A New Collection from Steven Cramer

Clangings
By Steven Cramer
www.stevencramer.com

From Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
502.458.4028
info@sarabandebooks.org
Fax: 502.458.4065

About Clangings

Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Steven Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.

Two poems from Clangings

[Dickey’s death feels all over me.]

Dickey’s death feels all over me.
I try not digging at the thing. He died
before I could grow his hemlock seed.
Boyo, the tricksters of this cemetery,

long-sleeved shorts with their shirts off,
can’t tell a cow’s dead till it’s slaughtered.
He was a sublime Halloween snicker,
bat dark meat. Never watched golf.

Not much now but gum and minerals,
blue pods, tainted entertainments.
Our folder warps, drifts, frags, taunts.
Everest ground down to soil samples.

I’ve lost my sprite, my shot at distemper,
nobody’s rabies can pillow this blow.
Nobody’s but Dickey’s. My “he” is “O,”
who once flicked hearts, a lamplighter.

I could clang wish-bells, break out a dish,
but I know he’s the headache at the base
of my throat. He’s left ice in my voice,
foam round rocks where we used to fish.

###

[First I denied the no-seeums speckling]

First I denied the no-seeums speckling
my dead boy. Over here, they called.
I overheard there. My shoulder thawed,
felt fine. I exhaled my unson’s song.

Then came blame. Used up, I sued it.
Anger management? I nail-gunned
flies all over drywall. My tantrum
plucked a geshrunken dish; threw it, it

pitched back, thew! Pawed hardball,
return me his birthdays. I’ll be prompt,
to Commencement, promise. I’m unkempt?
I’ll kempt. But worms don’t dicker a deal . . .

I resigned my shift; I mean, took a break.
Blanket our dog wouldn’t even adopt,
I laid off apostrophes to the teardrop.
His name sank, forsook all heartache—

no more pantomime palominos.
If you can't stage miracles, curtain.
It’s not like you become Adam, even
whistling to the herd in widow grass.

Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books. Clangings (2012) by Steven Cramer

To Order Clangings

Order the collection at Sarabande Books, where there’s also a link to an interview with Steven Cramer, a Reader’s Guide, and a list of upcoming readings by Mr. Cramer.

Comments About Clangings
________________________________________

“… one of our favorite poetry books of 2012″ - Memorious

“‘Clangings' are specialized modes of speech schizophrenics and manics use to express themselves, and identify themselves, and communicate, so desperately and wittily and forlornly and with such resourceful energy. That's wonderfully registered here. But one gets to feel, reading it, that these diagnostically defined ways of using language are only extreme cases of how we all use language. Steven Cramer handles and contends with and profits from that extremely difficult, intensely compressed, stanzaic form, over and over, inventive all the way, hilarious a lot of the time, and scared, scary, distanced and objective, and very moving. Clangings is a wild ride.”

—David Ferry, 2012 National Book Award winner for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

“Humane from its aching heart to its flummoxed nether regions, whipsmart, formally acute but unfussy, and entertaining as all hell—Steven Cramer's new book shreds our airwaves with an inventiveness that is rare. Rare, as in once-in-a-lifetime-if-you're-lucky rare. It balances perfectly on the knife-edge of improvisation and necessity. Clangings is magnificent.”

—David Rivard, author of five poetry collections including Otherwise/Elsewhere and Sugartown

“Steven Cramer’s Clangings is a poetry not of madness, nor even the merely unspeakable, but instead irresistibly musical musings that reveal a command of language only achievable through fierce intelligence and the most piercing wit. A brilliant revision of the clinical term that describes speech that sacrifices sense to sound, here one finds that sound itself—'Two rhymes snagged between rhymes,/ spun puns, all my blinds up in flames./ The voices in noise are getting wise,' as Cramer writes, indelibly—is indeed sense. Poetry is healing here, the astonishing process itself laid out on these pages in all its utterly humane glory.”

—Rafael Campo, MD Harvard Medical School author of The Desire to Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry

“Steven Cramer’s Clangings may well be the most disturbing book of verse ever written! Binding the warp of psychotic blurts into a poetic weft is one way to make all of language unbearably strange. But the poems here disturb and illuminate—that’s the magic.”

—Jean McGarry, author of Dream Dateand A Bad and Stupid Girl

To Order Clangings

Order the collection at Sarabande Books, where there’s also a link to an interview with Steven Cramer, a Reader’s Guide, and a list of upcoming readings by Mr. Cramer.

Clangings

A new collection from Steven Cramer (www.stevencramer.com)

From Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
502.458.4028
info@sarabandebooks.org
Fax: 502.458.4065

Everyone Who Left Us by Steven Cramer

Everyone who left us we find everywhere.
It’s easier, now, to look them in the eyes—
At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us.

It’s easier, now, to look them in the eyes,
Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm.

Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk—
Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness.
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm,
We think of calling them, leaving messages.

Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness—
No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction.
We think of calling them, leaving messages
Vivid with news we’re sure they’d want to know.

No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction:
We close our eyes in order not to see them.
Vivid with news, we’re sure they’d want to know
We don’t blame them, really. They weren’t cruel.

We close our eyes in order not to see them
Reading, making love, or falling asleep.
We don’t blame them. Really, they weren’t cruel,
Though it hurts every time we think of them:

Reading, making love, or falling asleep,
Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms.
Though it hurts every time we think of them,
Like a taste we can’t swallow their names stay.

Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms,
Then, they leave us the look of their faces
Like a taste we can’t swallow. Their names stay,
Diminishing our own, getting in the way

At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Everyone who left us we find everywhere,
Then they leave us, the look of their faces
Diminishing, our own getting in the way.

How did you come to write this poem?

I confess I don’t entirely recall. I know it was one of the first poems I finished after completing my third book, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand. Writing is always a struggle for me, especially after a book is done. I remember, dimly, that I’d been reading some of my handwritten notes and fragments, and the sentence, “Everyone who left us we find everywhere,” seemed like a good sentence with which to start a poem. But I don’t remember when it occurred to me to explore the challenges and opportunities of writing a pantoum—probably after I’d written a quatrain with lines that seemed to merit repeating. All pantoums must develop that way, no?

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

The poem doesn’t pertain to a specific experience of recovery. Between 1987 and 1996, the year the poem was written, my father, brother, and mother died. Certainly the poem, in part, grapples with that sequence of losses, and the way such losses leave deep impressions. In retrospect, the structure of the pantoum—the insistent recurrence of its lines—seems like the right form for the way lost loved ones keep “turning up” in memory. Of course, had I been aware of that, I would never have written the poem.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I tend to “construct” poems rather than write them—that is, I generate material in the form of fragments, scribbles, lines or stanzas that go nowhere—then reread them and try to make something of the passages that show some promise as language. “Everyone Who Left Us” certainly developed out of that process. The other day I heard a friend describe writing a poem in one sitting, starting with a first line and then simply—simply!—following the verbal cues to a more or less serviceable first draft. I seethed with envy.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Well, the usual suspects in the English: Shakespeare of the sonnets and the great, introspective monologues (really, meditative poems in and of themselves); Keats, Dickinson (who loved Keats); the modernists except 90% of Pound (love that 10%, though). First hearing Eliot read out loud by my high school English teacher made me fall in love with poetry. I recently had the opportunity to write about W.S. Merwin, which re-introduced me to what I like and don’t like about his poetry. Decades after everyone else, I’ve just gotten around to reading War Music, Christopher Logue’s “account” of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of the Iliad. It’s as astonishing as everyone has said—every rift packed with ore, as Keats said poetry must be—and page-turningly readable. What took me so long? I hope it will not take me as long to read the other parts of this project which took him from 1962 until 2005. He died in 2011; I don’t know if there are any posthumous volumes forthcoming. I hope so.

What are you working on now?

My fifth collection, Clangings—a book-length sequence of poems comprising a single dramatic monologue—was released this month from Sarabande Books. I wrote it in a kind of white heat in 2009 and 2010. The speaker manifests the thought disorder known as “clang associations”–mental connections made between dissociated ideas through rhymes, puns, neologisms, and other non-linear speech, occurring frequently in schizophrenia and mania. I’m no more schizophrenic than Browning was the Duke of Ferrara; and the book, I hope, isn’t a fictionalized or versified case history. The clinical premise allowed me to write in a new way—more irrationally than is characteristic of my work.

Now I’m mainly trying to figure out how to write poems again. As I said, it’s always a struggle.

STEVEN CRAMER's new collection of poetry is Clangings (Sarabande, 2012). He is the author of four previous collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987); The World Book (1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997); and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Steven’s poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets, The POETRY Anthology, 1912–2002, and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012).

Steven has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge. His new collection Clangings is available at Sarabande Books.

His poem “Everyone Who Left Us” was anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books, 2008).

Bogger’s note: A friend recently died, someone with whom I worked for several years, but hadn’t seen in subsequent years. She was bright and gregarious but progressively overcome by a demon. She died of a drug overdose earlier this month. After I heard the news, I thought of this poem, and as I read it, Steven Cramer’s pantoum drove home this point: The longer you live, the more people you know and love die, and if you are lucky enough to be one of those who continues to wake up each morning, then you must carry the responsibility of grief. Thank you, Steven Cramer, for helping me bear the grief through another day.
–Tom Lombardo, Editor, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events .

Rachel Tzvia Back’s New Collection

A Messenger Comes
by Rachel Tzvia Back

From Singing Horse Press
http://www.singinghorsepress.com
5251 Quaker Hill Lane
San Diego, 92130

An excerpt from A Messenger Comes appears below these words of praise.

Rachel Tzvia Back’s A Messenger Comes is poetry that, without apology, centers of grief and its faithful companion, memory. The reality of death—always a shock—pulls us inward and apart, but the messenger from the living insists that we mourn while we continue on with our lives. Back’s poems are moving, eloquent, and delicately honed.
—Irena Klepfisz, author of Keeper of Accounts, professor of Women’s Studies, Barnard College

A Messenger Comes is no simple book of consolation. It is a book of questions: Can grief be sustained? What can we learn from the grief of another? Can we know another’s grief? What can we say to console her? What if grieving is not something that we should get over? What are the connections between grief and memory? How does a poem intensify our memory of the ones we have lost? Lost to what? A harrowing and inspiring book of poems!
—Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit and Deathwatch for My Father, Editor, Contemporary & Modern Poetics Series, University of Alabama press

In the poet’s own words:

The title A Messenger Comes is lifted from a passage I read in Leon Weiseltier's seminal scholarly work Kaddish – on the history and evolution of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The extract – which is my new book's epigraph – goes as follows:

A messenger comes to the mourner's house.
"Come," says the messenger, "you are needed."
"I cannot come," says the mourner, "my spirit is broken."
"That is why you are needed," says the messenger

The book is a collection of elegies for my sister and my father. It is very much a book of a broken spirit.

Excerpt from A Messenger Comes by Rachel Tzvia Back

Lamentation

          (for my father, on his dying)

(1)

In worded a world
how broken
from beginning:

sunburst and blossoms all
subterfuges
of creation ruses

of beauty –
fragrant thicket no less
complicit:

we exist
in a shattered vessel
shards at our bare feet –

Someone’s mother cries out
Stand still or
you’ll get hurt – and

you try hard in the slivered
moment
not to move.

(2)

Day asks: What does it matter
putting this anticipated
loss

on the page our
un-readiness
for imagined emptiness

of after –
why
direct half-

worded sorrow to tell
his tale or
your own

inked in another – it's
just another
loss what

does it matter
it has always been
already

shattered –
Day asks
then asks again.

(3)

Because what
can be said?
In the end

the spoken stands
with bare spindly arms
around

its unspoken
brother what
fear

fastens
with tight knots to
your ravaged throat so

what you do
speak is always
poor and pale

shadows
of what
you do not.

(4)

You are dying.

But you do not say so
we do not say –
together

in steadfast
not-saying
alone

the winds orbit
echoing inner chambers where we
linger in

your researching
options thick
folders of studies

long letters to the scattered
family reports
of shifting numbers

platelets and neutrophiles
knotted
defiance of

your fall.

Reprinted from A Messenger Comes by permission of Singing Horse Press and Rachel Tzvia Back. Copyright 2012 by Rachel Tzvia Back.

Rachel Tzvia Back – poet, translator and professor of literature – lives in the Galilee, where her great, great, great grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include Azimuth (Sheep Meadow, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2003), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 (Shearsman Boks, 2007), and A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012). Back's translations of the poetry of pre-eminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg, published in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005) represent the most extensive selection of Goldberg's poetry in English and were awarded a 2005 PEN Translation Award. Back has translated into English poetry and prose other significant Hebrew writers, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tuvia Reubner, Hamutal Bar Yosef, and Haviva Pedaya. Back is the editor and primary translator of the English version of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions, 2009) – a collection named "haunting" and "historic" by American poet Adrienne Rich. Ms. Back’s poems have been anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events .

Rachel Tzvia Back "what has anchored us"

In a world swarming with a species that always seems to be at war, somewhere at some level, poets have historically been writing about war, its glory, its gore, and its recovery. The Middle East, it seems, has been defined by warfare for millennia, and the hostilities never seems to be far from the edge of a poet’s pen. Today’s poem, by Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back, commemorates an incident at the town of Sakhnin during which 13 Israeli-Arabs were killed in October 2000. The incident sparks annual demonstrations and memorials. Ms. Back excellently crafts a metaphor for this incident, then induces readers to smell the grief of history.
--Tom Lombardo

Rachel Tzvia Back

(what has anchored us)

The ballast of their breathing
                  in the next room in the bed
beside in the darkened house
             enchanted
                    breath expanding

to the rhythm of our fantasy:
                     buffalo stars
stampeding through
          unblemished skies
above a sacred land we imagined
                            our own

The weight of the unwritten 
                          truth
at well-bottom: rabid fear
          perched on the back of the absent
buffalo

The certainty of migrating cormorants
        in massive flocks their flight
                         path and patterns
absolute: they return every year
    to rest here

in the Huleh valley around the reflooded
     swamp of the north   where
I walk     October 2001
     one year after
            the women of Sakhnin first

buried their faces
          in the rough wind-dried still
                   sweet smelling clothes of their
dead sons

From On Ruins and Return (Shearsman Books, 2007). Copyright 2007 by Rachel Tzvia Back. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life- Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books, 2008).

How did you come to write this poem?

My poem "what has anchored us " – was written in the first years of the Second Intifadah (uprising) in Israel and Palestine. My family and I had just moved to the Galilee, after living for years in the Jerusalem area, and until the Intifadah erupted, there had been a feeling of hope, of the possibility of a new era in our very troubled region. In October 2000, the second round of violence began – fierce protest against the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I was then a mother to three very young children, and at every moment I viewed and lived the violence that ensued – in Palestinian and Israeli territories alike –through the prism of young motherhood. This was, of course, the prism of my children's overwhelming vulnerability – indeed, all children's vulnerability. As the death ledgers began filling up with the names of children literally caught in the cross-fire, my poetry and heart became obsessed with the little ones who were living, and too-often tragically dying, in this bloody land.

The poem emanated from very specific moments in those years of violence – moments reported in the news, moments of deaths that were practically on my doorstep, and moments of terrible clarity of how the violence had changed and hardened me too.

How did writing this poems affect your recovery?

The word "recovery" is a hard one for me to connect to, so I answer this question with some hesitation. "Recovery" – such as it is – resides for me in telling the truth, my truth, and of feeling that perhaps my poetry speaks also for those who cannot. Recovery is in daring to speak at all. Recovery has continued for me in reading these poems at various venues, in Israel and the US, in an effort to reach others, in an ongoing desire and commitment to being a voice of dissent. Moments of recovery have presented themselves when I have felt my poems impact on another, when my poems have moved another's heart toward reconciliation and compassion.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems come to life?

The poems start, almost inevitably, from a single image or single sentence. The single image or line simmers and simmers (to borrow from Whitman), until it boils over. As for the rest of the process, I'm afraid I can't say much – I have a type of black-out regarding the exact process of writing most of my poems. I can't really remember how it happens.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Emily Dickinson is always my favorite, my poetic buoy in the vast sea. And she is always new to me… Another poet who is new to me and whose work I've been reading recently is Antonio Machado – I've been reading his poems in Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Willis Barnstone, translator). And I've been reading a great deal of the Hebrew poet Tuvia Ruebner whose work I'm translating now – he's not new to me, but my current level of engagement with him is new. He's a wonder, well worth reading (new translations of his work can be found at Four Poems from Tuvia Ruebner).

What are you working on now?

My new collection A Messenger Comes, has just been published by Singing Horse Press (edited by the wonderful Paul Naylor). The title is lifted from a passage I read in Leon Weiseltier's seminal scholarly work Kaddish – on the history and evolution of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The extract – which is my new book's epigraph – goes as follows:

   A messenger comes to the mourner's house.
   "Come," says the messenger, "You are needed." 
   "I cannot come," says the mourner, 
   "My spirit is broken." 
   "That is why you are needed," says the messenger

The book is a collection of elegies for my sister and my father. It is very much a book of a broken spirit.

Rachel Tzvia Back – poet, translator and professor of literature – lives in the Galilee, where her great great great grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include Azimuth, The Buffalo Poems, On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005, and A Messenger Comes. Back's translations of the poetry of pre-eminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg, published in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005) represent the most extensive selection of Goldberg's poetry in English and were awarded a 2005 PEN Translation Award. Back has translated into English poetry and prose by other significant Hebrew writers, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tuvia Reubner, Hamutal Bar Yosef, and Haviva Pedaya. Back is the editor and primary translator of the English version of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions, 2009) – a collection named "haunting" and "historic" by American poet Adrienne Rich.

Anthony S. Abbott "The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday"

A few years ago, I toured the Eastern U.S. to read from the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. In some cities—Boston, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Charleston, Atlanta—poets from the anthology would join me to read their poems. In other locations, I would read alone. During readings by myself, I would generally select a variety of poems and poets from several of the chapters: Grief, War, Exile, Divorce, Illness, Injury, Bigotry, Abuse, Addiction.

In one particular group—a recovery group at Otey Memorial Episcopal Church, in Sewanee, Tennessee—the leader, a psychologist, had told me in advance that two of the 15 or so group members had lost children. So, I focused a few of the poems on that topic. And in a few words introducing those poems, I off-handedly said something like “this is the worst kind of loss—loss of a child.” I spoke from my own feelings not from any therapeutic expertise.

After my reading and the group’s quite lengthy discussion of the poems of recovery, I was corralled by one of the audience members, a lovely woman about 55 years of age, whose 17-year-old daughter had died when a train hit her car at a railroad crossing. This woman was a decade out from her life shattering event. And she said this: “My grief and recovery is no different than anyone else’s. It’s not worse as you have said. You can’t make that judgment, and I don’t accept it.”

Her diction was strident but her tone, though direct, was not angry. It was clear that I had offended her sense of fair play.

Through my work editing After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, I’ve met several poets who’ve lost a child and written about it. The anthology contains the heart-rending poems of William Stafford (“A Memorial: Son Brett”), Mary Jo Bang (“You Were You Are Elegy”), Stephen Rhodes (“This New Never”), B. Terri Wolfe (“Timbuktu”), and Farideh Hassanzadeh (“I, I Who Have Nothing”). Those poems present their open wounds just starting to heal, with pain still very deep, grief still on the verge of crippling. While they are excellent poems, worthy of high praise, I will present them later in this blog. The incident with the audience member above makes me think of a poem in After Shocks that I related to very personally. Anthony Abbott’s “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” caught my emotions because the poet speaks from the perspective of years, his grief still alive, gut-wrenching and tense, but it has taken a different form as time has moved forward. I reacted strongly to this poem because of my own experience, having lived a quarter of a century past the death of my wife in a car wreck.

Here is the poem, followed by inteview with Mr. Abbott.

Anthony S. Abbott

The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter
on Her 40th Birthday
May 8, 2003

1.

“Poetry is the supreme fiction,” says Wallace Stevens.
I know. Then how to express the truth, simple
and unadorned as Stevens’s “dresser of deal.”

You see, I am already equivocating, ducking
behind the decoration of language. So, stop me.
Good. That’s better. Now, tell me where you are.

If that’s too hard, just tell me—something.
Or appear to me in a dream, or leave a symbol somewhere—
some mysterious talisman that lets me know it’s you.

Not the feather floating down trick, that’s too common.
Nor bumping around in the old house. Something original
like your name spelled in shells before the tide comes in.

2.

All right, let me try it another way. When you were
three, I let you go to school in the winter without
leggings, without anything to warm your legs.

The teacher told me at the end of the day
and I burned with shame. You were my favorite person;
I was yours. And what I really want to know—

now that all the nonsense about your ghostly reappearance
is out of the way—what I really want to know is
where we would have gone, you and I. I want

to think of you at fourteen or twenty-four
or even thirty-one, want to picture you, know
the clothes you would have worn and how

you would have cut your hair. Early this morning
I walked in the rain to your grave. The tree is gone.
You know I picked the spot because the tree

was there, and now it’s vanished like my images
of you. Damn it, anyway. I’m supposed to be
a writer, supposed to create you at twenty-five

or thirty-nine, give you a history. What would
you like? A husband, three children of your own?
A law practice in the suburbs of Boston?

3.

I’m such a romantic fool. That’s the problem.
The way I see it, I’m sitting in a tea room
in London, it’s raining, of course it’s raining.

Umbrella stand inside the door. Dripping coats
hanging on the wall. My hands cupped around
a hot mug of tea. I’m breathing steam. I look up.

There you are, at forty, looking at me with so
much love I feel my body rising from the floor.
You walk over. I try to stand. “No,” you say,

“Sit down and rest.” You place your hands
on my head and tell me all the years were
nothing—a grain of sand, one grain of sand—

that’s all. You tell me you’ll come for me
whenever it’s right, and then you’re gone.
The bell rings, door closes, flash of a heel

And then, nothing but the steady fall of rain.
They look at me, there in the shop, all of them,
and then I laugh and cry, too, I’m sure.

Pretty improbable, don’t you think? Wouldn’t
sell even in Hollywood, or would it? Still,
dammit, I wish you’d talk to me.

Anthony S. Abbott’s poem “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” from The Man Who (Main Street Rag 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Anthony S. Abbott. Reprinted by permission of the author. This poem was anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events Sante Lucia Books, 2008)

How did you come to write “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday”?

My daughter died when she was just short of her fourth birthday in 1967. I began writing poems for her in the 1970s. I wrote “The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat” to celebrate her college years. So, “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” is part of a series of poems I have written celebrating her life as it might have been. I have one for her 45th birthday, and will celebrate her 50th in 2013.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

This poem and the others I have written in her memory have kept her alive in my imagination, which is critically important to me. Recovery is in part the result of turning something painful into something that heals. The writing of these poems has been a central part of the healing process.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I think I have already alluded to the process of consciously celebrating her life in poetry every five years. So I being to think quite consciously of what she might have been like at 40, 45, or 50. That conscious imagining is central to the whole process of crating the poems, but the poems also must come in and of themselves. I can’t know everything in advance or there is no surprise, no surprise no emotions. So the whole last scene in the poem at the English tea house is pure imagination, pure surprise, pure joy of having her appear.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you’d recommend to others?

Poets I have worked with in recent years who have meant a great deal to me include Jane Kenyon (absolutely essential), James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, William Carlos Williams, and Walt Whitman.

What are you working on now?

I published two books in 2011—If Words Could Save Us, a book of poems with accompanying CD, and an anthology I edited, What Writers Do, which celebrates the writers who have been part of the Lenoir Rhyne University Visiting Writers Series. I am very busy teaching and doing readings from these two books this year.

Tony Abbott is Professor Emeritus of English at Davidson College in North Carolina. He is the author of two novels, including the Novello Award winning Leaving Maggie Hope. He has written six volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is If Words Could Save Us (Lorimer Press, 2011). He is the 2012 winner of the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award of the North Carolina Writers Network.

Diann Blakely's Remembrance of Jimmy Pitts

Thank you for remembering Jimmy Pitts in this special way; and yet, how strange to find your message in my Facebook inbox, which is checked so rarely, since the very last message in my box is from Jimmy. I don't think I can ever bring myself to erase it.

[Note: see "Scar Inventory" below by Jimmy Pitts.]

I "met" Jimmy in the very best manner: standing up in Nashville's independent bookstore, reading and re-reading this intriguing prose poem--with a Confederate flag mysteriously waving in its lines!--of his in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly. Of course, on my next trip to Oxford, I felt compelled to look him up, and as the years passed, we became correspondents and friends. I still have a heartbreaking sheaf of correspondence from him; toward the very end, he wrote of how energetic he felt, how he wanted to put together a new and selected poems and asked for my help, also if I would succeed him as poetry editor of the Oxford American, since he wanted more time to pursue his painting and music. In fact, he wanted to send my husband, Stanley Booth, his new CD for this collaborative column we had planned, for Stanley, who is the harshest of critics, had listened to some samples and expressed admiration for Jimmy's gifts.

I literally fell to my knees when I heard the news.

Neither the poetry editorship nor the collaborative column happened; but while I also would have liked to have had a group of poems--I could have plucked a half-dozen from the OA itself to prevent copyright problems--and written a tribute to him as a poet for the magazine's pages, which seemed appropriate to me, given his longtime service there, as well as Jimmy's highly gratifying trust in my discernment. Nevertheless, the outcome was the same.

So how good to know he won't be forgotten. Perhaps the new editor at OA will allow what I had originally planned; whatever happens, nothing is as important as the mystery of your choosing to have begun your new project linked to The Poetry of Recovery with him. His spirit lives on and always will, for his friends and admirers were countless, and we hold his person and work in our hearts.

Thank you again, Tom.

Sincerely,

Diann

Diann Blakely
104 Queen's Court
Brunswick GA 31523
USA

http://www.diannblakely.com

Antioch Review, Best American Poetry.com,
Bloomsbury Review, Harvard Review,
Plath Profiles, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace,
Village Voice Media

Academy of American Poets, National Book Critics' Circle, Poetry Society of America

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