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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Karl Kirchwey
Posted Jun 15, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Maria Stepanova
Posted Jun 8, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Geoffrey O’Brien
Posted Jun 1, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Glyn Maxwell
Posted May 25, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Melissa Green
Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her fourth post. In 2011 the poet Melissa Green wrote a series of poems in the voice of Mad Maud, from the pair of anonymous early seventeenth-century songs, “Tom A Bedlam” and “Mad Maud’s Search.” Tom O’Bedlam, and with him his paramour Maud, became a stock character in English literature and folklore—an “Abram Man,” a vagrant-beggar-con man ostensibly sprung from the Abraham Ward at Bedlam (the Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the insane in London). Although Bedlam denied releasing its patients to itineracy, and there seems to have been a certain amount of theater to the Tom O’Bedlam vocation (part of the songs’ color), the joke of the songs overlay a terrible reality about the long ostracism of the mad. Green’s Maud reflects on the cruelties, not so different from our own, then suffered by the insane, her “ancestress[es]” who “carried the gene for mental illness. I was haunted by generations of women who would have been burned as witches or would sit in the urine and shitsoaked straw of Bedlam, chained to the wall.” But this note of sympathy and reconstruction is only the beginning. Maud’s language, the language of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals and King Lear’s Edgar, who took on the persona of Tom O’Bedlam in order, like the Fool, to disguise the truth in nonsense, participates both in English literature’s notably earthy origins and its most exalted lyric flights. Maud’s home, like Blake’s, is Albion; the spaces in her lines reflect both her broken thinking and the strong caesuras of English verse’s alliterative origins. In Maud’s day wild boar were caught and trussed by the river, but people were also a hair’s breadth from, on the one hand, magic, and, on the other, revelation, as they stretched their laundry out on rocks. And indeed Maud’s “broken mind” is a torment, but it also admits wonder. Her language is its expression and cannot pass beyond it; for Maud her madness is as elemental as the sky, and yet it is kin to the sensitivity of her perception and her capacity for love. Green writes, one wonders whether Tom and Maud could be “figments of one another’s imagination.” In “Mad Maud’s Four Dreams,” below, as in several of the poems, in the vanishing point is a place of final blankness and extinction (a few last lines: “that place where no light ever comes”; “I fell out of the world without a sound”; “there’s mist between us now—or murk—or vanishing”; “he trod upon the stars and put the morning out”) and yet the encompassing world—the cathedral of nature and the soaring language in which the poem contains it—seems to offer a compensatory exaltation and consolation. And a complicity with those inducted, across time, in the language’s underground fraternity. The diction of Green’s poems is often archaic and not demotic... Continue reading
Posted May 18, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Abby Rosebrock
Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her fourth post. A batch of poems by a young poet named Abby Rosebrock was sent to me by a scholar-friend in 2011. I was astounded by them. Each one was as bold and confident as a banner, and said something I have never read in a poem before. It should perhaps not surprise that Rosebrock is an actor and a playwright (her web page is a welter of performances, under klieg lights and in cellars, as it is this weekend, with new work at The Rule of 7X7 at The Tank and New York Madness at Playwrights Horizons). Her poems are monologues and in them an utterly singular being comes fully to life and vanishes within the poem’s single act. The speaker is both nakedly there and ingeniously crafted. “Future Baby,” in its courageous bid for absolute tenderness, was the triumph of the bunch. The boggling truth that a baby in its final vulnerability becomes a locus of total love, an expression of even the possibility of total love, and that this consuming totality comes to rest in a being so tenderly specific, is at once intimate to the experience of being a mother and capacious in its scale. The reciprocity with which love reaches through the generations in the poem becomes an affirmation of the unity of experience and the illusoriness of time. Love clings to us as we crawl away from the disaster of death. Love makes a future baby as real as a living one. The baby is “the whole point,” a vanishing point, that organizes everything and gives it value in the infinite distance; and then, in the poem’s closing lines, as the baby opens its mouth, as babies do, its “glass-clear spittle” becomes lens or a crystal ball, both revealing truth and magnifying love. Where the dragon’s teeth sowed warriors, the spaces where a baby’s teeth will be within baby who does not (yet) exist, beatitude. Within the homeliness of the poem’s dirty snow, its elbow, its bottle cap, its spittle—like an image in a glass bead in a baroque painting—resides the image of mother and child that haunts our art and poetry, a nesting place for eternity. The poem’s long lines yearn toward its absent object; its alternating couplets and single lines express the poem’s paradox: in love, we are two in one, one in two. Read more of Abby Rosebrock’s poems in Little Star #3. Her monologue in the voice of spring (“What does your heart encompass, how do its contents compare / to my foliage, my Hellenic arsenal of metaphor?”) is in our mobile app Little Star Weekly this week. Future Baby The way you will reach for me. The supernatural luckiness of being reached for by the one I reach for. That you should cry for me—when... Continue reading
Posted May 11, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Anthony Madrid
Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her third post. A couple of years ago the young Chicago poet Anthony Madrid published a book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, apparently consisting of sixty-four ghazals; we published one of them, “Beneath Your Parents’ Mattress,” in our app, Little Star Weekly. The ghazal is an ancient classical Eastern form that pervades the literature of multiple languages and traditions. It had its origins in a sixth-century Arabic panagyric but found its full expression in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Persian of Rumi and Hafiz. It spread, partly through the energies of Sufi mysticism and Islamic court traditions, throughout the Middle East to Turkey, North Africa, and Northern India (whence Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali brought the ghazal to modern American literature with an anthology of new ghazals by dozens of English and American poets in 2000). The classical ghazal is an exacting form: ten to thirty lines of rhyming couplets and identical length, with the second line repeating a refrain and the last couplet playing off the poet’s name, either literally or figuratively. (Read more ghazals in Little Star.) But Madrid’s book is anything but an academic exercise. His completely original take illuminates a paradox lurking in the ghazal’s biography: that a form so highly structured became the foundation of an ecstatic religion that embraced music as a vehicle for revelation and eroticism as its germinal metaphor. Madrid’s ghazals, like Rumi’s and Hafiz’s, often find the speaker in the clutch of love, and driven from there to further reaches of apprehension. The poems of the ghazal masters were set to music and became the vehicle of an ecstatic religious practice. In both love and verse, a constraint becomes a provocation. Madrid’s poems are divided into chapters and even identified, somewhat jokingly, in a way that looks scriptural: “1.1,” “1.2,” etc. And constraint has its own place in them, as we’ll see. (That he likes a constraint can be seen too in his sixteen limericks recently published in Little Star #5.) True to form, “Beneath Your Parents Mattress” offers a hilarious, sexy cosmology inside a profane poem of love. Generally, Madrid keeps the ghazal’s couplets but not their metrical constraints; in this one however he starts off with a bravura metrical stroke: two dactylic lines with pyrrhic caesura. That we are speaking of one’s parents’ marital bed in such a form throws a strobe light on the ghazal’s invitation to ontological sex play. The first couplet sets up a kind of joke Divina Commedia in which the cosmic architecture springs up and down from the terra firma of one’s own conception. The joke is redoubled by the appearance of moles in the second couplet as some kind of genealogical–temporal astronauts. In the third stanza we meet our heroine, who surfaces throughout the book as a... Continue reading
Posted May 4, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Jean Valentine
Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her second post. Hospice I wore his hat as if it was the rumpled coat of his body, like I could put it on. The coat of his hair, of his brain, its glitter he gave it to me, something he’d worn. He didn’t touch his dog, touch was too much, he didn’t let her go. I felt his hat on my head, like a hand, though his hat was on the floor, just by my chair. I went on drinking water as if there was more water. I went on living on earth as if there was still life on earth I remembered like an islander my island like a calving iceberg, air like jazz rumpled like its glitter worn hand by my chair • I thought I’d have to listen, hard, I didn’t even swallow. But nothing from you stopped. After: Isn’t there something Isn’t there something in me like the dogs I’ve heard at home who bark all night from hunger? Something in me like trains leaving, isn’t there something in me like a gun? I wanted to be loud squirrels, around the trees’ feet, bees, coming back & back to the wooden porch, wanting something—and wooden planks, wanting something. To go back into a tree? I want to go back to you, who when you were dying said “There are one or two people you don’t want to let go of.” Here too, where I don’t let go of you. After: Down on the street Down on the street a man’s voice, every night at ten— God God God I love you God Halleluia God Halleluia God God Everyone breathing hard to get through, to get through soon to the air, a word in everybody’s mouth— You must have trusted some word that time in that half-underwater cave when you dove and came up someplace else, and called to me, Come on —Jean Valentine Continue reading
Posted Apr 27, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by James Stotts
Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her inaugural post. The sixteen poems by James Stotts that we published in our very first issue of Little Star were, I believe the first poems he ever published, or nearly. I received them from my colleague the poet Melissa Green, who wrote to me, “Oh, my dear, but we've found one of the Tribe, the James Stotts I wrote to you about. I just haven't had time to send you his poems—he's coming to my new digs with my old roommates […] and we're going to give him succor and kindness and welcome him in. This young man is quietly chewing the bark off trees, alone and without a community—[…] He was born in the Rockies, studied Russian, went to Russia, married a Russian, reads Russian—well I can't tell how well, but his house is full of all our beloved poets—and he seems to have them all in a cellular level...” He certainly did. Most of Stotts’s poems seemed to share the same horizon, where a dull half-lit sky meets a blighted earth, and a lonely man, hung-over or a little drunk, navigates his way among the world’s last things. He is saved not by answers but by song: the rhymes come closer, the rhythm approaches the heartbeat, and at the end the language itself seems to offer some simple orientation, a firm bed on which to plant a foot. His unwavering commitment to the lower case requires a moment of adjustment but suits him fine. The reader feels they are eavesdropping on his thoughts, in which he sets so little stock he does not even bother to clothe them in type. And yet these thoughts are born up from beneath by a stately rhetoric as old as Herbert—and indeed the pivot at his final couplets often calls the metaphysicals to mind. In “sonnet where i sober up” the speaker looks up to find a sky where the old furniture has fallen into disrepair. The celestial corridors of Tiepolo have been replaced by a parkway with its littered median; the halos surround cop cars’ flashers. Instead of angelic choirs, scuffed bones and hair hoarded by rats. The image shifts to an inadvertent reliquary: our fragments are stashed behind a blind wall by scavengers. The speaker, hung over, feels the shadow of death in his own body; like Odysseus and Aeneas he’s had a brush with Lethe, but in his Lethe had the upper hand. And then, the turn. “I piss” (naturally) and “brush off the skin and earth into a little death nest.” Then for the second time he addresses an unknown “you.” We first met “you” in the first stanza: “this is the hidden meaning of morning by your own admission.” Now, “this is, in your own words, not such a bad place to begin.”... Continue reading
Posted Apr 19, 2014 at The Best American Poetry
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