National Poetry Month May Be Over...

...But Jordan Davis doesn't see that as any reason to stop reading the stuff.

"Poets talk about the attention brought by National Poetry Month the way kids talk about food at summer camp--" says Davis, "it's terrible, and there's not enough of it. For the rest of the reading world, the initiative has all the appeal of a charity drive. While there's plenty of good poetry being written today, there's at least six times as much of the not-so-good variety. Take heart: Slate has winnowed the stack down to a manageable few."

To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire

Follow along as Steve Scafidi, a poet and cabinet maker living in West Virginia, reads his poem "To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire," courtesy of the audio archives of From the Fishouse.

Don't Talk About My Moms, Yo

In a recent Paste article titled The Nature of Mother, Brian Howe undertakes a decent discussion of the rolls moms play in the lyrics of rock and rap songs, offering up this insight:

"Mothers: They’re always reservoirs for ineffable longing. We talk about mothers as a means of indirectly talking about ourselves, our hopes, our fears, our insecurities and dreams, which seems to give our actual mothers short shrift. But as Smog implies in 'I Feel Like The Mother Of The World,' motherhood is a foundational concept from which everything else descends, and the urge to approach such an awesome concept in the abstract is understandable."


In his essay, "Mothers--Don't Give up," Pastor Randy Nabors shares this:

"Many of our moms put up with a lot of grief and disappointment, and yet they kept on loving us and kept taking us back in. In this they reflected the character of God and his ability to forgive and not treat us as our sins deserve....I want to say to all mothers, whatever the difficulties you face or the blessings you enjoy, God has called you to a noble task."

Louis Armstrong, trumpeter, collage-maker

According to a piece in the latest Paris Review, when Satchmo wasn't on stage or in the studio, he could be found spinning albums or constructing collages for their covers using things like photos, product labels, and letters:

Receptivity

Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like Mercury--let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey-bee like, buzzing here and there from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at. But let us open our leaves like a flower and be...receptive--budding patiently under the eyes of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us with a visit--sap will be given us for Meat and dew for drink.

-John Keats, Letter to J.H. Reynolds, Feb. 19, 1818

From Reznikoff to Public Enemy (to 44th St.)

Towards the tail end of a party last Saturday night in St. Elmo, I took a walk with Matt Allison. As if following a cue from the air's easy calm, we slipped off the crowded backyard deck where we'd been perched for the last couple hours and started off down the alley at the edge of the yard below. In a couple of minutes we were standing at the corner of Virginia Ave. and 44th Street watching the wind push shadows through the streetlight beam focused beneath our feet.

Distracted by our conversation, I hadn't realized the significance of this intersection until it was upon us. So I had the experience of being flooded all at once by the memories of my last visit there. This was a night two months earlier when Kiko and I witnessed the crash of a Mercury Cab into the garage five feet from where I now stood, the driver shot dead inside. I had relived that crash in my head countless times since, but none of these recollections had occurred here, at the scene of the crime. Now, standing on the same patch of pavement where I stood that night when I first saw the driver's head, holed and still, the memories returned with a new gravity.

As we rounded the corner and continued up the street, I recounted to Matt what I'd seen that night. He was familiar with the details of the crash because of an email I'd sent out the morning after. Still, I felt a need to recount the experience again, as if repeating the objective details we both knew might somehow get across the invisible emotional responses this violent scene had stirred within me. Yet I felt as if I was coming up against a wall. I felt a need to break free from the constraints journalistic reporting put upon my expression of the event. I had felt this same need the morning after the accident when I awoke early, grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote a poem about it. As I reflected later on what I'd written, I began to wonder if it was closer to journalism or poetry. I then wondered if this was a necessary distinction for me to make.

The American poet and translator Philip Metres takes up this question in a recent article published by The Poetry Foundation, From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: The Poet as Journalist, Historian, Agitator. Metres gives us these famous lines from the poem "Aspodel, That Greeny Flower," by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.

These lines "argue against viewing poetry as reported news," says Metres. "Yet Williams, most notably in Paterson, and many other 20th-century poets (from the Objectivists to hip-hop artists) have sought to marry poetry with the news. Drawing from the ballad tradition and from Modernist poets’ experiments with collage, these poets frequently employed documentary materials to give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent. In this sense, they echo earlier lines in “Asphodel”: “my heart rouses / thinking to bring you news / of something // that concerns you / and concerns many men.”

According to Metres, "the successful documentary poem withstands the pressure of reality to remain a poem in its own right: its language and form cannot be reduced to an ephemeral poster, ready made for its moment but headed for the recycling bin....While it may be that such poems will not 'stand up' in a court of law, they testify to the often unheard voices of people struggling to survive in the face of unspeakable violence. In the words of C.D. Wright in One Big Self, “I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference / Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing / You could use. In a court of law.” These poems ride the ambiguity between a nothing and a something that can be used. Their power resides in their negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence."

Even before reading Metres on this subject, I had concluded that the disctinction between journalism and poetry is one that I should continue to make. But Metres' studied understanding deepens the discussion. He delineates that line and argues for a sort of resolution that "courts [its ] own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called 'the pressure of reality.'" In further drafts of my poem about the slain Mercury Cab driver, I'll seek a more confident "negotiation between language of evidence and language of transcendence." I imagine it'll be an "ambiguous" divide to "ride," but that's the thrill and the satisfaction of testimony.

To illustrate his definition of documentary poetry, Metres concludes his article with a list of ten poems by the likes of Bob Dylan, Denise Levertov, Charles Reznikoff, and, of course, Public Enemy. Each poem is worth checking out if you haven't already.


<--Charles Reznikoff

A Good (Wo)Man is Hard to Find

"An' Ma ain't nobody you can push aroun', neither. I seen her beat the hell out of a tin peddler with a live chicken one time 'cause he give her a argument. She had the chicken in one han', an' the ax in the other, about to cut its head off. She aimed to go for that peddler with the ax, but she forgot which han' was which, an' she takes after him with the chicken. Couldn't even eat that chicken when she got done. They wasn't nothing but a pair of legs in her han'.

-Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath,