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.

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.

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

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.

Remembering John Logan

A poem by Perry Nicholas, which will be featured on the July 1st Poetry Page, is dedicated to the late John Logan, the much admired "poet's poet" who lived in Buffalo and taught in UB's English Department from 1966 to 1985.

An entire generation of Buffalo poets and writing students came to know the book-strewn living room of Logan's apartment on Amherst Street directly across from the Buffalo Zoo as both a salon and a saloon where the company of poets was always welcome, always celebrated.

This November will mark the 20th anniversary of Logan's death, and I, for one, hope it will not pass unnoticed.  The cynical-hearted may choose to remember Logan as a very good poet who came to a very sad end--someone who had he lived and remained productive for another decade might well be considered a "major" American poet today.

There is also a growing body of critical writing that identifies Logan as one of the two or three most important "Catholic poets" of the 20th century.  This work tends to focus on his early volumes The Cycle for Mother Cabrini and Spring of the Thief as well as his years as a junior faculty member at Notre Dame.

I prefer to remember Logan for the self-questioning, spiritually transformative work he produced during his years here in Buffalo.  One simply cannot read through Logan's volumes The Zig Zag Walk (1968) , The Anonymous Lover (1973), The Bridge of Change (1979), or his volume of selected poems Only the Dreamer Can Change the Dream (which received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1982) and fail to be moved by their lyricism and search for redemption through language.

In the heyday of "confessional" poetry, Logan counted the number of syllables in each of his lines and asked, "How's your soul?"  His answers were often daunting, as when he suggested that lacking a sense of guilt, we are incapable of change.

Canadian poet visits Buffalo tonight

As the resident of a "border town," I've always been puzzled by how much Canadians know about the minutiae of American culture, while Americans are oblivious to everything that occurs up North save for hockey scores, a few rock bands, and the real estate market in Toronto.

Most Americans tend to think of Canadian culture as a slightly more earnest and less materialistic analog to their own.  Think of the high seriousness with which the work of three of Canada's best contemporary fiction writers--Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondatjee and Alice Munro--is regarded by readers in U.S., and you'll probably wonder why a Canadian poet hasn't similarly "crossed over."

A chance to remedy this situation (at least for one evening) occurs this evening (May 31) at 7 p.m. at Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St., when George Bowering, Canada's first poet laureate (2002 to 2004) reads from his latest book Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006.

Although I'm familiar with Bowering as one of several prominent Canadian "West Coast" poets affiliated with the avant-garde poetry journal TISH, I'm embarrassed to admit that up until last week I had no idea of how substantial and adventurous a body of work he had produced.

With 27 collections of poetry, 11 novels, a half dozen story collections, and more than 12 books of non-fiction on topics ranging from Canadian history to baseball to his credit (not to mention two Governor General's Awards), it's no wonder that Bowering--who as born in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley in 1935--was a consensus choice for the title of first "Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate" in 2002.

For Buffalo audiences, there should be additional interest in that as a student at the University of British Columbia in the late 1950s, Bowering was greatly influenced by the "Black Mountain" school of poets including Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (who served as his Master's thesis adviser).

In every interview or writing philosophy statement that I've been able to locate, he continues to credit Olson and Creeley (both taught at UBC in the early 1960s, shortly before coming to UB) as mentors and enduring influences on his work.

Why is Lucille Clifton under appreciated?

This is a follow-up to my previous posting on Buffalo native Lucille Clifton, who accepted one of the literary world's highest honors, the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry this past week in Chicago.

I've long thought that Clifton was under appreciated in her hometown and have often wondered why.

It's true that the Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County honored her as one of their artists of the year in 2004 and Just Buffalo Literary Center has sponsored at least two events in which she was featured in the last decade, but if you asked the average Buffalo area resident about Clifton, I'd bet less than one in 10 could identify her correctly. 

Compare her name recognition in Buffalo to another woman writer of her generation who has had a comparably long and distinguished literary career--Joyce Carol Oates (born in 1938 in Lockport, while Clifton was born in 1936 in Depew)-- and you'll see my point.  Both Oates and Clifton left the Buffalo area as young women, but only Oates is still claimed by the community at large as "local."

The news that Clifton is the first African-American woman to receive the Lilly Prize in its 21 year history ought to be a special source of pride to our entire community, and the fact that she graduated from the former Fosdick-Masten (now City Honors) High School in Buffalo at age 16 in 1952 ought to be as much a part of local lore as Oates' graduation from what is now Williamsville South High School three years later.

It would be very disappointing indeed if this were simply a matter of race, but I'm not sure of where else the discussion can begin.  Readers, I ask you for your thoughts on the matter.   What will it take for Clifton to get the recognition she deserves in the city of her origins?   

Lucille Clifton wins poetry prize

At an ceremony held Wednesday night in Chicago, Buffalo area native Lucille Clifton accepted the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry from the Poetry Foundation. 

Clifton is the first African-American woman to receive the prestigious award in its 21 year history.

The three-person selection committee issued a statement that read in part: “ Her poems are local and funny, and have their own particular idiom; they speak big things in quiet ways, and she’s voracious in the subject matter she takes on, spanning city and country, speaking for the unspoken, the sacred, and the invisible. Clifton has added enormously to the representation of the African-American experience in poetry and has been a kind of historical consciousness for her people and a public consciousness for us all.”

Clifton was born in 1936 as Thelma Lucille Sayles into working class family in Depew. She was raised in Buffalo (her family lived on Purdy Street).

She is the author of 11 selections of poetry including Good Times (selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 1969), Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and Next: New Poems (both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988, marking the first time in history any author had two books selected as finalists in the same category for the award).

Clifton's Blessing The Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 won the National Book Award in 2000.

She and Fred Clifton married in 1958 and remained in Buffalo until 1960, when they moved to the Washington, D.C area. A long series of teaching appointments followed along with numerous literary awards. She was Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985

Clifton, who now lives in Columbia, Md., has also published more than 20 books of children's literature, most of them focusing on African-American history and stories about the black family. 

The Ruth Lilly Prize is administered by Poetry magazine and its parent organization The Poetry Foundation and carries with it a $100,000 cash award. Past winners include UB professor and Buffalo resident Carl Dennis.