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In a dream near the end of last year, I was walking through long hallways in a dorm-like building with art and writing tacked to the walls between the many doors. Sometimes people were in the halls with me and sometimes I walked alone. As I walked I said "thank you" aloud to the poets and artists by name and when I said "thank you, Bernadette" I realized that Bernadette Mayer had been walking beside me. She died shortly before I dreamed this, and even my dream-self felt the loss. When I read this kind appreciation of Mayer's life's work recently I recalled this and was glad she walked with me in that dream-space; I never saw her IRL.

Lately I've been facing some despair and loneliness, winter-related and otherwise. Writing has felt unattainable. But I still note down my dreams when I remember them, and I still keep a tiny journal (possibly subconsciously inspired by Mayer's journal suggestion for "beautiful and/or ugly sights") of one lovely thing I saw each day. And I still carry around scraps of language as little talismans in my mind even when I feel wholly detached from my ability to assemble words in any pleasing or useful way.

The title "The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica" is one scrap I carry around lately, thinking of the poem in conversation with other poem-talismans I've held. Its command "Do not be afraid of your own heart beating" is a second-person version of Alice Notley's "May I never be afraid / especially of myself," which I've had embedded firmly in my memory for most of a decade. And the last line brings in suffering, and suffering in a poem always brings to my mind Auden's Old Masters (and my college-aged self wrestling with a close reading of that poem in a basement computer lab). But the end of "The Way to Keep Going..." with its many "if"s is all about possibility: a hard thing to grasp, slippery as ice. Which is all to say: good poem, good ending, good poet to walk a dream's hallway with while I try and fail and try again to find wherever it is I want poetry to take me.

I hope you're taking good care out there, I hope we all keep going.

So OK I think I’ve been an out queer person for long enough to write a few cranky words about rainbow capitalism for June, our special month of public awareness and parades. Corporations are invited to shut up and quietly give gobs of money to trans people of color and other folks whose gender identity or sexuality put them at risk of political persecution instead of making LinkedIn graphics. Queerness isn’t a flag or a hashtag or a sales section at Target: more like a constellated pattern of selves, ways of being in the world that link us across time and space.

But and so let me give you some queer poems that are breathtaking for my own sad gay brain. (I use gay and bi and queer interchangeably as the mood strikes for myself: despite caring very deeply about “the literary arts” in scare quotes, I don’t particularly care about finding exactly the right word for my glorious midlife identity journey. The word “gay” appeals to me as a reclamation of something that was used mockingly in my teen years, now that I’m grown and have realized how little it matters what other people think of your harmless behavior. Which is to say: I’m not interested in dating cis men but life is long, gender’s a spectrum, the world is a vampire, here are some poems.)

I hadn’t heard of Jason Schneiderman before I saw him read alongside Ada Limón at the big literary conference, and look, here she is reading his poem that permanently lodged itself in my heart during that reading, “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)”. I love stuff: collecting it, perceiving it, looking at how other people arrange it. So the metaphor of heaven as an infinity of custom shelving storing everything you’ve ever loved, everything that surprises you with joy: what could be more perfect for a packrat? This is a poem about time, and age, and what you get from age. Who dies? Everyone, but hopefully you know you’re loved before you do. You become whole through the experience of love, which must necessarily begin with loving yourself. Sorry to be corny on main! Trust that this poem says it better than I did.

Another poem recently began untangling certain knots in my mind about queerness and time. “Is time is queer/and memory is trans/and my hands hurt in the cold/then” is a mouthful of a title by Raquel Salas Rivera – I love that the slashes imply linebreaks within the title, or simultaneous things happening. Then what? This poem purposefully confuses timelines, putting us squarely in the singular forever (which is “Composed of Nows,” lest we forget) and crossing languages at its fulcrum: “the sí;” appearing at the exact halfway point, an axis for the stanzas to orbit. Putting forever in a poem isn’t new but putting “memory is trans” in the title is quite new and revelatory to me. Memory, like all experiences we may want to consider the life of the mind, is squarely situated within the flesh. And the flesh can be transgender, can journey through hormones (or not) to find pleasure (or acceptance, hope, or just moments of wanting to crawl out of itself less).

Time passes. I keep waking up in the cursed hours between 3 and 5 am, wracked with anxiety then, eventually, grateful for birdsong. With one dear person in my life, I joke about the occupational hazard of my poetry job which is crying at work because I loved a poem so much. This came up because I absolutely sobbed at Samin Nosrat’s lovely reading of Aracelis Girmay’s “Elegy” and needed some time to recover from that one. Y’all know I love birds and emotional bird poems, which “Elegy” is, but this message is about another occupationally hazardous section of the Poetry Foundation’s database which is our collection of Brenda Hillman’s poems, which inspired me to buy her collection Extra Hidden Life, among the Days when I was at the AWP conference some amount of time ago, simultaneously forever and yesterday, as time goes.

I found “Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind” because the title is so striking and relatable: what resident of these midwestern windswept places hasn’t angrily stood outside in some wind at some point? Then it turned out to be both hilarious (indeed, how can one “lose the self / after reading so much literary theory?”) and profound. The project of this book is an ecologically political one of grief mixed with hope: “it’s too late for countries / but it’s not too late for trees…” sums it all up to me. Borders and wars and the global political foot-dragging on the incoming climate apocalypse are a few of the things that wake me up in these cursed hours, and I know my gal Brenda’s right out there with me in these worries. And I also know that trees and dirt have wisdom I’ll never comprehend, and I try to tamp down the worry with the wonder.

As a proven sucker for a great title, I gotta say, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days totally rocks. There’s a sci-fi sound to it, as if the poems will bring you to a place where you can get a video-game power-up, a +1 to your heart-count. I think often of this line from Blade Runner, an android’s demand of his creator: “I want more life, fucker”. Everything that lives desires more life. The “extra hidden life” in the title poem is bacteria that thrive in extreme environments, but it’s also a poem that’s dedicated in the book “for CDW” - C.D. Wright, who’s mentioned in this poem as “our friend” who wrote “of those who love glass / & early freedom” in her series of “obscure lives.” The more I read of hers the more C.D. Wright is becoming maybe my actual favorite poet so the long poem/lyric essay/photo scrapbook “Her Presence will Live Beyond the Days” in Extra Hidden Life… was yet another occupational hazard I experienced: big-time weep fuel. Life and more life, through words, conversation, presence with beloved people.

Down by the river near where I live, the wild onions from which Chicago stole its name out of the Algonquin language are in their living season. Ramps are sending their tall leaves out of the soil now in glorious green clusters. Two weeks ago I walked there with my dog and the spouse from whom I’m separated (my “partner emeritus,” as they like to say) and showed them how to cut the leaves and leave the roots, so the ramps will grow back next year. They made pesto and I made chimichurri with our foraged handfuls, each in our own kitchens. This is the work of loving repair, to me: sharing space and knowledge in a different context, still with care.

Every once in a while I get reacquainted with a poem or two and want to effuse about poetry, so I thought I’d fire up the old email machine on a platform that doesn’t have gross transphobic tech-bro vibes. (RIP to my shortlived Substack, you had a better UI than the benignly neglected Tinyletter, but I can’t hang with your whole thing.)

A flippant remark I like to make about myself, which comes from a true place, is that I make all my decisions based on vibes. So having briefly caught a favorable vibe for writing about some poems, allow me to introduce “Reasons to Survive November” and the mostly wholesome constellation of nonsense it brings to mind. A content warning as you click: there’s some discussion of self-harm in this poem.

Something about the motion and simile-accrual in the first stanza is Brautiganesque to me, with November becoming a powerful entity like Trickortreat and moving like a flame. I like the symmetry of the trains in the first and last stanza, as if the poem carries its own caboose, running itself around the little track of its logic. I like that the reasons for survival are as small as a bowl of soup or the option to see some paintings of barns. In this poem as in life, I like that there are options, things that might occur in the world as the vibes permit.

The monosyllabic adolescent dramatics of “shove joy like a knife” in the second-to-last stanza almost make me laugh aloud, remembering a moment when a friend did laugh aloud at a Mountain Goats lyric I found very serious and dire in 2005. (Said lyric was “wringing out the hours like blood-drenched bedsheets,” which, admittedly, is kind of doing the most.) It’s a poem of surviving for pure stubborn spite, dragging your donkey soul through life like a stubborn dog who needs to be convinced to walk around the block for their own good, making it through the days again and again – until little by little things look brighter and you’re able to stand in the sun of those brighter days.

(I appreciate when other folks provide content warnings on their writing so will strive to offer my own going forward.)

Last month marked many grim anniversaries in our indoor year of pandemic-time. I biked past Lincoln Hall with its marquee reading ONE YEAR DARK. I listened to Indoor Living by Superchunk a lot, and I made daily attempts to claw my attention span back from the phenomenon of pandemic-induced wet-noodle brain: I read poems and novels and one very outstanding novel by a poet that contains a dedication to one of my many outstanding coworkers.

It's an honor and a pleasure to think about poetry and how it can live online for a job these days. I still believe that poems can be useful as well as beautiful, that poetry is for everyone, that it is a fine art that can happen anywhere, made as it is of nothing but language in intimate relation to time.

And so here is a poem about time that has been kicking my ass six ways from Sunday: "Not This" by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

Everything, as my erstwhile pal the spam horse once said, happens so much.

Horse ebooks @Horse_ebooks

Everything happens so much

June 28th 2012

82,026 Retweets89,341 Likes

Three weeks ago I left my beloved job at the food bank for an exciting opportunity at the Poetry Foundation. This was perhaps the hardest choice I've made in my career, to leave a team and a mission I cared about so much and make a leap of faith into an institution that's in the midst of profound uncertainty and transition.

"Poetry keeps people sane," one of my food bank work friends said. A bold claim, but one that's proven true in my experience. Poems ease transitions and provide maps for the mind to follow in difficult moments.

A year is an arbitrary unit. But as this uniquely universally miserable one comes to a close, I'm thinking often about cycles, and beginnings within endings. An old college friend and lovely poet tweeted a phrase on a New Year's Eve more than a decade ago that I always remember around this time of year. The internet remembers its precise punctuation for me:

Travis Smith @travis_oliver

Let the old year burn!

January 1st 2010

1 Like

A burning could be a celebration, an exorcism, or a clearing of space. Of course I am also, often & always, thinking about trees. How the scrub burns so the tall hardwoods can thrive in the sun. How traditional indigenous firebuilding practices can mitigate harsher wildfires, and all the related things I learned reading Braiding Sweetgrass this summer. Here is a tree poem that sets these cycles up just right, to me: “For Allen Ginsberg,” by Dorothea Grossman.

The part that rung in my head like a struck bell was "the generous death / of old trees." How a death can be generous: a giving of form and foundation to the organisms yet to take root in "the red powdered floor / of the forest." I know I am saying the same thing I said about other tree poems back in Early Quar, but the cyclical nature of trees becoming soil remains a wonder to me. There's a beautiful passage in Braiding Sweetgrass about how the soil in an old forest is much richer than anything humans could fortify. And "generous" is such a surprising and precise word for dead trees. I aspire to generosity. It hadn't occurred to me until I read this poem that letting go of things that no longer serve you — moving a cycle forward, letting the old year burn, allowing your old self to wither and die — is itself a generous act. I first came across "For Allen Ginsberg" quoted on Mariame Kaba's Twitter; I'm guessing she was thinking of something similar but wiser.

This will be short. Everything feels fraught two days before the consequential election, and my nerves and concentration are shot, as maybe yours are too. The last couple months I've been thinking of a very good poem of anxiety, "Wanda in Worryland" by Wanda Coleman. She writes "i have been known to imagine a situation / and then get involved in it, upset, angry / and cry hot tears." How many late nights have I spent imagining a situation and getting deeply involved in it?

As an antidote to all this upset, I recently remembered a poem I first read probably 20 years ago in a magazine named after it - “Doubletake” by Seamus Heaney. It's one of those soaring, hopeful numbers that I often have a tinge of reflexive cynicism about. I just decided to call them "Occasion Poems": the ones that get busted out to mark something momentous and ceremonial. But in this constantly momentous churning time, I reckon we all need a dose of ceremony, a sense of the truth that:

…once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

I really feel like I heard Barack Obama quote this poem once. It seems like something he’d do. Anyway I will be out here clinging to hope and also to my dog, awaiting a rebirth into justice and peace.

I'm not going to shut up about Black lives mattering and I'm going to keep featuring some brilliant poets of color in these emails. I read one poem and one collection lately that gave me that gasping, top-of-your-head-taken-off, walking-around-with-your-whole-heartmind-open feeling.

The poem in question gets its titular Kendrick Lamar track stuck in my head. We love our nation’s Pulitzer-winning rapper. The track is GOD, the poem is "Self-Portrait as Kendrick Lamar, Laughing to the Bank" by Ashanti Anderson. The line that catches me in my tracks (still, and I've read this poem dozens of times) is:

I've noticed that good people must die

to let there be light in my house.

So much is happening here - God and Genesis and goodness. And even noticing: an ideal verb of observation, one that I think of often in my daily life. (Notice the pace of your thoughts. Notice the space your breaths take up as you meditate, as you walk, mask on, around public spaces). Here the speaker may or may not be complicit in what must be going on. I take it to mean — no matter what, our suffering is bound up in that of others. That none of us are free until we all are, that we are each other's harvest where it counts the most.

It's Juneteenth. It's a celebratory day in Black culture; I got to post some professional tweet content about it. And it's a strange day for white Americans like me to try and make a statement of solidarity and recognition. But I am trying to show up and say something, if imperfect, rather than rest on the assumption that people know what I believe and how strongly I hold it to be true. And so I am saying, again and again, Black lives matter. And: Black joy matters. I worry sometimes, as we hold space and try to understand what we cannot experience, that my fellow white folks see Black people as vessels of pain and not fully realized fellow humans, with all the wonder and absurdity that entails. And so I made a ✨ Black Joy Poetry Playlist.✨ It starts with a poem I can't stop thinking about and ends with an arrival from space. In between there are omelets, warm arms, a lifesaving folk-punk band, feelings and queerness, liminal spaces and play. And a shoutout to a very classic Frankie Knuckles bop that you'll have to find for yourself. Read, watch, listen:

• Jamaal May, "There Are Birds Here"

• Essex Hemphill, "For My Own Protection"

• Hanif Abdurraqib, "Defiance, Ohio is the Name of a Band"

• Britteney Black Rose Kapri, "We House"

• Nikki Giovanni, "I Wrote a Good Omelet"

• Angel Nafis, "When I Realize I'm Wearing My Girlfriend's Ex-Girlfriend's Panties"

• Nikky Finney, "Aureole"

• Eve Ewing, "Arrival Day" (it's down at the bottom of the page but all three of these poems are very worth your time)

OK. I hope you found some new poets or maybe rediscovered some old favorites there. Reply and let me know what you liked. Reply with anything. Keep being loud about defunding the police (fellow Chicagoans, join me to strive for CPAC, here's a script you can use to call your alderman about it) and letting everyone breathe in true freedom.

Yours in hope,
Erin

PS: As predicted I completely forgot to announce to y'all in last month's message that I made a very cute zine about Moomins and tarot. You can buy it, along with my other zines and chapbooks, right over here. All proceeds from the Moomin zine are going to Chicago-area mutual aid efforts for BIPOC. End of commercial.
PPS: I will give a free zine of your choosing to the first person who correctly identifies the Frankie Knuckles track mentioned in one of the poems in this playlist. My spouse (who owns all my zines anyway) is not eligible for this exclusive offer.

We've made it through another mass of time, together in our separateness. Poetically and otherwise, here are some things that are getting me through. I hope they'll provide some kind of nurturing soothing sensation for you too.

Oak galls and old trees

We held Other People's Poems on our webcams last month and we'll do it again tomorrow (reply to me for the link if you want to join one of my favorite monthly celebrations of words). I recited two poems that I found via various internet perigrinations, both of which feel very Of This Moment without being written for it. The first was Wendell Berry's "Stay Home," which would've been perfect for the title if nothing else even. (And I'm pleased to find it quoted in full in a 33-year-old event writeup from our beloved local independent paper, the Chicago Reader.) But it's a lovely, lively short piece about enmeshing yourself in nature. The old trees that move only with the wind and then with gravity are my favorite; I can almost visualize them sinking back into the earth, becoming loam.

And then I memorized another poem with trees in it, Stephanie Burt's "Advice from Rock Creek Park," because I find its opening lines oddly life-affirming in the sorta-Buddhist way of accepting the connection between all things. I like the oak galls because "gall" is a funny word for a feeling or a body part or a lumpy infection on a plant where a wasp laid eggs in it. And I find the ending a cryptically supportive reminder that people and nature rising up against ineffective and cruel leaders will always have the edge.

Japanese craft Youtubes

It's been a while. Here we all are looking at our email. Everything is strange and I have the start of one of my own old never-quite-for-sure-completed poems stuck in my head, because it says

Fuck it. We need each other,
desperately or just a little

It's true, even if I haven't yet succeeded in making it into a beautiful or resonant whole. Nothing like a global pandemic to remind me that everyone is truly, deeply, and inextricably connected, that we depend on each other in ways visible and hidden. I rely on the warm presence of my neighbor with the three-legged dog who smiles at me and my dog, on the mayor who quotes Gwendolyn Brooks on a livestream, on bus drivers and garbagemen and grocery clerks and many, many people who clean and make and mend many things in the world. And, of course, on the friends and family who call and text and email, all of us saying We are here, we are still in this together. Not desperately, but just a little reminder.

Here are a few things I've found comforting in this time of social distancing. Send me yours, or just your favorite emoji. (This is my favorite Depression Texting Hack, by the way: if your brain doesn't feel up to composing a sentence, you can send one of those tiny colorful pictures that live in your phone and people know you're out there. Anyway, onward, to the comforts.)

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

Three women stood on the low stage in the glass building one winter evening, bare trees lit behind them. The woman in the center would read some lines in Korean, and the one standing to her left would read them again in English. The third woman, colorfully dressed, had begun the event with a slideshow of her riotous blacklined ink illustrations for the book — figures crawling under and out of graves; vast strange machinery; sleeping and singing human forms. After eloquently describing her art and her inspiration in her mother's poems, Fi Jae Lee apologized for her bad English (which was, throughout, perfect). Her mother is the South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who appeared that night at the Poetry Foundation with her translator, Don Mee Choi.

It's always felt like a keen disadvantage to be monolingual, especially so once I fell for poetry in my early twenties — after I'd missed my opportunity to push my limited high school Spanish past the point of frustration towards understanding. Although I read lots of writing in translation, it's mostly fiction — this reading at PoFo was the first time I saw poems translated live. I was mesmerized, particularly by repetitive poems like "Lord No" as the sound of the unfamiliar words cascaded into the known ones, the texture of sound in each language bearing down with the weight of grammar in a massive structure of refusal.

When I'm reading poetry I think often of the ending of "Why Poetry Can Be Hard for Most People" by Dorothea Lasky:

No
Poetry is hard for most people
Because of sound

The lack of punctuation makes "sound" ring in the open air of the poem. And it's sound that makes poetry distinct from prose, to me — I wonder at the translator's craft of balancing meaning against tone against the feel of the words in the mouth and ears. Not knowing a lick of Korean that isn't the name of a food, I can't tell you the nuance of these poems. I wonder what I miss without a vocabulary of different sounds, without ordering the words around me to other grammars, learning more sets of homonyms.

Because I couldn't stop thinking about this reading I bought Kim's most recent collection, Autobiography of Death. At the end there's an interview between her and Don Mee Choi, the second question of which has to do with the feeling of disembodiment that comes from returning to the place you were born, listening to the language and thinking of what has been left behind. Kim says:

The Korean word for "hearing" is a homonym for the word "posessed," as in possessed by a ghost or spirit; a homonym for "visiting" or "dropping in" at your own or somebody else's house; and a homonym for "holding" something in your hand." So the same word is used for actions involved with the ear, ghost house and object. Which is to say, we hear things as if we are possessed by a ghost, then we hold something in our hands and let go of it as we enter then exit somebody's house. While I was writing these poems, I was probably possessed by a ghost, listening to death, then I held death in my hand and entered the house of death.

I'm honored to have been selected for the third time as a semifinalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards. GBOMA is a fantastic event. It epitomizes what I love about Chicago: its hustle and heart, its creative folks from every neighborhood and every continent. I'm humbled and heartwarmed each time I'm there. Come on out for it on September 17, 7:30 pm at Promontory in Hyde Park.

Before I do GBOMA I will presumably practice reading this poem (it's one of the ones from Breathtaken, which you can read as a pdf here since I sold all the printed copies I made). I will ride my bike a long distance and think about the light through trees. After, I'll continue distilling some of my many thoughts about poetry and translation and sound and put them in your email box eventually. And on November 17 I'll cohost another installment of Basement Life, the new reading series that gets much of my excitement and little of my website-tinkering time. And life will go on, and seasons will change, and we'll all move through the world as we must.

Thanks as always for reading. Come out next week, or drop me a line, or just know I am glad you're there.

Yours,
Erin

Astrology is fake (as the humorous astrology column on the dearly departed website the Hairpin always began) but Cancer season is here, which means my birthday is right around the corner, which means I will break my self-imposed rule of not writing about the same poet twice on this email list because I do whatever I want for my birthday.

For some reason poetry and astrology go together - the popular Twitter account Astro Poets is run by Dorothea Lasky and Alex Dimitrov; more than one reading series I've attended has introduced people by their signs. While I don't put much stock in horoscopes I do understand the appeal of various different practices for developing cosmic and sweeping narratives, whether it's astrology or tarot, folklore or fanfic.

Lately I have been expressing my feelings by loudly declaiming some stanzas of Mary Ruefle's "Provenance" at things. I'm ready to declare "Provenance" the Official Poem of Cancer Season. This poem is cosmically upset, and so am I. (And here's Mary Ruefle— and Dorothea Lasky— previously on this email list.)

Before we get into how "Provenance" is a perfect gem, I present for your consideration An Incomplete List of Things I Have Cried About During Cancer Season:

• A bag of tasty salad greens but some of them were slimy

• Rock music's #1 drummer Janet Weiss leaving Sleater-Kinney

• The inevitable yet sudden demise of my favorite houseplant

• Not having enough coffee

• Having too much coffee

• Having just the right amount of coffee

• The mere existence of dogs

• Every lyric on the new Bill Callahan record, more or less

• How dang long it takes to make a quiche

• Ridiculously sexist popular attitudes towards incredible athletes (the USWNT, Serena Williams)

• [gesturing vaguely yet urgently towards the country's borders, the White House, and the climate, while hissing] whatever the utter fuck this shit is

All that is to say that "Provenance," an essential masterwork for someone experiencing outsized emotions, begins in childhood and leads us on a journey through our most childish yet authentic feelings. I can't find a clean copy on the internet so here's the scan I took from my copy of Trances of the Blast to help me memorize it.

Where this poem really begins to hit me is "I did not want to give her anything"— that affronted sense of justice, articulated in crisp words that assertively refuse to be contracted ("did not" vs "didn't," where a previous line uses "can't"). Whom amongst us doesn't carry some childhood affront in the psyche's back pocket? Something you loved and were forced, for reasons you did not understand, to release, as the speaker releases her beautiful horse Aurora to the dimly recalled classmate?

Once Aurora's departure is mourned with the Biblical-sounding language of "together and on one day" the poem transitions into the dark night of a fairytale:

And so I have had to deal with wild
intractable people all my days
and have been led astray in a world
of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees
where no one ever even curtsies anymore
or has an understudy

I have a new zine of poems that I'm proud and excited to share. Breathtaken is a series of eight poems about swimming pools, memory, family and identity. A few copies are for sale here. I'll also be reading from it at Tuesday Funk on Tuesday, June 4. Tuesday Funk is a consistently delightful show; I'm honored to be reading there again and I'd be so very pleased to see you.

The Breathtaken poems started from a prompt I gave myself to write about every swimming pool I could remember. Whether by astrology (triple Cancer, as watery as they come) or by happy association (learning to swim as a very small child from my beloved grandfather), I have always been drawn to water. I pictured the pools of my memory as a vast network of blue nodes on a map. Memories came alongside them: of being in my body, of being with my siblings, of the unique color of light that came through the windows of the pool on my college campus in the evenings. They coalesced around some images: trees, boundaries, the feeling of being held up by the water or by your own form inside it.

Tell me about some water you remember, or anything that comes to mind. I love getting responses to these messages. (And I'd love to hear your thoughts on the poems. Although I feel very tenderly towards them, even mixed reactions give me lots to think about.)

Yours,
Erin

It's not exactly a poem, but I'm delighted to present a new zine I created with the design help of my loving partner, my friend John Morrison, and my very dumbassed private Twitter account. It is an extended meditation on the dad zeitgeist and baseball as storytelling through the persona of Baseball's Dad, an ur-father-figure loosely based on Chicago Cubs Manager Joe Maddon.

The one poetic aspect of Baseball's Dad as a project, aside from the repetition of the structure, was choosing exactly what detail would be the most dadlike for each scenario. What song would Baseball's Dad play to accompany his snifter of good scotch when his handsome baseball sons clinched their spot in the World Series? "Let's Go Crazy" by Prince, of course. What cereal would Baseball's Dad eat straight out of the box in his underwear one late night? Certainly Golden Grahams. It could be no other.

And because I care more about people than baseball franchises, I'm donating half the proceeds from the zine to two Chicago-based organizations that are making the world a little safer for some of the people whose lives are most threatened in our current political hellhole. Check out the great work that Brave Space Alliance and CAIR Chicago are doing.

You can buy your copy of the Baseball's Dad zine right here, or save on shipping and pick it up at Uncharted Books or Quimby's if you're local. Or you can wait six weeks and get it at the Left The Prairie table at one of our most wonderful annual events for people who care about independent literature and art, Chicago Zine Fest. (Say hi to me at the Chicago Books to Women in Prison table if you go.)

Happy opening day of baseball to Baseball's Dad and to you. Enjoy the springtime; reply with any and everything that's on your mind.

Yours,
Erin

If your social media circles are anything like mine they crumpled in grief this week at the death of Mary Oliver. People who professed themselves not to be "poetry people" sent their gratitude for what she'd brought into their lives: strength, healing, a connection to some ineffable and needed something. Some capacity they'd had locked inside them that her poems broke wide open. Which is a great strength she had, a great strength her poems will always have, and a great opportunity for me to revisit my own snobbery at loving the work of a popular, accessible poet. I found a much more articulate expression of this examination in this tribute from the poet Sam Sax:

So every month I go to a poetry recitation night at my favorite neighborhood bookstore and every month I have a tiny identity crisis about what poem to memorize. While I love the process of memorizing and reciting a poem — the ritual of making the words present in your body, letting them unspool — still I cling to a teenage-weirdo idea that I have to project a certain coolness in my choices. I have to impress some nameless attendee of this incredibly friendly and welcoming poems-night with my impeccable, eclectic, obscure taste. And so when a Google result for Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" on some decidedly middlebrow blog talked about its popularity in yoga studios and wedding vows, I shied away from making it my poem last month — even though it heals me.

Here is "Wild Geese":

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

It occurred to me as I sat on a slow city bus watching Mary Oliver read "Wild Geese" that "Meanwhile" here does the same work that "While someone else…" does in that Auden poem I love so much (and which I previously discussed here). It's calming to be merely a small bit in "the family of things" in painful times. It's calming to tell yourself "You do not have to be good" when you tend towards having a brain that tells you at every turn you never will: I was riding the bus home from getting my antidepressants refilled. Which is to say I have such a brain, a genetic or learned tendency towards despair.

"Tell me about despair, yours" is at once sweeping and intimate: the broad and life-devouring "despair" alongside the secret-whispering pact of "and I will tell you mine." I'm sure that this sort of invitation, unhidden behind a veil of metaphor, is exactly why snobs and critics don't like Mary Oliver. But I want to argue my inner snob away from avoiding sentiment. Because I've found so much else of use in this poem. The geese, the rain, and "the world offers itself to your imagination": suddenly I noiticed that this poem encapsulates a daily practice I've pursued since mid-2017. I call it "one lovely thing." I was struggling to write, to be in my mind in a way receptive to making new sentences, new poems. It was frustrating. But I walk the dog every day, I leave the house and I try to look at the world. So I started collecting one little moment every day that was lovely and writing down these scraps of things before I go to bed.

The world offers itself to your imagination, as loud as the wild geese or as quiet as snow. Some of the lovely things I've seen are mundane: a crow in a tree, a bright-colored piece of garbage in the street. Some seem worth a photograph: a wall of steam shot through with headlights so it looks like a gathering of ghosts, or a pair of twin-Santa-dressed buskers playing "Despacito" together on violins between two arriving trains. And someday some of them could become poems, but they're also enough in themselves. After all, you do not have to be good, at writing or at life, every moment of every day. You only have to allow yourself love, to be in your soft body and in the world.

I love these words, the tender and tough offering of "Wild Geese." I hope they bring comfort to you too. And now I plan to recite it at next month's Other People's Poems on February 11. Maybe I'll see you there.

Send me your favorite Mary Oliver, or anything that occurs. I always love hearing back.

Once there were world wars and that's where modernism came from, the horrors of war that were too much to present in a linear narrative or a classical form. I recently revisited a fifty-year-old poem I learned about in a video last year, an untitled poem by Muriel Rukeyser that begins "I lived in the first century of world wars." The video shows people in 1968 and 2018 doing much the same thing — allowing the news to "come out of various devices" and drown out their morning thoughts, finding their friends "more or less mad for similar reasons," inhabiting a sorrowful and anxious age.

In poems I'm often drawn towards the turn from "I" to "we." There's a powerful gesture in a "we" — a unity that demands questioning. Who gets to be a "we" and who is a "you" or otherwise? Who is invited under the big tent of the plural first-person? The first "we" in this poem comes two-thirds of the way in, after the speaker has lived through the day in its frustrations and worries:

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other...

The "we" reaches out to become a bigger "we" — and maybe the first "we" is just a theory about the others that might be found.

Contrastingly I found a poem with a "we" in the title, a "we" that acts in the speaker's imagination throughout: it's called "Everybody In the Car We Are Leaving Without You." The first line lends the title to the collection it's in, "Let's All Die Happy" by Erin Adair Hodges. It's a poem with a very different mood, and one I'll admit I was drawn to because its core mechanic of listed "Let's" statements resembles a poem I once wrote about love in the time of No Fear t-shirts. (Which I read aloud on video here if you need that.)

The "we" in "Everybody In the Car We Are Leaving Without You" performs a variety of more or less theoretical actions, from unlearning mayonnaise to being Vienna, or accident. Enjambed half-rhymes fading into full rhymes at the end (graves/ flames/ names / blame) bring about an off-kilter resolution to an oddball list. It's a poem of possibility with an undertow of resignation — do "we" really want to be "the lake / that the bodies go into" in the end? Something mysterious and nullifying? I think I'd rather not.

I don't have a satisfying conclusion to this letter or this year. I have fragments of hope and good intentions — to be part of a significant "we," a force for what is wonderful. I have an ever-growing stack of things to read and a dog staring me down for a walk. Which seems as good a place to leave this as any.

Here's to next year together,
Erin

When I was a teen trying to be punk rock, my boyfriend decorated the ceiling of his room with setlists from shows, and so I'd sit around making found poems of them. And ever since I've had this poetry email list I've wanted to write about song titles as poetry.

It barely bears mentioning that poetry and songs overlap; both are made up of sound and words and time. And I could start anywhere but I will start here, with a silly but real promise I made to my spouse: to write about how the song title "Fit Throwing Hellride" is a perfect phrase. It's a Wesley Willis song that stubbornly refuses to be located on the internet. Wesley Willis was a beloved Chicago artist, musician and personality who had schizophrenia and characterized his experience with demons as "hellrides." He has a lot of songs about hellrides on the city bus and I think "fit throwing hellride" is the best title among them partly for its sound: every syllable in there has a different vowel sound. The long "o" in the middle and long "i" at the end make it particularly suited to a wail. And "fit throwing" seems so primal and uncomfortable: it's just right.

I value the words he gave to his experience, and I don't want to mock Wesley Willis or this perfect phrase. As a person who is tremendously skilled at overthinking everything I worry about appreciating things the wrong way. But I think everyone has their own idea of hell, and a shorthand for it like "fit throwing hell ride" can invite you to poke around in your own discomfort, to sit in the pothole-ridden bus ride of your own mind for a bit.

Recently I read a thoughtful retrospective about David Berman, a songwriter I dearly love and another writer of some perfect phrases with just enough room to invite you in. If "Fit Throwing Hellride" is a city bus that is too much, "The Wild Kindness" is for me a peaceful forested space. It's another case where the vowel sounds make it stick in my mind, in this case two long "i" sounds that drawl along. Wildness and kindness, two abstractions that somehow seem concrete and entire in this phrase.

I have a memory of listening to this song in the passenger seat of my friend Abigail's red Jeep with the sun setting over the hills of rural Wisconsin, where families paint patterned quilt squares on their barns and old trees arch over roads with no shoulders. One of the refrains, "instead of time there will be lateness," comforts me — it's like ingesting a tincture of the feeling of sitting beside a fire when the only hour you know is the darkness, then waking up only when birds and sun become too loud in the morning.

There are songs and phrases I could talk about forever. Tell me yours. And if you're a US citizen, let me be the umpteenth person to tell you to make absolutely certain that you vote next week. You can start here.

Yours,
Erin

That subject line is the first line of a new poem I will be reading at the 25th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards, one week from today. Reciting at GBOMA in 2014 was absolutely a highlight of my poetry career, and I'm thrilled and humbled to be in another one of these stellar events. Please get a ticket if you can make it out to Hyde Park at 7 pm on September 18!

Since I've already written about Gwendolyn Brooks and her admirable dedication to Chicago poetry, and since I should walk away from the laptop and start practicing reciting this poem, I'll leave you instead with a link to a poem I've been enjoying a great deal in the last month — "It Happens Like This," by James Tate.

So there you go. Enjoy your travels through that poem with the Prince of Peace, and I hope to see you next week!

Yours,
Erin

It is the 21st century and my friends and I live on what we call "the bird hellsite." While Twitter has lots of strikes against it (primarily that they value a purely intellectual concept of free speech over their non-fascist users' safety), there's also some delightful and original short-form writing there. Folks, I want to talk about poetry memes. These come in two main formats: the meme-turned-poems and the poem-turned-memes. Like so:

1. this bad boy can fit so many arch literary references in it

Apparently the "salesman slaps roof of car" meme has been around for a hot minute, but it first crossed my Twitter list with literary references like Yeats' Second Coming:

and Hamlet's soliloquy:

I picked up a glorious junk drawer of a book-length poem at the library last month: Junk, by Tommy Pico. All in couplets, it covers the end of a relationship, the beginning of a unified theory of junk, and what it is to exist in relation to America and capitalism in 2018.

The engine of capitalism:
dope, dicks misc bullshit Junk is its accumulation Not as

indistinct as "thing" not as dramatic as "trash" It's important
to value the Junk, Junk has the best stories

I got to watch Tommy Pico read from the beginning of the book in early June. The poem seemed to unfurl out of him like the flag of a new loud nation. It swerves from funny to sorrowful and everywhere in between. In the Q&A after he talked about how he took the ancient technology of the couplet, stuffed it with junk and now it was art. I took heart.

Sometimes I feel that I will never be a notable poet but I will be a decent accumulator of scraps: little moments I notice. And through the ancient miraculous technology of poetic form (and through much hard work and intention) scraps like the ones I scribble down each day become something worth reading. Once you put things in relation to each other, they become something more. As a segment towards the end of Junk repeats: it's never just about the night in question.

I found so much tenderness in this poem, in lines like:

I don't want to eat apples from the tree in the yard of the neighborhood of that feeling anymore

With the mendacity and misdirection involved in American politics, it's easy to lose track that a law, like a poem, is a thing made of words. Enforceable words, words with money and muscle behind them. Ideally, the words are the will of the people. More likely, they're an unrecognizable compromise. (And as a wise fictional six-year-old once said, a good compromise leaves everybody mad.)

I recently read Layli Long Soldier's book Whereas, a response to an apology encoded in law. The book assimilates the structure of the 2010 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans
into poetry through a series of "Whereas Statements," one for each of the statements in the resolution. And why shouldn't an act of poetry respond to an act of government? Long Soldier uses Congress's language as an instrument to disassemble it.

The poem, the word, is the available tool. Introducing her "Whereas Statements," she writes:

My response is directed to the Apology's delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document. I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation — and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.

The verb "art" creates poetry as an imperative action. And the Whereas statements that follow are astute, sometimes darkly humorous. They closely read the apology to expose the ways it contradicts its own stated desire for reconciliation. Commenting on the last "Whereas" statement in the apology, which declares "Whereas Native Peoples are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", Long Soldier notes:

Whereas I remember that abstractions such as life, liberty and happiness rarely serve a poem, so I have learned it best not to engage those terms anyway. Yet I smash head-on into this specific differentiation: the Creator vs. their Creator. Whereas this alters my concern entirely — how do I language a collision arrived at through separation?

Between Star Trek: Discovery, the comic series Saga, and a despondent postmortem revisiting of Ursula K. Le Guin, I've been on a huge science fiction tear lately. It's a response to living in a world that doesn't make sense, run at the whim of narcissists, tyrants and assorted petty doofuses. When order feels lacking, world-building is necessary. Successful science fiction takes away what we take for granted and reshapes our understanding of what is left. I'm stealing that thought from Le Guin, who was a genius: writing about the genderless world she established in The Left Hand of Darkness, she says:

I eliminated gender to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human. It would define the area that is shared by men and women alike.

Eliminating things taken for granted — gender, the senses, even life on earth — and finding the humanity in what is left is an area that both poetry and science fiction take as their purpose.

I'm stealing the subject line of this email from Richard Siken, who if he doesn't necessarily work in sci-fi definitely tweaks the edges of reality to find out what is left. His Crush is one of my favorite books of poetry I read last year. In a volume of brutal, heartbroken and hopeful poems, "Boot Theory" sticks in my memory. It's built around jokes and idioms: "a man walks into a bar," "walk a mile in my shoes," "waiting for the other shoe to drop." (I'm now choosing to believe that this song is a response to this poem; they're certainly thematically related.)

The central image to the poem is a sound: a heavy boot dropping, over and over, an endless series of falling boots. The "you" of the poem tries to die, but death doesn't work. So what is left? The ending opens a stark space:

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river

The year that is drawing to a close was my tenth year in Chicago and the centenary of the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Her poem "We Real Cool" is as deeply engrained in the American poetry canon as anything I can think of, any Whitman or Dickinson just as iconic as its clipped, haunting lines. I won a copy of her collection Blacks for being a finalist in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards three years ago and the centennial celebrations have reminded me to revisit it.

I had read "We Real Cool" and a few other Brooks classics before, but the GBOMA competition was how I learned of her legendary generosity, how it was money from her own pocket that paid the first prizes, and how she took children's poems just as seriously as adults'. Civic-mindedness is an admirable quality in a poet. It's easy to stay home tinkering with words, less so to be generous with your time and patient with others' ideas.

A wonderful play called No Blue Memories dramatized the seven pool players of "We Real Cool" in shadow puppets, scattering their pool balls and clustering in the corner of the bar as Jamila Woods sang the poem.

It was in the play that I learned of the dedication poem Gwendolyn Brooks wrote for the Chicago Picasso sculpture, which has now graced our downtown Daley Plaza for 50 years.

The poem exemplifies Brooks' good humor and astute sense of detail. In explaining it, she sums up what makes people ambivalent about art, and poetry too:

We feel that something is required of us that perhaps we aren't altogether able to give.

Art, in this formulation, is something like exercise: it stretches you, demands much of you. It's a form of self-improvement, a task you take on that makes you uncomfortable, but somehow better. Which isn't all art is for: in certain lights, like when it's wearing a giant Bears helmet, the Chicago Picasso can be quite useless. But being willing to say "Art hurts" in a dedication, an occasion that's so often anodyne and pointless, is both brave and compassionate. I love this about Brooks' writing. She is eminently bullshit-free.

Eve Ewing, a Chicago poet, writer, and sociologist, collaborated on the script for No Blue Memories. Like Gwendolyn Brooks, whose correspondence with a man in prison was included in the play, Ewing has a history of supporting people who are incarcerated. I heard her read at the 15th anniversary party for Chicago Books to Women in Prison, where I have been volunteering. She closed with the last poem in her excellent book Electric Arches, "Affirmation," and introduced it by saying that she wrote it to be easily memorized as a mantra. This is poetry not as self-improvement, but as survival strategy. The words are a way of staying with your breath and with your mind in an oppressive situation. They are a way of being free. Art urges voyages, even for those who can't change much in their physical circumstances.

I could write a lot more about Gwendolyn Brooks, but instead I will close this letter and this year of reading, writing and surviving with her own words, from "Paul Robeson":
We are each other's harvest:
We are each other's business:
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Here's to a 2018 filled with hope, justice, and good things to read.

Yours,
Erin

There are attention games I play with myself as I go from place to place. These are various strategies for attempting to notice my surroundings more, to sharpen my awareness. One of them is just being aware of how much text is in my visual field at any moment. Sitting in a coffee shop writing this, I see a wall of posters, a billboard, two street signs, a hat with "Delta" on it, a t-shirt with a slogan — and that's without even turning my head to look out another window.

This game always makes me marvel at how inescapable text is in an urban environment. It sometimes seems you could write whatever you'd want just from the words you see in the course of a day. And assembling poems from other texts is an age-old strategy. It's another kind of attention game: going through words like a magpie, picking them up and rearranging them into your own poem-nest. You can discover different angles, different threads, in an existing text.

I learned the term "cento" when I saw Simone Muench read from her book Wolf Centos, a collection composed entirely from other texts, many of which are about wolves. Here's one example, with endnotes sourcing each line. This pastiche approach, combining many texts, leads to surprising contrasts in diction, from the abstract loftiness of "the time allotted for disavowals" to the abrupt declaration "This is a woman's confession." A more traditional approach is to draw entirely on a single author's work: Virgil, or Homer, in the first examples of the form.

I wrote some centos using lyrics from Carly Rae Jepsen's albums E•MO•TION and E•MO•TION: The B-sides. It was a fun exercise in seeking out the more equivocal and even unnerving angles of pop songs. For instance:

Look real close
You might not see me anymore
Somewhere out there someone is breathing

The breathing someone becomes distinctly menacing when you put it next to the speaker's disappearance, like a rattling doorknob while you're alone in an empty house.

I've done erasures before, too: the distinction I'm making here is that centos can rearrange lines, while an erasure usually operates with a text in its original order. The often-fascinating online journal Entropy is currently publishing a series of erasures from Wikipedia, like this one about Björk. It's a good illustration of some of the constraints people often use in erasure. My tiny mini-chapbook Nickels is an erasure of the lyrics to Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen, done with similar constraints: everything had to stay in the original order, and I had to preserve the capitalization and punctuation as they appear on the record sleeve.

I find song lyrics to be a really enjoyable medium for remixing into new poems. I've always gotten into music based on an affinity with the words (it's why I'm a Mountain Goats superfan) and there's a lot of interesting material you can draw out by taking the sound away. It's another component of the context to play with.

Recently I picked up a couple volumes of Colette Arrand's zine You Have to Deal with Me Breathing. In addition to having one of my favorite titles for anything ever, the poems in these zines illustrate the power of a fresh context. They're each subtitled with the name of a professional wrestler, and the full text of the poem is taken from a promotional clip that wrestler made. But thoughtfully applied line breaks turn them into something new, as in this excerpt from "A Technicality (Dean Ambrose)" found in You Have to Deal with Me Breathing #2:

You can't get a car loan
because on a technicality
you don't have a good enough credit score.
So now you've got to walk to work,
your children have to walk to school,
on a technicality. Your boss pushes you
around even though you're better
at his job than he is, and he talks to you
like you're an idiot. But he's the boss
on a technicality. […]

I've never seen a pro wrestling promo in my life, but this poem sounds to me like a close cousin to "What Work Is," which, as previously discussed, is one of my favorites. It punches up the parallelism between "you've got to walk to work" / "your children have to walk to school" and between "your boss pushes you" / "and he talks to you." It makes a good, solid shape on the page, and it offers thoughtful pauses. If I was teaching poetry I would use these poems as an example of how line breaks change the way you read something. So I've really enjoyed these zines; go buy some copies from my friend Ed's zine distro.

What are you reading, what's new? I like hearing back from you.

Yours,
Erin

PS: I'll be watching 20 very talented poets compete in the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards tomorrow evening. Come join me if you're in town!

It is a good week to read Danez Smith. I've been reading his frequently breathtaking collection [insert] boy. And reading the news moved me to revisit the the first poem of his I read, a few years back: "Dinosaurs in the Hood." Here it is, and here's the poet reciting it at a poetry slam.

The part people know and remember about this poem is "& no one kills the black boy. & no one kills / the black boy. & no one kills the black boy." A chorus, or a prayer. A rosary, or a broken record. I've been thinking about it all day.

After the events in Charlottesville over the weekend, my fellow white American people have to reckon with every measure of ease and comfort that we have on the back of someone's pain. There can be no illusion that racism is history. Racism is our foundation. We are all responsible for maintaining it or chipping away at it. Or, likely, some of both. And we're responsible for holding the uncomfortable truth that we are responsible: I am borrowing this reflexive construction from Smith's poem, from "a long history of having a long history with hurt." A sputtering, and an attempt to grow.

If we want to reconcile with this history, if we want to move forward not back, we have to face the hurt we've inflicted, or the times we've stayed silent where it sprouted.

James Baldwin has also been timely these days, and one of the poems toward the end of [insert] boy takes an epigraph from him.

What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time, my uncle's time, my brother's & my sister's time, my niece's & my nephew's time… how much time do you want for your progress?

How much time? Poetry is an art of time. This long poem, "Song of the Wreckage", creates a spiritual vision of resurrected black boys, and a world created in their image.

In an interview about the book, Smith says:

A lot of these poems deal with trauma or oppression, and I think about oppression as the suppression of joy. When I think about oppressing Black people, systems of racism, at their root, they’re intended to keep people of color from being able to fully experience untinged joy.

Sometimes a phrase from memory takes me by surprise. Some weeks ago I was walking across the Chicago River with my partner and a friend, talking about something I disdained, when I set myself suddenly laughing by saying "I'd rather throw dead batteries at cows" than do this disliked thing. Then I realized I still had almost all of "James Joyce" by Matt Cook committed to memory.

It's the sneering delivery of this poem that made it stick in my head so much; I saw this video in high school, the peak time of life for judging canonical authors to be stupid guys who "didn't know as much as me." It seems fitting that this was included in a series called The United States of Poetry - there's not much more American than shit-talking someone with phrases like "Deal with it" and "Work it out somehow" while sitting on what appears to be a curb outside a convenience store.

Revisiting the poem, I'm drawn to how it uses pronouns. We get a repeated series of declarative statements about what "he," this apocryphal James Joyce, did. But it's not the "I" who'd rather throw dead batteries at cows who winds up telling James Joyce to get lost — it's a "we." There's a collective voice addressing him with their disdain.

I've been thinking a lot about being addressable after reading this interview with Claudia Rankine. Here's the relevant bit:

Years ago, I went to hear [Judith] Butler give a lecture. I’d always read her work, and I was very excited to see her speak in person. Her talk reiterated much of what I had read in her books, but then someone in the audience asked, Why are words so hurtful? The entire audience was ripped into attention. Everybody wanted to hear that answer. The response was something like, Because we are ­addressable. And the way we demonstrate our addressability is by being open to the person in front of us. So we arrive, we are available to them, we expose ourselves, and we give them the space to address us. And in that moment of vulnerability and exposure, we are not defended against whatever comes.

In the last line of "James Joyce" there's a dubiously sourced quotation from Thomas Jefferson that reminds me of current political uneasiness: "you always get the rulers you deserve." It's a transparent play on words: ruler as what measures and what governs. A poem, like speech, is granted space to address you. This one tells you, in the end, what you deserve. As much as I've thought over this ending, I don't know how sincere it is. A sudden turn to aphorism could be either another way of mocking the canon (Thomas Jefferson was stupid, he didn't know as much as me) or a rhetorical move to add some weight to a humorous poem, or somewhere in between. Not deciding is part of my reading.

When I consider this line now, I think we Americans could (and should) demand better, but I don't know what we deserve. I've never really believed that anyone deserves anything more than the dignity to make their own choices and the resources to cover their basic needs. And if America provided those things, we'd be a pretty different set. But I don't know that we're one set at all, or a variety of fragments. I don't know how we can address each other in a way that opens more possibilities than it closes. But I'm eager for those sorts of conversations.

Yours,
Erin

I don't go in much for quantifying my behavior or experiences. Not for me the Fitbit, the Foursquare, the daily selfie. The one exception is my regularly updated Goodreads, where I'm always satisfied to glance over my past year in review. Because I was unemployed for about two months in 2016 and then got a job where my winter commute involves spending two hours on the train every day, I'm pleased and unsurprised to see that I read more than a book a week in 2016, covering 12,935 pages in 54 books.

I read a little less poetry than usual in 2016: only six books of poems appear in my Goodreads list, although that of course doesn't count single poems or chapbooks. My favorite book of poems I read was Killer by Kimmy Walters. If you spend a lot of time in certain corners of Twitter, you might know Kimmy as @arealliveghost. She's the person who did @Horse_ebooks poems before me. It is not at all flattery or self-deprecation when I say that Kimmy's Horse_ebooks poems are better than mine; I still really enjoy revisiting them.

There's a hilarious inventiveness to the poems in Killer: things happen that seem both inevitable and impossible, like a dream of "trying to marry a husband" and buying him and the priest coffees for their trouble when signing over and over on the line leaves you unchanged, or being "so anxious I could / French-braid a golden retriever".

The exacting balance of humorous and sinister things in these poems makes me feel extra-aware of my perceptions. It's an exciting awareness, an expansion of the usual, like one of those dreams where your house has extra rooms you'd never noticed and you wake up looking for them. For instance, "Imagined Sighting Three Years After the Fact" begins

I saw him from far away
the color behind him
furrowed like a badly-sewn
garment

Picturing these wrinkles in a of color - a wall, or a piece of sky - succinctly captures both a visual and an emotional state. It's the anxiety of seeing someone you didn't plan to see who evokes strong feelings in you, whose presence seems marked by your reaction.

Kimmy studied linguistics and she has an incredible gift for making language strange, pointing out its odd holes. The example that always sticks in my head is from her first book Uptalk, from the last poem, "It's Raining":

you go to the window and say it's raining
I say what is
you make a huge movement
toward the window
and say everything is

and just like that, everything is

everything is, at slightly different speeds

The shock of the recent election can't be ignored. I've spent the past week in grief. Still, "the sun shone / as it had to" on the half of the country that's terribly afraid for our future. I look to people and words for comfort.

I find comfort in my family, a bunch of brilliant, funny, compassionate people. My brother texted me earlier this month asking me to write something about a particular poem he loves for his birthday, which is Thursday. I'd never read the poem, "Separation" by W.S. Merwin, but here it is:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

An image of connection - stitching something - illustrates separation. It seems right to talk of the absence of someone loved as a palpable thing with a color, something sewn into the fabric of life. There's a transition between the simile of the first two lines and the assertion of the third that makes the poem work: it moves into action. The threaded needle is in motion, stitching through everything. There's no need for the poem to continue, to point out examples of this color: you find it for yourself. Part of the meaning of the poem is its stopping cold like this. It's a refusal that creates space for the reader to bring their own experience in.

My friend Rose shared a link to "What Kind of Times Are These" on Twitter as we reeled from the election results. It also ends in a refusal that makes space. Its particular refusal is buoying my heart a bit, now.

Unlike the Merwin, which is an image that could be anywhere and everywhere, this is a poem of a place. It's a lonely, desperate place, a "ghost-ridden crossroads" where a mass of people— "the persecuted"— have gone to vanish into shadows. The short "e" sounds in "edge of dread" punch up the menace: they sound like something collapsing. The speaker tells you "this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here". This line captures the unreality I've felt since my country elected a reality television misogynist xenophobe to represent us in the world. These are the shadows of our own home. They're not someone else's but ours. But the place in the poem is a place of resistance in the midst of uncertainty and dread. It's the type of place I want to cultivate in times like these.

The poem refuses twice to tell you where this place is: "I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear." It resolves with a sideways answer to the titular question. These are times where "you still listen" — times where we can still reach each other, even if the way we do so isn't immediately clear. Muddled times, but not entirely hopeless.

Reading this poem reminded me that Adrienne Rich refused to accept the National Medal of Arts as an act of protest against broadening inequality. She speaks of "the power of art to break despair." This is one among several powers we need now. And I don't know what comes next, but I have to believe we can listen to each other, hold close the people we need, and find a way to resist despair.

Sending you light and fortitude,
Erin


PS: I'll be reading at Wit Rabbit on December 6th at Quenchers Bar starting around 7 pm. I'd love to see you there.
PPS: Happy birthday week, Jack Watson. Thanks for recommending some Merwin you like. You're my favorite brother ever.

We have this dog now. His name is Basil and he is the most perfect being ever to lick his own butt. Having a dog has made me more attentive to the texture of the ground: what smells and sensations might be there, what is so exciting that he leaps and spins at the opportunity to explore it. I can only aspire to be that enthusiastic about walking out into the world every day. The dog has surprised me constantly with how forcefully I can love a creature whose consciousness I’ll never comprehend.

In Laurie Anderson’s movie “Heart of a Dog,” she talks about leaving New York to be alone with her rat terrier Lolabelle on the California coast after September 11th. I can understand why a dog would be the ideal companion after such an enormous trauma: life slows and simplifies when you share a dog’s priorities.

While the dog has been a joy every day, I’ve also thought about the full scope of our life together, and how I’ll almost certainly outlive him. These thoughts remind me of the title poem from Mark Doty’s book Atlantis, which opens with a recurring dream of the narrator’s dog being hit by a car. The pain of the dream is a kind of preparation for the pain of losing a partner who’s dying of AIDS:

We don’t have a future,
we have a dog.
Who is he?

Soul without speech,
sheer, tireless faith,
he is that-which-goes-forward,

black muzzle, black paws
scouting what’s ahead;
he is where we’ll be hit first,

he’s the part of us
that’s going to get it.

Love without a future: the dog, in his joyous going-forward, his tireless faith, is “going to get it,” a phrase that takes on a surprising depth of darkness in this context. Each of the poem’s six sections contains something, or someone, being held: the dog, the lover, a sick bird. All you can do is hold on, try to stay close to the thing you love while you can be together.

In its third section, the poem reckons with friends and lovers who have died, or are dying, naming them and saying “gone.” Just as a dog’s consciousness is mysterious, the process of losing a body is unexplainable: “What is the body?” the poem asks, ending this section with “lucky we don’t have to know / what something is in order to hold it.” This small mercy, this luck, is heartening to me. And I’ve long loved the word “held”: it feels comforting and solid, reminding me of being rooted to the earth. There’s a song I love called “Held,” too, about surrendering yourself to being cared for.

At the end of “Atlantis,” the narrator and his dying companion, Wally, adopt a second dog. Although Wally is paralyzed, can no longer walk or feed himself, he can pet the new animal, who stills for a moment in his “restless splendor.” I get very emotional about the ending of this poem, the dying man deliberately and carefully working to lay his hand on the golden dog. There’s a sense that Wally is freed of his body in this gesture, that his consciousness follows the dog into “the new.”

I recommend reading all of “Atlantis” and then petting a dog for some reassurance after you’re walloped with grief. It’s a beautiful, complex, tough poem for an incredibly hard experience. It’s a fitting elegy for the people and dogs involved.

Yours,
Erin

Lately I've been in a writing slump. Nothing strikes me as poem-worthy; I struggle to get started and seek out as many distractions as possible. Recently, I rediscovered a useful set of starting points: Bernadette Mayer's writing experiments.

In this slump-time, the idea of writing as an experiment appeals to me. It's writing as play rather than writing as duty. Mayer's collection "Sonnets," which I'm currently reading, follows in this vein of playful experimentation. Scraps of songs, answering machine messages, and famous lines from other poems weave their ways into her sonnets, which resemble the traditional form only in their fourteen-line length. In one delightful example, the sonnet takes on a surprise ending. It cracks me up pretty effectively, even after reading it many times.

Some of these writing experiments remind me of exercises in other media: Lynda Barry's assignment, described in her book "Syllabus," of drawing the same subject for five minutes, then two minutes, then one minute echoes the spirit of "Make writing experiments over a long period of time." I spent a weekend earlier this month at Moogfest, which was unique in my music fest-going experience in its emphasis on lengthy soundscapes. In one tent, the Grimes song "Realiti" played on repeat, and pushing into walls of stretchy fabric allowed you to stretch out or compress different elements of the music, creating a continuous remix as people moved through the space. In a dark room, Olivia Block created sounds in an attempt to answer a question of what cinema was, and how one might experience cinema in pure sound, resembling the writing experiment "Do experiments with sensory memory." When I can't write, I often doodle, and I notice how I remember the colors and shapes of things, and the feeling of different inks on paper.

I know I'll find my way out of this slump sometime when I least expect it. In the meantime, I'm contemplating experiments, and I'm interested to hear what works for you. How do you get back to writing after a slump? Reply any time.

Yours,
Erin

PS: I'll be doing a very short reading along with many other poets at the final Dollhouse Reading Series event on July 9th. Come check it out!

The week that David Bowie died was also the week that C.D. Wright died. Maybe you had this experience, too: going into public spaces and being surprised at the universal Bowie background music. C.D. Wright's poems aren't quite such a cultural force, but they're also a wonder. Seeing her obituary made me finally check out a couple of her books. The word I'd use for them is generous: they're welcoming, playful, like highly stylized letters from a kind friend.

In her book The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, Wright's prose poems consider the uses of poetry. Many of them share the same title, with the effect of implying perpetual revisions and revisitations. "In a word, a world" begins the book with a sentence set off as a stanza: "I love them all." Reading this on the floor of a bookstore just a week or two after the poet's death had a specially elegiac quality. Going out loving the world of words. Wright's poems assert qualified, quirky stances: "I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else." In this faith, then, poetry sculpts substance.

Other poems under the "In a word, a world" heading discuss the love of "O," as in "O my black frying pan" or "O what's the point." They consider compound words both recognized and novel, referring back to another collection of Wright's work with "deepstep, "which names a tiny town in Georgia — an engagement with Southern place is another thing I appreciate about Wright, who was born in the Arkansas Ozarks. The final poem with the title announces what "the mother word, word of words" should do: "It must whelm the mouth when spoken, and clobber the senses when confronted. It must include everyone everywhere. Forever." It's posited that "world" is this word, with a hypnotic listing of its Old English etymology concluding that "It cannot be got outside of." So "world" is enough, a totality. "Made of everything and nothing." There's warmth and wonder: the inescapable totality of it feels like an embrace, not a limit. A world of possibilities.

The poet doesn't act alone in this book. Wright's poems bring up conversations and travels with other writers and artists. Robert Creeley is a frequent presence, in a series of poems titled "Hold Still, Lion." The phrase quotes from one of his poems:

Hold still, lion!
I am trying
to paint you
while there's time to.

Wright contextualizes this with the idea of rightness: "He always wanted to do things right. Now he wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to get it all right." This idea of capturing a wild thing just right in diminishing time seems close to what poetry does. You might as well say hold still, fire or hold still, feeling. Everything's always changing, while there's time to see and document it.

It's sad that it took her death for me to find C.D. Wright's poems. They offer a new angle on what poetry can do: forge allegiances, remember, respond, create.

The only time I was ever called out in a rap battle, I was wearing a Toothpaste for Dinner t-shirt with the little wobbly guy shouting "shut up shut up shut up." The MC referenced "homegirl's shirt telling you to shut up three times." As a mere rap battle spectator, I don't remember the context. It rhymed well; it worked. I think the guy won. I gave him a hug later.

I was reminded of this because poorly-executed rap battles fit one of several cultural tropes for bad poetry. That particular comic is a tidy summary of why I'm reluctant to say I'm a poet in mixed company: people get all the wrong ideas.

So here's a letter about bad poetry throughout the ages, conveniently subdivided into three headings. Send a copy to your friend or relative whose knowledge of the contemporary canon begins with Billy Corgan's Blinking with Fists and ends with "I heard James Franco did some poems once"!

(God, I hate James Franco. I want to ship his face to the Pacific Garbage Patch.)

1. Boringly rhymed verse

Like many hilarious things in life, this letter started with Bob's Burgers, which Nick and I are currently watching almost every night. We fell over laughing as Sad Cat Lady Gayle tortured poor little devious Louise with her poem "Happy Things We Should Send Into Space." (Here's a YouTube excerpt.)

"You should write a letter about bad poetry," my loving partner said. "Just eviscerate all the stereotypes." The oldest trick in the modern-English book is where I'll start: rhyme scheme! Gayle's poem end-rhymes all the way through (mayo/Baio/"day-o"). It has that sing-songy nursery-rhyme feel that you might've learned to hate if anyone ever made you study Robert Frost against your will. My amazement that he made a poem that might be about taking a leak in the woods into a national treasure is the subject for another discussion.

When I reviewed a collection of sonnets, it was important to start with the form. People know what a sonnet is: fourteen lines long, Shakespeare wrote a bunch of 'em, my mistress' eyes are nothing like her butt, etc etc etc. If you've ever tried to write a sonnet, you know they're far easier to mock than they are to finish. Form and rhyme aren't bad things. They just might not suit you.

2. Terrible beat-inspired emo woes, or your worst slam nightmare

My beloved email address (erin (at) ibiblio dot org) is sending spam. Having this happen feels to me like a great loss — a disaster. So I'm thinking often of One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, a villanelle you've definitely heard in some form. It's that one that starts "The art of losing isn't hard to master."

The stanza I love is the third one:

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

And the final two lines get me in a devastating and perfect way: the stutter of "like (Write it!) like" feels so real. It's lit, as the kids say.

Anything lost may look like disaster. Write it anyway. I'm coping with other losses I'm not ready to write.

In the meantime, I'm down to my last dozen copies of No Experiences. There are four copies left at Quimby's. Then it'll be available only at Uncharted Books.

And the surprise promised to the first 4 people who replied to the last letter is now available for sale! It's a zine collection of five of my favorite letters with covers I designed and made, and loving footnotes to all the links, called Poems Like Hands Can Be Useful. It's limited to just eight copies, though.

Deliveries will be delayed over the holidays, but they'll get there. I'm proud of 'em. And I'm proud of my wonderful partner for typesetting this awesome zine, and for his great recent work on a book he wrote with several colleagues. That book is for you if you're interested in running an independent business.

I wish you well in the new year. Practice losing farther, losing faster. Practice time away from email.

Yours,
Erin

I like poems that tell you what to do. They satisfy my inclination to speak in the second person when I write poems, talking to a "you" that's always partly me. But I love poems that poke holes in what they're telling you to do.

Morgan Parker's "If You are Over Staying Woke" amazes me; it's one of my favorite poems I've read this year. It starts out with some pretty straightforward instructions and soon veers into telling you to do impossible things. Water, news, funerals: I love these irregular repeated patterns in it, the discomfort they create as they get grammatically irregular. I love the way its form resembles the bumps in a spine. I love that Parker abandons periods for the rest of the poem after "Be honest / when you're up to it." The poem seems to acknowledge this later with the line "Never punctuate". I love being told what to do with the sky. And the way the last several lines tumble into the ending, like a frozen waterfall of demands. "Turn / into water" and "Keep a song mind". Maybe I will, I think, maybe I am.

Because I love Morgan Parker's poems on the internet, I bought her book Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, which won a contest for which Eileen Myles was the judge. "Edward the Confessor," the poem from which Eileen Myles' book Not Me gets its title, is another poem that I like for how it tells you what to do. This poem, like a lot of Myles' work, is mostly in the first person. It opens with:

I have a confession to make
I wish there were
some role in society
I could fulfill
I could be a confessor

I have a confession to make

This repetition, set off with a stanza break, suggests that this confessor is someone who confesses, not someone who takes confessions. This idea comes up again when the poem escapes, midway through, into a second-person moment of telling you what to do:

…I hope you accept
this tiny confession of what
I am currently going through.
And if you are experiencing
something of similar nature,
tell someone, not me,
but tell someone. It's the new
human program to be in.

I'm having a hard time being in my head lately which means I have a hard time writing. (Which is to say: this will be a short message.) Still, I made a poem that's about having a hard time being in your head, wanting to empty it out, wanting both to be seen in your hard time and to be alone with your tangled thoughts. Here is the poem, it's called "little red knife."

"little red knife" has four endings and several different middles. It's made using Twine, which is a tiny miracle of free software for telling interactive stories (or poems, which are not stories but are texts).

Twine is probably my favorite software that exists; it hits all the buttons of ease of use and portability and just letting you do something cool with your idea. There are several poets making cool things with Twine: here's a good site where someone is writing Twine poems and writing about Twine poems; here are more than 25 million poems about the Midwest. If you want to make your own Twine game or story or poem but you don't have a website to host it on, here's a site where you can host Twine games super easily.

Have you seen more awesome Twine things? Did this give you a cool Twine idea? I am a huge proponent of making small strange things in Twine, and I love hearing about them. Reply any time.

Yours,
Erin

PS: I've been writing these letters for two years! When I emerge from my cocoon of hard times like a crappy butterfly of anxious misery, I want to mail you something on paper to mark the occasion. First 4 folks who reply with a mailing address get a thing.

I have a story in Story Club Magazine. It’s about where I’m from. I hope you’ll read it; I’d love to hear what you think.

Without drawing any sort of equivalency between these two links, I also hope you’ll read this writeup about five British poets who write about identity and displacement. Reading Warsan Shire’s poems gave me a new outlook on a poem I’ve known well for years, Philip Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures,” which I typed up on my old blog because I couldn’t find an accurate copy elsewhere on the internet back in 2011. Larkin wrote:

We all hate home
And having to be there

But home can only be such tedium if you can control it. If your identity isn’t threatened there. If you can take it for granted that you’ll always belong. Warsan Shire’s “Home” opens with a very different statement of what home is like and how we might relate to it:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark

Just as songs can get inexorably linked to a season or a feeling, so can poems. There are poems that are tied to rooms and smells and people in my memory. There's one poem in particular that gets stuck in my head whenever I hear of a tragedy. It's an ekphrastic poem, a poem about a painting, a pretty famous one: W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." That link will also show you the painting in question, but on my screen its crucial detail – Icarus, drowning – is just a pixelated streak. So here's a better image, too.

There are layers of complexity to this poem that I'm not even going to attempt to carve open, 'cause Auden was a dang genius. But an opening like "About suffering they were never wrong" seems to anticipate the poem's fame. "About Suffering" sounds like it should be the title of a philosophical treatise, chock-full of eternal wisdom. The poem then delves into details and particularities about suffering: some situations in which it might happen, and go ignored.

Rereading it, I realized that this poem works very similarly to one of my favorite stories, Lydia Davis's "What I Feel" (which you can read at the bottom of this page). I've written a bit about "What I Feel" in the past. Both texts start by pointing to an external authority (the Old Masters, "several books") to make claims about how emotion works, or ought to work, in the world. Then they move into "its human position" – how suffering takes place "anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot" in Auden, and "in this dark living-room late at night, with the dark street outside under the streetlamps" for Davis's narrator. In both texts, suffering is (or ought to be) "off to the side, one of many things." And this is a comfort, or could be, if you could will yourself to feel the smallness of your suffering among all other things. That you know you just have to go ahead and suffer anyway is the irony in both works. If only, they imply, if only it could be so darn tidy. If only your suffering could be a splash of white paint in an old Flemish painting, a detail you could turn away from or ignore, and not a great force twisting your life up in knots.

I'd recently studied "Musée des Beaux Arts" when I experienced the first loss of someone close to me: weeks before my college graduation, my maternal grandfather died suddenly one morning at home. I remember thinking of my grief as an object outside of and surrounding me: a fog, or a frame, placed around everything I did.

I remember taking a long walk in the streetlights along the abandoned train tracks with my friends. That helped. And it helped to think this: "the dogs go on with their doggy life." And: "The sun shone / as it had to". Everything surrounding suffering, loss, tragedy — it all sails calmly on with time. And so does your own life. Not without scars, but it continues. I remember not laughing for days from sadness, then listening to "Golden Boy" and bursting into hysterics thinking of hell as the place eternally without delicious peanuts. My grandfather and I shared a love for delicious things and a disbelief in hell.

Of course, poetry has more places in the world than times of great tragedy or ceremony. Jenny Zhang's wonderful recent essay "How it Feels" talks about this:

When someone dies, we go searching for poetry. When a new chapter of life starts or ends — graduations, weddings, inaugurations, funerals — we insist on poetry. The occasion for poetry is always a grand one, leaving us little people with our little lives bereft of elegies and love poems.

But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and all caps and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.”

Reading poems is a way of saying "an enormous yes" to feelings — even dark ones, even ambivalent, confusing ones. I think this is why people so often claim they don't "get" poetry: because it's uncomfortable, it's askew, it forces you into the uncomfortable crannies of your own mind. And it's a lifetime's project to be at peace with that: to accept both the impossible calamity of the boy falling out of the sky, and the necessity of "the expensive delicate ship" sailing calmly on.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Erin

This poem arrived in my life with the force of a benediction. More prosaically, I kept seeing Alice Notley as a tag on things I liked on poetry Tumblr. Alice Ordered Me to Be Made is a great title, and I am easily swayed by titles in poetry, so I put it on hold at the library. At the very end of the book, there’s this poem, which seems to bear no relation to its title, “30th Birthday.” But this poem is here at a time when I need it, and I assigned it the relation I need it to have.

Before I returned Alice to the library, I Xeroxed “30th Birthday” and taped it up on the shelf that forms a wall next to my writing desk. I made a picture of this ad-hoc Alice Notley shrine my phone’s lock screen. This was a cool way to accomplish two goals at once: memorizing a poem and reminding myself to spend less time staring at my phone.

On a 60-mile bike ride, I kept reciting “30th Birthday” to myself through mud and sticks and city roads, past industrial ruins and a deer who dove into the canal, past trees and towns in three counties of Illinois. May I never be afraid. I came home with the poem still stuck in my head.

Let’s step into this poem and investigate my obsession.

It is considered corny to like Billy Collins. His poems are as easy to read as your standard airport bestseller paperback. This makes them less important than poems that demand more out of their readers, that invite you in to do some interpretive heavy lifting. But airport paperbacks have a place in the world (they’re brisk and marketable, which might be another reason poets are suspicious of former laureate bro Billy C: poets, myself heartily included, don't trust poems that make money).

Out of embarrassment at my youthful unseriousness, I’ve gotten rid of the Billy Collins book I bought based on a pleasant memory of seeing him read when I was in school. But the older I get the less I believe in guilty pleasures: life is short, find joy where and when you can, YOLO, etc, and as a wise internet man has said, "let people love the small things they love. They mean you no harm". So all that is to say that I have no regrets about enjoying “Marginalia.” Its last line is a goofy little zinger, quoted from a manic pixie dream librarian: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

I like used books for their weird old covers and their marked-up margins: this winter I giggled for hours that someone underlined the last paragraph in my copy of The Mill on the Floss and wrote neatly beside it "They died." (Sorry for the George Eliot spoiler, I guess.) And in the copy of Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III that I picked up in a great little shop in Cleveland someone has indicated on the lines of animal noises in “Crusoe in England” that they "could do without this." Maybe you could, I wanted to say back, but the poem couldn't. It'd be a different animal, pun intended, without the moment of cacophony in the middle. And Elizabeth Bishop was a meticulous editor of her own work; it wouldn’t be published if it could be done without. But I love that this reader imposed their will on the poem, deciding how it ought to have been written, then recording their moment of “why wasn’t I consulted?” fury for posterity.

Revisiting your own marginalia has a particular embarrassing flavor, like rereading your LiveJournal. Yesterday I alphabetized all my books and today I’m flipping through them. I have two copies of the Collected Philip Larkin: a dust-jacketed hardback for displaying, a broken-spined paperback for defacing. In it I found notes to myself from eight years ago, saying things like “hella Keats - ever wilt thou love and she be fair, motherfuckers.” (College was a sweary time. And I still rep hard for Keats.) And on some lines of “The Whitsun Weddings” that I’ve written about before, the note “This is the best liminality ever.” And this bowtied doodled guy, probably modeled on my thesis advisor, announcing the mission of most of Larkin. I cringe to think of some future youthful Billy Collins narrator flipping through this book when it’s pried from my cold dead hands, judging me with snark. But nearly a decade back when I wrote those things I was thriving inside those poems, marking up scansion and cross-references until they were nearly illegible. And now I have a continuous thread of reading and rereading that takes me back to the way I interpreted poems when I was a student and it was my job to do so. It's a nice way of wading into a poem, maybe throwing some rocks into its stream.

What's your favorite marginal note you've found, or written? I would love to hear it.

Cheers,
Erin

PS: I'm reading at the next Tuesday Funk! Come hang out and eat frites and talk Keats.

For the past eleven days of April I have been writing a poem every day. It’s a challenge that I’ve heard called the grind or a 30/30. I am learning a lot about endings, and about how sometimes a poem you work on too hard gets all the love kicked out of it and just sits there on the page meaning nothing. I am learning that I have phrases like "a claw machine game full of live rabbits" lingering, for some reason, in my brain.

I wouldn't say these poems I'm writing are polished or ready for someone to read (although I have been emailing them to a group of some dozen-odd other poets who are taking the same April challenge to write a poem every day). But they are all complete as structures: they all have some core image or pattern or phrase that I could be pleased, eventually, to publish, after I've lived with them a little longer and verified that they still feel true.

You might know Lunch Poems. It’s one of my favorite titles, a straightforward one, for a book by Frank O’Hara that turned 50 last year. I am telling this from memory but how I recall it is Frank O'Hara had a day job in one of the big museums, the Met or MoMA, and on his lunch break he would take a walk and write a poem. And the poems are intimate and immediate and full of good cheer and little scraps of '60s New York that are so precise and evocative and sonically compelling. Like “A Step Away From Them,” a poem that starts out by naming that “It’s my lunch hour so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored /
cabs.” I love the synesthesia of “hum-colored” and then all the diaristic, musing details later:

And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they’ll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

In fact the first favorite poem I remember having was another O’Hara, the one about avocado salad. I liked how it went from something as concrete as breakfast in the sunlight to something as abstract as forgiveness. The objects and the emotions were both immediate. My teen brain could latch on to that.

I think American poets come out of Frank O'Hara's lunches like Russian novelists come out of Gogol's Overcoat (which is something Dostoevsky was supposed to have said). It’s impossible not to be influenced, whether first-hand or through other poets who read and loved him, by the immediacy, the clarity, that O’Hara’s poems project. But what I particularly love in Lunch Poems is that writing poetry comes down to earth from being this exalted, inspiration-driven activity. It’s just part of the day, among taxis and buildings being demolished and papaya juice.

Writing my first of the 30/30 poems on a break between meetings at work, I thought, Here I am, with my lunch poem inheritance! Having this timebound routine, 30 minutes to write a draft of something, forced me to be a lot less precious. And it forced me to get what Nick calls “the despair period,” where you think about the project from every angle and worry about how you’ll approach it, out of the way before April started. I allow myself about five minutes of micro-despair each day, but then it’s just generating ideas and shaping them into some semblance of a form.

Maybe I won’t go back to these poems and refine them. Maybe they’ll languish on my hard drive until the end of time. I’m feeling encouraged about moving past despair back into the world of real things, making the clackity noise every day for as long as I can keep it up.

When I took my Collected Frank O'Hara off the shelf to revisit these poems, I caused an avalanche of chapbooks to fall irretrievably down the back of the bookcase, then discovered my boarding pass from the flight where I moved to Chicago shoved in the front of the book. That feels like the germ of a poem. Maybe for tomorrow.

Yours,
Erin

PS: I still have a few copies of Nickels for a cool dollar. I also have readings coming up at Story Club South Side on May 19 and at Tuesday Funk on July 7. Hooray!

Long ago in Internet Time (which moves much faster than Everyday Life Time) I sent an email where I recommended this prose poem by Claudia Rankine. The poem was an excerpt of a book, Citizen, which is my pick for favorite book of poetry I read in 2014. I have been telling many people in my life, loudly and at great length, to read this book. I brought it home to North Carolina with me for Christmas and left it around for both my parents to read. I put it on the top of Nick's book-reading stack and pestered him until we could discuss it. It articulates what oppression feels like in the body, in lived time, harrowingly and often beautifully.

Reading this interview with Claudia Rankine while waiting in the TSA line to fly to North Carolina, I thought this about Citizen's subtitle, "An American Lyric": an American lyric can't be purely lyrical, it must be hybrid and broken and angry, because America is. This thought did not prepare me for how emotionally jarring it would be to read Citizen cover to cover in an airport lounge.

I keep thinking about short little moments from the book: the very beginning, sleepless and remembering, "You smell good." I keep thinking about wearing dark glasses inside the house: “they soothe, soothe sight, soothe you.” I think a lot about this:

You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.

But the ultimate piece I keep thinking about from Citizen is the "you" inside it. There's a play of rhetoric: you understand the narrator to be saying "you" to mean "I." Instead of the “lyric I” that has a long history in poetic theory, we get a lyric you. There's a complicity to this. You are responsible. And you are the person who is slighted when a colleague says that she didn't know black women got cancer, or that your author photo looks angry. Did you just hear, did you just say, did you just do that?

You are real; you take up as much space as I do. Reading Citizen makes you see people not as populations, a very abstract word I sometimes see in my work days: you see these lyric yous as the product of their experiences, no longer abstract or elsewhere. You see how those experiences are layered on them: not just through their lives, but through their families, through shared cultural experience, through historical memory. And the poem is the lens of all this experience. The poem strips away the everyday layers of abstraction you put between yourself and the world in order to live in it, then reconstructs them differently.

Another bit of Citizen I wrote down in my notebook, because I saw myself in it: "You are sitting around, publicly listening..." I am a vampire of experiences in my poems, harvesting little scraps of what people say on the bus or the street or in the coffee shop and building worlds around them. Public listening, with its scrappy overheard quality, is woven throughout The Pedestrians, another book of poems I enjoyed a great deal last year. In that book Rachel Zucker has several different poems called "real poem" (all the titles are set in lower case like that). Here's one, called “real poem (happiness)”:

We’re all fucked up because in English
the phrase “to make someone happy”
suggests that’s possible.

I don’t have a long letter this month. I have a few links to other things I’ve written and done, and one thing I will be doing. If you like reading these emails, you’ll probably enjoy these things.

Some things of the past:

• I wrote the story of seven doors for the Uncommon dispatch. These ideas were kicking around in my head for a long time. When Brian kindly invited me to write something for this internet community, they found the form they needed.

• I reviewed "Something Bright, Then Holes" by Maggie Nelson for the Volta. I have a lot of feelings about Maggie Nelson’s poetry. (Surprise: the feelings are positive.)

• Because I noticed how much the phrase “I have a lot of feelings about…” comes out of my mouth or off my keyboard, I wrote about my favorite band (Sleater-Kinney, don’t you know) and my permateen feelings-having lifestyle.

• I read an erasure poem, a Chicago poem, and a bunch of permateen-feelings poems at the Private Reading Series last month. It was a pretty lovely experience. There’s a recording here if you want to hear my voice for about 15 minutes.

And a thing of the future:

At the end of this month, on November 30th, I’m doing a reading here in Chicago. There’s more information on Facebook. I’d love to see you in this mysterious location. I’ll share the recording once it’s up, too.

Thinking about what to read on the 30th, and about an online poetry class I recently took, I’m focused on revision. In poetry class, after a week of revising the same poem according to different rules every day, we read a series of poets' versions: two of the same poem, published separately, both considered complete. Most striking were the two versions of "Poetry" by Marianne Moore, a poem whose first words I own emblazoned in red on a yellow tote bag: "I, too, dislike it." Which is arch and at least partly untrue. (The Poetry Foundation sold me the dang tote bag.) I like the poem (and the tote bag) very much. I like poetry enough to labor over it on Saturday afternoons, among all the things I could be doing. And I like seeing Moore's revision made plain: it gives me hope for my own perpetually unfinished adjustments.

The version of “Poetry” that I knew elaborates on "I, too, dislike it" with "there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." This sounds like every objection to the poetry lifestyle I've ever heard: why spend your one life in powerless penury? Why spend hours moving and removing a comma, breaking and re-breaking a line, to make a thing that comparatively few people will ever read or think about? But the poem meets these objections with four stanzas telling what poetry can do in the face of “perfect contempt for it”.

The later version of “Poetry," published in 1967, cuts the earlier version down to just three lines:

I, too, dislike it.

Reading, it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Here’s my latest review for the Volta, of a new poetry collection called Interrobang. In it I keep returning to “muchness.” Google reveals that I inadvertently repurposed this word from Alice in Wonderland: “you’ve lost your muchness,” the Mad Hatter tells Alice, meaning her vivacity and wonder, I suppose. My notion might not be exactly that: my “muchness” means intense emotional expression that seems constantly on the brink of overwhelming the poem, but stays just barely contained. To strike this balance takes intense skill and compassion for the reader. Many of the poems I admire most have it in common.

Two poems that wear their muchness openly are often on my mind. These poems share a humorous streak, which counterbalances and highlights their emotional intensity. Take “Snow” by Mary Ruefle, which opens with this sentence:

Every time it starts to snow I would like to have
sex. […]

The linebreak itself becomes a punch line, and the rest of the poem continues to repeat the verb phrase “to have sex” with amusing bluntness, as when the speaker envisions herself abandoning a class she is teaching with the words “It is snowing and I must go have sex, good-bye.”

The end of the poem resolves the prevailing emotions throughout (in a scene that reminds me of the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” with its “snow falling faintly and faintly falling”):

the snow, which is falling
with such steadfast devotion to the ground all the
anxiety in the world seems gone, […]
[…] yes, when it snows like this I feel the
whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.

First: my third review for the Volta, of Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems, is online. This is some of the most fun critical writing I've done this year: minimal poems are an appealing canvas upon which to splatter some ideas about politics, poetics, and art. Plus, this review assignment introduced me to one of my new favorite poems. Here is the poem:

sky
every
day

There's more reading into this poem than reading it, which appeals to me. And it looks so symmetrical and pleasant in the typewriter font in which it's intended to be rendered. It's compact in form and expansive in connotation, like a fluffy little emoji cloud over a wide Midwestern horizon. I think about it often, maybe even every day.

(Also Aram Saroyan-related: I saw a man with a tattoo of "lighght" last month at the Pitchfork festival, and then that man turned out to be Zachary Schomburg, and then I saw him read this poem that I love a lot while an extremely loud metal band played nearby, which was obviously very appropriate.)

And secondly, here is the thrilling conclusion to the email I sent last month: I was a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, which was an incredibly cool honor. (You'll find me pictured there, with my enormous grin and my bright blue shoes.) I've rarely seen such a diverse group of poets present such stylistically different— yet consistently excellent— poems, one after the other. I'll be submitting a poem again next year. I'll be attending no matter what. Consider this a very early invitation to join me there.

I'm told eventually there will be video of me reading "Baba Yaga on Palmer Square" archived from cable access TV. In the meantime, I made an audio recording of it for you: almost like being there.

Here's the poem that won the 2014 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, in PDF form. It's worth your time to read. And if you were there and I haven't yet thanked you in person, know that I am so grateful.

And so: thank you for reading. In the spirit of "sky / every / day," tell me about something tiny and beautiful that gets stuck in your head. These are always my favorite emails.

Yours in houses and in clouds,
Erin

I am so excited to tell y'all that I'm a semifinalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. If you're in Chicago, please come out to the Chopin Theater at 7 pm on July 23 to hear some poems performed.

After a number of rejections, I didn't expect anything to come of my submission to this contest (besides discounted admission to the reading). I'm a little terrified. But I welcome the excuse to learn a poem by heart again.

This will be the first time I've tried to commit my own work to memory and recite it, instead of just reading off paper. It's a different and more excruciating process than learning to deliver someone else's poem: I'm blaming myself for the two barely pronounceable words I chose. (When was the last time you heard "pestle" uttered? Or "crystalline," unless you've been jamming out to that Björk song, as we all should?)

But there's a special satisfaction in knowing that you haven't shaken loose a particular combination of words between the page and your memory. Knowing the poem after several attempts feels like turning a difficult key in a very important lock. While reciting, you have the chance to inhabit someone else, the poem's speaker, distinct from who you were when you read it.

I remember the tones of my father's voice reciting scraps of "The Waste Land" more immediately than anything else about that poem, like a melody stuck in my head without the lyrics. "In the mountains, there you feel free," my dad would declaim, driving on I-40 with some Appalachian foothills looming on the horizon. But every April I'm reminded of that same poem and its famous opening line of how this is the cruelest month.

And it's National Poetry Month. It's always National Poetry Month, of course, if you use poetry as a strategy for making sense of time and experience.

Poetry, like the month of April, is a medium where new things become possible. Shoots bloom on trees after ages of grey winter. New rhythms worm into your memory alongside lines from Eliot and whoever else. Birds enthuse noisily. Life goes on and life is written down.

There is so much to read in the world. I constantly want to be reading everything all at once. I picture braiding a giant rope of poems together in my head forever, or chipping away at a monumental cliff of poems with a tiny silver chisel. All these impossible images for the impossible task of making everything known.