Noritake Sestina Relish Butter Tray (pictured) Wag's Revue is offering up a "Syllable Sestina Challenge" based on an exercise from the Oulipo listserv, in which a sestina is composed with only six syllables. Poetry editor Will Guzzardi admits it may be easier to complete the challenge in French than English, but it doesn't stop him from giving it a try with "The Masturbating Sign." Submit your sestina before March 1, 2010 and you may be published in a showcase on Wag's Revue with other sestinaistas! Continue reading

This is a love letter. Not an exegesis. Not a manifesto. Not a new notion. This is a thank you note. I met Andrew Hughes in January 2002, during my final residency at the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Andy was the first editor outside of a school literary journal to accept a poem of mine for publication. He and Whit Griffin started Tight in 2001 while undergraduates at Bennington. I was fortunate enough to be included in the second issue, which also features work from Jonathan Williams, John Coletti, Russell Dillon, Stephen Sandy, Anselm Berrigan, Amy Gerstler, Pierre Joris, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Jackson Mac Low. If you happen to find a copy, you really should buy it. When the Vermont Studio Center restructured in 2007, my position as Writing Coordinator was eliminated. Andy, in the midst of getting his own MFA from Brooklyn College, suggested we move in together. We did, taking up residence above Kevin's Restaurant in downtown North Bennington, Vermont. Andy dubbed our apartment "Villa America" after one of Gerald Murphy's paintings, at the time (fall 2007) on exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art. Andy, Whit, and I would resurrect Tight and put out three more issues, all of which I recommend with extreme prejudice (Tight 3, Tight 4, Tight 5). Andy's one of my best friends. Ever encouraging, always enthusiastic, he's helped me maintain my sense of experimentation, that drive to create, which so often falters after graduate school, or after any heyday of the blood fades away. Andy is a great inventor, and he dubbed us—me, him, our friends and fellow Benningtonians Whit, Jason Myers, and Evan Kennedy—with intentional allusion to Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski (and a thorough self-deprecation), the Green Mountain Boys. There is properly no history, only biography, and there are innumerable projects and creations that can be attributed to our band of brothers, the ongoing, all-encompassing collaborative project of written, visual, and aural specimens called Notes Toward a Pixie Culture being just one fraction of this universe. If I said Chocolate Submarine Review (Revue) or Brothers Hernandez, if I talked about the White Goddess or backroad lifting, or said Deb, or Joyce, or Norton, or Zube, or Dawg, you might appreciate them in part, but would have no idea what I was talking about. And you'd be right. For the moment. I'm not here to define a poetics or inaugurate the Green Mountain School. That would be impossible with five such distinct personalities and temperaments. Most of our conversations/arguments, about poetry or anything, end up as a variation of this While we do share many attributes and loves—mystical knowledge and arcane lore, tall-tale Southern/Yankee Gothic spookiness; psychedelic sonics intended to upend syntax and thought; a neo-Romantic rural mix tape pastoralism (best illustrated, quite literally, in Andy and Whit's collaboration Rural Radio and Jason's American Mix-Tape); humor, dark, dry, deadpan, wacky; a surreality of urreality, dreamscapes of the waking world; the love of song in all its forms, from folk... Continue reading

He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers. Constance Rourke "Chest Fever" was written as a reaction to "The Weight." It is what Robertson refers to as a "vibes" song. "At the time I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute, where are we going here with Buñuel and all of these ideas and the abstractions and all of the mythology?' This music, for us, started on something that felt good and sounded good and who cares. 'Chest Fever' was like, here's the groove, come in a little late. Let's do the whole thing so it's like pulling back and then it gives in and kind of kicks in and goes with the groove a little bit. If you like 'Chest Fever' it's for God knows what reason, it's just in there somewhere, this quirky thing. But it doesn't make particularly any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything." The beginning always remained a showcase for Garth Hudson. On the recorded version he opens with a bit of Bach's Toccata & Fugue In D Minor. He adds, though, with a whimsical smile, "After that it becomes more unqualifiable, more ethnic." Hudson's intro eventually evolved into what became known as "The Genetic Method." I want to know how much of the show is scripted and how much is crazy make-’em-ups. Christopher Walken A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. Wallace Stevens The coming into being of something new does not by that fact deprive what was of its proper place. Each thing has its own place, never takes the place of something else; and the more things there are, as is said, the merrier. John Cage I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back. Ralph Waldo Emerson What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. Constance Rourke Continue reading

He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers. Constance Rourke "Chest Fever" was written as a reaction to "The Weight." It is what Robertson refers to as a "vibes" song. "At the time I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute, where are we going here with Buñuel and all of these ideas and the abstractions and all of the mythology?' This music, for us, started on something that felt good and sounded good and who cares. 'Chest Fever' was like, here's the groove, come in a little late. Let's do the whole thing so it's like pulling back and then it gives in and kind of kicks in and goes with the groove a little bit. If you like 'Chest Fever' it's for God knows what reason, it's just in there somewhere, this quirky thing. But it doesn't make particularly any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything." The beginning always remained a showcase for Garth Hudson. On the recorded version he opens with a bit of Bach's Toccata & Fugue In D Minor. He adds, though, with a whimsical smile, "After that it becomes more unqualifiable, more ethnic." Hudson's intro eventually evolved into what became known as "The Genetic Method." I want to know how much of the show is scripted and how much is crazy make-’em-ups. Christopher Walken A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. Wallace Stevens The coming into being of something new does not by that fact deprive what was of its proper place. Each thing has its own place, never takes the place of something else; and the more things there are, as is said, the merrier. John Cage I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back. Ralph Waldo Emerson What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art. Constance Rourke Continue reading

"Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." Frank O'Hara's famous "Personism" manifesto is one of the great modern expressions of American Transcendentalism. It reminds you that poetry isn't a form but a way. Just because a piece of text is written in lines doesn't make it a poem. Nor does a poem have to take the form of words necessarily. Anything that works well, that does the thing it intends to do, is a poem. I often find more poetic inspiration from comedians than I do from poets. After all, everything that makes a good joke makes a good poem, makes a good comedian makes a good poet. Stephen Colbert daily examines the complexities of human language, and thus nature, with "The Word" feature on his show. Colbert's introduction of words like "truthiness" into our lexicon is an accomplishment on par with Aram Saroyan's "lighght" or The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger. Indeed, each of these examples fulfill Emerson's insistence: "Every word was once a poem." The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Word - Truthiness www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy The Poet Colbert also echoes the Emerson of "Spiritual Laws": "I may say it of our preposterous use of books, —He knew now what to do, and so he read." The satire (and danger) comes from the fact that he's arguing from a political perspective, not a poetic one. My love for poetry comes from the verbal acrobatics and insane logic of Looney Tunes, Monty Python, the Marx Brothers, and almost ever single show on Adult Swim There are poets who use humor, the premise of joke, as the form of the poem. Such as Aaron Belz. Belz is a funny poet. I don't mean he's witty or amusing or humorous—though he certainly is all these things—but that he's laugh out loud funny. To wit, check out this recent poem in The Washington Post. "Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game" is funny for reasons beyond the image of an adult man denying a child her use of imagination or that said child would actually identify a cloud in the shape of Alsace-Lorraine. His book The Bird Hoverer is both hilarious and touching. It really touches you. Sometimes in places you don't like. I'm sure his next book, Lovely, Raspberry, will continue the touching. Peter Davis is another funny poet. Each poem in his book Hitler's Mustache takes for its subject, well, you guessed it. I once had the pleasure of reading with Peter and Aaron at Zinc in New York and while everyone enjoyed it, a blond-haired couple left after only a few of his poems. We found out afterward they were German tourists. We like to think humor is universal. It also requires timing. Another poet complained to me... Continue reading

My father suffered a series of brain seizures due to sleep apnea at the end of August '09 and I, his only child, was responsible for taking care of him (my mother passed away from breast cancer in 1995). So I flew down to Naples, Florida. He didn't know who I was. He would answer your question with the same question. You could tell he was fighting, tell there was some recognition in his eyes, but the engine wasn't turning. The first few weeks were scary, but he soon began to recover. I returned to Vermont with a promise to visit as soon as I could and with the happiness that not only was my father alive, but seemed to be a man that I hadn't known in about a decade. And it would be easy to visit him any time: I'd lost my job at the Northshire Bookstore because of my month-long absence. My hard drive died last Thursday, the day before my 34th birthday, the day before I was scheduled to visit my father in Florida. I was upset about my hard drive, but the good people at Driversavers made it sound like nothing more than a standard fail. It would be expensive to recover the data, but they seemed confident they could do it. I received the call yesterday. Complete physical damage. Nothing can be recovered. My shaking was imperceptible at first. The light-headedness soon followed. 20 years of writing. Notes. Work from other poets, all the poems I'd selected for my new literary journal, The Equalizer. Syllabi. Résumés. List of published works. Correspondences. Years and years of poetry. All gone. I could give up. It's easy. I'm sure I'll have moments when I go to find something I've written only to meet its memory. I should just get a job in the Goldman Sachs mail room, forget this silly dream of writing. Except. It's no dream. There are people who write poems. Then there are poets. I have to write. I have no choice. The voices come and their chaunts must be transcribed. No choice. I am. If I'd been schooled to hold every single word precious, maybe I should despair. If I'd lost the only copy of my 1,000 page sure-to-be-bestselling novel, I'd probably cash in my chips. But I come from another school, a school of nature, of experimentation and erasure. Here's the ultimate erasure. The only thing I despair is nostalgia. I'd go back to look at poems I wrote in high school, marveling at how weird they were even then, even if they weren't very good. All my graduate school poems, gone, save for the ones in my thesis. There's a possibility I have things here and there on very old discs, and my latest manuscript, Green Mountains, is safe. I feel unburdened. I feel light. Maybe I'm still in denial; but maybe I'm liberated. I'm the only one who knows what I lost so I can either throw ashes on my... Continue reading

In the past year (at least) I've made several attempts to write a long piece about Charles North's excellent 2007 book Cadenza. Each time, I've faltered. I think my best course of action is to apply for a grant and, Gideons-like, use the money to place not just Cadenza but all his other books into hotel rooms across the country. The book would act both as reading material, the artwork that adorns the walls, and the rural radio station. I'd like to call his style something like "Transcendental Objectivist" but I don't want the responsibility. The book's title poem is one of the great longer poems of the last decade. Akin to Ashbery's "The Skaters" in that it's a kind of entry into North's poetry. It's indeed a cadenza—"an elaborate flourish or showy solo passage, sometimes improvised, introduced near the end of an aria or a movement of a concerto." Except that it's the first poem in the book, so we already know we're in for something different. It's a discourse that opens up the fluid passage between the reader and the book, an argument for a certain approach to the creation and evaluation of art that still seems to be largely dismissed. Like Ashbery's poetry, it puts the classical and contemporary on the same plane. Medusa romps with Ted Williams, Athena and "How High the Moon" are not so dissimilar. I remember the exact passage where I began to feel the top of my head being taken off—and I mean this quite literally: I had a physical reaction to the revelation Then I am at the bottom of an extremely tall, vaguely cylindrical (something about it reminds me of a free-form glass candy bowl) swimming pool which has the water painted up the sides and no clear point of exit or entry. Far off, near what must be the top, is what looks like a porthole where, if the pool were in fact filled, a swimmer could theoretically exit—although if this were as well the point at which the water entered, exiting would be problematic to say the least. The water is painted in a pleasing —actually dry-looking—powder blue, more the look and fell of sky than water, neither realistic nor stylized (in the manner, say, of a Hokusai) but somewhere between the two. The English painter David Hockney, who has in fact painted swimming pools, comes to mind. I don't have enough space here to investigate all the nooks in "Cadenza" that I'd like to, but the ending must be mentioned, for it is also a key. The penultimate stanza takes the form of a memo/email to, we presume at first, one of North's graduating classes at Pace, then lists several lines of names. Whether these students are real real or invented, who knows, and that's North's point. Then, the last stanza goes In a crowded off-Broadway theater, a heckler refuses to sit down despite mounting threats from the relatively large audience. Several of the costumed and in... Continue reading

An open letter to the Nobel Committee No American-born poet has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his/her country. Eliot was a British citizen and, despite the fact that he could never hide his St. Louis roots, we must consider that. Of himself Milosz said: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian." Brodsky, when asked, replied: "I am Jewish—a Russian poet and an English essayist." What does this matter? Poetry knows no geographical or even temporal boundaries. Yet it would be naïve not to acknowledge that Laureates are often chosen because of their political stances as much as their literary achievements. Herta Müller, Harold Pinter, and Gao Xingjian are just some recent examples. John Ashbery, born in upstate New York, has won nearly every American and international literary award that a poet can, save for being named Poet Laureate of the United States, which, because of his "obscure" poetry, will probably never happen. But is it obscure? Ashbery's poems are interactive, or, dare I call them, Transcendental. The personal is the universal, the universal personal. You make the poem as you read, you become, as Emerson would have it (in everyone's writing including his own), "the book's book." The poet washes away, escapes his personality, and you experience the poem as a thing unto itself, formed by the universe. It's an engagement that places Art alongside Nature in the most radical American way. Best to approach a poet like Ashbery as a landscape sorcerer rather than a writer. Language is a nature. Language is nature. Yes, you simply experience Ashbery's poems, which is liberating for the reader, especially the casual or inexperienced with poetry, awful for the critic. How do you explain a tree? A river? America? The universe? As Van Morrison sang: "It ain't why, it just is." Remember when you were in school and your teacher had you break down, say, "The Second Coming"? "Why can't it just mean what I want it to mean?" is thrown up. Ashbery writes poems like this. No need to know about gyres and Yeats' mysticism. Do you need to know the story of Orpheus to appreciate "Syringa"? Do you even need to know what syringa is? Surely this knowledge would be helpful, but if you read the poem as if you wrote it—because you are writing it as you read—the heart moves roomier. Eurydice and Daffy Duck are on the same level, and Ashbery shows us this. On the occasions I've been lucky enough teach, my students responded better to Ashbery than most "classic" or "accessible" poets. There are a lot of poets who like to say anything can be in poetry, but very few who embody that motto in their poetic philosophy or form. They default to what others call poetry. Ashbery's style is such that all language can be pulled in and manipulated, like a prospect of flowers. More than any other living poet from these shores, Ashbery's poetry is... Continue reading

I was born in Concord, Massachusetts. Raised in Connecticut. Brookfield for the first eight years, four years in Marietta, Georgia (home of the Big Chicken and the Georgia Satellites), then back to Southbury, my hometown if I have one. The state's branded no country for young men, a place you go when you have a family and want to keep them safe. Surely that was my father's logic. I understand. He's from Brooklyn. But Connecticut is a supremely weird place. Brothers Dave and Jake Longstreth are from Connecticut. I went to high school with Jake, a talented artist who reminds me of Fairfield Porter. His paintings of suburban landscapes—parking lots, strip malls, tennis courts, treelines—mostly devoid of human movement (though not the human stamp), hold such a vivid familiarity that they work less like windows and more like mirrors. I would love to be able to hang , in my non-existent home, a painting like "Whales?" or "Sonoma" or "Karate." Dave Longstreth's name you might be more familiar with. He's the lead singer/songwriter of The Dirty Projectors. Their latest album, Bitte Orca, was my favorite album of 2009, and is, at least to my ears, quintessentially Connecticut. Because it combines disparate strands to make its own thing. I suppose in that sense it's also quintessentially American. There are large black, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polish, and Jewish populations in the state. People think Connecticut, they think Yale, the Gold Coast, Litchfield County, WASPs, The Gilmore Girls. They think white, but don't really have a fixed image, maybe just a cocktail party on a yacht. Connecticut to me is the Witch's Dungeon, the Barnum Museum, the Whalers, Freddie Fixer Parade, Denmo's, hip-hop, Holy Land USA, UConn basketball. All of it is true. We've got urban blight and pastoral romance within a mile of each other and one does not excuse the other. It can all be, and in one place. The Dirty Projectors mix right and proper our indie spirit, jazz experimentation, hip-hop beats, soul grooves, to bring me back to my youth at Pomperaug Regional High. White kids and hip-hop. Whatever. I grew up with hip-hop (the music and the attitude, the culture) and to hold my love at arms' length as if it wasn't a part of who I am would be like cutting off my middle fingers 'cause they might now and again get rude. Yes, Connecticut is a supremely weird place. Maybe you have to grow up there to understand the occult power the landscape holds. You go out into those woods, you walk those hills, you stumble through the Hartford night, you stroll down Dixwell Avenue, you see the phantoms, you hear the songs. It's the home of ESPN for the love of. The poets most often associated with Connecticut—Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Samuel Amadon—are magicians, in the literal sense. Not sleight-of-hand-men but true conjurers, as both Jack Spicer and Lytton Smith (in his fantastic book The All-Purpose Magical Tent) would argue and win. I've known Sam... Continue reading

I was born in Concord, Massachusetts. Raised in Connecticut. Brookfield for the first eight years, four years in Marietta, Georgia (home of the Big Chicken and the Georgia Satellites), then back to Southbury, my hometown if I have one. The state's branded no country for young men, a place you go when you have a family and want to keep them safe. Surely that was my father's logic. I understand. He's from Brooklyn. But Connecticut is a supremely weird place. Brothers Dave and Jake Longstreth are from Connecticut. I went to high school with Jake, a talented artist who reminds me of Fairfield Porter. His paintings of suburban landscapes—parking lots, strip malls, tennis courts, treelines—mostly devoid of human movement (though not the human stamp), hold such a vivid familiarity that they work less like windows and more like mirrors. I would love to be able to hang , in my non-existent home, a painting like "Whales?" or "Sonoma" or "Karate." Dave Longstreth's name you might be more familiar with. He's the lead singer/songwriter of The Dirty Projectors. Their latest album, Bitte Orca, was my favorite album of 2009, and is, at least to my ears, quintessentially Connecticut. Because it combines disparate strands to make its own thing. I suppose in that sense it's also quintessentially American. There are large black, Puerto Rican, Italian, Polish, and Jewish populations in the state. People think Connecticut, they think Yale, the Gold Coast, Litchfield County, WASPs, The Gilmore Girls. They think white, but don't really have a fixed image, maybe just a cocktail party on a yacht. Connecticut to me is the Witch's Dungeon, the Barnum Museum, the Whalers, Freddie Fixer Parade, Denmo's, hip-hop, Holy Land USA, UConn basketball. All of it is true. We've got urban blight and pastoral romance within a mile of each other and one does not excuse the other. It can all be, and in one place. The Dirty Projectors mix right and proper our indie spirit, jazz experimentation, hip-hop beats, soul grooves, to bring me back to my youth at Pomperaug Regional High. White kids and hip-hop. Whatever. I grew up with hip-hop (the music and the attitude, the culture) and to hold my love at arms' length as if it wasn't a part of who I am would be like cutting off my middle fingers 'cause they might now and again get rude. Yes, Connecticut is a supremely weird place. Maybe you have to grow up there to understand the occult power the landscape holds. You go out into those woods, you walk those hills, you stumble through the Hartford night, you stroll down Dixwell Avenue, you see the phantoms, you hear the songs. It's the home of ESPN for the love of. The poets most often associated with Connecticut—Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Samuel Amadon—are magicians, in the literal sense. Not sleight-of-hand-men but true conjurers, as both Jack Spicer and Lytton Smith (in his fantastic book The All-Purpose Magical Tent) would argue and win. I've known Sam... Continue reading