The Bad Bank

My poem, "The Bad Bank," is up at The New Yorker's website. Like an episode of Law & Order, it's "ripped from the headlines" of the financial news. Well, not exactly ripped -- more like when you're reading the paper on the subway, and you don't notice that the ink has smudged all over your fingers until you look in the mirror in the bathroom at work a few hours later, and there's an inky bruise across your face that nobody said anything about because they just assumed someone gave you a beatdown over the weekend and you were too ashamed to talk about it. 

"The Bad Bank" at NewYorker.com

New Ben Mirov Poem

I really like this poem by Ben Mirov on the Best American Poetry blog. It employs a series of verbal slip-ups, wherein the wrong letters are used to transform words, e.g. "Park your car in the garage" becomes "Park your star in the garbage." I can't even count the number of times I've parked my star in the garbage (or at least that's how it feels sometimes). Kudos to Ben on a great poem. 

"The Poem Addresses Ben Mirov in a State of Inconsolable Grief"

Ben edits the superb journal Pax Americana, which has some great poems by Brian Kalkbrenner and others in the latest issue. 

Couplet

In this week's New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles the Dickman twins: 

"Michael is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind; reading Matthew is like taking a deep, warm bath with a glass of wine balanced on the soap dish." 

"Couplet: A tale of twin poets"

Gary Snyder, Zen Poet

Reading Dana Goodyear's profile of Gary Snyder in The New Yorker this week, I was struck by the following quote from Snyder:

"When people tell me they don't understand a poem, I say, 'Fine, just listen to it. The exposure to it is part of its power. Don't vex yourself with an intellectual understanding of it.' We don't expect to understand graphic art that way."

I couldn't agree more. It gets so tiresome to hear people complain about poetry that employs any level of abstraction. When we look at an abstract painting and consider its colors, forms and patterns, we don't kvetch that it's "not saying anything." Yet all too often the readers of poetry lose interest if they don't immediately "get the story," or if it's not all lyrical meditation on trees and streams, or confessional hand-wringing over mothers and lovers.

As an aside, I've been a great admirer of Dana Goodyear's poetry and essays since we were both in Wayne Koestenbaum's poetry workshop at Yale around '95. That has remained one of the most influential classes of my life, both in the writing it inspired and the friendships it forged.

The article is not online, but here's a link to Dana's TNY blog and a post in which she finds traces of Snyder in Japan:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/danagoodyear/2008/10/snyder-in-japan.html

Here's a link to Snyder's new poem in The New Yorker, "Mu'Chi's Persimmons": http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/10/20/081020po_poem_snyder

And here's a link to Dana's first book, Honey and Junk:
http://www.amazon.com/Honey-Junk-Poem-Dana-Goodyear/dp/0393060063

Roth: "The literary moment has come and half-gone."

I'm always interested when writers describe their work habits. Nine times out of ten, they reveal the lifetstyle to be entirely unglamorous, an endless slog of quiet days alone at the computer. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Philip Roth describes his writing day as:

"I go to work at about 10 in the morning, work until 4pm, and then exercise. I work every day, six or seven days a week, when I have a project. I don't travel very much any longer. It's nice to see people in the evening if they're around, but most nights I read. It's a quiet life devoted to work."

Not a huge surprise from a novelist who's just come out with his 29th book, but it's a good reminder that there are no short cuts. And I love short cuts.

Roth also bemoans the loss of a reading culture, removing the varnish from one potential reward of such labor -- having an audience to read your books. As he says:

"Print culture is dying out. To be more specific, readership is dying out. Other things are taking its place. The literary moment has come and half-gone."

Here's the interview, which includes some thoughts on the late Norman Mailer ("There isn't room for a character like him today"), along with a short excerpt from Roth's new novel, Indignation:

Philip Roth Goes Back to College

Introducing Elaine Equi

Last week I had the honor of introducing the poet Elaine Equi at a reading at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House at NYU, where I am a poetry MFA student. Here is the introduction I gave:

In an interview with Jenni Russell in MiPOesias, Elaine Equi once described her process as “write-five-words, cross-out-three.” Her lines are spare, yes, and deliberate, but not without whimsy. They delight in quotidian activities like opening the mail, working out at the gym or eating Ciao Bella chocolate sorbet.

They also reach for the transcendent. In the poem “Thesis Sentence,” Equi offers a possible definition of God as “a set of words / held tightly together by an invisible bond—// not one can be added or removed.” She then declares, “The poem is a small machine made of God.”

As small machines, her poems are remarkably effective, employing devastating turns of phrase and a wonderful musicality – “saltlick tit of the infinite,” “chamber pot of gold,” “according to your accordion” are a few examples.

Her wry observations at times blend humor with resignation, as in the poem “Perversely Patriotic,” which reads in its entirety: “Terrorism has ruined S&M / for me. // Now it just seems / like watching / the news.”

Other poems run through a simple, invented form, milking the possibilities: “Autumn is a solitude. / Winter is a fortitude. / Spring is an altitude. / Summer is an attitude.”

Always beneath the surface, there is a depth and a strangeness that lingers. “Poems are paperweights, / ballast to keep our words /from floating away,” she writes in “Gradually, Gills,” one of her recent poems.

A member of the creative writing faculty at NYU, Equi also teaches in the MFA programs at the New School and at City College. Her latest book, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems, from Coffee House Press, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Surface Tension, Decoy and Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award.

It is a great pleasure to introduce Elaine Equi.