they haven't ended

"But never attend / to happy endings—because if stories are happy, / they haven't ended."

~~ from "Ric's Progress" in The Back Chamber by Donald Hall

Later his leg died.

"[Daddy] had worked in a steel mill for over thirty years and had contracted emphysema. Emphysema and fits. And a brain tumor. He discovered he had a brain tumor during the course of a hospital stay because of the emphysema and the doctors wanted to operate. At first he refused. Nobody cuts my family, he insisted. But my sisters and my brother and I fussed and fussed until he finally agreed to it. They removed a tumor about the size of an orange from his brain and he was up and out of the hospital in a matter of weeks. And just the same. We saw no difference in him.

"Later his leg died. Just shriveled up and turned black and died and the doctors said that they had to amputate it or the death would spread throughout his body. And so he let them cut it off and he got a cane. He would smile and point to the empty place. Yeah, they got my leg but they didn't get me, he would boast."

~~ from Good Woman: Poetry and a Memoir 1969--1980 by Lucille Clifton

the first person from our church to go to college

"A week before we were to move I was to leave for Washington. The church gave a reception for me, the first person from our church to go to college, and everybody brought gifts and laughed and new that I would make good. But I left Howard after two years. Lost my scholarship because I didn't study. I didn't have to, I thought. I didn't have to know about science and geography and things that I didn't want to know. I was a Dahomey woman. And so I came home to a disappointed and confused Mama and Daddy who was furious and defensive and sad."

~~ from Good Woman: Poetry and a Memoir 1969--1980 by Lucille Clifton

The Poems of Jay Roberts

Grab a copy to go!

Joker, Joker, Deuce

Only July 30, The novelist-in-residence at L.U.S.K. finished Paul Beatty's Joker, Joker, Deuce.

I've been working ever since I was twelve.

"'I was eleven or twelve. I remember when the taxicab driver brought that telegram.'

"'I need details,' I said hoping to coax him into a deeper story, something better than my imagination. 'Was it a weekend? Were you coming home from school? Were you watching cartoons? Was your mother at work?'

"'I think I was at work.' He laughed. 'I've been working ever since I was twelve. I had a job changing tires.'

"'You were pretty much taking care of the family while he was gone?'

"'Yeah, my great-uncle got me a job changing tires.'"

~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes

it's poor swollen America

"The radio clicks on—it's poor swollen America, / Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation / Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not / A man who kills fifty people in five minutes / With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose / Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Of if terrorists / Are mentally ill."

~~ from "Dancing" included in Summer Snow by Robert Hass

not necessarily the safest place to be

"I was having a lot of problems with my dad. . . We had an argument, and [my dad] says, 'You didn't suffer. He says what you are you whining about? You had easy duty.' Which was true."

"Right. But. . . it's still the military. You're still away from home. It's still not necessarily the safest place to be . . . that's where I struggle with the hierarchy of service. . . [E]veryone served. We just served in different capacities."

The Life and Times of a Korean Veteran Renaissance Man

Once he gets going, this artist-writer-veteran-polio-survivor-German-translator-mime-masseuse-soldier-on-the-Korean-wall-during-Vietnam is good. Have a listen.

 

Eugene N.

 

Michael Weingrad's Eugene Nadelman arrived from Philly.

new Nadelman review

Consider Philadelphia in the 1980s in a new review of Eugene Nadelman by Michael Weingrad.

W. H. Auden

"As a young man, W. H. Auden renounced his faith. He wrote his most popular poems during this period of unbelief in his native England—notably the rousing civil-war poem “Spain.” As such works skyrocketed him to fame, Auden recognized that he was being tempted into soaring rhetoric and sweeping moral judgments that failed to reflect the subtleties of real life. Believing such a performance to be unethical, he abjured his position as national icon and fled to America."

He liked to be alone

"Margaret Obank writes: Mahmoud was a completely secular person, rather philosophical, an avid reader, elegant in his dress, and supremely modest in his opinion of himself. He liked to be alone, but would always be ready to speak on the telephone."

The Third Martini

The Third Martini by Chris Benson offers "[g]ood poems, incredibly inexpensive for the value."

note from January 6

from poet Lamont Steptoe

 

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

disappeared

 America is better at ignoring its poets.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2020

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Gluck. 

Support Jessica Smith

You can support poet-adjunct Jessica Smith by selecting two of her collections. Her books include Organic Furniture Cellar and life-list.

even "a bag of dirt"

If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.

— Kaveh Akbar (@KavehAkbar) March 18, 2019