May 19, 2013

Dear Friend,

I’m sitting in the garden of an old house here in Noting Hill, reading an anthology of young British poets called Dear World & Everyone in It: New Poetry in the UK. It’s amazing how similar and how different the poetry of the United States and The UK really are seeing how the basic tool being used is absolutely the same! Rhyme and meter are still alive and well on this island but so is the prose poem and a kind of free verse that seems both free and sometimes shy about its own possibilities. Some exciting work in this selection is being done by poets such as Marcus Slease, Amy De’Ath, Ahren Warner, Rachael Allen, Emily Critchley, and someone named Jonty Tiplady.  There’s a range of energy here and it expresses, perhaps, a moment where young British poets are beginning to look away from their Iambic parents and toward something wilder inside themselves… or perhaps I’m being West-Coast-Centric and only want them to be wild. Either way it seems like an exciting time here and perhaps also a time where well-defined groups that identify as Marxist poets or Avant-Garde poets or just plain old poets begin moving out of their safe-houses and into the streets to party together, to spill into one another, and create a poetry community that is loose and vibrant. Any poet or reader of poetry in The States who wishes to know what’s going on over here should pick up this anthology.

I read here in London the other night and got the chance to meet some of these poets and hear them read. I wish you were with me, all of you, and that we could begin to build a bridge over the Atlantic and be in touch with these poets in a new way.

Instead of thinking of Shakespeare we might think of this:

“Now I’m real nakedness some kind of hay bale girl a goofball/ actress jumping rivers in the Comic Adventure of Boots” – Amy De’Ath

“I liked to read/ on you all my false news it went across your head like The/ Financial District and how you glowed with it” – Rachael Allen

“Matisse, radiance of crepe, cancer smarting like a bitch”  — Ahren Warner

Believe me,

Matthew

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

May 7, 2013

Dear Friend,

I have arrived in Berlin after a short stay in Reggio-Emilia, Italy. There at the Collezionemaramotti, I attended the opening of Jason Dodge’s first permanent sculpture titled “A Permanently Open Window”  and joined him in conversation about the piece, our ongoing collaboration in conversation about visual art and poetry, as well as reading a group of my own poems, translated into Italian by Franco Nasi, for the event which included about a hundred and sixty people. Part of my inclusion in this event came out of Jason’s interest in building a collaborative understanding/connection between visual artists and poets through his publishing house Five Hundred Places.

A lot of the time collaboration seems to be focused on some sort of physical object: a poet writes a poem and a painter paints the words on a canvas, a quartet plays and a speaker speaks, but those kinds of collaborations seem limited to me. Jason and I have been having an ongoing conversation for about a year now. It is the conversation itself that I view as the collaboration and through that conversation the poems I have been writing have changed. This is more than simply being affected and so ones impulses change, but a conscience decision to engage in the collaboration and choose to make work that comes directly out of it. I wonder if this makes any sense! I miss you and want to be clear! I wonder what you think about when you think about collaboration. Have you ever collaborated with someone who works with different tools than you do? Will you write me about it?

Maybe you and I are beginning our own collaboration right now? Maybe this week you might reach out to someone with different ideas than you, with a different heart, and collaborate on something, each your own, with them… and maybe write me about it!

Believe me,

Matthew Dickman

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Joanna Klink’s inaugural reading as the Tin House Writer-in-Residence. Before a packed congregation (the event was held in a church), Joanna delivered a perfect sermon, one that seemingly pulled the crowd closer to her with each line read. The poems she elected to share seemed to mirror the night’s unfolding weather. Airy and playful at first, then tinged with melancholy as the sun set. There was something holistic about the entire affair, one that I still can’t quite put my finger on.

 Adding to the evening’s enchantment was the introduction given by one of Joanna’s graduate students, Missy Ward. Rather than list biography and accomplishments, Missy spoke of sonic registers and infinite arrangements. Time and care had obviously been given to her thoughts, and I ended up thinking about her words as much as I did Joanna’s (no small feat).

As such, I am happy to share Missy’s introduction below.- Lance Cleland

Every Tuesday afternoon, Joanna arrives at PSU to lead a graduate writing workshop.

Each week she is as eager and curious and engaged as any devoted artist for whom sharing is an expression of living.

Her syllabus this spring features, among five or six equally remarkable quotations, one from the writer and translator Jane Hirschfield. It says: “Here, as elsewhere in life, attentiveness only deepens what it regards.”

But of course it does, doesn’t it?

And of course we need reminder of it.

We need to feel that attention is itself an art and one that, moment by moment, deepens both the writer and the reader via practice.

Art is, after all, a verb as Yoko Ono says and not a noun.

Before I had the chance to learn from Joanna in person I had her three books to pore over and those are most recently Raptus as well as Circadian and They Are Sleeping.

Each of them, you’ll find, features an undeniable attention to sound and an appreciation for what James Longenbach calls “the poet’s materials.”

Our English language is the very “stuff” of poems but is, terrifically, a patchwork of German and Latin and French influence come down through the ages.

The many sonic registers available for use thus allow for sentences like this one from Joanna’s “Winter Field.”

What better witness than this evening snow,


its steady blind quiet, its eventual


completeness, a talc smoothing every surface

through the lumen tricks of ice.

In it you can hear her love of music and arrangement because you hear the conjuring undulates of “better, evening, steady and smoothing” give way to the three little thumps at the end – the “tricks of ice.”

Here we have a trick more subtle than deceptive, one that’s “played” with happy surprise.

It makes me think that material is, for the sonically attentive among us, a play-thing encouraging its own infinite arrangement.

Joanna’s gift for gathering together sonic bouquets is as characteristic as her insistence upon new hyphenated compounds for the English language.

I read her work and think of the urgent “couple-color” in Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” I think of the grieving “spectre-thin” in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”

I wonder, too, whether her fascination with the German-language poet Paul Celan has influenced her taste for union.

I know that German, which is notorious for its long words, allows for hyphenation as a means of clarification.

However, I discovered that German grammar also employs the hyphen during combinatorial invention or “coining of phrases.”

Our own English language contains existing neologisms like cyberspace, Astroturf, Xray Frisbee.

To these Joanna has added: gray-bodied, fog-locked, calendar-sprung and my very favorite far-nessess.

When I encounter art that requires, “as elsewhere in life,” great attention, I sense the original effort of feeling first required of its maker.

But please don’t let me reduce attention to mere seriousness or difficulty.

The attentive approach is, on the contrary, an agreement that allows the subject of one’s attention to expand and reorient the senses and make the attendant new.

It is a generous Whitmanesque multiself whose work is always ever an invitation for its recipient to do the same – to encounter and play and grow and draw vitality from the practice.

Thank you again for being here and please help me welcome Joanna Klink.

Missy Ward is a graduate writing student in the MFA at PSU.

It exists in the most sacred and most profane corners of our lives, from the illuminated spiritual texts that have created our planet’s moral codes to corny couplets tucked neatly into Hallmark cards. Poetry is read aloud at weddings and funerals, at christenings and wakes, under the covers and over bottles of wine. All of us, whether we know it or not, speak in poetry. We use metaphors and similes and images to explain our lives to others. Poetry is the humanizing and empathetic body of our language. In some countries whole soccer stadiums fill with citizens to hear a single poet and in some a small gathering of twenty people will sit in a café to hear a human voice sing. For all our differences, poetry is a constant art form that connects our different languages. It’s a seer and a healer, an instigator and a diplomat.

Last October, I wrote a Call to Arms to advocate for poetry, and now, during National Poetry Month, I would like to raise the flag, raise the fist once more! Tin House and Coffee House, along with YesYes Books, Sarabande Books, Archipelago, BOA, Red Hen, Milkweed, and Copper Canyon Press, invite you to join in an experiment to share poetry with loved ones and strangers who normally do not read poems. For every book of poetry you purchase in the month of April, another book will be sent to you or to the person of your choice for free. The idea is to share poetry, to advocate for an art form that creates empathy and connection in a world complicated by cynicism. Join us and you join a love movement!

Kazim writes, “citizen of sound or stone/ at the boarder of light clamoring”

And he is a poet, a citizen, of both song (sound) and thingness (stone), his book full of an exciting musicality and lyricism, yet firmly anchored to the world we live in which is a kind of dream, is it not? Isn’t it a world that exists on the edges of our own understanding, at that boarder of light clamoring in the brain?

Kazim writes, “In the battle to own yourself/ whom do you fight”

Throughout this beautiful book, full of the elements of water and air, there is a battle to understand (or to know again) the inner-life and the meaning the poet has as a human being on earth.

Kazim writes, “Your own body is the only mosque you need”

Kazim writes, “there is no one to write this sadness how hard it is”

Kazim writes, “it hardly matters my silence/ weather moment or year”

In his new book, the poet teaches us about the holiness and fragility of the self, he attempts the work of writing about the elemental experiences of grief and love in such a way as to be given over completely to these mysterious gods, and for me the poet’s silences do matter! As this is a book you read and after reading can’t imagine not having it near you.

Kazim writes, “My heart is a nickel, unearthed and scent. We are manmade/ catastrophe”

Which is true!

The blurbs on the back of “Sky Ward” call for the book to be read out loud, they celebrate the lyricism of Ali’s lines, they praise the language he engages in. And they are right. But there is something else I would like to add to the cheer of the crowd, which is this:

Kazim Ali’s book is also a hymn, a hymn to the self, to the father and mother, to the lover, the sea and sky, a hymn to the city, and a hymn to the failure of being human, which is really a song about the success of our species! A book of celebration that should be celebrated!

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

And like the world we live in, we too are incomplete. And this is why we listen to stories, this is why we read poems and plays and novels. It is an amazing feeling to read something that will make you feel whole. Not that you know it will have that power when you pick it up off the shelf or download it onto an e-reader. You don’t know what will occur until you turn the first page. But when it happens, when someone you don’t know, someone who could have been alive in this incomplete world a hundred years ago, reaches out to you as if through a wave of understanding, it is a feeling of connection that is so deep, so alive, you will comprehend yourself in a new light, a complete light, if only for a moment. This feeling of completion, of betterment and empathy, was what I felt when reading Mary Ruefle’s collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures.

I have written here and there little celebrations of this book and have told anyone who would listen to go out and buy it. And that is because it is not just a book which collects the lectures of a wonderful poet, but for me has been a talisman I have carried around since it’s publication, a book that has made me feel sane when my mind is bending and crazy, when I have felt too sensible.

This is a book not just for poets but for anyone interested in the human heart, the inner-life, the breath exhaling a completion of an idea that will make you feel changed in some way. This is a desert island book. This is a lost at sea book. This is a book which has reminded me how I might treat myself and others, how to approach art, how to be happy even though I live in a body which is doing what your body is also doing: dying.

“What has life taught me? I am much less afraid than I ever was in my youth—of everything. That is a fact. At the same time, I feel more afraid than ever. And the two, I can assure you, are not opposed but inextricably linked.”

This, from Mary’s lecture titled “On Fear,” is just a brief idea of what you will be walking toward when you go out and find her book. It is also why you will probably be skipping or running afterwards.

Matthew Dickman is the poetry editor of Tin House and the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Mayakovsky’s Revolver (Norton, 2012). He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

For me, Gilbert was one of the most important poets I have ever read. He was also one of the first poets I read who broke my heart and built up my heart at the same time. He was a poet who seemed to easily engage with his inner-life, was not shy about love or grief:

Jack Gilbert: 1925-2012 (Photo by Robert Toby)

“Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If Babies/ are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else./ With flies in their nostrils”

And

“Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts/ of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred/ pitchers of honey.”

Gilbert died on Tuesday, November 13^th in Berkeley, California. The author of six books including a new and collected, he’s a poet not to be forgotten. If you are reading this right now you should stop, get online, and order a copy of The Great Fires. You should own Gilbert’s Collected Poems. You should carry his Refusing Heaven around for a month straight.

Gilbert was a poet of meditative and spiritual strength, a poet that made sense of the complicated world for the rest of us who could not. He is a poet to share with your loved ones and your enemies.

In his poem, Waking at Night, Gilbert wrote:

“I lie in the dark/ wondering if this quiet in me now/ is a beginning or an end”

Instead of an end let’s all share Gilbert’s work with others, let’s turn his new quiet into a radiant beginning!

Wonder at the hundreds of people walking up and down the Mission to hear other people read, to listen to a story, to lift up in their chairs at the end of a poem. There seemed to be a collective bravery, a collective celebration at being alive. It felt like… well… it felt like a living poem.

So now I’m thinking about poetry! It was one of the earliest inventions of almost every culture known to the planet earth, helping form our earliest civilizations. Poetry is radical for many reasons not the smallest being that it teaches compassion and empathy. Even if you are not a poet, even if you do not read poetry, you are always talking in similes and metaphors, in image-making and lyric moments.

The fact is that poetry has always advocated for us. Beyond the more secular creation of publishing houses and prize money, poetry has only ever wanted us to live, to feel, to be together, to love and grieve, to engage with the dark, to walk through the light. Poetry has lifted us up out of the worst sort of sorrow, as well as illuminating moments of happiness we thought couldn’t get brighter.

I think it’s time for us to advocate for poetry!

I want to ask if you will join me in a small, inexpensive, but possibly life-altering experiment. Over the next thirty days, let’s all buy a favorite book of poems and send it to someone who doesn’t usually read poems. This could be a family member, friend, your local representative, whomever! I believe poetry enriches our lives and our hearts. I believe that by sharing poetry with others we are taking part in humanizing our culture.

So that we may all share in the experience, you can tweet the book title you mail and whom you are sending it to with the #shareapoem hashtag.

For my part, I have picked up two copies of Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light and am sending them to Portland’s mayoral candidates. Whoever becomes my mayor, I want them to do so with a book of poems on their shelf.

It’s raining a little harder outside. I can hear the buses on Burnside driving west toward a soggy downtown. It’s dark. But in living rooms and apartments, in bars and restaurants, in countless bathrooms, there’s someone reading a poem, somewhere…and that makes the world a little less scary, a little more bearable, and exceedingly more interesting.

So let’s raise a book of poems in the air! Let’s preach the good news of poetry and all it does for us! Advocate for poetry and you advocate for a better world.

It certainly feels that way to me: an ethereal, secret, written language that we experience but can’t see. It’s easy to sense that private language but almost impossible to write… unless you’re Allan Peterson! Or perhaps more directly, unless you’re Allan Peterson’s latest book of poems Fragile Acts, recently published in the new, yet already exciting, McSweeney’s Poetry Series.

Reading this book makes you feel as if Peterson’s understanding of language, of both the natural and manmade world, of compassion and understanding, of inquiry and the wildness of the heart, is so particular that he could be a messenger from another world, of another poetic understanding we are only just beginning to grasp:

“There were times glass would cry out itself,

even unbroken, little shrieks from rubbing

with water and ammonia while trying

to make the yard and dinning room come closer”

But “Fragile Acts” not only makes you feel something, it makes you celebrate, and it makes you think:

“Stop. There is no need to spread the animals everywhere.

No reason everyone should have a collection including a few of everything.

That is what the mind is for.”

That is what the mind is for!

Awesome.

This is an exciting book and although I was originally sent a review copy from our brothers and sisters at McSweeney’s, I have bought another six from different bookstores for different friends because Fragile Acts needs to be read, it needs to be in the world. YES! It needs to be in the same strange wonderful world that Peterson illuminates, puzzles over, and celebrates in these gorgeous poems.

Jack Spicer believed the poems he wrote were sent through him by extraterrestrial beings. That is, he believed he was the vessel through which the news, heartbreak, strangeness, music, and the art of the “other” was carried.

I like this. I like to think about people’s creative mythologies. In an artist’s case, I don’t think the “myth” part of their existence is untrue. I believe Jack Spicer when he talks about aliens. And I believe we can see in some poets work a kind of otherworldly experience happening to them and then to us as readers. Of course, this is often translated in our academic and secular minds as purely “inventive” or “creative” imagination though there is something mysterious happening, something we can’t explain so we say: “How did he come up with that?” or “How does she write like that?”

Perhaps the “voices” from outer space that Spicer talked about are not so far from, well, outer space.

I had this kind of experience reading Andrea Rexilius’s book Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012). This book is like a lost journal in that you are not sure if the people being written about are from the distant past or the distant future:

“It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs/ helped them to arrive”

Rexilius’s book is broken up into five sections, five “residence”: Desire, Water, Emanation, Weather, and Territory. Each residence is filled with beautiful prose and lyric poetry. This is a book that will not make an appearance on Prairie Home Companion or perhaps even Poetry Daily, though it should. The more I re-read Andrea’s book, the more open and strange I feel (a great thing to get from experiencing art), which leads me to believe the book is about the inner territories of the self, that strange, outer space world of our inner lives:

“What is it to embrace water?

Are you fearful near the edge or the middle?

Could you symbolize your idea of the self?”

What is it we are crossing over to in our lives? What is it that pushes and pulls at us? I think this book is digging into the world of those questions with an extraterrestrial shovel. Everyone should buy two copies: one for yourself and one for Garrison Keillor.