Isak

The Russians Steal My Heart

Their names ring bells inside me: Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Vladmir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Turgenev. With strange slippery stories and poems, visionary novels and novellas, they'll have me coming back to them my whole life long.

One Russian I haven't read yet is Maxim Gorky. I know nearly nothing about the guy, actually. Happily, a feature in The New Republic on Gorky, and particularly his "reminiscences" of Tolstoy," gives me a starting place. The occasion? A new translation of Gorky's memoir of Tolstoy by Donald Fanger that TNR calls "fascinating."

When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. ...

The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.

(Gorky's) memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. ...

THANK YOU, 1980s: Rita Dove

Canary
for Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

Flirtation

After all, there’s no need
to say anything

at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares

like a tulip on a wedgewood plate
Anything can happen.

Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs

and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart

is humming a tune
I haven’t heard in years!

Quiet’s cool flesh—
let’s sniff and eat it.

There are ways
to make of the moment

a topiary
so the pleasure’s in

walking through.

"Canary" is from Rita Dove's collection, Grace Notes (1989); "Flirtation" is from Dove's second poetry collection, Museum (1981). Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. Her poetic debut came at the birth of the eighties; she published her first book of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980. Seven years later, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Thomas and Beulah.

In 1993 Dove became poet laureate of the United States, the first African-American woman to hold that role, and, at forty, the youngest to hold it. She's also written short fiction, lyrics, and plays, the poetry is her primary medium and language, a favorite tool. She teaches today at the University of Virginia, that lucky school.

Dove says, beautifully (in a quote from here):

I've always been obsessed by the voices that are not normally heard. I think it comes from the women I knew as a child, the women in the kitchen who told the best stories. They knew how the world worked, about human nature, and they were wise, are wise. When you are marginalized in any way—race, gender, age, class—you must learn to listen and pay attention very carefully if you are going to survive, and—women have known this since time immemorial—you have to anticipate what is expected of you, what you can get away with, how far you can push yourself. That makes you an extremely sensitive human being. It's the lemonade you get out of the lemons.

Image credit: The University of Virginia

THANK YOU, 1980s: Raymond Carver

Who will argue with me when I say that Raymond Carver is one of best story writers we've had? The very form of the short story was revived in the 1980s, and Carver was a big reason why. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral, and Elephant are the collections he published in the last decade of the Oregon native's life. Today, it seems that Carver is more often read one story at a time; "Cathedral" in one anthology, "The Bath" in another. It's certainly how I became acquainted him. But I think there's a loss here, to pull popular stories out of there context. Just like the album of number-one Beatles hits is hardly a fully colored representation of who they were as a band, so is Carver as a writer shortchanged when his work is known more by an anthology listing than for the whole collections he put together. He becomes the 'minimalist' in comparison to the stories around him, and in that label is somewhat minimized.

For some reason, Carver's life and work as a poet is less-acknowledged--a shame, because from what I've read, he was good. Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Ultramarine, and, posthumously, A New Path To The Waterfall were the poetry collection he published in the 1980s In 1989, the year after Carver died, Daisy Goodwin made the short British documentary on Carver called "Dreams Are What We Wake Up From." It features interviews with Ella Carver (the author's mother), Richard Ford, and Jay McInerney. Wonderfully, you can see it in parts online. Here are the first two:

Tonight ...

... it's back to the MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) for readings with fiction writer Peter Markus and poet Kristin Palm.

I'm new to both their work, but I have it on good Dzanc-style authority that this is going to be good. I rather like jumping into the live literary events of writers who I don't know well. Rather than attending a reading only to nod knowingly and mouth the words right along with the author's reading, this is a chance to jump into something new and three-dimensional. I want to walk away having fallen in love.

Markus's book is enticingly titled Bob, or Man on Boat. Rumor has it that "Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself."

Sounds good, yes? I'm ready to make a night of it.

If you're in the Detroit area, I'll see you there at 7 p.m.

Image Credit: www.mocadetroit.org

Poetic War

In the dark times will there also be singing?
Yes there will also be singing about the dark times.
~Bertolt Brecht

Poetry has been a chosen way to voice way since, well, forever, says The Guardian's book blog---and while the point's made that there's a particular awe of soldier pets (like the haunting Wilfred Owens, who did in World War I, barely a week before the end of combat), most poetry about war is written by non-combatants. That is, the writers are those "who play bit-part roles in modern warfare" and come up with striking work like "Mother and Poet," "From One Who Stays," "Innocence and Experience," and "The Waste Land."

It's particularly interesting how this poetry of war is almost entirely opposed to it. When the group Poets Against the War shaped up in response to the U.S.'s modern war in Iraq, I heard a lot of groaning dismissals. However the critics felt about the war, they seemed to agree that such a group as PAW was doomed to marginal quality and heady pontificating crammed into verse form. The assumption, then, is that poems that are intended to vocalize a dissnession from war can't be more than propaganda. But as the Guardian points out, war is one of the primary themes of poetry throughout history, and the majority of it opposes war. We see  tremendous poems opposed to war come from soldiers and non-soldiers alike. So why is there a contemporary idea that "poetry against the war" is silly? That idea seems a little ahistorical for me. Of course not all poems against the war are good, just as not all poems are good; I imagine the success ratio is parallel.

Back in the MFA program I was part of, Eleanor Wilner gave a lecture I've never been able to get out of my mind. "Poetry in an Age of War & Atrocity" had the whole of us struck, still in our chairs at the end of it. She spoke of "the poetic urgency to call things by the right name" while at the same time, a "danger of shading into pornography, witness into something 'sordidly inquisitive.'" That is, even as it's needed for poetry to enter the often speechless void of war and violence, poets run the risk of exploiting gory details for cheap visceral affect in the readers. How, then, to approach atrocity in poetry without, as Wilner said, "becoming atrocious" ourselves?

Happily, other poets might guide us. Here are two:

We Lived Happily During the War
by Ilya Kaminsky

and when they bombed other people's houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. And we kept repeating that grand moment:

a president saluting a flag on an enormous ship.

I knew I did not say much. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

                                  In the sixth year
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country
of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

Body Bags
By Brian Turner

A murder of crows looks on in silence
from the eucalyptus trees above
as we stand over the bodies--
who look as if they might roll over,
wake from a dream and question us
about the blood drying on their scalps,
the bullets lodged in the back of their skulls,
to ask where their wives and children are
this morning, and why this hovering
of flies, the taste of flatbread and chai
gone from their mouths as they stretch
and rise, wondering who these strangers are
who would kick their hard feet, saying
Last call, motherfucker. Last call.

Heart

I found myself drawn in by the poem picked by Ted Kooser for today's "American Life in Poetry" column. The column each day features one poem and Kooser's brief introduction to it. It's delivered daily to my inbox.  

Heart
By Rick Campbell

My heart was suspect.
Wired to an EKG,
I walked a treadmill
that measured my ebb
and flow, tracked isotopes
that ploughed my veins,
looked for a constancy
I've hardly ever found.
For a month I worried
as I climbed the stairs
to my office. The mortality
I never believed in
was here now. They
say my heart's ok,
just high cholesterol, but
I know my heart's a house
someone has broken into,
a room you come back
to and know some stranger
with bad intent has been there
and touched all that you love. You know
he can come back. It's his call,
his house now.

"A homegrown poet of terror, abjection, and difficulty"

That's how Maureen N. McLane describes Emily Dickinson in the current Boston Review. The article, "This Ecstatic Nation," says that Dickinson is the gal to learn from in a post-9/11 world. She takes the re-release of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson --- a book she succeeds in selling me on --- as her cue to look back and forth between Dickinson's poems and letters, and Susan Sontag and Susan Faludi's contemporary interpretations of 9/11. The focus? Captivity narratives, memorializing and mythologizing that emerged from it.

One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock. Here Dickinson’s ceaseless instinct for negation, distinction, refinement, annihilation, seems wholly relevant, when things are

most like Chaos—Stopless—cool—
Without a Chance, or Spar—
Or even a Report of Land—
To justify—Despair.
    (#510)

"The state joy is spring"

A Primer

by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go

to be in Michigan. The right hand of America

waving from maps or the left

pressing into clay a mold to take home

from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan

forty-three years. The state bird

is a chained factory gate. The state flower

is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical

though it is merely cold and deep as truth.

A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”

can sincerely use the word “sincere.”

In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.

When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life

goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,

which we’re not getting along with

on account of the Towers as I pass.

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget

how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.

It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.

The Upper Peninsula is a spare state

in case Michigan goes flat. I live now

in Virginia, which has no backup plan

but is named the same as my mother,

I live in my mother again, which is creepy

but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,

suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials

are needed. The state joy is spring.

“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”

is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,

when February hasn’t ended. February

is thirteen months long in Michigan.

We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us. “What did we do?”

is the state motto. There’s a day in May

when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.

In this way I have given you a primer.

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

From The May 19 issue of The New Yorker

Michigan Inspiration for Theodore Roethke

It's been a century since Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, MI. NPR seizes the day with a look at Roethke, his poetry, and how his childhood home fed into his writing.

I first came to know Roethke by the prize in his name at the University of Michigan for a long poetic series. And I've enjoyed his work, but at a distance. I don't know it well, and I think I've felt a little intimidated by it. No good reason (is there every a good reason for feeling intimidated by a poet?). But I think it was the poet Marianne Boruch who told me that she took a pilgrimage to Roethke's former home in Saginaw, and that it was a wonderful and fun and revelatory time. Maybe a trip like that would be a nice way to let myself sink into his writing, get to know this Michigan poem-writer a bit better. A little ritual never hurt anyone.

Via

Poem Found While Paging Through Tony Hoagland's Book of Essays on Poetry & Craft

Birthday Cake
By Paul Goodman

Now isn’t it time
when the candles on the icing
are one two too many
too many to blow out
too many to count too many
isn’t it time to give up this ritual?

although the fiery crown
fluttering in the chocolate
and through the darkened room advancing
is still the most loveliest sight
among the savage folk
that have few festivals.

But the thicket is too hot and thick
and isn’t it time, isn’t it time
when the fires are too many
to eat the fire and not the cake
and drip the fires from my teeth
as once I had in my hot hot youth.