August 11, 2011 Poetry Two Poems: ‘The Crew Change’ and ‘Rice in the Spoon’ By Don Share These poems by Don Share bring surprising music and thrilling turns of mind to the matter of everyday life. We especially liked the eerie litany of woebegone objects in “Rice in the Spoon”: “Sea glass beached / on a porch bench” or, better yet, “A brown bust / of a sad man.” Whether Jethro Tull’s Aqualung is or is not a classic is a question Share’s readers are left to settle for themselves. —Dan Chiasson Read More
August 8, 2011 On Poetry David Orr: Lost in the Archives, Summer 1996 By David Orr A. R. Ammons. “Locality,” said Frost, “gives art.” It’s an aphorism that directs us toward, well, directions. But when we’re talking about space, we’re also usually talking about time—which means it’s important to think about when, not just where, an artist finds the locality that’s going to be doing the giving. These questions have particular relevance to the Summer 1996 issue of The Paris Review because the subject of “The Art of Poetry” interview is A. R. Ammons. Ammons has been slightly out of fashion since his death in 2001—fame, as Emily Dickinson observed, is fickle food—but he was a bracingly intelligent writer, and his relationship to the idea of place is intriguing. In part, it’s intriguing because he can’t seem to determine whether he is actually Southern after having lived for three decades in the north. Consider: INTERVIEWER: You’ve spent more time in the north [at Cornell]. AMMONS: Much more. I lived the first twenty-four years in the South. I’ve been in Ithaca more than thirty years. INTERVIEWER: Are you conscious of being a Southerner here? AMMONS: I don’t hear my own voice, but of course everyone else does, and I’m sure they’re all conscious of the fact that I’m Southern, but I am mostly not conscious of it. In the first years, I was tremendously nostalgic, constantly longing for the South: for one’s life, for one’s origin, for one’s kindred. Now I feel more at home here than I would in the South. But I don’t feel at home—I’ll never feel at home—anywhere. On one hand, this is the kind of thing poets like to say because it recalls the expatriate glamour of the early twentieth century (“I have beaten out my exile,” announced Pound, in the most self-satisfied formulation of this maneuver). On the other hand, Ammons wasn’t just a poet. Read More
July 12, 2011 Poetry Poem: The Listener By John Burnside John Burnside’s poems evoke the other world—whatever it might be. The poems are at once lyrical and meditative, their seemingly ordinary declarations cross-stitched with spookiness; the result is a kind of vivid, autumnal intensity. We liked this poem for the way it steadily drew us into a world of its own making, the slightly surreal clarity of its stains and stars. —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
July 6, 2011 On Poetry Making ‘Of Lamb’ By Thessaly La Force In 1796, at the age of thirty-two, Mary Lamb had an attack of madness and killed her mother and wounded her father with a knife. She was institutionalized for three years until the death of her father, when, at the behest of her younger brother, Charles, she was brought to live with him. Charles Lamb was a clerk at the East India Company and a well-regarded essayist, and he remained Mary’s caretaker and companion for the rest of their lives. The Lamb siblings were part of a literary circle that included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworths, William Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley, and they are the subject of the biography A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil. Their story is also at the heart of a strange new illustrated poem that was published as a book by McSweeney’s this month. Of Lamb is a collaborative project between poet Matthea Harvey and artist Amy Jean Porter. Harvey was fascinated by the process of erasures after seeing Tom Phillips’s A Humument and Jen Bervin’s Nets and decided to do one herself with the first book she could find for three dollars. “I picked up A Portrait of Charles Lamb completely randomly,” Harvey told me. “When I discovered that Mary and Lamb were on each page, a story in poems started to emerge.” There are echoes of Sarah Josepha Hale’s famous nineteenth-century rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which tells the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer who brings her pet lamb to school. But there are also weirder, more fascinating moments, too: “Nerves his family / Trouble his home / Dark spirits his company.” Below are a few slides of Harvey’s erasures and the illustrations by Porter. Porter says she was “thinking of an illustrative tradition of a nineteenth-century British variety—Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter, Eleanor Vere Boyle” but also cites brass chandeliers, water towers, and artists such as Balthus and Gabriel Orozco as inspiration. Click to enlarge. BLOG_oflamb_1 BLOG_ofalamb2 BLOG_ofalamb_3 Join Harvey and Porter tomorrow, on July 7, at P.P.O.W. Gallery at 7:00 P.M. at 535 West 22nd Street, in New York, for a reading from Of Lamb.
July 6, 2011 Poetry Poem: Tender Range By John Rybicki Today’s poem, John Rybicki’s “Tender Range,” is an incantation that seems particularly fitting for a crisp fall day. It’s a series of lyrical fragments arranged as a kind of stay against loss and death. We liked this poem for the way it subtly but persuasively finds a fresh language for the sense of imperilment that lurks around us, as in the eerie lines “I don’t know anything / about blowing a child out/ like a balloon, or what comes after— .” —Meghan O’Rourke Read More
June 29, 2011 Poetry Poem: Because my daughters are growing, By Tayve Neese This is Tayve Neese’s unsettling poem “Because my daughters are growing.” The children’s refrain (“Oh, Spider Mother”) about their mother turns out, in that unforgettable final turn, to prefigure their own (potential) futures as mothers, “a small life” inside them that “struggles like an angry fly.” Good poems change what we see: the next time I see a pregnant woman, thanks (I think!) to Neese, that’s what I will see. —Dan Chiasson Read More