Reading is Resistance: Take This Cup from Me Performance

In some ways, it was an idle thought, a passing observation, an idea that would be pretty obvious to just about anyone who was looking, but still, it caught in my brain as these things sometimes do. Pretty much since I first encountered Cesar Vallejo in an anthology edited by Clayton Eshelman called Conductors of the Pit, I knew I wanted to write a book about him. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to focus on just ten poems and call the book “10 Poems by Vallejo” even though I had (have) no idea what form or angle the book might take. Finding myself in between projects, I started typing up the ten poems I'd selected, including “Spain, Take this Cup from Me.” Said idle thought passed through my mind; there were some interesting and potentially enlightening parallels between the Spanish Civil War Vallejo wrote about and our current resistance to the Trump administration (and the notes of our own civil war playing in the background). I started thinking about how we could use Vallejo's poem to explore our own political turmoil. And, I wrote this post on Facebook:

Writerly, readerly friends, especially poets or those poetic inclinations. I'm kicking around a project that might become an event or might become something else (anthology, chapbook, who knows.) It involves rewriting a poem about and inspired by the Spanish Civil War by the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. So, if you're a fan of Vallejo and fighting fascists and might be interested in participating, comment or send me a message. Right now, I'm just gauging interest. Thanks.

And writerly, readerly friends responded. I'm still a little blown away, but, then again, Vallejo kicks serious ass. The first result was a translation and response event called Take This Cup from Me, in The Late Night Poetry Lab reading series the bookstore hosts at Aeronaut brewing.

Throughout the event, a slideshow juxtaposing images from the Spanish Civil War and the political turmoil of the last year or so, played. What struck me about these juxtaposed images was the similarities and differences in the energies of the people in the pictures. There was a vibrancy in most of the images from both eras. Even if that volume of energy was driven by anger as it was at Trump rallies, there was a volume to the emotions that was thrilling. But there was something different in the eyes of the people in the images that were clearly from later in the Spanish Civil War. I was paying attention to too many other moving parts (like getting the slideshow to actually work) to really identify what I saw in those eyes; maybe a kind of exhausted defiance, maybe just exhaustion, maybe something else entirely, but it is clear something happens to people over the course of a long struggle. And, I suspect, regardless of what happens with Trump himself, we're going to find out what it is.

The main event of the evening was what I called a cascading line by line translation. Reading one line at a time, the poem was performed first in the original Spanish and then in three different English translations, Eshelman, Gerard Malanga, and an original translation made for the event by Maria Jose Gimenez and Anna Rosenwong. This let us hear some of the different ways Vallejo's Spanish could be rendered in our English and it was fascinating. Sometimes the differences were subtle, some of the differences were drawn from the strangeness and complexity of Vallejo's vocabulary and imagery, and some were, in the moment at least, inexplicable to me. More than a few times I had to remind myself to focus on the line I was about to read rather than the differences in the lines I'd just heard.

The cascading line by line translation was followed by a number of responses to Vallejo's piece. A poem by Epi Arias was performed in both Spanish and English. Then, I performed my original line-by-line response to Eshelman's translation (posted below).

Perhaps my favorite part of the event was that, through Chris Boucher, I was able to connect with Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who recently translated some works by Kerouac, and get my response translated into Quebecois French. I grew up in Lewiston, a French-Canadian mill town in Maine, and, though I have plenty of Quebecois heritage (including a great uncle who played hockey against/with Maurice Richard once) I don't feel as though I have a particularly strong connection to it. Getting my poem translated into Quebecois interacted with the theme of the event and strengthened this connection for me. Furthermore, it was fascinating to hear my work in another language. Even without being able to speak French (Quebecois or otherwise), it was clear that this translation brought out an anger, that, in the English original, was under the surface and between the lines. What was a kind of exasperated frustration, a long sustained, “Guys, seriously, come on,” became a glorious spittle-flecked rant, a kind of linguistically hallucinogenic “These fucking guys!” (There was also something truly beautiful about listening to this angry Quebecois poem echoing around a bar.)

But that is, of course, the power of translation. Translating a work from one language to another, in essence creates an entirely new work that is in direct conversation with the original, highlighting and illuminating aspects of the ideas in the original that its original language was unable to express. In many ways, our ability to express ourselves in words is fundamentally limited by the language we use, a language (any and every language) that simply cannot contain and transmit all of our complexities. Every time the idea is translated into another language a different aspect of it is revealed. Which leads me to a kind of Borgesian idea; that the only truly complete thought is one that has been translated into every human language that has ever or will ever be spoken.

Next Alyeda Morales read an original response in Spanish and did a fantastic job. Not speaking Spanish, I only understood the occasional word here and there. (OK, that occasional word was “gringo.”) Which got me thinking. I, personally, love hearing people speak languages I don't know. Maybe it's because, as a writer I have an inherent interest in language, maybe it's because I like to try to figure out what people are saying, or maybe it's because, as a poet, I'm interested in the mechanics of the sound of language. Regardless of why, one of my favorite parts of living in a city is listening to conversations in languages I don't understand. (Which makes me wonder what a sociological study examining how people react to overhearing a foreign language would reveal.)

Given that there was so much Spanish in this performance and a little Quebecois, for me, and many other audiences members, this was a musical event as much as it was a poetry event, an experience of the sound of the human voice as much as it was an experience of the spoken word. Which meant having singer-songwriter JD Debris close the night with his song “Vallejo,” (which he tweaked specifically for the event) was a perfect way to end the performance.

Because it was Vallejo's words that started this whole project, I concluded the event by reading this excerpt from Vallejo's essay “The Great Cultural Lessons of the Spanish Civil War” from The Selected Writings of Cesar Vallejo:

But the jurisdiction of thought has its revenge. If the protest cries out loud and clear, and the expression of combat in the flesh truly explodes against the coagulated powers of the economy, then the timeless inflection of an idea from a speech, article, message, or manifestation could be a petard that falls into the guts of the people and explodes into certain incontrovertible outcomes on the day we least expect it. It's by thinking and constructing, without expecting immediate explosive miracles from their present work, and by devoting the maximum spiritual strength and dignity necessary for the social interpretation of contemporary problems...that [intellectuals] exercise influence and have a bearing on the ulterior process of history. And it's especially important for the intellectual to translate the popular aspirations in the most authentic and direct way, worrying less about the immediate...effect on their actions and more about their resonance and efficiency in the social dialectic, since the latter, in the long run, laughs off hurdles of all kinds, including economic ones, when a social leap is ripe for the taking.
And...I've decided that, among other goods the Spanish people's victory over fascism will bring is proof to foreign intellectuals that, although creating an intrinsically revolutionary work in the silence and seclusion of a study is a beautiful and transcendent act, creation is even more revolutionary when it's done in the heat of battle by pulling it from life's hottest and deepest pits.

At time of writing (which, given the pace of our times should be an assumed phrase), Donald Trump is reportedly considering finding a way to fire Robert Mueller, pardoning everyone in his family, and pardoning himself. At the same time, for reasons that really and truly only seem to be a personal vendetta Mitch McConnell has against President Obama, Republicans are trying to destroy the contemporary American healthcare system. A process that started with Nixon's Southern Strategy and intensified under the politicizing of radical Christianity, has culminated in a national, mainstream party enacting and supporting the transformation of the United States of America back into a malignant and overt white supremacist nation. I don't know what the fuck is going to happen next. I mean, we all know how the Spanish Civil War turned out. I don't know if events, acts, and moments like these really help. Well, I know they help me. I know they helped the other performers and I know they helped at least some of the people who attended. And I know that we must fight, both using established techniques and flailing about the vastness of human experience for something that might break through.

Finally, though it can be easy to dismiss poetry performances, acts of art, and other experiments with expressing dissent as impractical or silly, or as alienating to some other population one hopes to ally with politically in 2018, though it can be easy to point to a translation event at a bar and ask how that could possibly influence Senator Susan Collins or whichever other Republican we're hoping might actually act with a modicum of human decency, we need to remember that acts of poetry, acts of art, acts of creative life aren't just acts of resistance or examples of the fight; art, poetry, and creative life are also what we're fighting for.

USA, Take This Cup from Me

    White dudes of the USA,

if the USA falls—Hey, it could happen—

if her torch

falls upon your fraternal scaffolding secured,

in a necktie, by waning logistic highways;

white dudes, what harvested the corporeality of grounds!

how it feels to bear water for the first time!

how obvious the tassels of your confidence!

how to recuperate without sick days!

    White dudes of the USA, mother

USA reveals the army you concealed from yourself;

her others once beyond your barbutes

she appears as mother and teacher,

training and strength, reside in the muscle fiber,

chamber and hammer and competence, white dudes;

she arms all soldiers, they remember!

    If she falls—Hey, it could happen—if the USA

falls, from the homestead upon,

white dudes, how could you possibly win!

how by tomorrow you will be yesterday!

how your atrophied muscles tremble from others' typical gravity

how the fraternal network smally betrays, the crumbs of the crumbs!

How the little league will laugh

at mocking marionettes made from your filament enhancements!

How your auxiliary attachments will be distributed

one way or another and abdicating leaves fewer scars!

    White dudes,

sons of soldiers, meanwhile,

ready or not, for with or without you, the USA is changing

her gaze into phallus agnostic eyes,

body cameras, riots, and people.

Ready or not, for she

awokens catastrophically, knowing just

what to do, and she has in her hands

the legal case, arguing away,

the case, the one with the provisions,

the case, our argument for!

    Ready or not, I tell you,

ready or not the white between the print, the whisper

of being and the strong reveille of the monuments, and even

that of your chambers, which walk with two stones!

Ready or waiting, and if

the torch comes down,

if the barbutes shrink, if it is lunch,

if seams occupy the balance of our logistic highways,

if there is potent creaking in the executive joints,

if I am late,

if they do not regard you, if the barricaded ears

starve you, if mother

USA falls—Hey, it could happen—

let go, white dudes of the world, let go of entitled!...

The Last Book I Bought: Grave of Light Edition

It might sound odd to say, but I buy books much less frequently than I would prefer. A combination of limited money, even more limited space in my apartment, and great relationships with a bunch of fantastic publishers who just give me books, means that, even with my generous staff discount from Porter Square Books, I rarely buy books for myself. Which tells me there is often something distinctive or important about a book that compels me to actually spend money and shelf space to own it. Something distinctive and important enough that I think it's worth an informal series on my blog, one that provides another avenue or structure for talking about books that I think you should read, and one that riffs on The Rumpus's great also somewhat informal Last Book I Loved Series.

So the inaugural Last Book I Bought post is Grave of Light by Alice Notley.

I love poetry. I read it, I write it, I review it, I've even blogged about my love of poetry, but there are some major gaps in my awareness and understanding. Perhaps the most glaring one is in American poetry from about the end of the Beats until about Kevin Young, later James Tate, later Merwin, Mary Reufle, and more contemporary poets like Patricia Lockwood and Brian Turner. Basically it is a gap from what is usually taught in schools up until I began reviewing poetry about ten years ago. A lot of poetry happened in that time and a lot of changes happened in the landscape of American poetry in that time.

Alice Notley is in that gap. She was one of the names I would see in collections of poetry criticism or in interviews with poets, but for some reason, the timing of her new collections or my enthusiasm for other poets, or the standard-issue chaos of existence, I never got around to trying her until I saw Grave of Light in the bookstore. I flipped through and saw big blocks of text, long poems, unique arrangements of lines on the page, a blissful absence of pointless empty white paper (don't get me started on poets who assume white space inherently communicates and create these giant fucking books that don't fit on the shelves of any human bookstore), and, at least through the course of a casual flip-through, a refreshing diversity of style, form, and technique. Notlety is, obviously, a poet struggling to express the complicated currents of human experience and is not afraid to be complicated herself to do it. So I got the book out of the library first. (Remember all that about money and space.)

I like the debate about the relative impact of Whitman and Dickinson on American poetry. To me, even if I'm hashing out the distinctions by myself, distinguishing between the two and assigning value to those distinctions, reveals much about my poetics, my political values, and my general aesthetics of literature, as does following their influence through other poets I read and respect. For all her influence, I still contend that American poets have not caught up with Dickinson's innovations in poetic grammar. (If I were focusing on our ideas of grammar, I might take a moment to argue that Dickinson's use of the dash might be the greatest consistent use of punctuation in English, but this post is about Notley.) In fact, I'd go so far as to say very few poets, perhaps especially those short-line white-space enthusiasts that so get under my skin, have even attempted her way of arranging clauses, enjambing lines, and arresting and diverting grammatical momentum.

It's important to note that grammar isn't just about punctuation, but about how the parts of sentences are arranged in relation to the idea of “making sense.” At it's heart, grammar is an agreement that facilitates efficient verbal communication. Grammar is a system of logic, a way of arranging ideas so they make sense to the people who did not originate them. Though poetry has a very different relationship to the nature of sense and logic and communication than prose, it still has grammar, it still has agreements that allow for communication. Beyond her dashes, Dickinson had a way of arranging her ideas to stress the seams of poetic grammar, almost without us noticing it. Each phrase that seems to act as a qualifier or a descriptor also complicates and obscures. There are moments where her work feels so overt and open as to lurch towards a kind of obscenity, but that overtness collapses upon closer reading.

What I found when I started reading Grave of Light was a poet grappling with Dickinson's grammar. And that made the sale.

Plume Poetry Anthology 2012

What do Andrie Codrescu, Lydia Davis, Paul Muldoon, and G.C. Waldrep have in common with me? OK, fine, not all that much. But, all five of us have one thing in common and we share it with Rae Armantrout, Rafael Campo, Martha Collins, Tess Galager, Daniel Tobin, and Dean Young. We all have poems in The Plume Anthology of Poetry 2012. I'm still at the point in my “career” where all publications are exciting, and even more so when I happen to share space with some of my favorite writers, but I think this particular path to publication is worth narrating.

I started reviewing poetry for Bookslut in 2006 for the same reasons most people start reviewing; free books and a line on the old curriculum vitae. I decided to focus on poetry reviews because I felt I had enough time to give books of poetry the level of attention I believe books should get from reviewers; basically, with a job, my own writing and reading, and life in general, I felt I could read a book of poetry twice in a reasonable amount of time before writing a review. Knowing the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of hours that goes into a writing a book, it only seems fair to read one twice before passing any kind of professional judgment on it, and I just don't have the time in the day to do that for longer works. This has changed a little bit as I've learned what to look for when reading for a review and so I now do novels and other longer works, but mostly just for my personal blog.

So I had been reviewing poetry for Bookslut for about four years when they approached their 100^th issue. I'd reviewed a bunch of collections for them, read a lot of poetry on my own, and write it, so I pitched a “state of American poetry,” essay for the special issue. This essay was one of, if not the, highlight of my critical “career.” (If I keep saying I have one, it means I have one.) Some obsessive googling revealed that a few people in the poetry world actually read it, thought about it, and discussed it. One person even used one of my ideas from the essay as part of the aesthetic groundwork for a lit mag. Another person was Daniel Lawless. (Real name as far as I know.)

Daniel got in touch with me because he was starting an online poetry magazine and liked what I had to say. (If you're wondering why anyone would start an online poetry magazine, well, I asked him.) He asked me to submit some poems and, because I'd been reviewing poetry for a while and because I worked at a bookstore, he asked me for some advice about getting the word out. I gave him some advice. He accepted my poem “Johnny Damon's Vacant Stare.”

Of course, I wasn't the only writer he solicited for submissions. Sometimes you've got to cast many lines to catch few fish. I don't know what Danny wrote in the other emails he sent out but he landed some prize winning catches almost instantly. The first issue had works by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Alicia Ostriker and G.C. Waldrep. Number two had Stephen Dunn, Thomas Lux, and Donald Revell. Three had Tess Gallagher, six had Lydia Davis, nine had Andrei Codrescu and Billy Collins, ten Sharon Olds, eleven D.A. Powell. The anthology features works by those writers and more as well as stuff, like mine, that didn't appear in the online journal. If you want to know more about the process of going from an online lit mag to a print anthology check out the interview I did with Daniel for the PorterSquare Books Blog. We've also organized an event at the bookstore with Daniel that I'm going to host with readings from four of the contributors who happen to also live in the greater Porter Square area.

Getting something you've written published (at least short stories, poetry and short essays, hopefully I'll be able to tell you about how it feels to get a book published some day) is a very strange emotional experience. You work your ass off on the piece and then it's finished and then it sits there until you get around to submitting it. Then you wait. Then it gets rejected. So you submit it, wait, and it gets rejected again. Over and over, often for years until the piece itself becomes like someone you got really close to during one summer camp and then never really talked to again. Sure that person is important to the story of your life, but they've moved into a different emotional compartment, one you only access when you're telling stories about summer camps.

And then one time you submit it, wait, and it gets accepted. Then it's like that friend from summer camp showed up at your house needing to crash on your futon. It's awesome and strange. Of course you let them, but you no longer quite know what to think about them. With a poem or story or something, you end up rereading and seeing everything that is absolutely terrible about it as though it were a first draft all over again. Furthermore, if it's been a long time, one can be a very different (ideally better) writer from when the work was composed, with different skills, different goals, maybe even different tastes.

But this was a little different. In this case, Daniel asked me to send him some poetry based on ideas I expressed about poetry. In some ways, it couldn't be simpler. When someone asks you for work with an intent to publish your work, you send them your work. (At least when you're “career” is at the level mine currently is.) It would be one thing if my essay focused on say, development of line breaks, or asked for simple objects of conceptual-linquistic beauty or celebrated the ability of poetry to capture abstract experiences, but given the essay I wrote I had to ask myself, does my poetry do what I ask other poets to do? Does my work have evidence of ambition? Does it reflect a desire to write the next great movement? Is it even just as good as what I ask others to produce? Could I walk the walk? Of course, the real problem is that I can't answer any of those questions myself. I write what I write with whatever ideas, goals, and emotions are in my head, and it is up to the reader to place the work in whatever context, evaluation, poetics, the reader believes it belongs with.

Of course, if the want to put what I write in anthology with some of my favorite living poets and a few others who have won major awards, that'll be just fine too.

Interview with Daniel Lawless of Plume

Plume is a new online poetry magazine that is two issues old and already publishing some of the biggest and best contemporary poets; Rae Armantrout, Thomas Lux, Charles Bernstein, G.C. Waldrep and more. (Including, soon, me!) Plume is dedicated to publishing the very best of contemporary poetry, and I've to to say, so far so good. They are are highly selective, offering twelve poems per monthly issue; poems with a sense of the uncanny, foremost, and of the fineness of language, the huge absences to which it points and partakes of, and the urgency and permanence of its state of departure — the coattails forever –just now—disappearing around the corner. Or as one of the rotating quotes, this one from Jean-Michel Maulpox, “Poetry is completely divided between the desire for the country that does not exist and the need for common ground: between elsewhere and cliché; its two contradictory genies.'

Daniel Lawless is a poet and editor of Plume. He teaches at Saint Petersburg College. Below is an interview with Daniel conducted via email.

Why start an online poetry magazine?

For practical – monetary – reasons, of course, it’s easier than print; even print on demand requires one to sell – not my strong suit. Why, more general: a mixture of base and not so base motives: to duck school committee work; to allow my mother before she dies and some long-disappointed friends to believe I accomplished something (as if there was something to accomplish…another discussion); to pass the time; to put to some use a lifetime of reading and writing; as in writing a poem, simply to make a beautiful object.

As an editor, what do you look for in a poem? Do you imagine potential readers? Do you look for quality beyond your own personal taste? Or are you honestly subjective, publishing the poems that connect with you?

As our mission statement notes, I look for a sense of the uncanny, of the fineness of language, to be written by someone keener than I in some ways or many ways. Not so much a message: I do not wish to be instructed, unless beauty itself is instructive, and it is. The image that makes one want never to write again or to close the book or turn the page and pick up the pen, figuratively or literally. Potential readers, yes: mostly dead or soon to be so: Trakl, Cendars, Parra, Transtromer, Cassia, Ponge and Michaux, Follain, Canneti, Cioran, Bly, Li Po, etc. I would hope I look for quality beyond my own tastes, but I doubt I do. I publish what I like – why else – aside from the reasons given above, would I bother? And it is a bit of bother.

Is there anything a poem or poet can do or not do, that will guarantee rejection?

I’m not a huge fan of nature poetry: I see no greatness in knowing the names of things –plants, fish--though many do and can argue almost convincingly that such is an intrinsic, even a primary good. The poetry I loved first was Surrealism: Benedikt's great anthology. The translations were so flat – I liked how they contrasted with the extravagance of the imagery. When I learned to read French I was vastly disappointed by the musical quality of the work. So – I prefer a detached, observational style – Simic, Ponge, again – ipso facto, sentimental, didactic, pastoral, spiritual – likely not to be well-received. And formal approaches manhandled.

How do you think about “America Poetry?” Do you think about a coherent entity and compare it with entities from other eras? Do you think about individual poets who happen to be writing now? Is there a way to think about “American Poetry,” or should we only think about individual poems and poets?

If anything, I stayed away from American poetry when I was young; I think Sontag drew an entire
generation of poets and writers toward Western Europe. Part of this was inevitable rebellion against my mentor/teacher (and later my fellow grad students): a lover and crony of the Beats, pal of Thomas Merton. (Also the lure of the exotic, the obscure – which these were at the time, at least in my world of Louisville, Kentucky.) I thought of some books as coherent entities: Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel, the Artaud Anthology, the Contemporary European Poetry anthology with the white cover, Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life where I discovered Cendrars, Benedikt’s Prose Poem anthology, Leaping Poetry, Barthes’ Mythologies, magical realism, Borges, Tzara, Guillevic, Voznesensky, Mishima, Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Guy Davenport essays : these were nations to me. Compare? Only in the most superficial way in which one compares the music of one’s youth to that which comes later --and finds inferior despite one’s public rehearsal of its minutia and over-loud praise. Am I wrong to think non-US poets take more chances, generally? And fail more often and succeed more spectacularly?

What are the most exciting things happening in poetry today? The most frustrating?

The usual complaint, which can be made of all the arts, I suppose – so many bands, so many films, so many this or that: a surfeit. Not too long ago, it seemed, one could know all of the poets worth knowing, might have assembled them in a Holiday Inn Express conference room. No longer, of course. Whether that is exciting or frustrating, I’m not sure.

Who is the one poet you wish everyone was reading?

Not a poet, but “the last philosopher in Europe” as he has been called: Emil Cioran – an aphorist of the first order, a master of knee-slapping bleakness, to use a phrase from my first Editor’s note, one who had read everything worth reading, like Steiner, also one with a horrific, troubling past to say the
least (Grass comes to mind), but a gorgeous stylist; one can, in reading him, if one is a particular type of person, only nod one’s head in assent until one becomes faintly ridiculous, like one of those mechanical water-sipping bird toys.

What is the responsibility of the poet to the world? Do poetry editors have different responsibilities? If so what are those?

The poet is responsible to nothing (except to his craft? on second thought, no, not even that) and no one: society or humanity least of all. Editors have no responsibility either – it seems silly to use those words in the same sentences – though many, many do, I know, serious, talented writers and editors. I merely say that, for me, no. One tries one’s best, one tries to be fair, to be discerning, but in the end whether one does or not is not a matter of responsibility, but temperament.

In terms of a poet's responsibility. Does poetry make the world a better place? Is this even a useful question to ask and if not, in terms of understanding poetry, what is a useful question to ask?

I am tempted to say that which distracts us from the inevitability of our demise, and does no harm to others in the general sense, is never a bad thing. I am great believer in distraction: that most things are little more than that. As I say, I think I am rarely edified by poetry, but often am fascinated by it, as one tends to be in the face of beauty in all its manifestations. Which is not nothing.

Is there a particular poem or poet that first showed you the potential of poetry? What was that moment like for you?

Breton’s “Free Union” – the listing was hypnotic, the images have stayed with me for forty years. I first read it in, oh, 1976 or ’77, I think. Around the time I took a trip to San Francisco, where punk was crowning in certain neighborhoods: exhilarating. I came back to Louisville and found it, punk, was popping up at the art schools and such, too. The spirit of DIY was in the air, and I recall printing up poems and stapling them to telephone poles – virgin forest then – unsigned, only a little stamp my girlfriend at the time made up. I’d walk around days later, checking my route as it were. Many were still there, weathering, which was nice, many were gone. Best was when I’d go to a party and find one of them stuck to a wall or refrigerator door.

How do you read a poem? What do you listen for and think about while reading? How do you discover
or create meaning through reading a poem?

Good questions. Could you answer them for me? If nothing else – and there is very little else – I have read a fair amount in my life, so reading becomes allusion, an echo chamber: this calls to this, to that, the other thing, and in time a dozen other things. That is what happens when I read, I think – sometimes to the detriment of reading the poem actually in front of me. To the degree that I have a way of reading, or listening for, or thinking about, poems, it has to do with the whispers of past work, other poets, distant images, that maintain some ineffable connection to the words I am reading: “.. that rose which only words distant from roses can describe…” (Aragon).

What are you reading now?

Poetry: Plume’s submissions list is growing frightening. Also Dana Gioia’s early work, Interrogations at Noon, and Montale’s Motets. Luljeta Lleshanaku . I like the unjustly maligned Padgett Powell’s Interrogative Mood – again, lists. Ennemis publics – a dialogue between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Levy. Pessoa’s Always Astonished. Larkin. Cavafy. Avital Ronell’s Stupidity.