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Kaveh Akbar

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I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder. —Kaveh Akbar

A neighboring blog (so to speak), The Poetry Department…aka The Boynton Blog,  not long ago posted this quote from the poet Kaveh Akbar. I had never heard of him, but I’ve been curious about him ever since, and luckily managed to lay my hands on his book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017).

So now I’m embarrassed. Kaveh Akbar is huge. He is the poetry editor of The Nation, his poems have appeared all over the place, including The New Yorker, which I read faithfully (or thought I did), teaches all over the place, and founded Divedapper, “a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry.”

Having confessed to my obliviousness, I hardly consider myself to be a reliable guide to his poems. But a few clues about this book: a yellow sticky note that a previous reader left between pages, reading “addiction”; the sticky note borne out by the epigraph to the first section, “All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation” (W. H. Auden).

Themes interwoven (and overlapping) throughout the poems: alcoholism, hunger, desire, sex, God, death.

Sample lines: “If the body is just a parable / about the body if breath / is a leash to hold the mind” (“Against Dying”).

And: “blue water plus yellow sun equals // green plants it’s almost too simple to speak” (“The Straw Is Too Long, the Axe Is Too Dull”).

Well, it all just blows my mind.

francine j. harris’s praise from the back cover: “You can open this stunning debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, anywhere and find the critical tenderness that permeates Kaveh Akbar’s work.” I heartily agree. Or, as in the quote I began with, the poems are everywhere “permeable to wonder.” I don’t pretend to fathom this book, and certainly not this poet on one read-through, but here is one poem—others have more elaborate choreography, most are much longer—

Recovery

First, setting down the glass.

Then the knives.

Black resin seeps

into the carpet.

According to science,

I should be dead.

Lyptus table, unsteady

boat, drifts away.

Angostura, agave,

elderberry, rye—

the whole paradisal

bouquet spins apart.

Here, I am graceless.

No. Worse than that.

—Kaveh Akbar

Poetry Month Announcements

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I’m booked all day, Tuesday, 20 April, from early morning to evening, so I am taking a little break from reading a poetry book cover to cover and writing a “real” blog post, to share these reading announcements from both Anita K. Boyle and David D. Horowitz.

Anita’s first reading is Wednesday, April 21, 7pm on ZOOM, and is through West Seattle’s PoetryBridge Community. She will share featured poet position with Joannie Stangeland (whose book was included in last April’s blog round-up). There is an open mic right after the two features, and if you’re interested in reading &/or listening to more poetry, please email the event host Leopoldo Seguel at info@poetrybridge.net to get the link for this reading.
The second reading is Thursday, April 22, 6pm, courtesy of the superlative Edmonds Bookshop. Six poets will be reading from the Rose Alley anthology, Footbridge Above the Falls: Carolyne Wright, James Bertolino, David D. Horowitz, Randolph Douglas Schuder, and Anita K. Boyle. The reading will be live-streamed through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/EdmondsBookshop/.  More information can be found at https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/our-annual-poetry-reading.

The third reading is extra special. Bellingham’s SpeakEasy is featuring our new Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest, Saturday, April 24 at 7pm. A few of Rena’s Bellingham mentors and friends will be reading with her: James Bertolino,  Nancy Pagh, Jeanne Yeasting, and Anita K. Boyle. More information and the link to this event can be found at  Other Mind Press’s website, and at https://www.facebook.com/events/470241207425214.

Finally, I want to point people toward The Seattle Times story about Rena that appeared in Sunday’s paper: “New Washington State Poet Laureate Aims to Celebrate Poetry in Indigenous Communities.” The featured photo above (isn’t it lovely?) accompanied the article.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

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I have to admit that this morning I felt utterly exhausted. I seemed to be suffering from a complete lack of forward momentum and was just about to commit to taking a day off from my #nationalpoetrymonth blog marathon, when I opened my email and found this:

I was thinking about how I think of my life as stories, which tripped me to think about short stories, which caused me to wonder about how a poem is like a short story….I went to your blog and right off the bat, found two great examples of poems that are short stories. Gary Copeland Lilley and Jeanne Lohmann gave me a knock on the side of the head.

It made me want to join the conversation again.

I have been reading—sometimes memorizing—Ruth Stone’s poems ever since I came across her early poem, “Orchard” in a small Modern Library anthology with a blue cover: Twentieth Century American Poetry. Published by Random House in 1944, and again in 1963, that “Twentieth-Century” seems poorly chosen, or at least arbitrary. I mean, why did the editors decide to include Emily Dickinson? Perhaps because she was published in the 20th century? But in 1944, we still had half a century to survive and write about!

Since that time I have picked up numerous copies of Ruth Stone’s books (she had 12, during her life). And now, thanks to Copper Canyon Press, we have a new, Essential Ruth Stone. I paid for a ticket so I could attend their Zoom book launch last fall, and bought a copy of the book.

Please, please follow the link (in paragraph above) to Copper Canyon and listen to Ruth’s granddaughter, Bianca, read aloud “Pokeberries.” Worth the price of admission. (And is it too much to hope that one day I’ll have a granddaughter who writes poems?)

Speaking of reading poetry aloud, I once heard Dorianne Laux recite this poem aloud—this was during her keynote talk at Litfuse, in maybe 2015. I had read the poem before, probably more than once. Frankly, it had never really come alive for me. But when Dorianne Laux recited it! Years later, I can still hear Dorianne’s voice—and Ruth Stone’s words. It also strikes me as being a perfectly condensed short story. Addressed to her late husband (who committed suicide when their daughters were young), the poem pours a whole life into its lines:

Curtains

Putting up new curtains
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, “No pets! No pets!”
I become my aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it’s like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

—Ruth Stone

Forgive my pronunciation of Anna Magnani. I practiced it, and still didn’t get it right.

Gary Copeland Lilley

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As I read Gary Copeland Lilley’s debut collection, The Subsequent Blues (Four Way Books, 2004), this morning, I could swear my daughters’ high school choir teacher was in the room, raising her arms in a hallelujah and exclaiming, “Take me to church!”

These poems are chock-full of lines begging to be read aloud, or sung in a church choir—or make that a blues bar: “stashed steel gods….stolen still” (“Rudeboy in the Light”); “Blue jeans and boots and sometimes a black / leather jacket” (“Ritual of the Bush”); “Dude was gone like the single gunshot, / his life bouncing like a basketball / off alley bricks” (“Hitting It at the Paradise Apartments”). I could open the book to any page and find more lines for you. The syllables bounce, vocal riffs, as this poet plays the page like an instrument. Or, in Eleanor Wilner’s praise on the back cover: “Master bluesman of letters, heir apparent to Etheridge Knight, Gary Copeland Lilley is the versatile troubadour for people doing hard time on the planet.”

The Subsequent Blues is only 48 poems in 3 sections, but there is so much packed in. It’s a book where dead people walk, where the mortuary and bar and dance club and Pentecostal church all tip onto the same dark streets, where “every song’s got a bag of blue notes,” and the poet smokes with ghosts.

Click on his name above to find a video of him reading a poem. Here’s one from The Subsequent Blues:

Oracle at the End of the Bar

I’m drinking Jim Beam doing small sips
in the sentences no one interrupts.
You talk to yourself nobody’s got a damn
word to waste on whatever you have to say.
Stools lined with government workers.
This fast crowd of mortgages drinks
and it turns a moon of consequences.
Leon who beats his wife will get jacked
leaving this bar about 3AM he will wear
her bruises tonight. Johnny Cole
a nostalgic pimp in shades walks in
just so people know he’s not dead.
The cash and carry boys roll through
‘cause money gets off the street
to watch a piece of the game.
Lil’ Nate will get shot in the foot
for his jacket and will get a job
when he gets off crutches.
Dorothy rides bottles in the mirror
knowing she’s the prettiest
crackhead in the room her man John
is hustling just so she doesn’t
have to sell some ass. She will
hit the bricks John is going down tonight
on possession with intent. Herm’s holding on
to a quarter and a dime. Lynne’s going home
and will arrive in time for the booty-call.
The cop’s daughter Elizabeth will leave
with the cash and carry crew
and for a few hours more she’s free.
Outside in the light that comes
from the bar there’s a man
begging cigarettes and he looks right
into your eyes. You can believe
that Leon’s early morning stagger
will be just the chance he needs.