David Orr’s review of The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War, a new book of poems by Frances Richey, in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, quickly turns into a meditation on the role of the personal in modern poetry, but it might just as easily be a reflection on our need to construct frames through which to view any art. The book, as Orr notes, “reportedly sold at auction for a solid six figures,” an astonishing sum for a book of poetry. (As Orr points out, that’s “approximately five figures more than most poets could ever expect to see from a collection.” And have the words “auction” and “poetry” ever occurred in the same sentence?) Orr speculates that the book’s publisher, Viking, has invested not in the poems themselves but in what Hollywood calls the back story: the book offers Richey’s reflections on her relationship with her son, a Green Beret and West Point graduate who served two tours in Iraq. That’s quite a hook, and Richey’s “memoir in verse” gives us all the wrenching emotion for which publishers of the contemporary memoir hunger. A poem like “Kill School” is all act and feeling, the son’s emotionless narrative of learning to kill contrasted with his mother’s silent response:

The trainer showed him
how to rock the rabbit

like a baby in his arms,
faster and faster,

until every sinew surrendered
and he smashed its head into a tree.

They make a little squeaking sound,
he said. They cry.

He drove as he told me:
You said you wanted to know.

I didn’t ask how he felt.
Maybe I should have,

but I was biting
off the skin from my lips,

looking out
beyond the glittering line

of traffic flying
past us in the dark.

Of course, Richey’s gesture of (literally) biting her lips is a mother’s response, while the poet’s is to gaze out of the car window at the metaphoric closure forming around them. There’s a doubleness about these poems, which are simultaneously emotionally raw and . . . I started to write “polished,” but that’s not the word exactly, since it implies a specific quality of verse. Savvy, perhaps. Richey’s website includes a photo gallery that begins with Richey cradling her newborn son, then shows his progress from happy child to proud soldier, along with a blog in which the author shares stories sent in by readers who have their own experiences of families affected by the war. It’s moving, but also thoroughly professional, exactly what you’d expect from a best-selling memoirist. Her list of personal appearances includes stops at West Point, the Special Forces Senior Spouse Conference at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Poems from the book, her author bio notes, “have appeared in a two-page spread in O, The Oprah Magazine, Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, on the Lives page of the New York Times Magazine, and the local PBS show ‘New York Voices.’”

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The laundry room of my complex is covered in notes. While the notes are anonymously written, I’m certain they are the work of a single noteleaver. They are uniform in font and formatting, and singularly irksome.

For four years now I have been guided in my laundering by these suspiciously obvious instructions in the turning off of lights, the proper loading of driers. An anger lurks in typography:

The Heat is on in here so that the pipes do not freeze. And if they do there will be a large repair bill we will all have to pay for. So it is very simple

Shut the door as you leave.

It is not summer anymore.

The note is up year round. In summer months, the last line’s certainty sings with an ornery resilience. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so these Choate kids and I have been at close quarters now for nearly a month (see prev. post). I know their names. They know mine. They grace me with direct eye contact. In class we’re pretty much a well-oiled thespian machine (…does that sound dirty? or have I regressed?). In homage to Kubler-Ross, I think I’ve identified the stages of my assimilation– in case you, like me, love the comfort of flattening out a many-faceted experience into numbered bullet points. I’ll try to note the associated phases of our play’s development as well.

1. Curious ignorance (coinciding with the play’s research phase). What are these tween things? How do they amble and tick? Are they friends or foes? Should I fight or flight? I could see in the animal eyes of my charges that they were in the same, scent-sniffing place. Which led to:

2. Overidentification (coinciding with the character-finding, discovering-the-story phase). For about a week, we were all miraculously the same age. Meaning I suddenly was 13. As I hunkered down in their trenches with my notebook, grasping at the violently protected, elusive furry animals known as their Thoughts and Feelings, I found myself “meeting them where they are” with a vengeance. I was childishly homesick. Even though as a visiting prof I haven’t had an official “home” for a year and a half. While a couple of my students nightly tucked themselves into dark corners of the dorm and hissed their escapist pleas to their parents, I would shut the door of my room and obsessively stand in front of my dorm mirror checking out the size of my butt, while bitching for hours on the phone with my friends about not knowing anybody, the schedule, the berg the school’s in. (Of course Choate’s a beautiful campus, in a town much like Kenyon’s Gambier.) OK, but this stage eventually passed, into the phase I am least proud of:

3. Judgment (coinciding with the play’s rewriting phase). I hate this one, but it’s a periodic virus endemic to teaching. This is the phase where we teachers formed an exhausted, wise-ass clump in the parking lot, making coffee-scented cracks about this kid’s tendency to ask sixty questions a class, that kid’s nascent work ethic, and that other kid’s painfully obvious crush on one of us. OK, it’s fun. And it bonds. An us needs a them and all that. But when I get aware I’m in this phase, I try to move out of it quick. God knows I was (am?) all of those kids at some point.

Which brings us to now, the last week of the conservatory…the phase coinciding with the full-draft, ready-for-performance, “people,-we-have-a-show” phase.

I don’t know how to capture this one, probably because we’re all still in it. Tender around the edges and peppered with spasms of white-hot irritation, this phase is a rough blend of pride, familiarity, warmth, mockery, and respect for each others’ lasting mysteries. It’s strongly familial. Which is impossible in four weeks with strangers, right? Yet like parents or brothers or sisters, we spend every day in each other’s faces, standing behind each other, shoving each other, laughing at the failed jokes of the fragile ones, slowly sanding down the cruel ones, always yelling but always listening for the small voice in trouble at the back of the line.

So this “us” forms, given time; a unified movement is made from utterly foreign to almost consanguine. It’s the same thing that happens in every cast I’ve ever been part of or witnessed at work. It’s the same thing that happens when I write or read something new. This quiet shift from “I don’t know you” to, “Ah, I know you. I know your name.” It feels impossible near the beginning. But it seems to happens every time.

Hooray for Kay Ryan, our new Poet Laureate, who packs her force in a thimble, articulating dreams and philosophies in just a sliver of serrated lines.

Ryan is one to seize Dickinson’s barefoot rank in her work, tossing and turning in it to create her fixtures. Here’s “Chinese Foot Chart,” from her sixth and most recent collection, The Niagara River:

Chinese Foot Chart

Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock.

Built to be odd: how the expectant pressure of “dock” in her last sentence weighs in on the “knock,” making it felt. Her odd knocks are good medicine. I will rest easy knowing she’s at the helm, perhaps cringing in bookstores with organizing principles like this:

And having witty, Kay Ryany things to say about it.

If you are in D.C., catch her at the Library of Congress National Book Festival on September 27 or at her formal reading there on October 16. If autumn in New York City is in your stars, Ryan will be part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poets Forum, November 6-8.

[Kay Ryan photograph courtesy of Jennifer Loring.]

This week I went clamming. As verbs go, that one’s under a lot of pressure to produce a poem (much more so than mussel harvesting, which I was also doing but takes up too many drab syllables), and so as I searched for signs of clam life I tried to prepare the scene for my clamming poem. Will it start here, I thought, as I crossed a tiny shrinking mud-creek (and if so I’ll need to look up the word for mud-creek), or will it start with my baby in his carrier (for the poem it would need to be a sling, or my arms) peering over my shoulder into the mud, or will it start with the unidentified shorebirds staring at us? I kept sinking into the mud. The actual clamming took a back burner. I was so excited to be doing a poetic thing.

In grad school I kept a list of words I would not allow myself to use in a poem: oranges, sardines, socket, dawn, forsythia, cicada, whiskey, flotilla, small, ochre, oyster, onion skin. These were words I kept coming across in poems and that I thought needed a rest. They felt like clubhouse words and I didn’t want in the club. For a couple years my snide little list grew and I wrote surreal, unspecific narrative poems.

But then, ten months ago, I had a baby and suddenly my days rarely supply the poetic fodder to which I had grown accustomed. No more late night walks, hardly any whiskey, no movies, hardly any reading, few conversations beyond the baby. I caught myself thinking I should eat some sardines for lunch because that would be nice in a poem. Read the rest of this entry »

Near the end of their first week of the program, the Kenyon Review Young Writers must choose a genre session. If they want to focus on historical fiction, there’s a session for that. If they want to write plays or translate poems from the original French, there’s a session for that. If they want to imitate Jack Kerouac and dash off a frenzied draft of a novel, there’s a session for that, too.

And if they want to write monster stories, they climb the stairs to my classroom.

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Haven’t tried it yet? Check out these four new delights:

A hilarious and humbling essay by Colleen Kinder on blushing.

A review by Mark Kemp of Brian Hall’s Fall of Frost.

A review by Robert Bernard Hass of Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher by Peter Stanlis.

A charmed note by Brian Doyle on the use (and misuse) of adverbs.

I write today from Gambier, where the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop is wrapping up another week. Seventy-eight imposingly intelligent (to wit: this morning I learned that nearly half of them have already read Paradise Lost), self-aware sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds spend their days writing. I’m here as a fellow, talking short stories and writing with them.

I’ve never been around so many teenagers (since I, you know, was one), and it turns out: they have a lot of really smart things to say. Late in the day yesterday, after hours of writing, we came to a point of giddiness. Rather than keep writing in such a state, we just talked about a metafiction we’d all read. It led one student to ask if writing metafiction is post-modern. Not po-mo, another corrected– po-po-mo. But that didn’t seem right either, so I lamely suggested we’re moving to the Post-Ots. Not much response there.

Then one young writer struck on something: Po-bama. We’re living in a post-Obama world. Another student suggested that it’s possible we’re more appropriately pre-bama (pre-Obama)- hopeful thinking, I’d guess, as it would mean that we’re waiting to see how the world shapes up after he wins this fall, rather than just feeling satisfied he’s changed the discourse enough to claim a moral victory. Regardless: when the philologists feel ready to update the lexicon, we’re ready. Po-bama, pre-bama. And years from now when the etymologists are looking for a source just remember: it was a teenager at the KR Young Writers Workshops who coined it.

The now infamous New Yorker cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama (the latter dressed in military gear complete with a rifle draped over her shoulder) fist-bumping in the White House while a portrait of Osama bin Laden looks on and an American flag burns in the fireplace, is quite clearly a broad satire of certain misperceptions (or distortions) of the Democratic candidate.  Satire is often quite broad, as in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (where the ironic persona proposes the eating of Irish babies for nutrition and profit),  for hyperbole is one of the satirist’s handiest tools.  Of course, satire works, as any writing works, within a given context, and it’s understandable that Barack Obama would call the cover offensive in a context where many people are in fact taking offense.  At the same time, it should not take a very elaborate analysis to understand the cartoon cover as satire in a rather recognizable vein. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out this library’s color coding system, via MoCo Loco. There are fourteen pictures of it at Valerie Madill’s site. I think I’m in love.

Also, do you feel like writing your book? Perhaps with a team? Or everyone on the internet? WeBook is changing authorship as we know it. No wonder publishers use the word “digital” with trepidation.

And if you’re looking for a good read, let this Pandora-esque site be your guide.