May 1, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Tess Taylor By Tess Taylor In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Musical Interlude” by Eamon Grennan Issue no. 154 (Spring 2000) Through the voice, the soul’s work is done. Janet Baker Cragflower. Music of the sea. The flower still standing in its tormented place. Morning full of voices. Mourning too. Mahalia singing On My Way and making it to Cay-nen Land. On a rock, sit, listen to Bjorling sing Only a Rose over your friend’s ashes. Chaffinch on the clothesline— rosy biscuit breast aglow— will any minute confirm himself in song. And listen, the thin single note of the sandpiper in lakedusk: beige and bright white, precise bill opening, closing: only the one note but enough to cut across the whole valley as a nightwind shakes the stiff green reeds to whispering. Pain, even a single grain of it anywhere in the body is a kind of stop and focus, turning us to pure attention, as may happen with some small invisible winged thing singing in the thick of hedges. Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, The Forage House, and Work & Days. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press.
April 29, 2020 Inside Story On Reading Basho with My Ten-Year-Old By Marie Mutsuki Mockett In the column “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. Edo era poet Matsuo Bashō By late February of this year, the virus had made me sufficiently nervous that I began packing to leave San Francisco. I wanted to go to my family home on the coast of California where I had grown up. It was isolated and my parents had always kept a pantry stuffed with dry goods, plenty of toilet paper, and two freezers filled with food in the garage. This semi-survivalist attitude had seemed an extreme and eccentric way to live when I was a child; now it seemed like we had reached the dreaded moment for which they were always preparing. As soon as my son and I arrived, I began to prepare the garden, planting the seeds my mother had left in the pantry before I had abruptly moved her into a nursing home in December. Then I turned my attention to homeschooling. In school, my son, Ewan, had been instructed in something called new math, which was supposed to make him feel like he understood the process of mathematics—the “narrative.” Suddenly acting as his teacher, I found his math sloppy. I felt something awful gestating inside of me: a latent tiger mom enraged that her son could not quickly multiply numbers. I could and would fix math. I was irritated, too, that his writing was full of run-on sentences. I began teaching him conjunctions, and his sentences became fluent fairly quickly. And what should we read? I dug out my old copy of Tom Sawyer. “He is not a nice boy,” my son observed rightly after Tom had beaten up Sid. “I’m afraid if we keep reading, a cat might get hurt.” I had been teaching my own class of M.F.A. students over Zoom, using the books I had brought with me. That week we were reading poems by the Japanese haiku master Basho, translated by Jane Reichhold. I put away laddish Tom Sawyer, and opened up Basho, on a whim. Here is his second poem. The moon a sign, this way, sir, to enter, a traveler’s inn. “I see a hotel,” my son cried. “Like the kind we used to stay in, in Japan. With a huge white lantern outside. And the moon looks like one of those lanterns.” There are one thousand and twelve haikus by Basho. If you read six a day, that will sustain you for about six months. The old woman, a cherry tree blooming in old age, is something to remember. “I see Oma,” he said, referring to my mother. “She’s sitting under the tree and she is old and the tree is old, but you can see where she was young peeking through when she smiles. Like flowers on the old tree. They are the same.” One by one, we went through the haikus on the first page, and then I asked him to write one. I told him that unlike new math, he did not have to worry about numerical precision. Forget about syllables. He scribbled down: The virus spreads, deaths increase, the earth is in grave danger. Yes it is, I thought. Read More
April 28, 2020 Quarantine Reads Quarantine Reads: The Anatomy of Melancholy By Dustin Illingworth In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it. COVID-19 has prevented the indolence melancholy requires, even as its variants—anxiety, panic, vertigo—have bloomed in quarantine. If one is not already longing for melancholy, surely one has begun longing for the conditions in which it was once possible. Perhaps this is why I’ve finally chosen to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy after many years of owning it. (I’ve not yet finished it; I’m not sure to what extent anyone can be said to have finished such a book.) “If you will describe melancholy,” Burton writes, “describe a phantasticall conceipt, a corrupt imagination, vaine thoughts and different, which who can doe?” The book sets this pessimism spinning like a top, whirling delightedly over local resentments and cosmic griefs alike. It is a labyrinth of arcane scholarship, obscure quotation, medical ephemera, and earthy shrewdness, all of it tied up with determining the root causes of melancholy. It is not hyperbole to call it one of the primary documents of European culture. This greatest of medical treatises was written not by a doctor but a reclusive Oxford clergyman. As with Shakespeare, little is known about Burton outside his chief occupation. His contemporary, Anthony Wood, called him “an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro’-pac’d Philologist.” The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is presented as a frayed patchwork of texts, is the obvious work of a bibliophile, less original conception than inspired collage. (“Tis all mine, and none mine,” Burton wrote. “Only the method is myne owne.”) It proved a remarkable popular success, going through six printings in Burton’s lifetime. After falling out of print for over a century, it was rediscovered by the Romantic poets—John Keats called it his favorite book—and quickly enshrined as a classic: the tract resurrected as literature. Read More
April 24, 2020 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Major Jackson By Major Jackson In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances. “Coral” by Kamau Brathwaite Issue no. 231 (Winter 2019) Read More
April 23, 2020 Re-Covered Re-Covered: A Black Female Beat Novel from the Sixties By Lucy Scholes In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. When I read the extract from the writer and activist J. J. Phillips’s novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale in Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (1992), I immediately knew that I had to track down a copy. Phillips’s writing is raw, but it’s astonishingly lyrical, too, mesmerizingly so. Later, trying to find out more about the book, I came across the novelist and academic John O. Killens’s verdict in Ebony magazine, congratulating Phillips for having “captured the beauty of Negro language and put it down without fear.” This is all the more impressive a feat considering she was only twenty-two years old when this, her debut novel, was first published in 1966. Reading Mojo Hand in its entirety only confirmed my initial impression; it was unlike anything else I’ve read. It was also a book I’d never heard any mention of outside Busby’s anthology, which seemed particularly bewildering given its strange, unique power. I quickly came to agree with the American historian, novelist, music critic, and longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, who, in 2015, described it novel as “the most neglected book I know.” Perhaps this disregard has an explanation. Reading it today, it’s clear that Phillips was a writer ahead of her era, and Mojo Hand, as summed up by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carolyn Kizer, was simply “too rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.” Read More
April 22, 2020 Inside Story Inside Story: What Spot? By Jenny Boully In our new column, “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. Like many things I love, What Spot? entered my life through happenstance: my son just happened to pick it out of the pile of books in his preschool classroom; my son just happened to have the one teacher who sent books home each week; he just happened to secure a last-minute spot at this preschool. If it were not for this seemingly fateful chain of events, I do not think I would have ever come across this charming tale of wonder and fear and empathy. All of these emotions feel re-created on the book’s cover, which magnifies and directs your attention to the period of the question mark, which appears target-like, a red dot encircled by other circles. Written by Crosby Bonsall for the “I Can Read!” series, which Harper Collins launched in 1957 with the publication of the now-classic Little Bear, by Elsa Holmelund Minarik, What Spot? is now out of print. Rather than trust that my son would be able to choose the same book each week, I bought a used copy. It arrived well-loved, with damaged pages, signs of its former life. I delighted in seeing my son pretend to read the book aloud on his own, so simple was its two-syllable, incredulous refrain, punctuated by a question mark that seems conjoined to an invisible exclamation point. Two days before we entered the stay-at-home phase of our lives, my son went on a field trip to see a production of The Princess and the Pea. His teacher sent us a PDF that explained to children how to prevent coming into contact with the coronavirus. She told us she read the poster to the children to reassure them. She also reassured us, saying that she would have the children wipe down their theater seats and wash their hands. Time was once less abstract, more palpable. I once could ask how school was. I could say tell me about the play. I could let my children know what they would need for school the next day. I could pack lunches and backpacks. I could check my work email after sending them off. I could have a day, a day that was measured and complete, one that I did, indeed, measure out with coffee spoons. Now, my children and I dream the dizzy dreams that manifest in between reality and a life once lived. Read More