A poet: Juliana Spahr

"poem written after September 11, 2001": Two tricks: the old scale 'em up, scale 'em down, and the old length-of-line is length-of-breath. And you know what, she combines them into something absolutely 21st century, about collectivity and how it relates to geography, at a specific historical moment and always.

As everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out. [mp3]

"Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache": This one shows us how much language contributes to our shared experience. And how language isn't enough if we destroy the things the words describe.

I replaced what I knew of the stream with Lifestream Total Cholesterol Test Packets, with Snuggle Emerald Stream Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets, with Tisserand Aromatherapy Aroma-Stream Cartridges, with Filter Stream Dust Tamer, and Streamzap PC Remote Control, Acid Stream Launcher, and Viral Data Stream.
I didn't even say goodbye elephant ear, mountain madtorn, butterfly, harelip sucker, white catspaw, rabbitsfoot, monkeyface, speckled chub, wartyback, ebonyshell, pirate perch, ohio pigtoe, clubshell.

"The Incinerator": Illustrates that poetry is a way of thinking, but you knew that. It's what she thinks that matters, and you'd better believe she has thoughts worth hearing about class and race and gender and herself.

As I write this other stories keep popping up and I keep abandoning them: wanting to talk about class, I kept talking only about gender.
As I write this other stories keep popping up and I keep abandoning them: when I sat down to write this piece I began by writing about myself using a series of statements that I stole from working class memoirs by US women and then memoirs by women from the global south.
As I write this other stories keep popping up and I keep abandoning them: the categories were not equal: working class US women and then just any woman from the global south, as if these categories had any relationship between them.

Some poems I liked this year, part 2

Takashi Hiraide (tr. Sawako Nakayasu), For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut 43

The spider is genius. The celerity which moves — leading the air mass — the atmosphere level that falls higher than the clouds connecting the seasons. The spider is genius. The brilliance descending omnidirectionally is not a gravity-evading parachute, but striates the entire sky, guiding drops of light towards the ground. And it just lowers itself down along the way. How can there be such transparent bones — bones that flood over, even as they break. And plus he is a seed. With endurance and imagination as nourishment, the scheme is rather null. Sorcery is rather null. A light-handed evil which admits no glory, not even your own. The spider is simply genius.

Sean O'Brien, Song: Habeas Corpus

Oh lock me in the deepest jail
And throw away the key.
The nation's desperate to be saved
From 'elements' like me.
There's none so blind,
We think you'll find
As those who cannot see.

Heh, kidding of course, that's a terrible poem.

Lynn Pedersen, "How to Speak Nineteeth Century"

Forget about the nomenclature
of the moon: lunar impact craters, rilles; your voice
translated into fiber optics or beamed pinpoint to pinpoint
on the planet. Here, all words are spoken to someone's face.
Earth. Seeds. Thresher. Plow. Timber'd.

- from New England Review (2008) 29:1

Juliana Spahr, "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache"
(this is the poem of the decade or something)

We came into the world at the edge of a stream.

The stream had no name but it began from a spring and
flowed down a hill into the Scioto that then flowed into
the Ohio that then flowed into the Mississippi that
then flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.

The stream was a part of us and we were a part of the
stream and we were thus part of the rivers and thus part
of the gulfs and the oceans.

And we began to learn the stream.

Krisztina Tóth, "Rainy Summer" (tr. Kevin Nolan)

A sentence grew the deepest scar, no memory
below the sweet-skinned sleep said wake now, wake now
sentence, tracking wordless searing hatred
spinning in the flesh and wanting none—
no pause or rest or passing come to birth
a soundless sentence spoke by no one, none to hear,
sounds the cardial nightclock out of time
in empty gravelled courtyards sounds the chained-up dog,
the sentence pulsing like the sea within a scuttled hull
glistens in the berries of a dream to murmur wake now, wake now,
the shoreless stormcry carried off by blinding waters,
the measured tambour threading sea to moon

Susan Wheeler, "The Debtor in the Convex Mirror"

The painter in the mirror wants privacy, not this call that invades
the reading of a book. Your own looked out at us, but mine, Massys—
disingenuous, masquerading, stressed and damp—doesn’t; weightier
things on his mind he’s got not. But he only pretends to absorption.
It’s we who discern the privacy he wants, we who can see
what he lacks. It’s as though we’re instructed to trust the lender,
his own fix being more, well, sequestered.
The last century mined focus as a notion, and even here in Manhattan,
a delirium of sorts swabbing its streets,
we tread with the intensity of hounds,
plugged into our earpiece conjointments, or collecting loose change
off of cuffs. Massys’ grimace under-dramatizes our lot.

Sources. Some of these are from the anthology American Poets in the 21st Century, as fair a flyover look at the field as you could hope for. Other tips come from the Third Factory poll, Jordan Davis's list, and Jonathan Mayhew's 9000 poetry book project. I sort of keep track of who's winning the prizes, and while this occasionally turns up something otherwise under my radar like the Brathwaite, more often the gongs go to the likes of O'Brien. Well, there are worse injustices in the world: the loss of habeas corpus, for instance.

Some poems I liked this year, part 1

Jasper Bernes, "Two Walts (Whitman Contra Disney)"

It's a small world after all, after the relief-deep wells barf up their prisoners,
after the exhaustion of credible souces, empiricism's
expiration date, a flash of rich, ferocious prose and eroded roses.

Coral Bracho, "Water's Lubricious Edges" (tr. Forrest Gander)

Water of jellyfish,
lacteal, sinuous water,
water of lubricious borders; glassy thickness--Deliquescence
in delectable contours. Water--sumptuous water
of involution, of langour

alternative translation

Kamau Brathwaite, "Kumina"

on the first day
of yr death it is quiet it is dormant like a doormat
no one-foot touch its welcome. its dust on the floor
is not disturb nor are the sleeping spirits of this house

i sit here in this chair trying to unravel Time so that it wouldn't happen twine

Jordan Davis, "Dust"

If you start to imagine
You feel the magnetic fields
The colander and the aluminum
Are in the lower cabinet on the right

This is gravity coming for us

Peter Gizzi, "Untitled Amherst Specter"

a sound of open ground having been taken

now a silver wisp winking on the roof

silver imp waving from a long shaft ago

I am a leaf storm night

I have seen the long file of mule trains and metal

the cavalry

these sounds we live within speaking to you now

sir, I was a soldier in these woods

Some poems I liked last year

Alice Notley, "Radical Feminist" (from Alma, or The Dead Women)
I haven't come close to finishing Alma: 300 pages of one-faced gender critique is too much for me. But there's a sequence where the anger crystallises into one of the bitterest rages against violence ever written, and that sequence starts with "Radical Feminist", which deserves its title.

"how will we dead women avenge ourselves now when there will be nothing but vengeance transpiring. oh these distractions says one. we intend that you keep on the subject says another. keeping on the subject is part of our vengeance. i am touched by men's love says the third but it isn't a world. men have died too someone says. they can take care of themselves someone else says but don't let one come near me again in the name of care. i want a chance to care for myself, perhaps i finally have that being a dead woman."

Christopher Middleton, "Orbiana" (from The Tenor on Horseback)
When he's at his best, which is quite often in The Tenor on Horseback, Middleton still writes more prettily than anyone. At other times he just writes pettily (calling Rafael Nadal a baboon; fortunately he's not under the jurisdiction of the ICC). The linked Shearsman 67/68 conveniently features three prime poems. "The First Portrait" and especially "Orbiana" show that historical drama in verse is only as dead as it always was.

"I could never help uttering a light soupir,
Just one, whenever the times
Were hard; today
Just one more, it hardly passed my lips,
But murdered they were, such news,
Murdered near Mayence, those two
Who sent me here, to Leptis Magna."

Tadeuz Rozewicz, "the professor's knife" (tr. Joanna Trzeciak, from Triquarterly 126)
Old Pole and friend recall weaponry/cutlery, war and breakfast.

"'I've thought more about my knife,
the one made from the hoop of a barrel.
It would be carried in the hem
of my death camp clothes
since they might confiscate it
and one could pay dearly...
So it served its purposes,
not just utilitarian
but far more intricate ones...'"

Penelope Shuttle, "Missing You" (from Redgrove's Wife)
Shuttle's mourning sequence obsesses through April and May, China and India, Tesco and Sainsbury.

"I make my home in your absence,
take your smallest hope
and make it grow
I wake to the dusk of everywhere
as if assisting at my own birth
or arriving in a country
where all the rivers settle down to be ice"

Jen Tynes, "Suspension" (from The Hat 7)
The Hat 7 was the best journal issue I read last year, or least the only one I read all the way through. "Suspension" is my fave in there by a whisker from a Rae Armantrout miniture ("One lizard/jammed headfirst//down the throat/of a second.")

"...Everyone looks
into my hollow and hollers
their own names.
I give it all
back in pieces."