What follows is part two of my pillaging The Pushcart Book of Poetry for new favorite poets, presses, and poems: Continue Reading “Shortlist from the Pushcart Book of Poetry (Part II)”
I have been flagging poems I like from The Pushcart Book of Poetry, and am now halfway through the anthology. It is excellent. Here is my list so far: Continue Reading “Shortlist from the Pushcart Book of Poetry (Part I)”
“what’s a good american / boy to do after he’s been / bitten by pandas?”
-George Wallace, “Bitten by Pandas”
Fellow Pacific MFA alumnus George Wallace recently sent me an autographed copy of his new book, Poppin’ Johnny. It’s terrific.
These poems are anything but quiet. Like the cartoon call-outs when Batman hit a bad guy in a punch-up scene, these poems are loaded with “pow,” “bam,” “biff.” But for all their muscular gestures, these poems also convey sensitivity and irony–sometimes at once. As much as Wallace has been called an inheritor of Kerouac, his heady and ecstatic proclamations can also be traced back to Whitman. Consider these lines from “Starlight! So Much Starlight”:
[...] i saw starlight in
the coffins of the mad. i saw
starlight in the eyes of a dog.
i saw a man with a tin badge
he wore starlight on his chest.
handcuffs have it electric lights
have it window shades drawn
at night. [...]
These are poems obsessed with cars and dames, liquor and baseball. But beneath the brass-band bravado lie the horrors of “My First Dance”–shaking a grown man’s enormous sweaty hand, being pinned and kissed by a fat girl, drinking punch from a paper cup, and sympathizing with the “four-legged madness of a dog / who was trying to do nothing more / complicated than just get away.”
Yet even the most intimate moments are told in a vernacular slant, like when the speaker realizes in “How it Worked” that his lover is kissing him goodbye for the last time, and says, “i laid there like a pizza delivery guy with too / many pizzas to deliver who has fallen off his bicycle and / onto some wet pavement. i laid there like bambi on ice, / like flipper on a plate, and i looked back at her like roy / rogers trying to figure out what is wrong with his faithful / horse trigger.”
These are poems as rough and vulnerable as manhood, as full of hope and heartbreak as the new world. If you want to know what America feels like in your mouth, read George Wallace out loud.
“Our planetary reality has split in two into the so-called West and the so-called East, and I have drunk from both one and the other poisoned well. I have also become convinced that the puzzle of the thirties still cries out for a solution.”
-Czesław Miłosz
I find myself intensely drawn to twentieth-century Polish poets. Having borne waves of tragedy in the last century, from the Holocaust to oppressive Soviet occupation, the country itself seems have been flung into a kind of national existential crisis. And so, its sensitive and intelligent poets grapple deeply and boldly with questions of faith and reason, tragedy and hope, nihilism and meaning. Many of them, like me, are fascinated with the allegorical dimensions of the Book of Job, with Nietzschean philosophy, with reconciling the tragedies of the great World Wars with the sometimes inexplicable beauty of this world. In short, they face down the deepest questions about what it means to be alive.
Yet I do not think it is only me, or only Polish poets, who must come to terms with these questions. Triggered by the worldwide disillusionment brought about by the global spectacle of the Second World War (brilliantly explained by Miłosz in The Witness of Poetry), it seems that Postmodernism is the first stage of grieving our collective loss of faith in centrality and certainty. I believe we can, and must, move past this stage by confronting the deep questions that surfaced in this time. We must heal the unspeakable wound.
Even as reconciling personal grief has been an inescapable task in my personal life, I see these same questions refusing to go unresolved in our modern world. In America, and worldwide, we are faced once again with an economic crisis stemming from the inherent problems of capitalism, and once again we regard those who offer a worldview more inclusive of the common good with deep skepticism and fear of tyranny. Religion and scientific reason continue to reinforce their differences. Generativity again takes a back seat to instant gratification in our culture. And all of it has been syndicated, and accelerated, by increasingly more sophisticated technological systems of disseminating information. Yet none of these systems, no matter how good their search algorithms, provide the means to make human meaning from this glut of data. And so, the great questions of the early twenty-first century are actually only the great unresolved questions of the last century.
Nowhere do I find more careful consideration of these questions than from Polish poets. What an unexpected kinship, and how reassuring, to read how they, too, found freedom in poetry, a declaration of their humanity capable of transcending the difficult circumstance of being human in a world that continues to shrink, even as the weight of history increases.
Now, I will let them speak for themselves. Here are some excerpts I found particularly insightful from the excellent compilation Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski:
Continue Reading “Twentieth-Century Polish Poets on Poetry”
I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing Andrew Philip, author of The Ambulance Box, as part of his virtual book tour. We conducted the interview via Skype, and it was remarkable to be able to both hear and see Andrew from such a great distance. Unfortunately, a few of those digital packets did seem to fall out of order somewhere over the Atlantic, so at times the lip sync is a little off. For me, it was still tremendously exciting to be able to speak with Andrew about his work, his craft, and his life using this technology. The complete thirty-five-minute video is available below.
Individual Video Tracks:
Complete Audio Version (35:00)
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At the start of each of my four semesters in the MFA program, I posted a call to help me find poets for my student reading lists. The responses were wonderful. (You can still read my requests, and the suggestions for my first, second, third, and fourth semesters on this site.)
Recently, Val and I have been spring cleaning books–since we had reached the point where we needed to either buy another bookshelf (we have six lining the walls of our small cottage), or cull the herd. We ended up selling about fifty books back to Powell’s, and gave away lots of others. With the MFA commencement right around the corner, our hotel in Portland booked just blocks from the main Powell’s store, and my $75 in store credit now converted to a gift card that’s burning a hole in my pocket, the only question left is: what should I buy?
I have been enjoying Yehuda Amichai lately, and want to get some Ibrahim Nasrallah. Newer poets like Shaindel Beers are on my radar. And one could do worse than, say, to stock up on some William Carlos Williams. But I’d love suggestions–particularly if you’ve read something recently that, as Dickinson says, takes the top of your head off. Something you would want to thrust into my hands with a wild gleam in your eye and say, “man, you gotta check this out.”
Robert Peake's poems have appeared in Iota, North American Review, Rattle, and others.
