by David Lehman
STEVE ORLEN was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1942. He taught poetry craft in the MFA program of the University of Arizona for more than thirty years, shepherding dozens of young poets into bright careers, including Michael Collier, Richard Siken, David Wojahn, and Tony Hoagland. He received NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and published many books, including The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems, 1978–2005 (Ausable Press, 2006). He died in November 2010. A month before his death he reported to the editors of New Ohio Review, where “Where Do We Go After We Die” would posthumously appear, that “The weather is cooler, my back & my hip joint flagellate me with every step, my wife is lovely, our son and his wife are visiting from LA and we told them all we want to do is stare at them and hug every once in a while, and Tony and Kath—I think you’re friends with them?—are off soon for Majorca, where they’re hoping to be included on a dig for the soul of Robert Graves.”
Tony Hoagland, Steve Orlen’s literary executor, writes: “Steve wrote under the constellation of Randall Jarrell, the wisest of his own generation of poets, and ‘Where Do We Go After We Die’ is a fine example of that wise, tender mode, braiding fable, anecdote, and meditation upon an undertone of philosophical acceptance. The Jon in the poem is the poet Jon Anderson, Steve’s lifelong friend. As young poets, they labeled themselves ‘Sincerists,’ and sought to write poems modeled upon perfect conversation between intimates, embodying ‘the poignant bravery of the living.’ What’s spectacular in ‘Where Do We Go After We Die’ are the many nuanced fluencies of texture and intelligence, and the masterly closing movement, in which ‘speech reverts’ from the personal to a more omniscient perspective: ‘And actions lose their agency—It came to pass—’ The poem is about stories as much as death: its final lines rather magically depict the end of all the narratives, and the onset of speechlessness.”
ALICIA OSTRIKER was born in 1937 in New York City and hopes to return there after living most of her life in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published fourteen volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven (2007), The Book of Seventy (2009), and The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979–2011 (2012), all with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also written several books of critical essays on poetry and on the Bible, most recently For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book (Rutgers University Press, 2007). She teaches in the low-residency program at Drew University.
Ostriker writes: “ ‘Song’ is one of a series of poems spoken by the old woman, the tulip, and the dog. They have come as a relief after a period of working on a series of poems of heavy self-examination and spiritual quest. I suppose they, too, may be a species of self-examination, but they continue to surprise me. Most people seem to like the dog best, but I am fond of all three characters.”
ERIC PANKEY was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1959. Educated in the public school system, he completed his undergraduate work in 1981 at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and earned his MFA in 1983 at the University of Iowa. He is the author of eight collections of poems. His first, For the New Year (Atheneum, 1984), won the Walt Whitman Award. Heartwood came out from Atheneum in 1988 and was reissued by Orchises Press in 1998. His next three collections were published by Alfred A. Knopf: Apocrypha in 1991, The Late Romances in 1997, and Cenotaph in 2000. Ausable Press published Oracle Figures in 2003, Reliquaries in 2005, and The Pear as One Example: New & Selected Poems 1984–2008 in 2008. New collections are forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches at George Mason University, where he is professor of English and holds the Heritage Chair in writing.
Of “Sober Then Drunk Again,” Pankey writes: “The title does the work of narration in this little lyric. Sober for many years, I tried my hand at drinking again, and apart from the consumption of many fine bottles of wine, little good came of my failed attempt to drink moderately. A melancholic to start with, I was pulled even deeper down by alcohol and the lead weight of depression. This is a poem voiced from that depth.”
LUCIA PERILLO was born in New York City in 1958. Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), her fifth book of poems, received the Washington State Book Award and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. In 2012 she published a book of stories, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, along with a new book of poems, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths.
Of “Samara,” Perillo writes: “A samara is beautiful both as a word and as a thing. It is all but impossible to believe that the engineering of its perfect thingliness could have been accomplished by so random a process as natural selection—but this is just to restate the poem.
“I’m not much of a celebrator, but if I were going to start celebrating, the samara is probably the thing I’d start with. An ideal form, in such marvelous nonmotorized flight, which maybe, serendipitously, gets buried in the dirt, where instead of rotting it starts bursting toward the light as it becomes that complicated thing, a tree. A much better system than ours!—wherein our corpses don’t grow, nourish nothing, and are too chemically infused even to rot.
“Though the readers and writers of poetry are a somewhat obscure subculture in our day and age, they (we) still have codes of conduct and attitude (like: thou shalt not be a warmongering Republican). There’s also pressure—or this is just my imagination?—to keep on the sunny side of the street, or, as Roethke said, ‘Praise to the end!’ But where are the songs of our gory going-down-into-sludge? The cries of ‘Oh, it’s so unfair’? Or: ‘Holy Fuck, somebody do something, the morphine’s not working’? The calls for mortality to be replaced, and now—if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can do this, not to live forever, ugh, but to be recycled for some purpose? To come to a graceful end, which is also a beginning?”
ROBERT PINSKY was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. His Selected Poems was published in paperback in March 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His CD PoemJazz, with the pianist Laurence Hob-good, has been released by Circumstantial Productions. He has won the Italian Premio Capri, the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his translation of The Inferno of Dante (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996). He served as poet laureate of the United States from 1997 until 2000. He is also the author of several critical books, such as The Situation of Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1977), an interactive fiction computer game (Mindwheel, 1984), and a prose book about King David, The Life of David (Shocken, 2006). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.
Of “Improvisation on Yiddish,” Pinsky writes: “I have no idea how to spell the few dozen Yiddish words and phrases I know. They are part of my heard and spoken language—which is to say, the quality of language that interests me as a poet.
“In that heard and spoken texture, Yiddish is not italicized: it is continuous with the English I have spoken and heard, not set off from it as though it were ancient Greek or Latin. ‘Improvisation on Yiddish’ reflects that fact.”
DEAN RADER was born in Stockton, California, in 1967 and grew up in Weatherford, Oklahoma, a farm town along Route 66. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize. His most recent scholarly book, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI, was published in 2011 by the University of Texas Press. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco, where he recently received the university’s Distinguished Research Award.
Rader writes: “One thing I try to do in my book Works & Days is pose questions about identity. I wrote a series of self-portraits that are less sketches of the self and more like episodes of selfhood enacted through dialogues. Some of the dialogues are serious; some are goofy. Among the least goofy is ‘Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas.’ Here I was interested in the connection between and among couplets, couple, and coupling. And I was thi
nking about how long poetic lines might somehow convey how long love (and loss) lasts. I also just like the character of Dido, and I wanted a version of the story in which she makes Aeneas doubt every future decision, she gets her say, and it is her words (not his deeds) we remember.”
SPENCER REECE was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1963. An Episcopal priest currently serving as the chaplain to Bishop Carlos López-Lozano of the Reformed Episcopal Church of Spain, he lives in Madrid, Spain. His first book of poems, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize sponsored by Houghton Mifflin in 2003. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish his second book of poems, The Road to Emmaus, in 2013.
Reece writes: “The people who change our lives are often mysteries. We never really understand them. This seems to me the crux of the story in the Bible that comes at the end of the Gospel According to St. Luke, ‘The Road to Emmaus.’ The author of Luke may also have written Acts, the book that follows Luke in the Bible. The Emmaus story hinges Luke to Acts. The book of Acts shows how the faith spread. And so this story links the grief over death with the hope found in faith. The two disciples, Cleopas and the unnamed disciple, do not realize, at first, what is in front of them. This experience, of not realizing the love that is in front of you until it is gone, resonates deeply for me. Much of the work behind the poem came through the spiritual direction I received from an unassuming Catholic nun of the Franciscan order over a seven-year period. I wanted to pay tribute to nuns in this poem: they, too, are an expression of love before us that is disappearing.”
PAISLEY REKDAL was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1970. She is the author of four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), and Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). She has also written a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Vintage Books, 2002), and a hybrid photo-text memoir entitled Intimate (Tupelo Books, 2012). She teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Of “Wax,” Rekdal writes: “This poem took eight months to write. My inspiration was twofold: first, John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’ which I play with a little bit here; second, the work of my friend Lela Graybill, an art historian at the University of Utah, who is at work on a book about the French Revolution and spectacles of violence. I thought at first that this poem, a response to her work, would be short: two pages at most. Then I started doing research about wax, and fell headlong into an obsession with it as a material medium. More pliable and far less durable than stone, used mainly for modeling processes rather than for finished products, what does a waxwork suggest about permanence? I was also fascinated—OK, maybe freaked out—by why we would feel the need to make a life-size representation of someone like, say, Charles Manson or Angelina Jolie out of a lump of congealed fatty acids, and then pay money to have our pictures taken with it. None of it made sense. Around the same time, as is evident in the poem, my mother had cancer—one of the latest in a string of people in my family who’d had some form of this disease—and suddenly my family and I were having lively, cocktail-fueled dinner conversations about things like genetic testing and end-of-life care. I never thought these issues were related until thirty dead pages into my second draft when I began to realize that my obsession with wax was perhaps an obsession with the ways we see ourselves and our loved ones when we are least in control of our bodies. Once I understood that, the poem began to come to life. The rest was—as it always is—subtraction.”
MARY RUEFLE was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Her latest book is Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), a collection of lectures on poetry. Her Selected Poems (Wave Books) appeared in 2010. She has written a second book of prose, The Most of It (Wave Books, 2008). She is an artist who erases, treats, and extra-illustrates nineteenth-century books (maryruefle.com). She lives in Vermont.
Of “Middle School,” Ruefle writes: “When I reread this poem, two lost memories return. Once I was watching an Italian film (whose name, sadly, I can’t recall) and one of its scenes was shot in front of ‘Cesare Pavese Middle School.’ I loved that! It lodged in my mind long enough to appear in the poem. Another time I was in a Laundromat, staring at the floor. I found a wonderful object there, a little totem figure, a chieftain made entirely out of twist ties twisted together. I took this figure home and for a couple of years he sat on my desk until I gave him to a friend in need of such a thing. I would like to take this opportunity to divulge (now that no one cares) that my principal, in whose office I stood trembling many a time, was later arrested for shoplifting and lost his job. I imagine he must have fallen into a great depression, and come at last to understand those he shepherded. Let us hope.”
DON RUSS was born in Wildwood, Florida, in 1943. He is a retired professor of literature, composition, and film now living and writing in Atlanta. He has published a volume of poems, Dream Driving (Kennesaw State University Press, 2007), and a chapbook, Adam’s Nap (Billy Goat Press, 2005).
Russ writes: “ ‘Girl with Gerbil’ began as an entry in a notebook: ‘a constellation of air-holes punched into the lid of a shoebox—night sky for a little girl’s gerbil.’ The shoebox was temporary, and the little girl I knew is now a young woman. By the time I got back to it, the original idea had begun to gather into itself other preoccupations of mine. Little worlds—snow globes, doll houses, shadow boxes, and such—have fascinated me for my entire life, and now more than ever I wonder about this little world of ours lost in this very big and very mysterious universe.”
KAY RYAN was born in California in 1945. She has published eight books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (Copper Beech Press, 1994), and Elephant Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005), and The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010), all from Grove Press. The Best of It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She served as United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010.
Of “Playacting,” Ryan writes: “Reading W. G. Sebald one morning I came upon his reference to playacting, how tribal cultures kept hold of a sense that their rites weren’t exactly real even though they might really die as a result of them. This sounded pretty much like life. I recognized the feeling of being a little abstracted. It’s a problem, how to die inside something never quite convincingly real.
“No, actually, it’s not a problem, in that it will happen whether I agree or not. But it is interesting—interesting to admit that one is not utterly convinced, to go ahead and admit it and to let one’s mind move around from there. I find these thoughts quite horrible, but the mind doesn’t care if thoughts are horrible; it’s just so glad that they’re interesting.”
MARY JO SALTER was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. She is the author of six books of poems, all published by Alfred A. Knopf. The most recent is A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems (2008). She is also the editor of Amy Clampitt’s Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), and a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th and 5th editions. She lives in Baltimore, where she is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University.
Salter writes: “The setting of ‘The Gods’ is familiar to the poet: I often find myself in the cheapest seats in the concert hall. In the third or fourth balcony, one may feel far closer to the architect than to the composer, and the mind wanders. Who are the gods or goddesses pictured on the mural? Who chose John Greenleaf Whittier’s name to be engraved in marble? Since I can’t see the musicians very well, why don’t I just close my eyes and listen?
“What surprised me as the poem unfolded is that it became, if not very polemically, a feminist poem. I hadn’t expected that. Why aren’t there any women’s names inscribed inside the dome? Do I dare to slip into a seat closer to the action—say, seat D9, which I haven’t paid for?
“‘The Gods’ has its political side, for sure. But I hope the poem is at least a lit
tle funny—that it acknowledges the timeless human comedy.”
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, a time and place she immortalized (well, sort of) in her 1989 novel, Leaving Brooklyn (Houghton Mifflin). She began writing poetry in childhood, but after that wrote mostly prose. However, now and then she is seized with the urge to return to poetry, and from those urges came her first collection, In Solitary (Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), and her most recent, See You in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012). Schwartz’s twenty-two books include memoirs (Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books, Beacon Press, 1997) and story collections (Acquainted with the Night, Harper & Row, 1984). Her translations from Italian include A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg, and Smoke over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, which received the PEN Renato Poggioli Award for Translation. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars.
Schwartz writes: “As far as I can remember, ‘The Afterlife’ did begin as a dream, just as in the poem. How can anyone remember a dream almost a year old? All I recall is that I was in the afterlife searching for my mother, and my great shock and dismay that she didn’t seem at all pleased to see me. I’m not sure whether in the dream I was actually dead or just paying a visit to the dead, but in either case, what a disappointment that my mother greeted me in so perfunctory a way.”
FREDERICK SEIDEL was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1936. He earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University in 1957. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and also from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Cosmos Trilogy (2003) and Going Fast (1998).
