Poetry Beat

Poetry Beat has moved

Dear Readers,

Poetry Beat has moved.  We are now a contributor to ArtsBeat, the new online site for expanded Fine Arts coverage at The News.

The Poetry Beat moniker will disappear shortly, and I will also be writing about innovative fiction and the small and independent press publishing scene.  The best news of all is that you won't have to witness my ever receding hairline and facial stubble every time you open one of these postings.

For those of you who RSS feed Poetry Beat, you'll want to reset your bookmarks or aggregator settings soon.  Here is a link to the new ArtsBeat.

Thank you all for supporting this little online experiment.  We'll keep trying our best to keep you up to date on news of interest to the Buffalo area literary community.

R.D. (Bob) Pohl

Grace Paley: A Personal Story

Despite her popularity on the reading and lecture circuit, Grace Paley, the great short story writer and poet who died Aug. 22. at age 84, handled her own correspondence and for many years even her own personal appearances without benefit of a booking agent.

When I wrote her a letter of appreciation and invited her to read in Hallwalls' Fiction Diction Series in 1983, I was stunned to receive her handwritten response, which included an unlisted phone number.

I dialed the number and found myself speaking to a woman who sounded like a slightly more focused and cerebral version of one of my great aunts. She was a whole lifetime wiser than me, but gracious enough not to call attention to the fact.

When I asked her about coming to Buffalo, she wanted to know more about Hallwalls and the brilliant young photographer Cindy Sherman (Hallwalls’ co-founder).  Sherman and her gender role exploring "Untitled Film Stills" were then the talk of Manhattan. Grace had been to one of her shows.   "Were there more artists like Sherman in Buffalo?" she asked. 

"Uh, we're all like that up here," I lied. "This town is a regular Salon de Refuses," I stammered, which was not all that far from the truth.  She laughed.

"Now how about Leslie Fiedler and Robert Creeley, will they be there?" she asked.  "I'll make a point of inviting them personally," I promised.   "Alright then, cover my expenses and I'll be there," she said.  "How does the first week of April sound to you?"

"Great," I said, "our snow should be melted by then." 

"That's too bad. You know, we never get any snow at all here in the hills of Vermont," she said dryly, referring to the farmhouse she lived in with her husband Robert Nichols, when she wasn't at her Manhattan apartment.  My turn to laugh.

Since I had promised to drive her and Nichols up to see Niagara Falls before the evening reading, we spent most of afternoon cruising the Niagara Parkway in my garish, fire-engine red Chrysler K car with the cheap vinyl seats.  Whenever I made a sharp turn in that car, my passengers tended to slide right out of their seat belts, owing to my overzealous application of vinyl protectant on the bench-type seats.

I was so embarrassed at chauffeuring one of America's greatest writers around in my tiny econobox that I made a joke about the red "K" on the dashboard standing for "kosher."

“Do you really think that Lee Iacocca would hire a rabbi to oversee production on his assembly lines?” asked Grace.  “Don’t apologize, I wasn’t expecting a limousine.”

It was one of those foggy gray days in early April that Eliot had in mind when he wrote The Waste Land.  When we finally got to the so-called "Honeymoon Capital of the World," the mist was so thick that you could hear the falls, but barely see it.  The view wasn't much better from the Canadian side.  On the drive back to Buffalo, we reminded ourselves of Oscar Wilde's famous dictum about Niagara Falls being "one of the earliest and keenest disappointments in American married life."

“Really?” said Nichols, “I always thought he said it was the second greatest disappointment of married life.” 

“What was the greatest disappointment?” asked Grace, with mock innocence.

“Wilde never said,” Nichols deadpanned, “and neither will I.” 

The 40-minute drive back to Buffalo was like the dramatization of a classic Paley story about a long married couple for whom life was a single ongoing conversation.  “Forget about Wilde,” said Grace, “his wife was disappointed in plenty of ways. What I want to know is how Tolstoy got away with that first sentence of Anna Karenina.”

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — that sounds like something only a man would write,” she said.  “Did anyone ever bother to ask the women whether or not they were happy?”

“Not Tolstoy,” winked Nichols, “he never had a research assistant.”

The banter went on like that all the way back to Buffalo and through dinner that evening.  When we got to Hallwalls, which back then was in the Theatre District, there were more than 200 people waiting for us.

I corresponded with Paley briefly and very occasionally over the following years, and saw her twice after her initial reading in Buffalo.  The last note I have from her was a “thank you” for a review of her Long Walks and Intimate Talks (a mix of poems and stories) in 1991.

I wouldn't presume to say that I knew her as anything other than an enthusiastic reader, and for one afternoon 24 years ago, as a not very knowledgeable Niagara Falls tour guide. 

Still, if you had the good fortune to meet her, Grace Paley was one of those people you would never forget.

The New/reNEW Series

From 1975 to 1990, the Niagara-Erie Writers played a key role in the growth of the local literary community.

NEW (as it was known) brought several hundred writers from widely disparate backgrounds (i.e., urban and rural, tenured academics, labor movement activists, feminists and environmentalists) together in an organization that sponsored readings, workshops, and a monthly "NEWsletter. That publication, edited by the late Robin Willoughby, was the definitive source of literary news and information for poets and writers across the region.

NEW's demise was not a result of declining membership or internal dissension.  Instead, it was the victim of a kind of paradigm shift in public funding for the arts.  With little earned revenue or corporate sponsorship, NEW was unable to adapt to changing criteria for how groups applying for public support were evaluated.

Beginning next month, a new reading series organized by former NEW program coordinator Ryki Zuckerman and sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center pays tribute to NEW's legacy.  The "New/reNEW Series" will bring together poets and writers associated with the former Niagara-Erie Writers with promising "new voices" emerging from the community.

The initial reading at 7 p.m. on Sept. 20 at Impact Artists' Gallery (Suite 545) in the Tri-Main Center, 2495 Main St., Buffalo, will feature poet Michael Basinski, a former executive director of NEW who is now curator of the poetry collection of the University Libraries at the University of Buffalo.  The widely published Basinski's improvisational text and sound-based performances are like archaeological digs through the deep structure of language.  You never know what linguistic treasures he might unearth amid the ruins.

Reading with Basinski will be Karlen Chase, a self described "serial laborer and recovering vagabond" with a MFA in creative writing from the University of Vermont,  who returned to New York from a stint out west with an award-winning chapbook of poems entitled Spreading Stars to enter the master of library sciences at UB.

For information about future events in the New/reNEW Series visit justbuffalo.org.

New U.S. poet laureate

"Driving Home," a new poem by Charles Simic in the current issue of The New Yorker, reminds us of how important a poet Simic is: how much pathos and dissonant imagery he can evoke in just a dozen lines of simple syntax.

On Aug. 2, Simic was appointed to succeed Donald Hall as the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress James Billington.

In a remarkable coincidence, he was also selected that same day to receive the Academy of American Poets'  highest honor, the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."

For those who have followed Simic's work -- his early collections Charon's Cosmology (1977) and Classic Ballroom Dances (1980) were considered essential reading among younger poets of that era -- this recognition seems a validation not only of his minimalist poetics and absurdist view of history, but also a victory of sorts for "foreignness" in American poetry. 

"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15," Simic observed in a brief statement following his appointment.

Readers familiar with only his essays on poetry and literature in The New York Review of Books or his selections as coeditor of poetry for The Paris Review, may not appreciate the extent to which Simic's penchant for dark humor and surreal images was shaped by his childhood in eastern Europe.

  Born in Belgrade, Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia) in 1938, he witnessed the destruction and multiple dislocations of World War II before emigrating to the United States with his family and settling in the Chicago area in 1953. 

"My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go," he explained in a recent interview in The Guardian, "so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity."

If you'd like to sample some of Simic's work, a good place to begin is with his collection of prose poems The World Doesn't End (which received Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1990), or better yet his Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize) where you can find assorted gems like this one:

Paradise Motel

Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.

I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.

On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.

Final issue for Parnassus

The literary world is full of unsung heroes whose cultural impact is greater than their name recognition.

For the last 30 years, one of these heroes has been Herbert Leibowitz, the founder and longtime editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the New York City based publication that ranks among the most influential poetry magazines of our era.

Like many readers, I've come to admire Parnassus for the clarity and depth of its reviewing, the high-minded inclusiveness of its editorial philosophy, and even the quality and heft of its volumes. But I didn't realize it was essentially put together on a shoestring budget by a college professor and a few of his graduate assistants in the spare room of a Manhattan apartment.

Last month, Leibowitz announced that the next issue of Parnassus, a 600-page, Thirtieth Anniversary "International Poetries" issue due out this autumn would be the magazine's last.

In recent years, funding the publication without a major patron or underwriter has proven to be in Leibowitz's own words, "an insuperable obstacle," forcing him to dip into personal savings to finance several issues.

Recent articles in Poets & Writers Magazine and the Wall Street Journal have reported on Leibowitz's decision, with the WSJ in particular focusing on the contrasting fortunes of Parnassus and Chicago based Poetry magazine's The Poetry Foundation, the recent beneficiary of a $200 million bequest from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly.

Ironically, even as the publication closes down, Parnassus will be honored in a high profile program at the Poetry Center of Manhattan's 92nd Street Y on Dec. 10th, and Leibowitz himself is slated to receive the newly created Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism from the Poetry Foundation.

For all its accomplishments, excellence alone was not enough to save Parnassus. According to Leibowitz, the magazine's perennial funding issues mattered less than a "failure of nerve" on the part of many of today's poets to engage in critical dialogue.

Here is a portion of his most recent "Editor's Manifesto" which you can read in full at Parnassus: Editor's Manifesto:

"Over the last fifteen years or so, as the prestige of high culture has steadily declined, the audience for belletristic criticism—as opposed to the jargon-riddled academic variety—has dwindled. Yet what I find perhaps even more distressing is the reluctance of poets to write honestly about their peers...This widespread timidity, this failure of nerve, quashes the frank exchange of ideas; it closes the valves of everyone’s attention like stone, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson...If reviewers hail nearly every poet as being worthy of a laurel wreath, why should we believe them?"

Poetry or fiction?

Is it poetry or is it fiction?

That's a question some readers of literary magazines and journals may be asking themselves about the new forms of narrative writing that incorporate elements of both prose poetry and short (or "flash") fiction.  The distinction is increasingly one without a difference, especially among those writers who intentionally resist such categorization.

Both the prose poem and "flash fiction" (which is also sometimes referred to as "sudden fiction" or the "short, short story") are established literary forms with long, if somewhat disputed histories.  The prose poem generally credited as originating in 19th century France, notably in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Arthur Rimbaud, all of whom rejected the constraints the alexandrine (or twelve syllable metrical line) imposed on early modern French verse forms.

Flash fiction is probably as old as storytelling itself and shares its ancestry with the fable, the parable, and folk tale.  Advocates of the most concise examples of the form often cite Ernest Hemingway's six-word story (reputedly composed to win a bar bet): "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

It is only recently, though, that the two forms have begun to converge aesthetically.  Perhaps the most extensive examination of this phenomenon in print is PP/FF: An Anthology published in 2006 by Buffalo novelist and independent publisher Ted Pelton's Starcherone Books.  The anthology is edited by Peter Conners, the Rochester based writer/editor best known for his work with BOA Editions Ltd. and features 75 examples of this emergent form by 61 of today's most innovative poets and fiction writers.

In his introduction to the anthology, Conners points out that some of the work in the volume does not fit neatly into either category.  "As a reader, writer, and editor, it is my opinion that this 'neither' type of writing is so contemporarily important as to define a zeitgeist," he asserts.   

"For more information, or to order a copy of PP/FF: An Anthology, visit Starcherone Books | The Art Of Fiction.

Susan Howe tribute

For the past three and half decades, Susan Howe has been a visionary nonconformist who has left her distinctive mark on American poetry.  More than any other figure associated with Language poetry and the critical writing it has generated, she has applied her innovative poetics to seemingly disparate historical narratives, divergent literary and philosophical traditions, and unchallenged cultural assumptions about gender and authority.

In her books My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Howe undertook a radical and passionate rereading of the foundational literary texts of her native New England--from Cotton Mather and Anne Hutchinson to Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Dickinson--that reclaimed those texts from the puritanical interests of patriarchy and social control.

In her own poetry, notably The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), and The Europe of Trusts (2002), she takes up many of the same themes less methodically, using a hauntingly fragmentary and collage-like approach that acknowledges the text as visual space.   If one were to read her work entirely out of context, she might be mistaken for a literary anthropologist out to demystify the entire edifice of meaning.  "Where philosophy stops, poetry is impelled to begin," she writes in The Midnight.

Howe, who spent a portion of her childhood in Buffalo, returned here to teach in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo from 1988 until her retirement this year.  In honor of her influence on an entire generation of students, poet Kyle Schlesinger's Cuneiform Press has just published I Have Imagined A Center//Wilder Than This Region: A Tribute to Susan Howe.

The 120-page volume is edited by Sarah Campbell, the young poet and essayist who made such a strong impression during her year-long stint as host of WBFO's Spoken Arts radio features last year.  It features an introduction by UB professor Neil Schmitz and contributions from 16 of Howe's more prominent students over the years. In addition to Campbell and Schlesinger, contributors include Barbara Cole, Benjamn Friedlander, Peter Gizzi, Jena Osman, Jonathan Skinner, Juliana Spahr and Elizabeth Willis.

For information on how to purchase the book, go to www.cuneiformpress.com

Natasha Trethewey

Monday night's edition of the National Public Radio program Fresh Air featured an 40-minute interview with Natasha Trethewey, the Gulfport, Mississippi, native whose collection Native Guard received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.   It's a terrific interview, even by the high standards set by UB graduate Terry Gross and her staff on that program.

Trethewey discusses growing up as a biracial child in the still segregated South of the late 1960s and reads from "Miscegenation" (one of her best-known poems).  She describes the pressures on her parents'  interracial marriage - still illegal in Mississippi in 1966 when she was born - and the unwelcome attention it drew from the local Klan, which burned a cross on their lawn. 

She also talks about her mother's murder by her second husband (Trethewey's stepfather) in 1985, and explains how she was able to write about it for the first time in Native Guard. Breaking her silence on this family tragedy inspired her to seek out other unwritten narratives of her region's African-American heritage.

Her "Elegy for the Native Guards" is dedicated to the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a regiment of African-American and Creole soldiers (mostly escaped slaves and free men), who were formed under the Confederacy, but eventually fought on the side of the Union in the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana during the Civil War.  They were stationed on Ship Island, just outside Trethewey's native Gulfport, though she never learned of their existence until her years as a graduate fellow at Radcliffe.

I picked up a copy of Native Guard in April shortly after the Pulitzer announcement and was impressed by Trethewey's diction and command of formal verse forms.  They give her work the clarity and restraint necessary to handle difficult personal memories and sweeping historical narratives with equal mastery.   

You can listen to the interview and hear Trethewey reading several of her poems by clicking on the following link: NPR : Poet Natasha Trethewey, Hymning the Native Guard

Reed, Troupe at Book Fair

Two of the leading figures in the American Black Arts movement  will read and discuss their poetry at Saturday's Buffalo Book Fair. 

Both Buffalo native Ishmael Reed and former California poet laureate Quincy Troupe are prolific authors probably best known for their prose: Reed for his satirical novels (Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada) and controversial essays and Troupe as a biographer (Miles Davis, James Baldwin), memoirist, and the co-author (with Chris Gardner) of the book version of last year's Will Smith film The Pursuit of Happyness.

Both began their careers as poets and have continued to write and publish poetry with such regularity that one could argue that it forms the baseline from which the rest of their work stems.  Reed, for instance, returns home to Buffalo as co-chairman of the book fair and in support of his recently released New and Collected Poems, 1996-2006, published in March by Carroll & Graf.

He will be interviewed and engage in an open discussion with Lorna C. Hill, founder and executive director of Ujima Theater Company, about the new book and his five-decade-long career as a writer.  "A Conversation with Ishmael Reed" will take place from 1:15 to 2:15 p.m. in the downtown library's "Ring of Knowledge" area.  This is a "can't miss" event for anyone interested in great literary talk between two strong personalities.

In that same area from noon to 1 p.m., Troupe will be interviewed by Les Trent, the former Channel 4 News reporter/anchor who is now a senior correspondent for television's Inside Edition. Troupe's most recent collection of poems, Architecture of Language, was published in October by Coffee House Press.

Troupe will read from his jazz-influenced performance poetry from 3 to 3:45 p.m. in the "Literary Cafe'" area.  Reed will read from his New and Collected Poems at 5:30 p.m. in the "Uncrowned Queens" pavilion.

Kazim Ali in APR

The July/August 2007 issue of American Poetry Review features a fine, essay length column called "Poetry and Space" by Kazim Ali.  It's an intuitive, beautifully-written meditation on how the spaces we inhabit (and leave behind) resonate through our spiritual and productive lives.  Pieces of such clarity, depth and emotional intelligence are rare, even in publications that bill themselves as showcases of fine contemporary writing like APR. 

It's good enough to make you want to scratch your head and ask "Who is this Kazim Ali?"

Many Buffalo area readers will remember Ali as the ambitious and engaging young poet of Indian Muslim heritage who spent part of his youth in the Buffalo suburbs.  He attended the University at Albany before returning here (where his parents still reside) to become an active participant in the local literary scene in the late 1990s. His work has been published on The News' Poetry Page and he did a stint as a Writer-in-Residence for Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Although his work back then was much more "performance-oriented" than what he is doing now, he always seemed to be absorbing new influences and refining his craft.  After leaving Buffalo for New York City and the MFA Writing Program at New York University in 1999, he began publishing his work in many leading literary magazines and journals.

Buffalo's own Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVox Books published Ali's "lyric" novel Quinn's Passage in December of 2004.  The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by Chronogram magazine.  His first book of poems, The Far Mosque, was published by Alice James Books in October of 2005 and selected for that publisher's New England/New York Award.   His new collection of poems The Fortieth Day will be published in 2008 by Rochester's BOA Editions. 

Ali teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, and begining this fall, will join the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio.  If readers have any additional observations on or insights into his work, I'd love to read your comments on it.