The Hide-and-Seek Muse Read online

  THE HIDE-AND-SEEK MUSE:

  ANNOTATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY

  BY

  LISA RUSS SPAAR

  INTRODUCED BY

  NICK FLYNN

  THE HIDE-AND-SEEK MUSE:

  ANNOTATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY

  BY

  LISA RUSS SPAAR

  INTRODUCED BY

  NICK FLYNN

  books by Lisa Russ Spaar

  Vanitas, Rough

  All That Mighty Heart: London Poems

  Satin Cash

  The Land of Wandering

  Blue Venus

  Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems

  Glass Town

  Blind Boy on Skates

  Cellar

  books by Drunken Boat Media

  Radha Says: Last Poems by Reetika Vazirani (2010)

  Copyright ©2013 by Drunken Boat Media

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention. Published in the United States of America by Drunken Boat Media, division of Drunken Boat, international online journal of the arts [http://www.drunkenboat.com]. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, online reproduction, or any information storage and retrieval system, whatsoever without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Drunken Boat’s books may be purchased for educational or promotional use. For information, please write: Drunken Boat 119 Main St., Chester, CT 06412 or email: [[email protected]].

  Cover art from photograph “Lung” donated and used by permission of Allyson Clay.

  Cover Design by Claire Zoghb.

  Interior Book Design by Bailey Lewis.

  Copyediting and proofreading by David Harrison Horton, Managing Editor, and Ravi Shankar, Executive Director of Drunken Boat.

  These essays appeared in earlier form in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Arts & Academe and Brainstorm blogs. This book’s publication and promotion were made possible in part by grants from the University of Virginia, Central Connecticut State University, from our Board of Advisors and from our loyal readers who contributed during our Kickstarter campaign, made possible by Director of Development, Michele Battiste.

  For more information on helping sustain the arts online and out in the world, and to interact with the best multigenre work in one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts, please visit Drunken Boat at [http://www.drunkenboat.com].

  Printed by Book Mobile [Bookmobile.com] and available at [Amazon.com]

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spaar, Lisa Russ. “The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry.”

  Drunken Boat Media (2013)

  ISBN# 978-0-9882416-0-2 (pbk.)

  ISBN# 978-0-9882416-1-9 (ebook)

  Drunken Boat ISSN #1537-2812

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction by Nick Flynn

  Preface & Acknowledgments

  Whitman & Dickinson in Our Space

  •

  The Hide-and-Seek Muse

  Edward Hirsch, “To Poetry”

  David Baker, “Swift”

  Brenda Hillman, “In High Desert Under the Drones”

  Stephen Cushman, “List List” & “Time Management”

  Mary Szybist, “Happy Ideas”

  •

  Spring & All: Poetry & the Seasons

  Carol Muske-Dukes, “To a Soldier”

  Laura Kasischke, “March”

  L.S. Klatt, “Hearsay” & “First Frost on Windshield”

  Jennifer Atkinson, “Lemon Tree”

  •

  Words in Love

  Jennifer Chang, “Love after Love”

  Randall Couch, “Pressed”

  Cate Marvin, “Let the Day Perish”

  Suzanne Buffam, “Happy Hour”

  Monica Ferrell, “The Date”

  •

  Verse’s Rich Web Portals

  Michael Rutherglen, “Went Viral” & “Cursor on a Chinese Poem”

  Kyle Dargan, “Note Blue or Poem for Eighties Babies”

  Kate Daniels, “Disjunction”

  Jennifer Key, “Delay at Washington National”

  Debra Allbery, “Of Evanescence”

  •

  Poetic Bloodlines

  David Wojahn, “In the Attic”

  Amy Newman, “While Sylvia Plath Studies The Joy of Cooking On Her Honeymoon In Benidorm, Spain, Delmore Schwartz Reclines In the Front Seat Of His Buick Roadmaster” & “After Sylvia Plath Kicks Out Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop Watches Idly From A Balcony In Rio As Police Chase A Thief Over Picturesque Hills”

  Heather McHugh, “As Authors Can’t Perfect One Agent”

  Paul Legault, from The Emily Dickinson Reader

  •

  Some Musings on Poetic Self-Portraiture

  Eric Pankey, “The Problem with the First Person” & “Beneath Venus”

  John Poch, “Echo”

  William Thompson, “Stutterer” & “The Prayer Rope Knot”

  Kazim Ali, from “The River Cloud Sutra”

  Allison Seay, “Town of Unspeakable Things”

  •

  Illness & Poetry

  Joanna Klink, “The Graves”

  Mark Jarman, “Oblivion”

  Alice Fulton, “After the Angelectomy”

  Jill Bialosky, “Teaching My Son to Drive”

  Kiki Petrosino, “Ragweed”

  •

  Dementia’s Commonplace Book

  Claudia Emerson, “Ephemeris”

  Meghan O’Rourke, “In Defense of Pain”

  Michael Collier, “Laelaps”

  Erika Meitner, “YIZKER BUKH”

  •

  The Ecstatic Stereoscopy of September

  Charles Wright, “Ancient of Days” & “Pack Rats”

  Larissa Szporluk, “Vanished Harvest” & “Bludgeon-Man”

  R. T. Smith, “Orchard of One”

  Gabriel Fried, “Ends Well”

  Jane Hirshfield, “Bruises,” “The Promise,” & “Sometimes the Heart is a Shallow Autumn River”

  •

  Poets in the Print Shop

  Brian Teare, “Hello”

  Srikanth Reddy, from Voyager

  Bin Ramke, “Cloud as an Open Set Maps Onto the Hillside” & “Hausdorff Spaces”

  Hank Lazer, Two Poems (N18P60 & N18P64)

  Ye Chun, from Map

  •

  Cabin Fever: Winter Thoughts on the Place of Poetry

  Carl Phillips, “My Meadow, My Twilight”

  Ravi Shankar, “Breast Feeding at the Blue Mosque”

  Talvikki Ansel, “Glaze”

  Mary Ann Samyn, “My Life in Heaven”

  Maurice Manning, “Provincial Thought”

  •

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  Nick Flynn, December 2012

  This book in your hands—while reading through it for the first time, just now, I very nearly burned the brown rice I was cooking for dinner. I went into the kitchen just now to check on it (the rice)—I must have heard something, or smelled something—a crackle, a burning. Burnt offering, I thought, stirring it. I put the lid on and went back to the world of this book, the book in your hands. I have now lived with it for days, but that first time I got caught up in a poem by Mary Szybist, then a poem by Kazim Ali, then a poem by Joanna Klink. I felt completely alive reading the poems, then reading Lisa Russ Spaar’s open and generous and brilliant commentary I felt the world opening. The universe is expanding, inexorably pushing into the
void, we know this, but it’s not often you get to feel it. We’re living in an incredibly rich time for poetry—I tell people that, if asked, and I’m never sure if they believe me, or if they understand. A rich, yet essentially invisible moment, for poetry always lives below the surface. I met the director (& personal hero) Jim Jarmusch once, at a dinner party, I told him I was a poet, and he was, or seemed to be, genuinely interested in finding out about this world, and so I promised I would make him a little packet of poems, but I never did. Or, rather, I made the packet, but never found a way to get it into his hands. I never found his hands again. On the other side of us at that dinner was a woman who played cello for the Houston Opera, Jarmusch knew what type of wood her cello was made of (sycamore maple), and why (tone). He asked me if I listened to DJ Screw, the Houston hiphop star who invented the genre known as “syrup,” so named for the codeine cough syrup he ingested (and which eventually killed him) which made his raps languid. Welcome to Houston. Jarmusch is a hero because we’re living in a shitty time for Hollywood movies, maybe even for novels from big publishing houses, but poetry (and song) are somehow thriving, thriving in this darkness, like strange beautiful mushrooms. I turned off the flame under the rice pot—it’s going to be okay, it will keep cooking in the pot as it cools, it will be perfect. I’ve also said, recently, that everything, it seems, is a daily practice, or at least everything that matters, at least everything that matters to me. I get the sense that this book in your hands could become part of a daily practice, that these poems, alongside Lisa Russ Spaar’s truly thrilling commentary, could be a way to infuse poetry into every moment, or to simply reveal how it is already infused, if we can find the thresholds. I think I’ll light some incense, I have a pack of matches in my hand, a black pack of matches with a white mermaid on one side and the word “foc’sle” on the other side. “Foc’sle,” I believe, is a window in the hull of a boat. A threshold. I want to write Lisa an email, thank her. I want to eat a bowl of short grain brown rice. My daughter is with the downstairs neighbors, watching a movie—it’s movie night. I don’t know what movie they are watching, I will ask when she comes back upstairs. I promise if you sit with this book for an hour, or even five minutes, or, even better, play hookie for a day, or stay up later than you should, if you spend some time with this book you will find not what you sought, but something as yet unimagined. Have we been talking all this time? The mermaid matches are still in my hand, my head is in my hand, I keep reading poem after poem, I can smell the sulphur, the incense is waiting, the rice is waiting, they have been waiting all along, as Rilke pointed out in one of the Duino Elegies, how did I forget that? How lucky I am, we are, to have found these hours, these days, these poems, and to have Lisa Russ Spaar as my, as our, Virgil, to lead us through them.

  PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In September 2010, Alexander Kafka, deputy managing editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education Review, asked me if I’d be interested in writing as a poetry editor/blogger for a new Arts & Academe on-line poetry feature of the Review. On October 4, 2010, we posted the first of what became a regular offering, “Monday’s Poem”—a weekly presentation of a new poem by a contemporary American poet, a different poet each week, accompanied by my commentary. Once every month or so from that fall until July 2012, I also wrote a column in which I meditated on some aspect of contemporary poetry. From the start, the venture had no overarching design or program. My only charge was to write about current, compelling poetry for readers who are intelligent and interested in poetry but who might not necessarily be poets. The only other stipulation made by the Chronicle was that I consider for presentation poets with some sort of university or other higher education affiliation and/or who publish with a college or university press. We did not know what to expect when we launched the feature, but “Monday’s Poem” and the monthly columns attracted a devoted following of readers in and outside of the academy, many of them poets. Although no agenda informed these weekly selections, they almost by necessity came to reflect what Ezra Pound called “the tone of the time.” Whether or not the columns and commentaries articulate the Zeitgeist of American poetry at the start of the second decade of the new millennium, the poems I’ve been privileged to present are aesthetically and culturally diverse, representing fresh work by well-known as well as emerging poets from a wide array of formal, political, and other perspectives, all attuned to issues of originality, influence, debt, and innovation that have ever stalked and emboldened American poetry.

  About a year ago, the poet, editor, and publisher Ravi Shankar suggested that we consider collecting some of these Chronicle poems, commentaries, and columns into a book, creating a gallery of sorts, a locus, a space in which individual poems and musings might be allowed to resonate with one another and invite the kind of perspective and significance that only deliberate and concerted gatherings allow. An ardent anthologizer, I love the ways in which, when brought into proximity, what is disparate, diverse, and manifold becomes freshly illuminated. What had been for me an almost devotional exercise—to respond to a contemporary poem in the two or three free hours I could devote each week for the task—became something even more as I began to imagine ways of gathering the poems together for a book. The endeavor raised questions: is it possible to characterize American poetry being written in the second decade of the twenty-first century? Who are our ancestors? Our heirs? What is our future? In what ways are poets responding to and shaping the force of our volatile times? What can bringing these poems into conversation reveal about what engages and animates and provokes American poets working in the present moment, and why should we care?

  The work compiled here comes from established, award-winning poets like Charles Wright, Carl Phillips, Carol Muske-Dukes, Claudia Emerson, and Philip Schultz, and also from younger writers such as Kiki Petrosino, Allison Seay, Kazim Ali, Kyle Dargan, Paul Legault, and Jennifer Chang. Some of the poets tend toward more traditional, formal approaches (Mark Jarman, John Poch, Eric Pankey) while others are avant-garde or experimental (Brian Teare, Hank Lazer, Heather McHugh, Srikanth Reddy, Brenda Hillman). Narrative, dramatic, lyric, mashed, crossed, hybrid—the voices represented are repercussively American, and in context and conversation with one another convey a partial sense of an evolving, plural, and kinetic notion of contemporary American poetic attitude and inclination—perhaps even identity. This mesh of influence (Susan Howe: “My precursor attracts me to my future”) is felt throughout the collection, as in Debra Allbery’s ghazal “Of Evanescence,” which culminates in a multi-cultural and pan-temporal conflation of speakers (Allbery, Agha Shahid Ali, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville) or as in Paul Legault’s Emily Dickinson “translation” project, in which he feistily talks back to Dickinson’s gnomic verses, rendering them into aphoristic, provocative, and witty one-liners. In poems like “While Sylvia Plath Studies The Joy of Cooking On Her Honeymoon In Benidorm, Spain, Delmore Schwartz Reclines In The Front Seat Of His Buick Roadmaster,” Amy Newman attempts to capture chordal glimpses of American poetry itself coming into being.

  In curating the work that follows, I settled on the organizational trope of a year, choosing twelve of the monthly columns around which I constellated 52 of the weekly individual poet/poem commentaries in an intuitive way that sometimes had to do with style, at others with theme or innovation or impulse. The monthly columns themselves also mention and include a number of poems by poets not numbered among the 52, including Ron Slate, Philip Schultz, Sarah Schweig, Rachel Hadas, Willie Lin, and David Francis, allowing me both to exploit and transgress any sort of overly programmed approach while at the same time honoring the seasonal and temporal motions that very much informed my ongoing selections and themes each week. Importantly, including poems within my poetry columns sometimes allowed me to feature strong work being done by poets not affiliated with the academy or an academic press. I came to interpret in the most open terms the Chronicle’s request that I situate the poetry I was presenting in relation to “higher
education,” with “higher” coming to stand more broadly for inspiration, exhilaration, and intensity. Coleridge called poetry the “best words in their best order.” Charles Wright says that poetry is simply language that “sounds better and means more.” It is that kind of “higher” and that kind of “education” that I hope these poems reflect.

  In Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Jay David Bolter points out, in relation to Roland Barthes’s S/Z, that “a commentary is by nature a series of interruptions.” Attempting to unpack or offer close readings of a new poem each week sometimes felt, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, like splitting open the lark in order to find the music. If my remarks on this intrinsically rich work feel to the reader at times like perverse “interruptions” of the poems themselves, I hope that recompensatory flashes of insight nonetheless ensue in the fissures, forays, and interstices the commentaries afford.

  Because of the nature of its origins in a weekly blog column of poems intended primarily for the “page” or screen, this collection is not meant to nor could it ever be comprehensive or historical, nor could it begin to represent the many streams and voices and experiments being undertaken now in American poetry, especially in the realm of spoken word and other performative endeavors, or with regard to projects by poets working in visually experimental ways (we quickly learned at the Chronicle the limitations of our blogging software when we attempted to present work with unusual formatting). But what assembling these poems in one place does suggest is that American poets are doing what they have always done: restlessly sampling and borrowing and ignoring and trampling the vineyard and forging and foraging and questioning and making things new. It has been said that American poetry can in part be characterized by the difference between the invocatory petitions of Homer’s “Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles” or Shakespeare’s “O, for a Muse of fire” and Whitman’s fiercely individual and independent “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” The process of compiling these essays suggests, however, that early twenty-first-century American poems, like poetry for centuries, continue to defy neat categorizations. And contemporary poets continue to be both fueled and frustrated by the Muses, by Eros and Thanatos. Age-old themes—love, death, memory, art, desire, God-hunger, fear, time, being, politics, beauty, change, truth, mutability, the absurd, language, the pulse of poetry itself—are particularly challenged in our moment by keen awarenesses of the perils, contingencies, nascence, and velocities of technology—linguistic, social, cultural, environmental, political, global—and by urgent political and environmental threats as well as new senses of what constitutes materiality, style, and virtuosity. Even in poems of high lyricism or narrative plain speech, I see a new and renewed, daring interest in excavating, restoring, and breaking with the past; in inter-textuality; in sampling; in collaborative voicing.