What We're Reading Now

We're always reading fine works of poetry. This month on Poetry Matters, instead of an in-depth review or interview, you’ll find three quick posts about what books have captured our attention: 

• Melva Sue tells us about couple of books she recently read: Virgil’s Georgics and a memoir, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.


• Anthony Fife discusses Robert Hayden's Collected Poems


• Nancy Chen Long discusses The Book of Goodbyes by Jillian Weise

So take a look—you might find that next great book of poetry or a poet whose work resonates with you. And friends, please do share with us what you're reading. We're always looking for good books!

From Melva Sue Priddy's Bookshelf

Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation (The Yale New Classics Series)

translated by Janet Lempke

Yale University Press; New Haven, 2005

ISBN: 0-300-10792-7

A copy of Georgics was loaned to me by poet Chris Mattingly. His comment about how the same tools used in farming today were used in farming 2000 years ago hooked me. And so they were. I had never read Virgil’s Georgics in its entirety, so this was a pleasure. I soon found I needed a copy of my own so I could annotate it. Lempke, whose father was a farmer, retains as much of the original poetry as possible while translating into American English. She replaces out dated place names, and other obscure antiquities with their geographic, modern equivalents. She retains the four book division and line numbers as closely as possible. What a joy to read about the work of farmers, not as an idyllic pastoral, but as the daily struggle the work is, with ruin from insects and weather a perpetual possibility. Book Four reminded me of my family’s bees, however our’s arrived by mail.

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford
by Kim Stafford

Graywolf; Saint Paul, 2002

ISBN: 978-1555973896


I return to this memoir written by the son about his father William Stafford. Kim Stafford mines his father’s journals, book, letters, notes and poetry drafts as his father’s literary executor. As well as chronicling the elder’s life and work, it reads as an honest portrayal of the strained relationship between son and father. The poet isn’t understood by his son, though they lived closely and often worked together, until after Kim delves into his father’s papers, and it then becomes part of his life’s work. I attended several AWP conferences and had the pleasure of sitting in on panels including Kim Stafford.

Anthony Fife Discusses Robert Hayden's Collected Poems

Collected Poems
by Robert Hayden
edited by Frederick Glaysher

Norton, 1985

Regarding “‘Mystery Boy’ Looks for Kin in Nashville,” the poem is so profoundly grounded, so deeply of this world that I can’t quite reconcile how distant the poem truly is. The story floats ten feet off the ground, never touching down, despite that fact that its full weight is a burden upon my shoulders each time I think of it throughout any given day. And I think of it often.

Robert Hayden’s work cannot, however, be pigeonholed by the likes of the “Mystery Boy.” Hayden’s oeuvre is quite varied, as would be any half-a-dozen-decades-worth of work, and knowing this, as I read and re read my way through his Collected Poems I can't help trying to recapture that feeling so strongly eased upon me by the aforementioned poem. I ‘v yet to find its like, though I have combed the pages many times. I haven’t found it, at least, in quite the same way.

Whether it’s a poem about Malcomb X (“El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” 86-89) or the legendary fighter Tiger Flowers (“Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers” 130-131), many of the poems in this collection select a topic, a very specific topic, and more or less stick to it throughout. In this way they are particularly linear. Highly imaginative: definitely. Conscientious in light of the multitude of responsibilities they name and satisfy: absolutely. They pull in and out their masterful focus, never resting long before a single storefront. But highly linear. Having typed and edited the previous paragraph, I think I’ve learned a little more about our “Mystery Boy.” Though many of Hayden’s poems are self-contained—leaning heavily on the book ends of a definite and logical place to start and stop—there is, it turns out, no damned kin in Nashville. The poem—organized but decisively nonlinear—will go on forever. And with no beginning and no end the poem has no choice but to swell and resonate.

Before recently reading his Collected Poems, my only exposure to Robert Hayden was his “Those Winter Sundays” (41). Due to being so commonly anthologized, I was highly aware of “Those Winter Sundays” and the role it plays in 20th Century literature. It’s a marvelous poem, of course; it’s earned its place in the thick books. And, revisiting it now after having read and reread 195 pages of Hayden’s work, I can’t help but feel it serves as the perfect halfway point between the two types of poems I mention above. Definitely linear. Yet allowed off the leash to expand and fill an almost empty room.

Of course, whether it’s the historical epics concerning the lives and exploits of notable personages including but not limited to Malcolm X and Tiger Flowers, character sketches that are also cultural and historical lessons (read the wonderful “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield” 13-14 for proof of my claim), or a poem more like the one concerning the young whomever that begins this brief rumination, Hayden’s poems often tell much more about Hayden himself than the supposed subject of the poems. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him.

Nancy Chen Long Discusses The Book of Goodbyes

The Book of Goodbyes
by Jillian Weise

BOA Editions Ltd, 2014

ISBN: 978-1938160141


The Book of Goodbyes is Jillian Weise’s second book. Her first is The Amputee’s Guide to Sex. The Book of Goodbyes is the winner of the 2013 James Laughlin Award, which is awarded by the Academy of American Poets to a poet for a second book of poetry. The Book of Goodbyes is also the winner of the 2013 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, which is awarded to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit.

I found the overarching theme of the book to be what the title indicates—goodbyes in its various forms: loss, departure, death, loneliness. The book contains four sections that are presented like acts in a play (Weise is also a playwright): act “One,” an “Intermission,” act “Two,” and “Curtain Call.” With respect to subject matter, the sections titled “One” and “Two” center primarily around two things:

• The first is how other’s react to the speaker being an amputee, for example “The Ugly Law,” a poem that weaves in lines from a law about disfigured or unsightly people being restricted from appearing in public, and “Café Loop,” which reads as a sort of transcript of things the speaker has overheard in a café: “She's had it easy, you know. // I knew her from FSU, back before she was disabled. / I mean she was disabled, but she didn't write like it. // Did she talk like it? Do you know what it is, exactly?” (You can read the poem here, second poem on the page). “Café Loop” is indicative of the conversational tone of most of the poems in the collection. The collection is peppered with dialog.
   
• The second is the speaker’s affair with an older person, someone she calls Big Logos, e. g. “Poem for His Girl” (“I’ll tell you which panties / look good on you // psychedelic plaid / with ruffles on the waist …), “Semi Semi Dash,” “Poem for His Ex,” and “For Big Logos, In Hopes He Will Write Poems Again” (“Maybe it’s because you’re cut off / from your roots, and need to go / to Spain, be with your forefathers …”)

Act “One” tends to dwell more on the disability; “Two” tends to dwell more on the affair. Regarding the intermission between the two 'acts', it is indeed that: It's comprised of three poems that form a narrative about “Tiny and Courageous Finches” named Bitto and Marcel who live in a cave behind the Iguazú Falls on the Argentine side.

The last section, “Curtain Call” is one long poem “Elegy for Zahra Baker.” Zahra was a ten-year old who, due to cancer, was deaf and disabled (she had a prosthetic leg.) She went missing in North Carolina in 2010. Her step-mother confessed to dismembering her and leaving her remains in the wild. The poem includes snippets from news reports, personal reflections of the speaker, snippets of conversations between the speaker and others, dialog from Zahra herself.

Friends, I was quite taken with this book and will definitely re-read it. It’s quiet and powerful, unflinching. I find something about it to be irresistible. Here is one of my more favorite poems in the collection, “Goodbyes.”

Christine Gelineau: An Interview given to Caroline LeBlanc

Christine Gelineau is the author of the book-length poetic sequence Appetite for the Divine (Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Publication Prize)and Remorseless Loyalty (winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize), both from Ashland Poetry Press, and co-editor with Jack B. Bedell of the anthology French Connections: a Gathering of Franco-American Poets. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University.  Gelineau lives with her husband on a farm in upstate New York.

Dear Christine, 

Congratulations, and thank you so much for agreeing to this email interview on the publication of  Crave, your third full length book of poetry.

 I reference it briefly below, but just so our readers know at the beginning, this is in fact the second time I interview you. The first was in 2010 when you put me in touch with Franco-American poets around the country, and I interviewed you (and many of them) for a presentation in Montreal, which was eventually published as an essay in the International Journal of Canadian Studies in 2011. That first interview was by phone, and we were distant neighbors in Central New York at the time—you along the southern border, me close to the northern border. It’s nice to have the chance to “visit” again. OK, let’s get started with my questions, and your answers.  

1. Generally speaking, the poems have to do with the relationship of public and private worlds. In the first section, “Hard Evidence,” the poems seem to be more grounded in the public implications, while poems in the second section, “Crave” they are more grounded in private life, though both aspects are in most of the poems in the book. Would you agree with this, and why or why not? How did you decide to organize your manuscript in this way?

I like this question very much, especially the insight that a melding of the public and the private are the province of the poems. Unless a book springs from a particular concept, I think one reaches a certain number of poems and starts looking to see if there are any ways in which the poems speak to one another productively that might suggest a collection. The first time I went looking for that in this group of poems, my initial focus was on a kind of plain-spokenness in poems like Hard Evidence, Grace, Physical, What Men Do, etc. and the words “Seeing Things” came to mind as a book title. I could see I was immediately attaching to that title and that notion of what organized the poems so before I got too infatuated I googled Seeing Things to determine if it was "available." No doubt many will know that I quickly discovered Seamus Heaney had beat me to that title a good number of years ago. So back to the drawing board. I wrote some more, fiddled some more, and gradually I began to notice there were poems with a kind of stubborn insistence on something like optimism, or at least a desire and hunger for more that continued to propel us in a sensation of moving forward and I began to attach the word “crave” to that impulse. Maybe in part because I already had a poem called “Hard Evidence,” it next occurred to me that there were a number of other poems that looked at the many instances in which the world presents us with hard evidence that would seem to contradict that impulse to crave. From there it was easy to make the decision to group the “hard evidence” first, and allow the poems that “crave” to have the last word. Perhaps your sense of the public and the private in the poems suggests that much of what knocks us down emanates from the wider sphere while much of what sustains us is embedded in the private. I would have to think about that some more but I was interested to hear what qualities you saw the poems as sharing.

2. I know from FRENCH CONNECTIONS: A gathering of Franco-American Poets, and the interview you granted me when I was researching Franco-American poets, that we share a Franco-American heritage. And that your husband is Jewish, and you live on a horse farm. Would you talk about how any or all these facts influence the poems you write, and those you chose to include in Crave?

I do not think of my poems as a variant of memoir, nor do I try to occlude their grounding in aspects of my actual life. Family heritage is a fact and factor and thus is likely to pop up now and then. Poems like “Morning Prayers” and “Fill” have settings that reflect some small sliver of Judaism in America , and the poems I wrote about the two weeks I was able to spend in France in May of 2013 are included in CRAVE. My mother’s parents both immigrated from Ireland and the poems from the trip to Ireland are in the first book REMORSELESS LOYALTY. I am interested in cultural connections such as those but would hope that any claims those poems might seem to make about speaking for a group are very small and tentative claims, as that’s the most I would feel comfortable with claiming. In her poem "Sources" in the book YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE, Adrienne Rich considers the cultural narrative of "special destiny," a concept appropriated by the Pilgrims from Jewish tradition, and then folded into the narrative of America. I like that poem's interrogation of how "special destiny" can at once be "a thought often peculiar to those / who possess privilege" but simultaneously "the faith / of those despised and endangered // that they are not merely the sum/ of damages done to them." A heritage cannot avoid being an inclusion and exclusion, a comfort that we have to be alert to when it develops the potential to be a cudgel. When your identity enfolds "American," "French Canadian," "Irish," and through your husband and children, "Jewish," then like Rich one occupies a position of privilege and dispossession simultaneously. Finding the language to speak about racial and cultural identity is surely one of the vital conversations of our times.

As to the horse farm, the opportunity to have lived a life among other-than-human animals of the size and power of horses seems to me the very best grounding I could ever have had for poetry. Riding is a physical language you speak with the whole of your body to another species. Rhythm is embodied, incorporated. The skilled rider, like the poet with the emerging poem, does not control the horse; rather she learns to control herself in order to allow the horse the opportunity to express itself. What could be better training for a poet?

3. The “Crave” section especially contains what I would call life course poems: from pregnancy with your children to your long term marriage to the birth of grandchildren. (At least I’m assuming you are writing about your life and not the anonymous life of “the speaker”). When were the various poems written and what was you rationale for including them in the same manuscript?

The poems in CRAVE have all been written since APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, my previous book, was written. APPETITE came out in 2010. So these are the poems written since then that seemed to me (and happily apparently also to my editor / publisher) to work as a collection.

4. Would you tell us the story of poem, “Sockanosset,” and how you won the Pushcart Prize for that poem in 2013?

I have Patricia Smith to thank for Sockanosset. She was teaching a workshop at Binghamton University and suggested an exercise she had “borrowed” from someone else (whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot recall). The idea was to hand draw a map of your childhood neighborhood and see if any ideas for a poem leaked into the process. I had long wanted to write about this memory of us neighborhood kids pedaling our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues that might lead to the boys who had recently escaped from the nearby reform school. I think what allowed the poem to move forward that time was the realization that the poem’s true point of view was that of the escaped boys. Maria Mazziotti Gillan published the poem in Paterson Literary Review and then later that year Lee Upton kindly put my name in as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed me to submit three pieces I had had published that year for consideration for the prize. The Pushcart had two guest editors and I have to believe it was Maxine Kumin who pulled my poem out of the slush pile of nominations and that it was her notice of it that allowed the poem ultimately to be chosen for the edition. Thanks to Bill Henderson, of course, for his indefatigable work producing Pushcart all these years, including that one, but then thanks to the posse of women who inspired, supported, and championed the poem along the route to that selection.

5. I also appreciate how grounded in the rural life and the body many of the poems are. They are not anti-intellectual, but neither are they steeped in intellectualism. Would you comment on whether you think there is an academic/industry bias toward urban intellectualism and a mind-body split in much literature today?

Now this question I love. As you can see from my comment on the horses earlier, I would identify this inclusion/melding/prioritizing of mind and body to be a core value to my aesthetic. To my understanding of poetry, it is crucial to have the body, not only the mind, in the poem--in its content, in its rhythms, in a kinetic, physical sense of the poem as a made thing. A significant percentage of the poetry published in our culture that gets the most attention is certainly published by and produced by poets with an urban sensibility. Is there really any debate over the idea that New York City, and to a lesser extent a number of other urban centers, have the most impact on what content, modes, and names are considered most significant in contemporary American poetry? Just because you live in an urban area doesn't mean you have to champion only work with an urban perspective to it but don’t we all find perspectives closer to our own easier to enter? And haven’t those of us involved in poetry all encountered some degree of dismissal of “nature poems”? Inevitably we are all “rural,” all dependent upon the health and well-being of this one and only planet but the utter dependence of urban centers on the rural areas that support them can grow invisible to city dwellers.  The impact of that on poetry promotion is, of course, not the most important of its impacts but we poets do think about it.  I have a panel proposal in right now to AWP for the 2017 conference in Washington, DC on the topic of The Nature of the Natural in Poetry Today: Postpastoral, Antipastoral, and Beyond. I hope to have the opportunity to have more to say (and hear about) the topic then.

6. What is your favorite poem in the book, and why?

I don't usually think in those terms. I like “Anniversary in Paris” because lyricism is my first love and because "happy" poems are so challenging to write, but each of the poems has some moment or aspect I favor. I'd be more interested to know what is your favorite and why?

7. What’s next on your writing agenda?

I also love the essay form and I've been working on shaping up a book-length collection of my essays. Any potential poetry projects are too young and tender to be talked about until they've had a chance to more fully develop. But thanks for asking.

Thanks again, Christine.