Lit Tripping Through the Birmingham Poetry Review

Here begins a journey through a journal the Steiny Road Poet values for many reasons. In the Spring 2013 (number 40), the Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR) published poems by 59 poets and several remarkable book reviews that are so well written and reasoned that the essayists deserve special attention. (Full disclosure, the Steiny Poet has read two of the books reviewed, helped publish one of the books, and wrote one of the collections of poetry.) Let the short quotations from these reviews speak for themselves.

Double Agent by Michelle Chan Brown as reviewed by Laura Eve Engel

“Brown’s speaker—a single speaker, it seems to me, who is unified in tone but nearly boundless in every other regard—often appears to be observing the party from above even as she is present... The omnipresence of the consciousness in these poems lends it self well to their content—she can move from Berlin to a Russian museum to the moon with ease and, perhaps more importantly, without explanation. She can also move with grace into quiet, more internal spaces, and it is in these spaces where it’s clearest that despite the delightful flamboyance of her un-truth telling, Brown is often working something that resembles a confessional mode.”

For the Mountain Laurel by John Casteen as reviewed by Jennifer Horne

“Perhaps my ear is overly attuned to the confessional mode, expecting resurrection through revelation or the appearance thereof. These poems frustrate that expectation, maybe intentionally so, forcing us back to the poem itself and not the author’s biography. To borrow a phrase from Sharon Olds, these poems are ‘apparently personal,’ drawn from the author’s life but not intended as literal diary entries. The poems evoke the feeling of someone passing through a crisis and, of necessity, focusing on the present rather than looking backwards or forwards, as though a sustain examination of what is will be more freeing than any other kind of analysis.”

How to Make a Bird with Two Hands by Mike White as reviewed by Alyse Knorr

“The most striking aspect of White’s work, to me, is how intelligently and playfully intertextual it is—bouncing between various schools, movements, and canonized poets to highlight his own aesthetic lineage. The effect is that of being at a party with a room full of your favorite poets—and White is an excellent host. He nods directly to Basho, Berryman, Li Po, Whitman, and Wright in titles and epigraphs, while injecting Frank O’Hara as a character into two poems.”

On a Bed of Gardenias:Jane & Paul Bowles by Karren LaLonde Alenier as reviewed by Brandel France de Bravo

“…I am impressed with Alenier’s ability to transform biography into finely wrought lyric poems of varying styles and textures. On a Bed of Gardenias contains highly condensed, whip-smart free verse (Riff on ‘A Quarreling Pair’); poems with longer, more conversational lines in the form of a letter (Agonizer); and poems that have chapters and gesture toward the novel (Hidden Messages: Paul Bowles introduces Jane Auer to his Family); or towards plays with acts (Drawing Room Comedy); a poem in tow columns (Yanked); a pantoum (Gift), and poetic forms of Alenier’s own creation.

The lit trip, if all goes well, will be a series of posts looking at as many poems as the Steiny Road Poet feels moved to examine without regard to their resting place in the BPR Table of Contents.

Jane Satterfield’s “Resurrection Spell” with the following epigraph from Muriel Rukeyser—“Too much life to kill” caught the Steiny Poet’s attention for the opening leg of this odyssey. The epigraph comes from Rukeyser’s poem “Suicide Blues” but the Steiny Poet does not see that Satterfield is talking about that kind of death. And by the way, as you, Dear Reader, might surmise from the Rukeyser epigraph,  “Suicide Blues” does not end in suicide. Satterfield’s emphasis in her poem is on the living, “the good friends who wish for resurrection” with such intense grieving that the expectation is that the dead one will “breeze back into the studio kitchen.”

In “Resurrection Spell,” the grieving which manifests by ritual, particularly a type of wailing known as keening, takes on a theatrical presence that mirrors “Suicide Blues.” Rukeyser’s focus is on woman vocalizing first with speech and then with singing. Satterfield begins with elegy, which can be either a poem or a song (and yes, this poem is an elegy), and rapidly moves to the musical landscape of song and choral practice, which she annotates as “these stagey ways to garb our grief.”

What is unusual about Satterfield’s elegy is the way it teaches the language of grief, defining such words as elegy and the verb to keen, and then tosses it back almost comically like a needed stiff drink after a good show. The narrator, despite philosophic aphorisms as “The universe at odds with our will” and “How the hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” begs off on how to achieve a spell that will “call the lost one to cross over” and thereby rise again as a living entity of “breath, blood, bone.” Except there is the keening that “lives on, a choral practice that came/ to accommodate all manner/ of praise and social critique.” What follows is a call for spirits to salute life and its after state: “Spell me with something/ auspicious, a glass of said ale, Abbey style, with its five types of barley malt, and the/ dormant hops the brewmaster brought back.”  So the only certain resurrection is the beer that has been brought back from inactive hops.

The Next Big Thing: A Writer Looks at her Projects

The Steiny Road Poet had not heard of The Next Big Thing until her publisher Sammy Greenspan of Kattywompus emailed her and asked if the Steiny Poet wanted to participate. Given that the Poet will be on the road in San Francisco and the Los Angeles area for a reading tour, she had to think hard about whether to participate. However, it seemed like a good thinking tool for the Poet and easy enough to do most of the work before she left home on January 12.

Besides it was a good way to learn about the personal writing of Sammy Greenspan. http://www.kattywompuspress.com/content/next-big-thing-which-publisher-puts-her-writer-hat So dear publisher of Karren Alenier’s On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles, thank you for giving me a peek into your writing and for thinking of me for this project.

Here is Karren Alenier’s next big thing post:

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

The working title of my next poetry collection, a book-length manuscript, is The Anima of Paul Bowles. It includes the poems in the Kattywompus chapbook On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles. The Anima of Paul Bowles adds 19 more poems to the story of who Paul Bowles was.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The first poem of this series, “Raconteurs in Tangier,” was drafted in the early aughts (2000 maybe) while the Steiny Road Poet was managing a writing and arts retreat in the Castello di Montegufoni in Tuscany, Italy. Her partner on this trip, Grace Cavalieri gave the writers an assignment and something sparked for the Steiny Poet. Eventually, the Steiny Poet knew she wanted to write a whole series about Jane and Paul Bowles because she wanted studies for an new opera libretto. Writing poems first is how the Steiny Poet writes an opera libretto.

What genre does your book fall under?

This book is poetry but within these poems comes formats that resemble a novel, a dramatic play, a puppet play, a letter. Grace Cavalieri said of these poems that the Steiny Poet had a “different strategy for each poem.” The formats seemed to be suggested to the Steiny Poet by the life and work of Jane and Paul Bowles.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The Steiny Road Poet has written an opera libretto based on On a Bed of Gardenias. This collection is the exotic love story of Jane and Paul Bowles who loved each other but each had same sex lovers. The bigger unpublished collection The Anima of Paul Bowles starts with the boyhood and teenage years of Paul Bowles. For these characters, if a movie were made, I would pick Sean Penn and Mary-Louise Parker. I think these actors could get the quirkiness of these two complicated artists.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Paul Bowles, a loner-composer-world-traveler made an underground guru by the Beats and Hippies, was influenced in his writing by his mother, Gertrude Stein, and his unpredictable writer-wife Jane.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This book will not be self-published and it is unlikely to be represented by an agency. Poetry according to Muriel Rukeyser in her book The Life of Poetry said “[Americans think of poetry as something] to be passed on but not used.” Therefore poetry seems to have no monetary value like fiction or a how to book. I found Sammy Greenspan and Kattywompus in Chicago at the 2009 AWP bookfair and so maybe I’ll be lucky enough to find a new publisher in Boston at the 2013 AWP bookfair.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The Steiny Road Poet probably took ten years because the collection kept evolving. When she first spoke to Sammy, she had a group of found poems in this collection. Because getting permission to quote letters of Paul Bowles from where the found poems sprung was mind bogglingly impossible, the Steiny Poetreplaced those eight poems with brand new work.

What other books would you compare this collection to within your genre?

There is something audacious about writing a collection of poems about a writer who only died in 1999 as Paul Bowles did. However, the Steiny Road Poet believes he encouraged audacity and cultivated it. The Steiny Poet doesn’t know of any other collection of cross-genre poems like those of The Anima of Paul Bowles. She hopes someone will inform her if such a collection exists.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

In 1982, the Steiny Road Poet spent three weeks in Tangier, Morocco, in a program that featured Paul Bowles as a co-leader of a fiction workshop. While she worked on the fiction with the other co-leader Fred Tuten, she worked with Paul on her poems about Gertrude Stein which much later became part of her opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Here's a comment about On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane & Paul Bowles from a poet who first met Paul Bowles as a teenager because her step-father was writing a graduate paper on Bowles:

As someone who spent time with Paul Bowles and has read all of his and Jane Bowles' work, I am impressed with Alenier's ability to transform biography into finely wrought lyric poems of varying styles and textures. Her book, On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane and Paul Bowles, contains highly condensed, whip-smart free verse, poems with longer, more conversational lines, poems that dress up as other forms of writing (one with chapters gestures toward the novel and another is in the guise of a letter), a pantoum, and forms of Alenier's own creation.

Through ever shifting points of view--third person narrator, Paul, Jane, and Jane's longtime lover, Cherifa--we enter the complex relationship of this dueling and devoted dyad whose creative coupling defies logic and defines need. Alenier has great tonal range--a fitting gift given that between the two Bowles, they produced music, poetry, short stories, novels, travelogues, memoir, and a play.

Alenier is also a poet who knows how to tell a story, keeping us riveted right up to the quietly tragic final poem, "Exit Interview."

Brandel France de Bravo, author of Provenance

Drum roll as the Steiny Road Poet presents the following writers who will tell you about their Next Big Thing:

Bernadette Geyer who is the author of the forthcoming book TheScabbard of Her Throat from The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection selected by Cornelius Eady. 

C. M. Mayo (Catherine Mayo, A.K.A. Madam Mayo), poet, writer, publisher, also spent a several week session with Paul Bowles the year after the Steiny Road Poet did.

Splendid Wake, Discovering the Scope of Poetry in the Nation’s Capital

Something very huge in scope is happening in the greater Washington, DC area and adds fuel to the fire concerning why poetry matters.

Splendid Wake, a project initially conceived to honor dead poets who lived and worked in the Nation’s Capital, is the brain child of poets  Elisavietta Ritchie and Myra Sklarew, with logistical help from  George Washington University Gelman Library Special Collections librarian Jennifer King. At the first meeting held June 27, 2012, the project immediately expanded to include a broader historic scope of what happened in the DC community with poetry, poets, literary movements, publishing houses, reading series, and more.

By the second meeting held December 11, 2012, such poets as Karren Alenier, Anne Becker, Patricia Garfinkel, Mary Ann Larkin, Merrill Leffler, Judith McCombs, Jean Nordhaus, Bill Rivera helped Sklarew, Ritchie, and King decide that they wanted to create a record for posterity. Creating an Internet Wiki seemed to be the best solution for gathering such voluminous information. King was able to negotiate that through GWU, but counseled that categories had be established and named that would bear the test of time.

This brings the Steiny Road Poet to the third meeting February 7, 2013, where categories and boundaries were established. So the project encompasses all that happened involving poetry from 1900 to the current day in the greater Washington, DC area where poets as far away as Baltimore, St. Mary’s City, the outer reaches of Northern Virginia consider DC their spiritual center. The Wiki categories after much passionate discussion were boiled down to poets, publications, and public presentations. Under these three categories will cluster information about poets dead or alive working in the DC area and influencing the DC literary scene, publishing houses and institutions, reading series, informal workshops and literary salons, media outlets and programs, bookstores, literary movements and whatever else surfaces to be included. The plan is to have a one evening public program at Gelman Library in 2013 to share some of this information.

What is clear is that Washington, DC, with its history of poets sponsored by the Library of Congress, its active small press, workshops and reading series scene with public radio broadcasts and occasional cable TV programs featuring poetry as well as its interest in international poets and poetry in translation is unlike any other literary community in the country. Myra Sklarew wondered out loud to the Steiny Poet what would be the outcome of this documentary project? Thinking large, the Steiny Poet believes that the audience for poetry will expand to prove once again that poetry matters.

Despite Obstacles, Why Poetry Matters

After a bout with the fake flu that everyone is giving to each other like a hot potato that you don’t want to catch, the Steiny Road Poet is back from what she will now call her Life of Poetry tour. This is the tour that started January 15, 2013, in San Francisco with Poetry in Red Dress that offered poems of Muriel Rukeyser and Gertrude Stein and featured Karren Alenier, Mary Mackey, Evelyn Posamentier, and Margo Taft Stever and concluded January 20, 2013, in Venice, California, with Beyond Baroque:East & West Coast Poets that showcased Karren Alenier, Andrea Carter Brown, David Del Bourgo, and Margo Taft Stever. More about this tour shortly but first the Steiny Poet wants to talk about how poetry in America is treated.

HAVE POETS GONE POSTAL?

Apparently The Washington Post opinion writer Alexandra Petri has been stirring the embers where sick potatoes are roasted to raise the same old question about whether poetry is dead. In the Saturday January 26, 2013, print edition of The Washington Post, the editors finally saw fit to print Richard Blanco’s poem of elegant heft “One Today,” which he presented at the public swearing in of Barack Obama for a second term as president of the United States. In the same print edition, the Post editors also published Petri’s essay “Ode to an obsolete art” where she sarcastically wrote, “Poets are like the Postal Service—a group of people sedulously doing something that we no longer need, under the misapprehension that they are offering us a vital service.” Petri also stated, “We have movies now capable of presenting images to us with a precision that would have made Ezra Pound keel over. All the things that poetry used to do, other things do much better.” What Mad Men sold Ms. Petri this bill of goods?

While Ms. Petri, a 2010 undergraduate of Harvard knows her ancient poetry assuring us that all literature in its day—The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh—used to be poetry, she apparently has not read Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry. Rukeyser, who had a thick FBI dossier and who worked in Hollywood as a film cutter, said in her book published in 1949 that Americans see poetry fit to be “passed on but not … used” except for ads and greeting cards. According to Rukeyser, good poetry is “time-resistant more than monuments.” She said Americans fear poetry not only because they are afraid of not being able to understand it, but also it might expose their feelings and cause them to respond. She says poetry prepares the reader for action in perhaps unexpected ways, ways associated with emotional exposure.

Rukeyser said the images produced by Hollywood are all about advertising. Rukeyser was enlisted to work with the WWII effort to fight against Fascism, but ad people elbowed out the creative thinkers saying the people at home during wartime were customers (as opposed to citizens) who needed to just win without considering the meaning of what the country was fighting against and for. She also wrote in her manifesto, “The writer becoming an employee in Hollywood, forced to conform to a code which dictates emotional limits, and producing material which can be censored and re-arranged, with or without his knowledge, is a key figure in our society.” Why? Because movies are part of our every day fare? Why shouldn't poetry fill this gap?

LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF POETRY TOUR

So now that Steiny Poet has completed her Life of Poetry tour in California, the question most people would ask is what difference did it make? Actually, the better question is what was learned?

Lesson Number 1—the literary community in San Francisco does not support its writers. Two outsiders, Karren Alenier of the Washington DC area and Margo Stever of the Greater New York City area landed at the San Francisco airport on January 12, scrambled over to an Alameda meeting of 20 plus women poets of the Greater San Francisco Bay area, read poems with this group for two hours (everyone sharing their own work) and got exactly one person in attendance at the Poetry in Red Dress reading and that one person had been someone that Alenier had attended three of her readings held in the DC area over a period of several years. Two of the Red Dress poets—Evelyn Posamentier and Mary Mackey—were San Francisco area poets well known to this salon. Salon member said during that warm and gracious salon reception that there were too many readings going on in the Bay Area and they were not sure what to do about it.  However, everyone agreed that it was important to keep on doing readings. Also despite several emails to Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash and help from a Poetry Flash insider, no notice of Red Dress was listed in their community calendar.

Lesson Number 2—don’t count on local writers in San Francisco to draw audience. While the Steiny Poet and her traveling mate Margo Stever were trying to arrange a reading in The City by the Bay, one desperate bookseller, who later apologized but nonetheless did not schedule a reading for Red Dress, demanded that book sales and audience count be guaranteed. The fact was Red Dress at Books and Bookshelves had a respectable audience numbering around 30 people and over $275 worth of books was sold.

Lesson Number 3—the most interesting reactions come from audience who were not literary writers. Poetry in Red Dress which had a script that included group readings of work by Rukeyser and Alenier as well as solo readings by each participating poet and presentation of poems by Gertrude Stein, got such comments as:

“I go to a lot of poetry readings with my wife (this was science professor by training) and this program was so interesting and well done. It may be the best I have ever experienced.”

“I enjoyed the variety of subject matter in the poetry and the pacing. I am now excited to go back to reading poetry which I haven’t done in a long time.” (Artistic director of an Asian-style theater company)

Lesson Number 4—don’t underestimate efforts at blogging and social media like Facebook and twitter. What really made the Steiny Poet’s day for Red Dress was having a couple show up who said they came because they read about it in the Poet’s blog posts.

Lesson Number 5—Californians have a much more laid back approach to how they handle things that can frustrate the get-it-right-the-first-time East Coaster. Beyond Baroque, a struggling arts organization with budget issues (just like every other nonprofit in America), took weeks to get an announcement up on their website calendar and then the information was incorrect and, worse, accented information that had no relevance to the workshop and reading that Alenier and Stever orchestrated. Slowly things were corrected. The Steiny knew from talking to a San Francisco poet who had also scheduled a Beyond Baroque workshop and reading that if there was to be any audience at all, it was strictly up to participating poets.

Lesson Number 6—reach out to people whom you want to see in your audience with personal one-on-one conversations well before the event. The Steiny Poet and her travel mate did this for both the Red Dress and Beyond Baroque readings. It worked in both cases and especially interesting was that a member of Alenier’s Coursera Modern Poetry class showed for the Beyond Baroque workshop and the brand newly appointed poet laureate of Los Angeles Eloise Klein Healy attended the BB reading much to the pleasure of everyone associated with the arts center and those in the audience. Also Alenier was able to connect with her former teacher James Ragan (well known at Beyond Baroque and a poet who has read his work to thousands on international stages) who brought his daughter, the poet Tera Vale Ragan.

In the end, the communication of poetry in America still goes between a small number of people. Giving poetry readings is a kind of frontier, where only the brave or foolish travel. Those of us, who carry a torch for poetry, do it because we know it adds meaning to our lives and we hope to the lives of others. For Alenier and Stever, this was not a vanity tour. Both extended themselves to other writers living and not. Both hoped to pass on knowledge about why living the life of poetry matters.

ONE TODAY

And while Alenier missed the live reading of Richard Blanco’s “One Today” because she was flying back from her Life of Poetry tour , she would be happy to illuminate why Blanco’s poem, written for a special occasion in our American history, will be “time-resistant more than monuments.” For starters, think about how it evokes Martin Luther King’s I-had-a-dream speech, the Newtown murders of 20 little children, and 9/11 without prosaic commentary.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,

the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:

equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,

the "I have a dream" we all keep dreaming,

or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain

the empty desks of twenty children marked absent

today, and forever.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed

their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked

their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:

weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report

for the boss on time, stitching another wound

or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,

or the last floor on the Freedom Tower

jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

(excerpts from Richard Blanco’s “One Today”)

Copyright © 2013 Richard Blanco

WHAT’S NEXT

No, Alexandra Petri, poetry is not dead and there is no hot potato to catch. It’s time for you to go out with your friends and support what poets do. And by the way, Natasha Trethewey, our new American poet laureate, is reading at the Library of Congress January 30 on the subject of the civil war and how it still affects us today. Ask Ms. Trethewey if poetry matters. Ask her if poetry is dead.