Poetry in Evergreen
Just realized that I had not been blogging about the poetry I published as poetry editor in the spring/summer issue of the Evergreen Review. I had been introducing the poets and their poems on Facebook, so I will copy and paste those introductions here.
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How to write political poems? Try comedy. Paul Stinson does it so variously and well in the group of five poems that I'm proud to publish in The Evergreen Review. He understands that laughter is never pure, but is always tinged with bitterness, regret, longing, self-criticism, and self-satisfaction. Laughter is always destabilizing.
From "Americana":
"If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s that empires love to die. Look, they’re not doing this for their health. And then we can jingle them in our pockets like coins, like a pile of palm-smoothed metal, with a laughing flood of memory, and not a single thought of wealth."
The poems are accompanied by the terrific art of Barbara Weissberger. Images and poems seem made for each other.
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Once in a while you meet poetry that breaks every tenet of good writing that you think you know. That was my encounter with Christian Roberts' poetry. It pays the high costs of abstract nouns and abstruse adjectives. It gives no quarter to the reader. It is opinionated, sarcastic, and sentimental. But there is no denying the energy that surges through every verse, an energy that you soon realize comes from writing as "a way to stay alive," as Jacques Houis has it without exaggeration in writing about Roberts. The writing demands re-reading because it is too rich, too angry, too lost, to be taken in all at once. Give yourself up to the billows.
"Love is a purple toothbrush when your bicycle runs out of rain. I remember cocaine for days / In Union Square, Washington Heights rocket fuel ether, crystal and coffee in Palm Desert, / Being swallowed alive at the Royalton by a pink electric anemone carpet, pulled inside / Of a wall, molecules and all, at the Byrne Arena, punching through a plasmatic Jell-O beast..."
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So pleased to announce that James Midgley is the recipient of The Evergreen Review's Promising Poet Grant. Honestly I'm astonished that he has not published a full collection yet. Publishers, you should be bidding for his manuscript. Read the poems and find out why. Art by Clare Grill.
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1993, Welling, South East London. The Anti-Nazi League and Youth against Racism in Europe organized a march to close a bookshop that housed the headquarters of the British National Party. The march was galvanized by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black British man. It was met by police truncheons and horseback charges. Hannah Lowe's poem "Welling, 1993" remembers what so many American street protesters now know, the awful silence, the unbearable tension, and then all hell breaking loose. The preceding poems published in the Evergreen Review remind us what we should not forget, that these protesters, British and American, are someone's lover, child, family. They are citizens that the police has sworn to protect.
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By now 'process' has become as much cant as 'product' when talking about art and writing. Still, still... 'process' is written all over these poems by Lune Loh, which I'm so pleased to publish in Evergreen Review, process as hot iron, process as tea leaves, process as operable programs, process as variable deltas. Loh's poems show us the possibilities still available in process, for grief, desire, disruption, self-interrogation, and the shape of aesthetic/ecstatic satisfactions, as we "overdosed on data, / strolled about the fibre, / and added and added."
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Gary J. Shipley's poems make me feel physically uncomfortable in their descriptions of bodies self-consuming, starving, and exposed. What makes the suffering bearable, readable, is the voice, questioning and questing, that does not float above the body so much as worms its way out through flesh, blood, and bone. "I repeat myself until the only meaning left is modulation. I get up from my chair. I go in no directions at once." The potent art accompanying the poems is by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak.
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James Reidel's translations introduced me to the utterly compelling poems of Heiner Müller, one of the most important dramatists of the German Democratic Republic. A committed socialist, he saw the reunion of Germany as a disaster for the socialist experiment. However, he did not write about such catastrophes, including the Holocaust, as a detached outsider or self-righteous judge. Instead, without sentimentality or evasion, he wrote as a poet and a German complicit with history, in dialogue with the many ghosts of the European past. This selection of poems, which ranges from the 1950s to 1992, gives a good idea of his various concerns and methods. Adept with both lyrical narrative and postmodernist collage, he makes for an exhilarating read. Other Poems: "Tales of Homer," "The Joyless Angel," "Heart of Darkness after Joseph Conrad," and "Soap in Bayreuth."
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All good poems have direct lines to imagination, reality, and memory. Not just to one or another, but to all three. These three poems by Andrew Shields, which I'm so pleased to publish in the Evergreen Review, have all those lines up and working. And yet, each poem calls a special number its own. "The Castles of America" is on the line with imagination:
"The castles of America
are invisible.
Everyone imagines
they aren't ruins."
"The Story" is in conversation with a Kafkaesque reality:
"Somebody must have slandered him, he guessed,
as if somebody had to tell a story
before two men would come to someone's door,
and tell him with a laugh of his arrest."
And "This Poem" has just put down the phone after telling memory how much it is missed.
"This poem is the translation
of a German poem, but the translator
did it from memory..."
*
How to write political poems? Try comedy. Paul Stinson does it so variously and well in the group of five poems that I'm proud to publish in The Evergreen Review. He understands that laughter is never pure, but is always tinged with bitterness, regret, longing, self-criticism, and self-satisfaction. Laughter is always destabilizing.
From "Americana":
"If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s that empires love to die. Look, they’re not doing this for their health. And then we can jingle them in our pockets like coins, like a pile of palm-smoothed metal, with a laughing flood of memory, and not a single thought of wealth."
The poems are accompanied by the terrific art of Barbara Weissberger. Images and poems seem made for each other.
*
Once in a while you meet poetry that breaks every tenet of good writing that you think you know. That was my encounter with Christian Roberts' poetry. It pays the high costs of abstract nouns and abstruse adjectives. It gives no quarter to the reader. It is opinionated, sarcastic, and sentimental. But there is no denying the energy that surges through every verse, an energy that you soon realize comes from writing as "a way to stay alive," as Jacques Houis has it without exaggeration in writing about Roberts. The writing demands re-reading because it is too rich, too angry, too lost, to be taken in all at once. Give yourself up to the billows.
"Love is a purple toothbrush when your bicycle runs out of rain. I remember cocaine for days / In Union Square, Washington Heights rocket fuel ether, crystal and coffee in Palm Desert, / Being swallowed alive at the Royalton by a pink electric anemone carpet, pulled inside / Of a wall, molecules and all, at the Byrne Arena, punching through a plasmatic Jell-O beast..."
*
So pleased to announce that James Midgley is the recipient of The Evergreen Review's Promising Poet Grant. Honestly I'm astonished that he has not published a full collection yet. Publishers, you should be bidding for his manuscript. Read the poems and find out why. Art by Clare Grill.
*
1993, Welling, South East London. The Anti-Nazi League and Youth against Racism in Europe organized a march to close a bookshop that housed the headquarters of the British National Party. The march was galvanized by the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black British man. It was met by police truncheons and horseback charges. Hannah Lowe's poem "Welling, 1993" remembers what so many American street protesters now know, the awful silence, the unbearable tension, and then all hell breaking loose. The preceding poems published in the Evergreen Review remind us what we should not forget, that these protesters, British and American, are someone's lover, child, family. They are citizens that the police has sworn to protect.
*
By now 'process' has become as much cant as 'product' when talking about art and writing. Still, still... 'process' is written all over these poems by Lune Loh, which I'm so pleased to publish in Evergreen Review, process as hot iron, process as tea leaves, process as operable programs, process as variable deltas. Loh's poems show us the possibilities still available in process, for grief, desire, disruption, self-interrogation, and the shape of aesthetic/ecstatic satisfactions, as we "overdosed on data, / strolled about the fibre, / and added and added."
*
Gary J. Shipley's poems make me feel physically uncomfortable in their descriptions of bodies self-consuming, starving, and exposed. What makes the suffering bearable, readable, is the voice, questioning and questing, that does not float above the body so much as worms its way out through flesh, blood, and bone. "I repeat myself until the only meaning left is modulation. I get up from my chair. I go in no directions at once." The potent art accompanying the poems is by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak.
*
James Reidel's translations introduced me to the utterly compelling poems of Heiner Müller, one of the most important dramatists of the German Democratic Republic. A committed socialist, he saw the reunion of Germany as a disaster for the socialist experiment. However, he did not write about such catastrophes, including the Holocaust, as a detached outsider or self-righteous judge. Instead, without sentimentality or evasion, he wrote as a poet and a German complicit with history, in dialogue with the many ghosts of the European past. This selection of poems, which ranges from the 1950s to 1992, gives a good idea of his various concerns and methods. Adept with both lyrical narrative and postmodernist collage, he makes for an exhilarating read. Other Poems: "Tales of Homer," "The Joyless Angel," "Heart of Darkness after Joseph Conrad," and "Soap in Bayreuth."
*
All good poems have direct lines to imagination, reality, and memory. Not just to one or another, but to all three. These three poems by Andrew Shields, which I'm so pleased to publish in the Evergreen Review, have all those lines up and working. And yet, each poem calls a special number its own. "The Castles of America" is on the line with imagination:
"The castles of America
are invisible.
Everyone imagines
they aren't ruins."
"The Story" is in conversation with a Kafkaesque reality:
"Somebody must have slandered him, he guessed,
as if somebody had to tell a story
before two men would come to someone's door,
and tell him with a laugh of his arrest."
And "This Poem" has just put down the phone after telling memory how much it is missed.
"This poem is the translation
of a German poem, but the translator
did it from memory..."
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