by David Lehman
CK: Bloom’s fervor is admirable. Like me, he is one of the few scholars paying attention to contemporary poetry. What, it must be asked, do you think is the function of the critic in an ever-uncritical culture?
TH: I don’t mind critics. That’s why you’re here in advance of the critics and reviewers at the door. But do we really need someone to police the boundaries of poetry? I’m not saying that Adrienne Rich’s 1996 volume was, like, the best of the best, but Bloom became narrow and polemical as he accused Rich of being narrow and polemical. It just wasn’t a very generous introduction. If there is no generosity toward the arts, there is no Art.
CK: Fine. I happen to think Bloom is invaluable to poets. But enough of that. You have a political cento in your introduction. Let’s hear that one before I order another bottle of wine. The Argentinian Malbec?
TH:
POLITICAL CENTO
It takes an American to do really big things. | For just a moment, imagine yourself as an Iraqi living in Baghdad. | dance backward toward town, down the long dirt road | Attack, back off, and then | GO GO GO GO | I believe in life as sure as I believe in death | I know why he is in ache. | How can a piece of knowledge be stupid | It’s all Romeo and Juliet—hate crimes, booty calls, political assassinations. | All thumbs. All bicoastal and discreet and masculine and muscular.| so much to be learned and even more to be researched. | I know some readers need to see their lives reflected on the page | I’ll spend the rest of the week closing an eye to the world | Let that be true.
CK: Well. I don’t know how “political” that is. But you also selected a poem inspired by the Trayvon Martin story: Jon Sands’s “Decoded.”
TH: Yes, that’s a terrific poem.
CK: Is it not too topical?
TH: It’s ingeniously structured. It shows us just how complicated a political poem—I don’t think I trust that descriptor—can be. Actually, I think Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” is more controversial.
CK: We should talk about that one.
TH: I’m not sure what to say about it. There’s so much to say about it. Which is why it’s here speaking for itself.
CK: So we’re not going to talk about it?
TH: Listen, a dude can’t really cheer for a poem called “Rape Joke.” But what I felt reading it is akin to what I feel reading poems white people sometimes write about race. I’m thinking especially of Eleanor Wilner’s “Sowing,” or Tony Hoagland’s poem, “Write Whiter.” A reader can call for silence when a poem engages taboo subjects, or a reader can call for conversation. “Rape Joke” calls for conversation.
CK: Soon our opinions will realign, Terrance. I have faith.
TH: It’s OK with me if they don’t.
CK: Here is the opening sentence of Italo Calvino’s essay, “Definitions of Territories: Eroticism”: “Sexuality in literature is a language in which what is not said is more important than what is.” Does this hold true for poetry as well?
TH: Gerhard Richter says something similar: that painting shows what isn’t there. So maybe it’s a better general statement about the effort of Art to make the immaterial material? Lockwood’s poem does that. As does Joseph Ceravolo’s “Hidden Bird.” But such big declarations about Art, even when it’s Richter or Calvino positing them, are always slippery. Rothko was making fun of rules even as he offered a fairly palatable recipe for Art in his 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute:
1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality. . . . Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient—the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
5. Wit and Play . . . for the human element.
6. The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.
7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.
It’s a pretty good recipe for poetry.
CK: Certainly there are poems preoccupied with death. Mark Doty in “Deep Lane,” Sharon Olds’s elegiac “Stanley Kunitz Ode,” Corey Van Landingham’s “During the Autopsy.” You have more poems by dead poets than most of the anthologies in this series: Kurt Brown, Joseph Ceravolo, Adam Hammer, Larry Levis, Jake Adam York. Interestingly, all of them are deceased white male poets. Is this to suggest the white male poet is a dying breed?
TH [laughing]: Of course not! You really shouldn’t be drinking red wine and espresso.
CK: What are we to make of the specter of death in poetry? Seems the hour is always elegiac, the heart cries out.
TH: I remember something the poet John Shade said once. I’m sure you remember because he said it to you: “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
CK: You, Mr. Hayes, are no John Shade. I pray you do not find this fact offensive.
TH: That’s cool. Sorry I brought him up. Seems like a good time to read the “Death Cento”:
DEATH CENTO
There is a double heart behind the breast bone. | In particular, there is a rift through everything | You/I take/nurture my/your | I live alone with my life | I have come to believe in loss as a way of knowing | for dying is a song the body is learning | the choir shouts Praise! Stand up and be forgiven | It is customary to hold the dead in your mouth | One must at times learn to ignore the body | I mean, what good are words | they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world | I tell them to imagine me on horseback | It takes a while to sort it out | it kisses me goodbye. I’m dead. (Pause). | How absurd to still have a body
CK: Shall we end there? With death? It is a tad depressing, I think.
TH: We can end with the opposite of death. Something you said once: “I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.” It’s akin to the act and ambition of making poems—all Art-making. The desire to change as well as endure.
CK: I am flattered. Let us end, then, with what this interview is not. What this is not, you realize, is your 182-page introduction decorated in graphs, poetic astrologies, recipes, explications, photos, theories on Art and Poetry and America. . . . You implied at the outset that introductions matter little. Doesn’t a bit of judgment improve, and if we are lucky, refine the mind? You might be cutting corners, Sir. Poetry like all Art demands a bit of selectivity.
TH: I think I’ve been selective, Dr. Kinbote. The poems are here as proof. They are a gift to you whom I was thinking of all along the way. How you might, on an overcast day, criticize my choices. How you might, on a well-lit day, salute what I salute, and be transformed as I have been transformed.
SHERMAN ALEXIE
* * *
Sonnet, with Pride
Inspired by Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan & Niko Henrichon
1. In 2003, during the Iraq War, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during an American bombing raid. 2. Confused, injured, unexpectedly free, the lions roamed the streets searching for food and safety. 3. For just a moment, imagine yourself as an Iraqi living in Baghdad. You are running for cover as the U.S. bombers, like metal pterodactyls, roar overhead. You are running for cover as some of your fellow citizens, armed and angry, fire rifles, rocket launchers, and mortars into the sky. You are running for cover as people are dying all around you. It’s war, war, war. And then you turn a corner and see a pride of freaking lions advancing on you. 4. Now, imagine yourself as a lion that has never been on a hunt. That has never walked outside of a cage. That has been coddled and fed all of its life. And now your world is exploding all around you. It’s war, war, war. And then you turn a corner and see a pride of freaking tanks advancing on you. 5. It’s okay to laugh. It’s always okay to laugh at tragedy. If lions are capable of laughter, then I’m positive those Baghdad lions were laughing
at their predicament. As they watched the city burn and collapse, I’m sure a lioness turned to a lion and said, “So do you still think you’re the King of the Jungle?” 6. I don’t know if the lions killed anybody as they roamed through the streets. 7. But I’d guess they were too afraid. I’m sure they could only see humans as zookeepers, not food. 8. In any case, the starving lions were eventually shot and killed by U.S. soldiers on patrol. 9. It’s a sad and terrible story, yes, but that is war. And war is everywhere. And everywhere, there are prides of starving lions wandering the streets. There are prides of starving lions wandering inside your hearts. 10. You might also think that I’m using starving lions as a metaphor for homeless folks, but I’m not. Homeless folks have been used far too often as targets for metaphors. I’m using those starving lions as a simple metaphor for hunger. All of our hunger. 11. Food-hunger. Love-hunger. Faith-hunger. Soul-hunger. 12. Who among us has not been hungry? Who among us has not been vulnerable? Who among us has not been a starving lion? Who among us has not been a prey animal? Who among us has not been a predator? 13. They say God created humans in God’s image. But what if God also created lions in God’s image? What if God created hunger in God’s image? What if God is hunger? Tell me, how do you pray to hunger? How do you ask for hunger’s blessing? How will hunger teach you to forgive? How will hunger teach you how to love? 14. Look out the window. It’s all hunger and war. Hunger and war. Hunger and war. And the endless pride of lions.
from Hanging Loose
RAE ARMANTROUT
* * *
Control
We are learning to control our thoughts,
to set obtrusive thoughts aside.
It takes an American
to do really big things.
Often I have no thoughts to push against.
It’s lonely in a song
about outer space.
When I don’t have any thoughts,
I want one!
A close-up reveals
that she has chosen
a plastic soap dish
in the shape of a giant sea turtle.
Can a thought truly be mine
if I am not currently thinking it?
There are two sides
to any argument;
one arm
in each sleeve.
*
Maybe I am always meditating,
if by that you mean
searching for a perfect
stranger.
from A Public Space
JOHN ASHBERY
* * *
Breezeway
Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasn’t my call.
I didn’t have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red shutters.
Alas if that were only all.
There’s the children’s belongings to be looked to
if only one can find the direction needed
and stuff like that.
I said we were all homers not homos
but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.
We have to live out our precise experimentation.
Otherwise there’s no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards.
Batman came out and clubbed me.
He never did get along with my view of the universe
except you know existential threads
from the time of the peace beaters and more.
He patted his dog Pastor Fido.
There was still so much to be learned
and even more to be researched.
It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,
anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods
in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.
Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us
and promptly looks away, at a new catalog, say,
or another racing car expletive
coming back at Him?
from The New Yorker
ERIN BELIEU
* * *
With Birds
It’s all Romeo and Juliet—
hate crimes, booty calls, political
assassinations.
Who’s more Tybalt than the Blue Jay?
More Mercutio than the mockingbird?
That ibis pretending to be a lawn ornament
makes a vain and stupid prince.
Birds living in their city-states, flinging
mob hits from the sky, they drop their dead
half chewed at my gates. But give anything
even one lice-riddled wing and suddenly
we’re symbolic, in league with the adult
collector of teddy bears, the best-addressed-
in-therapy pinned like a kitty-cat calendar in
every cubicle. Pathetic, really. With birds,
make no exception.
Alright. It’s possible
I’ll give you this morning’s
mourning doves, there on the telephone
wire, apart from the hoi polloi—
something in their pink, the exact shade
of an aubade. And shouldn’t we recall
that keen pheromonal terror, when dawn
arrives too bright, too soon? Let’s hope we
never muster what God put in the goose’s
head. For this,
you keep the doves.
from The Normal School
LINDA BIERDS
* * *
On Reflection
—Michael Faraday
I will never contain the whole of it, he said,
the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp
floating swan-like near the angle of incidence.
Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern
and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small
for the swan. To reflect the object entirely,
he said, stepping back to the lectern,
the glass must be half the source’s height.
To reflect the object entirely—the lamp,
or a swan, or my figure before you—
the glass must be half the source’s height.
Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.
My figure before you, the lamp’s swan,
reflects my object entirely; that is, unlike
thought, which easily triples—or transforms—the whole,
the mirror is bound by harmony.
Entirely. Unlike the object reflected.
Finally, when you back away from the glass, your image—
the mirror is bound by harmony—
always doubles the distance between you.
As it finally backs away through the glass,
light doubling its loss through angles of reflection,
your image doubles the distance between you—always
twice as far from the source as you are before it:
Like a thought doubly lost through an act of reflection
floating swan-like past its angle of incidence,
twice as far from its mate as a lamp from a mirror
that will never contain the whole of it.
from The Atlantic
TRACI BRIMHALL
* * *
To Survive the Revolution
I, too, love the devil. He comes to my bed
all wrath and blessing and wearing
my husband’s beard, whispers, tell me who
you suspect. He fools me the same way every time,
but never punishes me the same way twice.
I don’t remember who I give him but he says
I have the instinct for red. Kiss red. Pleasure red.
Red
of the ripe guaraná, of the jaguar’s eyes
when it stalks the village at night. Red as the child
I birthed who breathed twice and died.
The stump of flesh where the head should be,
red. Pierced side of Christ, red. A sinner needs
her sin, and mine is beloved. Mine returns
with skin under his fingernails, an ice cube
on his tongue, and covers my face with a hymnal.
I never ask for a miracle, only strength enough
to bear his weight. Each day, I hang laundry
on the line, dodge every shadow. Each night
he crawls through the window, I pay with a name.
from The Kenyon Review
LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO
* * *
Bird, Singing
Then, every letter opened was an oyster
Of possible bad news, pried apart to reveal
The imperfect probable pearl of your death.
Then, urgent messages still affrighted me, sharp
Noises caused the birds not yet in flight to fly.
Then, this was the life of you.
All your molecules
Gathered for your dying off
Like mollusks clinging to a great ship’s hull.
Ceremony of wounds, tinned,
Tiny swaddled starlings soaked in brine.
A bird, singing in his wicker cage, winds down.
Now, a trestle table lined with wooden platters
Neat with feathered wings of quail tucked-in.
Until you sever the thing, from self, it feels.
Thereafter it belongs to none.
You have nothing to be afraid of, anymore.
Outside Prague, I find you warm
Among the million small gold bees set loose
