The bucking ofit all, the push & head

not moving, not an inch until,when he flew from me, it was the night who came

flying through me with all its hair,the immense terror of his face & noise.

I heard the stranger & my brain, without looking, voweda love-him vow. His struggling, merely, to be

split me down, with the axe, to two. How true,the thinness of our hovering between the realms of Here, Not Here.

The fight, first, to open, then to breathe,& then to close. Each of us entering the world

& entering the world like this.Soft. Unlikely. Then —

the idiosyncratic minds & verbs. Beloveds, making your ways

to & away from us, always, across the centuries,inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this

iteration

of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear,Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us

fall all

47ARACELIS GIRMAY

to our knees with awe,the beauty of it against these odds,

the stacks & stacks of near misses& slimmest chances that birthed one ancestor into the next & next.

Profound, unspeakable cruelty who counters this, who does not see.

& so to tenderness I add my action.

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luam/asa-luam

the afterworld sea

there was a water song that we sangwhen we were going to fetch river from the river,it was filled with water sounds& pebbles. here, in the after-wind, with the other girls,we trade words like special things.one girl tells me “mai” was her sister’s name,the word for “flower.” she has been savingthis one for a special trade. I understand& am quiet awhile, respecting, then giveher my word “mai,” for “water,”& another girl tells me “mai” is “mother”in her language, & another says it meant,to her, “what belongs to me,” then

“belonging,” suddenly, is a strange word,or a way of feeling, like “to be longing for,”& you, brother, are the only one,the only one I think of to finish that thought, to be longing for mai brother, my brother

ON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

51ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

academy of american poets

This April marks the twentieth anniversary of National Poetry Month, a celebration founded by the Academy of American Poets with input from other nonprofit poetry organizations and publishers. The original aim remains today: to create a time-bound occasion in which we might work together to spotlight poets and poetry. Many publishers take advantage of the month to release their poetry titles; many libraries and schools celebrate the art form with special events that inspire young people to engage with poetry, some for the first time. More and more, National Poetry Month has become an event to inspire the next generation of readers, with thousands of grade school and high school students participating in Poem in Your Pocket Day (April 21 this year) and other educational projects. The hope has always been that this increased visibility for poetry might spark an interest in readers that would carry forward into the rest of the year and even last a lifetime.

Of course the month also inspires critics to question whether a month-long observance of an art form is a kind of boosterism. While the month is a platform, poetry is not a product. There’s no pack-aging the poetic imagination and the wilds of poetry communities across the globe that celebrate the art form regularly. National Poetry Month is what we make it. It is a concentrated time to explore the ways in which poets’ work changes language and lives. This year, the Academy of American Poets asked poets, leaders of poetry organiza-tions, and publishers to respond to the question: What should poets and poetry readers be thinking about or doing for the next thirty days? Their responses are below.

— Jen Benka, Executive Director, Academy of American Poets

•

I once suggested that a friend and I compile and read some of our favorite short poems. It would be an event for National Poetry Month. He is a great proponent of reading poems aloud, so he would stand up and recite them from the podium. Meanwhile, I would

52 POETRY

sit on a chair hidden in the corner and read them silently to myself. I was kidding about the event, but half-serious about the idea. Much can be said for performing poems aloud, using our bodies as their instruments, but an equal amount can be said for keeping them to ourselves. Reading is contact. What we read can be shockingly per-sonal because it so deeply activates our inner lives, the daydreaming capacity of the mind. Reading poetry has helped deliver me to my-self. It has given me a language for experience — not just my own experience but also the experience of others. I wouldn’t recognize myself without being able to read and reread poetry. That’s why I’m sure it can be so determining. Reading is both private and social. For National Poetry Month, I recommend this sustaining way of being alone with others.

— Edward Hirsch•

When I was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in 2009, I felt the weight of opportunity and ex-pectation. How could we live up to the promise of Barack Obama’s historic campaign? How could we contribute to realizing the hope for change that inspired millions of Americans?

I turned to poetry.Poetry is a careful medium, a practice of observation and thought-

ful articulation, and a centuries-old conversation. But it is also a space of exploration, of bringing the inside out. We cannot change our country or ourselves without the courage to speak honestly about who we are and who we hope to be. We need to put our unique knowledge into words and insist that it be seen.

In 2011, the President’s Committee created a program to elevate and invest in our country’s most promising teen poets. To date, twenty of these National Student Poets have been pinned by First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House. They each spend a year bringing their poetry to communities across the country, en-couraging and inspiring others to bring out the poetry of their own communities, and of themselves.

Michelle Obama tells these poets that they are brave to “share something so personal and so precious.” I would tell them that kind of bravery is both the hardest and most powerful way to change the world. National Poetry Month is a time to combat a fearful, chaotic,

53ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

and angry world with the courage to raise your voice, to pour your hope into poetry.

— Olivia Morgan, member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, founder of the National Student Poets Program

•

This morning, a friend said, “Be in the life you’re in.” Why is it so difficult to live by these words?

Over my lifetime, I’ve used poets and poetry as a way to ground myself. When depressed or lost or crazed or in love, I’ve written a poem or read a poem or corresponded with a fellow poet. It’s com-monly said that after great personal or national tragedy people turn to poetry. Poetry sales rose after 9/11. It is reassuring to know that poetry somehow answers the unanswerable. Over the last few years, several people in my peer group have died unexpectedly. Some of them were writers. I was put not just in the position of turning to poetry for solace in these instances, but to their poetry.

My friend, the poet Justin Chin, died unexpectedly in December. I drove to San Francisco, where he was spending his final days in a coma. People came in and out of his hospital room to bid him fare-well. Many were poets. Some I hadn’t seen in twenty years. We’d all shared the same San Francisco literary community. And now we’d gathered to say goodbye to one of our own. It gave me such peace to see Justin surrounded by writers. His mother had flown eighteen hours from Singapore and never left his side. Justin’s brother was there too. All the poets kept telling Justin’s family, “Justin is a great writer. An important writer.” His mom, sharing Justin’s wit, said,

“Unless he’s writing about you.” We laughed. Later, I tried to write a poem about Justin. The poem never went anywhere. But I still stand by the first line, “Poets are everything.”

— Ali Liebegott

•

As we celebrate National Poetry Month, let us widen our gaze to see clearly the people and lives blurred in the margins of rhetoric. Let us ask ourselves how we are using our power and privilege in language

54 POETRY

to empower our communities, lift the voices of others, and speak for those who have been silenced. Over the past year, I have watched poets and allies rally in the word to speak out against police brutality through the Black Poets Speak Out campaign. I’ve seen poems raised at demonstrations in the name of justice. I’ve watched a man attend an open mic searching for the best words to share with his son when children were killed by those sworn to protect them. He was given James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and more. The poets read him the words of Ross Gay, Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, and others. In this way, I have turned to my own writing, searching for the best words in darkness and light. I’ve asked myself: Who and what are my poems in service to? Let our poems be in service to the people. Let each word work relentlessly to call forth the best of our humanity.

— Amanda Johnston, Cofounder, Black Poets Speak Out

•

There is a familiar argument that gets reorchestrated every year to proclaim that poetry is dead. The argument cleaves to the idea that poetry has outlived its usefulness as an archaic, inaccessible art form and assumes that poetry is only something done in service to the dis-tant past, perhaps in the presence of a Grecian urn.

Yet, if you look around, you will see a vast and diverse ecosystem of poetry and poets all around you, teeming with life and vitality. You will see poetry not only as a thriving community and conversa-tion, but the extraordinary poets who are continuing to serve as vital translators of the most intractable problems of being alive in our cur-rent moment of beauty and collapse.

For National Poetry Month, try to spend the month engaging in the extraordinary work of living poets. Read a book (or 30!) by a contemporary poet. Go see a reading (or 30!) in your community. Take a poetry workshop, write a few poems yourself, and contribute your own bit of DNA to the evolving ecosystem of living poetry. Look around and be amazed.

— Samantha Giles, Executive Director, Small Press Traffic

•

55ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

This past fall, for the culminating reading of a poetry class at a Miami elementary school, we tried to order pizza from a major commercial chain. They told us that they didn’t deliver to that particular neigh-borhood, despite it being technically inside their delivery zone. Their refusal was blatantly discriminatory (the neighborhood has “a bad reputation”), and we were frustrated. We wanted pizza and were willing to pay for it; why wouldn’t they just bring it to us? I relate this story because sometimes I think the poetry world, for all of its good intentions, behaves like that pizza shop. We make decisions about who does and doesn’t receive poetry, about where poetry should exist, and about who should be writing it. Much of poetry advocacy would be better defined as poet advocacy and comes pack-aged with unspoken rules about who is and who isn’t a poet. It says: if and when poetry receives more attention (insert: money, fame, etc.), here is who should benefit. This advocacy becomes a frail mouth-piece for a fringe sector of society. If we want poetry to have a more central place in our culture, we have to let go of our personal invest-ment in its growth. We have to admit that we don’t fully understand how poetry exists in the lives of people who don’t have MFAs, who don’t take workshops, who have no idea what AWP stands for, and we have to admit that those people have far more to teach to us than we have to teach to them. Poetry isn’t pizza. It doesn’t need to be delivered. It’s already in our communities, and by listening to those communities, we might learn that poetry’s power is far greater than we had ever envisioned.

— P. Scott Cunningham, Director, O, Miami Poetry Festival

•

Poetry asks us to pledge to one another, I see you. Poetry has been for centuries our great social media. You are its great theme.

I should have made my way straight to you long ago. — Walt Whitman

My life has been one of too much care, which ruins a person. I have turned through many pages. To summarize: we are invisible to each other. Let’s look into the first person’s claim of being first. Let’s look past the first person to see the second person.

56 POETRY

Then you, hey you — — Claudia Rankine

But let us pledge that it’s not enough to see you, in the poem, in the world. Let’s also set the poem humming so that the world may hum. Let me be you in the poem, and let me look up from the poem and still be you. Let me look up from many pages. Let me be you and you and you, and even you.

Let’s be simultaneous — — Christopher Gilbert

April to-do list: 1. If prose is called for, write a poem. 2. Write to someone, not to no one. 3. You will do.

A challenge for you, You-ness. / Add yours. — Thomas Sayers Ellis

— Jeff Shotts, Executive Editor, Graywolf Press

•

Early in the year, Natalie Diaz pointed me to a New York Times opinion piece by Pagan Kennedy: “How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity.” Kennedy explores whether we can create condi-tions for serendipity and profiles the research of Dr. Sanda Erdelez. Dr. Erdelez’s work reveals distinct groups: “non-encounterers,”

“occasional encounterers,” and “super-encounterers.” Imagine the spectrum: non-encounterers focus too much for serendipity; super-encounterers find connections everywhere, always. The research shows the frequency of serendipity is not exclusively the domain of luck. How then do we move around in the spectrum of encountering, increasing our capacity to see and feel connections? “You become a super-encounterer, according to Dr. Erdelez, in part because you believe that you are one.”

Cultivate serendipity. Use poetry to do it. In showing us another’s experience of the world, poetry has a lot to serendipitously teach us about ourselves. Czesław Miłosz famously said that language is the

57ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

only homeland. I have always felt this to mean that how we talk about things that matter is who we are. Poetry is a record of our best uses of language. Try it for a month — it might become a life.

— Tyler Meier, Executive Director, University of Arizona Poetry Center

•

Let’s be reckless. As humans and as artists, it is our natural instinct to take the risk of questioning what we know, what we like, and why. Similarly, the art of writing poetry does not progress without the constant questioning of poetry by poets. We are in a new age. An age when many of us are wild with our forms, our styles, our per-formances, and our ideas. So let’s be reckless. Write without form. Write without punctuation, without capitalization, without the letter e. Write with form, in extreme iambic hexameter, in a strict Shakespearean sonnet, in Victorian language. Put your poetry in a new place. Do what you’re uncomfortable with, but most of all, write without regard to the possible consequences. Poetry allows recklessness; it allows us to question certainties without caring about what’s to come.

— Andrew White, Houston Youth Poet Laureate

•

As a Presidential Inaugural Poet I’ve been blessed with the opportu-nity to share my love of poetry at such unlikely venues as the Federal Reserve, the Mayo Clinic, Silicon Valley, the USDA, engineering firms and conferences, law firms, and advocacy groups of all kinds. In every instance, I witness audiences taken by a newfound connection to poetry. I hear comments such as: “I never knew poetry could be like this”; “That’s not what they taught me in high school”; “This is my first time at a poetry reading — and I’m hooked.” For many, it’s the first time they’ve been exposed to contemporary poetry and en-gaged with a living poet. Their sudden delight and appetite for poet-ry has made me question why poetry isn’t a larger part of our cultural lives; why poetry isn’t as connected to our popular conversations as film, music, and novels; and why poetry isn’t more entrenched in our history, rooted in our folklore, and established in our national

58 POETRY

identity as it is in other countries. Where is the disconnect? I think the bottom line is education. The way poetry is generally deemed to be taught (especially in K through 12 grades) falls short of explor-ing its full potential for students as well as teachers. As such, this National Poetry Month, I urge poets and lovers of poetry to engage teachers of all disciplines, encourage them to discover the relevance and power of poetry, and the importance of enabling young people to encounter poetry in schools. That’s what I’ve committed to as Education Ambassador for the Academy of American Poets, which offers a plethora of resources for educators, including lesson plans, a monthly newsletter for teachers, and the “Teach This Poem” email series with activities to help teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom. Involving ourselves in education is important not simply for the sake of poetry, but to ensure that the world-changing power of poetry continues to enrich lives, not just in April, but every month of the year for generations to come.

— Richard Blanco

•

You open April’s front window wide — it’s bursting with flowers and the best words jostling to be seen and heard. These are the poems of April. It’s not so much a “national” month as it is a month of in-ner life pushed forward, flattened against the page, the glass, the mirror, the front window. We see you! It is poetry — soul on paper, never-to-die. But then, as you must, you open April’s basement door, where the rotted poems, so stinking and so much more plentiful, are pushing up through the floorboards, shoving the flowers to the front window saying, “Go go my beauty! Take your chance, and don’t think of us. We won’t make it to May.”

— Brenda Shaughnessy

THE VIEW FROM HERE

“The View from Here” is an occasional feature in which people from various fields comment on their experience of poetry. This is the fourteenth installment of the series.

61MARIAME KABA

mariame kaba

Imagining Freedom

I am not a poet. Nikky Finney, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Pat Parker are. I started writing poetry when I was eleven years old. My poems were melodramatic diatribes about poverty, home-lessness, and war. I was a strange kid who grew into a weird adult who is not a poet but reads, loves, and still occasionally writes poems in her journal.

I am an organizer: a prison abolitionist who wants to see black people, my people, free. To achieve this goal, we need imagination. Poetry helps me to imagine freedom.

It is possible ... It is possible at least sometimes ... It is possible especially nowTo ride a horseInside a prison cellAnd run away…

— From The Prison Cell by Mahmoud Darwish

Over the past year and a half, more people across the US have been circulating images of black death in part because of the current fo-cus on police violence and impunity. These images, however, are traumatic and to some degree mind- and soul-numbing. How do we mourn? How can we grieve? I think poetry opens a door. Poetry helps us to resist.

Last summer, I stood on a soapbox, a real one, and used poetry to call out the cops while grieving in public.

The previous Friday, Dominique “Damo” Franklin, Jr. had been laid to rest after having been tased to death by police. I hoped to attend his funeral but in the end I was unable due to a previous com-mitment. It was just as well. I hate funerals, especially when the per-son being buried is in his early twenties.

i sawthree little black boyslying in a graveyard

62 POETRY

i couldn’t tellif they were playingor practicing.

— Rehearsal by Baba Lukata

On an overcast Saturday afternoon, on a concrete island at the in-tersection of Ashland, Milwaukee, and Division, I joined a couple dozen people (mostly young) who were reading and performing poetry in opposition to state violence. The organizers of the gather-ing were from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade of Chicago and they invited me to say a few words. I said yes, hoping to find an outlet to express my grief.

I was preceded by Damo’s good friend, artist and activist Ethan Viets-VanLear, who shared an original poem:

And the police of the block that got a vendetta on every Black boy child;

The perpetrators of this fabricated peace we’ve apparently disturbed!

I was born in the gutterhandcuffed on the curb.I was born in a dungeon,medicated and shackled, smothered so I couldn’t speak.

I was transfixed by Ethan’s words and gutted by his pain. His poem was part eulogy, part primal scream. I hoped that his spoken words were a catharsis on the long journey toward healing. Maybe poetry can be a balm. When one reads Dennis Brutus, for example, it is im-possible not to believe in the healing power of art:

Somehow we surviveand tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.

— From Somehow We Survive

It was my turn. In memory of Damo and other victims of state vio-lence, I read two poems by Langston Hughes and Ai, holding on to their words like a raft in choppy waters.

Three kicks between the legs

63MARIAME KABA

That kill the kidsI’d make tomorrow.

— From Third Degree by Langston Hughes

At some point, we will meetat the tip of the bullet,the blade, or the whipas it draws blood,but only one of us will change,only one of us will slippast the captain and crew of this shipand the other submit to the chainsof a nationthat delivered rhetoricin exchange for its promises.

— From Endangered Species by Ai

As I read, I pictured Damo being tased (twice) by Chicago police and hitting his head so hard that he was brain dead when he arrived at the hospital. Unable to adequately convey my horror, I borrowed the poet’s tongue and took comfort in losing myself in another’s words.

The gathering was titled “‘No Knock’ an Artistic Speak-Out Against ‘the American Police State.’” The title was of course inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “No Knock.”

No Knocked on my brother, Fred Hampton,bullet holes all over the place!No knocked on my brother, Michael Harrisand jammed a shotgun against his skull!

It is as it ever was. No knocked on Damo who is now six feet under-ground.

Passersby stopped to listen as various people read poems about Guantanamo, police violence, prisons, surveillance, and more. Lorde is right:

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

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There is magic in hearing voices speaking out for justice over the din of a bustling city. Gathering as a collective to recite poetry can’t end state violence but it can lift our spirits so that we might live anoth-er day to fight for more justice. Now more than ever we need words to help us think through that which cannot be thought. Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation.

65MEREDITH WALKER

meredith walker

Smart Girls Read Poetry

What is the impact of poetry in our creative, professional, and per-sonal lives? For me, all three of those are intertwined, and have been since I created Smart Girls with Amy Poehler. Smart Girls is an orga-nization dedicated to helping young people cultivate their authentic selves. We emphasize intelligence and imagination over “fitting in.” We celebrate curiosity over gossip. We are a place where people can be their weird and wonderful selves.

Smart Girls has grown into a real community. One of the main goals of that community is to let people, especially young girls, know that they are not alone. Poetry is a part of that picture. I turn to po-etry to know that I am not alone in my own feelings — feelings that I don’t know how to articulate. Poetry reminds me to be generous with acknowledgment, to advocate for others, and to stay the course.

The earliest memory I have of poets and poetry is Shel Silverstein. At the time I wasn’t even aware that it was poetry. I just liked the sound and feeling of his words. I’m probably not alone when I say a lot of that feeling was lost when I encountered poetry at school. There it was mostly learning about iambic pentameter and onomato-poeia. Looking back on it, I didn’t really connect with or understand most of the poetry I read in school. I connected with Doonesbury and Judy Blume instead. I wish I had encountered Edna St. Vincent Millay. That would have been pretty incredible.

The first time a poem resonated with me in a way that made it stick was when I was told to read “The Guest House” by Rumi, the Sufi poet. This poem helped me stop and think about the uninvited aspects of my life. By welcoming them, they became less frightening. I still read “The Guest House” when I find myself hiding in the fa-miliar. This poem probably helped inspire our motto at Smart Girls:

“get your hair wet!”There is a kind of teaching without lecturing in Rumi’s poetry that

inspires me. In my frequently competitive and sometimes negative world, his optimism gives me a sense of hope. It has been said that his poetry “celebrates union” — bringing together, ending isolation. I know that we all need that.

66 POETRY

Welcome and entertain them all!Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,who violently sweep your houseempty of its furniture,still, treat each guest honorably.He may be clearing you outfor some new delight.

— From The Guest House, tr. by Coleman Barks

Now that I am older and, I hope, wiser, I have had the good for-tune to befriend a real life poet: Amber Tamblyn. She is everything you want in a fellow human being. She’s intelligent, artistic, funny, curious, and poetic.

I invited her to be the Poet in Residence at Smart Girls immediately after I first encountered her poetry. Here was someone who seemed to know what I was thinking, feeling, afraid of, encouraged by — she made me feel understood. I look forward to her poems in our ABCs of Smart Girls every month, but her poem for H, “Heartbreak,” made me go deep. In this poem, Tamblyn pulls off what most of us aren’t able to: she distills grief and loss down into words that help others understand their own grief and loss.

as all the teenagers inside of meand all the voices inside of those teenagersand all the pain inside those voicesand all the bloom inside that painand all the fruition inside that bloomand all the yearsand all the loveand all the pastand all the brokenand all the beauty still feels youlaying here beside meforever.

— From Heartbreak by Amber Tamblyn

Our relationships are the one beautiful and difficult thing holding us together. Otherwise, we are in constant risk of isolation and a sub-tle but persistent loss of our humanity. I am the first person to roll my eyes when someone says “It’s just business” because I think human-

67MEREDITH WALKER

to-human encounters deserve more respect than that. The origins of our lives are a mystery, but I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that those origins weren’t from a benevolent energy cultivating cubicle farms. When the measurements I use for success aren’t adding up to what society uses to measure success, I turn to Mary Oliver.

As you left their voices behind,the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voice,which you slowlyrecognized as your own.

— From The Journey

This poem expresses what it feels like to discover your vocation. For me, that was discovering that I wanted to move forward with creat-ing Smart Girls. But the poem is also about dumping your addictions, or dumping what is not working for you. “The Journey” affirms my theory that unconventional choices work out more often than not. I live with a wonderful and kind-hearted man with whom I’ve made a family — of our adopted dogs. I put all my effort into starting an online community to help girls know themselves better. It isn’t al-ways a blast, but this is my life, and almost every Mary Oliver poem sheds light on it.

There is something positive about people of all kinds finding something of themselves and their world in poetry, even if others consider the poetry less than brilliant. It’s like music. I would rather go to somebody’s home and listen to something that’s not my favor-ite than go someplace where no music is played at all. What feeds my life may not feed yours. Where you find understanding and mean-ing, I may not. What matters is bringing ourselves to a poem and being open about what we find within the words. Poetry becomes that honest, beautiful, scary, confrontational, wonderful door for our imagination.

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omar kholeif

To Speak with Many Tongues at Once

I have always been an immigrant, wherever it is I have lived in the world. I left Egypt, where I was born, at three months of age. I lived in the West as an Arab infant whose family had imposed ex-ile. When I returned home as a teenager, I was a stranger to my own extended family who scoffed and giggled at my polyglot Arabic ac-cent. Now that I am living in the United States again, I realize that I have been code-switching my whole life: not only speaking, but also writing in a foreign language, a tongue and vernacular that is not my own, constantly attempting to assimilate. Being a millennial diasporic Arab, I have watched the world devour the image of my people and their collective identities on many stages. I’ve been privy to everyone from presidents to school kids spewing bigoted rhetoric, seeing the Arabic-speaking world conflated with the violence of re-ligious extremism, a condition created and spoon-fed to the public by political commentators who have perhaps withdrawn themselves from their own complicity in making history.

I’ve always longed to find a native polyglot like me, someone who could discuss the mutilation of the Arab image in the Western con-sciousness, with whom I could talk about Putin and Paris, Netanyahu and Nagasaki, Tehran and Tel Aviv. But increasingly, the freedom of expression is stripped and buried in the Arab world — the criti-cal young Egyptian author Ahmed Naji, for example, was this year sentenced to prison for writing novels that speak of sex and hashish. Egypt, the largest of Arab countries, is becoming akin to the violently oppressive and homophobic Cuba that Reinaldo Arenas protested. With the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the image of the Muslim as well as the Arab became hollowed of any poetry: an apoca-lypse engulfing image and text.

As we seek resurrection and resuscitation from these ashes, there is one figure that I keep returning to, one who eloquently captures the essence of this collective trauma, and that is the poet, essayist, and painter Etel Adnan. She was born in Beirut to a Syrian father and a Greek mother from Smyrna in 1925. Adnan grew up in a household where multiple languages were exchanged: Greek, Arabic, Turkish, and French, to name the ones that I am certain of. However, in her

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meditation on growing up, “To Write in a Foreign Language,” Adnan explains how writing in English (as opposed to the many languages spoken in her familial home) became a form of resistance; she then proceeds to untangle the concept of home and the diasporic tongue’s potential to roam across multiple territories. Hers was a life lived in multiple self-imposed and forced exiles from the Arab world (spe-cifically her native Beirut); she spent much of her life between the ur-ban metropole of Paris and amidst the mountain ranges of Sausalito, California. In these places, Adnan worked between prose, poetry and painting, merging these worlds into a tapestry of her imagina-tion. Her elucidations evoked a hybrid being — a creolized subject, persistently developing a sense of home in foreign lands.

In her collection In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Adnan negotiates these memories of her native Lebanon. She begins:

placeSo I have sailed the seas and come ... to B ... a city by the sea, in Lebanon. It is seventeen years later. My absence has been an exile from an exile.

As she continues, she meditates:

The most interesting things in Beirut are the absent ones. The absence of an opera house, of a football field, of a bridge, of a subway, and, I was going to say, of the people and the govern-ment. And, of course, the absence of absence of garbage.

Absence is a theme that recurs in her landmark text The Arab Apocalypse, a book where hieroglyphic painted forms sit and breathe next to evocative passages of text. Here, Adnan reflects on the vio-lently mediated image of the Arab, who has become a violently con-tested and loathed public enemy:

A Hopi filled with bitter whiskey a solar bar in the midst of America.

.........................................................................The night of the non-event. War in the vacant sky. The

Phantom’s absence.Funerals. Coffin not covered with roses. Unarmed population. Long.

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The yellow sun’s procession from the mosque to the vacant Place. Mute taxis.

................................................................................The much awaited enemy has not come. He ate his yellow sun

and vomited.............................................................................A green sun on the Meadow of Tears sun in my pocket

wretched pocket sun.

The sun in these words is an embittered and pulsing device that evokes, absorbs, and contains the trauma of Beirut after the Lebanese Civil War. The specificity of this context, however, can be used as an allegory for the collective trauma that has ensnared the nations of the Arab world since the collapse of the Pan Arab ideal in 1967. Yet with-in Adnan’s words are coping mechanisms, ways out of the alienation induced by diasporic Arab status. This is often most clearly evoked by her renderings of landscapes — in poetry, accompanied by her thick broad brushstroke paintings. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Adnan retreats from the burden of the past, seeking solace in the hills before her: “open wide the earth, shake trees from their roots,” she sub-mits, as she makes her way through numerous returns and crossings.

In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, we begin to sense a kind of liber-ated renewal taking place. Adnan is emancipating herself from the burden of being placeless (or indeed, of many nonplaces), claiming art as the site of her escape and shelter. By the time we reach forth to 2012, a new form of critical resolve is conjured in her treatise on love, which was first printed as a notebook for the renowned art event Documenta 13, The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay.

Love begins ... becomes a desire to repeat the experience. It becomes an itinerary. A voyage. The imagination takes over that reality and starts building fantasies, dreams, projects ... It creates it own necessity, and in some people encompasses the whole of life.... How can one bear such an intensity?... But what is love? And what are we giving up when we relin-quish it? Love is not to be described, it is to be lived. We may deny it, but we know it when it takes hold of us. When something in ourselves submits the self to itself.

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Submitting the self to itself, to acknowledge one’s own polyphony within the world as a conditioned code-switcher is the ultimate re-solve of these poetics. Etel Adnan dances through language, speaking not only of many tongues but also of many places. Through her writ-ing, the condition of exile becomes one of possible resistance.

Playground, 2008, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

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tilleke schwarz

Poetry Is Everywhere

I make hand-embroidered work that contains images, texts, and tra-ditional items such as sampler designs. My work typically has what some might call a poetic character, a result of the content, lively com-position, and sensitive use of color. I love poetry and relate to it, not by quoting lines in my work, but through the inspiration that is of-fered by the free spirit of poets. A great example of such a poet is Kira Wuck. Here is one of her poems, which I have translated myself:

Finnish girls seldom say helloThey are not shy nor arrogantOne only needs a chisel to come closerThey order their own beer Travel all over the worldWhile their men are waiting at homeWhen angry they send you a rotten salmon.

— From Finnish Girls

I am very impressed by this young Dutch poet. In 2011, she won the Dutch Poetry Slam Championship. Wuck is half Finnish and half Indonesian. The poems have a remote kind of humor with un-usual but precise language. I relate to the free and creative way she combines images, like a chisel, beer, and a rotten salmon. I combine items in a similar way in my own work. I have not used this beautiful text in my work yet, but I often use repetition of a traditional image. I now have started to add a carrot in each work as a kind of running gag. I was very happy when Nigel Cheney machine-stitched plenty of carrots for me when he heard I had run out of carrots.

In art school we practiced a kind of calligraphy while copying a section of “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” by Frederico García Lorca. (We needed to practice calligraphy and our teacher thought it would be best to use a good poem instead of a stu-pid text. A great idea!) The repetition of “A las cinco de la tarde” (At five in the afternoon) had a huge impact on me. The rhythm of the second (repeating) line reminds me of the ringing of church bells. It is one of the few lines of poetry I remember after all these years.

100% Checked, 2005, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

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I rarely include lines of poetry in my work, but a few times I was invited to do so. For instance, when I was participating in a group exhibition that celebrated the two hundredth birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the curator sent several lines for inspiration. In general I hate to use other people’s themes for my work but the lines of po-etry spoke to me and I rather appreciated them, so I included “As the thistle shakes / When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed” and

“I am a part of all that I have met” in my work Playground.I always like to include text in my work, mostly out of its original

context, whether it is poetry or not. I like to think that it becomes a kind of poetry (if not already) as new meanings appear and the oddi-ties of our modern society surface, which seems to be the main theme in my work. For instance, last summer I had a layover in Detroit. The airport is modern and pleasant, and not only people but also dogs are welcome. There were specially designated “pet relief areas,” which sounds a lot more inviting than the blunt toilet or WC for human beings. Pet relief can be understood variously as a device to get rid of one’s dog or as a kind of liberation. This poetry leaked through to the design of the facility itself, including the tiny dog bidets. I prob-ably will use some of this inspiration in my work. As the visual artist Susan Hiller has said in her work, which mainly consists of huge texts,

“There is no distinction between ‘reading’ images and reading text.” Security is an extremely important issue in our modern world. It

makes us behave stranger than ever and dominates our way of living. I love signs that say “secret access code” for a simple locker at the train station or “suspicious circumstances” for an area one is not al-lowed to enter. This sounds so mysterious but does not give any clues to what is going on. Last year I received a parcel from the US with the notice that it “does not contain any unauthorized explosives, de-structive devices, or hazardous materials.” The US seems to require the sender to add this kind of information to a package. To me it is absolutely unusual to inform the addressee about what is not in the package.

When on holiday in Iceland I was intrigued by the content of their national phone book. The first pages contained instructions for the general public regarding natural disasters. Attention was paid to vol-canic eruptions (“Always wear a helmet in the vicinity of eruptions”), lightning and thunderstorms, earthquakes, and avalanches. Exciting! The text would even improve when shortened (“take the short-est way out by moving perpendicular to the wind”). It offered me

Losing our memory, 1998, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

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something to think about: Why the general public? Why natural di-sasters? My favorite line is: “Stay where the wind blows and do not go into low (!) areas.” First of all, it sounds romantic. Then I realized that I am also living in a low area (below sea level) and that area is also called the “low countries” (the Netherlands and Belgium). So maybe I am risking my life over here.

Sometimes quotes knock on my door and insist to be part of my work. “On ne mange pas tulipes” (one does not eat tulips) is an origi-nal quote from the French chef Paul Bocuse when a Dutch television host interviewed him about what kinds of Dutch ingredients he uses in his world-famous cuisine. His first answer was Gouda cheese, but the interviewer insisted on hearing a bit more. Bocuse’s answer was a little arrogant and humorous, but probably more dramatic than he realized. Tulip bulbs were a common dish near the end of WWII when there was a great shortage of food in Holland. My mother-in-law told me she even liked them as they taste like onions. Needless to say, she is not a very fussy eater.

I was born in 1946 but WWII had quite an influence on my life. I am Jewish and my parents survived the war by being hidden by very courageous farmers in the north of Holland. My eldest sister was protected by a minister and his wife. Most of my relatives, how-ever, were murdered. My parents hardly spoke about those times or the loss of their numerous relatives. We hardly dared to ask; even in our childhood we somehow sensed that it was too painful and too difficult to cope with.

The famous Dutch visual artist, writer, and poet Armando was raised in the town of Amersfoort near a “transition camp” for pris-oners who were to be sent to concentration camps in Germany. The suffering of the victims and the cruelty of the Nazi camp guards, so near to his home, influenced him for the rest of his life and became the main theme in his work. He blames “guilty landscapes and guilty trees” and wonders why they did not do anything when the drama took place.

Yes, the trees are still there, actually. But thatnoise, where does that noise come from.That did not used to be there.

— From Notes on the Enemy

I like the way he makes very short poems, often consisting of just a

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few lines with subtle references to the past. I try to deal with this past in a similar way. I have known them all has many references to WWII and my family. Tally marks recall the many murdered people. I used different colors from reddish to gray to black to indicate that their fire is still slightly burning. In 1999 I included the Star of David and the words “millenium proof” in my work Losing our memory.

Leo Vroman was a very interesting and sensitive Dutch poet. Like Armando, he is multitalented as a Dutch-American hematologist, a prolific poet (mainly in Dutch), and an illustrator.

If I know better as a poetMy heart I do not know you very wellAnd uncertain if you know me well;You are maybe used to meOr mainly attached to me.

— From If I know better as a poet

I am not certain about the meaning behind the quoted lines. But I as-sume they are part of a love song for his wife, Tineke. Their mutual history is a moving love story. I have never expressed my love on linen, except for maybe the love for my main muse: my cats. Almost all my works contain some cats.

COMMENT

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ben lerner

From “The Hatred of Poetry”

We were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human. Our ability to write poems is therefore in some sense the measure of our humanity. At least that’s what we were taught in Topeka: we all have feelings inside us (where are they located, ex-actly?); poetry is the purest expression (the way an orange expresses juice?) of this inner domain. Since language is the stuff of the social, and poetry the expression in language of our irreducible individual-ity, our personhood is tied up with our poethood. “You’re a poet and you don’t even know it,” Mr. X used to tell us in second grade; he would utter this irritating little refrain whenever we said something that happened to rhyme. I think the jokey cliché betrays a real belief about the universality of poetry: some kids take piano lessons, some kids study tap dance, but we don’t say every kid is a pianist or dancer. You’re a poet, however, whether or not you know it, because to be part of a linguistic community — to be hailed as a “you” at all — is to be endowed with poetic capacity.

If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now. They will tell you they have a niece or nephew who writes poetry. These familiar encounters — my most recent was at the dentist, my mouth propped open while Dr. X almost gagged me with a mirror, as if searching for my innermost feelings — have a tone that’s difficult to describe. There is embarrassment for the poet — couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you? — but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poem and self. The ghost of that romantic conjunction makes the falling away from poetry a falling away from the pure potentiality of being human into the vicissitudes of being an actual person in a concrete historical situa-tion, your hands in my mouth. I had the sensation that Dr. X, as he knocked the little mirror against my molars, was contemptuous of the idea that genuine poetry could issue from such an opening. And Dr. X was right: there is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all,

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and at best, a place for it. The awkward and even tense exchange between a poet and non-

poet — they often happen on an airplane or in a doctor’s office or some other contemporary no-place — is a little interpersonal breach that reveals how inextricable “poetry” is from our imagination of so-cial life. Whatever we think of particular poems, “poetry” is a word for the meeting place of the private and the public, the internal and the external; my capacity to express myself poetically and to com-prehend such expressions is a fundamental qualification for social recognition. If I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me. I don’t mean that Dr. X or whoever thinks in these terms, or that these assumptions about poetry are present for everyone or in the same degree, or that this is the only or best way of thinking about poetry, but I am convinced that the embarrassment or suspicion or anger that is often palpable in such meetings derives from this sense of poetry’s tremendous social stakes (combined with a sense of its tremendous social marginalization). And it’s these stakes which make actual poems an offense: if my seatmate in a holding pattern over Denver calls on me to sing, demands a poem from me that will unite coach and first class in one community, I can’t do it. Maybe this is because I don’t know how to sing or because the passengers don’t know how to listen, but it might also be because “poetry” denotes an impossible demand. This is one underlying reason why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed: most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet by his very claim to be a maker of poems is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet your interlocutors will often ask: A published poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? It’s not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It’s as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, how-ever small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise

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bafflingly persistent association of poetry and fame — baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.

(At the turn of the millennium, when I was the editor of a tiny poetry and art magazine, I would receive a steady stream of submis-sions — our address was online — from people who had clearly never read our publication but whose cover letters expressed a remarkable desperation to have their poems printed anywhere. Some of these let-ters — tens of them — explained that the poet in question was suffering from a terminal condition and wanted, needed, to see his or her po-ems published before he or she died. I have three letters here that contain the sentence “I don’t know how long I have.” I also received multiple letters from prisoners who felt poetry publication was their best available method for asserting they were human beings, not merely criminals. I’m not mocking these poets; I’m offering them as examples of the strength of the implicit connection between poetry and the social recognition of the poet’s humanity. It’s an association so strong that the writers in question observe no contradiction in the fact that they are attempting to secure and preserve their person-hood in a magazine that no one they know will see. It is as though the actual poem and publication do not matter; what matters is that the poet will know and can report to others that she is a published poet, a distinction that nobody — not Death, not the social death of exclusion from the Law — can take from her. Poetry makes you fa-mous without an audience, an abstract or kind of proto-fame: it is less that I am known in the broader community than that I know I could be known, less that you know my name than that I know that I am named: I am a poet / and you know it.)

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet your interlocutor will often ask you to name your favorite po-ets. When you say, “Cyrus Console,” he squints as if searching his memory and nods as if he can almost recall the work and the name, even though of course he can’t (none of the hundreds of non-poet acquaintances who have asked you this sort of question ever can). But I have decided — am deciding as I write — that I accept that look, that I value it; I love that the non-poet is conditioned to believe that the name and work are almost within reach even though the only po-ems he’s encountered in the last few decades have been at weddings and funerals. I love how it seems like he’s on the verge of recalling a

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specific line before he slowly shakes his head and concedes: I’ve never heard of him; it doesn’t ring a bell. Among other things this is a (no more than semiconscious) performance of the demands of poetry, at this point almost a muscle memory: the poem is a technology for me-diating between me and my people; the poem must include me, must recognize me and be recognizable — so recognizable I should be able to recall it without ever having seen it, like the face of God.

Exchanges of this sort strike me as significant because I feel they are contemporary descendants, however diminished, of those found-ing dialogues about poetry that have set, however shakily, the terms for most denunciations and defenses in the West. Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetori-cians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk corrupting the citizens of the just city, especially the impression-able youth. (Socrates’s questions in the Republic are so leading and full of traps that he might as well have his hands in his interlocutors’ mouths). One difference between Plato’s Socrates and Dr. X is that Socrates fears and resents the corrupting power of actual poetic per-formance — he thinks poets are going to excite excessive emotions, for instance — whereas Dr. X presumably fears and resents his in-ability to be moved by or comprehend what passes for a poem. Still, Socrates’s interrogations of poets — what do they really know, what do they really contribute — will feel familiar to many of my contem-poraries. Plato/Socrates is trying to defend language as the medium of philosophy from the unreason of poets who just make stuff up as opposed to discovering genuine truths. The oft-remarked irony of Plato’s dialogues, however, is that they are themselves poetic — for-mally experimental imaginative dramatizations. We might say that Socrates (“He who does not write,” as Nietzsche put it) is a new breed of poet who has found out how to get rid of poems. He argues that no existing poetry can express the truth about the world, and his dialogues at least approach the truth by destroying others’ claims to possess it. Socrates is the wisest of all people because he knows he knows nothing; Plato is a poet who stays closest to poetry because he refuses all actual poems. Every existing poem is a lie and Plato “reads” the claims made on behalf of those poems and refutes them in order to promote the endless dialectical conversation that is reason over the false representation that is an actual poem. Socratic irony: perfect contempt. Plato’s famous attack on poets can be read, therefore, as a

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defense of poetry from poems. Socrates: “Of that place beyond the heavens none of our earthly poets has yet sung, and none shall sing worthily.”

I remember first reading Plato at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library and feeling poetry must be a powerful art if the just city depended on its suppression. How many poets’ outsized expectations about the political effects of their work, or critics’ disappointment in what actual poems contribute to society, derive from Plato’s be-stowing us with the honor of exile? Of course, many poets under totalitarian regimes have been banished or worse because of their writing; we must honor those — like Socrates himself — who died for their language. But the Republic’s attack on poets has helped spon-sor for thousands of years the vague notion that poetry has profound political stakes even in contexts where nobody can name a poet or quote a poem. Anybody who reads (or reads the SparkNotes for) the Republic is imbued with the sense that poetry is a burning social question. When I declared myself a poet, I knew it was an important calling not because I had seen the impact of actual poems, but because the founding figure of the Western tradition was convinced that po-ets had to go. (The difference between what Socrates and I meant by “poet” or “poem” never occurred to me; the point was my work would be revolutionary; I, like many poets and critics, acquired my idealism via Platonic contempt).

It didn’t stop, of course, with the Greeks; when I read around in the Renaissance, there were more assaults on poetry, the assailants often deriving their authority from Plato — poetry is useless and/or corrupting (somehow it’s at once powerless and dangerous); it’s less valuable than history or philosophy; in some important sense it’s less real than other kinds of making. Philip Sidney’s famous and beautiful and confusing The Defense of Poesy — a work that helped establish the posture of poets and critics of poetry as essentially defensive — is the assertion of an ideal of imaginative literature more than an exalta-tion of actual poems. Poetry, Sidney says in his wonderful prose, is superior both to history and philosophy; it can move us, not just teach us facts; the poet is a creator who can transcend nature; thus poetry can put us in touch with what’s divine in us; and so on. But Sidney doesn’t worry much about specific poems, which often suck: we shouldn’t say “that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry” — we shouldn’t knock poetry because of bad poems. At the end of the defense, instead of supplying examples of great

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poems, Sidney just pities people who “cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry.” (I, too, can’t hear it).

Even the most impassioned Romantic defenses of poetry rein-scribe a sense of the insufficiency of poems. Percy Bysshe Shelley:

“the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.” A feeble shadow of an original conception sounds like Plato, although Plato didn’t think a poet could really conceive of much. In Plato’s time poetry was dominant relative to the new mode of phi-losophy he was attempting to advance; by the nineteenth century, defenses of poetry had to assert the relevance of the art for a (novel-reading) middle class preoccupied with material things, what Shelley calls the “excess of the selfish and calculating principle.” To defend poetry as an alternative to material concerns is both to continue and invert the Platonic critique. It is to accept the idea that poems are less real — less truthful, according to Plato — than other kinds of representation, but to recast this distance from material reality as a virtuous alternative to our insatiable hunger for money and things, credit and cattle. This enables poets and their defenders to celebrate poetic capacity — “original conceptions” — over and against the

“feeble shadow” of real poems. Reading in my admittedly desultory way across the centuries,

I have come to believe that a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of virtual poetry — it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual. Which is not to say that defenses never cite specific poems, but lines of poetry quoted in prose preserve the glimmer of the unreal. To quote the narrator of my first novel who is here describing an exaggerated version of my own experience:

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encoun-tered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

•

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Many of the periodic essays worrying over the state of American poetry have — despite their avowed democratic aspirations — an im-plicit politics that makes me uneasy. Consider one of the most recent high-profile jeremiads, Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: or, The decline of American verse,” which appeared in the July 2013 Harper’s. Edmundsons’s essay contends that contemporary poets, while talent-ed, have ceased to be politically ambitious. The primary problem is that, while many poems are “good in their ways,” they “simply aren’t good enough”; this is because “they don’t slake a reader’s thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common.” Once again, the problem with poets is their failure to be universal, to speak both to and for everyone in the manner of Whitman, who Edmundson of course evokes. (Why Whitman should be considered a success and not a fail-ure is never addressed; again, it’s as if Whitman’s dream was realized in some vague past the nostalgists can never quite pinpoint.)

Edmundson makes a few silly claims, e.g. that contemporary writ-ers haven’t responded to the influence/language of popular culture (maybe he didn’t read any of the Ashbery he criticizes?), or that the poets he singles out — mainstream, celebrated poets such as Jorie Graham and Frank Bidart — have never attempted to take on issues of national significance. Whatever you think of these poets, these claims are merely false. Putting that aside: according to Edmundson, the problem with contemporary poets is that they’re concerned with the individual voice.

Contemporary American poets now seem to put all their en-ergy into one task: the creation of a voice. They strive to sound like no one else. And that often means poets end up pushing what is most singular and idiosyncratic in themselves and in the language to the fore and ignoring what they have in common with others.

Seamus Heaney is criticized for sounding like Seamus Heaney and not everyone; “John Ashbery sounds emphatically like John Ashbery”; etc. Individuals are too individual to speak for everyone. Who is at fault? The university.

How dare a white female poet say “we” and so presume to speak for her black and brown contemporaries? How dare a

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white male poet speak for anyone but himself? And even then, given the crimes and misdemeanors his sort have visited, how can he raise his voice above a self-subverting whisper?

Well, how dare he or she? Edmundson raises these questions as if it were obviously PC cowardice not to claim the right to speak for everyone. But then, his essay strongly suggests that he considers speaking for everyone the exclusive domain of white men. He praises Sylvia Plath, for instance, but note how her work — singled out as an example of the ambitious writing we currently lack — turns out only to speak for women:

Sylvia Plath may or may not overtop the bounds of taste and transgress the limits of metaphor when she compares her gen-teel professor father to a Nazi brute. (“Every woman adores a Fascist.”) But she challenges all women to reimagine the rela-tions between fathers and daughters.

Edmundson apparently cannot imagine a father reading the poem and feeling challenged. When Robert Lowell writes, however, he is “calling things as he believed them to be not only for himself but for all his readers.” Somehow, according to Edmundson, “Waking Early Sunday Morning” — one of Lowell’s most famous anti-war po-ems — speaks for everyone: “Lowell speaks directly of our children, our monotonous sublime: few are the consequential poets now who are willing to venture that ‘our.’” Plath helps daughters reimagine their relationships with their fathers; Lowell is everybody’s father. Lowell’s specific cultural allusions — the title echoes Wallace Stevens, the prosodic structure recalls Andrew Marvell — apparently make him universal (Whitman, by the way, would have rejected these tech-niques as too exclusive and staid for the American experiment).

The weirdest moment in the essay might be when Edmundson, probably eager to give an example of a nonwhite person who can speak for the collective, discusses what he calls Amiri Baraka’s

“consequential and energetic political poem,” “Somebody Blew Up America.” The poem received widespread attention because Baraka — who was then the poet laureate of New Jersey — included the following quatrain:

89BEN LERNER

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombedWho told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin TowersTo stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

The poem was “consequential” in the sense that it caused New Jersey to dissolve the position of poet laureate — Baraka refused to resign and it turned out there was no constitutional mechanism for his removal — and the poem earned a place in the Anti-Defamation League archive. I can imagine cogent arguments praising or excusing or bashing Baraka’s poem, but I am startled by Edmundson’s claim that this poem is at least “an attempt to say not how it is for Baraka exclusively but how it is for all.” It’s true that Baraka’s poem is not concerned with the particulars of his individual experience, but it is not at all true that the poem isn’t unmistakably in Baraka’s voice; regardless, how do lines like the following speak for “all”:

They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn’t our American terrorists It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death RowIt wasn’t Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring

Most of the poem is devoted to cataloging the violence done to peo-ple of color by white Americans. Since Edmundson evokes Baraka’s intentions, we might as well quote Baraka’s account of his own poem:

The poem’s underlying theme focuses on how Black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into US chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners, US & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis, Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism, character assassination, historical-ly, and at this very minute throughout the US. The relevance of this to Bush’s call for a ‘War on Terrorism,’ is that Black people

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feel we have always been victims of terror, governmental and general, so we cannot get as frenzied and hysterical as the peo-ple who while asking to dismiss our history and contemporary reality to join them, in the name of a shallow ‘patriotism’ in attacking the majority of people in the world, especially people of color and in the third world.

The “we” here is purposefully not “all”; indeed, Baraka’s point is ex-plicitly to refuse the false “we” politicians are attempting to deploy — a

“we” that tactically forgets the history of anti-Black violence as it at-tempts to constitute a unified front in the “War on Terror,” which in turn involves killing more people of color. To suggest that Baraka’s

“we” is an attempt to speak for “all” is therefore to repeat the dis-missal of “our [people of color’s] history and contemporary reality.”

I can forgive Edmundson for his bad examples only in the sense that there are no good examples of “superb lyric poetry” that at once “have something to say” utterly specific to a poet’s “experi-ence” and can speak for all. (Edmundson might say what he demands is that a poet attempt that impossible task and fail, but his readings lead us to suspect he believes that white men will fail better.) The lyric — that is, the intensely subjective, personal poem — that can authentically encompass everyone is an impossibility in a world char-acterized by difference and violence. This is not to indict the desire for such a poem — indeed, the word we often use for such desire is

“poetry” — but to indict the celebration of any specific poem for hav-ing achieved this unreachable goal because that necessarily involves passing off particularity as universality. Edmundson lacks a perfect contempt for the actual examples he considers.

The capacity to transcend history has historically been ascribed to white men of a certain class while denied to individuals marked by difference (whether of race or gender). Edmundson’s (jokey?) ac-knowledgment of the “crimes and misdemeanors” white men have committed in their effort to speak as if they were everyone can hardly count as an engagement with — let alone a refutation of — this in-equality. As Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine put it in a recent essay:

What we want to avoid at all costs is ... an opposition between writing that accounts for race ... and writing that is “universal.” If we continue to think of the “universal” as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look

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universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it — that it “transcends” its category.

What makes Walt Whitman so powerful and powerfully embarrass-ing a founding figure for American poetry is that he is explicit about the contradictions inherent in the effort to “inhabit all.” This is also what makes it so silly to imply Whitman’s poetic ideal was ever ac-complished in the past and that we’ve since declined — because of identity politics — into avoidable fractiousness. “I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves,” Whitman wrote in his journal, indicating the impossible desire to both recognize and suspend dif-ference within his poems, to be no one in particular so he could stand for everyone. You can hate contemporary poetry — in any era — as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone.

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michael robbins

Make the Machine Sing

War Music: An Account of Homer’s “Iliad,” by Christopher Logue. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28.00.

In 1937 Sergei Eisenstein noted an affinity between filmic montage and the imagistic sequencing Homer employed in The Iliad. Joanna Paul, in Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, traces several arguments

“that certain pre-modern societies understand visuality in a way that can be equated to cinema.” Paul Leglise, working from Lucretius’s conception of vision, wrote in 1958 that “it is no paradox to claim that the new terms” of cinema “define very exactly certain literary techniques used by an ancient Latin poet.” Leglise thought of Virgil, not Homer, as the first cineaste; in 1970 we find Alain Malissard arguing that Homer’s poetry, but not Virgil’s, anachronistically exemplifies the seventh art.

Obviously, it is problematic to liken ancient poetry to a medium that was invented around the same time as Coca-Cola. But I’ve been thinking of The Iliad in cinematic terms since I first read it in college, when I was also learning about Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, Godard and Nicholas Ray. Eisenstein, drawing on Lessing’s Laocoon, isolates Homer’s description of Hera’s chariot, pointing out how the poet depicts the wheels in stages. In Stanley Lombardo’s flinty rendition:

Hebe slid the bronze, eight-spoked wheelsOnto the car’s iron axle, wheels with pure gold rimsFitted with bronze tires, a stunning sight,And the hubs spinning on both sides were silver.

Strangely, there is no good film version of Homer’s epic. Or perhaps that’s not so strange. As cinematic as its techniques may be, The Iliad does not lend itself easily to conventional commercial moviemaking. Maybe it would take something like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 — a thirteen-hour film in which theater groups rehearse avant-garde adaptations of Aeschylus — to capture its sweep and roil. (This is one reason Godard’s Le Mépris remains the best Homeric movie — among other things, it’s a consideration of how one might

93MICHAEL ROBBINS

bring Homer to the screen; Fritz Lang plays himself, hired to adapt The Odyssey.) Directors tend to play up the romance angle and tack the sack of Troy from The Aeneid onto the end, as in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). As Paul notes, The Iliad “does not claim to be ‘about’ the Trojan War, and it does not matter that it ends before the war does.”

Troy is a bad movie, peppered with basic errors and laughable dia-logue. But it contains one scene that seems to me to possess genuine Homeric insight. It’s the battle between Achilles, played pretty well by Brad Pitt, and Eric Bana’s Hector. Achilles is insane with rage and grief over Patroclus — you know the story — and controls the fight from the outset. But at one point, Hector scores a blow, nicking Achilles’s breastplate. Achilles looks down at the mark in astonish-ment. It’s just a scratch on the leather, not worth a second thought, but Achilles can’t believe it — and you realize, no one has ever pen-etrated his defenses that far before. No sword-point has ever been that close to his flesh. It’s a brilliant moment: it tells you how good Hector is, and, even more, how good Achilles is. And in a flash, from a simple glance, you have a sense of these two warriors as titans — the son of a god contending with the son of a king.

This is the sort of effect that the late Christopher Logue achieves again and again in War Music: An Account of Homer’s “Iliad,” the greatest film adaptation of Homer ever set down on paper. The new edition gathers the poem, written over forty years and published in installments over twenty-five — War Music (1981, covering books 16–19); Kings (1991, books 1 and 2); The Husbands (1995, books 3 and 4); All Day Permanent Red (2003, books 5 and 6); Cold Calls (2005, Books 7–9) — and adds as an appendix Big Men Falling a Long Way, editor Christopher Reid’s reconstruction of Logue’s projected final installment, which contains fragments from books 10–24.

It’s very far from a translation, by design — Logue, who couldn’t read ancient Greek and worked from existing translations, rearranges Homer’s material as he pleases and drags the diction into the pres-ent by way of Pound’s Cantos, even borrowing lines from August Kleinzahler. The redoubtable classics scholar Bernard Knox was shocked at the liberties taken in The Husbands. It might have helped to think of it as a movie. Indeed, Logue opens with an establishing shot worthy of John Ford:

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Picture the east Aegean sea by night,And on a beach aslant its shimmeringUpwards of 50,000 menAsleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

Now look along that beach, and seeBetween the keels hatching its western dunesA ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black claySplit by a double-doored gate;Then through the gate a naked manRun with what seems to break the speed of lightAcross the dry, then damp, then sand invisibleBeneath inch-high waves that slideOver each other’s luminescent panes.

The filmic qualities become explicit at times, infiltrating the poem’s vocabulary. The shift of speakers in Achilles’s insolent exchange with Agamemnon is produced by “Silence. // Reverse the shot. // Go close. // Hear Agamemnon ... ” After Hector kills Patroclus, as the Greeks mass on the beach to attack: “Close-up on Bombax; 45; fighting since 2.” “Quick cuts like these may give / Some definition to the mind’s wild eye.”

Critics have focused on these cinematic aspects of the poem, but Paul brings out how properly Homeric they are — how The Iliad is

“primed and ready to be made cinematic.” Logue’s poem, I’d argue, zooms in closer to Homer than the plodding literalism of a version like Richmond Lattimore’s, made to “please professors,” as Guy Davenport said. Of course lines like these take us far from the Greek text:

‘There’s Bubblegum!’ ‘He’s out to make his name!’‘He’s charging us!’ ‘He’s prancing!’ ‘Get that leap!’ thock! thock!

‘He’s in the air! ‘Bubblegum’s in the air!’ ‘Above the dust!’ ‘He’s lying on the sunshine in the air!’ ‘Seeing the Wall!’ ‘The

arrows keep him up!’ thock! thock!

And you’ll find Kansas in these pages, and Uzis, binoculars, Stalingrad and Cape Kennedy, “headroom” and guitars, helicopters, airplanes,

95MICHAEL ROBBINS

fly-fishing, gigantic font, and the earth revolving around the sun. But like Brad Pitt’s stunned face, War Music finds a visual and emotional equivalent for Homer’s human realities, as when Achilles looks over the armor Thetis has brought him:

Spun the holy tungsten like a star between his knees,Slitting his eyes against the flare, some said,But others thought the hatred shuttered by his lidsMade him protect the metal.

His eyes like furnace doors ajar.

When he had got its weightAnd let its industry assuage his grief: ‘I’ll fight,’He said. Simple as that. ‘I’ll fight.’

And so Troy fell.

It doesn’t always work. But Logue’s reconciliations of idea and image are often perfect.

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind. Add the receding traction of its slats Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up. Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

These lines even have a soundtrack, the repeated staccato alliteration of the slats recalling Ginsberg’s “boxcars boxcars boxcars.”

There are fine passages in the unfinished material culled from Logue’s notes — with a title as delicious as Big Men Falling a Long Way there would almost have to be — including an initial stab at Brad Pitt vs. Eric Bana, the scene I most lament Logue not having lived to complete. But welcome as it is, this material is mostly undeveloped and diffuse, and can’t add much to our experience of the poem. We can all regret that the poet was unable to undertake his planned re-writing of Homer’s famous 130-line description of Achilles’s shield, which Logue proposed in his notes to extend.

But War Music is complete in its way, one of the mad socko follies of the twentieth century, writhing with coarse, fevered life. Logue

96 POETRY

conveys the terrible rush of war with the guerilla pathos of Samuel Fuller’s epigraph to The Big Red One: “‘Why are you crying?’ — An insane child to a burning tank.” Odysseus to Achilles:

They do not own the swords with which they fight,Nor the ships that brought them here.Orders are handed down to them in wordsThey barely understand.They do not give a whit who owns queen Helen.Ithaca’s mine; Pythia yours; but what are they defending?They love you? Yes. They do. They also loved Patroclus.And he is dead, they say. Bury the dead, they say.A hundred of us singing angels died for every knockPatroclus took — so why the fuss? — that’s war, they say,Who came to eat in Troy and not to prove how muchDear friends are missed.Yes, they are fools.But they are right. Fools often are. Bury the dead, my lord,And I will help you pitch Troy in the sea.

Western literature is born in rage. But it is also born in song. μῆνιν and ἀείδω. “Our machine was devastating,” Michael Herr wrote of America’s profane destruction of Indochina. “And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” Logue’s Homer makes the machine sing.

97CONTRIBUTORS

contributors

jennifer bartlett’s most recent book is Autobiography/Anti-Auto-biography (Theenk Books, 2014). She also coedited Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011).

jan beatty’s books include Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (2017), The Switching/Yard (2013), Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1995), all from University of Pittsburgh Press.

jen benka* is the executive director of the Academy of American Poets and the author of Pinko (Hanging Loose Press, 2011) and A Box of Longing with Fifty Drawers (Soft Skull Press, 2005).

reginald dwayne betts’s second poetry collection is Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015). He won an NAACP Image Award for A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Avery, 2009). In 2012, President Obama appointed Betts to the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

richard blanco* is the fifth US Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of three collections of poetry and two memoirs, and the first-ever education ambassador for the Academy of American Poets.

sarah browning is cofounder and executive director of Split This Rock. Author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (Word Works, 2007), she is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

regie cabico* is a former Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion and received top prizes in several National Poetry Slams. He produces Capturing Fire: An International Queer Poetry Slam.

dominique christina* is an educator, poet, and author of three books including This Is Woman’s Work (Sounds True, 2015).

martha collins’s most recent books of poetry are Admit One: An American Scrapbook (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Day Unto Day (Milkweed Editions, 2014).

p. scott cunningham* is the founder and director of O, Miami, a festival that aims for every single person in Miami to encounter a

98 POETRY

poem during the month of April, and the editor of Jai-Alai Books.

d.w. fair* is an artist currently incarcerated at Stateville Correc-tional Center. His work on the cover of this issue was part of The Weight of Rage at the Hyde Park Art Center, which was the third an-nual exhibition of work developed in classes in the Prison + Neigh-borhood Arts Project (P+NAP).

samantha giles* is the author of deadfalls and snares (Futurepoem Books, 2014). She is the director of Small Press Traffic and lives in Oakland, California.

aracelis girmay* is the author of the poetry collections Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011) and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). The Black Maria is forthcoming. She teaches at Hampshire College.

edward hirsch’s most recent books are Gabriel: A Poem (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

linda hogan’s* recent books include Indios (Wings Press, 2012) and Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, 2008). She received a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cul-ture Foundation in 2015.

amanda johnston* is an Affrilachian poet and Cave Canem grad-uate fellow. She is a cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, founder of Torch Literary Arts, and faculty with the Stonecoast MFA program.

mariame kaba* is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grass-roots organization with the long-term goal of ending youth incarcer-ation. Her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, and supporting youth leadership development.

omar kholeif* is the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and teaches visual arts and art history at the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of over twenty books of narrative prose, art criticism, and fiction.

ben lerner* is the author of three books of poetry and two novels concerned with poetry. His monograph, The Hatred of Poetry, will be published this summer by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ali liebegott* has published Cha-Ching! (City Lights/Sister Spit, 2013), The Beautifully Worthless (City Lights, 2013), and The IHOP

99

Papers (Carroll & Graf, 2007). She also writes for Transparent.

dawn lundy martin* is the author of three books of poetry in-cluding, most recently, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015). Good Stock is forthcoming from Coffee House Press this year.

tyler meier* is the executive director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, jubilat, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere.

olivia morgan* was appointed by President Obama to the Presi-dent’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and led the creation of the National Student Poets Program.

craig santos perez is the editor of two anthologies and the author of three collections of poetry. He is an associate professor at the Uni-versity of Hawai‘i, Mānoa.

michael robbins is the author of two poetry collections, The Sec-ond Sex (2014) and Alien vs. Predator (2012), both from Penguin. His collection of criticism, Equipment for Living: Poetry & Popular Music, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

tilleke schwarz* exhibits her work all over the world and has ap-peared in many books and magazines.

brenda shaughnessy’s forthcoming collection is So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).

jeff shotts* is executive editor at Graywolf Press.

ocean vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Cop-per Canyon Press, 2016). Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in New York City.

meredith walker* has been the producer for Nick News and the head of the talent department for Saturday Night Live. She cofound-ed and directs Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls and lives in Austin.

andrew white* was recently appointed the first Youth Poet Laure-ate of the city of Houston, where he is currently a senior at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

* First appearance in Poetry.

CONTRIBUTORS

Recent books from WFU Press,celebrating 40 years of bringing

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LORAINE WILLIAMS POETRY PRIZEan annual award of $1000 and publication in the

Spring issue of The Georgia Review for a single poem.

The submission period for the 2016 award opens

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“devAstAting, one-of-a-kind collection.”

— Foreword Reviews

WORKSHOPS IN POETRY, FICTION, AND PLAYWRITINGJULY 19–31, 2016

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTHSEWANEE, TENNESSEEAccepting applications through April 15Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, every participant receives assistance covering two-thirds of the actual cost to attend. Additional funding is awarded to fellows and scholars.

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FACULTY & READERSDaniel AndersonRichard BauschJohn CaseyTony EarleyB.H. FairchildAdrianne HarunRobert HassAndrew HudginsNaomi IizukaMark JarmanRandall KenanMaurice ManningCharles MartinJill McCorkleAlice McDermottErin McGrawMarilyn NelsonDan O’BrienWyatt Prunty

Christine SchuttA.E. StallingsSidney WadeAllen WierSteve Yarbrough

VISITORS & LECTURERSMillicent BennettBeth BlickersPaul BoneValerie BorchardtMichelle BrowerSarah BurnesMaryKatherine

CallawayGeorge David

ClarkBarbara EplerGary FisketjonMary Flinn

Emily ForlandRob GriffithGail HochmanMike LevineDavid LynnAlane Salierno

MasonSpeer MorganKathy PoriesElisabeth SchmitzAnna SteinPhilip TerzianN.S. ThompsonLiz Van HooseLes WatersMichael WiegersAmy WilliamsRobert WilsonDavid YezziRenée Zuckerbrot

Visit poets.org to learn more about National Poetry Month 2016 initiatives, including Poetry & the Creative Mind on April 27 and Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 21, and to sign up to receive our .

The Academy of American Poets thanks the organizations that help make National Poetry Month possible.

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READINGS, WORKSHOPS, PANEL DISCUSSIONS,

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POETRY FESTIVALSPLIT THIS ROCK

poems of provocation & witnessapril 14-17, 2016

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Events

View educational resources including a sampler featuring the poetry and politics of US Poet LaureateJuan Felipe Herrera from our Poet 101 series.

During National Poetry Month, guest editorsDawn Lundy Martin, Daniel Borzutzky,Stephanie Young, and Brandon Shimoda each curate and introduce five essays by five poets at poetryfoundation.org/harriet

Harriet News

On the Poetry Magazine Podcast, Poetry editors Don Share and Lindsay Garbutt go inside thepages of this issue, talking to contributors and sharing their poem selections with listeners.

Poetry Off the Shelf, a bi-weekly podcast, exploresthe diverse world of contemporary American poetry.

Podcasts are available free from the iTunes store.

Poetry Podcasts

Bernadette Mayer: MemoryMarch 3–April 27, 2016Monday–Friday, 11:00 AM–4:00 PM

Exhibition

April FeaturesTHE POETRY FOUNDATION PRESENTS

POETRY FOUNDATION61West Superior Street, Chicago, IL (312) 787-7070

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Learning Lab

Plan your trip to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago to see some of our April events!

Young People’s Poetry DayPoetry and Home: Jacqueline WoodsonSaturday, April 9, 10:00 AM–3:00 PM

Documentary Film“and when I die, I won’t stay dead,” the Life of Bob KaufmanThursday, April 21, 6:00 PM

Bagley Wright Lecture Series on PoetryRachel ZuckerThursday, April 28, 7:00 PM

Founded in 1912 by Harriet MonroeVolume 208, Number 1

& so to tenderness I add my action.AR ACELIS GIRMAY

ALSO

Sarah BrowningJeff Shotts Jennifer BartlettJan BeattyRegie CabicoMartha CollinsCraig Santos PerezJen BenkaEdward Hirsch

Olivia MorganAli LiebegottAmanda JohnstonSamantha GilesP. Scott CunninghamDawn Lundy MartinTyler MeierAndrew WhiteRichard Blanco

Brenda ShaughnessyMariame KabaMeredith WalkerDominique ChristinaTilleke SchwarzReginald Dwayne BettsMichael RobbinsOmar KholeifD.W. Fair