Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Poets Al Black and Tim Conroy put me at such ease during this interview yesterday. I read poems from STEEP TEA and CONNOR & SEAL and chatted with them about writing with playfulness and prayerfulness; navigating life in major cities; the influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ; the inspiration from Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah ; the importance of having a trusted writing group; the primacy of experience, memory, and images over objects. Get CONNOR & SEAL from my indie publisher, Sibling Rivalry .

Heard Gerald Stern read on Monday in a private home just around the corner from where I live. The reading was organized by PL, held under the auspices of the ALSCW, of which I am a new council member. Talked with SS about the conference and the panel on translating Asia. HS introduced me to RW, who seemed very nice. Then Stern read, and talked, for about half an hour. I liked the more compressed poems better, especially a powerful one about the uselessness of cultural assimilation. You still have to pack your leather bag and go when they tell you to. "Tell" is, of course, an euphemism. Stern's parents were Polish and Ukrainian immigrants. There is a lot of truth-telling in his poetry. During the Q&A, I asked him about the controversy over Rita Dove's anthology of American verse, whether his sympathies lie with the editor's principle of "diversity" or with Helen Vendler's "aesthetic" critique of Dove's choices. Given the hedgi...

I Do, I Do In me (the worm) clearly is no righteousness, but this— persistence             H.D., “The Walls Do Not Fall” I’m eating my way through the books of dead women poets— Aemilia Lanyer’s garden where Eve is blameless the robin-eye in Elizabeth Bishop Phillis Wheatley’s bird- of-paradise the swart swan song by Marianne Moore Anna Wickham’s strangled cry the tunes of Li Qingzhao Annie Finch, not the American anthologist, the Countess of Winchilsea the living are eaten too Elisabeth Bletsoe’s Sherborne Woodcock, Pied Wagtail, Starling Molly Peacock Rita Dove And one born in Ghana whose name is a birdcall Ata Ama Aidoo

The Cliché My mother will die with a cliché on her mouth— I’m going to God or Love each other and live — she will embarrass me even in her last moment, common as the Kleenex she blows her nose into. Unlike Rita Dove’s Beulah, she will not think, with horrified longing, There is no China. She will not ask what she knows of Africa, or the equivalent of a land of origin. As far as she is concerned, China is Africa, and Africa may as well be China as anything. She is going to God. She has loved and lived. My mother will die contented, non-tragic.

This year the Dodge Festival was held in the city of Newark. I attended it on Friday, with TS and a few students. In the morning, we heard Michael Cirelli, Dunya Mikhail and Oliver de la Paz in NJPAC. One was hip, one was sentimental, one was lyrical. Then we walked over to the Horizon Foundation Theater, in the Center for Arts Education, and heard Kyle Dargan talked about race and poetry, and why it is nearly impossible for a poet to be in a relationship with another poet.  Finally we heard Billy Collins, Rita Dove and Sharon Olds. Collins was his usual witty self. Of all the poets we heard that day, I was most impressed by Rita Dove. Her new book Sonata Mulattica , about the biracial violin prodigy George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower who inspired Beethoven and helped shape the course of Western classical music, sounds ambitious and achieved. Olds read odes to douche bags and tampons.