All Announcements

Ted Greenwald, 1942–2016

by selliott • June 17, 2016

It is with sadness that we announce the passing of New York City poet Ted Greenwald (December 19, 1942–June 17, 2016).

Ted Greenwald’s poems sing the commons and dance with a homely grace American poetry has rarely seen.

WHIFF

An evening
Spent talking
Spent thinking
About what my life would be
If I’d stayed
With a particular girl or woman
I went with
What would be
If I’d’ve been accepted to and gone
Where I applied
To a different school
Than the one I did
Where I’d learned
Different social graces
Then the ones I have
Where some of the material
Values of the American dream
Had rubbed off
Enough to make me
Live it out
In the good-works sense
If I’d settled down
And settled
For the foundation
On a house
For future generations
Instead of assuming
Immediately past generations
My foundation to mine
If I’d been
A little quicker to learn
What was expected of me
And wanting to please pleased
Going on that way
Through all eternity
I’ve probably been saved
From mere routines
By a streak of stubbornness
By a slow mind
And tendency to drift
By an emotional development
That requires
My personal understanding
Before happening
Feeling out the implications
An emotion has in
Form of expectation
Before trying out and
After awareness
I sense a willingness
To tell someone
I know and like
And sense the same from
Anything they’d like to know
About me
And, at the same time, have
A vast sense of privacy
Which means
There’s no way
I’ll wear out my personality
And its sense of continuity
Although sometimes
I feel empty
But talking to
Someone I like
And trust
And sense the same from
I feel way up
And after a long evening
Of talk about this and that
Feel wide awake
And feel the world
Wide and awake around me
And have a visual intensity
In memory
That, in near memory, dulls
And throbs
And grows vivid as hell
When I bring it to mind
Some time from then
What my life
Would’ve been like
Under different circumstances
Would’ve been different
With its own
Attendant ifs
And its own what-might’ve-been
But this way
I’ve elected to follow
And cast my vote
Each waking day in
I avoid
The possibility
Of taking the past too seriously
Or feeling any bitterness
Or sadness
This way
When my ship comes in
I’ll’ve passed out of mind
Beyond the sight of land
And won’t hesitate
For a second
To look back on all this
With fondness or remiss
The air’ll be clear
The moon’ll be there
And you, whoever
You are and hope to be,
Will be here with my love

[from Common Sense]

“Is it cynical or is it innocent? He has an almost machinic way. But is it utopian? The most progressive of Ted Greenwald’s poems are just that. No, they all are: forward thinking, Sagittarian, and wildly Americanly kind.” –Eileen Myles

Common Sense

First published in 1978, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald’s work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable.

The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems, 1969–1982

A New York-based poet with close ties to the New York School and the Language poets, Ted Greenwald has written daily since the early 1960s. The Age of Reasons includes the best of Greenwald’s uncollected poetry. While some of these poems appeared in literary journals or magazines in the 1970s, none were included in any of his previously published books. These distinct works were written in advance of or alongside the extended explorations of a mutated triolet form that increasingly occupied him from the late 1970s on. Alongside Common Sense (1978), The Age of Reasons evinces Greenwald’s ability to think with his ear, to hear what’s said as it arrives as a fresh sound or shape in his head. This work is singular in its pattern-making, its music-making, and its ability to simultaneously follow multiple paths.

“No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald.” –Publishers Weekly

“Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America’s most ambitious and provocative poets.” –Terence Winch, Jacket 19

“Ted Greenwald’s poems ‘give voice’ to a variety of New York idioms, and with that, a distinct attitude toward both language and experience. His ultimate strength as a poet is his basic humanity, something that can be claimed for very few.” –Bill Berkson

“I have called Greenwald an ‘urban primitive’ because his work seems to spring from the base materiality of New York streets, the immediacy of enunciation, abrupt demand, tough neighborhoods, shifting milieus, grit and exhaust, flux and flurry. I see him as a genuine original whose method is a unique exploration of common language, utterly without academic pretense.” –Curtis Faville, publisher, L Publications

Benedict Arnold & AMC’s “Turn: Washington’s Spies”

by tsjohnson • June 6, 2016

Wartime treachery, twisted spies and brutality—sound familiar?

AMC’s period drama TURN: Washington’s Spies is in it’s third season, and tensions are rising in the Arnold household. One can understand how a man could be frustrated, having served as Washington’s finest battle commander only to be sent to work a desk job. This restless man would become synonymous with ‘traitor.’ If you’re loving the drama and intriguing politics of Turn, Eric Lehman’s Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London should be on your summer reading list.

The clandestine meeting of John Andre and Benedict Arnold led to Andre’s death and Arnold’s discovery as a traitor and became one of the most talked about incidents in American history. From an engraving by S. B. Stearns, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, University of Bridgeport Archives.

Maybe AMC’s Turn has you wondering how true the drama between John Andre, Peggy Shippen, and Benedict Arnold is? Or you’re interested in learning more about the charges leveled at Arnold surrounding his leniency towards Loyalists? This new take on the most reviled traitor of the Revolutionary War is filled with fascinating details surrounding his attack on New London, Connecticut, when the settlement was burnt to the ground. Based on research of primary documents, Lehman pays close attention to key changes in Arnold’s character—from his time as a decorated American soldier, to “the point where he went from betraying his comrades to massacring his neighbors and destroying their homes.”

Homegrown Terror, a finalist for both the Indie Book and Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Awards, is a must-read for anyone enthralled by the twists of Benedict Arnold’s storyline in Turn. None of his colleagues saw his betrayal coming, just as readers will not anticipate what Lehman uncovers regarding this Revolutionary War antihero’s psyche.

Announcing “Treaty Shirts” from Gerald Vizenor

by jgagne • May 13, 2016

The imagined narratives of seven native exiles from the White Earth Nation

Gerald Vizenor creates masterful, truthful, surreal, and satirical fiction similar to the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. In this imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations; they pursue the liberty of an egalitarian government on an island in Lake of the Woods. These seven narrators, known only by native nicknames, are related to characters in Vizenor’s other novels and stories. Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and this novel is a rich and critical commentary on the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867, and a vivid visualization of the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation in 2034.

An online reader’s companion is available at http://geraldvizenor.site.wesleyan.edu.

Gerald Vizenor is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and citizen of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota. He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His novels Shrouds of White Earth and Griever: An American Monkey King in China were both honored with the American Book Award, and the latter also received the New York Fiction Collective Award. Vizenor and his wife, Laura, now live in Naples, Florida, making regular visits to both Minnesota and France.

“In writing that’s full of possibilities, Gerald Vizenor delivers to us the native world that should be.”
—Diane Glancy, author of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

“Treaty Shirts presents a masterful exhibition of the capacities of stories to create enduring images of natural reason, as it strides the shifty terrain of cultural survivance, treaty rights, and political sovereignty. Perhaps the most impressive is the way Vizenor achieves his goals, not through condemnation but through the humor of tease of stories that are the achievement of a literary artist at the height of his powers.”
—Billy Stratton, author of Buried in Shades of Night

May 10, 2016

148 pp., 6 x 9”

Jacketed Cloth, $24.95 x

978-0-8195-7628-6

eBook, $19.99 Y

978-0-8195-7629-3

Read an excerpt from Landfill Meditations, for an introduction to Gerald Vizenor’s family.

Read an Excerpt from Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation

Announcing “The Selected Letters of John Cage”

by jgagne • May 10, 2016

Letters of an avant-garde icon available to the public for the first time

Events: May 1- Atlas Eclipticalis at Wesleyan

May 7, NYPL for Performing Arts.

This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage’s joie de vivre resounds in these letters—fully annotated throughout—in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage’s correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

JOHN CAGE (1912–1992) was an American composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced twentieth-century music. He was an early proponent of aleatoric music (music where some elements are left to chance), used instruments in nonstandard ways, and was an electronic music pioneer. LAURA KUHN is the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College and director of the John Cage Trust.

“The publication of a great artist’s letters is always an important event, but rarely is such a volume as thrilling to read as is The Selected Letters of John Cage, which takes us from the 1930s, when Cage was an eighteen-year-old college dropout traveling in Europe and Algeria, to his robbery at knifepoint shortly before his sudden death in 1992. In his published writings and even interviews, John Cage was so naturally reticent, so unfailingly polite and formal, that the letters, wonderfully informal and often surprisingly frank and even severe, come as a real surprise. Anyone interested in the development of the twentieth-century American avant-garde will want to read Cage’s week-by-week reaction to its twists and turns. His life-in-letters emerges as a heroic tale of struggle and triumphant survival.”

—Marjorie Perloff

“Cage’s letters are invaluable in that they show us the day-to-day life of a composer at work: organizing concerts, raising funds, working with performers, worrying about getting the next piece done. Essential reading for anyone interested in Cage’s music.”

—James Pritchett

Publication of this book is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

January

680 pp., 6 illus., 6 x 9”

Cloth, $40.00

978-0-8195-7591-3

eBook, $31.99 Y

978-0-8195-7592-0

John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis” and Van Vleck Observatory

by jgagne • May 1, 2016

Dedicated June 16, 1916, Van Vleck Observatory celebrates its centennial this year. For one-hundred years the observatory has inspired young astronomers and others in the Wesleyan community.

In 1960, John Cage came to Wesleyan as a visiting professor in the Center for Advanced Studies. While exploring Wesleyan’s campus, Cage discovered the observatory’s Van Vleck Library. Bill Jefferys (Emeritus Professor of Astronomy, UT-Austin) was a junior at Wesleyan, working at the observatory, when Cage visited, searching for star charts to guide his music, a new experiment in composition. Bill presented Cage with Antonín Bečvář’s Atlas Eclipticalis, one of few astronomy books printed entirely in color at the time. The book inspired “Atlas Eclipticalis,” a composition that relies on the placement of stars within constellations, rather than the orthodox implementation of musical notes. Using a transparent music staff, Cage composed this piece, basing each note’s sound upon the size and color of the stars which landed on the staff. Greater detail of the piece’s creation can be found in the series of Selected Letters of John Cage edited by Laura Kuhn.

“Atlas Eclipticalis” has become an iconic piece of music, raising questions of improvisation and musical ownership. The piece will be formed today, May 1, as part of a concert in celebration of the Van Vleck Oberservatory’s 100th anniversary.

In his own words, here is Bill Jefferys’ story of his encounters with John Cage:

I was aware that John Cage was at Wesleyan, in the Honors College, that year. I would have been a junior in 1960–61, and I had some duties in the Van Vleck library, probably making sure that books left around got back to the right place on the shelf…I was the only astronomy major during my years at Wesleyan (1958–62). I happened to be in the library when John Cage wandered in, looking for star charts to use in his music. His idea was that you could put a transparent music staff randomly on the chart, which would make potential notes become real notes, indicated by where the stars happened to be at that point. I was aware that Bečvar’s Atlas Eclipticalis had just been printed…we had recently received a copy. Unlike most star charts of the time, this book was in full color…stars had their colors indicated by the color in the chart and of course the size of the image indicated the magnitude. Also, nebulae were indicated in green. I showed this to Cage, whose eyes lit up as I think it was a lot more than he expected. I helped him check it out, and he took it down to the Honors College to work in his piece.

A year or two later, I forget which, I learned from the late David McAllester, who had been one of my favorite professors at Wesleyan, if not the favorite, that the US premier of Atlas Eclipticalis was to be presented at what was then Connecticut College for Women (now just Connecticut College, I believe). David invited me to go along with him and his wife Susan to attend this event, which I did. Susan brought along a very large shelf fungus that she had collected at their place in the Berkshires (Monterey, MA), and presented it to Cage prior to the performance. Cage was delighted as he was a very good amateur mycologist. The performance was the music for a dance performance by Merce Cunningham, Cage’s longtime companion and lover, and his troupe. Cunningham was dressed as a chicken, I believe. The whole affair was quite amusing.

Cage had a custom of dedicating parts of his compositions to friends and colleagues; There was a part dedicated to David and Susan McAllester, for example, and also to the chair of the music department at the time, whose name escapes me. Some years later I wrote to Cage and reminded him about how he came by the Atlas Eclipticalis. In return he wrote me a letter (which is somewhere in the attic) in which he dedicated the Second Bassoon part to me. This may well have been one of Cage’s jokes, as there may not actually be a Second Bassoon part! I don’t know, but I’ve always been amused by the notion.

My favorite mycology story about Cage is from Silence: He had taken a course on mushroom identification at the New School, and the professor took the class out for a field trip. One of the students brought a mushroom to him, which the professor identified as such-and-such a species (I forget the name, but it is in the book and on the recording). The professor declared it “edible.” Cage, however, thought it was a different, and possibly poisonous species. Cage reports that this put him in a dilemma: Should he keep silent, and perhaps be responsible for a student poisoning himself, or should he speak up? He spoke up, and the professor said, well, let’s key it off. Which they did, and it turned out that Cage was right. After the field trip, the professor took Cage aside and asked him, how come, since he seemed to know so much about mushrooms, he was taking the course? Cage responded that there was a lot that he didn’t know. Cage then asked the professor why he had made a mistake in identifying that mushroom. The professor responded, “My specialty is the jelly fungi; I just give the fleshy fungi a whirl.”

So, that summarizes what I know about the origins of Atlas Eclipticalis and the relation to Cage’s Wesleyan visit.

New from Wesleyan:

Also available:
MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words

NaPoMo16: Philip Whalen’s “Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis”

by tsjohnson • April 30, 2016

When asked about his favorite poem, Michael Rothenburg replied with “Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis” by Philip Whalen from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen.

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
splashed picture—bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher
on paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—
Cheered as it whizzed by—
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.

“Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis” is often cited as one of Whalen’s greatest poems. It is certainly the most anthologized. It reminds us of impermanence and lineage, the debt we owe to the poets who preceded us and inspired us with their work, poets who showed us generosity in their teachings. It also suggests that we should not take ourselves too seriously.

–Michael Rothenberg

Philip Whalen (1923–2002) was an influential Beat poet and the author of dozens of books of novels and poetry, including On Bear’s Head, The Diamond Noodle, and Overtime. Michael Rothenberg is one of the literary executors of Whalen’s estate, and the editor of www.bigbridge.org. Also the editor of major volumes of selected poetry by Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, and Edward Dorn, he lives north of San Francisco.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

NaPoMo16: Sarah Blake & Monica Ong’s “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix”

by jgagne • April 29, 2016

When asked about her favorite poem, Sarah Blake replied with “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix” by Monica Ong from Silent Anatomies.

ETYMOLOGY of an UNTRANSLATED CERVIX

In Rufumbira, the local language here in Kisoro, there is no word for cervix,
and the word vagina is a shameful, dirt word, rarely uttered. -Erin Cox, MD

This space between two entries
I claim it.

When it (she) is blotted out with black marker
I say it, I name it.

But under these volcano peaks, I am locked out in English.

Cells rupture. Quietly.
A carcinoma colony creeping in her blank space. Spreads.

What if dysplasia simply meant
to displease?

The interpreter asks

Why do they want to go down there,
to that dirty, shameful place?

What is the point of wailing horns, of fighting
a fire with no address?

This dialect was not designed for her.

On the Western shore, I can spell it out, letter by letter
print a scan and map every tumor’s point of entry,

conduct daily surveillance on each tendril
until it is white with radioactive surge.

But what about her tongue?

Absent, unable to make real
her body, written in silence.

Danger: ( ) is waiting in red,
The monster’s shadow, taller and hungrier than the monster itself.

Ink spilled. Bleeding.

I chose “Etymology of an Untranslated Cervix” because I love the intersection of the body and language, multiple languages, the failure of language. Recently I’ve been focused on threats that bodies face, sometimes women’s bodies especially, and this struck me as a strange threat–not causing harm and yet fundamentally an attack on women’s bodies, even if in avoidance, in denial. I’m usually thinking about the faulty space between signifier and signified, but here, a situation where there is actually no signifier. What becomes of the signified then? This a part of my body I am supposed to reach up and touch once a month to check that my IUD strings are in place. I feel a sudden emptiness there without language. I love this poem that reclaims it so forcefully and beautifully.
–Sarah Blake

Silent Anatomies
96 pp. 7.5 x 10″
$19.95 paper
978-1-888553-69-7
Kore Press
February 2015

Sarah Blake is the founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, an editor at Saturnalia Books, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Drunken Boat, FIELD, and The Threepenny Review. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mr. West, published in 2015 by Wesleyan University Press. You can visit her website here.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

Announcing “Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart” from Kenneth Bilby

by jgagne • April 28, 2016

Celebrating the legendary studio musicians of Jamaican popular music through personal photographs and interviews

While singers, producers, and studio owners have become international icons, many of the musicians who were essential to shaping the sound of Jamaican music have remained anonymous. Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall, complete with 98 color photographs, is the first book devoted to the studio musicians who were central to Jamaica’s popular music explosion. Bilby delves into the full spectrum of Jamaican music, from traditional and folk genres, such as Mento, Poco, and Buru, to the popular urban styles of ska, rocksteady, and reggae. Photographic portraits and interview excerpts (with such musical pioneers as Prince Buster, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and many of Bob Marley’s early musical collaborators) provide new insights into the birth of Jamaican popular music in the recording studios of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The book illustrates how players of “traditional” Jamaican music and lesser-known singers have made fundamental and wide-ranging contributions to the music. Appendices include a recommended listening list, a bibliography of interviews and field recordings, and a glossary of terms.

Kenneth Bilby is an ethnomusicologist, writer, and lifelong student of Jamaican music. He is the former director of research at the Center for Black Research at Columbia College Chicago and currently a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. Author of True-Born Maroons and coauthor of Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, his collection of field recordings of Jamaican traditional music is one of the largest in the world.

“Bilby celebrates his roots in Jamaica in this magnificent book through beautiful photographs and interviews with musicians. Bilby unveils the backstory of Jamaican music, and his work will be cherished by all who love Jamaican music.”
—William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues

“Bilby doesn’t just tell the story that’s never been told—delivering an homage to the heroes who helped shape Jamaican music—he lets these heroes tell the story in their own words, writing their own chapter in history.”
—Baz Dreisinger, producer and writer of Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop and Rhyme & Punishment

“An essential work of Jamaican musical scholarship. The interviews are engrossing on multiple levels. Our understanding of the black musics of the New World would have fewer gaps in it if there were more of the kind of thorough oral history that Bilby does here. He proves himself to be not merely a good collector but a good listener.”
—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

Enjoy some musical examples!

Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of
Jamaica. (CD) Smithsonian/Folkways. 1992. [1970s–1990s]

Example of Nyabinghi drumming

Mento version of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, performed by The Jolly Boys

Alerth Bedasse & Chin’s Calypso Sextet perform “Industrial Fair”

Cedric “Im” Brooks and the Divine Light. From Mento to Reggae to Third World
Music. (CD) VP. 2008. [1973]

Studio One Ska—The Skatalites “Beardsman Ska”

Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae. (CD) Mollselekta. 2009. [2000s]

The Harder They Come (Deluxe Edition). (2-CD box set). Hip-O. 2003. [1960s and 1970s]

Publication date: May 10, 2016
256 pp., 7 x 10”
Paper, $29.95 x
978-0-8195-7588-3
eBook, $23.99 Y
978-0-8195-7604-0

NaPoMo16: Robert Fernandez on Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” (466)

by jgagne • April 26, 2016

When asked about his favorite poem, Robert Fernandez replied with “I dwell in Possibility – (466)” by Emily Dickinson.

I dwell in Possibility – (466)

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

This is one of my favorite poems. I think that Dickinson here is thinking about the question of being. It’s not just the poem that dwells in possibility, it’s the person. The person has the potential to dwell poetically. What would that mean? We’re still in a house, a structure—like the poem, a place of laws and limits, possibility partitioned off, diverted into channels—but above us recede the “Gambrels of the Sky,” a void that fills us with the sense that anything is possible. Kierkegaard, seizing on Christ’s assertion that “with God all things are possible,” noted that “God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is the existence of God.” The poet has to break with the reified, prosaic supports and repetitions of the world, which exist to make us feel safe and to keep things productive, into the exposure of this “fair” (meaning pleasing to the sight, beautiful, bright, clear) place of poetry, a place made beautiful and bright because resonant with possibility, the divine. This is the human in its capacity to exist for and toward the unknown, new truth and new light. Dwelling poetically is dwelling in the dread and wonder of this exposed place and affirming it. Dickinson here speaks to poetry’s relationship to being, to what it means to be human (to see possibility and disclose the unknown), thus situating a radical thinking of being and the event, the seer’s work, at the center of American poetry.

–Robert Fernandez

Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh and Pink Reef, the cotranslator of Azure: Poems by Stéphane Mallarmé. His new original poetry collection Scarecrow was published by the Wesleyan University Press in February 2016. He has won a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fernandez lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

NaPoMo16: Marianne Boruch on 2 poems & an email from Russell Edson

by tsjohnson • April 21, 2016

When we at Wesleyan University Press asked poet Marianne Boruch to select one of her favorite poems, she replied two poems by the late poet Russell Edson.

This being spring, specifically April, and heralded for a while now—for good and ill—under the name of Poetry (capital P), here’s part of an email I got in May 2006 from the late (infamous and beloved) Russell Edson. He wrote—

“Everything’s gotten kind of green. I suppose, since we didn’t create
the universe, we’ll just have to go on living our lives as if everything
was meant to happen.”

That’s not a poem, of course, and in fact Edson did create small riveting universe after universe in his prose poems, verse paragraphs, fables extraordinaire—whatever you want to call them. Here’s a favorite of mine….

THE FALL

There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out
saying to his parents that he was a tree.

To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room
as your roots may ruin the carpet.

He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall.

What to say about such a moment? What to say about a playfulness that is dead serious, poems that turn on us and suddenly there’s that huge void looming, in us and around us?

That’s poetry for you but but but… Unlike prose which is “inherently tragic” since it moves “through time,” poetry is “joyous … no matter how gloomy its seeming content.” So Edson brilliantly argued in his essay “The Prose Poem in America.” With its sense of “continuous life,” poetry “celebrates everything it touches” pretty much in spite of itself. He said that too.

But there’s a certain humility required of poets, a crucial lightness of being. Note this wonderful piece of his:

A PERFORMANCE AT HOG THEATER

There was once a hog theater where hogs performed as
men, had men been hogs.

One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has found a
mouse which is being eaten by the same hog which is in the
field and which has found the mouse, which I am performing
as my contribution to the performer’s art.

Oh let’s just be hogs, cried an old hog.

And so the hogs streamed out of the theater crying, only
hogs, only

hogs . . .

In that email from long ago, Edson wrote this before he signed off—

“Good news! Poetry month has ended. Now we can return to reality.
Someone once said April is the cruelest month…”

–Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including, the forthcoming Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (2016); Cadaver, Speak (2014); The Book of Hours (2011), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan, 2008); and Poems: New & Selected (Wesleyan, 2004). She has also published a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (2011), as well as two collections of prose on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995).