Sneak Peek at St. Louis Anthology

"Anthology" comes from Greek roots meaning "gathering of flowers." And here, just a bit too late to give to your mom for Mother's Day, is a glimpse of the coming An Anthology of St. Louis Verse from Walrus Publishing of St. Louis, gathering poems from 56 area poets. It's an advance copy so it's not finalized; the cover may be different, the interior tweaked, but what matters is that editor Matt Freeman, in a heroic effort, made sure it contains poetry of consistently good quality: two or three poems from most of the poets. You will find some familiar names (Castro, Finkel, Newman, Van Doren, Revard), and some very young and new. Freeman says, "There's only one bad poem" in it, so I've been trying to find it. No word yet on publication date or price. How did I get a hold of this? We have ways.

Sylvia Plath and the Tee-Shirt

Wore this today to town and to the gym. This tee-shirt (I thought) was in bad taste on any occasion -- I mean, a depressed poet, dead by suicide -- so I owned it for two years before I finally wore it to a buncha-writers dinner party, but today it was the only clean shirt, so I wore it to town: to the Christian café (it has wireless), to the gym, the post office, and pharmacy. The lone comment came from pharmacy technician. Squinting at the image she said, “Is that one of those shirts that they give you at high-school reunions, showing what you used to look like back in high school?” Sylvia’s my main lady, but I never expected to be mistaken for her.

Yes, I Knew Derek Walcott

Poet Derek Walcott is in the news, the NYT reporting 30-year-old charges of sexual harassment forcing him out of a professorship at Oxford. He was the Hurst professor I studied with at Wash U. This was 1989, before his Nobel Prize.

How gruff Walcott was. Students had to go to his special visiting-professor apartment to meet with him. He answered the door reluctantly. He said some snappish thing as I walked in. I stopped, looked him in the face and said, "You're a tyrant."

He did a double take. Immediately he dropped the tyrant act, and we had a productive discussion. Later he told me my poetry was "damn good."

Normally I wouldn't have faced down Derek Walcott, except coincidentally he shares my birthday, 23 January, and I felt as if that were a key to his personality. What else I remember: his light-blue eyes. His white girlfriend. His urge to level things. I wrote a poem that made fun of a Hawaiian bar. He urged me to rewrite it, have yet more fun, and "destroy Hawaii!"Now circumstances conspire to level him. What goes around comes around.

Your Future Holds Many Many Chapbooks

Every poet’s got a chapbook, is making one, is competing to publish one – and is showing us the future. Readers want

• short
• intimate
• prettily designed
• highly portable and
• cheaply-had books. Chapbooks seem disposable because they seem slight; but then they’re not so disposable, because they’re usually not worth the trouble to re-sell.

Plus, I find myself picking up chapbooks from my shelf and enjoying brief readings; I do this more often than pick up full-length, hardback poetry books, some of which I begrudge reading because they cost me so much. Last full-length poetry book purchased was a 90-page paperback, $17.95, titled Enterprise, Inc. Love the poet, Chuck Sweetman. Hated the price.

Q. But will people download poetry chapbooks?

A. I think they will. I’d rather pay $9.95 and see half of that $9.95 going to the poet. Easy to make a PDF of a pretty chapbook. It'd cost nothing to add a sound file, too, so one can hear the poet read a few poems. In the chilly electronic cocoons that we're spinning for ourselves so that we can't be hurt, we're going to be craving more truth and intimacy. Poetry will fill the need.

I’d only miss getting the poet’s autograph and smile.

I Dare Me

Yesterday a poet named Matthew Guenette, young guy from out of town, read at Black Bear Bakery on a double bill with Rockwell Gray. Guenette is a social satirist -- currently a rare type of poet -- who knocks "things" like Katie Couric, and grocery stories so big "the aisles have storm drains." Audience laughed. I liked his work enough to buy his book Sudden Anthem (2007) from Dream Horse Press. He sold all the copies he brought.

My work also has a satirical streak and I decided in a flash to gallop out to my car, scoop my book Fierce Consent out of the trunk, run back and give it to him. I did, surprising him. I told him, "I'm doing this because we are alike. "

This was bold of me but I sensed that it was the right time and place. The day's horoscope ("there will be a small window of opportunity") and old maxims went through my head: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Would the book better off in my trunk? Hardly. I hope it'll make him laugh too.

"Part of Being a Great Poet Is. . ."

"Part of being a great poet is having great pictures of yourself taken," Tess Gallagher told our class back in '87; and I admit to being fascinated by author photos, especially studio or "studied" photos such as these here. Such photos alone express the high drama and confidence involved in the work of writing -- never otherwise visible. Probably for the drama of it, authors are traditionally photographed only in black & white. True, I've seen some super-dramatic, off-putting, plunge-neckline jacket photos, but most writers have more taste than that.

Here's Tess (photographed in Washington State by Corbin) in 1987, about age 44, when I knew her; the picture is on her book Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. And here's Vladimir Mayakovsky as a 20-year-old art student in 1913, the year he published his collection "I" and blew some windows out of the Moscow literary establishment. I like how Mayakovsky defined himself in a poem: "I'm not a man; I'm a cloud in trousers!"

Poet Marina Tsvetayeva, Mayakovsky's contemporary, left a hint on what she thought writers should wear: "Clothes that are not beautiful in the wind are not beautiful at all."

"Starving in a Garret"

Writer (usually poet) is always, in the popular mind, "starving in a garret." I wondered whence came this phrase and image of our profession. Looked it up. The original "born in a cellar and living in a garret"comes from the 18th century. The word "starving" replaces "living" in the19th century, whence comes this romantic 1856 painting, "Death of Chatterton." Seventeen-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton committed suicide in 1770. He actually WAS going to starve, and chose to poison himself. The phrase and image endure; has nobody come up with anything more accurate? I mean, bummer!

Credit Lord Byron, in "Childe Harold" (1812) for making a powerfully attractive figure out of a brooding, reckless young artist who, in real life, would give anybody a pain. I can see Byronic poets wearing black and smoking cigarettes on Delmar Blvd. even today.

How to Anger a Poet

Now, I know enough to PICK my battles, but for Christ's sake PLEEZE, America, cut me some slack and don't show me any more course descriptions like this one I saw today:

"POETS AT HEART": We’re all poets at heart. In this course we will address several poetry forms and devices. Class reports will be made defining these forms and devices and each week we will write and read poems (our own and other poets’). Our goal is to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of poetry, along with enhancing our abilities to write poetry. Remember, anybody can write poetry. (Text: Poetry For Dummies.)

When Poets Gave Orders

"We order that the poets’ rights be revered:

• To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (word-novelty).
• To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.
• To push with horror off their proud brow the wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches [clearer translation: "from toothpicks"].
• To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage."

The above is from the Russian Futurists' manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," 1912. By comparison, our poets are people-pleasers and wusses. Each of these century-old demands is, for poets in 2008, a total taboo. We say, "I don't think your experiment with coining new words is very successful," and "I don't know where you'll find a market for this," and "If only I could make it into Best American Poetry 2009," and "I can't figure out who is that collective 'we' being referenced in your poem."

By comparison, how timid we are! And how powerless! Are those things linked?

Chapbook Renascence

Not so long ago -- about 15 years -- a "real" or "serious" poet wouldn't be caught DEAD issuing a chapbook. Only losers would try to preserve their work in little stapled, spineless booklets! Because desktop publishing as we know it did not exist, the booklets were either hand-set or photocopied. That was the extent of alternative publishing -- the only way for poets to take publishing into their own hands. A book reviewer back then, I swatted chapbooks away like flies. I saw them knee-deep at secondhand bookstores. Well, things have changed and chapbooks are important now.

Cherry Pie Press since 2005 has published a series of poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women. They are beautifully produced and the poetry is hot and it keeps coming: Three new books this year. A friend of mine, Pamela Garvey, won a chapbook contest last year; her chapbook is titled Fear (Finishing Line Press), and each copy is threaded through with a satin rattail ribbon, different colors: mine is wine-red. Poets with traditional publishers will issue chapbooks if they've got some work that's too edgy for the suits. Ted Hughes issued 110 copies (that's all!) of a chapbook titled Howls & Whispers (1998), 11 poems from the Birthday Letters series that he, or somebody, thought were too edgy to publish in the regular book. In a rare-book room I read copy #75. Online I found a deluxe edition for sale that costs USD $27,500. Mostly, though, chapbooks are a heck of a lot more affordable than normal books of poetry, and they're mostly meat, very little gristle. A book of 20 or 30 poems that are ALL good is positively intoxicating.

I'm even urging chapbook publication on poets who have lots of good poems but not enough for a full-length manuscript, or who have full-length manuscripts they can't publish. Chapbooks can be handsomely made, even at home, and circulated and sold, mainly at poetry readings, but also through flyers, local bookstores, and the Internet.

And as far as I can see, no poet today is ever sorry that he or she issued a chapbook. Poets, consider it. And maybe it's time for some fiction or nonfiction writers to do it too.

Showered with Jewels

Proof that great ideas DO often strike in the shower! A news brief in the June 2007 Ladies Home Journal quotes recent research: "'Our skin is designed to naturally administer the right proportions of molecules to have a beneficial, stimulating effect on our thinking,' explains Frank Rice, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience. . ." Credit your endorphins -- the stuff that gives you your natural highs, like those you get from exercising or massage. Or maybe from hugs. I read somewhere that for maximum creativity, you need 12 hugs a day.

What's a few wet footprints on the carpet compared to inspiration? Each gift of sudden inspiration comes only once, to only one person. You don't want to lose it. Even Emily Dickinson thought, " 'Twill keep," but it won't -- and you don't want to have to say along with her, ruefully, "The Gem was gone -- /And now, an Amethyst remembrance/ Is all I own."* Get out of the shower, out of bed, or pull over the car, and write down that idea or first line. I do, even if it's a bother. My personal research says that you have two or three minutes before the gift turns to vapor. (Writers do receive other gifts -- such as book ideas -- that are less perishable.)

To be an artist is to be a channel or gateway for creative power. Enjoy your appointment to the welcoming committee!

*"I held a Jewel in my fingers--" (#245)

Going to Readings is Good for Your Health and Ego

Poet Erin Belieu read at Washington University's Duncker Hall last night. Full house; did my heart good to see it. She read "In The Red Dress I Wear at Your Funeral," the climactic long poem from her critically acclaimed new book, Black Box. I am so glad I went. It was good in all ways for my health as a writer.

At least once every two weeks I attend a literary reading or event in order to stay current, to learn, to enjoy, to listen to the hot new poets or honor the hot old ones. Always I keep a notebook and pen at hand, because it seems that poems attract poems -- at readings, the whole room fills with them, like butterflies -- and I want to capture my share to take home. Some of my best ideas for prose and poems are conceived at readings. It's a stimulating environment, full of thoughts and ideas: totally writer-friendly.

That said, I like Ms. Belieu's poems, but at their best they are only about 5 to 10 percent better than mine -- a great boost to my confidence. And on the way home it occurred to me that no matter how painful, the end of a love relationship is not at all like real death. That metaphor originated with court poets who wrote for the elite. We in the wealthy USA use that metaphor to lend drama to our lives. Anyone who has seen death knows that by comparison, a love relationship gone bad is bubblegum.

What People Say

A very serious young student heard me read from my poems. I asked her opinion later. (Never do that.) She said, "Cute."

She was being pompous in a twentysomething way (recalling too well my own flaming youth), but this lodged in me like a grain of sand in an oyster. Of all the things I've been and ever aimed to be, I've never wanted to be cute. I'd like to be entertaining, like Chaucer, but also have his smarts. Coy, kittenish -- no!

A hundred defenses occured to me: She doesn't register my feminist politics -- because she's so young she never had to have any! -- She has no idea what poetry costs! -- and so forth.

Then I saw this Soviet-era quotation from a poem addressed to poets:

“[…]/ This is for you—who dance and pipe on pipes,/ sell yourselves openly,/ sin in secret,/ and picture your future as academicians/ with outsized rations./ I admonish you,/ I—/ genius or not—/ who have forsaken trifles/ and work in Rosta*,/ I admonish you—/ before they disperse you with rifle-butts/ Give it up!/ Give it up!/ Forget it./ Spit/ on rhymes/ and arias/ and the rose bush/ and other such mawkishness/ from the arsenal of the arts./ […] There are no fools today/ to crowd open mouthed round a “maestro”/ and await his pronouncement./ Comrades!/ give us a new form of art—/ an art/ that will pull the republic out of the mud.”

Spot-on, I thought. Was that what my student had meant? But has a poet ever done that? Maybe Whitman? But with such a muddied republic as ours is? Can it be done? What would it cost me? Should a poet care what it might cost?

[from The Bedbug and Selected Poems, by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Indiana University Press, 1975. Translated from Russian by Edwin Morgan. *"Rosta" is a contraction of "Russian Telegraph Agency"; the line's connotation is "and give my all for our people."]