63---> jody & loy

Gertrude Stein

by Mina Loy

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word 

Jody on her process in composing what she calls her Something Songs:

Generally, I sit down with my iPad, a microphone and a line of a text I am reading at that moment. I will read the line over and over and then record. The music is quite obvious from the prosody. I don’t plan anything. I record loops, and then once all of the loops are recorded, I create what I consider to be the most “compositional” aspect of the song: I mix the loops to convey the mood or meaning of what I myself am trying to understand of the text. So, they become hyper-text-snippets. 

I am under the delusional impression that somehow, I have given a personal reading of these texts by creating these songs. It’s likely a delusion, and its clearly a solipsistic activity, because I’m pretty sure about 4 people total have ever listened to them on my website. But I’m ok with that.

________________________________________________________________________________

Jody Pou is an American writer who has lived in and out of France for many years. She is also an accomplished lyric soloist whose career has focused primarily on Baroque and Contemporary music. She has premiered many pieces, sung with many ensembles and in many festivals throughout Europe and in the US since her career began. In 2007, she sung the soprano role in a staged production of Ligeti's Aventures et Nouvelles Aventures at the Paris Opera. The same year in New York City, she created the netlabel, shskh.com, commissioning pieces by a diverse array of musicians and composers, including Garth Knox, Etsuko Chida, and Igor Ballereau. It is here that one can find her interpretation of all of Webern opuses of piano with voice, as well as a volume of Baroque songs and Jazz standards. Her books, Will (Les Petits Matins, Paris, 2009) and I thought j'irais en bloom (Le Bleu du Ciel, Bordeaux, 2014) are both written in English and French mixed. Other texts have been published in various journals, notably Tilt, with audio on quaderna.org, and she will be featured in the Migrant Women’s Poetry anthology which will be published in 2017 in Japan. She is also a painter.

62---> j.s. & mallarmé

Live Mimeograph printed script from Cabaret Voltaire performance by J.S. Makkos

Name: J.S. Makkos
Hometown: Cleveland, OH
Current City: New Orleans, LA
Occupation: Archivist & Printer
Age: 37

What does poetry mean to you?:

Poetry is the word some people use to talk about poems, but for me it’s been about wordfare and wordcraft: breaking into the landscape of signs, signifiers, and the signified, cutting through and expanding out into a world that reveals possibilities of what language can be, outside of ourselves. Poetry is the very making of meaning, be it through meter, sound symbolism or through phonoaesthetics. We deploy various devices to serve the imaginative plane where interpretation and agency are simultaneously at play by creator and destroyer, by the viewed and viewer. Poetry remains as a forum for expressive expansion, the variable lens or looking glass illuminating the often fleeting yet infinite focal points of the human experience.

Favorite Poet/Poem:

Stéphane Mallarmé's book-length poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)

Here is a sample page:

Why do you like this poet/poem?:

It entreats me as a poet, as interpreter, to consider all new possibilities in the field of language as a medium perpetually in play. This work recreates the page with words and sounds as a dance across the pulpy canvas. It cuts the plain into pieces reinventing and reminding, through both form and function, the necessity for poetry to remain illusive, indeterminate, as a means for arriving at new meaning barely graspable by the fingertips of expression.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Picture from Letterpress Amsterdam

J.S. Makkos is a writer, printmaker, and a self-described media archaeologist who has salvaged and restored historic printing equipment from at least a dozen print shops to date. Using these resources he actively runs CODEX in New Orleans, a design studio and print shop that focuses on artful production and independent publishing. In another capacity he curates Nola DNA, a one-of-a-kind archive of some 30,000 historic New Orleans newspapers dating from the late 19th to the early 20th century.  In 2016 he toured Europe for the 100th anniversary of Dada with Dadalogue, visiting Dadaist collections, attending exhibitions on Dadaism, working in various print shops, and giving a performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The work he made during this tour is currently part of the Typo-DADAist100 exhibition, which is traveling to over a dozen cities around Europe through 2018. He currently co-hosts the weekly No Good Poetry podcast.

61---> lala & giorno

Name: Lala Drona

Hometown: Denver, Colorado

Current City: Paris, France (soon to be Beijing, China)

Occupation: Painter / vidéaste

Age: 29 years

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry provides an outlet for me to express things I am otherwise unable to express in my paintings.  Poetry, like other arts, is a sacred moment of connection to the self, but is also a connection to a collective consciousness. It is strongest in the instant of inspiration, and that is why I expose myself to the muse in front of the camera.  I create poetry spontaneously and record it in order to catch the immediacy of each emotion and each word expressed at its birth. (See video for “La Politesse” and “The Physical” links below).

Favorite poem or poet: 

I have many favorite poems and poets, but my favorite poem at this moment in time is “Thanx 4 Nothing” by John Giorno. 

Why do you like this poem? 

This poem resonates with me because after living in Paris for 4.5 years, I’m now moving to Beijing, China.  I’ve literally and figuratively broken my teeth in this city, exhausted my creative muscles to the bone.  I consider Paris my arch nemesis and my lover.  She simultaneously asphyxiates and offers relief:

[I want to thank you for your kindness and praise,
thanks for celebrating me,
thanks for the resounding applause,
I want to thank you for taking everything for yourself
and giving nothing back,
you were always only self-serving,
thanks for exploiting my big ego
and making me a star for your own benefit,
thanks that you never paid me,
thanks for all the sleaze,
thanks for being  mean and rude
and smiling at my face,
I am happy that you robbed me,
I am happy that you lied
I am happy that you helped me,
thanks, grazie, merci beaucoup.]

Paris is a beautiful narcissist, but I’ve experienced all that I can for now, and now it’s time to open myself up to new inspiration for my work.  Such as in the poem, I wish all my exhilarating experiences onto those whom are left behind and those still to come:

[May every drug I ever took

come back and get you high,

may every glass of vodka and wine I’ve drunk

come back and make you feel really good,

numbing your nerve ends

allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free…]

“Thanx 4 Nothing” by John Giorno is my farewell for now to Paris.  See you in a few years.  Peace, love and art. —Lala

________________________________________________________________________________

Lala Drona is a painter, vidéaste, and novel writer. Her name comes from the Spanish word “la ladrona,” which means “the thief." It appears she's adopted Picasso's famous saying, "a good artist copies, a great artist steals." To create her work, Lala displays, claims and is inspired, thus, by the theme of "the theft." She has created through her site, Based on a Fact, a vast artistic universe based on her life: The Lala World. “The Physical” and “La Politesse" are two of her most recent gifts to this land. 

60---> laurie & lane

Name: Laurie A. Williams

Hometown: Bentonville, Arkansas

Current City: New Orleans

Occupation: Tutor, creator and founder of Louisiana Poetry Project, educator

Age: 52

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry means survival of humanity. When I used to teach middle school, I would ask my students to come up with a definition for poetry and each student would work on an individual definition. Then we would work on a class definition together from our various individual definitions. I still do this activity sometimes when I work with teachers in hopes of getting them to include more poetry in their classes, to not be afraid of poetry, and to expand their definition and understanding of poetry. I remember the first year I did this with my students, they asked me for my definition. Of course, I wasn't prepared with an answer, so I thought about it for several minutes before telling them that the best way I could define it was that poetry is the breaking of your sternum to set your heart free. I'm still not sure if it was the best idea to say that to thirty seventh graders at Catholic school, but that is the definition that stays with me and still seems most accurate to me. Poetry is deeply personal, but is also connects us with one another and lets us know that we are not alone. Poetry makes sense of the chaos while still recognizing the chaos. 

Favorite poem or poet:

My favorite poem/poet changes from day to day. I have poets and poems I go back time and time again. During hurricane Katrina, these lines from Yeats ran through my head as a constant mantra: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity." This segment from Octavio Paz's "Fable" (Eliot Weinberger's translation) is a second skin, or maybe a tattoo etched into my bones.—

There was only one huge word with no back to it

A word like the sun

One day it broke into tiny pieces

They were the words of the language we now speak

Pieces that will never come together

Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shattered

Right now, my favorite poet is Pinkie Gordon Lane. She is often my go-to poet when the news weighs heavy. I found her in my research for the Louisiana Poetry Project. She was Louisiana Poet Laureate from 1989-1992. I had never read her work in any of my classes or come across it through any of my poet friends and acquaintances. Her last book, Elegy for Etheridge, sits on my desk with a pale pink, wrinkled and ragged sticky note marking the page to the right-hand side of "Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare." I put the sticky note there last November (2016). Early Wednesday morning, November 9th, this poem popped into my head. I couldn't remember which one of her books it was in or the exact title, but I could see it sitting on the page, and I remembered the second strophe and the last line verbatim. So I pulled all of her books off the shelf, and thumbed through them until I found this poem:

Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare

The ACLU Mountain States Regional Office came across a welfare application used in [a certain state] for women with illegitimate children.

Among the questions:

--When and where did you first meet the defendant [the child's father].

--When and where did intercourse first occur.

--Frequency and period of time during which intercourse occurred.

--Was anyone else ever present. If yes, give dates, names, and addresses.

--Were preventative measures always used.

--Have you had intercourse with anyone other than the defendant.

--If yes, give dates, names, and addresses.

--The Privacy Report, American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, vol 4, no 3, Oct. 1976

When and where did you first

confront loneliness?

When and where did you resist

the urge to die?

Did you pull a blind around 

your sorrow?

Was anyone present? If yes, give

names and dates and addresses.

Did you survive?

Were preventative measures always

used?

Who listens to the rage of your 

silent screams? Give the frequency

and period of time,

dates and names and addresses . . .

Will you promise never to breathe ice?

To follow the outline

of a city street whose perspective

darkens with the morning light?

Document.

Pinkie Gordon Lane

from her book Elegy for Etheridge

Why do you like this poem?

I love how Pinkie responds to news and information in her poems, how she takes dehumanizing information and humanizes it. I usually prefer my news with a little satire or parody to temper it, to give that temporary anesthesia of the heart that comedy provides, allowing for clarity and distance. But with Pinkie's poems, she pulls you in closer--the subject of the poem and the speaker sit in the room with you. The second strophe arrests my breath each time I read it.  The final line--"Document" as a verb and not a noun goes through my head in a continuous cycle these days. As I read and watch the news, as I interact with colleagues and students, as I research, as I daydream, that imperative sentence from this poem demands I pay more attention and make note of what I think, feel, say, know, and understand.

How do you approach poetry with your students?

One of my favorite projects to do with my students is a found poem or a black out poem because it makes them think about words and language in an entirely different way. I always use a page from a book we are reading as a class. They have to let go of having the words they choose have the same meaning as the author originally intended. They have to redefine what writing is and how meaning occurs. 

A blackout home, as seen in Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, created by Laurie A. Williams

59---> robin & a scribe called quess?

A Favorite Poem: A Scribe Called Quess? “Grounded by Sky: A Southern Epitaph”

Why do you like this poem?

In 2015 I became involved with a movement called Take 'Em Down NOLA (TEDN), a coalition of community members committed to the removal of ALL symbols of white supremacy in New Orleans as a part of a broader push for racial & economic justice. A Scribe Called Quess? was part of the foundation of that coalition. I've never told him this, but I knew of him long before I first marched in the streets of the French Quarter with TEDN. About a year before, I went to a spoken word night where he gave an impromptu reading. It was my first live experience with spoken word. I'd always reserved a slow, solitary space for experiencing poetry, but this was not that kind of space. It was very much alive. Parts of the evening were languid, other parts extremely urgent. Multiple generations of folks shuffled in and out, enjoying juice and snacks, nodding to the various performers. The experience of poetry, I learned, could be about community, laughter, and pain, all at once. This is what we all bring to struggles for justice. So as a thank you for his words, art, leadership, and most importantly, friendship, I wanted to illustrate them, and also give something of myself. The animated images are archival materials collected over the years from my own writing and research in Louisiana. Think of this animation as a gift exchange between comrades.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Robin McDowell is originally from Cottekill, New York. Currently, she floats between Cambridge, Massachusetts & New Orleans, Louisiana, as she completes her Ph.D. in African & African American Studies. She is a freelance graphic designer and French Quarter tour guide.

58---> lauren & davis

Name: Lauren Capone

Hometown: New Orleans, LA

Current City: New Orleans, LA

Occupation: poet + currently nearing the end of nursing school

Age: 30

What does poetry mean to you?

Can I read this as what is poetry to me? Poetry is a way of putting under a magnifying glass some aspect of being human. It’s a writer reaching out to a reader, human to human.  As you pay attention to the world within and around you, I think you are finding poetry in many places and in various forms. Poetry opens; poetry may address an otherness in you, maybe something you didn’t know was there, and maybe it will ask your questions. As a living thing, poetry is mutable and takes different forms evoking different experiences for different people, but with some common ground.

Favorite poet:

I don’t like choosing favorites, but two of my current loves are Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.

Why do you like these poets?

Things I like about Lydia Davis: she makes poems out of anything. Poetry is sacred yes, but do less-sacred-seeming things not deserve a place in poems, too? I think they do! It’s like the zen of going to the bathroom or something. Maybe next time you’re in an otherwise mundane situation, you’ll remember the poem you read and you’ll find a window of light in the experience. Also, Lydia Davis is very funny. Anne Carson. Things I like: she’s adventurous with form. Like Lydia Davis, she welcomes everything in poems. Much of her work responds to, or engages with other literature, but she offers it wedged in her own relationship to the literary work, and encourages you to let yourself develop relationships and worlds around literature. I appreciate that she creates a new sphere with older work. Putting stuff in a new sphere = new perspective = learning opportunity = win/world opens up.

I debated for a while about which poem I would engage with for this project. At first, I thought to use a serious poem and make it funny; for instance, I thought to have a cartoon with many writers and literary characters, including T.S. Eliot and his friend J. Alfred Prufrock on a beach wandering for years, trousers rolled and such. I considered Anne Carson’s “Zeus Bits” from her newest, Float. But there are a few reasons I ended up going with Lydia Davis' "Passing Wind" that I think speak to what poetry and art mean to me. First things, it’s funny. I think that we forget that poetry can be funny. So here it is. Louis C.K. once said something like this:  that you don’t have to be smart to laugh at a fart joke, but you have to be stupid not to. (I don’t want to call anyone stupid, but I do think this poem is funny.) When I thought to ask friends to be photographed for the piece, I knew it was going in the right direction; I love including friends in my projects—this strengthens the artistic community, and involves more people in poetry and art. As I am finishing up with nursing school, I have a new appreciation for “passing wind.” Flatulence is a sign that the gastrointestinal tract is working properly, and everyone in a hospital wants to hear that. Finally, this poem takes what may be considered a very unpoetic topic and explores the human compassion involved in the narrative. The speaker is primarily concerned with ensuring that her guest is comfortable, and nothing more. Compassion is a powerful thing in our world.

Passing Wind

by Lydia Davis

She didn’t know if it was him or the dog. It wasn’t her. The dog was lying there on the living-room rug between them, she was on the sofa, and her visitor, rather tense, was sunk deep in a low armchair, and the smell, rather gentle, came into the air. She thought at first that it was him and she was surprised, because people don’t pass wind in company very often, or at least not in a noticeable way. As they went on talking, she went on thinking it was him. She felt a little sorry for him, because she thought he was embarrassed and nervous to be with her and that was why he had passed wind. Then it occurred to her very suddenly that it might not have been him at all, it might have been the dog, and worse, if it had been the dog, he might think it had been her. It was true that the dog had stolen an entire loaf of bread that morning, and eaten it, and might now be passing wind, something he did not do otherwise. She wanted immediately to let him know, somehow, that at least it was not her. Of course there was a chance that he had not noticed, but he was smart and alert, and since she had noticed, he probably had, too, unless he was too nervous to have noticed. The problem was how to tell him. She could say something about the dog to excuse it. But it might not have been the dog, it might have been him. She could not be direct and simply say, “Look, if you just farted, that’s all right; I just want to be clear that it wasn’t me.” She could say, “The dog ate a whole loaf of bread this morning, and I think he’s farting.” But if it was him, and not the dog, this would embarrass him. Although maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he was already embarrassed, if it was him, and this would give him a way out of his embarrassment. But by now the smell was long gone. Maybe the dog would fart again, if it was the dog. That was the only thing she could think of—the dog would fart again, if it was the dog, and then she would simply apologize for the dog, whether or not it was the dog, and that would relieve him of his embarrassment, if it was him.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Capone is a poet, nursing student, and plant enthusiast who lives and writes in New Orleans where she hosts the bread & butter reading series.

57---> andrea & myles

Name: Andrea Panzeca

Hometown: Merritt Island, Florida

Current city: New Orleans, Louisiana

Occupation: Teaching Artist

Age: 33

What does poetry mean to you?

Uttering or reciting is central to poetry. I had a tape called Wee Sing Silly Songs I loved to listen to and memorize as a kid. Even little jingles, anything you memorize becomes a part of you. You could be away from your home and anything you can call to mind can keep that part of you alive, in the same way remembering the dead keeps them alive. But maybe you have to go further and utter or talk about them for it to be poetry.

Memorizing little silly songs is something I still do, make them up. It's fun to play, sing random stuff: "My cat's a bunny, that cat's an octopus," just whatever. Shape shifting. That's very poetry. Poems and reciting them is part of what makes up a person, like their ingredients, but poetry also connects two people made of poems. Sort of like how there are infinite points in a line segment, but also infinite points in a never-ending line, so even though they’re both infinite, there's more infinity in a line. I'm full of poems, you're full of poems, we're both line segments, but when we read each other's poems we become a line—connected and more infinite.

Everything’s related and that's the whole point of poetry. You can connect any two things or any number of things.

I read poetry to get a sense of someone’s interiority, how their particular mind works and their particular body lives in their particular world. I should add their particular time.

When the reader comes to it matters too. First read... Second read... If someone says Martha or Robert, my parents’ names, it will mean a lot to me it might not mean to another reader. But if they read the poem again having met a Martha or Robert, the meaning might change.

It's all about having a rich internal life or activating your internal life. There's this cool quote about reading, you sit there and have these wild hallucinations for free. I didn't read as much as I should have, wanting to be a writer, until I went to grad school and had to read so much. Now I go to reading—I'll hit a sentence and it'll make me have a memory and I'll go write a poem, or make me have a thought, or connect two things, and I'll go write it down.

I wrote a whole poem just reading the Wikipedia page for the trial of Clay Shaw at night when I came home from jury duty. I would read a sentence and I'm like “Oh, gotta go write a poem.” I didn't even think of it as writing a poem but then I looked and I had like 12 pages of these connected poems. Claudia Rankine said, “I am a relational being and doing research is keeping the self in relation.”

That's what poetry is. I think people think it's something else, like it's school or there has to be a point but there doesn't.

Favorite poet:

When I read Eileen Myles's I Must Be Living Twice it was really great because... I like Frank O'Hara; I read his poems, he was recommended to me, and reading Eileen Myles is kinda what I always wished Frank O'Hara would be.

I don't know if it's cause I'm a woman or because I didn't have an Ivy League education or—nouns I might not be familiar with, references, it's not even that. It's just something about the thought process. That's something I'm really into: showing your work, showing your thinking, but also family-making, which Maggie Nelson talks about in The Argonauts and other works.

One thing I didn’t like about poetry was that I was expected to get all these Biblical or Greek mythology references, and yet people complained if they didn’t get mine. Here’s a bit of a conversation I always go back to: Maggie Nelson’s speaking to Wayne Koestenbaum: “I remember you talking about reading Frank O’Hara and people saying, oh, they felt put off by all of his references, and you were saying, “are you kidding, like when I arrived in New York I was like, This is the guide to gay New York that I want to know about, so I’m going to get busy with every reference on Second Avenue,” you know, but I think that that’s a kind of—I think of that as a form of gratitude, and I think of that as a form of homage.” It’s about making one’s own canon from one’s own milieu and sensibilities and fandoms.

Myles talks about female lineage and how it gets lost. I wrote a paper about Zora Neale Hurston and I know she was lost, and Alice Walker rediscovered her in like the '70s. I think that's really important: I guess writing that research paper I got in the mode of footnoting, and being a nonfiction writer, same thing—a "prove it" kind of thing, receipts. Footnoting can be family-making.

In nonfiction but in poetry too, just sort of honoring the associations, how that's the magic of it. For a while I was trying to make things easier for the reader, but it's not about that. It's about how my mind works, my particular mind.

I really responded to how in-the-body Myles’s poems were. Maggie Nelson calls it metabolic. In “My Devil” I read “Genitals / itchy. That’s / me” and thought, same. Lot’s of coffee drinking. Bread. This reminds me of another thing: lectures. Myles’s Twitter bio says, “Poet, writer, talker.” You can look up any number of lectures they’ve given. One of my favorites is on spoilage. Seems like a given, with my last name meaning “dry bread,” but I hadn’t realized how much I share this preoccupation till I watched and listened.

Over a year ago I recorded a bunch of the poems I liked before I returned my copy of I Must Be Living Twice to the library. It’s fun to try to listen for the part(s) of each poem that first struck me.

In “A Poem,” for example, the first poem I recorded, it was “from the point of / view of all the nooks and crannies / I occupied in my childhood.” It reminded me of houses, bay window seats I always wanted to sit in, and also English muffins (bringing store-bought ones for international day in sixth grade while others made recipes to represent the countries on which they wrote reports).

The second time I read “A Poem” was on a turbulent plane. I made a little stop motion animation about it. Funny, when I recorded it I read the line as “and now that it shows we should really go slow” and only when I made the movie did I notice it actually says “go really slow.” The particular mind thing—misreading or mishearing something can change the course of one’s life, you know?

Favorite poem:

Writing

By Eileen Myles

I can  

connect

any two

things

that's

god

teeny piece

of bandaid

little folded

piece

of bandaid

I ran

to the

bathroom

to see

my face

sometimes

I don’t

want to

see my

face in

the mirror

sometimes

I can’t

bear

my thoughts

sometimes

I can’t

do anything

but that’s

okay

bandaid

book

god

that’s

right

"I can / connect // any two / things // that's / god"—that is writing to me, associations and relations. Making connects is god. And the sadness and shame in there too, based in the body, like in “Romantic Pain”: “I / want to look at myself in the mirror / but I look so shitty I don’t want / to expose my third rate vanity.” (Earlier in the poem: “I looked pasty in the bathroom. / Eyes like raccoons. My hair’s screwed up. / My jacket looks ‘boxy.’”) And cycling between feeling powerful or creative and powerless or depressive, feeling both at the same time. I love bothness.

“bandaid / book / god // that’s / right.” I’m developing a stewardship/arts workshop, and before we begin, say, picking up litter this is one of poems we read. (The others are “Salute” by James Schuyler and “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay.) Sweeping a place of litter you definitely might find a bandaid. That it would be called god or even be in a poem is important to me.

It reminds me of an exercise in Brigitte Byrd’s class, my first poetry class at FSU, to write an ugly poem or a non-poem-seeming poem. I’d been disenchanted by Poem-poems, full of metaphor and Western references, and this really opened things up for me.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Andrea Panzeca is the author of Rusted Bells and Daisy Baskets. She earned her M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing at the University of New Orleans, where she was associate nonfiction editor of Bayou Magazine. She has published poetry, memoir, and a scholarly essay on Zora Neale Hurston. She also cartoons, sculpts, dances, and teaches in New Orleans, where she lives.

56---> jamika & fork & hughes & burroughs

Below are the texts that make-up this collaborative tribute to poets Langston Hughes and William S. Burroughs:

them nowhere home blues

(for brothah from another other langston hughes)

by jamika ajalon

blues?

carry in my shoes

from one go to another

stop nowhere

imprints pissed stained

pleasured worlds of road

avenues & boulevards

askLangston

Hughes would agree--

the poetry of the city marianates

skull high sands

in loose coin & blues bones

tide in black froth & indigo

tied upin a knot

outbackmy throat

got me up and left me gone

this road aintso short

but it don't seem so long

them blues sisters

 been sitting ‘round me

in they kingdom thrones

singing me they songs

 and I been taking notes

like who evah heard

why she take to the road

when nowhere is home for long …

no nowhere is home for so long

NOWHERE BLUES cut up

by fork burke

Langston would agree – black and froth & indigo – pleasured worlds – throat sands – taking notes

who imprints singing – why this road – pissed one go to don’t

they songs - nowhere got avenues

avenues shoes round me kingdom – bones hughes blues loose coin stop

taking when agree

to poetry they kingdom

poetry nowhere marinates like notes

it thrones

stop ain’t sitting indigo city up

songs the & to

they & tied to pleasured

avenues notes long long the kingdom

they me

short of blues? she and indigo up gone

the indigo my nowhere

from for when worlds back pleasured thrones      brothah

the nowhere

don't the in tide been other

to in poetry

brothah bones blues        don't road blues

worlds sitting road Langston

been city

another no gone

my the marinates heard coin of blues

when is ask this don't

sands Langston hughes

longroad they singing Langston

go brothah        it from brothah

boulevards     go pleasured

road tide them home

worlds     why    worlds

city

________________________________________________________________________________

Name: Jamika Ajalon

Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri

Current City: Paris, France

Occupation : Poet/ writer /pluri-disciplinary artist/musician

Why Langston?: 

Langston Hughes is the blues. 

Why Burroughs Cut-up?:  

William Burroughs is another artist whose form inspires me in the various mutations of my artistic practice. My ode to Hughes had already gone through several permutations as a text on paper, and I wanted to transform it further. Fork Burke is probably one of the biggest fans of Burroughs that I know, and his influence is also very present in her work, so I invited Fork to do a cut up of my poem, my ode to Langston—“Them Nowhere Home Blues.” 

Why experimental audio-visual mash-up?:

The word is always the root of my practice, and I often re-work poetry and prose into visual/sonic pieces.  In the end, with “Nowhere Blues,” the video has become a kind of a cut-up of the cut, of the cut-up expressed through layers of voicings, sound, and dissected images.   The mood, tone, and theme of the poem speaks to Langston, but the transformation reflects Burroughs’ form, technique, and philosophy as an artist. Besides, I get a kick out of bringing seemingly disparate elements together to create a whole new beast.

Name : Fork Burke

Hometown: Detroit, Michigan

Current City: Biel-Bienne - Switzerland

Occupation: Poet

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry is like Spirit—It is in everything seen and unseen—I think of poetry as a communication I encounter all the time—All subversive moments are poetry and all poems are love poems—Poetry holds space—I am constantly taking notes—the poem emerges over a period of time, and it is the poets calling to witness possibility of truth—Poetry is both destructive and restorative, and writing poems is the work of Poetry.

Favorite poem:

Where Flesh Circulates

by William S. Burroughs

Its so hard to remember in the world – –   Weren’t you there?        Dead so you

think of ports – – Couldn’t reach flesh – –       Might have to reach flesh from

anybody – – 

           And i will depart      under the Red Masters

           for strange dawn words          of color                      exalting their

           falling on my face   impending attack         satellite in a 

          Gold and perfumes          of light              city red stone

          shadows brick terminal time             wet dream flesh            creakily the

          the last feeble faces             fountains play stale

          spit from crumpled cloth               Weimar youths            on my face

          bodies           where flesh circulates             Masters of color

         exalting their dogs      impending attack of light

         unaware of the vagrant        shadows on the Glass and Metal Streets

         silver flying   scanning patterns    electric dogs

         dark street life   “Here he is now”       staring out

         from the dawn           he strode toward the flesh     jissom webs drifting

         where identity       scarred metal faces      masturbating

         “Who him?” spitting blood laugh on the iron   afternoons

          ejaculates wet dream flesh          in red brick Terminal Time

          red nitrous fumes  under the orange gas flares

         grey metal fall out               on terminal cities

         to the shrinking sky fading color   sewage delta

        caught in this dead whistle stop                     post card sky

        dead rainbow flesh             and copper pagodas                flickered on the

        in a city of red stone       black skin work fish smell and

        dead eyes in doorways red water words             spitting blood laugh

        sharp as water reeds      fish syllables

        stirring this Moroccan sunlight           vagrant noon station

        spent in the mirror          dawn jissom webs       drifting rainbow

        speeded up from afternoon’s       slow ferris wheel          flesh.

(Originally published in Floating Bear 24 in September-October 1962. Republished by RealityStudio in August 2010.)

Why do you like this poem?

William Burroughs asked—What are words and how do they function?—Writers work with the enemy—The idea of freeing text and breaking the spell cast over words resonated with me deeply—The work of Burroughs goes beyond writing and storytelling—It is visionary work—Everything vibrates—I listenspeak—Burroughs seemed to be the keeper of a whole relationship to language that extended off the page and that is happening all the time—The Cut-ups—The recordings —Burroughs said, When you cut into the present the future leaks out”—There is no separation.

55---> kristin & glück

Kristin Sanders on poetry and on "Pomegranate" by Louise Glück:

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of poetry being "too precious," and I totally get that, but for some reason when I think about my favorite poems, they end up being serious, traditional "poetry" types of poems. In my own writing, I try to stay away from the idea that poetry can only be a certain way, has to be sincere, has to end with a nice fluffy "bow" of a conclusion, shouldn't include certain uncomfortable things. I try to write against those ideas. But the poets who feel the most important to me, whose voices speak to me the strongest—Louise Glück, Margaret Atwood, Richard Siken—definitely do all of the "traditional" things I try to avoid.

I settled on this Louise Glück poem, "Pomegranate," because it's always been a favorite. I'm a fan of her use of Greek myth (especially in her book Meadowlands). I like her pessimism, her honesty about romantic relationships, her frankness, and the subtle ways she brings sex and bodies into her poems. I find her poems sort of sexy, and very sad. Or maybe realistic. I wanted to make a video that reflects my recent move back to the central coast of California, specifically San Luis Obispo: a place where—twelve years ago—Louise Glück's poems were constantly in my mind. Now I've returned, and I'm "my own woman, finally." I think writing poetry means the world sees you a certain way and projects a lot of weird stuff onto you—and this is especially true for women who write in any way about bodies, sexuality, gender, etc. But writing and reading poetry offers you access to "depths" you may not—like Demeter in the poem—normally be offered in your lifetime. I'm grateful for those depths.

______________________________________________________________________________

Kristin Sanders is the author of CUNTRY (Trembling Pillow Press 2017 and a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series), This is a map of their watching me (BOAAT 2015), and Orthorexia (Dancing Girl Press 2011). She has taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; Loyola University, New Orleans; Belmont University; and Louisiana State University. She is currently a poetry editor for the New Orleans Review and a contributing writer at Weird Sister. 

54---> noise & ai

This sound composition is inspired by Ai’s 1979 book Killing Floor. It represents a collaboration between myself and Godefroy Dronsart, who created/improvised the soundscape. Godefroy and I collaborated on this piece because we've been experimenting with poetic noise compositions. We wanted to hear Ai’s poetry in a sonic-world because we’ve never heard it there before.  

_______________________________________________________________________________

Portrait of Malik Crumpler by Scott Benedict

Malik Ameer Crumpler is a poet, rapper and music producer that’s released several albums, short films and five books of poetry. He co-founded the literary journals: Madmens Calling, Visceral Brooklyn and Those That This. Malik has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University, Brooklyn. He is the curator/host of Poets Live, Paris and the new editor-at-large for The Opiate. Crumpler also wrote several musicals, ballets/arias commissioned by Harvest Works, Liberation Dance Theater, Firehouse Space, Panoply Lab, B’AM Paris, B’AM Vancouver, and Double Wei Factory.

Photo of Godefory Dronsart by Sabine Dundure

Godefroy Dronsart writes poetry mainly because novels are too long and let's face it drama requires performers. He is fond of poetry which takes back alleys and has a weird limp, both full of itself and honestly altruistic.

53---> thomas & baudelaire

À une passante

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté 
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

— Charles Baudelaire

Thomas Baas sur son dessin après le poème "À une passante" de Charles Baudelaire:

C’est un instant, un moment aussi fugace qu’intense. Chaque vers résonne comme le pas de la passante. À peine le poème est lu, la femme à déjà disparue. Capter l’instantané, figer la puissance des impressions—cette entreprise admirablement mise en œuvre par Baudelaie est celle, souvent, de nombreux artistes; que ce soit en dessin, photo, musique. Saisir l’impalpable et l’éphémère est de l’offrir à une contemplation éternelle. (1)

_________________________________________________________________________________

Thomas Baas intègre la section illustration de l’École supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg en 1994. Diplômé en 2000, il travaille pour l’édition et la presse jeunesse. Il a publié chez de nombreux éditeurs, comme Actes Sud Junior ou Flammarion, et travaille aussi régulièrement comme affichiste (Rock en Seine, RATP, etc.). (2)

________________________________________________________________________________

Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell/ Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell

(1) This is an instant, a moment as fleeting as it is intense. Each verse resonates like the step of the passerby. No sooner is the poem read than the woman has already vanished. To capture the instantaneous, to transfix the power of impressions—this undertaking admirably put into practice by Baudelaire is often the venture of many artists ; be it in drawing, photography, music. To grasp the impalpable and the ephemeral is to offer it to eternal contemplation.

(2) Thomas Baas was accepted into the illustration program of the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 1994. He graduated in 2000 and works for children and young adult publishing houses. He has illustrated with numerous publishers, such as Actes Sud Junior or Flammarion, and also works regularly as a poster artist (Rock en Seine, RATP, etc.).

52---> jonathan & hayden

Name: Jonathan Finlayson

From: Oakland, California

Current City: New York, New York

Occupation: Musician/Composer

Age: 35

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is that which is sublime and nameless without attribution, the movement that is exceptional within the ordinary, the well of emotional intelligence that exceeds our capacity in all directions.

Poet and poem I’ll use for this entry:

“Perseus” by Robert Hayden

Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield—
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on. 
I struck. The shield flashed bare.

Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone, 
I thirsted to destroy. 
None could have passed me then— 
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy—and lived.

Why do you like this poem?

The simplicity and universality of the themes of Hayden’s poem are what resonate with me. We’ve all encountered something at one point in time so terrifying that it left us paralyzed with fear. Conversely, we’ve all also slew those fears and thus fed on the rush of endorphins that accompanies this type of achievement.

51---> shafiq & das

Name: Mohammad Shafiqul Islam

Hometown: Tangail, Bangladesh

Current City: Sylhet, Bangladesh

Occupation: English Teacher at Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh; Poet; Translator of Bengali into English.

Age: 38

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is very important to me. It gives me immense pleasure, astonishes me, accompanies me at my distress, sometimes takes me far away from the mundane reality, engages me in a distinct thought process, and also makes me happy.

Poetry is a second presence in my daily life – I sometimes speak to poetry, and it also speaks to me. Poetry is what does not let me sleep, leaves me in a space that is both known and unknown. Poetry, to me, is breeze that spreads love and peace. In another sense, poetry represents what happens around us every day, what we experience in our quotidian existence, how we see the world, nature and human beings, and how we feel after a certain shocking or pleasant experience. Through poetry, we see reality in a distinct way, we travel around the world, through spaces, and we discover something new. We strive to imagine a safer world through poetry.

Poetry continues to live, keeps us alive, and we cannot survive without poetry.

Favorite Poem:

Out of many wonderful poems from around the world, I would like to mention one titled “Banalata Sen” by Jibanananda Das.

Why do you like this poet/poem?

“Banalata Sen” by Jibanananda Das is one of my favorite poems—it is indeed one of the most read and acclaimed poems in Bengali literature. The poem has been translated by several translators into English; I have read both the original and the translated version of the poem. Banalata Sen is the name of a girl who is a paradigm of beauty—she stands beside the most beautiful women characters presented by poets, writers and artists. Female beauty is glorified in the poem. Banalata is the poet’s muse who is his eternal inspiration in the creative venture.

The poet sets words in the poem in such a way that one is reminded of a great work that is created out of love—words in the poem are like pearls placed one after another to form an eternal beauty. Reading the poem means walking through a serene forest path surrounded by trees where breeze kisses the leaves with a sense of grandeur.

বনলতা সেন 

– জীবনানন্দ দাস

হাজার বছর ধরে আমি পথ হাঁটিতেছি পৃথিবীর পথে,
সিংহল-সমুদ্র থেকে নিশীথের অন্ধকারে মালয়-সাগরে
অনেক ঘুরেছি আমি; বিম্বিসার-অশোকের ধূসর জগতে
সেখানে ছিলাম আমি; আরও দূর অন্ধকারে বিদর্ভ নগরে;
আমি ক্লান্ত প্রাণ এক, চারিদিকে জীবনের সমুদ্র সফেন,
আমারে দু-দন্ড শান্তি দিয়েছিল নাটোরের বনলতা সেন ।
 
চুল তার কবেকার অন্ধকার বিদিশার নিশা,
মুখ তার শ্রাবস্তীর কারুকার্য; অতিদূর সমুদ্রের পর
হাল ভেঙ্গে যে নাবিক হারায়েছে দিশা
সবুজ ঘাসের দেশ যখন সে চোখে দেখে দারুচিনি-দ্বীপের ভিতর,
তেমনি দেখেছি তারে অন্ধকারে; বলেছে সে, ‘এতদিন কোথায় ছিলেন?’
পাখির নীড়ের মত চোখ তুলে নাটোরের বনলতা সেন।
 
সমস্ত দিনের শেষে শিশিরের শব্দের মত
সন্ধ্যা আসে; ডানার রৌদ্রের গন্ধ মুছে ফেলে চিল;
পৃথিবীর সব রঙ নিভে গেলে পান্ডুলিপি করে আয়োজন
তখন গল্পের তরে জোনাকির রঙে ঝিলমিল;
সব পাখি ঘরে আসে – সব নদী – ফুরায় এ জীবনের সব লেনদেন;
থাকে শুধু অন্ধকার, মুখোমুখি বসিবার বনলতা সেন।

BANALATA SEN

For a thousand years I have walked the ways of the world,
From Sinhala’s Sea to Malaya’s in night’s darkness,
Far did I roam. In Vimbisar and Ashok’s ash-grey world
Was I Present; farther off, in distant Vidarba city’s darkness,
I, a tired soul, around me, life’s turbulent, foaming ocean,
Finally found some bliss with Natore’s Banalata Sen.


Her hair was full of the darkness of a distant Vidisha night,
Her face was filigreed with Sravasti’s artwork.As in a far-off sea,
The ship-wrecked mariner, lonely, and no relief in sight,
Sees in a cinnamon isle sings of a lush grass-green valley,
Did I see her in darkness; said she, ”Where had you been?”
Raising her eyes, so bird’s nest like, Natore’s Banalata Sen.


At the end of the day, with the soft sound of dew,
Night falls; the kite wipes the sun’s smells from its wings;
The world’s colors fade; fireflies light up the world anew;
Time to wrap up work and get set for the telling of tales;
All birds home ─ rivers too ─ life’s mart close again;
What remains is darkness and facing me ─ Banalata Sen!

Translated by Fakrul Alam

50---> guy & collins

Name: Guy Choate

Hometown: Beebe, Arkansas

Current City: North Little Rock, Arkansas

Occupation: Communications Team Manager at an engineering consulting firm; Founder and Curator of the Argenta Reading Series

Age: 35

What does poetry mean to you?

My default literary mode is set to nonfiction prose, so a lot of times what I think of as poetry is found within larger bodies of prose. To me, so much of the poetry I come across is the isolated brilliance of a section of prose or the arrangement of words within a piece that has no flaws. The relationship written poetry has with spoken language, however, is extraordinary.

I love reading aloud, so I can feel the written word. Sometimes, when I sit down to write something for an audience, I can’t get past an initial desire I have to stand at a podium and scream words at them. (I have no idea what this means.) As a form, though, prose typically requires more context than a yell, while I think a poem can inhabit this space. A good poet needs less reason, in the space of poetry, to hit people hard with words. She doesn’t always have to think about why or where the words, or the act itself of language announcing, must “fit” in the orderly space of essay. I will always be envious of that kind of expression, one that is not obligated to linearity, and the courage to articulate from these associative places. Poetry allows a space for words that don’t always want to be explained.

Favorite Poem:

“Dharma” by Billy Collins

Why do you like this poem?

The poem calls attention to how admirable dogs are for being able to leave the house without any belongings, and I think of the poem every time I put a leash on my own dog. It becomes a subconscious mantra for me when I walk out the door; every day I tell myself, I can navigate all of this, the whole world, without the help of the material goods of a house, what I put in the house. It find it so reassuring.

___________________________________________________

You can follow the (un)material-ridden days of Guy Choate on his very active and humorous photo-a-day blog.

49---> lindsay & spenser

Name: Lindsay Turner

Hometown: Kingsport, Tennessee

Current Town: Greenville, South Carolina

Occupation: Poet and translator, and I’m finishing my PhD in English at the University of Virginia.

Age: 32

What does poetry mean to you?

I just finished a long project about the work of making poems. For me, poetry is that activity of arranging language, really grappling with forms and words, and the meanings forms and words are charged with before you even get your hands on them. I like to think that there’s something valuable and necessary in that activity, however it gets done.

But that’s “poetry” from the poet side and not the reader side. As a reader—actually I think it’s hard to say what poetry means for people who read it, and that that’s part of what poetry is. In the same way that there’s no one way for people to be activists or to change the world, for example—I mean that it would be wrong to tell people how to do these things—poetry’s a space that has to mean lots of different things for different people. Maybe poetry helps hold spaces like that open, reminds us that they exist.

Favorite poem or poet /Why do you like this poem?

I never pick favorites. For a long time I’d hedge and say that Elizabeth Bishop was a favorite, but I have such trouble saying anything much about her poems. I’ve been on a Bernadette Mayer kick for a year or so now. I love her work because it helps me write about the spaces where I live, which is something I avoided for a long time. I’m trying to read through the collected June Jordan but I keep getting stuck reading her off-rhymes (I really like off-rhymes) over and over.

But here are a couple of stanzas from Edmund Spenser’s long elegy, Daphnaida, written in 1591. I know not everyone has this problem, but sometimes I catch myself thinking that poetry has to have some kind of intellectual interest, or at least interesting emotion. And then there’s this: poetry about stupid, repetitive, non-cathartic, boring, useless anger and grief. It doesn’t offer anything false. It just comes up out of the centuries and is right there:

'Hencefoorth I hate what ever Nature made,

And in her workmanship no pleasure finde:

For they be all but vaine, and quickly fade,

So soone as on them blowes the northern winde;

They tarrie not, but flit and fall away,

Leaving behind them nought but griefe of minde,

And mocking such as thinke they long will stay.

‘I hate the heaven, because it doth withhold

Me from my love, and eke my love from me;

I hate the earth, because it is the mold

Of fleshly slime and fraile mortalitie;

I hate the fire, because to nought it flyes,

I hate the ayre, because sighes of it be,

I hate the sea, because it teares supplyes.

‘I hate the day, because it lendeth light

To see all things, and not my love to see;

I hate the darknesse and the drery night,

Because they breed sad balefulnesse in mee;

I hate all times, because all times doo fly

So fast away, and may not stayed bee,

But as a speedie post that passeth by.

‘I hate to speake, my voyce is spent with crying:

I hate to heare, lowd plaints have duld mine eares:

I hate to tast, for food withholds my dying:

I hate to see, mine eyes are dimd with teares:

I hate to smell, no sweet on earth is left:

I hate to feele, my flesh is numbd with feares:

So all my senses from me are bereft.

‘I hate all men, and shun all womankinde;

The one, because as I they wretched are,

The other, for because I doo not finde

My love with them, that wont to be their starre:

And life I hate, because it will not last,

And death I hate, because it life doth marre,

And all I hate, that is to come or past.

______________________________________________________________________

Lindsay Turner’s first collection of poems, Songs & Ballads, is forthcoming from Prelude Books in 2018. Her translations include the Franco-Japanese poet Ryoko Sekiguchi’s book adagio ma non troppo, forthcoming from Les Figues Press, and The Next Loves, by Stéphane Bouquet, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. With Walt Hunter, she is the co-translator of a book of philosophy, Atopias, by Frédéric Neyrat, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina.

48---> kyle & berman

Name: Kyle Field

Hometown: Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Current City: Los Angeles, California

Occupation: Artist

Age: 44

What does poetry mean to you?

Well, it is a vague question, and to be honest I create more than I absorb from others these days, though my inspiration phase of early years was, of course, vital. Once you learn how to ride a bike there is less and less need to watch others doing it. Now it's time for them to watch you! Zoom zoom down the cobbly boulevard...

I truly enjoy the activity of puzzling words and rhymes and meter and syllable together, a practice I consider similar to constructing a picture or a painting. There are precise moves balanced with loose moves, and I believe that the difference in weight of several actions gives balance and flexibility to the fabric. Different juxtapositions based on the ever-evolving and mounting vocabulary of all of the words one has ever written, an ever-growing canon that reflects back on itself and rebounds, references, builds on and on, living in its own context and gaining mass glory and legend along the way.

That being said, my ideal place of reading is in bed, half-sick, maybe a mild fever, as I lay dying as the hunter's bow from Hamsun's Pan has felled me, and while bleeding I take in words on, sometimes hopefully, yellowed pages from a used $5 or less volume. This happens after I have run and run and run and worn out to the place that I have nothing left to say. Then, I read, with a notebook close at hand, and roll over with achy back and ribs, to jot in this small book of pages a tweak or grabbed phrase, sometimes twisting it into a song title. I rarely read my own poems. Most of my words ultimately end up in song, for, in some sense, I feel, if the words are strong, a poem is at it's strongest set to music.

Favorite Poet:

I don't have any single favorites, but, for the purposes of this questionnaire, I will say David Berman, as I just dug out of an outdoor storage closet, only yesterday, my 4th copy (I've given it away three times) of his excellent book of poems, Actual Air, from 1999. I will now read from his poem: 

"The Coahoma County Wind Cults"

My dream walked on four legs

toward the remote source

of a pale yellow letter

only to circle around the cabin

when it got there.

A black and white cave rainbow

arched between two old shoes.

Oxygen bounced off the face of a doll,

looking for the slow dazzling guts

of a life form.

There was a moment of sudden clarity

when the pages burned in opera glasses,

like a herd crossing zip codes

or an exhumed idea pressing

at the limits of the marquee bulbs,

my dream pushes air.

Why do you like this poet/poem?

What he does with words, word to word, gives me a liberating life experience, and I like the feeling just to have my eyes pass over them on a page. I also feel like he is always abstractly talking about something so normal in some sense, so universal to the human experience, yet the way he reframes it is intoxicating. That sounds so corny—descriptions and comparisons are odious, especially if the thing speaks for itself so well. Sometimes the spoken word is a jacket too tight.

His dead blog is still quite interesting. He talks about when he quit writing, like when Duchamp quit making art and just played chess, I somehow love these kind of grand gestures.

"SEE Paradise" by Kyle Field is a piece in conversation with David Berman's "The Coahoma County Wind Cults."

47---> jennifer & beatty

Name: Jennifer Jackson Berry

Hometown & Current City: Pittsburgh, PA

Age: 39

Occupation: Claims Adjuster, Poet, and Editor

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry has saved me. When life took turns that I didn't expect and when those turns left me unable to verbalize my emotions, I turned to the page. When someone tells me that one of my poems has helped them, I am so profoundly honored and so deeply happy. When I find a poem that helps me, I am indebted to that poet.

A Favorite Poem:

"I'll Write the GIrl" by Jan Beatty

Why do you like this poem?

Jan Beatty is an amazing mentor, a generous spirit, and a powerhouse poet. This poem speaks to me because I lost my way in the poetry world for a long time. I didn't write anything for nearly ten years after completing my MFA back in 2002. I didn't know how to be a poet if I wasn't going to be in the academy as a professor/teacher. I didn't think that what I was writing about was important, was high-art enough. I started writing again and found the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops, which are workshops for students and community writers that are small, supportive, and intergenerational. I found friendships, support, and validation. I learned that I'll always write the girl, too, and that my voice is important when I'm writing about her.

46---> katie & sandburg

Name: Katie Thompson

Hometown: Montgomery, Alabama 

Current City: Birmingham, Alabama

Occupation: Art Director by day, Visual Artist by night

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is difficult. It's difficult to write, it's difficult to read. Difficult to talk about. I believe poetry reflects our own inability to be absolute in the communication of our thoughts. We've created this incredibly difficult thing that holds as much meaning in between the words as it holds within the words themselves. Poetry is as indescribable as the human condition. 

Favorite poem/favorite poet, & why?

I'll share what has interested me lately: The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg. He wrote it in 1936 in America—so at the height of the Great Depression. I've been fascinated with this era of American history because I think it mirrors some of the anxiety that is currently buzzing here. The whole (book length) poem dives into the existential questions that all human societies tend to cycle through. I'll note that it's largely more optimistic than I am, especially when he approaches any notion of American exceptionalism. It's an interesting exercise to think what this poem would look like, if it could even exist, if Sandburg was writing in 2017 when optimism in America is not as easy to come by.

Here's an excerpt:

The people yes

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

    They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

    The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

    You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:

    "I earn my living.

    I make enough to get by

    and it takes all my time.

    If I had more time

    I could do more for myself

    and maybe for others.

    I could read and study

    and talk things over

    and find out about things.

    It takes time.

    I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:

phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:

"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll

break loose..."

    Once having marched

Over the margins of animal necessity,

Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

    Then man came

To the deeper rituals of his bones,

To the lights lighter than any bones,

To the time for thinking things over,

To the dance, the song, the story,

Or the hours given over to dreaming,

    Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses

and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond

the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food

while reaching out when it comes their way

for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,

for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.

    This reaching is alive.

The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.

    Yet this reaching is alive yet

    for lights and keepsakes.

    The people know the salt of the sea

    and the strength of the winds

    lashing the corners of the earth.

    The people take the earth

    as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.

    Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

    They are in tune and step

    with constellations of universal law.

    The people is a polychrome,

    a spectrum and a prism

    held in a moving monolith,

    a console organ of changing themes,

    a clavilux of color poems

    wherein the sea offers fog

    and the fog moves off in rain

    and the labrador sunset shortens

    to a nocturne of clear stars

    serene over the shot spray

    of northern lights.

    The steel mill sky is alive.

    The fire breaks white and zigzag

    shot on a gun-metal gloaming.

    Man is a long time coming.

    Man will yet win.

    Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

    There are men who can't be bought.

    The fireborn are at home in fire.

    The stars make no noise,

    You can't hinder the wind from blowing.

    Time is a great teacher.

    Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

    the people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people

march:

    "Where to? what next?"

_________________________________________________________

Katie Thompson is a designer and artist living in Birmingham, AL. Currently, she serves as Artistic Director at Studio By The Tracks, a non-profit organization that provides art guidance and materials to emotionally conflicted children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder or other mental illnesses. 

45---> ross & oliver

Name: Ross Peter Nelson

Hometown: Northern Montanifornia

Current City: Helena, MT

Occupation: Playwright/Photographer/Programmer

Age: Slouching towards geezerdom

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is the girl you watch shyly from the sidelines, wondering if she'd like you. And when (or if) you finally get up the nerve to talk to her, you don't understand her at all. Rinse, repeat. Then, after dozens of confusing encounters, there is clarity, a spark. To me, poetry is a distilled essence of a mood, situation, and poet, and it's so personal and idiosyncratic that unless we match at a nearly genetic level, the connection doesn't happen.

Favorite poem:

I love Mary Oliver's "Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard."

Why do you like the poem?

I love the contrasts: it's dark; it's whimsical; it speaks of valentines; it speaks of death. It's imagery evokes so much. Her "festal mouse" conjures up an almost Arthurian gala, and the "aluminum ladder of his scream" is both aural and visceral. Her little owl is both darling and dread. It's a portrait no painter or photographer could ever match.

Mary Oliver is attuned to nature in a way that inspires awe. Her visions are clear-sighted; when she celebrates new life in the spring, she doesn't spare the observation of the whitened bones that didn't survive winter.

There is one bit of poetic advice that I try to hold to in my own writing and that is Emily Dickinson's "tell the all truth, but tell it slant," and I love writers whose own "slant" lets me see things anew.

_________________________________________________

Ross Peter Nelson self-identifies as a playwright but enjoys cross-genre experiences as well. His plays have been produced on three continents, and his drama, fiction, photography, and political essays have been published in magazines, anthologies, and appear online. His dark internet surveillance comedy Becoming Number Six premiered last fall in New Orleans, and he will spend October 2017 as playwright-in-residence at Can Serrat, Spain.

44---> leela & sexton

Name: Leela Chantrelle

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

Current City: Paris, France

Occupation: Literature Teacher

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is a means of identifying my own emotions and feeling less alone. (And that is what I hope my poetry could do for people when they read my work.)

Favorite poet/poem:

My favorite poet is Anne Sexton, and my favorite poems of hers would have to be "For my Lover Returning to his Wife" and "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator."

Why do you like this poet, these poems?

I like Anne Sexton because she has always felt as closely to myself as I have found in writing, because her poems make me cry and because she writes about masturbation as a marriage between the bed and the self and because no one else can do that. I used to be afraid that I would kill myself like her, now I am more reassured that I will live because of her. 

The following is a poem I wrote with Sexton in mind:

Here’s the IV Drip of It All

                              —for Annie

The grossest part of the body is its own anatomy,

Its inconceivability;

What clothing manages to let loose.

If you closely examine a love handle

You might not understand the temptation

Of the slobber of a lover 

Who’s forgotten to get tested

Or how this

Boy pulls me

Back in – even across oceans,

Watch me end

Up in the middle

Of an ocean. Who’s allowing me to survive?

Find your own oasis.

What if it’s not a page?

What if you can’t hold

Me again, but then

Remember this morning I woke up as pieces

Of evidence, my body curdled around yours.

What’s the solution in permanence?

Like a pair of black boxer briefs, black boxers, black.

It’s good when it doesn’t seem dirty after awhile,

That’s quality.