June 4, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: John Murillo and Nicole Sealey Read Anne Waldman By John Murillo and Nicole Sealey The second series of Poets on Couches continues with John Murillo and Nicole Sealey reading Anne Waldman’s poem “How to Write.” In these 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. “How to Write” by Anne Waldman Issue no. 45, Winter 1968 Perhaps I’m kidding myself about the life I lead Sometimes I feel I’m dying like a lot of things I see around me Then I turn on the TV and understand that everything must still be moving Music, for example, and I rush outside around the corner to a concert It’s so easy Everything accessible from where I happen to live at the moment Things like rock concerts not too many trees on 2nd Avenue Once, on the Sixth Avenue bus I got a sudden sensation I had been alive before That I was a man at some other time Traveling You would think this strange if you were a woman If I were a man right now I’d be getting out of the draft but I think I’d want to be a poet too Which simply means alive, awake and digging everything Even that which makes me sick and want to die I don’t really, you know I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way you have to think about yourself a lot Dull thoughts like what am I doing ? Uptown in a large crowd I want to sit down and cry because everything is simple and complicated all at once Everyone has this feeling Even people downtown It is very basic to the way we are which is why I can say “we” A lot of drugs can change you if you want because you too are made of what drugs are made of In fact you are just a bundle of drugs when you come right down to it I don’t want to go into it but you’ll see what I mean when you catch on That’s not meant to sound snotty I’m open to whatever comes along This is the feeling I get before I take a plane Then everything’s the same afterward anyway All into one space and here I am again alive still, same worries on my mind The thing is don’t worry! You are doing what you have to what you can You hear from your friends They let you know what’s happening in California, Iowa Vermont and other places about the globe They take you out of your little room just like the newspapers or the news or the man you live with and put you in a much larger room one in which you are in constant motion around the clock John Murillo is the author, most recently, of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast and received the Rome Prize. Her poem “Pages 5–8” appeared in the Fall 2020 issue.
May 28, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Rita Dove Reads Ingeborg Bachmann By Rita Dove The second series of Poets on Couches continues with Rita Dove reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “My Bird,” translated from the German by Mark Anderson. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping them through—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 distances. “My Bird” by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mark Anderson Issue no. 92 (Summer 1984) Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world sinks back into twilight, the forest offers it a sleeping potion, and from the tower the watchman’s forsaken, peaceful and constant the eyes of the owl stare down. Whatever comes to pass: you know your time, my bird, you put on your veil and fly through the mist to me. We peer into the haze where the rabble houses. Yon follow my nod and storm out in a whirl of feathers and fur— My ice-gray shoulder companion, my weapon, adorned with that feather, my only weapon! My only finery: your veil and your feather. And even when my skin burns in the needle dance beneath the tree, and the hip-high shrubs tempt me with their spicy leaves, when my curls dart like snake tongues, sway and long for moisture, the dust of distant stars still falls right on my hair. When I, in a helmet of smoke, come back to my senses. my bird, my nighttime ally, when I’m ablaze in the night the dark grove crackles and I hammer the sparks from my limbs. And when I stay ablaze as I am, loved by the flame until the resin streams out of the trunks, drips over the wounds and spins the earth warm into thread (and though you rob my heart at night, my bird of belief, my bird of faith!) the watchtower moves into brightness where you, tranquil now, alight in magnificent peace— whatever comes to pass. Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, is the only poet to have been honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. A professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, she lives in Charlottesville. Her poems “Postlude” and “Naji, 14. Philadelphia.” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue.
May 12, 2021 Re-Covered More Pain Than Anyone Should Be Expected to Bear By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. I first came across the poet and short story writer Frances Bellerby’s fiction when I was working on my Ph.D. My subject was sibling relationships in mid-twentieth-century British literature, and some dusty avenue of research led me to Bellerby—a name I had not come across before and haven’t since, bar this article on the treasure trove that is the Neglected Books website—quite a few of whose short stories feature brother-and-sister pairs. Ultimately, I didn’t reference her work in my finished thesis, but neither did I forget some of the haunting images therein. Two children in the gloaming, the descending darkness bringing with it a premonition of war. The strange out-of-body experience of a child—a reaction to witnessing a horrible accident—that momentarily renders her unable to identify the scratched and bloody hand in front of her as her own, caught on blackberry brambles. Or simply the tableau of a cozy drawing room on a winter’s evening, seen through the eyes of a child for whom it’s usually out of bounds, a fire roaring in the grate, the heavy curtains drawn against the cold night outside, and a striking blue vase filled with brilliant bronze chrysanthemums. Returning to Bellerby’s stories this year, I was relieved to discover that they’re every bit as remarkable as I’d remembered. All the more so, in fact, when I learned how the death of her beloved brother, Jack—killed, age eighteen, in World War I—influenced much of what she wrote. Sadly, Jack’s death was only the first in a series of tragedies that blighted a life marked by considerably more pain and suffering—both physical and psychological—than anyone should be expected to bear, let alone spin into accomplished, poignant writing. As fellow poet Charles Causley wrote on the occasion of Bellerby’s death, in 1975, she was “a true original.” Read More
May 7, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Sara Deniz Akant Reads Naomi Shihab Nye By Sara Deniz Akant The second series of Poets on Couches continues with Sara Deniz Akant reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Missing the Boat.” In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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 distances. “Missing the Boat” by Naomi Shihab Nye (Issue no. 72, Winter 1977) It is not so much that the boat passed and you failed to notice it. It is more like the boat stopped directly outside your bedroom window, the captain blowing the signal-horn, the band playing a rousing march. The boat shouted, waving bright flags, its silver hull blinding in the sunlight. But you had this idea you were going by train. You kept checking the time-table, digging for tracks. And the boat got tired of you, so tired it pulled up the anchor and raised the ramp. The boat bobbed into the distance, shrinking like a toy— at which point you probably realized you had always loved the sea. Sara Deniz Akant is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Babette (Rescue Press, 2015). Two of her poems appeared in the Winter 2020 issue. Read an interview with her.
April 30, 2021 Poets on Couches Poets on Couches: Donika Kelly Reads Taylor Johnson By Donika Kelly National Poetry Month is almost over, but the second series of Poets on Couches continues. In these videograms, poets read and discuss the poems that are helping 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 distances. “States of Decline” By Taylor Johnson (Issue no. 228, Spring 2019) The room is dying honey and lemon rind. Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair sweetening into the blue velvet. Domestic declension is the window that never opens— the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled. It is an american love she lives in, my grandmother, rigored to televangelists and infomercials. Losing the use of her legs. Needing to be turned like a mattress. No one is coming for her. The dog is asleep in the yard, her husband, obedient to the grease and garlic in the cast iron, salting her death in the wind house. Donika Kelly is the author of two collections of poems, Bestiary and The Renunciations. She teaches at the University of Iowa. Her poem “Dear—” appeared in the Winter 2018 issue.
April 19, 2021 Re-Covered The Novel as a Long Alto Saxophone Solo By Lucy Scholes In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. Photo: Lucy Scholes. The Flagellants, the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite’s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois éditeur as Les Flagellants in Pierre Alien’s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The narrative is largely made up of a series of stream of consciousness orations. Polite’s prose is frenetic and loquacious, and her characters fling both physical and verbal violence back and forth across the page. The French edition received much praise. Polite was deemed “a poet of the weird, an angel of the bizarre,” and the novel was described as “so haunting, so rich in thoughts, sensations, so well located in a poetic chiaroscuro that one [could] savor its ineffaceable harshness.” And while certain American critics weren’t so impressed—“Miss Polite’s narrative creaks with the stresses of literary uncertainty,” wrote Frederic Raphael in the New York Times, summing the novel up as a “dialectical diatribe”—others recognized this young Black woman’s singular, if still rather raw and emergent, talent. Malcolm Boyd, for example, declared the novel “a work of lush imagery and exciting semantic exploration.” It won Polite—then in her midthirties and living in Paris with the youngest of her two daughters—fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities (1967) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1968). Why, then, am I writing about Polite only now? Well, although the vitality and inventiveness of her prose is undeniable, there’s something about her characters’ long, drawn-out pontificating that wavers on the overwrought. For all the passion of their outpourings, Jimson and Ideal often feel one-dimensional. These reservations stood in my way, combined with the fact that Polite never really felt like my discovery. Compared, for example, to another subject of this column, Mojo Hand (1966)—J. J. Phillips’s woefully neglected Black Beat novel—The Flagellants is a book that appears regularly on lists of African American literature from the sixties. Yet, finally deciding to dig a little deeper, I realized that although Polite is widely acknowledged as one of the most important female artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement, there’s been surprisingly little written about her or her work, especially her second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play. Read More