THE END

MICHAEL BAZZETT

In the beginning, God wanted

to be a comedian. What’s made
in my image, but has no soul?
he’d ask, and just stare at you,
exchanging the idea of a punch
line for something like endless
exhalation. He would raise
one eyebrow and ash his cigar.
No laughter. Part of the issue
was the slight skew in the angels’
sense of humor. Sometimes
dozens would sit and watch
the obstinate waves batter
a glacier for weeks, only laughing
when it calved and a shattered
hunk of dirty ice lunged free
into the frigid Antarctic sea.
Then they’d bray like donkeys.
God took notes and tried using
a similar structure: the slow
build that feels like boredom.
Maybe good timing is tough
when you’re eternal. Jokes,
like most folks, have no idea
what they mean until the end.

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, Copper
Nickel, and The Iowa Review. He is the author of three poetry collections—You Must
Remember This (winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry), Our Lands Are
Not So Diferent (Horsethief, 2017), and The Interrogation (Milkweed, 2017)—as
well as a forthcoming verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milk-
weed). The recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Minneapolis with his
wife and two children.

44 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

 AMERICAN “Because past the angel at the gate,
oh can turn like that, go under, straight

POETRY REVIEW
into poetry. Here’s the god’s honest: a
moment of calm recently came to me,
so close to sleep it was sleep. In my
dream I saw a girl whose dark t-shirt
read: All is Failure. Except ‘failure’ was
misspelled—part of the dream too—either
‘far-lure’ or ‘fear-lure.’ The words still
blur. But thank you, whatever sent that.”

(BORUCH, cont’d. p. 21)

JULY/AUGUST 2018 VOL. 47/NO. 4 $5 US/$6 CA

KHADIJAH QUEEN
(PRAIRIE ERASURE & OTHER POEMS)

SHARON OLDS
THE ENCHANTMENT
& OTHER POEMS

KIMIKO HAHN
REGENERATION
& SHE SELLS SEASHELLS

PLUS NEW POEMS BY

JUSTIN BOENING
LYNN MELNICK
FRANK SHERLOCK
MAGGIE SMITH

APRWEB.ORG PHOTO: MICHAEL TEAK

 / HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE

t An award of $3,000
t Publication of a volume of poetry
with an introduction by Sharon Olds

Distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium

Open to all U.S. poets
Book publication in 2019

Judge: Sharon Olds

Now Accepting Submissions Online at www.aprweb.org

The winning author and all other entrants will be notified in January 2019. An announcement of the
winner will appear in the March/April 2019 issue of The American Poetry Review. For complete guidelines,
visit www.aprweb.org or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:
APR/Honickman First Book Prize
The American Poetry Review
The University of the Arts
320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313
Philadelphia, PA 19102-4901

Entry fee $25. Manuscripts, following guidelines format, must be postmarked or submitted online
between August 1 and October 31, 2018.
A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN

AND
THE HONICKMAN FOUNDATION

2 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

 The American Poetry Review (issn 0360-3709) is published
bimonthly by World Poetry, Inc., a non-profit corporation.
Editorial oices: The University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad
Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102-4901.
Subscription rates: U.S.: 3 years, $65.00; 2 years, $48.00;
1 year, $28.00. Foreign rates: 3 years, $95.00; 2 years, $70.00;
1 year, $40.00. Single copy, $5.00. Special classroom adoption JULY/AUGUST 2018 VOL. 47/NO. 4
rate per year per student: $14.00. Free teacher’s subscription
with classroom adoption. Subscription mail should be addressed IN THIS ISSUE
to The American Poetry Review, Dept. S, The University
of the Arts, 320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, KHADIJAH QUEEN 4 Prairie Erasure & Other Poems
Pa. 19102-4901. Phone: (215) 717-6800. Fax: (215) 717-6805.
www.aprweb.org.
CATHERINE BARNETT 6 Central Park & Other Poems
JOANNE DIAZ 8 Paper Crowns & Other Poems
Editor
Elizabeth Scanlon MAI DER VANG 10 Refugee, Walking Is the Most
Business Manager Human of All & Other Poems
Mike Dufy JENNIFER L. KNOX 11 Iowa Bird of Mouth: Keeping a
Editorial Assistant 12-Month Crowdsourced Poetry
Leyna Bohning Project in the Air
General Counsel DARA WIER 17 I Feel Sorry for You Someone
Dennis J. Brennan, Esq.
Said to Me Over and Over Again
Contributing Editors & Other Poems
Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham,
George Economou, Jan Freeman, ALEXANDRINE VO 20 Surrogate & Forgetting
Leonard Gontarek, Everett Hoagland, MARIANNE BORUCH 21 Oh No
Teresa Leo, Kate Northrop, Marjorie Perlof,
Stanley Plumly, Ethel Rackin, Natania Rosenfeld, FRANK SHERLOCK 23 The Sea a Battered Dream
Michael Ryan, Jack Sheehan, Peter Siegenthaler,
Lauren Rile Smith, Valerie Trueblood KIMIKO HAHN 24 She Sells Seashells & Regeneration

Founder SHARON OLDS 26 The Enchantment & Other Poems

Stephen Berg LEAH UMANSKY 28 Bernard / 1
(1934–2014)
GALE MARIE THOMPSON 29 Reading Ekstasis: Tracking
Co-founder
Sidney H. Berg Contradictions, Sustaining
(1909–1973) Incongruences

Periodical postage paid, Philadelphia, Pa. and at additional

MAGGIE SMITH 33 Junk Trees, & Other Poems
oices. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The
American Poetry Review, The University of the Arts, 320
JUSTIN BOENING 34 What You Call a Thing
S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102-4901. & Other Poems
Nationwide distribution: Ingram Periodicals Inc., 1240 Heil
Quaker Blvd., P.O. Box 7000, La Vergne, Tenn. 37086-7000.
LYNN MELNICK 36 Too Jewish / shtetl kitsch
(800) 627-6247. Media Solutions, 1217 Heil Quaker Blvd., & Other Poems
La Vergne, Tenn. 37086. (615) 213-0081. Printed in U.S.A.
Advertising correspondence should be addressed to The DITTA BARON HOEBER 38 reading & Three Deaths
American Poetry Review, Dept. A, The University of the
Arts, 320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, Pa. DAVID BIESPIEL 39 Grandeur of the Unimportant
19102-4901. (215) 717-6800.
LEILA CHATTI 42 Tumor & Haemorrhoissa
Vol. 47, No. 4. Copyright © 2018 by World Poetry, Inc.
All rights, including translation into other languages, are MICHAEL BAZZETT 44 The End
reserved by the publishers in the United States, Great Britain,
Mexico, Canada, and all countries participating in the Uni-
versal Copy right Conventions, the International Copyright BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Convention, and the Pan American Convention. Nothing in Jonathan Katz, Chair Eileen Nef Elizabeth Scanlon
this publication may be reproduced without permission of the Margot Berg Jen Oliver Ava Seave
publisher.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
All previously published issues of APR from the fi rst in 1972 to
Linda Lee Alter Marian Garfi nkel Sondra Myers
2013 are accessible online through JSTOR—www.jstor.org.
Natalie Bauman Rayna Block Goldfarb Judith Newman
The American Poetry Review receives state arts funding support Richard Boyle Werner Gundersheimer Carol Parssinen
through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Marianne E. Brown Lynne Honickman S. Mary Scullion, R.S.M.
state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Paul Cummins William Kistler Peter Straub
Helen W. Drutt English Edward T. Lewis Rose Styron
This magazine is assisted by a grant from The Dietrich
Foundation. Ann Beattie Donald Hall Cynthia Ozick
The columns in APR are forums for their authors, who write Robert Coles Edward Hirsch Frederick Seidel
without editorial interference. Rita Dove Emily Mann Kenneth Tyler
Carolyn Forché Joyce Carol Oates
The Editors are grateful for the opportunity to consider
un solicited manuscripts. Please enclose a stamped, self-
addressed envelope with your manuscript or submit online at ANNUAL PRIZES
www.aprweb.org.
The Editors of APR award these annual prizes:
Subscription blank: p. 37
THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning
Index of Advertisers: p. 41 poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in
honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.
THE JEROME J. SHESTACK POETRY PRIZE: Two annual awards of $1,000 each for poetry
published in the magazine during the calendar year.
THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman
Foundation, an annual prize for a fi rst book of poetry, with an award of $3,000,
an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper
Canyon Press through Consortium.

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 3
NINE POEMS
KHADIJAH QUEEN

Prairie Erasure beauty we don’t want

to waste & the world says it
I wants, but trashes, sees as glut,

Blazes travel the state roads. Entire fields ingrained in us—fires usable in a finite manner We like
a house, a forest, essential in land and soil—set a purpose. talk of human forevers as holes in us
unfilled, we’re raggedy apartments
II Who to blame
At growing season, leave dead matter above deluxe in schism—runaways & orchids
ground. Future burners—side ditches. Dead matter, new plants— tattooed on wrists or thighs As dull men scof
shells that need breaking. Never leave them. we still say keep fighting,
& love me again— don’t the pines die, too
III & exactly with our names
This time we see plumes rising. Grasslands herds, hunted,
go hide in falsified ash. Drip torch upwind— Apace
machinery itself. The guardians of us decide when to intervene.
I fell in love with honesty & twilight beacon
took rhythm apart
Anodyne / Plea
Room for nothing else
Who objected when the truth disappeared or when the truth battered but reveille & learned aloneness
us & we pretended fear fell from the ripped pillow of our sky instead of
rising from the one clear place of us. Where were you when madmen told forgetting how art folds us
us to die & blasted us into nothing. Were you downtown, a figure cluster forward in time / however student & used
watching yourselves stagnate in skyscraper shade or neon glower. Did music to mark shifts like
you hop a bus & clutch a cold center rail, your palm sweat making you everyone else in the iced streets
slip as if at sea. Were you at sea in memory, your of-shift body afloat in
dissemblance, in the act of defending any era as a safe one. You could’ve I almost slipped so many times, failing
scrapped what you knew near plaza fountains, ultra-anonymous. Instead in every archaic sense / my lace
an arrowhead sharpens blood under flesh. You claim millennia led to the shirt intact / I talk a lot
arrowhead led to the obelisks led to whatever weaponized emblem severs about lace no one sees
the least connection, but we only ask that you not kill us
I wear what fits me in my mind
of winter & the Stevens mood
Reclusionary
cannot quite hold me
Stranger, no one good enough
likes the way I armor up, but the stone
forest alive with spires & strata Retreat
says come on over to my place If I had the bones for this, I could cheat
à la Pendergrass & check this LCD TV the finish. Melodramatically,
Let’s watch animal gods trembling as I peel tangerines
probe the floodplains, in a state, catering to doubt.
red in beak & claw—How else A lifetime thinking I know who I
can I live alone am here—I avoided erasure, I fought—
having read ol’ Herm through 1857
Can I collect my fragments,
Knowing what’s corroded fragile now in the outright
its way into the heart itself, the entrance gentleness of your questions?
full of swifts & Archimedes counting
principles of loss—we can get joy No such burst
at gold anklets & clock subterranean of agreement, no lush
pursuits of cave-evolved fish on Nat Geo turbulence to estrange us, no

opposition to map onto

The world says not to expect the joke. Observe a whole person
making choices at each point
the world
of refusal, edges hazed against
But do it anyway— be made, all clarity—uncut nails catching
out of love— taken, bestowed, lived unfortunate silk in a chase to loosen—
through, by means of, without

4 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

From Personae

MONOLOGUE FOR IA MONOLOGUE FOR IX

Setting: Black box. Red chair upstage left. Flowers on a table, dead or alive. Setting: Nowhere
Strange light. Background chorus: At least four people singing/saying “Oh my time” in tones
of lamentation, slow contemplation, wistful meditation, and/or hymnal. IX enters
IA: (improvised stage direction, different for each performance)
wearing layers and layers of colorful skirts, with a black shift underneath.
In an excess of self-concern, I get lost on the route home. In my
IX: The place I borrowed didn’t do me any good. I had to pay, in tears—
imagination, I live in a safer lacuna & have a habit of wondering how has
side efects of sleeping of lack. All said before, but listen. Everything’s
it, my imagining, manifested so expensively. How has it cut me. (Actor
in media res & I consent to what I don’t know how to heal yet. Undo
improvises physical motion for several minutes)
misunderstanding, make an agreement with quiet, wrestle of rebellions—
(silence, a walk downstage if needed, right or left; a seat if desired)
(begins spinning in a circle, tossing off layers with exuberance until fatigued)
It feels strange to smile in a fascist era—grief dammed up like certain
It’s already too late. You’re in the middle of something, then I can—
floods. I had one in winter, a flood. My eyes burned in the snow.
(mumbles to self, then whispers)

MONOLOGUE FOR IM —imagine life without the paranoia of truly hunted mothers. A mother’s
body as a door of no return, as a galaxy pointing toward grit & I want to
Setting: Plainly seen psychological systems
find out who can feel
IM: (no direction) the possible in their bodies & break toward it
Hello, disarray. Soft hip abridged, subaltern superstructure.

Under certain circumstances, I sit in the drawing
like a sir, as cold as refusal, wingless.
I have a merchant discipline. Light with stealth, in my anti-prime.
Implicit: private rages to thwart
Khadijah Queen is the author of five books, most recently I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men
& What I Had On (YesYes Books, 2017). Earlier poetry collections include Conduit (Akashic/
Black Goat, 2008), Black Peculiar (Noemi Press, 2011) and Fearful Beloved (Argos Books,
2015).

most paramount wants. Sultanic—

(Stomps and jumps up and down, ad infinitum)

-
ABC
congratulates
JOHN YAU
The Jackson Poetry Prize,
winner of the
established in 2006
with a gift from the Liana 2018 JACKSON POETRY PRIZE
Foundation, is sponsored
by Poets & Writers, Inc.
and named for the
The $60,000 award honors an American poet of
John and Susan Jackson
exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.
family.
The judges for the 2018 prize were
Learn more at pw.org Laura Kasischke, Robin Coste Lewis, and Arthur Sze.

JULY/ AUGUS T 2018 5

THREE POEMS
CATHERINE BARNETT

Central Park the world with just our two bodies,

I’d like to buy one when I die,
one of the benches not yet spoken for,
not yet tagged with a small stainless plaque
and someone else’s name.
If they’re all gone, please
help me carry a replica
to the boat pond so I can sit
and watch the model boats get nowhere
beautifully, rented by the fixed hours
I’m grateful not to be out of yet.
Another flicker of love,
an updated Triple-A membership,
and a handful of Pilot G-Tec-C4 blue-black pens,
what else do I need?
Universe,
watch over us.
Boat, my poor faraway father says,
as if my mother has never seen one.
Boat, he says, and we say, Yes,
aren’t they beautiful.
Come winter,
the boathouse here is locked up,
the pond drained,
except one year it wasn’t
which were to be both string and bob.
In the woods behind school, he climbed into a tree
and lowered himself down,
holding a branch.
I reached up to his thin ankles
and lifted my bare feet of the ground.
Someone must have been there to try to make us swing,
record the harmonic oscillations,
and take the polaroids,
still stapled to this yellowed lab report.
It’s haunting to discover it now, to see in the photos
how we hung there smiling, white,
safe and dumb.
How little history we knew.
If only all feet could come back
to stand on the ground,
not get buried under it,
left to hang above, left outside
in the told and untold,
in the toll of hot municipal suns.
We didn’t understand much of anything
but completed the assignment,
typed up the results, passed physics,

and my son and I convinced ourselves went to college and typed and typed
his new Golden Bright and never took another science class,
could sail across. we were humanities majors.
Merry Christmas, no one said Sometimes when I’m not typing now
as I pulled the black plastic liner bags I run lines with an actor friend
from the empty trash cans and can’t get them out of my head.
and stepped into them, Another heavenly day,
one for each leg, says Winnie as the curtain rises.
and waded into the addled water
She’s buried to her waist in earth
to salvage the present. and for a while you think it can’t get any worse.
I think that moment is something to remember,
or something to remember me by, The humanities.
What are they, really?
brief, vivid, addled, foolhardy—
even the revenants watching from the line of benches Don’t let me sleep on.
said so:
thus have been our travels. In the Studio at End of Day
Oblivion, they said, From my mother I’ve inherited dark eyes
there’s no unenduring it. and the desire to spend hours alone in a room
making things that might matter to no one.
The Humanities She paints canvas after canvas, so many

A classmate and I chose pendulums,
what happens when a pendulum
hangs from a pendulum?
How does gravity work then?
We were studying invisible forces
and left the classroom, heading into
she doesn’t know what to do with them all.
Would you like one? Please,
come down to her studio,
she’s giving them away now, as I write,
as I watch her and write and revise draft after draft
while not twenty feet from me she’s spilling her paints

6 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

on the floor. She has more courage than I,
painting’s not like writing, you can’t get back

to earlier versions. Failure is hot right now,

said one of the children of her children,
and I think my mother was consoled.
I was, and then we were in it,

celebrating my mother and my father, both.

She made us laugh as she looked around the table
at the mutable world, her vast progeny—
so many of us she doesn’t know what to do

with us all, and two already lost—

then raised a glass to my father
and their ninety years together.
Who’s counting? Time passes

while my mother stands before the painting

as if it were a mirror
and paints the woman’s face purple,
tilts the woman’s head, blurs her outline.

She paints with whatever’s at hand.

Chopsticks. Fingers. Elbow.
If she had a gun she’d use that.
My father built the storage racks

but there’s no more room.

Try to hurry, try to get here fast,
before she leaves. Last night
she went home early,

and I was by myself in her studio,

which is like a womb. Everything
pulses. I turned the lights out
at the circuit breaker, as she taught me.

When they go of they make a kind of bang,

a shudder through the walls.
Tonight let’s leave my mother
working here, she says she’s not finished yet,

but take a painting on your way out

—tomorrow there will be another.
Read this draft, tomorrow there will be another.
Kiss her face.

Tomorrow there will be another.

Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, Human Hours, Into Perfect Spheres
Such Holes Are Pierced and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of
the Academy of American Poets

JULY/ AUGUS T 2018 7

THREE POEMS
JOANNE DIAZ
Paper Crowns
—After the New York Times newsfeed from the week of
May 6–11, 2018
This week in which faculty members at the University of Florida
shove black graduates ofstage for dancing in honor
of what is regularly denied them; in which Nordstrom Rack
apologizes to black teenagers falsely accused of shoplifting;
in which a woman says she saw burglars break and enter
into a home when in fact they were black Airbnb guests;
in which two Native American brothers are pulled
from a campus tour after nervous parents call police;
in which two black men settle with Starbucks and the city
of Philadelphia over the absurdity of their unnecessary arrest;
in which two black women are told to golf faster
and then the club calls the police; in this week, yes,
the white mother at a kindergarten celebration
might think that certain gestures will be seen
as kindnesses, especially here, in flyover country,
this place of no consequence, surely forgettable,
every lonely day an erasure, yes, especially
on this special day with homemade muins,
paper flowers, paper crowns decorated by the children,
a coronation as we walk through the door; yes,
certainly it has to be kindness for the white mother
to see the black child, the beautiful long braids,
the shine of the girl’s hair at her temples,
the rainbow barrettes and the vibrant ribbons
fastened neatly at the ends, and want to touch the hair.
Surely she imagines that it is right, an honor, to take
one braid in each hand and not ask, but declare,
I just have to feel your hair. I do not look,
only imagine what I am not seeing: one long braid
in each hand, the woman pulling down slowly,
the lingering of her hands, her open gaze, this white
wanting, which is ofered as an act of beholding
but is all blindness and much worse, and the black mother,
what does she do then, seated only two feet away
and at a child’s table, what is there to do but look up
to admire these paper crowns that the children have made
for each of us, queens for the day, plastic gems pasted
onto each horn meant to resemble the rays of the sun.
Excalibur
In the oice of the genetics specialist, I climb on to the table
and recite the wish from the Metta Bhavana. May I be well;
may I be happy; may I be free from suffering. May you
be well; may you be happy; may you be free from suffering.
8 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
The doctor enters the room and we ofer awkward greetings
and compliment his shiny shoes. He looks and says, Yes.
They’re called Excaliburs, then dims the lights for the examination.
Hard to imagine why a shoe company would choose such a name
for a product when there are so many other magical swords
in the world, like this: the Philips Vaginal Transducer, a marvel
of technology made even more marvelous in the hands
of the doctor, especially when he ofers it to Jay and says,
would you like to help with the exam? His ofer politely declined,
the doctor inserts the wand. We watch the monitor for a jerk
or bounce of a fetus, and there he is, glowing and throbbing,
still a dream of cells assembling into organ systems. The doctor
searches for what technology knows to find thus far:
the too-small knob at the neck, the irregularities in the spine,
any chromosomal evidence still coiled in the fish-body. Later,
he will send the blood sample to the lab in search
of the only other chromosomal abnormalities that can
be seen like faraway islands on a medieval map
that are out there somewhere, surrounded by dragons.
The etymon is chromos, which sounds like a god
but comes from the Greek for two colors—the brilliant flare
in every one of its metallic compounds—and soma,
body, the metals, the colors, the coiling, the spindling. Minutes
of silence, and then the doctor says, Everything is fine. Look
how happy he is, and just like that, the doctor is King Arthur,
gifted with the power of prophecy, and the work
of measuring happiness begins. Maybe, from this first dance
in fluid, the fire will crackle, but not in the ways we hope it will.
The thirst for drink might vanish, but the worry might burrow
in the deepest grooves of the brain. There might be no vestige
of the cruelty, but apathy could float like an oil spill
on the water’s surface. Happiness, doctor? Unlikely. But whatever
the result, one thing is certain: the colors of our son’s chroma
will be imprisoned by the soma, always electric, always ready to burn.
Luxury
—After Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel”
As I wait in the lobby of the Manila Rales Hotel,
my body relaxes into the ambient chord progressions
that the pianist plays on the shiny grand piano. My eyes
turn into half-moons at the sight of the broad, radiant chandeliers
that hover above each cluster of just-plush-enough upholstery
and perfectly proportioned carpets. The Rales is a laughable
name, at least to my ear. The word’s sound brings me back
to pancake dinners in the basement of the church, dusty stubs
of tickets that I bought for door prizes never won, fundraisers
for the local Girl Scout troop. But The Rales Hotel is the epitome
of luxury and postcolonial refinement, a tribute to the Englishman
who established Singapore for the British East India Company.
Complimentary tea or water while you wait? Shall I escort you
to the restroom? I find a chair in the corner, in front
of a television that loops what appears to be a feature film
but is actually an ad for Rales hotels. First, the pristine
white columns of what might be an old plantation, then
a middle-aged white man glances meaningfully
at the ruins of Angkor Wat. We’re in Cambodia, the film says,
we’re enchanted, it’s marvelous—it’s Asia for God’s sake!—
and it’s there for the white man to discover it as if for the first time
with his tiny scarf wrapped around his neck and his soulful,
searching eyes that stare almost indecently at the temple
in the day’s last golden light, his look beholding something
so new and rare that it is as if he is being born, right there
as I am watching. In a state that approximates the divine,
he closes his hands in prayer in front of a girl
who cannot be more than four years old. She holds
incense for his experience, and then is animated
by the ceremonial dancers who decorate the scene, just like
the tiki torches that flicker against their dark skin
in the crepuscular glow. This five-minute film is nothing
if not meaningful glances and a continual return to the white man
using his fountain pen to reflect on his thoughts—writing
is leisure, fountain pens and leather-bound notebooks
and wooden desks are luxury, and so is the ambience
of afternoon light, first against the pages of Maugham’s
Penguin edition of The Moon and Sixpence, which no one
has read since 1945, held with such delicacy and earnestness
in the hands of a blonde woman leaning against a tree
with no one else around for miles; and then more golden light
on a yacht’s long prow, two white lovers leaning against
the edge, not young, exactly, some experience there,
some world-knowing wisdom, no need for map or Dramamine
or the bags that ordinary people haul against traic on roads
with no sidewalks, no gutters, no drains, no toilet paper.
JULY/ AUGUS T 2018
It’s pornographic, this gauzy gaze at others who are lit
like furniture for the pleasure of white travel. You might think
that I am only seeing this in an ad at a hotel, but no.
Just this afternoon, when I walked past the tennis courts
of our apartment complex, I saw two white people
playing tennis, and whenever one of the men needed a drink,
he’d gesture to his Filipina servant. In one hand, she held
a bottle of filtered water; in the other, the man’s small poodle.
On a pillow. Truly, it is as if the Renaissance
never stopped glowing. How many times did painters
from that time focus the luminosity on the king or duke
or prince, while in the background or to the side
the dark-skinned servant stands next to the horse
or the throne, barely visible save for a single pearl earring
that leaps from the canvas in its glow, the servant
as accessory, as background dark to the king’s light,
as an object of contrast to be moved around in the painting,
or the Rales video, or, in this case, the poem.
Joanne Diaz is the author of two poetry collections, The Lessons and My Favorite Tyrants, and
co-editor, with Ian Morris, of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America.
HARVARD REVIEW
Fiction Essays Poems Book Reviews Art
New Translations Conversations with Writers
SUBSCR
IBE ON
LINE
WWW.H
ARVARD
REVIEW
.ORG
9
THREE POEMS
MAI DER VANG

Refugee, Walking Is the Most
Human of All
So long to the papaya kingdoms
Of olden mothers,
The shepherdess igniting
Peels of bergamot.
Grief of chalk
Scribbles the form of an
Consider
How the rubble of hair
Armless nation, hoarding amputated limbs? Maybe
The babbling entered in reverse,
A camouflaged back
Turned to you, the deletion of your death
As more than collateral,
Erasure of these toxins
To prevent spilling of the globe’s intestines.
Did you locate your way
To the hills of lineage
Archangel. Without a guidesong to keep pace, without
a pillow of mortars, A ground to sleep you?
How many decades

Weighs dense together Before you landed at the heirloom elders, jacketed
With the pedestrian heft Inside flames of beige?
Did you tell them of the
Of never coming back.
Western rains, a speckled land that slipped into
Home is a sleeping whale. A canal and then
Consider an armor Broke into downpour?
Of feathers, not to bufer the body from shelling, Let them know. Let the ancient ones keen their oath
But to be hoisted Lyrics. Let them scrape each leaf,
As a skyless meteor fleeing for Each spoiled bark,

An elsewhere chance Pieces of corroded lint, every spell of hemorrhaging.

to land. Let them one day utter
The narrative uncloaked.
You will come back
To rescue your footsteps.

Towels spread on a road

Notations to the Knower
As if forming: timeline Only you know how much
of cotton against my vellum endures.

A pillared topography. You are the scrivener

of my broken
But this, the clap of hands in crisis
traveler
Shoveling out evacuees.
In this season
Empty your opera
without centennial,
In the howling of the sea.
where sky monuments
cut
The Shaman Asks About Yellow Rain open
Did the airplane knife the sky? Or did it arrive, bodies,
Still and unruled
sing an autopsy
As a mass grave?
of armaments born
Did it drone a foreign talk, tune of a soggy
into nature’s crooked lab.
Friendship, or maybe
It was lit from Only you can write
my postscript
An acquainted hum? Did you look up to earth’s
Tinted azure for one in your
Terrific minute? midwinter leaf.

What of the power, as if sand had been thrown

In your face, as if innards
Had been scheming Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt
Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book
To leave you. How long before your flesh slipped of? Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a
Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of
Did you hear distant Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, the
Men chatter of their New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

10 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

IOWA BIRD OF MOUTH
Keeping a 12-month crowdsourced poetry project in the air
I HATE CROWDS
I’m an introvert. Most poets are. I’m terrible at
chit-chat and networking. In group work situ-
ations, my ideas are usually too far out, so I’ve
learned to keep my mouth shut. The only “team”
sport I ever played in high school was swim-
ming. Are you technically part of “a team” if you
can’t make eye contact or talk because your head’s
underwater?
My aversion to groups may be why I deeply
distrusted the premise of crowdsourcing—espe-
cially creative crowdsourcing, like people writing
a poem together. How does it cohere? Isn’t a poem
about capturing one person’s point of view? Who
has the ultimate authority to edit it? Is it “mean”
to delete terrible lines, as poets do to their own
work every day? How about terrible lines written
by a four-year-old, which is why they’re terrible?
Bottom line: why bother? Aren’t there enough
fabulous poems in the world, waiting to be read?
Why add to the noise?
But crowdsourcing grew on me slowly, until
it took over an entire year of my life. Iowa Bird
of Mouth (IBOM) was an online crowdsourced
poetry project that ran from September 2016 to
August 2017. With support from the Iowa Arts
Council and the National Endowment for the
Arts over 750 people around the world contrib-
uted to the project—from Girl Scouts to Guggen-
heim fellows.
The seed for the project was planted in 2012.
I lived in a tiny, mouse-infested Brooklyn apart-
ment. I was single, and lonely, and my downstairs
neighbors hollered at me like a pack of soccer
hooligans whenever I walked across the floor. One
night, I met with an old friend travel ling through
NYC for work who was very successful doing
something which involved math. She looked ter-
rific, and had two lovely grown daughters back
home in California, where she lived in a big house
near the beach.
So imagine my surprise when she said, “I’d do
anything to have what you have.”
“You want to be taller?” I asked, having no
idea what she was talking about, but knowing I
was a full head taller than her.
“No, your poetry and your creativity,” she said.
“I’d love to have those in my life.”
My old friend was not prone to exaggeration.
I was—big time—but I’m a poet. I didn’t know
how to respond, but I’d heard this before. “How
can I be more creative?” was a question I always
brushed of in post-reading Q & As. I had no idea
why I’ve always been a “creative person,” eschew-
ing criticism and even welcoming the (often pub-
lic) failure of writing and publishing poems.
But I do know that writing immeasurably
enriches my life. What would I do without
poetry? How would I live without access to art’s
spiritual dimension? I wanted my friend to have
what I have. Heck, I even want total strangers to
have it.
So I started thinking about ways to bring art
and creativity to people who felt left of the gift
list—that they were somehow not entitled to the
very things that made my life lively.
JULY/ AUGUS T 2018
JENNIFER L. KNOX
FAMILY DAY
I moved to Central Iowa in 2013 after falling in
love with a man from a tiny town. I started teach-
ing again, which I’d given up in New York,
where adjunct pay wouldn’t even cover my rent. I
missed my New York friends, but I loved my man,
Collin, my dog, and the house, under which no
hollering neighbors lurked.
One of the first things I noticed about the Cen-
tral Iowa culture was an ainity for wild birds.
Why, my normally super-stoic in-laws got down-
right giddy recalling encounters with crows, gold-
finches, and redwing blackbirds.
A manicurist confided that whenever she saw
a cardinal, she knew it was her deceased grand-
mother. “She’s just checking on me.”
A colleague complained that her backyard had
been overrun by birdwatchers seeking a rare tan-
ager. “They’re trampling my pampas grass!” she
griped. “That’d be me,” muttered an ashamed col-
league in the corner. “They’re very rare,” he said
and slunk out the door.
Iowa filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I
grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There
was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to
hear. But birds were a treat for the eyes and the
ears. Birds were the bling on our farm.”
The Iowan wild bird love was everywhere. I
shared my observations with New York friends.
“Yeah, I love to look at birds in Central Park,
too. Maria, remember that one bird?”
“What bird?” Maria asked.
They didn’t get it, and I didn’t either entirely
until one frigid winter day, when Collin and I
were driving around the lake. He loves long drives
when the permafrosted farm roads glow and sun
dogs hang in the sky like spaceships. After cresting
a hill into glaring sun, he stomped on the brake American robin (illustration by Polyphony Bruna; photo by
and skidded sideways to a stop. In front of us were Norbert Sarsfield)
three bald eagles, two deer carcasses, and lots and
lots of blood.
We stared silently until he said, “Look behind with power and the indiference of a thing like a
us.” Two more eagles, about 300 feet away. mountain or a meteor shower. More like falling in
“They’re the babies,” he gestured low to the awe than in love.
three in front of our car. As I was telling an old friend from Muscatine,
“How do you know?” All I could see was that Iowa, about the Iowa wild bird love phenome-
they were covered in blood, their beaks were non, his cell phone rang. His ringtone was the
comically yellow, and they were absolutely gigan- meadowlark call. We smiled, but didn’t feel the
tic. I couldn’t imagine their huge bodies lifting need to put our feelings into words, because we
into the air. were in Iowa. We saw the feathers floating on the
“The feathers on their heads.” updraft. This was real.
The three had ropey head feathers, like rag
mops. The pair behind us: smooth and white. The THE PROJECT
kids resumed their gory, awkward disassembly—
flinging tendons and gulping down ribbons of fat After a poetry reading in Des Moines, I met two
while making goofy bawk bawk bawk sounds. fabulous visual artists who encouraged me to apply
“Those two are teaching the kids how to eat,” for an Iowa Arts Council fellowship.
he explained, and as if it heard us, one of the par- “But I’ve never won a fellowship or grant or
ents spreads its wings as if to say: “Yes, we are.” award or prize in my life,” I blurted out, because
Collin knew this because Central Iowans know I’m an over-sharer.
stuf about birds. “You’d be perfect for it,” they assured me.
“So it’s like Family Day?” The application emphasized that the artist’s
“Better than a trip to Disneyland, if you’re an work should connect to people. I felt an epiph-
eagle.” any burbling. “Iowans are deeply connected to
This is where I fell in love with wild birds. Not wild birds,” I thought, “I could write poems about
in a romantic way. More like how one falls in love wild Iowa birds! No . . . that’s too clichéd. And
11
how would those poems connect to Iowans in a
unique way? You can’t force people to read poetry.
Wait . . . I could force people to read poetry about
birds! No one’s ever done that!”
As I was working out the details, I began to
notice excellent examples of crowdsourced poetry
everywhere. In David Lehman’s long-running
“Next Line, Please” project at American Scholar,
participants send in dazzling poems, often with
imposed formal restraints, based on his bril-
liant prompts: poems triggered by the name of a
chess opening, poems utilizing lines from Hamlet,
poems inspired by Napoleon’s infamous letter to
Josephine: “Home in three days. Don’t bathe.”
Kwame Dawes launched an inaugural crowd-
sourced poem for WNYC’s The Takeaway with
these powerful words: “Say ‘nation.’ In the wake
of quarrels, say ‘hope.’” Hundreds of respon-
dents sent in their suggestions for lines through
social media to write “A People’s Poem for the
Inauguration.”
Then I found “La Familia,” Juan Felipe Her-
rera’s epic crowdsourced poem on the Library
of Congress’ website. Anyone, anywhere could
contribute up to 400 words per day. Even when
the words clashed—and they often did—all the
voices seemed to be part of one song. Contribu-
tors’ names were listed on a diferent page to give
the authors anonymity and reinforce the con-
cept of the crowd as author. Unlike other projects
I’d seen, “La Familia” appeared to be unedited,
but I liked the resulting roughness. It resembled a
flock of birds in flight—dividing and converging,
squawking and bawking.
Suddenly, it fell into place. My project descrip-
tion was surprisingly easy to write because I actu-
ally understood what I was saying.
I will build and curate an online crowdsourced poem hon-
oring twelve wild Iowa birds, structurally based on “La
Familia.” The goal will be to increase our sense of collective
connection to the environment through creative convergence.
Beyond personal connections, birds occupy a unique space
in our collective consciousness—living in every community,
grabbing our eyes and ears.
Finally, I needed a catchy name, so I crowd-
sourced my friends. Barbara suggested, “Bird of
Mouth,” then “Iowa Bird of Mouth.” Crowd-
sourcing was already paying of.
12
In July, I received the email announcing that
I was a 2016 Iowa Arts Council Fellow. My goal
was to launch the site by September, so I hit the
ground running.
FLEDGE
Building an interactive website was so hard! Espe-
cially because I had no idea what I was doing. So
I posted an SOS on Facebook. “Can anyone help
me with a little website work? Should take about
a week.”
Vaughan Fielder, owner of the Field Oice Lit-
erary Agency in Lexington, Kentucky, a literary
speaking agency for poets, messaged me: “I can
do it!” I emailed her my site map ideas, lists, and
drawings, and then I waited. Vaughan’s extremely
thorough, so I knew she was carefully reading the
materials I sent, which is exactly what I was afraid
of. I wanted someone impulsive who bit of more
than they could chew. Like me.
When Vaughan replied at the end of the day, I
knew:
• She’d make the site (!).
• I’d write the text, create the graphics, and han-
dle PR.
• She’d read everything I sent and knew I was
clueless.
• The site would take one month, not one week, to
complete.
“What if someone writes a bunch of dirty
words?” I asked Vaughan because most people I
had told about the project—especially administra-
tive types—had asked me questions like that.
“What if someone uses profanity?” “What if
someone writes something disgusting?” “What if
someone writes too much? You have to be able to
control it!”
Fear of poetry trolls made IBOM seem scarier
than a personal ad on Craigslist.
Vaughan said, “I can put a high profanity filter
on the submission window . . . then, maybe, just
ask them not to use profanity?”
And that’s what we did: “Please avoid using
profanity as we hope this site will be used by
all ages.”
Vaughan and I worked (and worked and
worked), but one loose end remained. I loved
birds, but I didn’t technically know anything
about them. Where do they go in winter, for
example? I had no idea. I’d planned to spotlight
a diferent bird each month to match the actual
birds’ numbers in the environment, but all I knew
was January = eagles, because that’s when Collin
and I had seen them on the road. I briefly consid-
ered Wikipedia-ing my way through it but visual-
ized sacks of Audubon Society hate mail.
Here’s a sentence I’ve never said: I needed an
ornithologist.
At the local farmers’ market, I watched a
woman and a man pull a little boy around in a
wagon. The man’s brown baseball cap said, “Iowa
Young Birders.” “I like your hat,” I said. We
chatted. He was Tyler Harms, President of Iowa
Young Birders, a local non-profit organization
that encourages young Iowans ages 8–18 to study
and enjoy birds and birding. Kismet! I told him
about IBOM and he agreed to choose the spot-
light birds. Just like that! Afterwards, he confessed
that it was the toughest professional call in his
life—a real Sophie’s Choice.
September: American goldfinch
October: ring-necked pheasant
November: American crow
December: eastern screech-owl
January: bald eagle
February: northern cardinal
March: red-winged blackbird
April: trumpeter swan
May: American robin
June: eastern bluebird
July: eastern meadowlark
August: great blue heron
As September drew near, I emailed press
releases to K–12 school districts, newspapers, TV
stations, outdoor journalists, art and conserva-
tion organizations, writing programs, ornithology
departments, bookstores, writing groups, birding
groups, Audubon Magazine, every single person at
the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and all my fabu-
lous poet friends who were besieged for free work
every single day (forgive me). Then I waited.
WHERE DID MY LINE
BREAKS GO?
The first verse in “Poem for the Goldfinch” was
posted on September 1.
A goldfinch buzzed by us on our bikes,
dipping and lifting and hanging strong
in the air like a note from a trombone.
This must mean the end of summer.
Then . . . nothing for a few days. I watched people
glaze over at my pitch: “I just launched a crowd-
sourced poetry website honoring twelve Iowa
birds.” People couldn’t picture what IBOM was,
but it “seemed” boring.
It occurred to me that a launch party might
demystify the submission process. Even though
they, too, weren’t sure what IBOM was, the Ames
Public Library stepped up and donated their audi-
torium for the event. The librarian even brought
seed cookies and other bird- oriented snacks. Local
poets Heather Derr-Smith, Meg Johnson, Claire
Kruesel, and Molly McDonald read bird poems to
warm up the crowd of 80+ attendees—everyone
from artsy types with pink hair to seniors and lit-
tle kids.
Tyler took the mic and spoke eloquently on
wild birds and the environment. During the
Q & A, Richard, a Whitmanesque local celebrity
who wears skirts but would prefer to be naked,
asked Tyler why an aggressive band of crows once
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

Ring-necked pheasant (illustration by Polyphony Bruna)
drove him out of a California campground. “I did
nothing to them!” Richard lamented.
“Well, birds have their own personalities, just
like people,” Tyler explained, which satisfied
Richard, and us all.
This is the poem we wrote together that night.
People shouted out lines while I typed them into
the submission field on the site, which was pro-
jected onto the screen in the library auditorium.
When I read it now, I can hear the diferent voices
vying for dominance, but in the end, they unite in
soft surprise.
I have never seen a goldfinch. That’s sad but true. He’s
never seen a purple cow. But I have seen goldfinches
though. Several in fact. In flight in feather. I would like to
be as naked as a bird. Who doesn’t have something with
the word “naked” in it? I asked our mayor to let me speak
at the end of the meeting. I was sitting in the back and tried
to take off my clothes. They put me in the Story County
Jail. Were there any birds in there? I’m somewhat of a nud-
ist. Coneflower seeds are a delicious treat for the goldfinch.
Goldfinches are a lovely yellow. They are. Perfect. I don’t
understand why I’ve been all over the world and never seen
them. Come to my backyard. Plant coneflowers. When I
was a child I thought goldfinches were escaped canaries, like
canaries were born indoors. To escape. When they sing,
they’re outdoors.
After the last line was spoken, I felt the crowd
understand that the poem was finished. We’d
come full circle. It was a magic moment. “That
sounds like a wrap,” I said. The crowd nodded and
laughed. “What just happened?” someone asked.
The next day, more poems appeared on the site.
Funny ones. The asterisks represent where a new
writer enters.
99 problems and a finch ain’t one.
*
When it sings, it sings something.
When it flies, it flies somewhere.
When it coaches youth volleyball
it focus on defense. “That’s how to
win championships,” it whistles.
* but where a windstorm brought us
Rob Lowe fells goldfinch
in charity golf tourney
quits the game for good
JULY/ AUGUS T 2018
Followed by unsentimental ones that challenged
the notion of what a poem was.
Nancy texted me a few months ago, on a late spring morn-
ing, “I’ve got something for you.” When I arrived at her
house for coffee, she handed me a small bundle wrapped in
paper towels. “It hit the sun room window this morning.
I heard the thud and found it on the deck. I thought you
might like it.” I thanked her and when I got home, unsure
about what to do with the small, still body, I zipped it into
a sandwich baggie and put it in the freezer. I’m not a taxi-
dermist myself. Though I felt bad about it, I finally threw
it away last week. I needed the space for my leftover roasted
chicken.
And fabulous feminist ones.
The golden girl broods over all these flings of joy
In nests we never see, on eggs unrobinly drab!
Painters and states claim the noisy garish male
But the leaps of joy, darts to the sky—
knows no sex but yes yes yes!
The poets began emailing me: “Where did my
line breaks go?” Oh no. I hadn’t considered how
the HTML format and the skinny column width
would chew up the breaks.
“How do I make a title?” Aw, crud. I hadn’t
thought about that either. Hard returns were pro-
pelling first lines away from their titles.
I asked Vaughan if the formatting issues could
be fixed. “Not without redesigning the whole
site.” We added some instructional text on how to
make titles and key commands, which I suspected
no one would read. I worried that, when poets
saw their submissions mangled by HTML, they’d
never post again. Perhaps I was right.
DEAD ALBATROSSES
From “Poem for the Ring-necked Pheasant”
The reporter stands in the hurricane chamber.
“This is . . . a category three,” he wheezes,
skin pulling from his face.
I am in Iowa where there are no hurricanes,
the Ring-necked Pheasant.
I’m waiting for a windfall of money;
I don’t care where it blows in from.
Some of my neighbors say they’d never
take Illinois money, but how would they know?
Some spotlight birds were far more popular than
others; as Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa says,
“They can’t all be winners.” The ring-necked
pheasant was introduced to Iowa around 1900
during a windstorm that blew over pens of cap-
tive game birds. I suggested to Tyler that we
include a game bird to encourage all those poet/
hunters out there to submit. Turns out, the Venn
diagram intersection of hunters and poets is
mighty slim, folks. While none of the October
poems read as pro-hunting, many were definitely
anti-hunter.
Bird Song
Ring-necked, I ring with color
above and below my priestless collar,
green head, masked for your red death.
Don’t shoot, go home, cook up your meth.
Kill yourself, leave my wild speckled body alone;
Iowa, O Iowa, my accidental home.
Poisoned streams, rivers, lakes, ferti-laced fields,
Thanks, wind, for blowing me free, unconcealed.
In the beginning, I spent from 5 to 10 hours
a week on increasing submissions to the project.
To me, the most surprising response was from
poets.
“You should submit a verse to IBOM. This
month’s bird is the ring-necked pheasant.”
“Oh, I don’t have any poems about those,”
the poet thinks, “but I have a poem about a dead
albatross.”
“Oh—how sad! Uh, dead albatrosses aren’t
on the spotlight bird list, but if you ever get
inspired . . .”
It was an early “Aha” moment: poets I knew
who wrote books were busy writing poetry about
subjects they chose to write about. Wading into
the creative river of humanity was not necessar-
ily motivating to them. Perhaps “the creative river
of humanity” reminded them of the public pool
they swam in as children—and the horrible case of
plantar warts that ensued.
I reminded myself that IBOM was not for
poets—it was for people who yearned to write a
poem. So instead of shaking the poet tree branches
again, I set up a Facebook group and a Twitter
account, and connected to every bird, conserva-
tion, and nature group I could find.
Tyler and I began appearing on the “Local
Talk” show at Ames’ KHOI. He was the brain
on birds, dishing out the science facts. Did you
know the ring-necked pheasant is a member of
the grouse family? I was the bird brain, reading
beautiful, strange, funny, mysterious poems that
strangers posted on the site, like this one, recalling
Pope’s “Windsor Forest.”
From “Poem for the Ring-necked Pheasant”
See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes un-fold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?
CROW-D KILLER
Nothing can kill interest in a crowdsourced
poetry project like the 2016 presidential elec-
tion. People could barely lift their heads of the
couch. Poetry wasn’t making anyone’s to-do list.
We were all going to die. At least with its omi-
13
nous associations, the American crow reflected a
glooming, looming sense of doom. Some used the
site to vent their angst.
From “Poem for the American Crow”
Swan-lake white, Cardinal red, Blue-
Jay blue: the demagogue crushes
of birds; oh, you’re sick of it—
red and blue like the flashing hands
of sirens. Your apologists jumped
all over explaining your croaky finesse—
and I read about it, how you’re clever:
how you drop shiny turds
in the path of bulldozers; the running-
over exposes their silver
linings—but honestly, Crow
I don’t think it’ll be
enough. Evil doesn’t dress itself
up in black; I trust
you now more than ever.
I WAS LIKE, “YEAH, RIGHT”
The Iowa Arts Council organized several fellow
project presentations across the state. In Osceola,
members of the Clarke County Arts Council pre-
sented their work first: a carver who turned to
woodworking after he was injured at his con-
struction job; an abstract painter and retired high
school art teacher; a stained glass window maker
in his 90s! A presenter in her 80s said, though she
hadn’t painted in years, she still considered her-
self a painter. Everyone said how much art had
enriched their lives.
Then it was my turn, and together we wrote
this.
Do I hear a “hello” or a warning? The caw pierces the
cold night air. His dark beady eyes pierce through the day.
These are some of the smartest animals on the planet.
Their circling masses hover from above. Screeching shrews.
Chatty Cathys. A battle-scarred beak, says the den-
tist. Toothless. A feeling of peace when I see them hover-
ing above. “Is it an eagle?” I ask hopefully. “Aw, no.”
Oh, to fly effortlessly above the earth, says the pilot. Dark
reflections of their cousins, the blue jays. Good thieves.
Black magic. West Nile, says the pharmacist. Third time’s
a charm. Roadkill feast. Black phoenix. A black shining
monarch surveying his kingdom.
Afterwards, the attendees marveled at their accom-
plishment. A woman in a rhinestone-bedazzled
15TH ANNUAL
PALM BEACH
POETRY FESTIVAL
January 21–26, 2019
Delray Beach, Florida
Six days of readings, lectures,
craft talks, and poetry workshops.
An extraordinary opportunity to focus
on your work with eight of America’s
most celebrated poets.
APPLY TODAY! Deadline: November 12, 2018
14
tunic confessed, “When you said we were
going to write a verse together, I was like, ‘Yeah,
right . . .’” she rolled her eyes, “. . . but we did it!”
Another woman said, “Even Paul spoke up!”
referring to the wispy man in the far corner who
had suddenly shouted, “Their circling masses
hover from above!” causing the Osceoleans around
him to leap about a foot in the air.
Tunic whispered, “Paul never says anything.”
“Well, he nailed it today,” I shrugged.
“He sure did,” they nodded.
The crow was one of the most popular birds in
the project. I know this because I could sneak in
through the site’s backdoor and count the submis-
sions. People began including their names within
their verses as a work-around to the anonymity of
the submission window. I liked it. It meant they
felt that the site belonged to them, too, which it
did. It also gave me a chance to connect with peo-
ple using the site—like Steve Rose.
Three Crows
Three crows flew herd on a broad-tailed hawk
east of Albert Lea, black beaks talking trash
then driven into the hawk’s grey back.
One flies point while the other two harass from
the wings. You’ve seen this in Korea, three MIG’s
shooting down our bomber; or coyotes on a sick cow.
Two hours later across the Iowa border,
a new pecking order: two red-winged blackbirds,
clever as card players, harassing a passing crow.
The crow’s wings, lumbering like sails on a dingy,
drag against the current, while the blackbird
sharks slice the breeze into splinters.
The crow tries a barrel roll to the blackbirds’ delight.
Tufts of coal feathers flutter from his belly. A lone
cedar offers comfort and into its arms the crow falls.
Black feathers, onyx beak and talons sheathed in royal green.
This crow: terrorist, target, stowaway, scavenger,
and for a moment, on that rough branch, King.
by Steve Rose
RAPTOR PEOPLE
A volunteer at the Iowa Raptor Center outside
Iowa City sent in this crystalline haiku.
Haiku for the Iowa Screech Owl
Small rapture in the fracture
That blessed Burr oak Ents and Baxoje.
The prairie ghosts honor you.
POETRY WORKSHOP FACULTY:
•ELLEN BASS •LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR
•STUART DISCHELL •ARACELIS GIRMAY
•CAMPBELL MCGRATH •MATTHEW OLZMANN
•GREGORY PARDLO •ELEANOR WILNER
SPECIAL GUEST: SHARON OLDS
AND
w w w. p a l m b e a c h p o e t r y f e s t i v a l . o rg
It struck me as remarkably empathetic to care for a
species so indiferent to us.
My friend’s uncle raises falcons. He told me
about the leash around the bird’s ankle, and the
windowless box in which the falcon sleeps with
a leather hood over its eyes as he drives it out to
hunt for rabbits, ducks, and anything else it can
carry in its talons.
“Do your falcons . . . like you?” I asked.
“No,” he laughed and shook his head.
IS THIS GOING TO BE ON THE TEST?
Another surprising response was from schools and
teachers. They didn’t engage with IBOM like I
thought they would. Here’s an exception, writ-
ten by a group of junior high school students in
Ouzin kie, Alaska.
From “Poem for the American Eagle”
Dumb bird, sitting on a wire,
my dad saw one get shocked.
Favorite bird, wings spread,
my papa likes them too.
You say Eagle, I say no. No eagles.
I don’t know. They’re birds.
They make a nest in my yard.
Every spring they have babies
and you can hear them screeching.
I like the way they sound.
We see eagles everywhere.
They are like flies around here.
Less than 5% of IBOM submission were from
schools. I thought it would be such a “no-brainer”
for teachers, I wrote a lesson plan and posted it
on the site. Collin, a former junior high school
teacher, agreed. “It’s a great way to kill an hour.
I’d be hitting that thing once a week.”
I sent emails to K–12 school administrators and
teachers as well as university programs. I peeked
to see if the recipients had opened my emails, and
they did—every month—throughout the entire
project. They were interested, so why didn’t
they bite?
In March, rangers at the local conservation
area asked me to operate a poetry station for hun-
dreds of field-tripping K–3rd grade students. What
I observed on that sunny hill with my easel, giant
pad of paper, and sack of multicolored markers—
as well as in the auditorium with my laptop, when
rain waylaid our outdoor sessions—gave me valu-
able insight as to why teachers were not using
IBOM in their classrooms.
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
 They thought it was totally stupid. At least song. While both bird people and poetry people call, a thing of beauty, Dizzy
that’s what their folded arms, cocked heads, sneer- contributed, I’ll say the love of birds drove more Gillespie at the mouthpiece,
ing lips suggested. Yet another “Aha” moment: no people to the site. Several renowned poets pitched its beauty, obvious—a graceful
aspect of collective poetry writing prepares stu- in, but the majority of the contributors would be long neck, shadowed eyes,
dents for standardized tests: not the writing, not considered “amateurs”—which was precisely the a sleek, snow-white coat
an increased sense of connection to birds or the intended result. worthy muse of ballets and fairytales.
environment, not collaboration, not shouting out The real surprise was the poems themselves. Like all the pretty birds—peacocks,
answers. So why would a teacher engage? My crowdsource-doubting brain would never flamingoes, snowy egrets, roseate
I was like a babysitter, and a goofy one at that. have dreamed up the inspired beauty gifted by spoonbills, great herons—
I’m a terrible typist, and whenever I hit the wrong (mostly) complete strangers. Even though I know the trumpeter swan was once
key on the big PC the nature center had lent me it happened, I still find it stunning that people hunted for its plumage to adorn,
(which was often—I’m a Mac gal), the students from all over the world (1) discovered the project, to decorate women’s hats and quills.
corrected me, loudly—“Wrong letter!” or “No and (2) wrote wonderful poems about crows, east- Shot in springtime, rookeries robbed.
comma!” This was what was important to them. ern screech owls, and robins that danced with the In the Everglades, nesting birds
The older the students were, the louder they words of hundreds of other people. Every morn- were hunted almost to extinction.
shouted, i.e. the more unsettled they were by the ing, I awoke to find new surprises, like someone It’s easy for humans to mythologize,
presence of errors. The whole exercise raised their had planted flowers around my house in the mid- to control what they cannot ever
collective blood pressure. dle of the night. fully understand. Take women. Take Eve.
Of course, the teachers were unsettled, too, as Once endangered, today the birds
they no doubt considered students’ errors reflec- One Letter, One Word are thriving. Once adorned, now adored—
tions of their own teaching skills. I was posting It’s spring, and the peacocks one letter makes all the difference.
online (where everyone could see it) a collabor- are in heat, again. by Catherine Esposito Prescott
atively written poem, over which the instructors The male chases peahens
had no editorial control, written on a subject with as quickly as he can dragging *
which the students had no expertise. This sce- his fan of fanciful feathers Goodbye
nario was a nightmare for teachers. Why invite with eyes of gold, blue and green. (Postcard from an Eastern Meadowlark)
the scrutiny? He screams, he rages down the street you find my beak too sharp
I also learned that if there’s anything else to after the peahens who seek my song too sad and slow
do—like make a pine cone bird feeder, or go on refuge in my neighbor’s lawn you keep your acres neat
a nature walk, or touch an eagle’s feathers, or pet and, sometimes, our doorway. those grasses have to go
Tootsie, an elderly blind falcon, or wash your For as loud as its call can be, they love me in Brazil
hands in the restroom for 10 minutes—people will for as singular and solitary, they covet yellow so
pick that over writing a poem. For IBOM’s most it’s surprising this bird isn’t named along the verge there’s grass
successful crowdsourcing sessions, the audience for its high-pitched honk, its moo, they let the edges grow
had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. its mewl like a ball deflating,
*
At the 2017 Iowa Youth Writing Project con- like an old car horn. Some birds
ference in Iowa City, the middle school students are named for their symphonic From “Poem for the Northern Cardinal”
spotted the typos, but they didn’t obsess. In fact, parts. Take the trumpeter swan, I’m talking about you, Northern Cardinal.
they went with it and made poetry out of the mis- its sound is a muted trumpet You’ve got this striking vest
takes. But these students and their teachers already
loved creative writing, poetry, and—it turned
out—YouTube videos of trumpeter swans stealing
graham crackers from toddlers.

My Way or the Highway

Big, strong, loud!
One who is not outspoken.
You see its white feathers just like a cloud.
If you see my big white feathers, get outta my way!
You better listen to what I say.
If you make me mad, get away.
I know it’s repetitive, but I blow my own horn.
I’m the only one in my band.
I am literally called the trumpeter swan.
My trumpet doesn’t need a mute.
I use my neck to call you, “Pay attention!” with.
I know it’s crazy, but trust me, it’s not a myth.
If you see me, I’m not someone you wanna mess with.
My horns sounds in its own riff.
I’M THE MOST MAJESTIC!!
Forget red and black. Black and white are my colors.
I am an anarchist swan. No queen owns me.
When I honk, I make the other side panicky.
I am beautiful my own way, no matter what other people say.
I am the trumpeter swan so get outta my way!
If you don’t, I’ll make you pay, because at the end of the day,
it’s my way, or the highway.
by the Swans of Anarchy

CAN I WRITE IT?

At six months in, IBOM was breathing on its
own—beyond my social media posts and email
pleas. Like-minded local media and non-profit
organizations were essential in spreading the
word. Visual artists sent photographs, paintings,
and drawings. A local band even wrote a theme

JULY/ AUGUS T 2018 15


Northern cardinal (illustration by Polyphony Bruna)
of red and, as far as I know, whatever
else you’ve got, that vest is the best.
Who’s got the best vest? You do!
Who looks like a red pupil in the white
eye of winter? You do! Who questions
the world with feathers? Who could sit
on my head like a flaming fist?
by the Cedar Rapids
Facebook Writers
* It wasn’t the last lesson, but it was a doozy. How
Wild Blue Heron
Skinny old man in a shaggy cape
unhinged his bobbly elbows,
wobbled up on knobby knees
and blew his blue underneath
as we passed his marsh stump
on I-80. “Get a load of this!”
he trumpeted. We said: “A heron!
But what’s in his mouth . . . ?”
A squirrel’s tail twirled
like a sputtering propeller.
Tinkertoy spine winds up to spear fish at its feet
He bends with grace and ease of a yogi. . . .
Just two lines like kneeless legs
Legless knees, fish-head punctuation.
Or is that a pelican?
Drop it my way.
Those “Aha” moments continued until the end,
when I was still learning new ways to connect
people to poetry. In June, I visited Goldie’s Kids
Club, an after-school summer program directed
by the Iowa Historical Society, to crowdsource
some eastern bluebird poems.
“Do you want to tell me a poem about a blue-
bird?” I asked a tired little girl with lots of curly
hair, slumped over in a chair.
She suddenly perked up. “Can I write it?”
“Oh . . . sure,” I said, surprised, and handed her
a brown marker. This was the first time anyone
had asked to write their own verse on the easel.
“I want the blue one,” she said, pointing to the
marker in my other hand.
16
mine who was using a red-winged blackbird as a
metaphor for her jerkface ex-boyfriend.
Work-wise, IBOM was a part-time job. Why
did I keep doing it? Obviously, I fell in love—with
everything I learned about birds (which was a lot,
though I still don’t know where they go in win-
ter) and with all the people who interacted with
the poems. Cheerleaders were everywhere. Some
preferred to watch it evolve from the sidelines, but
that, I learned, didn’t diminish their pleasure. Peo-
ple I didn’t even know would ask me, “How’s the
IBOM thing going? I heard about it on the radio.
Very cool.” When we open a window, we can
never be sure of who will fly through. Or where
they will land.
Note: The text, art, and website code of IBOM (http://
www.iowabirdofmouth.com/) are open source and avail-
able for use in noncommercial projects.
Jennifer L. Knox’s nonfiction writing has appeared in The New
York Times, “Press Play,” “The Best American Poetry Blog,”
The Mycophile, and “The Inquisitive Eater.” She is the
author of four books of poems. Her work has appeared four times
in the Best American Poetry series as well as in The New
York Times, The New Yorker, and The American Poetry
Review. She teaches poetry writing and communications at Iowa
State University and is currently at work on a culinary memoir.
TE ACHER S
Are you looking for a lively, challenging, and
“Of course!” I said, handing it to her. She entertaining supplement for your reading list?
stretched as high as she could on her tiptoes in Adopt APR for your class!
front of the easel and wrote this. We offer half-price copies and subscriptions
for classroom use.
Bluebirds are
beautiful teach a Inquire:
bluebird how Classroom Adoption
to teach a little The American Poetry Review
math and a The University of the Arts
little science 320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313
Philadelphia, PA 19102-4901
T: 215-717-6803
selfish I’d been for ten months: the sole enjoyer F: 215-717-6805
of the tactile pleasure of writing—of drawing big E: dufym@aprweb.org
blue Bs, round as a bluebird’s loop-de-loop.
She handed me the marker, then the cap.
“Nice job!” I said.
“I know,” she said, then proudly read her poem
aloud, several times, touching each line she’d
written—in touch with creativity, her words, and
birds.
My old friend never submitted a verse to
IBOM—I think she’s mad at me for something
liberalish I said on Facebook. It’s OK. I’ll take the
heat. Only one profane word ever made it into a
poem—it was written by a diferent dear friend of
New from New Issues Poetry & Prose
ÜÜÜ°˜i܈ÃÃÕiëÀiÃðVœ“ÊUʘi܇ˆÃÃÕiÃJܓˆV…°i`ÕÊ
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
FOUR POEMS
DARA WIER
I Feel Sorry for You Someone Said
to Me Over and Over Again:
A Story in the Form of a Dialogue,
A Dialogue in the Shape of a Poem
If you keep saying to someone you feel sorry for them
what are you doing to them?
What are you trying to do to them? What do you think you are doing?
And if someone says, no, there’s no need to feel sorry for me.
Someone says, no, don’t say you feel sorry for me
And then you say it again, this time, fiercely as if it’s without compassion,
without the original compassion you thought you were attempting to
portray but had not done a very good job portraying it.
Or maybe it wasn’t compassion and that’s why it failed.
But your right to say about and to someone whatever it is you like—
What is it then, when then it’s transformed into another kind of thing.
Maybe a weapon (a good old fashioned weapon of words, a weapon of mind
destruction),
I feel sorry for you. (
You might as well have said, Look, what is wrong with you, can’t you
hear me
Saying I feel sorry for you?) (
Which could mean hey, you, I’m saying to you there’s something about you
I choose
To feel sorry for, who do you think you are
To tell me not to feel sorry for you?) (
On top of everything else, are you deaf? can you understand English?).
What are you doing, are you doing something hurtful, harmful, damaging?
And when once more I say, No, there’s no reason to feel sorry for me.
And you say it again, as if I didn’t understand it the other times,
But I feel sorry for you.
What is it your insistence fails to take into consideration?
And when I say, No, don’t feel sorry for me.
And you say, I do, I do feel sorry for you.
Are you saying I don’t understand how I should be grateful to have
someone like you
saying to me you feel sorry for me?
I feel sorry that you live the life you’re living.
I feel sorry that the life you’re living is not my life. (
Look at me, I have a good looking lover, I say I do, I’m at the top of my
game, I say I
am) (look at me, I’ve got a job, I’ve got so much going for me, I do, can’t
you see that?)
And you say it again, oh, and again, I feel sorry for you.
And I say, no, there’s nothing to feel sorry for me about.
Stop saying so, please, just stop saying that,
JULY/ AUGUS T 2018
I say, Stop, please, don’t say you feel sorry for me.
I’m trying to avoid something, something along the lines of I would
Prefer that you possibly, you maybe of all people, you, I would prefer
Not feeling sorry for me.
I don’t want to say, look, I don’t want your sorrow, you can keep it,
Keep it for yourself for when you need it
And leave me be, if someone needs to feel sorry for me it will be me.
And you say Look, it’s important for me to say I feel sorry for you.
I need to feel sorry for you because
In that way I feel superior to you
And if I can feel superior to you, I can feel better about myself & all else,
Maybe including you.
It’s that simple, as simple as that. Is this so hard to understand?
Is that so complicated, and what, what about that is so complicated?
What is wrong with you?
I can say I care about you. I can say my feeling sorry for you is a kind
of caring.
I can say I must have empathy if I feel sorry for you.
And I say, no, don’t, there’s no need to feel sorry for me.
And you say, but I do, I feel sorry for you.
What are you doing? And why is it impossible to get past this impasse?
Do you want me to turn to look at myself through
Your eyes, to turn to look at myself with what, the pity you propose?
Would you like me to feel sorry for myself?
Would that improve the situation for you?
Do you pity those you say you’re so sorry for?
And what is the worth of your pity?
Your pity you put on me for the sake of your pity’s worth?
How much can I count on your pity for?
If I took it and let it rest on me.
If I agreed for you to pity me.
If I agreed for you to feel sorry for me.
You’re sorry for me? Sorry for me.
For me you’re sorry.
I’m beginning to feel as if you feel as if for me
To be makes you sorry
And for that maybe you might wish I were to remain to be pitied
For eternity.
Would it be a better way were we to feel sorry for one another?
Would you be okay if I say I feel sorry for you?
Can I say how sorry I feel for you whenever you cross my mind?
Can my face go awry and my eyes conflate and my head go slack
While I say to you I feel sorry for you all time?
17
And when I do that does our mutually inclusive sorry for if it does come when it does come
Unite us or divide us? into our lives

Does it become a competition to see which one of us feels sorry better? we may feel as if
we’ve been taken prisoner,
Sorry more.
Sorry stronger, truer, sorrier? or as if
we are a city of goodness and gold
Sorry in a way more profound?
and it has, without pity,
And to be to be felt sorry for?
stormed our gates
What is that, to regret one’s life?
and it has captured us,
To regret I’m living?
torn us from our families,
To help me see I am to be pitied, to have been found to be good
taken away
For nothing
everything that matters most to us
As far as you’re concerned. As far as you’re concerned
taken away our will
I’m what? Something to fear? in order to replace it with its own
As if your fear takes hold when it no longer has me to feel sorry for.
it acts as if it is in fact
As far as your fear is concerned what it feels for me needs to be to remain a matter of life or death
on hold.
it may be a love
So that if you feel sorry for me and pity for me and there is no fear that is universal & conceptual

What I am can be of use to you. and therefore of little use

at least
To be good for nothing is that for me to be better than for you to feel
sorry for. for the most pressing
human needs and desires
To be good for nothing better than for your pity to have a place to land.
The sorry you say is a big bucket of water you throw on me and then because as the absence of meaning matters
as it is perhaps at the very center
I shake of what you’ve done to me as if I were a big dog shaking of water
in motion of the few things that matter
Slow enough to look as if each drop were all of a sudden no slowly each as we live
drop is its own
to say what life is
its own planet its own orbit and its own light. and to what end do we endure it

which is also to say

Violets, Doves, Girls, Bees a mystery beyond understanding
and Hyacinths though beyond understanding
does not mean
if an absence of meaning,
I wonder, not without meaning
it is beyond understanding
is only a matter, a moment
of always and of never and we have no concern to be concerned
we’ll misunderstand
that it is also an
aftermath an after in the aftermath we can reason about that
with a later reason
we throw words around
as if

they are indestructible

I Hadn’t Known Who I Am
as if their perpetual for I Don’t Know How Long
existence we can take That’s the thing about advice
for granted
Somebody has got to give it to you
and in one sense we can
I am always wondering what it is you mean
since love lives alone
When you say you’re busy
the life it has is
so much its own Now, you’re replenishing your stash
it is rare My love shows up at a phantom flea market
when it attaches
“to replenish his stash”
itself to any of us
He’s buying pictures of himself
the way an escaped or orphaned shadow
He buys a rusty tin box to stash his stash
attaches itself to us
its measure can’t be taken He lets me know to not let on who he is

18 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

I am lying down on my silky bed

He leans over to kiss my leg

Later he signs those pictures of himself

With someone else’s name

Melodious Tolling Goes on

in That Awful Pandemonium
What else besides

Is there other than eternity and all else

And boys and girls and others

Who mark it with their lives

As blue as it is most curious

How us and all other animals

Share our eyes and ears and more &

other sensory gadgets we adore

depending whether it’s midnight or morning

Or a day with no name

We let ourselves in for

Me, I, some other, as long as alive

I shudder with its awful power

Over me and every other I’ve loved

Beyond sense & oh, and more for those

Who lend me this, let me take sorrow’s arrow

beyond repair for company & awe

Without end to sustain me a split-second more

With you on the horizon somewhere

APR ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Where you always are  @TheAmericanPoetryReview
 @AmPoetryReview
Dara Wier’s newest book is In the Still of the Night. She teaches at the University of Massa-
chusetts Amherst.
 @american_poetry_review

THE MFA PROGRAM FOR WRITERS

AT WARREN WILSON COLLEGE

The Nation’s Premier

Low-Residency Program
in Creative Writing

Founded in 1976 by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Internationally-renowned faculty Asheville, NC
Substantial need-based grants and scholarships www.wwcmfa.org

JULY/ AUGUS T 2018 19

TWO POEMS
ALEXANDRINE VO
Surrogate
Drenched in the dampness from its mother,
its feathers were flat before softening.
It slipped through a fissure
where the hens had slept. We could hear its peeps
from where it had fallen. Alone
it stood, trembling before rejection.
Father gave it to me as a new pet and I welcomed it
into the private quiet of my days.
I cradled it in my arms, breathing dirt-scent,
smoothing spindrifts of plume.
I gave it a name. Watched it grow.
Watched it peck rice out of my palm
with that animal-knowing
that consumed without injury.
It would come running when I called to it, teaching me
love with inhuman allegiance.
Young friend, the wind conveys, even the best of our loves die.
Opening my ears to the dark,
now I listen for soft-pronged footfalls
on gravel. Call out to sounds of crackling twigs.
20
Forgetting
In late summer, by the cat’s-whisker flowers
that languidly unfurl,
when heat astounds the body with serrations that singe,
a drinking gourd lifts itself and water spools ravenously down.
Fall comes. Monsoons set in.
We study by candlelight, eat salted fish heads from cracked bowls,
longing for the copper trays of worship, a morsel more than this,
in my head that is filled with rain.
I was there once. And I am walking the length of my mind,
accounting. But who is there to inform me
of synaptic false connections,
and of the certainty of my psyche’s doomed neglects?
Alexandrine Vo’s poems have been published in England, Ireland, France, and the U.S., appear-
ing in Salamander, Poetry Ireland Review, Popshot Magazine, Painted Bride Quar-
terly, Bellevue Literary Review, CALYX, The Bitter Oleander, and Fjords Review,
among others.
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
OH NO
Because past the angel at the gate, oh can turn like
that, go under, straight into poetry.
Here’s the god’s honest: a moment of calm
recently came to me, so close to sleep it was sleep.
In my dream I saw a girl whose dark t-shirt read:
All is Failure. Except “failure” was misspelled—
part of the dream too—either “far-lure” or
“fear-lure.” The words still blur. But thank you,
whatever sent that.
Because now I accept far or fear as the real F
words, both part of lure and—most of all—that
F as failure, as in all is failure, a triumph. I hands-
down love that, everything made of failure, trig-
gered first by failure, seen in its light, built—at
least poetry often is—by one first failed turn
of phrase after another, stanza and more stan-
zas in a standing pool of white space until a seri-
ous full draft lies there flat. Failure as blank check
and ice floe into inner space. Is this what it is to
see clearly?
- it avoids a slide into self-pity, just barely. No poet
When Sylvia Plath wrote her poem “Poppies in
July” in the brilliant frightening throes of her last
year on the planet, it underwent surgery, a savag-
ing. An early stab at it meant four couplets, even-
tually the completed draft morphing to seven with
an ending one-liner for good measure, perhaps
really managed in a single day, July 20th, 1962. So
the date on the published version we know sug-
gests—and legend fixes to a stillness.
Here are the stats. What she kept of that poem
from the start: the couplet business, two questions,
four complete lines, present tense, first person, a
steady direct address to the poppies, the hesitant,
darkly wondering “if ” though it multiplied later.
What did not stay: an early draft’s stalling ellip-
sis mid-poem that wings pointedly of into outer
or inner space, and her laser focus on the pop-
pies only, the wish to hit and run (just 8 lines), her
leaving it right there.
But the poppies—didn’t they always seem pre-
dictable little creatures, at first diminutive, sweet
even, to be directly addressed as such? In sub-
sequent drafts they become “flames” that keep
“flickering” and later—abruptly—“Little bloody
skirts!” she in fact exclaims, marking this as a gen-
uine discovery, beyond observation. It’s a shock,
however whimsical this surreal metaphor might
seem for a second. Then more—“a mouth just
bloodied.” Her zoom-lens focus on the body is,
well, creepy because to circle the mouth is an
absence, a longing too raw to witness.
I do a little downhome research and turn on
my stove’s front burner and stare, its flame truly an
alien element. Plath was right, a most crazy flick-
ering, “wrinkly and clear red.” Welcoming? Mur-
derous? In the final version—the one printed in
Ariel—she hits bottom to thrill and refire: not just
“little flames” anymore but “little hell flames,” she
calls them. Her meticulous build of poem: min-
iature time machine of throb and survival. A
slow panic that—springs! It does spring. Inward.
Toward the end, two ifs (if only!) emerge. Those
passionate exclamations make the heart-stopping
6th couplet.
If I could bleed, or sleep!—
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
JULY/ AUGUS T 2018
MARIANNE BORUCH
But she hadn’t finished. Not yet. Something
close to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ecstatic dark
must have kept it going, a deep-ocean despair.
One follows back a keening, history’s first lament
even before there was history. If only the poppies’
“liqueurs” might “seep to me . . . / dulling and
stilling,” she adds, their dangerous non-color a
pure oblivion. Her actual ending incantation that
those liqueurs “seep to me”—I almost hear it as
“come to me”—is weirdly barbed and endearing.
Hypnotic. Hallucinatory.
Few poets nearing the edge of melodrama
resist this efectively the empty pleasure of its self-
indulgent warmth. So austere of Plath, and deeply
strange, to use the part and not the whole, her
vision made neutral by that, thus universal via
seemingly simple decisions, the choice of an article
for instance—“the skin of a mouth,” or “a mouth
just bloodied” and not—god forbid the posses-
sive—“my mouth.” Certainly the word “marry”
brings up a chilling biographical reference even as
was more of a genius with metaphor, such pitch-
perfect leap and transformation.
“I had a terror—since September,” Dickinson
wrote a century earlier, “—I could tell to none—
and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying
Ground—”
-
To go through the eye of a needle, to sew from
each end a coherent misery and revelation: others
have done such a thing. And some, like Plath,
abruptly and brutally stopped doing, not only
poetry but their lives with it. Yet surely those few
went as long as they did because that doing kept
them here. Until it didn’t.
Ask John Berryman who jumped to his end,
but before? It was no no no, hell no which really
meant yes. “I set up The Dream Songs as hostile
to every visible tendency in American and Eng-
lish poetry—in as far as the English have any
poetry nowadays.” His words—as he accepted the
National Book Award in 1969. “Long poems need
gall,” he added, “the outrageous, the intolerable—
and they need it again and again. The prospect of
ignominious failure must haunt them continually.”
Just so, wild beloved lines of Berryman in those
Dream Songs keep coming back.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now, I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me.
literature bores me, especially great literature. . . .
Etc, etc. Gall, yes. “Outrageous,” sure. Smart,
wily, sad/comic—but “intolerable”?
As for British poetry, in spite of Berryman’s
blithe dismissal, there’s recently rediscovered (and
republished by Bloodaxe) Rosemary Tonks who
walked away too, though not as suddenly as Plath
or Berryman. Tonks, growing silent, frail, nearly
blind, hearing voices of Satan, then—but only
through birdsong, she claimed—God himself.
She disappeared in the 70s and shuttered herself
apart from family and neighbors for years before
her death in 2014; it’s a private, largely disturbing
story. But the work! Chosen by Philip Larkin—no
stranger to darkness himself—for his 1973 Oxford
Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, her “Story
of a Hotel Room” begins
Thinking we were safe—insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom. . . .
More to this, of course. The dark, the “gloom” as
“we set about acquiring one another / Urgently!
But on a temporary basis / Only as guests—just
guests of one another’s senses” on this “bed of
cold, electric linen.”
Is there a happy ending? “To make love as
well as that is ruinous” is what the poet tells us
and “someone should have warned us,” she says,
because
. . . without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
—If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.
Threat lies here, in wait, as if she could hear
and see some huge meteorite speeding toward
Earth. As with Plath, this poet’s questions and
exclamations keep the voice human and grounded
in a lyric progression of place, evening, an inti-
macy, a not-quite regret. And there’s her brilliant
redefinition, sex as “the naked work” or a mat-
ter of “acquiring one another / Urgently! But on
a temporary basis / Only as guests. . . .” Never-
theless one can be “profoundly moved by it.” Her
subtle mix of decorum and nerve and abandon: no
wonder Larkin chose Tonks’ poem—Phillip Lar-
kin of “They fuck you up, your mum and dad /
They don’t mean to / but they do. . . .” Berryman,
back at that National Book Award ceremony,
added this insistence to his brief remarks: “It is no
good looking for models. We want anti-models.”
Which is to say, unlike engenders like, some discon-
nect deep enough to connect, regardless of risk.
Again and again, past the angel at that gate,
it’s back to the mythic garden in spite of its dan-
gers, a first forbidden bite, what for years I’ve
called “bummer lit,” what we must half-love, the
complexity, the pull toward something truly bad
has happened, is happening, will happen. Therefore
we write, therefore literature present and to come.
In this we resemble our lost betters—Dickinson,
Keats, Milton, and back to the first cave dweller
sick at heart over the loss of the one bloodthirsty
vandal buddy who was bearable, even treasured,
and so belted out the first elegy. Oh no. The ache
for a tangled gleaming thread. Add to the great
subjects of poetry (time, death, knowledge, love)
a human hopelessness, worlds at a loss, and our
perennial individual fuck-ups. And right from the
start the seductive failure of poetry, its slim-and-
none chance to solve anything at all.
Because like scientists, poets learn to follow this
by heart: whatever does not compute. Small eventu-
ally gets big, and big small enough for the page.
And always there’s the charm bracelet of only trou-
ble is interesting that Janet Burroway famously
forged for us, speaking of fiction, but it’s poetry’s
too. Failure, reasonably enough, never fails. Fail-
ure we do naturally, and do and redo and is done
to us. We’re experts at it.
-
Which is why I’ve become Coleridge’s obsessive
wedding guest, telling and retelling how I stopped
by my public library to send a quick email. Two
21
terminals down a dapper-looking young man
kept talking (through Skype, I suppose) to—
was it really the Pentagon? He said his full name,
politely asked that it be repeated before distinctly
reporting what he called sexual abuse via radia-
tion aimed from afar at his “private parts.” Would
those at the Pentagon find the culprit immediately?
He’d be grateful, he said. Where are you call-
ing from?—I imagined a voice at the other end
careful, long-sufering, asking this a second time.
Because he first gave stark “coordinates” via lat-
itude and longitude. Then again his request that
his words be repeated as if this were a sea-going
vessel far from shore, contact uncertain, possibly
shattered by wind and rain, all adrift in a random
earnest wash and moan. At my screen, my doing
e-whatever vanished. The truth is: all stopped in
me as I faked otherwise.
Poetry, or—what isn’t like this? The scary at-
odds just under the surface. Always a glimpse of
that.
I had no right to listen. My glued-to-it-anyway
set me up as an intimate of long standing, aware of
him, worried for him. And for those dealing with
his desperation in the badly paid, phone-answer-
ing lowest ranks of the Pentagon, feeling for them
too. How often are we stricken by how close
our own madness lies, our fears so easily ampli-
fied, gone surreal, overwhelming, toxic? Those
ten minutes abruptly ofered up a skewed looming
world. I kept at it: analogy, analogy, fortune, fate,
this guy, my own life, any of us, all of us.
Consider the many things (X times Z equals
thousands) with this same dire soundtrack, oh
no oh no oh no: a certain election and its appall-
-
ing aftermath that stalks us daily; what the doctor
might tell you by way of a strip of reckless lines
from the heart that reads like bad atonal music;
poem after poem aching to come through us; a
phone ringing and ringing and no, you don’t pick
it up.
In that library, its widening orbit of origin and
concern inevitable, I froze in my seat: aren’t we all
the saddest, richest most many-layered failed crea-
tures possible? My own Venn diagram of sanity
just barely crossing and containing my derailment,
I looked on, pretending to take in stride whatever
comes. No way around it, I was—am—a citizen of
this peculiar human race.
And poetry—everything to do with that.

Marianne Boruch is the author of numerous collections of poetry,

including Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016);
Cadaver, Speak (2014); The Book of Hours (2011), which
won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Grace, Fallen from
(2008); and Poems: New & Selected (2004).

T HE F ACULTY
Johannes Göransson
Joyelle McSweeney
Orlando Menes
Valerie Sayers
Roy Scranton

Notre Dame MFA Steve Tomasula

Azareen Van der
Vliet Oloomi
in creative writing R ECENT V ISITING
A UTHORS
• Full fellowship & tution Margaret Atwood
scholarship for every student Kate Bernheimer
Teju Cole
• Home to Notre Dame Review Lydia Davis
and Action Books Junot Díaz
Ross Gay
• Sparks Prize and Summer Michael Martone
Internships in NYC Alice Notley
Claudia Rankine
• Aesthetically diverse, George Saunders
internationally oriented Solmaz Sharif
Lynne Tillman
Creative Writing Program Natasha Trethewey
www.creativewriting.nd.edu
574.631.7526 Lidia Yuknavitch
creativewriting@nd.edu

22 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

THE SEA
A BATTERED
DREAM
FRANK SHERLOCK

Sky meets everything makes horizon liable these shoes aren’t conducive to lightness

for flight then plummets of grace Surrounded by people feeling nah There are those who were thrown of

there’s chatter I can’t make out half-listening to boats out there others sealed under the ground

the dead The voices are calling & it’s rare when They are not the deaths that do haunting

I am even half-ready Rain bangs I’ve named love the way I would

against forest to get attention back Let’s not a housebroke pet so it would only answer to me I knew

ask about presence & breathe absence in deep better but in the end it was me who gave up

There are no trees where we live but & simply obeyed the commands That happened

today we’re somewhere else Amphibians talk So not the type to care about idealized pasts but

syllable by syllable in the pitch of dark The sounds fuck what if some woman was the father of your country What if

w/ the inner ear until composed into someone else was the mother of mine What if

communiqués for worse or for better Wherever we didn’t need this at all & it was always just there It was

we are let’s find a coastline to skirt alone Some things Thankfully the crash of horrors

need to be said along a fluid border is interspersed w/ extended downtime

I stood still so long to protect Once it cracked sweet by our friend who wished a sports riot

existing ground but now the distance travelled would turn into general strike That didn’t happen

from your voice to mine is Back to the bells you like the way it

a space that cannot be ordered Not like it’s smooth makes me smile when you scream Out Demons Out

Me not interpreting your oppressor at the on-ramp for a bridge to an island

language in the way that you can’t process mine Tripped up w/ Now it is time for a swim Reptiles in water don’t struggle to

straight ahead statements betrayed by get each other Leatherbacks touch Loggerheads

loaded syntax there are so few clean springs meet in the sea Wherever we are

left when the best ideas have run dark red w/ slaughter will remain unnamed by refusing attempts to own

Heavy sure but forgetting to lift Crushes comrades gossip confidants float on

is a recipe for ghosts where the sky starts All we can really say is something like toward

There are already too many to talk to It’s hard

not to step on shadows from birds up there & Frank Sherlock is the author of Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated (Ixnay Press,
2014), The City Real & Imagined (w/ CA Conrad), Over Here (2009), and Ready-to-Eat
now I find I drink so much Individual (w/ Brett Evans, 2008).

since amethyst is gone So much loss but I like the way

you smile when you catch me ringing death knells

It took another city’s festival to make me at home enough to show

heartbreak Of course it is a place that isn’t a stranger to storms

(
This rising sign spells danger in glue & glitter Chart’s

been sent & god is it messy togetherness brief the forgetting

takes so long Let us keep going even if

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 23
TWO POEMS
KIMIKO HAHN
She Sells Seashells
considering the life of Mary Anning
If only I believed in charms
especially in regard to the dragonfly
and dragonfly nymph possessed by stone:
to make ends meet, Richard Anning
climbed a local clif with tools
to pry out spirals—snake stones—
he’d sell to neighbors convinced
of their healing powers.
***
Daughter Mary was named
after her departed sister
who’d tossed sawdust on the kitchen hearth,
inspiring flames to her bib
and burning her to bits. Me,
I was instructed to so fear a match
when the lesson came to strike one
I twisted, shrieked, and wept.
***
The verteberries, sea lilies, scuttle and
thunderstones had lodged in strata for millennia
above the English Channel. Above
my father’s rowboat
the sky relieved its torment
but for twenty years I knew no reason.
***
As the high-tide withdraws
a shell burrows down with its foot
and should that muck harden,
the razor, say, may petrify:
such demise is a little girl’s good luck.
***
When lightning struck a sheltering elm
babysitter and toddler were pronounced dead
until a congregant advised Mary’s parents
to set her limp body in a tub of warm water.
Once my little one spiked and seized
till plunged in a cool bath what seemed forever.
***
Miss-she-sells-seashells-on-the-seashore
found a flying-dragon
in the Lyme Regis clif near her home.
I found an egg dyed yellow and purple.
I found my mother’d died.
***
I found a piece of matzo beneath a tablecloth.
And I found my mother dead to which
24
a cousin asked, “What does that mean
to find someone dead? Lackluster? Uncaring?
Without a mirror for the little girl?”
***
Bleeding-tooth and pelican foot,
Venus comb murex, keyhole limpet—
I can imagine shells petrified into curios
and wish I’d dug out an Ammon’s horn.
But a hobby for one, for the Annings
bought bread, maybe mutton, maybe
The Dissenters’ Theological Magazine.
***
Mr. Anning fell from a clif
and sufered till he died. Mary’s dog
perished just feet from where she stood.
I wouldn’t want to puzzle over
the swirling coast that cost so much.
The Annings didn’t possess any such choice.
***
Mary’s a very clever funny Creature
said Dr. Featherstonhaugh as he purchased
the spine of a sea-beast she’d found. My aunt
told me that shells can be alive.
Some are left-handed, some right. Most
have a door and a foot and that is very funny.
***
King Frederick visited the seaside shop
to purchase an ichthyosaur—
the crocodile with flippers, the undulating fish lizard—
was it Joseph’s skull? Mary’s torso?
or was it complete?
Strange how the body is so
undependable except at the last moment.
***
Some shells have eyes. All have mouth and anus
employed to move along. I’ve watched
a sand-dollar drag its pattern in the silt
that made it simply found. Mary
chiseled out history—fossils
that gave a woman no purchase even in times of a Queen.
***
Some shells leap out of water!
Some leap of a boat’s deck
back into a more kindred habitat!
Mary bought her own house
so she could properly dust and polish
the so-called curiosities that evolved into
patriarchal—I mean paleontological import.
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
***
Not so odd that a soft fleshy creature
builds a stony home—
smooth, ribbed, warty, or spiny—
from a fold excreting particles of lime.
More strange is a creature of flesh
who can’t protect herself thus
regardless of cranium or cul-de-sac residence.
***
Some baby shells swim about,
others dig into mud flats
or latch onto random stone and stem.
When my own babies settled into silt
I had to rake them out
as my mother did, with indulgences.
***
Although the spiny, warty men
visited her seaside home,
bartered then took credit for her bones
when all was done and said again
Mary Anning made a name for herself,
even more stellar than a tongue-twister.
***
After the Alexander sank not far ofshore
Mary discovered a beautiful corpse on the beach,
pulled seaweed from her hair,
then covered her with flowers at St. Michael’s
every day until her name was known. Me,
I’ve not discovered a corpse
known or anonymous anywhere.
***
envoy
she-sells-seashells-on-the-seashore
bartered the so-called curios
some have eyes
most have a door and a foot
some baby shells swim about
below the coastal clif near her home
near bleeding-tooth and pelican foot
and their healing powers but
no one wants to puzzle over
an overhanging house or stony abode or
a charming
tongue-twister
without a mirror for the little girl
JULY/AUGUS T 2018
Regeneration
Scientists dote on planaria,
the champion of regeneration,
fi nding that one three-hundredths
of this worm can reproduce the whole.
But, a confounded researcher,
to determine how a worm
knows whether to make head or tail
based on a wound’s location,
cut as many as six side incisions
that then grew six heads
on the one poor creature. This
makes me unhappy
although I’m not a particular
fan of planaria. I mean, I agree
if a six-headed one can
advance knowledge
of, say, self-renewal—
swell. Still, I’m not sure
what’s so mysterious about
severing a tail end and
seeing the stump regrow said tail.
Of course it does.
Amputate my anguish and
the same site regenerates:
Mother was killed, yes.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Artist’s Daughter (2002),
The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), Toxic Flora (2010), and Brain Fever (2014).
Tyree Daye
River Hymns
River Hymns by Tyree
Daye, winner of the 2017
APR/Honickman First
Book Prize, is available
in APR’s online store at
www.aprweb.org and at
other outlets. River Hymns
was chosen by guest judge
Gabrielle Calvocoressi.
Tyree Daye is from Youngsville, North
Carolina. His poems have been published in
Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way
Review and Ploughshares. He was awarded the
Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The
Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award in the
Fall 2015 issue. He is a Cave Canem fellow.
25
SIX POEMS
SHARON OLDS
The Enchantment
When I said, to my mother, What was a good
thing about me as a child?, my mother’s
face seemed to unfurl from the center,
hibiscus in fast motion, the anthers
and flounces springing out with joy. Oh you were
enchanting, she breathed. What do you mean—
crazy? No sense of reality?
No-no, she laughed, with many little notes—
half a scale, plus grace notes—I don’t
know how to say it, you were just . . .
enchanting. Possessed?, I asked. Brain-damaged?
No, she smiled. There was something about you—
the way you looked at things. I thought I got it:
that stunned look on my face, in photos,
that dumbstruck look, gaze of someone
who doesn’t understand anything.
But a week later, I thought it had been
a look of wonder, it was bemused pleasure.
And days later, I see it—that light
on my mother’s face—she loved me. And today
I hear her, she did not say enchanted.
The woman in whose thrall I was
was in my thrall. I came into being
within her silks and masses, and after we are
gone would she caper here, my first
love, would she do me the honor of continued ensorcelling?
The New Knowing
What we had done, my ex and I,
for decades in our bed, didn’t feel like something
we did, but something passing into us,
through us—taking the shape of space
and time. And it seemed to be all one motion,
from before the beginning to after the end
of it, we stepped into the stream of it—
we eased in between the double jumpropes,
and helix-jumped, for unseeing joy,
and in service of what joy is in service of,
the brute continuance. I can’t
remember what it was like, after
he left, the coarse fur of the floor
against my cheek. And when, a year
later, I fell in love, in crush,
in paradise squeeze—I felt dumbstruck with amateur
luck. And yet, when I heard the new voice,
in the bed, I knew. When I heard the caressive
words, I knew—the generic names of
afection used, the bee’s word,
the sugar’s word, I knew his terms
of fondness were impersonal,
a traveller’s names for whatever town
he is passing through—once again,
I had stepped into a stream, this time
alone, into the river of a man’s life,
the waters where I’m called out of my name.
I heard it the first night, I knew
26
what I heard, I turned my green back
on my knowing, I labored with him for days,
weeks, months, a year, we made
not war, not love, but temporary
powerful sweet sorrow.
An Hour
Once a year, in the park, for an hour,
we met, and to see his face again—
the skin like a ceremonial sand garden,
known grains and new grains
raked, known and new lines
of thin and coarse tines, the rubble of
time stopped down—was to feel like a desert
dweller, in the desert, at night, looking up,
seeing the tiny pocks of impact,
the gravel and shrivel of the surface of the moon,
and feeling at exile home. We would chat.
I would waver on easier—It’s easier,
this time, to see you. But it was—the space
between us got a little firmer and firmer,
its air thicker, a barrier between us
like a mesh of spore in a petri dish; and as we
walked to where we would part, it was between us
like a low wall, which moved with us,
accompanying us. He said, sounding
surprised, that I looked good, and I said
that the part of me
that does not know
where he went, is always relieved to see him—
there he is! Alive! And then,
we would get to where we would part, and there’d be a
hug, like a child embracing a tree, and then
one went one way, one another,
one in sheer relief, one
in grieving relief.
When My Fear That I Won’t
When my fear that I won’t
slough of the fat
that I slabbed on, with my heavy boyfriend,
evaporates, I recall my body
from 16 to 64,
limbs shaped and lean as kitchen
utensil handles—spatula;
slotted scoop with six entries;
long-tailed spoon to sup with the devil—
and when I moved around, the lengthy
oak and cherry wands would make their
music like the drawer with the eggbeaters and the whisks in it.
To think, with the extra of, I am going to be
delicate again, sklendr in an elder’s
way, angled, planed—a thrill
thrills through me,
remembering those almost fifty
years of love’s making, without an
ounce of fat between muscle and bone,
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
having the pounce factor of a panther,
an once,
carrying the treasures of the breasts, the magi
punchbowls of the ass, the trove of the mound in
front, down there, which, in my dreams,
as a child, was pale green, and translucent, and luminous.
Let the Night
Four in the morning. Let the night
creatures walk—snow-footed ferret;
bobcat; shrew; mountain lion;
lynx; paw, claw, skin—
and let my mother walk, with them,
let her, come back, in, again,
for an hour. An hour is a long time.
Let her come back in for fifteen
minutes. A lot can happen in fifteen
minutes. Let my mother come back
for a silent run-through of Onward Christian
Soldiers, like the song in the back of her mind
she seemed to have been beating her daughter to.
And she enters, out the side of the coastal
mountain onto the bare porch, she is
five or so
inches tall,
and comes in with a hand resting, on either
side, on the shoulder of a long-haired rat. O
approach, feral queen, my thick glass
door is locked, I can see you through it,
greenish, pretty as a shepherdess,
a rat-herdess—don’t mind
that rushing above you, it’s just the great-horned
owl. And now there’s some shimmer before first
light, some shed petals of the day
to come. So if you’ve had enough,
for now, of lording it over creation,
may I suggest you go back where you came from—
back through the mattery door of lordation
and longing. For the dawn is at hand, the dawn is at
arm’s length. When my mom was in
a stroke trance, years before
she died, and did not know me, her mien was
cold, indiferent—profile
of the lingcod’s sister the electric eel.
But when she was on her death bed,
her face, in coma, glowed, its skin
shone with joy—it was the elements,
receiving themselves back again from her
borrowing, earth’s darling,
fire’s young, air’s child—the
little legions went from her then, on their
quiet nocturnal feet, breath after
breath, foxtail plume from her soprano
mouth, opossum breath, ringtail
mouth, pocket gopher breath,
until her whole creaturehood
had been returned to its originals, and I
saw her there, mortal as they come.
Anal Aria
When John Gardner said, to a crowd
of writers, “All writers are anal,”
I had never heard the word anal.
And I’d just heard there were women who preferred
to be “fucked in the ass,” and men who preferred,
JULY/AUGUS T 2018
in women, the ass. And I’d seen the beauty
of my father’s face, in make-up, when he’d cross-
dressed, the breasts especially fully expressed,
every Hallowed Eve. And I thought
Gardner might mean that the best writers
want to fuck, or be fucked, in the ass, and I worried about that.
The ass . . . When my kids had been two, or three, they would
watch their poop circle, and spiral
down, and they would wave goodbye.
And now that my apartment has a narrow-exit toilet,
I may stand and watch the drama, the level
of the pool sinking, the toilet paper
pulling apart into transparent wings in that pre-
Stygian greenish element, then
drawn into the tunnel down 17 stories to the
pipes under the streets where men stand up
with alligators, and keep political
prisoners, to rend information
out of them. If my mom had not beat me while I
clenched my butt as if to keep her out,
I might have liked the asshole more, I might
want to kiss it! I have been away
from sex so long I don’t remember much—
surely two people could kiss each other’s
ass at the same time. The great
bouquet of the body, its floral parts,
alveolar plate to anuz, A
to Z, conception to death, begin to make
a ring a rosy, pocket full a
posy, around me, until I all fall
down—nectar, nectar; ashes, ashes.
Sharon Olds teaches in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at NYU. Her next book is
called Arias.
Heather Tone
Likenesses
Likenesses by Heather
Tone, winner of the 2016
APR/Honickman First
Book Prize, is available
in APR’s online store at
www.aprweb.org and at
other outlets. Likenesses
was chosen by guest
judge Nick Flynn.
Heather Tone is the author of a chapbook,
Gestures (The Catenary Press). Her poetry has
appeared in The Boston Review, The Colorado Review,
Fence, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, she currently lives in Florida.
27
BERNARD / 1 Become a Friend
Dear Reader,
LEAH UMANSKY We are grateful for the support that you, a Friend of APR,
have shown the magazine. We hope you will join us again
now, in our 46th year, to keep The American Poetry Review
after Westworld
going strong during this diicult time for literature and all
* of the arts.
Ford tells Bernard, “creatures always go to extremes to protect themselves,” In 2017 we continued uninterrupted publication of APR
but the unraveling of the world is in the injustice of might and the muse of with six outstanding issues representing the work of 120 writ-
dreams damned. ers, including Terrance Hayes, Sasha Pimentel, Ada Limón,
Kaveh Akbar, Clint Smith, Marie Howe, Kazim Ali, Spencer
* Reece, and many others. We published the 20th volume in
the APR/Honickman First Book series: River Hymns by Tyree
Bernard believes he is doing the right thing. He protects and he loves, but his Daye, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and we awarded
is a story of lost innocence, of planting and carving, of garnishing, and of the the 8th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Ruth
imprisoning of a frayed tapestry. Lies and conceits. Madievsky.
We believe that our mission to reach a worldwide audience
* with the best contemporary poetry and prose, and to provide
His is a window into a life, is a bird I follow with my eye to a creek, that is authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which
not a creek, but a stream blackening, a butchered line of waste. to present their work is as important today as it was when we
began in 1972. The American Poetry Review remains a fully
* independent non-profit, and we currently receive less institu-
tional support than in the past due to the current polit ical cli-
Ford tries to comfort Bernard after his fall and I imagine the sprouting of his mate. Your individual contributions are more vital than ever.
not-heart. I imagine the gloss of his not-eyes. I even imagine the registry of the Your donation supports the publication of the magazine
program in the program of his mind. and enables us to pay our authors. We are grateful for dona-
tions of any amount. In thanks for your contribution this year,
* we are ofering books by the winning poets of the Shestack
What do we protect ourselves from, I wonder. Hate? Pain? Injustice? Prizes—Marie Howe’s Magdalene (W.W. Norton, hardcover,
$25.95) and Clint Smith’s Counting Descent (Write Bloody,
* paper, $15.00) along with The Body Electric: America’s Best
Poetry from The American Poetry Review, introduced by Harold
I want to protect Bernard from Ford. I want to sugar his hurt with cold, Bloom (W.W. Norton, paper, $22.50).
numb the stumbling truths inside him. When he learns his world is a
massacre of falsehoods, I want to show him that all worlds are. For $100 you receive one book
For $250 you receive two
We are always escaping. We are always running with cups half-full. For $500 you receive three
For $1,000 or more you receive all three,
We are always coming up between love and slaughter. signed by the authors.
Your friendship and support help poets and poetry thrive.
Our warmest thanks for your consideration and generosity.
Leah Umansky’s full-length collection The Barbarous Century is out now from Eyewear Pub-
lishing, UK. She is also the author of the dystopian-themed Straight Away the Emptied World
(Kattywompus Press, 2016). Elizabeth Scanlon, Editor

Mail to: The American Poetry Review, The University of the Arts,
320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313, Philadelphia, PA 19102-4901

Yes, I would like to be a Friend of APR. Enclosed is my donation of:

❏ $1,000 Benefactor (Select 3 books to be signed by the authors) Choose from:
❏ $500 Patron (Select 3 books) ❏ Magdalene by Marie Howe
❏ $250 Sponsor (Select 2 books) ❏ Counting Descent by Clint Smith
❏ $100 Supporter (Select 1 book) ❏ The Body Electric
❏ $ (other donation) ❏ Send no books
❏ Check Enclosed ❏ VISA ❏ MasterCard ❏ American Express

Card # Expiration

Signature

Name

Street

City State Zip

A copy of the oicial registration and financial information may be obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State by calling toll free, within Pennsylvania, 1-800-732-0999. Registra-
tion does not imply endorsement.

28 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

READING EKSTASIS
Tracking contradictions, sustaining incongruences
GALE MARIE THOMPSON
When I say ex-stasis, ekstasis, exstasy, ekstasy, ecstasy:
I don’t mean pleasure, bliss, passion, a blind
union with an otherworldly entity wherein I learn
some Truth. I don’t mean a total engrossment with
an object, or that I am beside myself: enraptured,
mesmerized until I can’t speak. I don’t mean Saint
Teresa; I don’t want her deep, white folds. But I
am reckoning and re-reckoning with what I don’t
know, with what I can’t know. I am attempting
alchemy, transference, to sublimate beyond a bor-
der of self—to be here and there at the same time.
In a sense, that is otherworldly.
- should be caught doing is thinking my experi-
Ecstasy comes from the Greek word ἔκστασις—
ekstasis—formed of the prefix ek (outside or be-
yond) and stasis (“standing,” “position,” sometimes
“static”). ἐκστα (eksta-) is the stem of the word
ἐξιστάναι, which means “to put out of place.”
Classical concepts of ekstasis were along the lines of
“madness” or “bewilderment,” and in late Greek
the definition of “withdrawal of the soul from the
body, mystic or prophetic trance” was added on.
The original lyric poems of Ancient Greece
historically involved ecstasy; the poems were
accompanied by music, and performed by a poet
whose voice comes partly from himself, partly
from a muse outside of himself. Even further, we
have the ancient ecstatic rituals from the mysti-
cal cult of Dionysus—a cult of female power, of
wine, and of liberation. At the heart of this rit-
ual is the trance—an encounter with otherness. In
this encounter, the self is displaced so that it occu-
pies two spaces, simultaneously. As Anne Carson
explains in an interview,
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they,
too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the
god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up
against something so other that it bounces you out of your-
self to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself;
there’s a connection to yourself as another [emphasis
mine]. It’s what they call ecstasy.
Ekstasis is not antistasis, the opposite posi-
tion. Ekstasis is not even on the spectrum of posi-
tion. It is outside position. It is the process of being
abstracted, channeled out. A stand-of. A radical
discontinuity. Standing outside of the body, look-
ing back from a vantage point exterior to it. Folk
tales tell of bodies staying put while the rest go on
a journey of ekstasis, giving us a sense of some-
thing akin to: Astral Projection? Bilocation? Autoscopic
hallucination?
One foot in the door, one foot out.
- ject,” although what I have to say is about the
I want for distraction, always. I cannot sit still. I
do countless things in order to not find myself sit-
ting still: working innumerable, often mindless,
paid and unpaid jobs; I “stick things out” far past
when I should, use the doggedness, the diiculty,
to make up for failures—to avoid risk, liabil-
ity, accountability. When traveling with friends, I
have to be reminded to do things like drink water,
go to the bathroom, sit down to rest, eat lunch. I
often have to ask those close to me what my pref-
erences are. Knowing what I want is impossible.
JULY/AUGUS T 2018
I am a thinker in dialogue; I still find it hard
to write to a paper that can’t answer back, ask me
questions, make myself think harder, push far-
ther, to say the thing. If I am alone, it is all too easy
to ignore what I think before it’s even thought,
to detach into silence. I am thinking of a profes-
sor who warned against students’ (over)use of the
I in our poems, thought it excessive, something to
grow out of. I understood it as a direct assessment
of how self-involved, how self-interested I was.
The last thing I wanted was for my poems to be a
litany of whines.
I had grown up believing that the last thing I
ences or ideas warranted “telling” about them.
Every I written beyond this point has been push-
ing against, or conceding to, this moment. What
happens when a poet forces away an action,
when there is self-consciousness without the self-
consciousness? Every poem loses, every poem a
stutter.
- so out from us there’s no vocabulary
There is a consequential and valuable diference
between the I of the poem and the I of a real per-
son behind it, the real person with the real body
who is either writing or reading the poem. There
is more to it than just saying the empty words I or
body. I want those two Is together. I want them to
rescue each other.
I also want to mind that “No ‘we’ should be
taken for granted when it comes to other people’s
pain” (Sontag). I want to mind that we is not the
plural of I:
Did anyone ever know who we were
if we means more than a handful?
(Adrienne Rich, “Contradictions”)
At the same time, the dialectics of inside and out-
side in our language have everything to do with
hierarchical, hegemonic meaning-making—iden-
tification depends on it; alienation depends on it.
We have self and other, subject and object, inte-
rior and exterior, conscious and unconscious. Gas-
ton Bachelard illustrates this as the “dialectic of
division,” through which language has developed
its own open and closed dialectics. Diference and
power have` been enlaced in our language, serving
to isolate us all and silence the marginalized.
This is an essay, then, about the gesture of
ekstasis as a vital touching. This is an essay about the
transformation inherent in the touching, its poten-
tiality. This is an essay of ekstasis as an opening up
to the world, as opposed to shutting it of. I don’t
want to be interested so much in an “ecstatic sub-
subject. My aim isn’t necessarily a call—for an
ecstatic form, or an ecstatic subject; rather, I want
to read the experience of ekstasis as an experience
of potential, as an experiment. I want to work
toward a form that can be transformative, that is,
to transmute the form in its untransformability.
This is an essay of tracking self and other, of
sustaining, holding on to what we track without
being tempted to define or consume: how can a
poet bridge the reality of the self with social, pub-
lic reality, when the tracking itself is a violence, is
codified in violence? How do you articulate pain
and experience, when language’s very existence
depends on the structures of power, where that
language serves to isolate and divide us—where “I
cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s lan-
guage” (Adrienne Rich)? How can you bridge
public and private pain when bodily experience,
pained experience, not only resists language but
refuses to be named?
This is not enough. Further, I want to ask: how
can we make visible the silences? Or absences:
since “silence can be a plan / rigorously exe-
cuted [. . .] has a history a form,” and we should
“not confuse it / with any kind of absence”(Rich)?
How does a poet mark and articulate diferences,
yes, but also: how do we make visible the same-
nesses? How do we communicate so that one line
doesn’t hide another line, one memory or death or
absence or experience doesn’t hide another? How
can a poet “break through this film of the abstract /with-
out wounding myself or you” (Rich)?
-
In Adrienne Rich’s “Hubble Photographs:
After Sappho,” moments of ekstasis are celestial,
out-of-time:
It should be the most desired sight of all
the person with whom you hope to live and die
walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
Should be yet I say there is something
more desirable: the ex-stasis of galaxies
but mathematics and optics
equations letting sight pierce through time (1–8)
She yokes together what is intimately up close
with what is infinitely far away—the cosmic and
the infinitesimal. The positionality of desire is
juxtaposed with this sustained communication
between the universal and self. Neither party is
violated in this encounter; neither party is really
subject nor object. The “impersonae” do not
look back, and the “we” can either “look at them
or don’t.”
Gaston Bachelard describes “Intimate Immen-
sity” as how the imagining, remembering con-
sciousness intimately, and internally, comprehends
a “world that bears the mark of infinity.” The
image being described (galaxies) has nothing to do
with physical description or geographical infor-
mation—in fact, they are described as being “so
out from us” that it cannot be described. “In
other words,” as Bachelard says, “since immense
is not an object, a phenomenology of immense
would refer us directly to our imagining con-
sciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we
should realize within ourselves the pure being
of pure imagination.” Even before we can imag-
ine something empirically, our imagination com-
prehends immensity, which therefore must come
from within. The image “accumulates its infinity
within its own boundaries.” Interestingly, Bache-
lard seems to describe all daydreaming as ekstasis:
“[daydreaming] always starts the same way, that
is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far
of, elsewhere in the space of elsewhere” (183–184).
“When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings,
that is, when it is not lodged in the houses of the
past, it is immense” (184). In other words, in order
to be thrown out of oneself, one must be thrown
in oneself.
-
Only in the reality of writing can we permit such
intensities of contradiction to exist: being here
and there at once, allowing a subject or object to
29
be intimately near, yet at the same time far away.
This is what a metaphor is—it holds a contradic-
tion in its hands, perpetually implying both dis-
tance and proximity: Anne Carson describes it
as “a shift of distance from far to near [. . .] [the
reader] sees their incongruence, then sees also a
new congruence, meanwhile continuing to rec-
ognize the previous incongruence through the
new congruence.” This sustained diference is
what we know of the “Image” as well—or at least
its definition vis-à-vis Imagism: “an intellectual
and emotional complex in an instant of time [. . .]
sense of freedom from time limits and space lim-
its.” A poem can be an event in itself that links
between self and Other.
Ekstasis can ofer this sustained diference.
In “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho,
Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell God,”
Anne Carson describes how, rather than a blind
trance, the writings of three female mystics—
the poet Sappho, Marguerite Porete, a medieval
Christian mystic, and 20th-century French mys-
tic Simone Weil—present the process of eksta-
sis as more of a self-unfolding, or a self-exposure
to the world. Weil calls this experience of cross-
ing the boundaries of the self—of moving the
Self aside in order to let God in—“decreation,”
or “an undoing of the creature in us.” All three
women describe this experience of the self moving
beyond its container—the boundary which sepa-
rates the self from the rest of the world, and makes
the very “self ” itself—as a love triangle of jeal-
ousy and desire. Sappho’s ecstatic experience in
Fragment 31 (“He seems to be equal to gods that
man”) occurs during a moment of jealous desire
for a woman (the “you”) speaking with an anony-
mous man. During this moment, Sappho’s physical
senses break down (“in eyes no sight and drum-
ming / fills ears,” yet she is still able to observe
herself from the outside, her Being (according to
Carson) “on a brightly lit stage.” “[G]reener than
grass / I am and dead—or almost / I seem to me,”
Sappho writes. In this event, Sappho has not left
the world, does not clear this stage—instead, we
see her standing outside her own body, recogniz-
ing herself as what is represented there—“I seem
to me,” she says. Sappho the subject, Sappho the
object. As Carson notes, she “leaves it unclear [. . .]
just how many people she imagines herself to be.”
The focus on jealousy in these experiences of
ecstasy, for Carson, emphasizes the splitting of the
Self in order to expose the Self to its own scrutiny;
it allows a forceful, transformational dialectics of
“here” and “not-here.” “It is a dance with a dia-
lectical nature,” she says:
For the jealous lover must balance two contradictory realities
within her heart: on the one hand, that of herself at the cen-
tre of her universe and in command of her own will, offer-
ing love to her beloved; on the other, that of herself off the
center of the universe and in despite of her own will, watch-
ing her beloved love someone else. Naked collision of these
two realities brings the lover to a sort of breakdown—as we
saw in Sappho’s poem—whose effect is to expose her very
Being to its own scrutiny and to dislodge it from the center
of itself. (“Decreation” 193)
For Weil, for example, this triangle included her-
self, God, and all of creation, in which she was a
third wheel (which explains Weil’s wishes to dis-
appear: “If only I knew how to disappear there
would be a perfect union of love between God
and the earth I tread, the sea I hear”). Marguerite
Porete’s “erotic triangle consist[s] of God, Mar-
guerite, and Marguerite” in which ecstasy is an
“annihilation” of the soul, leaving an “aperture”
to be filled with God.
As opposed to what we might imagine of a
more “negative,” interior, or “blind” traditional
30
mysticism, in all three experiences of mystical
ecstasy, the “inside” and “outside” of the self col-
lapse—can be both at once—so that the “decre-
ated” subject is all exteriority and can participate
most immediately with the world and with God:
“higher no one can go, deeper no one can go,
more naked no human can be,” Porete muses. The
exposure allows the Self to observe itself outside
of normal realms of subjectivity, to see itself as
Other. Yet, the real struggle comes when our mys-
tics want to “tell,” or write about this experience.
When the soul is displaced and leaves the Self—
according to the mystics—it is transmuted, and
has no contact with language. “In other words,”
Carson explains, “such a soul passes beyond the
place where she can tell what she knows. To tell is
a function of self.”
The underlying question in Carson’s explora-
tion, then, becomes what it means to be a writer
who wishes to decenter or displace herself from
her work, and yet who is also (and necessarily) a
Self. Because “to be a writer,” she says,
is to construct a big, loud, shiny center of self from which
the writing is given voice and any claim to be intent on
annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give
voice to writing must involve the writer in some important
acts of subterfuge or contradiction.
The three mystics approach this contradiction
by constructing “a kind of dream of distance in
which the self is displaced from the center of the
work and the teller disappears into the telling” (ital-
ics mine). This kind of paradox, a quick wrinkle
of disbelief, is allowed in writing—“A writer may
tell what is near and far at once.” Porete’s ecstasy,
for example, eliminates any concept of distance
between Self and Other, Self and God: “His Far-
ness is the more Near,” Porete imagines, this con-
tradiction of location leading her to her own
epithet for God: le Loingprés (in the Old French),
or “the FarNear.”
Carson concludes her essay by reading a
prayer by Sappho invoking God to arrive; Car-
son describes how the distance alluded to in this
kind of invocation is “decreated” as opposed to
destroyed. Sappho “will have to invoke a God
who arrives bringing her own absence with
her—a God whose Farness is the more Near. It is
an impossible motion possible only in writing.”
There is no journey here—the boundaries are
undone, and desire is eternally poised. The most
moving explanation of this sustained contradiction
of desire is Weil’s explanation that “Man’s great
aliction [. . .] is that looking and eating are two
diferent operations. Eternal beatitude is a state
where to look is to eat.” Weil creates an imaginary
dream of distance where the desire for consump-
tion and the consumption can exist at the same
time—where its Farness is more Near. Ever-pres-
ent, ever-fulfilling potential. Nathaniel Mackey,
in the preface to his Splay Anthem, calls up the
image of H.D.’s geese in Trilogy—“who still (they
say) hover / over the lost island, Atlantis / seeking
what we once knew”—in order to illustrate the
sustained, liminal force of his own serial form:
Provisional, ongoing, the serial poem moves forward and
backward both, repeatedly “back / at / some beginning,”
repeatedly circling or cycling back, doing so with such ada-
mance as to call forward and back into question and suggest
an eccentric step to the side—as though, driven to distrac-
tion by short-circuiting options, it can only be itself beside
itself. [. . .] H.D.’s crazed geese, circling above the spot that
was once Atlantis or the Hesperides or the Islands of the
Blest, come to mind, as do John Coltrane’s wheeling, spi-
raling runs as if around or in pursuit of some lost or last
note, lost or last amenity: a tangential, verging movement
out (outlantish). (xi–xii)
We may think of dancers, moving in and out of
synchronicity—pleasure arrives as they careen
out, arriving again as they wind back toward the
center, and then again as they fall back out. The
searched-for note is both “lost” and “last,” and so
the gestures are in pursuit but display a “dream of
distance,” and therefore a persistent defining and
redefining.
In order to “tell God,” the writer must open
herself to the telling, let its gravel scrape her. As
Carson puts it:
Decreation is an undoing of the creature in us—that crea-
ture enclosed in self and defined by self. But to undo self
one must move through self, to the very inside of its defini-
tion. We have nowhere else to start. This is the parchment
on which God writes his lessons, as Marguerite Porete says.
Ekstasis: to be pummeled, abstracted by the
unknown. To come back from ekstasis is to be
unable to speak about it: “So out from us there’s
no vocabulary.” The relations are quick and radi-
cal. The translation fails immediately.
But the Self becomes patterned by the world.
By exiting, the Self becomes scratched, marked,
incised. Grooved. It looks back at itself in scrutiny.
But in order to do so, it must understand the sur-
face edges of the self.
That patterning is then transformed into an
instrument of telling.
The patterning is the instrument.
Carson’s argument is, of course, more often
applied to meditations on translation, when the
writer is literally trying to “displace” the self, so
that the “teller disappears into the telling.” Yet, I
also see reflections of this love/desire triangle con-
structed in Adrienne Rich’s discussion of the rela-
tion of the I in her poems. For Rich, the I is in
dialogue both with the self and with the you, plac-
ing the self in continuity with the real world. In
“Blood, Bread, and Poetry” she describes the pro-
cess as “a kind of action, probing, burning, strip-
ping, placing itself in dialogue with others out
beyond the individual self.” I can’t help but imag-
ine this as an ekstasis of practical poetics. Perhaps,
then, we can have a Self in the continual process
of becoming.
-
Adrienne Rich’s “Planetarium” (1971) envisions
an earlier “ex-stasis” of galaxies which allows the
speaker moments of deep connection with the
lived experiences of others, corresponding with a
recognition and material embodiment of the self ’s
own subjectivity. The poem is dedicated to Caro-
line Herschel (1750–1848), “astronomer, sister of
William [William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus];
and others,” and begins with a woman, assumed
to be Herschel, observing and measuring the cos-
mos. The woman then moves from her position
by way of these instruments, “levitating into the
night sky / riding the polished lenses” up to “Gal-
axies of women, there / doing penance for impet-
uousness.” Herschel’s vision enacts an encounter
with the galaxies:
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
As the eye confronts the “NOVA,” the entity
erupts with light, sending it out in all directions,
while simultaneously “life flies out of ” the “us.”
The self leaves the confines of the body as a col-
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
lective of “us” (at this point transcending Her-
schel, the galaxies, and the speaker). The seeing
and the collapse of individuality occur simultane-
ously, giving way to transformation:
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
The speaker’s relationship to the language of
the self changes after this moment of ekstasis. The
ecstatic movement isn’t simply communing with
a divine spirit—the speaker here is crossing his-
torical thresholds, spatial, temporal thresholds,
and by doing so, becomes fully integrated with
her “I” by the end of the poem: “I am bombarded
yet I stand,” she declares. The final stanza exudes
urgency; the longer lines remain closer together,
still avoiding punctuation. The form becomes
the telling: the speaker becomes the instrument
of seeing/changing herself, to be the instrument
to experience the lives of others, to shape and be
shaped by the signals coming at her (previously
called “patterning,” for lack of a better word). The
regular intervals of a pulsar in outer space become
her heartbeat (dare we call this the “FarNear”?).
The self undergoes “a battery of signals” from the
universe—marked by the outside, but not extin-
guished. The “translation” from the pulsations
won’t ever be “perfect”—they are “untranslat-
able” by nature. It is enough just to be the instru-
ment. She is no longer “a woman in the shape of
a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman”;
she is “an instrument in the shape / of a woman.”
The power from the nova is the same as inside of
the “us,” and the “I,” and the “I” then becomes a
transmitter of this power.
- which is to “pluralize and specify.” (Barthes: “One must
What it comes down to is this: ekstasis is a pro-
found touching.
Not a shying away from the self, but allowing
the self to become patterned by others.
Where the Farness is the more Near.
- but the moment that we begin to abstract, make
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) is primar-
ily concerned with trying to articulate and “track”
that which refuses to be named. At its center is the
story of Nelson’s relationship with gender-fluid
artist Harry Dodge and the complexities of their
foray into queer family-making. Nelson explores
the restrictive ways we have approached expe-
riences of desire, motherhood, partnership, and
family, and how we can allow for broader defini-
tions, make space for fluctuation and fluidity. At
the same time, the transformation of something
fluid and alive into something abstracted is dan-
gerous. At one point, Nelson discusses the kind
of “sloppy praise” that might come from getting
“too juiced up about a concept like plurality or
multiplicity and start complimenting everything
as such.” This sloppiness is a kind of silence—
the other side of silence—of abstraction, allowing
similar experiences to eclipse the other. To com-
bat this tendency, Nelson explains to the reader
that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick thought a lot about
that which is more than one, and more than two, but less
than infinity. That finitude is important. It makes possible
the great mantra, the great invitation, of Sedgwick’s work,
pluralize, refine, continuously.”) This is an activity that
demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose
very rigor tips it into ardor.
These are relentless, liminal gestures of dis-
placement (and desire); we must make the outward
gestures to understand the experiences of others,
a definition, the moment we grasp for redemp-
tive closure, we’ve stepped far, far away from it.

The Editors of The American Poetry Review

and The Honickman Foundation
are happy to announce
2018
the winner of the APR/HONICKMAN
First Book Prize
Jacob Saenz
Throwing the Crown
The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an award of $3,000
and publication of a volume of poetry. Jacob Saenz’s Throwing
the Crown, with an introduction by Gregory Pardlo, will be
published in September 2018, with distribution by Copper
Canyon Press through Consortium.

The prize is made possible by the partnership between The

Safa Yalaz

Honickman Foundation and The American Poetry Review.

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 31
This perpetual accumulating and sieving give us
the same “sustained incongruence,” or “dream of
distance,” that Carson’s mystics were able to con-
struct in order to indicate the “FarNear”ness of
God. As she says, “a writer may tell what is near
and far at once.” At the same time, however,
Maggie Nelson reminds us that “that finitude
is important” in order to resist the other side of
silence. In other words, as Rich explains regarding
her “split” pronoun use, we can write “not as an
opportunity for literary voyeurism but as a drama
we ourselves are engaged in.”
The later, serial poems of Adrienne Rich often
take on this kind of drama as a way to “plural-
ize and specify,” articulating a network of relations
to the experiences of others. The form of these
poems tends to permit a kind of ekstasis by focus-
ing on the boundaries, limits, and margins of each
link in the sequence as the speaker moves from
subjective experience out to the cosmos, then to
another body—from inner, private pain out to a
more general public pain. Allowing the poem’s self
(and form) to split from its very plane in this par-
ticular way works to pluralize and specify, to call
attention to the limits of our experience, which
serves to strengthen our connections.
If the function of our meaning-making relies
on this patriarchal, hegemonic structure of inside/
outside, then what this form attempts to do is
not necessarily cross boundaries, but “decreate”
them—allow the self to be “both near and far at
once.” Rich shows this awareness best in her series
“Contradiction: Tracking Poems” (from Your
Native Land, Your Life, 1986). We live “in a world,
in which pain is meant to be gagged / uncured
un-grieved over,” and the question becomes how
“to connect, without hysteria, the pain / of any
one’s body with the pain of the body’s world.”
How can we be an instrument within these ges-
tures? How can we track those specifics of the
world outside ourselves “without hysteria,” yet
still communicate diference and conflict, across
boundaries, between bodies?
remember: the body’s pain and the pain on the streets
are not the same but you can learn
from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges
more than anything watch the edges that blur
Remember: “that finitude is important.”
In “Contradiction: Tracking Poems,” the
speaker addresses herself in order to share her
experience of pain, paying close attention to
the limitations of the body, the limitations of
communication:
Dear Adrienne,
I feel signified by pain
from my breastbone through my left shoulder down
through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain
I am typing this instead of writing by hand
because my wrist on the right side
blooms and rushes with pain
Rich details the significations with precision,
and by doing so bangs together both the I of the
poem as well as that of the writer: “I am typing
this instead of writing by hand.” I am in pain, which
is material, she says, and therefore my writing, my com-
munication with you, comes to you this way; writing is a
physical labor involving real, material instruments
which must be handled by a real, material body.
Much of Rich’s prose, including “Notes
Toward a Politics of Location” (1984) and Of
Woman Born (1976), is similarly devoted to resist-
ing the silence of abstraction and committing to
an embodied experience. In “Notes Toward a Pol-
itics of Location” she calls for women to resist
theoretical abstraction (perhaps she would call it
sloppy?) and urges her readers to locate themselves
32
more in the materiality of their lives and their
subject position. Grounding politics in the mate-
rial can bring us back to more personal account-
ability and responsibility. Similarly, in Of Woman
Born, Rich calls for women to reinvigorate lan-
guage with the physicalities of writing, with the
materials, in order to experience (and continue
to redefine) their relations to others. In “Perme-
able Membrane,” a later essay, she writes: “Poetic
imagination or intuition is never merely unto
itself, free-floating, or self-enclosed. It’s radi-
cal, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human
arrangements and relationships: How we are with
each other.” In this way, as we continue to “plu-
ralize and specify” our relationship(s) in the world,
we create a “network of intersecting identities
‘experienced simultaneously’”—a field of potenti-
ality when we “watch the edges that blur.”
- touching something profound. Ekstasis, anything
I want to imagine a series of vectors, each vector
resisting its own archival, pointing toward its own
unarchivability; I want to imagine a series where
each section acts out its own ekstasis on the page,
each transposed to a distinctly diferent plane.
Fragments, not of a bigger whole, but of them-
selves, with no outer or inner limits; they don’t
accumulate, they don’t add. They are One and
One and One and One. Here I am reminded of
Bhanu Kapil’s ruminations of hybridity in Ban en
Banlieue: “One thing next to another doesn’t mean
they touch,” she writes (13). And later:
“An organism that shares a membrane with other organisms
is a false indicator of hybrid forms,” I wrote afterwards,
laboriously, so as not to forget, in the lobby, waiting for my
ride. You can be a hybrid and not share a body with any-
thing else. Thus, the different parts of “Ban” do not touch.
They never touch at all.
- The Paris Review. No. 171, Fall 2004, www.
A series of insatiable vectors. Insatiable, meaning: a
gaping hole.
Each piece arrives and arrives and arrives.
- Poets and Critics on Poetry. Ed. Yopie Prins, Maeera
One thing is for certain: the act of ekstasis is one
that reaches toward a highest vulnerability. It is
an act of exposing oneself to its own scrutiny, an
act of self-making as well as self-othering—“more
naked no human can be,” Marguerite Porete has
told us. Ekstasis leads not simply to the cross-
ing of the boundaries between self and other, but
to the undoing of those boundaries; the question
of “inside” or “outside” no longer exists. These
Selves have been annihilated, pummeled, bombarded,
probed, stripped, and that is their instrument. Eksta-
sis can be a practice of creating a space where we
can be most fully in our selves in order to move
through that definition, to touch something pro-
found in someone else.
There is no poem if there is no one to read it—
if nothing echoes back. A poem is a vector, a call-
ing out, “is not about; it is out of and to” (Rich).
Paul Celan said that poems were no diferent than
handshakes—a ritual of ofering, asserting pres-
ence. The gesture, charged with the intensity of:
I am right here. Are you right there? Adrienne Rich
included lines from H.D.’s Trilogy (The Flowering of
the Rod) as the epigraph for The Dream of a Com-
mon Language:
I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity
The lines of a poem are the lines in the snow our
footsteps make as we walk toward the things we
love. What is written, drawn, made present, pat-
terned, is constructed from our moving toward.
Ekstasis is an incessant calibration, a dance of
becoming and becoming and becoming.
Ekstasis is also an act of displacement and desire,
an act that dances away from any attempts at clo-
sure. To encounter otherness in this way is to be
unable to “tell” the experience through any sort
of language. Our poets recognize this “untranslat-
ability” of the information received, but share the
intensity, that “dream of distance”—they know
we can only gesture toward this revelation. This
dream of distance is an experience of sustained
potential, a continued encounter that continues to
encounter. This dream of distance is, of course,
only a dream—a wrinkle of disbelief writers are
able to keep folded for just a little while. But if
we were to grasp for redemptive closure it would
be stepping further away from the truth, from
but nothing, is nothing but gesture. But being-
with is touching, touching is seeing, and seeing
is changing. Perhaps ekstasis isn’t losing your self,
but rather the release of your self ’s power to define
you. Identity is a field, a grid—fluid and circum-
stantial, and we must define and redefine (plural-
ize and specify, continuously) as a practice—of
ardor, of devotion.
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo
Press, 2015) and two chapbooks. She has received fellowships
from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nel-
son Center for the Arts. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish
Magazine.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994.
Carson, Anne. “The Art of Poetry No. 88.”
theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/
anne-carson-the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson.
———. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton: Prince-
ton UP, 1986.
———. “Sappho Shock.” Dwelling in Possibility: Women
Shreiber. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997, pp. 223–228.
Di Prima, Diane. “The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes
on H.D.” Ed. Ana Božičević. New York: The CUNY
Poetics Initiative, 2011.
Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.). Collected Poems, 1912–1944. Ed.
Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1986.
“Ecstasy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, Feb-
ruary 2017. Web. 19 February 2017.
Kapil, Bhanu. Ban en Banlieue. Lebanon, NH: Nightboat
Books, 2015.
Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. New York: New
Directions, 2006.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf
Press, 2015.
Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Poetry Mag-
azine. October 2015. Web. 19 February 2017, www.
poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/
detail/58900.
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose
1979–1985. New York: Norton, 1986.
———. “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.”
Collected Early Poems 1950–1970. New York: Norton,
1993, pp. 363–366.
———. “Cartographies of Silence.” Later Poems: Selected
and New 1971–2012. New York: Norton, 2013, pp.
40–44.
———. “Contradictions: Tracking Poems.” Later Poems:
Selected and New 1971–2012. New York: Norton, 2013,
pp. 164–179.
———. “Hubble Photographs: After Sappho.” Later
Poems: Selected and New 1971–2012. New York: Nor-
ton, 2013, pp. 426–427.
———. “Permeable Membrane.” A Human Eye: Essays on
Art in Society, 1997–2008. New York: Norton, 2009,
pp. 96–99.
———. “Planetarium.” Collected Early Poems 1950–1970.
New York: Norton, 1993, pp. 361–362.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
FOUR POEMS
MAGGIE SMITH

Junk Trees, lost its passage. And now?

Everything you own
the Bradford Pears, green-and-white globes of my girlhood
is new & the stinking hill
whose smell I’ve tried to name for years, settling on piss,
on the outskirts of town,
but walking by a row of them on my way to the grade school,
vented so it won’t blow, is full
I thought baking soda. Junk trees, those spring debutantes
of clothes & shoes & VCRs
stinking in their crinoline, begin snowing when the snow
& toasters, so many toasters:
is almost gone—only three more days of cold white once
avocado, harvest gold, ecru,
the forsythia opens its yellow stars, sign of not-quite.
black, stainless. One is mine.
False spring, too, is junk, not science. It serves us right
Turn it upside-down
for asking trees to tell us the time. Junk trees, why?
for burnt crumbs, even some
Because they’re frail? Because they’ll grow anywhere
from the twentieth century,
but not for long? Whatever we call them—bedwetters,
which until now I’d imagined
crooked drunks sick on themselves, even semen trees—
not broken & buried
they lined the aisles of my growing up, a row on either side
somewhere beneath us,
of our street, and threw their rotten white confetti,
but behind us, intact.
smelling of home. And when one failed to thrive,
the city came, dug it up, and planted in its place another.
The Village Dogs
Ohio Cento I have heard of places where
dogs leave their homes one by one
The sun comes up, and soon in the morning and meet up in the streets.
the you-know-what will hit the you-know-what. They lie together in the park, freckled
But this is what it means to have our life.
bellies warming in the sun, then leave
We need a break from this ruined country. for the butcher’s, for alley-scraps
Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over. of ham, chorizo, a bit of blood
sausage they needn’t even beg for.
What we know of ourselves
gets compressed, layered. Remembering The butcher carves with village dogs
is an anniversary; every minute, a commemoration in mind. They come daily for the salt
of cured meats. I wonder if they lap
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,
the savory sea air, too, the way
a strip of negatives.
the silver-bearded black Lab
Some days, I don’t even know how to be.
of my childhood licked the halo
I sink my feet past time in the Olentangy
of cigarette smoke from around
as if loneliness didn’t make us
my mother, as if to help us see her.
in some absurd blessing. —If there even is an us.
I have heard of places where
When are we most ourselves, and when the least?
dogs roam free—no dogcatchers,
Is it too late except to say too late and hear no meddling neighbors. I hesitate
the whole world take a rain check? to call their ritual togetherness family,
I worry it is.
but what is family? At sundown
the dogs come home one by one.
Planned Obsolescence Inside, they click across the tiles.
No one even needs to call them.
It used to be you’d buy a toaster
& if it broke, the fix-it man

would open it & redden Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017);
The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen
the coils for you. It used to be Press, 2005).
you’d darn a sock, wearing it
inside-out like a puppet

to close the hole, feeding

the needle through until light

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 33
FIVE POEMS
JUSTIN BOENING

What You Call a Thing tender fuck-scenes for you. I don’t like that.
You’re hurting me. Don’t stop. After all,
Without the advent who’s coming to worship me now
of Stockholm Syndrome, that all my worshipers have been institutionalized?
how could I have By which I mean, Go ahead. When I spy on me,
learned to love myself I find nothing worth noting. Yes, the roof leaks
from all the right spots. The wind, which was once
so much? I’m asking God
so popular with our parents, continues
and New York, can anyone
in the cul-de-sac to steal, to steal, to steal.
help me? (An all-but-audible
I get over it. I ignore it. Like anything else,
“or else.”) The captain’s chair: it replaces what I say with what I do. And then
it’s beginning to smell its song seems more real than its music.
a little too much like me. Again. And its episode seems more genuine
But there must be more than its season. Like the other day, a clear day,
I spotted my mother in our old front yard,
punishing consequences
slapping sprigs of lavender from my mouth.
imaginable, right? I noticed,
I keep telling myself life gets better
for example, you know
once it’s started.
the one, a boy prying his way
through the trash piles along the river,
looking a lot like the last time
Paradise When Almost Everyone
I saw you, but blind Lived in Paradise
instead of dead. (I dug Paradise never had enough chairs
my own grave; I used it and remained resistant
for someone else). And there it is: to installing traic lights at even
the most dangerous intersections
When all you know is the woods,
in Paradise. All about Paradise
every controlled burn is a forest fire.
there were women dressed up
Or it matters what you call a thing.
to look like our mothers, women
But not for very long.
who had spent their entire lives
on the streets of Paradise, never returning
Care Package to their families or friends, always
reminding us, without ever saying
I dredge my name out of the sand. What of it.
a word, who we could be in Paradise.
I jam my hands into my pockets.
For many years, Paradise was a set
When they catch me pacing in the waves,
for a TV game show called Paradise,
the mothers clutch their little ones close,
where contestants would be left alone
shield their eyes from whatever comes next.
in a white halogen-lit room
There are rules. I don’t touch myself
and told to wait for their cue
in public, not in private either. I wear many
before they walked onto the set
heavy layers—wool coats atop coats atop shirts.
of Paradise. Of course, many
I know the drill. I know what’s good for me.
of the most skilled contestants
At the theater, I sit in a seat
ignored their cue.
a few seats away from me, for my safety.
Inside every house in Paradise
You want me to have hope—I have hope,
was another, smaller house,
I just call it something else—a house, a hound,
one with fewer windows,
a payment plan. Doctors comb my skin
that felt more inviting
for cancer, they make numerous copies
than the houses we lived in in Paradise.
of my many IDs. They force me to recite
In Paradise, people talked about the war
the pledge of allegiance in cursive, en plein air.
as if it could end any day in Paradise.
Incroyable! It’s easy. I do it every day.
In Paradise, we were the most beautiful
I don’t ask who sent me this package. I accept it
people on the planet—we were alone.
so long as it’s free. When you say you need
And once, under a hunter’s moon,
a signature, I use the name of someone minor
that cast Paradise in a burnt
from the news. I mourn the death of what wilts
auburn glow, the municipal lake
in my refrigerator. I’m the dog that predicts
went white, like the milk we all loved
when the earthquake is coming. For your
to chug in the all-night diners in Paradise,
enjoyment, I would translate my suicide notes
and several older residents walked into it,
from cuneiform to emoticon, highlight the many

34 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

carrying one or two of their most
cherished bobbles from home—
a cob pipe, a hand-thrown mug,
a few bamboo spoons.
And though it didn’t happen all at once,
we came to learn, as the last of them
submerged, out of view, what we’d gotten
so right with our time in Paradise
and grew weak with the knowledge
we’d die from it.
Monkey
We were on one of our journeys.
We were somewhere.
The air was chiming five; the market
was sealing down
its spices, rolling up its rugs.
We were looking to buy
something that was alive,
something that had a beginning.
We wandered hungry into the old
bazaar, past the honey, cumin,
mastic gum, seed. We inspected
each stall until we stopped.
“What about a monkey?” I said,
pointing at a face pressed
between two bars.
“What about a monkey?”
you said, sliding some dried fruit
below his nose.
We were finished
making excuses for ourselves.
We bought the animal with what little
we had left, haggled deep
into the night, for the entertainment of it.
We took him in our hands, and our hands
felt lighter with him in them,
wrapped him in a wool scarf,
wondered how much warmth
he’d allow us to give him. I leveled him
with our eyes; you licked your hand
and untangled his tonsured head.
The monkey laughed, began to coo.
We knew he needed a name,
so we named him after the country
we’d never visit, after the forest
we’d never see again, after our most
admirable achievements, the mistakes
he reminded us of, we called him Monkey,
he didn’t answer at first.
“You’ll own this monkey
the rest of your life,” the merchant
promised us as he tied a twine bow
around Monkey’s scrawny neck.
“A monkey lives longer
than even our top scholars know.”
A fly landed on my forehead.
I tried to look into Monkey’s eyes
but could only look through them.
“We look so much alike,” I said,
“Is that normal?”
“No more alike than is usual
for a father and son,”
the merchant replied.
JULY/AUGUS T 2018
“Son?” I said, tickling Monkey’s belly,
rubbing my nose against his.
“I don’t have a son,” I said, hoping
no one heard me, hoping
you’d feed him while I was away.
The Box
Once, long ago,
though it could have been
yesterday, I spotted a box
bobbing (it was swaying)
in a nearby inlet. I threw a line
into the waters and fished it out
with a green green net.
Even sodden, wilting, it rattled
when I shook it. It seemed
important that it be opened,
which is to say I couldn’t open it;
it unfolded as if by itself.
I wanted to hold it
by my side, between my feet,
in the middle of the boat
(the boat was rocking),
but dropped it out of fear.
I was afraid to peer
inside, and yet I peered
inside. And in it, at the bottom
of it—I don’t remember
what was in it, but remember
it smelled of piss, fermented sugar,
and that the wind, when it swept
into it, whined and pulled
like an animal insane at the end
of his chain, which is to say
that what was in it now
seems beside the point,
but that it was there
or allowed itself
to be seen, or that it wasn’t
for me but was mine,
however briefly. I’d give it
to anyone who lives
to fight for the living.
But who can be sure who
the living are anymore.
Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last, a winner of the
2015 National Poetry Series, as well as Self-Portrait as Missing Person, which was awarded a
Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is the cofounding editor of Horse-
thief Books.
Moving? Miss an issue?
Please let us know.
Write ✦ Phone ✦ Fax ✦ Email
Mike Duffy
The American Poetry Review
The University of the Arts
320 S. Broad Street, Hamilton #313
Philadelphia, PA 19102-4901
TEL: 215-717-6803 FAX: 215-717-6805
EMAIL: duffym@aprweb.org
35
THREE POEMS
LYNN MELNICK

Too Jewish / shtetl kitsch but marriage outside the faith is a line
he will not cross. So fuck of with your agency,
Yes, I believe in generational trauma plus daughters!
that mix of pride and fear that 40+ years in patriarchy
What’s a put-upon milkman supposed to do
didn’t fix. I have a hard time saying no
but bring that fiddler to America
because you all are going to take it anyway to keep the girls in line and the tsar away.
but I didn’t come to monologue that. Synopsis:
Cue the orchestra. Cue the aging sound system.
I am worried all the time because of the tsar.
Holler “tradition” at me one more time,
Synopsis: I want to talk about my childhood I dare you. Holler “tradition” at me one more time
love of Fiddler on the Roof. Sounds crazy, no?
and my rage will swallow all of America
But I didn’t come here to choreograph how once
and every last actor hamming up my damage
I was so lost I couldn’t leave the apartment to prove some folksy point about conformity
and there was food trash on the floor
while the remains of us happen
and mice were enjoying the bufet
between blessing and bruising
and I wanted to die but didn’t have the energy. as we swallow pills
Think about how our whole cast of characters
to make the inveterate fear dissolve, deliver
would have thrived with some Zoloft to swallow.
salvation to the craggy split
I pray to those pills most days; I’m gravely devout. of the vinyl reminder. Revival:
I’ve got a shawl around my head
I am not trying to make a larger point
made of chemistry and pluck. Act 1:
as I have been too busy
The Constable has sympathy for the Jews, sure, trying to keep panic down
but is powerless to prevent the violence.
and men out of range of this
Who wants front row seats?
umpteenth curtain call to triumphantly bang out
Don’t you love that part where Tevye gets hammered what that point might be.
and trades his daughter to a butcher?
The Russian dancing is great. L’chaim!
American Value Inn
I know every word of every song.
This route has tolls, predicts a sign
I listened to that boxed set of albums
on I-80. I tell him dirty stories
so many times the needle skipped
and almost run us of the road.
at the wedding ballad but it didn’t matter
We pull into a rest stop to take care of him.
because eventually I snapped
It is never enough.
both records in two. Sunrise, sunset.
We pull into a diner parking lot and he wants more.
Love, is what I’m saying. Obsession.
I have to be invisible, inconspicuous
Ok, well, like with everything,
soft suction out of nowhere.
I was in it for the sex.
Years later he’ll track me down
Musical number: superstition turns me way on
to New York City using sorcery and wit
but mostly I wanted to run away
and he’ll storm into the oice
with the Marxist supporting character
where I’ll answer phones all day
because, like for all of us cozy
with my flawed mouth. I digress.
American Jews, changing the world
When we get to a motel
makes me wet. But I have to tell you,
he goes to piss while I take of everything
I don’t think I’ve ever had a Jewish cock
and lie face up across the bed
in my pussy unless you count the guy
even though history tells me what the spread
whose wrong parent was Jewish.
will feel like against my skin.
This is extraordinary math.
I stare at the wood paneling glued unevenly,
All those women deciding their own fate
at the peek of of-white wall underneath
despite the master of the house making side deals
which forms shapes I turn
with Cossacks and yentas? The lights dim.
into visions, like clouds, like prophecy.
Quiet, please, in the back, we’ve arrived at
He appears
Act 2: Tevye reaches deep into his soul,
around the corner, rote for a moment.

36 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

He is often cruel. He is often tender.
He flies at me because he is a bat after dark
with his fangs and we are so far

from lights that I forget myself

how precarious my durability.
He lifts me on top of him and I am at it again.

I cum. A lot. I digress.

My body knows what it’s doing
but will never accept why.

The Only Jew at the

Mock Jewish Wedding
My friend’s missing father came from Mexico
but her mom wouldn’t admit it. Sometimes she insisted Greece
sometimes Italy. Eventually we found proof in a Ziploc of documents.

We also found a stash of pills and money.

We took our giddy selves to the McDonald’s on Wilshire near Fairfax
and I ordered the first traif I ever ate. It felt less momentous

than I had expected. At the mock Jewish weddings they serve pig.
It’s hard to tell if it’s meant to taunt or just that in Radzanow
there are animals one expects to consume.

My maternal ancestors told people they were from Vienna

but they were not. They were from peasant Poland.
The dictionary defines shtetl with “(formerly)” but we’ve never

left. I once broke into a ballroom at the Plaza

and all I could think to do was put my boots up on a settee.
Most fetish bores me but I suppose it’s a comfort

to burlesque the joy of what you murdered.

Who are we trying to trick here? I mean this to be answered.
How are we diferent? This too. There is so much bacon in the world.

We came to this country to pioneer having it all! And then

we romanticized those who had nothing. In Ukraine,
where Melnicks originate, figurines of Jews are sold as good luck charms.

I’m hanging on inside my own pocket. I dare you to watch me

parade my costume here. I am not dust underneath. If there is no Torah
in the synagogue, I am still proof it is a building.

Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017)
and If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), both with YesYes Books, and the co-editor of Please
Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015).

LE T T ERS TO TH E EDITOR

APR welcomes comments, criticism, and dialogue in response

to work in the magazine. Authors of poems, essays, and other
work will be given an oppor tunity to respond to letters sched-
uled for publication.

Letters should be sent to: Letters to the Editor, The American

Poetry Review, The University of the Arts, Hamilton #313,
320 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102-4901.

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 37
TWO POEMS
DITTA BARON HOEBER

reading
I

reading what I write aloud is like speaking to you.

words sung into the air. me. wrapped in the listening silence.

II

it helps that winter is over

III

at this distance I can see that you were as bound by your own periphery as I.

caught inside that skin which is history unable to tear through lest you would bleed. empty out. lose
all shape all structure.

lose yourself.

there are moments, of course, but not for you and me.

IV

you fade. taking yourself out of the action. I see you quietly slip around the corner
into your own life even if with a little sadness

the ice cream truck plays its tune over and over and I can’t think. I miss you unbearably. I miss myself
unbearably.

but I will be able to work myself right again. surely.

VI

perhaps if I make a painting of you

touch you with each mark of the brush
it will be enough

Three Deaths
THIRD
black suits white shirts

men carry my heavy uncle

in his expensive box

my last uncle

and laughter
in his honor

SECOND
I kiss his forehead
his forehead like my father’s forehead that I kissed
warm
it greets my lips

FIRST
she
squeezed my hand hard held it whispered
come back very soon

Artist and poet Ditta Baron Hoeber has had solo exhibitions at The Print Center, Philadelphia;
the Philadelphia Art Alliance; the Abington Arts Center; and the University of Houston Clear Lake.

38 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

GRANDEUR OF THE
UNIMPORTANT
Books
The reasons a contemporary American poet might
consider writing political poetry these days are too
many to name. I would include the government’s
attempt to silence dissent in the media, in the Jus-
tice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA,
even members of Congress; to attack the research
and consensus of scientists and science; to dismiss
manipulation of our democracy as “nonsensical”;
to question the integrity of judges and elected oi-
cials; to attempt to take away health care from
millions of Americans, especially the vulnerable,
poor, women, children, and the elderly; as well
as to alienate, discriminate against, and deport
immigrants, while banning Muslims from coming
to this country.
American poets might address festering issues
that predate the current political situation, writing
toward issues like economic dislocation for work-
ing-age, non-college-educated people, a min-
imum wage that hasn’t kept up with inflation,
too-easy access to guns, the growth of mass incar-
ceration and along with that the old heritage of
slavery, segregation, and the continuing reality of
widespread racism.
“It is exhilarating to be alive in a time of awak-
ening consciousness; it can also be confusing, dis-
orienting, and painful,” Adrienne Rich once
wrote. I’ve been thinking about that sentiment
lately, and it’s led me to give a lot of thought to a
quieter path for poets. I believe a greater threat to
autocratic regimes is the writer who focuses on the
inner life. Why? Because, as Václav Havel reminds
us, authoritarians know that a citizen who thinks
for themselves is the greatest threat to their hold
on power. Perhaps now is the time for poets to
seek simple, private, intimate discoveries, to focus
on the viscera of the human condition. Perhaps
now is the time to tend to what is dynamic within
the human spirit so that a new day of healing can
begin. Perhaps now is the time to be a poet of
human emotions, a subject relevant to seven bil-
lion human beings on the planet.
And so the question is, does the world need
more books of poems about the impressionis-
tic fires of love? If you read what’s in high fashion
in American poetry today—poetry as a frontline
defense against racial and political aggression—the
answer might be no. And yet.
LI-YOUNG LEE, THE UNDRESSING,
NORTON
Li-Young Lee’s poems have always had the laid-
back pace of the sensualist, if not the novelist. His
new book, The Undressing, tells an important story
about human nature. The closer he looks at the
human body and the human psyche, the warmer
the world becomes. For a sensualist like Lee, the
flesh and blood of the body are an enigma. Con-
spicuous and unseeable, the body bales and
befogs, rattles and embarrasses—all in (mostly)
plain sight. Such as in the opening lines of the
book, in the title poem—
Listen,
she says.
JULY/AUGUS T 2018
DAVID BIESPIEL
I’m listening, I answer
and kiss her chin.
Obviously, you’re not, she says.
I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.
I can do more than one thing at a time,
I tell her. Trust me.
I kiss her cheeks.
All of us experience the history and the soul
and the physical aches and pleasures of the body
palpably. Lee is interested in that, but he also is
interested in showing the body as the stuf of illu-
sion, suggesting the journey into our daily, sensual
immersions holds the key to a great many spiritual
clarities. Perhaps that’s why Lee’s poems feel like
they keep coming to a never-ending longing—
Watching my quarry tumble down the sky,
I began to long
to be born, to become
one of the heirs to the sorrows
of hunger, the rites of slaughter,
and the several names of desire and death.
. . . the more I yearned
for a new reckoning of fire and clay,
a new ratio of body and song,
just proportions of world and cry.
Although writing like this—so abstract about
existence’s existences, you might say—can blow
one’s mind, the book also has a way of becoming
predictable. You come to anticipate that, in Lee’s
poems, experience leads to sorrow or to desire.
A turn of the head is a rite of passage. A name is
a reminder of birth or death. A tree is a ghost, a
sign, a secret. This strikes me as knowledgeable,
perhaps a ruse, but also tenderly optimistic. Who
doesn’t need that?
Lee’s poetry is the farthest thing I can think
of from avant-garde. Therefore it’s always won-
derfully out of fashion. The poems emerge with
their simplicity and complexity intact. In a word,
they are heartfelt, without condescension. It’s the
triumph of sincerity over authenticity. Even the
inclusion of an ecumenical God suggests the poet
is a raconteur of astonishment—
Exhausted,
God slips me unfinished
under God’s pillow.
I steep as long as God sleeps.
And Time is a black butterfly, pinned
while someone searches for its name in a book.
It may be an imprecise thing to say, but I come
away from reading lines like these thinking that
Lee’s elegance transports us into the aspirations of
yearning. Saturates us with it. And perhaps some
readers will find this absorption of his to be child-
like, unworldly, arguing that everybody knows
that it’s the role of the poet in these times to fight,
to write something like, What do we want? /
Political Poetry! / When do we want it? / Now!
But a poem that’s only a partisan argument—
worse a slogan, worse yet, propaganda—is not a
poetic experience. Nor is it convincing as a politi-
cal one.
I suspect audiences will have no trouble relat-
ing to Lee’s poems as a respite from the vernacular
of the poetry of violence. What I find is that Lee
is at his most convincing when he unravels the
voluptuousness of experience so that he’s left with
pure physical sensation. In those poems, as when
he writes of grief and his mother, the body is more
than a symbol of all that is mystical and eternal—
Both of us will have to wait
until we’re each alone to weep.
The mysterious gives way, boundlessness is bor-
dered by the perimeters of human need, and the
tears are going to have to fall as tears, at least.
The suggestive is just that, so long as it remains
uninsistent. It’s the poem not the premise that
counts, so that the voyage of experience remains
mysterious.
TARFIA FAIZULLAH, REGISTERS OF
ILLUMINATED VILLAGES, GRAYWOLF
Tarfia Faizullah’s Registers of Illuminated Villages is
a book about reversals. Reluctant, asperous, har-
rowing reversals. It is also, as the title suggests,
about validation, about the stubborn holler—Walt
Whitman’s word is yawp—against prejudice and
massacre. Whether set in Northern Iraq, Bangla-
desh, California, West Texas, or elsewhere, the
poems enshrine outrage, and they loop in voices
of those whose lives are impeded by violence. Fai-
zullah is a poet of historical imagination who
is, if not disquieted, alarmed by the forces of an
immoral contemporary world.
In Faizullah’s hands the world is divided
between the righteous and the wicked, and they
are coiled together by destiny and horror with a
knot that causes raw wounds—
I know
his hand
is not pressed
anymore against
my breastplate
trying to pull me open
when I curl into
a swan.
You’ll thank me
later, he’d smile.
What you notice first of all are the ways a swamp
of violence inhabits all the people in these poems.
Or is indiferent to them. Something elemental is
meant to be ofered at least, and you see it in lines
like these—
i swear, not all of us die at war
or in accidents
And here—
Forget the shaking and raving man
I still see, for years now. Forget his voice
burning past me. Bitch, I need you,
bitch, I need, I need, he moans,
and I know it’s not me he wants, but
the night is a varnished peeling wall
against which I, too, want again to be
roughly pressed.
These passages are gaming for psychological
nuance, even as they animate a sprawling atten-
tiveness to authenticity.
The book ping-pongs between poems of com-
munal tragedy and moral gravity, on the one
hand, and poems, on the other hand, mostly in the
second half of the book, of unremarkable nostalgia
39
structured like voice-overs. The former manages
outrage with confusion; the latter sags with cer-
tainty. Forget the latter. There’s much to admire
in the first half of the book that reveals the insid-
ious faces of bigotry, starvation, and violence: the
“begging body” or the taunting holler, “Go back to
your own country!” Faizullah’s subject is the poison
of colonial culture, a history of plunder, and the
heritage of human dignity in the face of assault.
The failures of the dominant culture are miti-
gated by
the silken emancipation
of a handkerchief
from the mystery of your grandfather’s
pocket, the handful
of invisible everything—
you tell your love it is okay to feel
This insistence on behaving like a human being—
like a mother so world-weary she “was used
to drinking smoke”—is the kind of image that
stays with you. Sizzling danger is brought up by
decency and by ordinary tenderness that exposes a
condition in which cruelty is routine and injustice
seems inexorable.
ANGE MLINKO,
DISTANT MANDATE, FSG
Ange Mlinko is a poet clearly fluent in literary
conventions. If you’re wondering, I mean that as
praise. Her restraint is laudable. Many poets of
Mlinko’s generation aspire to a fresh appliqué of
indirect speech, a smash-up informed by the In-
ternet and pop music with the politics of Jill Stein.
It’s hard for us, knowing as we do of the extraor-
dinary versatility of American poetry over the
last twenty-five years, to appreciate enthusiasm
for a poetic method so immemorial as rhyme
and meter.
It’s hard for us, knowing as we do of the extraordinary versatility of
American poetry over the last twenty-five years, to appreciate enthusiasm
for a poetic method so immemorial as rhyme and meter.
Mlinko’s latest book, Distant Mandate, tran-
scends those functional elements. Her subject is
the hide-and-seek of life and art. Schooled in
myth, tormented perhaps, Mlinko writes as if lit-
erary allusions could never mysteriously vanish
from her imagination. Instead, they are enlisted to
investigate everyday experience, including some-
thing genteel like a weekend getaway. Here you
find, from Padre Island to Cyprus: roadsides, sub-
urban enclaves, garden nooks, oil patches, beach
towns, headlands, tulip fields, listening posts,
shuttered villas, the Acropolis, train station stop-
overs, and old Confederate stomping grounds
(this last locale rendered through a sequence of
villanelles). Each item is connected by a mind
sparkling in the literary past—
We could eat grapes half the morning like Goethe
hunkered against an obelisk,
waiting on the proper angle for the seas
to see the Sistine sun-kissed
Too, a mild grievousness permeates this book,
as if Mlinko’s interests in poetry were to ren-
ovate what’s decrepit about life with stunning
embroidery—
Like Benedict and Beatrice, I thought—
as we went around the garden
trying, with words, a precarious knot
40
Or something literarily supernatural, like the fol-
lowing lines as mission statement for the book—
Nothing is an accident in love or literature.
I came to the library for The Aspern Papers.
Not on the shelf. Not to be deterred,
I read ‘Waiting for the Barbarians.’ It appears
in retrospect that this was actually the apter
choice . . .
I found myself wondering if these allusions
were akin to faded photographs, or like specters
from a well-stocked bookshelf, or like recently lis-
tened-to Spotify playlists. Such poetic clippings
emerge as if filtered through binocular vision,
revealing a rich Western Civ preoccupation. I kept
wondering, what’s behind the mood music? What
I experienced is that Mlinko’s M.O. is something
much more than finding literature imagined into
life. What’s behind it, I’ve decided, is a haunting,
like in a fable, where “everything is broken by the
tides.” It’s poetry as vigil. Something, or someone,
has gone away. You feel it in poem after poem. Or
might go away soon enough. And the loss is with-
stood by connecting what’s at hand:
Haze
mère or fille; people-pleaser, cocktease,
she-bear, in niqab, in getup, in stays;
having taken Saint Paul’s advice to seize
the gold ring: Who groks to the paradox?
Though one would sooner burn than freeze . . .
In the end the feverishness breaks in favor of for-
mal restoration, an appetite for coherence over
rapture, like the geometry of an invisible order.
I bring it up because, in contrast to the Fai-
zullah book, which devotes so much energy to
human conflicts, Mlinko’s interests—even when
the iconography becomes stif—are in not distin-
guishing the diference between the present and
the past, the real and the imagined. If you’ve ever
read a novel and come to think, “Hey, those char-
acters are alive, same as you and me,” you know
what she’s after. Time, in these poems—time,
experience, anecdote, the literary-layered word-
puzzle—is ofered as a consecration. Life may be
bric-a-brac, but literature is exalting.
DAVID BAKER,
SCAVENGER LOOP, NORTON
One of David Baker’s central images in Scavenger
Loop is the poetic equivalent of a manifest for con-
temporary life lived among everyday things—
—broken shutters, musty box
springs, two ancient-at-
eight-years-old laser printers
and all manner of lawnmowers, power tools, hand
tools, shredded planters, to name only a bit
of the stuff
crammed in my barn
We experience such castofs not just as formal,
neo-pastoral utensils and gizmos but as testimony
of an American style: headlong, spectral, common-
place, even imbued with the grandeur of the unim-
portant. The spirit is dolorous, though not fraught.
Scavenger Loop is an achievement of arti-
fice mixed with candor. A shorthand take would
have you notice this book’s overviews and fore-
grounds in the rich landscapes of the lyric and
the elegy that predominate, populated by swifts,
cats, rain, moths, ash, weeds, beetles, fawn, wind-
mills, bee pollen, a pair of doves, and so on. But
those romantic imprints are put in heroic contrast
to new, contemporary spatial dimensions: engine
velocity, suicide bombers, Twitter, Facebook, pro-
pane tanks, Ken dolls, CRV, OMG, DraughtGard,
Roundup, Agrigold, Archer Daniels Midland,
genetic modifications. Holding it together are
Baker’s passionate testimonials and ambition for
moral transparency. The conditions for his poems
are not entirely identical, but they do loop around
each other. Sometimes they are in response to a
predisposition, like a figure of speech, and the
result might be a series of odes. Other times they
are constructed out of the nature of things, such as
heavy shadows or floods, windows or bells, anni-
versaries, even heaven—
the cicadas keep up their own dry rain,
passing on high from limb to limb.
I don’t know what has shocked me more,
that you are gone, that I am still here,
that there is music after the end.
That’s the kind of passage that fastens itself to
the splendor of the familiar order of the lyric—
start with a stimulus, add emotional complexity
giving rise to metaphor, resolve the metaphor. It’s
harder than it looks. It’s what Baker hails as—
Immensity of song—to be so small
that throat—
that singer wren on a red
tree—
amid the wicks of wet fruit
Above all, there’s something gleeful in the way
he defends the lyric. Its limitations aren’t seen as
vacancies, but filaments to inhabit like a bright
surface of containment—
“Join us as several guest poets read from
and display their latest or landmark e-
erasures” Which means: take Dickinson, rub
some letters out, you can be famous, too.
Because I could not stop for Death—make that
Be a cold sop. I stood at—. You get the
picture. Sappho: without time’s injury.
It’s fair to say, I think, that Baker’s undisguised
argument is for the sincerity of writing, and it’s
something that a poet—in the glowing light of
the imagination, of “time’s injury”—fashions and
sculpts, chisels and trims, so that everything not
foregrounded shrinks away. It’s not the authentic
that’s supreme. It’s the artifice. Put another way,
his structural arrangements and correlated fig-
ures organize his thinking. Poems flatten then rise
up to meet other poems so that in the end experi-
ence is—
like a bruise smeared through the wet few uppermost leaves.
Not yet light so much as less dark.
This is poetry of textures and stitches, made to
cinch the inefable lowdown of the natural world
shivering before us. The world may be warped. Its
halftones may be creased. But it is not formless.
Nor will it resist a poet’s momentary buing.
DAVID ST. JOHN,
THE LAST TROUBADOUR:
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, ECCO
One thinks of David St. John, whose The Last
Troubadour: New and Selected Poems was published
last year, as quintessentially a confessionalist. Yet
his poems are tied, like a ribbon, to an expression-
ism most confessionalists avoid.
THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W
 By expressionism I mean a yearning for a higher plain of existence. Life is beauty and life is hell—the locus of confessionalism. People merge
Think, mystical. Think, escape from experience. To St. John, poetry is together, lovers, friends, strangers. And then the distances between them
meant to transcend immediate, raw, vulgar, political experience. Not that grow. In order to write about it, St. John has developed a repertory of tac-
he trucks in fairy tale, but the mood he has held to since 1976 when he tics to interpret love: something happened, and then something happened
published his first book, Hush, is a deeply felt route out of the grotesque underneath that too. No longer imprisoned by time, freed inside the lyric,
into the splendid— one surpasses the other.
St. John’s sense of being in pursuit of, I guess I’d call it, psychic relo-
As I bend
cation is consistent throughout his career. Meridians are approached and
Close above the iris, I see the train crossed. Songs are sung without forgiveness received. Patience shifts from
hard to noble. A slow dance becomes a lost reflection. These transcendent
Drive deep into the damp heart of its stem, & the gravel
experiences are pleated, explicit, butting against the edges of perception—
Of the garden path
The nothing you know is as immaculate a knowing
Cracks under my feet as I walk this long corridor
as any moment going from a distance into dawn
Of elms, arched
St. John’s determination for religious gesture, even if it sometimes
In these lines from the elegy “Iris,” published when St. John was in his includes adoring his subjects, also includes a logic that favors pathos and
late twenties, one already sees a main trait of his mature poems press- submission. It comes from the traditional, outstretched figure of the poet
ing through: the sense of an intertwined humanity that, while broken, or as troubadour, though in St. John’s rendering he’s not so much the French
whacked out of proportion, is always jostling back toward repair— minstrel composing poems of courtly love as he is a balladeer in a black
Didn’t you notice leather jacket with one hand on the bottle and the other inside a stanza. In
That when you fell to your knees I too a phrase, a man of sorrows, well-mannered, dense with feeling, habitually
Fell & kissed this scarlet earth hallucinatory. This stance carries St. John’s poems beyond moralizing closer
to the territory of invocation—
Blackened by the lyre of your wings
Tell me. What is the “beautiful,” what is the “lost,” & what lives still just
St. John aims to be an imaginary realist. His poems crystallize in the face at the edge of the sound of the trees? It could be the syllables of habit;
of two primary erotic subjects: ecstasy and memory. He is not the first poet it could be a single phrase of gratitude . . . or an unbroken prayer. Tell me.
to discover how the nearness, or the imminence, of death can absolve the What will stay, & what will hold its grace & last ease?
imagination—
I suppose one could read these lines as slouching toward nostalgia. But they
And how could I not trust the advice also enlist his fears, and they seek out and sometimes find meaning for per-
Of a woman who, with the ball of her exquisite thumb, sonal history on the other side. The word that comes to mind finally is
Carefully flared rouge along the white cheekbones poise, that place in lyric poetry between splendor and fright.
Of the most beautiful women in the world?
Last night, as we lay in the dark,
The windows of her bedroom open to the cypress, David Biespiel’s most recent book is the memoir The Education of a Young Poet. His sixth
To the stars, to the wind knocking at those stiff book of poems, Republic Café, will be published in 2019.
Umbrella pines along her garden’s edge,
I noticed as she turned slowly in the moonlight Books Reviewed
A small tattoo just above her hip bone— Baker, David, Scavenger Loop. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2016. 112 pages,
paper, $16.00. ISBN 978-0-393-35347-1. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/
It was a dove in flight or an angel with its Scavenger-Loop/
Head tucked beneath its wing, Faizullah, Tarfia, Registers of Illuminated Villages. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018. 112
pages, paper, $16.00. ISBN 978-1-55597-800-6. https://graywolfpress.org/books/
I couldn’t tell in the shadows . . . registers-illuminated-villages
Lee, Li-Young, The Undressing. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018. 96 pages,
Or, if not absolve it, then empower it, liberate it, relieve it— cloth, $25.95. ISBN 978-0-393-06543-5. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/
The-Undressing
I know my place & I know my business & I know those
Mlinko, Ange, Distant Mandate. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 112
Melodies melodies & the music of my own mind pages, cloth, $23.00. ISBN 978-0-37424-821-5. https://us.macmillan.com/
books/9780374248215
As I say, he is not the first to discover how the imminence of death can St. John, David, The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems. New York: Ecco, 2017.
free the imagination, but he is candid about it. From the fires of love and 192 pages, cloth, $25.99. ISBN 978-0-062-64093-2. https://www.harpercollins.
the insistent past come confessions of beautiful secrets lodged, or uttered, com/9780062640932/the-last-troubadour/
between terrors—
When I came to your hotel room
You were sitting in a hard chair Index of Advertisers Page
Just by the window
Carnegie Mellon University Press 7
Half-slumped & distracted
Diode Editions 12
Looking out at the persistent rain Finishing Line Press 9
Then silently back at me Harvard Review 9
Hollyridge Press 20
Your ghost your own ghost
Horsethief Books 22
Had already come
New Issues Poetry & Prose 16
What you might see here is how St. John goes beyond emptied, burned-out Pacific University 15
emotions so that he can realize what can and can’t stand anymore, but needs Painted Bride Quarterly 7
to be lifted and taken home. It’s as if from the copious ashes of expression- Palm Beach Poetry Festival 14
ism comes something unassuageable. Something like realism? No. Some- Poets & Writers 5
thing like life. The poems in this collection (of poems published over four Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation 7
decades) invent life as poetic sentience, is what I mean. Anecdote precipi- Steve Rafalsky 22
tates the lyric. You see a similar predisposition in Li-Young Lee and David Tom O. Jones 37
Baker’s books. Namely, the lyric stands against unmediated thought or University of Notre Dame 22
blurted-out thought. It stands up for the vividly intimate, as St. John does at The University of the Arts 43
the beginning of an elegy for his friend, the poet Larry Levis— The Unsung Masters Series 19
Warren Wilson College 19
The one who should write my elegy is dead Woven Tale Press 16
When we made that bet he said most likely APR: Friends of APR 28
I’d be the loser writing his elegy instead APR Subscriptions 37
APR/Honickman First Book Prize 2, 25, 27, 31
Nothing is as beautiful as nothing he once said

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 41
TWO POEMS
LEILA CHATTI

Tumor

Haemorrhoissa
Did she, like me, lose years of nights,
up at an ungodly hour, washing the sheets? She must have been

very tired. She must have been ashamed, waking again

to a stain in the bed, still warm like a lover just risen, dayspring

seeping over the weedy yard outside. She likely had once
a husband, but not long, not after. Because no one touched her

she must have touched herself, she must have known a woman could
die from living untouched and preferred to be satisfied. Her red hands

turning slowly and brightly like fish under a faucet

in the back of the quiet, lonesome house. Sometimes, I’m sure, she thought

her life was all right. She ate, when available, the foods
she liked best, and moved her chair while reading

to the sunniest spot. She presumably prayed for some time, then decided to move on
to more fruitful endeavors, like grooming her eyebrows, or organizing the kitchen drawer,

always a mess. I’m sure she enjoyed a good joke. Occasionally had trouble
with self-esteem, generosity. She was the kind to need and need, like me,

endlessly. So when one day that god walked by, all boyish good-
looks and not looking her way, she didn’t, for a moment, hesitate, she did

what I couldn’t do—a miracle within reach, she took it.

Leila Chatti is the author of the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017
Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press.

42 THE A MERIC AN P OE TRY RE VIE W

 The University of the Arts
in Philadelphia—home to
The American Poetry Review—
ofers a BFA in Creative Writing
program, providing an unmatched
opportunity to focus on the craft
of writing in an inspiring
and unique artistic environment.

At UArts, young writers of poetry and short fiction

collaborate with musicians and illustrators, filmmakers
and graphic designers, sculptors and actors, in the
heart of one of America’s most culturally vibrant cities.
The University of the Arts has a formal ailiation
with The American Poetry Review, which is housed at
UArts. Our Creative Writing faculty includes working
novelists, short story writers and poets. For more
information, please call (215) 717–6049.

uarts.edu

JULY/AUGUS T 2018 43