The Poem I Turn To: Actors & Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them is a new title this year by Sourcebooks. It’s edited by Jason Shinder, a poet himself of a few collections.
I suppose the book has 2 markets, those who love movies, and those who love poetry. I haven’t cultivated movie knowledge and only recognize four of the names of the actors and directors on the cover: Adam Arkin, John Landis, Holland Taylor, Peter MacNicol, Tim Blake Nelson, Lili Taylor, Stacy Keach, Michael O’Keefe, George Wendt, Bob Balaban, Peter Coyote, Swoozie Kurtz, Ken Brecher, Carrie Fisher, Walter Mosley, Brian Cox, Jane Fonda and Paul Simon. A further 2 dozen people are within including Eve Ensler.
Although it calls in names, and could work commercially from that vantage point of fan curiosity, what I like about it is the real nature. People didn’t have to participate, but some heard about it and asked to join in as well. Individuals wanted to add their voice to a project for a friend as a memorial. It doesn’t come from a place to selling a taste, selling a poet, prescribing what others should like, but more personally speaking, for myself, this matters.
The contributors have bios at the back but the primary focus isn’t the contributors but the nearly 90 poems chosen for enduring impact.
The poems are ones chosen that have been carried with these people, internalized touchstones and cover a wide range of the expected canon from Auden to Rumi and Shakespeare, Neruda to Plath and American contemporaries as well of Mark Strand, Mary Oliver and new to me, Carol Muske-Dukes who had poems that made me sit up and listen as the CD played on. She is the wife of the actor David Dukes. The project of this anthology was started in memory of him who died in his mid-fifties in 2000 and supports the theatre scholarship fund in his name.
About 1/4 of the poems are on CD and the rest, often, less touted, and more interesting ones, are in the text only. In a few sentences each poem has a sidebar of how and why it resonates, giving more depth to the poem for being explained why it matters to at least one person, in particular. For example, a poem grade 10 geometry teacher made students memorize stuck with Bob Balaban thru life – Paradox by Clarence R. Wylie Jr who wrote in part my successes are but pretty chains/linking my twin doubts […] How frail the wand, but how profound the spell or the one he recited in French, that he did so nimbly in a job interview that he faked people into thinking he could speak it and got the job. You never know when a poem will come in handy or how.
Other people describe their relationship with a poem as encapsulating, galvanizing, some era of their life, or a touchstone where, within the lines, continually “I feel like I can breathe”. The significance can be a milestone, returning to a poem much later and receiving the eureka that eluded and connection with who first tried to show the poem’s heart, or that a friend wrote it for them. The anecdotes are unexpected as the poems. Stanley Kunitz’s Touch Me is footnoted by Amix Lambert describing eating meatloaf sandwiches made by Stanley in his garden when she was a child. Others share what aspect of the poem made them fall in love with it, such as Mary-Louse Parker describing Kenneth Koch’s To You
It seems a lesson in getting poetry to people when they are young. Perhaps not necessarily by age 9 but resonance takes time and a captive school audience situation helps. Many (but perhaps even not most) people related poems that mattered they encountered in primary school, or at latest college.
The poems themselves are over a fairly broad map, not at all sedating, as some anthologies can be, in uniformity. Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse with They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to but they do to John Keats’ To Autumn and Sunny Dooley’s White Shell Ever-Changing Woman about a Navajo deity to Paul Celan on Nazi Germany. Certainly narrative. The map between the what and the why and the who is as interesting as the poems in some cases.
The text has tidy orienting bios of the poets, such as that of Ezra Pound, or of Li Yi, born in 1084 China, of which 100 of her poems remain, or of Constantine Cavafy born in Egypt 1863 who never sold a collected volume or his poetry but only privately distributed pamphlets among friends. or of Meghan O’Rourke who began her literary career a decade ago at the New Yorker and admits Inventing a Horse is not easy. /One must not only think of the horse/ One must dig fence posts around him. A lot falls away from where one begins and falls away from what one gets.
In the introduction (p. XV1) Billy Collins says what never happens, “I know how we should respond to this unprecedented cataclysmic event: we’ll go the movies.” In times of crisis, poems, not paintings or ballet, are what people habitually reach for. Um, dirty 30s = cinema popularity? Ah, no matter, small nit that. I agree with the sentiment he intends (i.e. rah rah, poetry) and when he goes on in a time when the audience for poetry seems largely composed of other poets, its is encouraging to see that poetry is alive in the lives of non-practitioners, whether they are film stars, lawyers or mechanics. At the same time I feel my back get up at the term non-practitioners. As if mechanics or lawyers could not overlap with poetry. It’s like suggesting walking is something exclusive for athletes. But maybe I’m just being bristly. Collins sermons can have that effect on me. Poetry is only communication with skill and heart, hardly something Poets have exclusive capacity for, even reading people’s anecdotes that accompany the collection show that.
It’s a pretty decent collection, worth keeping and browsing from time to time. It gives an interesting survey.

I think its a good thing that my desk is back to being a mess of books. At least it’s a mess I made. Since that last book sliding off desk on the heels of falling cat, she hasn’t been so keen to sit on papers. It won’t last I know but…
Anyhew, new off the press is almost sold out as I understand. Whack of Clouds of our poetry circle did well at the small press fair. Who’s in it? Amanda Earl, Nicholas Lea, Marcus McCann, Pearl Pirie and Roland Prevost. And here’s one excerpt, although each page of each person is pretty distinct,

expand further east
for the feast pander
defer the ex plan
read the spent fur

by Roland from p. 23.
And I finally got around to a couple books that have been sitting, An Everyman’s Library pocket book of TS Eliot which has Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Every street lamp I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
and thru the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium

Given the winds and lightning storm fronts that swung around us yesterday and the words, there’s a catch still of the heightened energies that wind brings.
Air and wind and travel among that in Peter F. Yacht Club #11 including this from Jenna Butler on wind, in part

The irony is
I come into being when called;
[…]
What a name
for a shambles of
meat & strongs;
the wind playing over,
my mouth a riveted
O Glass, firmament.
I breathe & am.

and this from rob mclennan from airport to airport, pivoting dextrous,

books becomes unreadable; small bricks.
my whole life on this solid earth
& four hours more, the ground
becomes unbearable.
I was not looking at her fingers
but I know where they were.

I got into Seal up the Thunder (Wolsak and Wynn, 2005). I saw excerpts in Erin Noteboom’s journal as it developed and it took me 3 years to get to her biblical Revelation, p.9

When I speak
your pulse will turn to tide. When I speak your ears
will hold all human words, like a wood full of birds,
they cry, lonely, lonely When you hear, your back
will arch like sky. You will call like the thunder:
bones, come together. Bones, take your order.
Be still. Your words are husk
for breath. They cannot make
the stones bleed water, or set the sun
ablaze past colour. I am the word
that made the clay curl up in fingers.
How can you answer? Be still

Ah, this is one I will take slowly but not want to. Opening to any given page and I’m caught up in not a line or phrase here and there but each bit and each complete. Lovely.
Peter O’Toole Magazine #4, with Hugh Thomas’

Cento:
I’ve been meaning to tell you I don’t need fish anymore.

Heh, give or teach, or just give a break to the whole dynamic.
Break a

tooth is going to
slide to pieces, you’ll swallow
the shards, exclamation point – you’ll
never get a job in retail,
sad face, sad face.

From the chapbook petty illnesss leaflet by Marcus McCann. What is it about teeth that makes that resonate. Hard candy breaking up in the mouth as a child seems to stay forever in nightmares of the whole mouth crumbling on apple bite.
One more to the tooth (wait for it) from Bunnybaby: the child with magnificent ears by Stuart Ross (1988), The Telephone Call

A man in a dark suit
enters a telephone booth.
He pulls an oyster
from his pocket
deposits it
and listens for the dial tone.
Jacques Cousteau answers,
says, “Life is many things –
an acrobat may hang by his teeth
but not tell the dentist.”
The man in the suit hangs up,
goes to his office,
and sells his brother-in-law.

Disturbances of Progress by Lisa Downe (Coach House, 2002), p. 13 The Shadow of your Simile is probably my early favorite with its accuracy

Travel broadening everything
even in absence.
[…]
there is no difference between
a little bit
and this welcome expanse which
makes you seem smaller.

Or in p. 37, Succession a spindrift of

A double of the sentence is offered.
Here. Here.
Introduction as conscience
foreshadowing a more complex past.
It gathers.

Funnily enough bodies are back again in two poems on my mind’s shelf. They are from different continents and years but were read and struck me back to back, about feet. One from Mary O’Donoghue in Among These Waters (Dedalus, 2007), p. 15 Thigging

Skin that was callous
as coconut husk
then melted to cushy
pearled flesh
of peeled lychees.
It ruched into folds
along the path
of her tickling finger,

They do wrinkle like lychees don’t they? She uses such unusual words and unexpected plays to convey, such as in other poems snapfastened suitcase or p. 25 back to the roking stewpot/to brew some little heartblock/with a soupçon of hallucination
Arc issue just received today has a whimsical poem by Robyn Sarah, p. 70, called End to End of having a chat with one’s feet in the bath, looking back to

in
patent leather, you dazzled
my eyes, showing me my
face, twinned in black lacquer.
Then you were nearer; near
the years I rode you hard
in scuffed Oxfords

Also got the Sino-Korean Translations: sinillogical translations, volume 4, by jwcurry and Mark Laba (underwhich editions 1987)

in full undress
uniformity

To close with Inspiration by name from The Sound of One Girl Screaming, Monica Kuebler (Burning Effigy Press 2002)

I like how inspiration overflows
in a mad cacophony of sensation.
Compensation for all those days
filled with black and white
and not a single thing that moves me.
The whole world goes through me sometimes
and doesn’t leave a trace
or taste
or scar
or caught breath even.

And what narrative arc that cat can do. But walk across my keyboard and sit on Seal Up the Thunder.

Less good in the news department, Shannon Leigh a top slam poet in the U.S. had an accident while diving and is in hospital. There’s news as it comes and a well-wishes community.

P.S. R.I.P. June 30. Beautiful memorial vid.

Dan Waber’s Strings at vispo.com. Heavens. What he can convey so simply and beautifully…

New contest via Matrix: Matrix Litpop, Entries of short stories or poetry must be postmarked no later than June 15th, 2008. [changed to July 15]
Sharon Harris’ lecture notes from Fun with Pataphysics is now available from Lulu. Pataphysics unites.
Gary Baldwin on Rachel Zolf.
The schedule is now up for the Sept 35-28th Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. 60 poets are giving readings – there’s also storytelling and music – in tents seating 50, up to the Concert Tent, which seats over 2,000. Going for 22 years (every second year since 86), it now routinely attracts audiences of 17,000 to 20,000. The Festival is the largest poetry event in North America
Poets without a book over 45 pages can enter the University of New Orleans writing contest for a $25 writing fee and can win scholarship to writing school in France, Italy or Mexico. Past judges, winners and short-listed are there for the browsing. Bök will be teaching one of them in Mexico . Nice gig.
What? Another publisher nips the dust? Closing is Greenboathouse Books but it promises there’ll be a regroup and dive back up in a new shape.