In Which The Dominant Metaphor is Silverware

Poems Newly Appeared: Silence Is Golden

Should you be a writer of complex formal poetry developed by French troubadours in the Middle Ages, you may think that McSweeney’s would be a good place to publish your work. But you would be mistaken. We find on the submissions page of mcsweeneys.net that “Sestinas are no longer being accepted at this time.”

This indeed is a blow. The superfluous formal rigor of the sestina would seem to have been tailor-made for McSweeney’s, a journal that has distinguished itself as much for its formatting as for its content. The sestina, briefly, is a 39-line form with six repeating end words that are positioned in varying sequence according to a set formula. John Ashbery was once at the vanguard of the sestina’s resurgence, going back to his 1956 poem “Poem” (end words: top, lamps, peace, hair, waiting, sky). More recently, though, he has said about the sestina: “you’re thwarted every time you try to write the next line. The form is always there, menacing you.”

For a time, sestinas were welcome to menace the readers of the McSweeney’s website. There was a special section set aside for the poetic form. Many writers contributed original works in the form, including interesting pieces by Meghann Marco (omg, lol, wtf, hahaha, stfu, rofl), Florence Cassen Mayers (form, form’s, formalist, form, from, form) and Jon Stone (Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, Monica). Perhaps there were too many good submissions to read, for the gates have been closed. Should you have a sestina now that demands to be read on the Internet, the easiest course would be to start your own web journal.

Indeed, if you write any kind of poetry, it is not welcome at McSweeney’s. The submissions page for their print quarterly informs us of this policy with the following line:

Poetry can be wonderful, but is not something we publish.

The “can” is excellent. Literary journals can of course publish whatever they wish, but it is not often with such well mannered condescension toward unwelcome art forms. It would have been far more to the point to write that poetry can, sometimes, be terrible; but it is difficult to say just what one means.

Meanwhile, McSweeney’s is actively promoting its next print creation. In a further twist on its formatting experiments, this will be published as a broadsheet, to appear in December. A detailed press kit about the $55 newspaper has been placed online, and for the discerning reader who scrolls down patiently, and does not mind reading small type, it will be discovered that this publication includes poems by Robert Haas, Rae Armantrout, and John Ashbery.

* * *

But McSweeney’s is more than a literary journal: it is a flag. Under this flag, a legion of different programs are in action, including child literacy workshops, ironic store-fronts, human rights advocacy, DVD compilations, and a general interest magazine called The Believer.

The Believer, in a shift of policy from the main office, does accept poetry submissions. There are detailed guidelines on its website, and its masthead includes a “Poetry Editor” named Dominic Luxford. This editor must have a remarkable amount of reading to do, given the popularity of the magazine and the rare opportunity of being published in a journal read by non-poets. Such a slush pile looming on his desk, we sympathize with his apparent decision to read none of it and simply publish Derek Walcott.

There was one poem in the previous issue of the The Believer, and it was by Walcott; a new issue has just appeared, and the situation is repeated. It is remarkable that a monthly magazine should publish only one poet in two consecutive issues. It is equally remarkable that The Believer, whose readership skews young and quirky, should choose a 79-year-old Nobel-laureate as its poet-in-residence.

Then again, what are years when the artist’s heart is young? The Believer’s most recent poem by Walcott begins with these lines:

I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning

in huge green meadows above the indigo sea,

amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing

with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.

The astonishment and amazement of this poem bespeaks a man who is perfectly at ease with the credulous magazine in which he is published, and with the spirit of young people in general. Actually, Walcott’s comfort-level with his students was partially the subject of Poems Newly Appeared last week. Based on certain poems in the New York Review of Books, we inquired if he was on a mission to explain the recent Oxford affair through verse.

Our suspicions return. Walcott’s poem “Li” in the new issue of A Public Space includes the following:

            … where all that matters

is understanding the errors I have made and the errors

still to come, here is a list of what would be lost:

the gentle slope of sleep into vast terrors,

my cowardice at the scale of each undertaking,

my withering gift, the degenerative process

of any organism, down to a crouched old age,

my astonishment at the pettiness of envy,

of comradeships whose greed I could not gauge,

whose pretty poetry I ended up hating.

The above poem, the pieces in The Believer, and those in the New York Review of Books, will all be included in Walcott’s next volume of poetry, White Egrets, forthcoming in 2010 from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Also included in White Egrets will be a poem called “The Mongoose,” which has not yet been published, but which Walcott has read at literary festivals. In it, he inveighs against V.S. Naipaul.

* * *

A look at the New Yorker. This week we find a poem by Linda Pastan in which the dominant metaphor is silverware (“our table set // only with memories, tarnishing / even as we speak”) and one by Dave Smith in which it is insects (“desire of things as subtle as what fireflies mean”). Pace our own suspicions about the magazine’s predilection for rhyme, neither of these use that device.

Instead, the New Yorker’s Poetry Editor, Paul Muldoon, is left to do the rhyming himself. He appears this week in the New York Review with a poem entitled “A Second Hummingbird.” It is a variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, the variation being short lines. The sestet riffs on both the hummingbird’s wing-pattern and the form he is writing in (the sestet representing the volta, or “turn”), for a playful melding of imagery:

… now being to make such rounds

and roundelays as mine, to touch

what I’ve come to see

as the raw nerve

in each of us, each

doomed to think of himself ever so

slightly behind the curve.

Muldoon and his rhyming (e.g., “slab/Ballymacnab," “see/so”) continue to astonish and amaze. A new book of his, Maggot, will also appear in 2010 from Farrar, Straus.

—T.K.              

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

In Which We Wonder In The Inching Sun How It Was Known

Poems Newly Appeared: Some Are Dun-Colored

The journal Conduit is many things. By its own accounting, it is “Words & visions for minds on fire.” It is also “An international magazine of poetry, art, fiction, non-fiction, non sequiturs, and interviews.” Not least, it is “The only magazine that risks annihilation.” That is a lot of slogan to appear in the first few pages. And, without meaning to do any disservice, we wonder if annihilation is really necessary for such an interesting magazine.

The current issue, No. 20, has as its theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature.” What is suggested is that we, humans, have a complex relationship with everything else. And in particular, with volcanoes. The first poem in the issue begins:

     At the stairs to the top of the volcano,
     you warn me, “Secrets are small fires.
     Let’s be more primitive. Let’s tie ourselves up.
     Let’s wait for the monster.”

Written by Carley Moore, the poem, “The Match,” expresses the volatility of the speaker’s bedroom activities, with the volcano used to express how love can force a young woman to sacrifice important things, not mentioned.

It should be clear: by the metaphoric use of the volcano. For poets, as for anyone, the difference between figurative and actual peril is important to keep in mind. Especially in the matter of volcanoes.

We had this particular natural phenomenon in mind already following the death of Craig Arnold (see Poems Newly Appeared, Oct. 13). A talented poet, Arnold was last heard from while blogging from the volcanoes of Japan. After Moore’s poem in Conduit, with its vivid evocation of standing at a fiery precipice, it came as a shock to see there was also a poem, cautiously positioned at the back, by Craig Arnold. His piece here is called “asunder,” and it would have appeared in print right around the time of his disappearance. “Now I write / without hope of answer,” he writes.

Conduit is printed biannually. In lieu of bios, contributors are listed only with city of residence and email address. Carley Moore of Brooklyn, New York, can be reached at carley.moore@nyu.edu. Craig Arnold, formerly of Laramie, Wyoming, is listed with the email address greatdarkman@yahoo.com.

* * *

When reading a poet who has died early, a certain optical illusion occurs. Lines that were more or less harmless when they were written now seem full of omen. The poet titles a book Made Flesh, and the old phrase takes on a glow of ironic premonition when he goes missing a few months later.

Sometimes, though, the sequence is reversed. Instead of writing unwittingly about what is to come, a poet writes unwittingly about what has already happened. This, at least, seems to be the case with Derek Walcott’s poems in the Nov. 19 New York Review of Books.

Earlier this year, Walcott was campaigning to be the next University of Oxford Professor of Poetry. But he dropped out of the election, despite leading in the polls, due to a smear campaign that focused on his sometimes unprofessional manner with female students. Instead, poet Ruth Padel was elected to the position. That seemed to be the end of it, until, nine days later, Padel herself resigned when it was revealed that she had slandered Walcott in emails to journalists. “I do think I was very silly to send those emails,” she explained.

And here we are now, with all that nastiness behind us, though not by much. The first line of one Walcott poem in the New York Review reads: “There was no ‘affair,’ it was all one-sided.” With this, it would appear that Walcott is about to offer his version of l’affaire Walcott and his related affairs. And how could he not be referring to the Oxford drama?

But he is not. Or, it seems, not wittingly. The poem is ostensibly about a simple, distant love interest. It takes place in “Siracusa,” where he is squinting into the sunlight:

     I wondered in the inching sun how it was known
     to the ferry’s horn, the pines, the Bay’s azure hills
     and the jeering screaming girls that I would lose her.

Who is “her”? Perhaps it does not matter. The “affair” mentioned in the first line may in fact be a simple love interest. Like so many poets before him, Walcott is alone in Italy, forlorn and full of words, looking for truth beside a fountain he refers to, unironically, as “the cool dark well sacred to Arethusa.”

Then we move to the second poem, and our suspicions revive. It includes the lines:

             I have no reason to forgive her
     for what I brought on myself. I am past hating.

Now it does seem to matter who “her” is. True, our baser nature reveals itself by making an immediate association with Padel. And perhaps Walcott has not made the association himself. The whole poem is a little confusing. If we are being asked to read it at face value—about a love affair—then we decline. If, on the other hand, Walcott is referring to the Oxford event, then he is being oblique indeed.

We seek clarity. Any readers who have seen recent poems by Ruth Padel in journals are encouraged to contact us.

* * *

Literary journals enjoy themes. Since a journal may appear only quarterly, biannually, or, like a high school prom, annually, a good theme provides some useful context. To compare with the theme “Humans ‘n’ Nature,” see past installments of Poems Newly Appeared, which looked at journals focusing on “Noir” and “Dread,” for example.

The model of all themed journals is probably Granta, having been around, off and on, since 1889, and almost never missing an opportunity for a theme. The current issue focuses on “Chicago.” Each of the fiction and reportage pieces has a perfectly evident connection with the city. Indeed, the word “Chicago” is usually used in the first paragraph, as though by a pupil careful to make sure he is answering the assignment.

Not so the poems in the issue, which are two, one each by James Schuyler and Anne Winters. We thought Schuyler was a member of the “New York School.” We know that he lived, worked, and died in Manhattan, and wrote poignantly about the city as a complex habitat for friends and art. The poem included here by Schuyler, “Coming Night,” does not mention “Chicago,” nor does Winters’s “Knight with Lady.”

“Coming Night” appears here in print for the first time, and we are delighted to have it. But we are unable to find even a circumstantial connection with the city in question. The poem conjures up “willows” and “sumac”—not the background flora one normally associates with the hog butcher for the world.

Leaving butchers aside, Winters’s poem communicates her first experience of seeing a penis, which was her father’s:

     —how could I have known?
     Long dun-colored unaware

     Dodona bough it seemed to me,
     —pale hornbeam suckering and sprawled.
     Indifferent, it had the quality
     of Fact; of old, seamed, Entity:
     I was called to a lifetime of study.

We, too, have looked, but we have not found “Chicago.” In any case, we think we discovered the reason for these poets’ inclusion in Granta No. 108. Schuyler was born in Chicago, and in fact today would have been his 86th birthday. Anne Winters, born in New York City and for whom New York is a “primary subject” of her poetry, currently lives in Evanston, Illinois.

—T.K.              

T.K. comments weekly on some poems currently in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

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