Katarina Bivald in Oakland

Katarina Bivald

One other highlight of the trip to Oakland was catching a presentation by Swedish author Katarina Bivald at Laurel Bookstore. I was unfamiliar with her work, but my dear friend and former colleague Jennifer DeVere Brody, who lives and teaches now in the Bay Area, had read Bivald's brand new novel Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2016), and suggested we check it out. I imagined the standard reading followed by Q&A scenario, but Bivald instead spoke to the audience, taking many questions, for an hour or so, and did so with aplomb. She unfortunately did not read from Readers, though many present at the event already had done so and were quite familiar with the characters and plot.

A few doors down from Laurel Bookstore

Though she writes in Swedish, Bivald is fluent enough in English to be able to walk all of us through many aspects of her writing life, including her experience with repeated rejections followed by eventual purchase of her manuscript; the differences between Swedish and US publishing (think scale, no agents until you are already famous and seek to sell foreign rights, and the comparative lack of diversity of voices there); her interest in 20th and 21st century American literature; her fascination with US small towns, including the eponymous Iowa hamlet "Broken Wheel," where her novel is set; and the absence of anything like US MFA programs and the institutionalization of creative writing in Sweden.

Oakland

Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is set in a small Iowa town, but it turns out Bivald was writing more from her imagination than any real time spent in the state, and one of the errors she got wrong, she laughingly shared, was having the characters wear cowboy hats (!), instead of the more likely baseball caps. When her book was translated into English and published in the UK, the British editor and readers had no problems with this factual solecism, since they were as unfamiliar with this sartorial peculiarity of the American Midwest as Bivald, but when the book was to be published in the US, Bivald shared, the headwear had to change. She has subsequently had the opportunity to tour in Iowa, and, it turns out, readers there are quite taken with the book.

No caption needed

Some of Bivald's most illuminating comments came when she was discussing her pre-publication view of how writers should create versus her changed perspective. As a beginning writer she had the idea that you should issue a book on a yearly basis, and not dither around, yet having made it onto bookshelves as a published author she now believed that authors should take their time and aim to produce the best book possible, however long it required. What she also emphasized was that authors should writer for themselves as opposed to the market, and challenge themselves in terms of their work. For obvious reasons, I appreciated all these comments.

Laurel Bookshop, on the right,
City Hall on the left

I asked her about how she saw herself bridging Swedish and US, recalling as I did so Tim Parks' eloquent discussion of non-US writers aiming for an American readership and the global (Anglophone) literary market. We discussed the differences in translation between Sweden (which, as a small country with a vibrant literary culture undertakes a sizable number of translations, particularly from the US) and the United States (whose publishers, as I've argued elsewhere and as Bowker's surveys point out, issue only a tiny fraction of non-English titles every year). Bivald pointed out that in Swedish, even the nomenclature was different; it was rare to hear "translated" work or "translation" there, whereas in the US, despite the frequent elision of translators in reviews and discussions of writing, publishers must highlight, sometimes to the detriment of a book's marketing and sales, its "translated" status.

A cathedral near the restaurant

Afterwards Jennifer, Katarina, and several others friends (Tanya, Maceo, and Emily) went out for drinks and a meal at Plum Bar, just down the street from Laurel, and I had some of the best cocktails I've drunk in a while. Their Boulevardier, which included barrel aged liquor, was so smooth you could have skated a figure eight across it! Thank you, Jennifer and Tanya, for a delicious meal, and thanks to Sean Hoskin and his friend Alex for the dinner fun at Duende the following night)!

Although it isn't the sort of novel I tend to read, I enjoyed Katarina's presentation so much I am looking forward to her book, and wishes her the best as she continues work on a new one, set in...Oregon!

GRIND Now Published!

Earlier this week I learned that the little art book project, GRIND, that I collaborated on with photographer Nicholas Muellner this past summer at the unforgettable Image Text Ithaca at Ithaca College, is now a book, edited by Nicholas and Catherine Taylor, designed by Elana Schlenker, and published by ITI Press! It makes its debut at this weekend's Los Angeles Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and will be available at ITI Press's booth.

If you're interested you should be able to order it directly from the press very soon, and please also check out their other books,  Tessex!, by Earl Gravy (Emma Kemp and Daniel Wroe), Bobby Schiedemann, Analicia Sotelo and Thomas Whittle, with contributions from the Best Friends Learning Gang and Jodie Herbage, and Andre A. Bradley's Dark Archives.

Below are a few photos of the book (all from designer Elana Schlenker's website), which I cannot wait to hold in my hands!

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

Here's the official announcement that appeared on Facebook!

Celebrating Countee Cullen @ Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx

Many a major American cultural figure is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; Countee Cullen (1903-1946) is among them. One of the most important poets of the Harlem Renaissance, he is perhaps less read than Langston Hughes or Claude McKay, though several of his poems have solidified their place in the canon, among them "Incident," "Heritage," "Tableau," and "Yet Do I Marvel." Like McKay and unlike Hughes, Cullen worked almost completely in conventional forms, yet  as with both of these poets he explored questions of race, politics and society, and, like them, also touched upon sexuality, including (his) homosexuality, though with considerable discretion.

The award-winning poet Major Jackson has now edited a brand new gathering of Cullen's work, Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (Library of America, 2013) and in honor of its publication, Cullen's importance as a New York poet, and his presence in Woodlawn, the Poetry Society of America, in conjunction with the Woodlawn Conservancy, presented "Yet Do I Marvel: A Tribute to Countee Cullen," which featured readings of Cullen's work by Major and fellow poets Robin Coste Lewis and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, as well as vocal performances of song settings of Cullen's poetry by Alicia Hall Moran, with Brandon Ross (of the group Harriet Tubman). They did so in Woolworth Chapel at Woodlawn, which hosts the gravesites of a number of leading cultural and political figures of the past, ranging from Miles Davis and Billie Holiday to Duke Ellington and Herman Melville. It's worth visiting on its own, but the Cullen event made the event obligatory (and how perfect too to honor this great black queer poet on Pride weekend). I ventured up with friend and fellow poet Patricia Spears Jones, and am very glad I did.

Major Jackson, introducing the program

Brandon Ross, at left, and Alicia Hall Moran, at center

I must praise Alicia Hall Moran's singing and Brandon Ross's musicianship before I type any more words; as wonderful as it was to hear the poets, Hall Moran, whose voice and performances I've seen praised ecstatically before but which I've never heard live, added a completely new layer to Cullen's poems. The three songs she sang, "Deep River," "Two Wings," and "Prepare me one body," all arranged by the great Roland Hayes, brought out not just the spirituality of the poems, but their grounding in the Spirituals and the Sorrow Songs. Rowan invoked Longinus's description of "the sublime" and I would concur that Hall Moran certainly took these poems, and singing in general, to another place. I'll add that her enunciation made it possible to hear every word, and though she had a microphone, her projection was so rich and full she didn't need it.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips reading

Robin Coste Lewis bringing Cullen's words to life

The poets too did a fine job in bringing Cullen's words and works to life. Rowan recited "Incident" from memory; through her recital of several of his Epitaphs Robin showed the humor and wit that often get lost in discussions of Cullen, while also giving voice, through several others, to his queer facets; and Major, after an insightful, rooting introduction, read several unexpected poems, including "Shroud of Color" and "Mad Song," that demonstrated how current Cullen's poetry and politics are. All three poets selected judiciously from the rich store of Cullen's work and helped to give a fuller portrait of him and his art. I took notes on a number of the poems, and when I teach Cullen again I plan to use this volume and to introduce Cullen poems I hadn't considered (or didn't know about before) to my students. But first I plan to read the collection.

Everyone on the event's program: L-r (Charif Shanahan, PSA; Alicia Hall Moran;
Robin Coste Lewis; Major Jackson; Brandon Ross; Rowan Ricardo Phillips;
and Cristiana Peña, Woodlawn Conservancy)

Woolworth Chapel, Woodlawn Cemetery

Patricia photographing a large, felled tree
at Woodlawn

A sphinx keeping vigil in front
of the Woolworth crypt

Poem: Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson (1965-1993), not the recent Pulitzer Prize winner but the late lyric poet bearing his name, was one of the promising British versifiers of his generation when he died of HIV-related disease in the early 1990s. A native of Stalybridge, Cheshire, he arrived on the London literary scene in 1984, and cut a stylish figure, while also producing poems very much in keeping with the mainstream conventions of that era. What began to set him apart was his fastidiousness with language and his openness in writing from the perspective of an openly queer young poet, taking up the thread that predecessors Thom Gunn, W. H. Auden and others had bequeathed him. Like so many queer male poets of that moment, of that generation, my generation, he was cut short before he even reached his prime. Johnson published one book in his lifetime, a second appeared only weeks after his death at 28; his Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell, did not appear until 2002. Johnson's poems are usually only a few stanzas long, show almost no formal experimentation or elaborate wordplay, draw upon observations of nature, and often invoke an unnamed beloved, though he was quite clear who, in later years, this was: James Levondowski, his love for whom underlines many lines. Below is "Nocturne," one of Johnson's earlier poems that shows the talent he possessed and gives a hint of what might have been possible had he lived longer. All art is ultimately in part a memorial, and in the case of those many artists struck down before they were able to accomplish what they hoped to, it's but a tiny cenotaph, yet one that, especially in Johnson's case, keeps drawing us back, to read, and remember.

NOCTURNE

October makes censers
Of these wooded places.
Out of the cool ether
Of darkness strike the
Branching crystals of trees,
By night's definition
Of a rarer substance -
The texture of bark
Is wholly light's privilege.

The path leads us to
A locked gate we climb. There is
Tension in our nearness -
The feel of you, our hands
Clasped in recognition
Of their own engaged warmth.

In embracing we earth,
Here, where a stream's course
Through banks of cypresses
Designs a garden,
The motion of its cool blade
As purposeful as blood.

Now the spell of your voice
Concedes to other sounds,
Falling into dark air
That cherishes each note -
This water easing
Over known rocks, through reeds,
The soft consent of leaves.
Drawing me close, there is
Nothing you would not give.

December 1986

Copyright © The Estate of Adam Johnson, from Adam Johnson, Collected Poems, edited by Neil Powell, Manchester: Carcanet, 2003. All rights reserved.

Poem: Aaron Shurin

I cannot find my copy now (it is hidden among the shelves of writing study books that this summer will enjoy reorganization), but Aaron Shurin's (1947-) A's Dream (O Books, 1989), was one of those revelations that serendipity in a bookstore brought me. I had never heard of him or his work, pulled the book off the shelf, realized quickly that I could not put it down, and then read it a number of times, letting its lush, lyrical language seep in and steep. A queer text in theme and form, it enfolds you in its prose, particularly the sequence "City of Men," which I read as specifically about San Francisco, where Shurin has lived for many years and where he directs MFA program at the University of San Francisco, but which I analogized to many an urban setting.

What I particularly love about this sequence is the specificity in the elusiveness; there is something always both before you and just out of reach, like desire itself, though what also overshadows this series of poems is the AIDS pandemic, which was well underway when Shurin wrote the poems. The poems incorporate that horror, but also each day's quotidian beauties. About his work Shurin has said (according to Wikipedia): "Poetry remains for me an act of investigation, by which the imagination makes itself visible in a real world - and through which the inhabitants of that realer world become dimensional." As the little snippet below demonstrates (the "disappear" is not a typo, just to be clear), we can see an imagination crystallizing in words; desire, a life, a world rendered, in its complexity, as poetry.

from CITY OF MEN

I heard my name, the day rose and disappear over the beach. the day on each breath tasted my food,that night roll slowly cover in the cool, his face around my breast. the day inhaling grow pale and disappear, water on his way, up the shores hissing. under the night stillness inclined my morning beach, undressing the friend of my liquid, my most same. at evening while whispering from the bed by me, his way was accomplished. his full perfect arm a health of ripe waters. the day received moon laughing, love lay me that night.

Copyright © Aaron Shurin, from The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems, Jersey City: Talisman House, 1999. All rights reserved.

Poem/Translation: Xavier Villaurrutia

I could not possibly post poetry about the night without again posting a poem by Xavier Villarrutia, one of whose poems I translated and posted back in January. Here is another, "Cuando la tarde," which, like all his poems, I enjoy reading aloud in the Spanish and then in the English. The lush sensuality of his poems, his language that approximates touch while also capturing a particularly powerful experience of yearning, is on full display here. The poem's messages are self-evident, but I would only call attention to the final line, where the heart of the matter lies, and, both in his Spanish and the English translation, bursts forth at the end of the line: el deseo. Desire, indeed, rising like that ash, that dust, that smoke, that absence of light, in the night.

***

CUANDO LA TARDE

Cuando la tarde cierra sus ventanas remotas,
sus puertas invisibles,
para que el polvo, el humo, la ceniza,
impalpables, oscuros,
lentos como el trabajo de la muerte,
en el cuerpo del niño,
vaya creciendo;
cuando la tarde, al fin, ha recogido
el último destello de luz, la última nube,
el reflejo olvidado y el ruido interrumpido,
la noche surge silenciosamente
de ranuras secretas,
de rincones ocultos,
de bocas entreabiertas,
de ojos insomnes.

La noche surge con el humo denso
del cigarillo y la chimenea.
La noche surge envuelta en su manto de polvo.
El polvo asciende, lento.
Y de un cielo impasible,
cada vez más cercano y más compacto,
lluevo ceniza.

Cuando la noche de humo, de polvo y de ceniza
envuelve la ciudad, los hombres quedan
suspensos un instante,
porque ha nacido en ellos, con la noche, el deseo.

Copyright © Xavier Villarrutia, from Nostalgia de la muerte. Introduction by César Antonio Molina. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro Editores, 1999. All rights reserved.

WHEN EVENING

When evening closes its distant windows,
its invisible doors,
so that the dust, the smoke, the ash,
impalpable, obscure,
slow as the work of death
in the body of a child,
keep growing;
when evening, finally, has recovered
the last glimmer of light, the last cloud,
the forgotten reflection and the interrupted sound,
night surges silently
from secret slots,
from hidden corners,
from half-open mouths,
from sleepless eyes.

Night surges forth with the dense smoke
of cigarette and chimney.
Night surges forth wrapped in its mantle of dust.
The dust rises, slowly.
And from an impassive sky,
each time closer and more compact,
ash rains.

When the night of smoke, of dust and ash
envelops the city, men stay
suspended but an instant,
because in them is born, with the night, desire.

Copyright © Translation by John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

Poem: Amy Lowell

I've asked the same question on this blog about her distant relative Robert Lowell (1917-1977), but does anyone read Amy Lowell (1874-1925) any more? In school or elsewhere? I recall having to, and neither liking or disliking her work. Returning to it long after childhood has not increased my enthusiasm, though it has helped me to appreciate her overall efforts more. She was from the same prominent Boston family that produced James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), the sometime-abolitionist, scholar and poet, and her brother, A. Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943), one of Harvard's major presidents, as well as a notorious anti-Semite and anti-gay bigot, yet unlike these male figures, she was not allowed any education beyond what she provided herself, which included copious reading and book collecting. With her wealth she was able to travel, live quite independently for most of her life, and challenge many conventions, including indulging her love of smoking cigars.

Amy Lowell was an early and consistent advocate for free verse, which few poets today think twice about, as well as of stylistic innovation in terms of form, particularly through her theorization of "polyphonic verse," which advocates for the use of prose lines and a range of styles within a single poem (do many poets today even know where this comes from?), but in the late 19th and early 20th century, she stood among the Modernist avant-garde. Her work also articulates an erotics of female desire, especially same-sexual desire, quite transparently in certain ways, yet veiled in others, as is clear in the poem below, the "Moon-white" body leaning beside the poem's speaker the unnamed actress Ada Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell is thought to have had an extended relationship. (A Boston marriage, you could say, but I am unsure whether they lived together.) She also got under Ezra Pound's skin, to his mind hijacking the Imagist movement from him, although the school was big enough for both and whereas Pound approached his poems with a scalpel, Lowell employed a large house-painting brush with hers. "July Midnight" makes a good argument for why we should keep reading her work. Whether there'll be an Amy Lowell vogue is another matter altogether.

JULY MIDNIGHT

Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees,
Flicker in the lower branches,
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.

Copyright © Amy Lowell, from The Complete Poetics Works of Amy Lowell, with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955. All rights reserved.

John Ashbery @ Poets House + Poem: Ashbery

He is 85 years old, and one of the most famous living American poets, a vital figure in mid-to-late 20th century experimental poetics, a central member of the literary coterie that came to be known as a New York School, the winner of every major US poetry prize including the Pulitzer Prize-National Book Award-National Book Critics Circle Award triad in 1975-76, a highly lauded translator of note and a former art critic, and the poet laureate of MTV. I am of course talking about John Ashbery (1927-), who read this past week at Poets House as part of their summer series and the River to River Festival. He had been scheduled to read earlier this year at Poets House, I believe, but had taken ill, and although I have seen Ashbery read many times, all over New York City, I decided under the circumstances that I ought not miss this appearance. Evidently quite a few other people did as well, and I had to join the overflow audience upstairs, to catch him on the TV monitor. And still people kept arriving! And yet Marjorie Perloff claims nobody likes or pays attention to poetry!

He was, once settled into his dovecoat downstairs and with a few sips of water, in fine form, and after Stephen Motika graciously introduced him, Ashbery read both from his most recently published book, 2009's Planisphere, and from his forthcoming one, Quick Questions. (I think I got the name right.) His poems were frequently hilarious. This is one aspect of Ashbery's poetry that I think often gets underplayed; he is one of the funniest poets writing, and his humor is not only droll and witty, but sometimes verges on verbal slapstick. Yes, there is that wistful tone, drenched in a kind of counternostalgia, that he can evoke (belatedness!), but there is also the highly comic in his work as well. He often is not that far either from Laurel and Hardy, whom he cited several times, or The Three Stooges, or Monty Python. Or the Firesign Theater, about which I knew and know nothing, but which Reggie H. told me Ashbery, and his partner, David Kermani (and Reggie too), were and are afficionados. It was initially warm downstairs, but cooled upstairs at least as Ashbery declaimed, and Poets House kindly provided sparkling wine and water afterwards, including to those who were waiting to get their book (for only one was allowed) signed. I got him to sign his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.

Innumerable are the Ashbery poems that I love, but here is one from one of his books that I have always found particularly beguiling, The Double Dream of Spring. It appeared a few years after he returned from his decade-long stay in France, and the poems, dreamlike in their logic (cf. Giorgio deChirico, whose painting inspired the title) but less syntactically disjunctive or overtly playful in their sentiments than his poems of the French years, marked a shift in Ashbery's work and to me pointed to a mastery of idiom that would reach its apogee in his poetry of the next decade and a half, including his most famous book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and the difficult but I think equally beautiful book, Houseboat Days, before he shifted into his next phase, which I call "overheard chatter," and which so many younger poets I knew first encountered and have found utterly baffling. Go back to the early poems, and then the ones of the 1970s, I always say--and then Ashbery begins to make a lot more--well, if not sense, at least impact.

Here are some photos from the event, and then, "For John Clare."

The overflow audience upstairs (there was a packed room downstairs too)

John Ashbery exiting the green room (Reggie H. at right)

The bard of Sodus on the screen

The line of people snaking up the stairwell waiting to get his autograph

Ashbery signing books

FOR JOHN CLARE

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Copyright © John Ashbery, "For John Clare," from The Double Dream of Spring, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970. All rights reserved.