The following is excerpted from a post at Dustin Brookshire's blog, "I Was Born Doing Reference Work in Sin". In this post, Dorianne Laux tells us why she writes. What I have here is the first paragraph only; for the full essay, go to Dustin's blog.


I have recently begun to think of writing as what Susan Sontag calls “a wisdom project” in her forward to Another Beauty, a collection of autobiographical essays by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.

“...autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.”

I am still hard at work on this project of the self. The solitary self, as well as the self in relation to the world and the unknown universe we swirl around in, uncertain of our purpose or future. When I wrote the poems that would become my first book, I didn’t think of it as a book, but rather as a need to understand the basic questions that all human beings ask: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is beauty? Why is there suffering? Where is truth? These questions would arise in me in the form of poems, and in making the poems into a collection, I tried to arrange them in a shape, find a path for them to travel to make clearer those questions. I write to know the questions.

Read more about Dorianne Laux at the Poets dot org website.
Read Ms. Laux's poem 'Shipfitter's Wife' at the Poetry Foundation website.

Bob Dylan and His Poetic Lyrics

The following was originally posted by Edward Byrne at his blog, One Poet's Notes, on Sunday, November 16, 2008. His blog is serves as an adjunct to the Valparaiso Poetry Review. What I have here is the beginning of the essay only.

This weekend [November 15, 2008] an article appeared in The Times discussing publication for the first time of nearly two-dozen poems written by Bob Dylan almost forty-five years ago. Apparently, the poetry had been handed to photographer Barry Feinstein in the 1960s by his friend, Bob Dylan. Feinstein, who often photographed Hollywood celebrities, also had followed Dylan on his European tour in 1966 and had taken a cover photo of the singer for The Times They Are A-Changin album.

Dylan’s poems had been stored along with Feinstein’s Hollywood pictures that inspired much of the material in the twenty-three poems. Recently rediscovered, the photographs and poems are now available in a new book, Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, published by Simon & Schuster. Some of the poems are reprinted in Times Online, which describes their appearance and content: “the lines are skinny, the rhythms abrupt, the language sparse and telegraphic and abbreviated, the situations jarring and dreamlike, the comebacks frequent and snappy. There are laments, complaints, musings, skits (a hilarious screen test, for one), parables (converting those wardrobe department shelves into a repository of human lives), nightmare scenarios (the lurching paranoid fantasy that begins ‘after crashin the sportscar / into the chandelier’ and sounds like a hellish rewrite of ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’), and plenty of dry tombstone epigraphs.”

Perhaps almost as interesting is the accompanying commentary by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who is credited as contributing an introduction to the book. Collins addresses questions concerning Bob Dylan’s status as a “poet.” Initially, Collins explains why songwriters rarely produce lyrics that achieve the criteria to qualify as lines of poetry: “Whenever the question comes up—and it does nearly every term—of whether or nor rock lyrics qualify as poetry, I offer my students a simple but heartless test. Ask all the musicians to please leave the stage and take their instruments with them—yes, that goes for the backup singers in the tight satin dresses, and the drummer—and then have the lead singer stand alone by the microphone and read the lyrics from that piece of paper he is holding in his hand. What you will hear can leave only one impression: the lyrics in almost every case are not poetry, they are lyrics.”
for the full blog entry, go to One Poet's Notes.

Click here to visit Bob Dylan's website.

Al Hellus

A poet I met years ago (1994), Al Hellus, died last Friday, November 14, 2008. His obituary is in The Saginaw News today (November 16). Here it is in full:

Hellus, Al
Saginaw, Michigan

Passed away Friday November 14, 2008 following a lengthy illness. Age 50 years. Albert William Hellus was born September 11, 1958 in Saginaw to Donald E. and Beverly (Musser) Hellus. He was a member of Holy Family Catholic Church. Al was very involved in politics as a teenager and young adult. He was a longtime poet and member of the Plastic Haiku Band in the Saginaw area.

Surviving are his mother, Beverly Hellus of Saginaw, a brother, Daniel (DeeAnna) Hellus of Freeland, a sister, Erika (Ronald) Maxwell of Saginaw, four nieces and nephews, Dylan and Danessa Hellus, and Cameron and Terra Hayden; and many loving friends. Al was preceded in death by his father, Donald E. Hellus and his grandparents.

Funeral service will take place 5:30 PM Tuesday November 18, 2008 at the Reitz Herzberg Funeral Home on S. Midland Rd. (M47). Fr. Ronald Wagner will officiate. Friends and family are welcome to gather at the funeral home on Monday from 5-9 PM and on Tuesday from 10 AM until the time of service. Memorial offerings may be given to Emmaus House or the American Heart Association.

Saginaw resident Gina Myers remembers Al at her blog, I Was Born in Saginaw, Michigan.

I remember Al as a self-described Arts Activist. He often organized fundraisers to benefit non-profit agencies such as Emmaus House. He organized the Drainage Basin Artist's Alliance. He created the Rouse for Theodore Roethke which brought, in the course of ten years, on an annual basis poets such as Tess Gallagher and William Heyen to Saginaw. Prior to that he organized the poetry slams held in Old Town Saginaw at the Red Eye Coffee House. I met Richard Tillinghast, Keith Taylor, Ed Sanders and other poets in that venue. Al introduced me to many people including the River Junction Poets when he decided to help me record a video introduction to Theodore Roethke and his poetry. Al had chapbooks published by Mayapple Press and also by Ridgeway Press. His titles are listed at the Michigan Poetry site. I'm sure Al is looking down on us from a better place. He is missed.

One of my favorite poems of Al's is his 'alternative baseball' poem. Here it is:

alternative baseball

the surrealists
take the field
& the crowd roars!

a right foot
flopping into
left field
with a glove
on its big toe

an assortment of
noses & teeth & eyeballs
& time pieces
blasting hot ones
across the infield

while the dugouts fill
with migrating salmon
& middle management executives

an inflated
fifty dollar bill
steps up to the plate
waving a Louisville Slugger
sprouting branches
& leaves & tiny fists --

it is enough
for a standing-O

and Magritte's head
rolls from the bleachers
laughing & shouting:
"DO BALL !
PLAY IT !
ARF ! ARF !"

Recommended Reading for President-Elect Obama

Are you not aware? The Poetry Foundation contacted Charles Bernstein, Patricia Smith and Forrest Gander to ask them which poem they would each recommend for President-elect Barack Obama. You can listen to the podcast at the Poetry Foundation website.

Don't want to listen to the podcast? You can check out the recommended reading as follows:

Charles Bernstein (b. 1950) recommends "The Bomb" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987). The poem was published in 1962 and is online here.

Patricia Smith (b. 1955) recommends "For My People" by Margaret Walker (1914-1988). The poem was published in 1942 and is online here.

Forrest Gander (b. 1956) recommends "The Blaze of the Poui" by Mark McMorris. The poem was published in 2003 and you can buy the book from the University of Georgia Press.

Assorted Comments

You might want to get a cup of coffee before you start digging into this one. Like savoir faire, this one is all over the place. David Caddy wrote this and posted it at his blog.

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The essay discusses the life and work of poet David Gascoyne (1916 – 2001).

Here is an excerpt:

[Gascoyne’s] concern is essentially with the boundaries and thresholds of consciousness, stemming from the discoveries of Freud, the surrealists, through the early existentialist movement, which Gascoyne splits into two separate groupings and sharply differentiates his perspective from that of Sartre’s, to Heidegger’s thinking on authenticity, being and time, to the frontiers of madness in Hölderlin and his novelist friend, Antonia White, and contemporary occult and magical practice. It is in the darkness of the last century that he set about trying to find some light, went mad, and recovered to re-read his past. After Judy Lewis rescued Gascoyne they married and he became part of the poetry reading circuit, reading to packed audiences at Cambridge, the Sorbonne and was later honoured by the French Government.

The essay looks at two poems in some detail:

Ecce Homo [excerpt]

by David Gascoyne

Whose is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun?
Whose are these hollow red-filmed eyes
And thorn-spiked head and spear-struck side?
Behold the Man : He is Man’s Son.

Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
To make their mortal enemy a friend,
To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell,
Lest the great scandal be no more disguised:
He is in agony till the world’s end,

And we must never sleep during that time!
He is suspended on the cross-tree now
And we are onlookers at the crime,
Callous contemporaries of the slow
Torture of God. Here is the hill
Made ghastly by His spattered blood

Whereon He hangs and suffers still:
See, the centurions wear riding-boots,
Black shirts and badges and peaked caps,
Greet one another with raised-arm salutes;
They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips;
Yet these His brothers know not what they do.

The Gravel-pit Field

by David Gascoyne

Beside the stolid opaque flow
Of rain-gorged Thames; beneath a thin
Layer of early evening light
Which seems to drift, a ragged veil,
Upon the chilly March air’s tide:
Upwards in shallow shapeless tiers
A stretch of scurfy pock-marked waste
Sprawls laggardly its acres till
They touch a raw brick-villa’d rim.

Amidst this nondescript terrain
Haphazardly the gravel-pits’
Rough hewn rust-coloured hollows yawn,
Their steep declivities away
From the field-surface dropping down
Towards the depths below where rain-
Water in turbid pools stagnates
Like scraps of sky decaying in
The sockets of a dead man’s stare.

The shabby coat of coarse grass spread
Unevenly across the ruts
And humps of lumpy soil; the bits
Of stick and threads of straw; loose clumps
Of weeds with withered stalks and black
Tatters of leaf and scorched pods: all
These intertwined minutiae
Of Nature’s humblest growths persist
In their endurance here like rock.

As with untold intensity
On the far edge of being, where
Life’s last faint forms begin to lose
Name and identity and fade
Away into the Void, endures
The final thin triumphant flame
Of all that’s most despoiled and bare:
So these least stones, in the extreme
Of their abasement might appear

Like rare stones such as could have formed
A necklet worn by the dead queen
Of a great Pharaoh, in her tomb …
So each abandoned snail-shell strewn
Among these blotched dock-leaves might seem
In the pure ray shed by the loss
Of all man-measured value, like
Some priceless pearl-enamelled toy
Cushioned on green silk under glass.

And who in solitude like this
Can say the unclean mongrel’s bones
Which stick out, splintered, through the loose
Side of a gravel-pit, are not
The precious relics of some saint,
Perhaps miraculous? Or that
The lettering on this Woodbine-
Packet’s remains ought not to read:
Mene mene tekel upharsin?

Now a breeze gently breathes across
The wilderness’s cryptic face:
The meagre grasses scarcely stir;
But when some stranger gust sweeps past,
Seeming as though an unseen swarm
Of sea-birds had disturbed the air
With their strong wings’ wide stroke, a gleam
Of freshness hovers everywhere
About the field: and tall weeds shake,

Leaves wave their tiny flags to show
That the wind blown about the brow
Of this poor plot is nothing less
Than the great constant draught the speed
Of Earth’s gyrations makes in Space …
As I stand musing, overhead
The zenith’s stark light thrusts a ray
Down through dusk’s rolling vapours, casts
A last lucidity of day

Across the scene: and in a flash
Of insight I behold the field’s
Apotheosis: No man’s land
Between this world and the beyond,
Remote from men and yet more real
Than any human dwelling-place:
A tabernacle where one stands
As though within the empty space
Round which revolves the Sage’s Wheel.

Read the entire essay at David Caddy's blog. Go now.

Andy Christ Birthday Reading

On October 6, I turned 42. To mark the occasion I hosted an event at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Saginaw, Michigan. A few special friends celebrated with me and made it a delightful evening together. We had an informal reading of a few poems from my chapbook. The picture here was taken that night. There were two other men in our group who I met that night; they decided they didn't want to be in the picture. I enjoyed hearing their comments on my poems etc, and hearing them read my poems was a treat. They also bought and signed a birthday card to me. I thought the whole experience was delightful. I will keep that birthday card in a special place and not lose it.

We started at 7:15 or so, then decided to go together to a nearby Bennigan's. Jack asked our waiter if they had anything special for customers on their birthday, and the waiter said yes. I was subsequently treated to a huge warm brownie drizzled with fudge and served with two scoops of vanilla ice cream - compliments of Bennigan's. Fortunately the waiter included five spoons with the dessert, and everyone was able to partake of the savory treat. To top it off, the waiter returned with the manager and other wait staff to chant a birthday greeting to me while I was sitting at the table with everyone. Fun!

National Writing Project Research Finding

NWP 2008 Research Brief: Writing Project Professional Development for Teachers Yields Gains in Student Writing Achievement

Date: August 27, 2008

Summary: This Research Brief summarizes nine studies that examined the effects of NWP professional development programs on teacher practices and student writing achievement in schools and districts served by writing project sites. The results demonstrate positive effects on the writing achievement of students of writing project teachers across a range of grade levels, schools, and contexts.

Excerpt

Related Resources

• Summary Report of National Results: Cohort III (2005-2006)
• Research Studies Continue to Show Impact of NWP Programs
• Summary Report of National Research Results: Cohort II

In nine independent studies, in every measured attribute of writing, the improvement of students whose teachers participated in NWP professional development exceeded that of students whose teachers were not participants.

The studies took place in rural, urban, and suburban areas across the country and included students with diverse economic, language, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.

Student results are strong and favorable in those aspects of writing for which the NWP is best known, such as development of ideas and organization.

Students in writing project classrooms made greater gains than their peers on writing conventions as well, suggesting that NWP professional development also helps teachers improve their students' basic skills.

The full four-page report is in a downloadable pdf file. Click here to go there now.

Jane Hirshfield

Recommended reading

from The Writer's Chronicle

Telescope, Well Bucket, Furnace:

Poetry Beyond the Classroom
Jane Hirshfield
March/April 2003

In the late Winter/early Spring of 2003, The Writer's Chronicle published a wonderful essay by Jane Hirshfield. Please find it at the AWP site and enjoy a few minutes today with it.
Click to go to the www.poets.org citation of the poet. For a brief critical introduction to Ms. Hirshfield's poetry, including comments from the poet herself, go to the entry at The Poetry Foundation.

Remembering Reginald Shepherd

The following was posted by Edward Byrne at his Blogger blog on Friday, September 12, 2008. With his permission, I post it here now:

Yesterday, as news about the death of Reginald Shepherd spread from one literary blog to another, I spent some time revisiting his prose and poetry. When I began writing posts for “One Poet’s Notes,” I had hoped to maintain a certain degree of serious study of poetry and poetics, even while striving to write pieces readers might find engaging and entertaining. Reginald Shepherd was one of the authors of critical commentary and personal essays on a regular poetry blog whose contributions to literary discourse I admired greatly and hoped to complement with my own offerings. Indeed, an article I posted to “One Poet’s Notes” in June of 2007 about the apparent demise of Parnassus specifically cited Shepherd’s work and his presence on the Internet as one of the online critics whose blog usually contained interesting perspectives or intelligent perceptions, helping to fill “the gap created by the absence of Parnassus” and the loss of book review sections in newspapers across the country. Reginald Shepherd’s blog was among those I have bookmarked and to which I have subscribed for immediate updates. Each time I received notice at my Google Reader page of a new entry on his blog, I looked forward to reading his words. Since Shepherd also discussed every aspect of his life with honesty and openness, all of his readers were aware of this poet’s serious health problems, as well as the ongoing pain or difficult medical procedures he endured. In fact, he was so frank in confiding with his readers that I am tempted to refer to Shepherd by his first name as any friend might do. However, I never had an opportunity for the good fortune of personally meeting with him. A little more than two weeks ago, Reginald Shepherd wrote again of his continuing health battle, beginning his August 26 blog post as follows:

I am in the hospital for the fourth time in the past five months, this time for excruciating abdominal pain that turned out to be due to a partial bowel obstruction which has still not cleared up. I have had a tube down my throat and have been unable to eat for over a week. I spend most of my days trying to sleep through the pain and nausea.

In the course of the various tests to try to determine the cause of the obstruction, my surgeon found several large masses on my liver which, after a blood test and a liver biopsy, have turned out to be a fast-growing resurgence of my colon cancer. Thus I am in the hospital cancer ward for the foreseeable future, starting chemotherapy again (it had been on hold during my assorted medical crises of the past few months), before I have had time to fully recover from my recent illnesses and surgeries.

Nevertheless, Reginald Shepherd continued in the post to present a marvelous excerpt from an essay on the poetry of Alvin Feinman that had been published in his recent book of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx, released just this year by the University of Michigan Press. Shepherd characterized his commentary in the blog post as his “final tribute to my recently deceased mentor Alvin Feinman.” Sadly, that was the last post on Shepherd’s blog, and I now include reference of it to recommend it as part of my final tribute to him. Reginald Shepherd was first and foremost a poet. Besides the blog entries or numerous essays he produced, Shepherd and his work might be better appreciated through reading his five books of poetry: Fata Morgana (2007); Otherhood (2003); Wrong (1999); Angel, Interrupted (1996); and Some Are Drowning (1994). As a sample of his poetry and an invitation to further seek his writings, in which his voice continues and evidence of his remarkable life remains, I provide the following example from Fata Morgana:

HOW PEOPLE DISAPPEAR

If this world were mine, the stereo
starts, but can’t begin
to finish the phrase. I might survive
it, someone could add, but that
someone’s not here. She’s crowned
with laurel leaves, the place
where laurel leaves would be
if there were leaves, she’s not
medieval Florence, not
Blanche of Castile. Late March
keeps marching in old weather,
another slick of snow to trip
and fall into, another bank
of inconvenient fact. The sky
is made of paper and white reigns,
shredded paper pools into her afterlife,
insurance claims and hospital reports,
bills stamped “Deceased,” sign here
and here, a blank space where she
would have been. My sister
said We’ll have to find another
Mommy.

And this is how
loss looks, my life in black plastic
garbage bags, a blue polyester suit
a size too small. Mud music
as they packed her in
damp ground, it’s always raining
somewhere, in New Jersey,
while everyone was thinking about
fried chicken and potato salad,
caramel cake and lemonade.
Isn’t that a pretty dress
they put her in? She looks so
lifelike. (Tammi Terrell
collapsed in Marvin Gaye’s arms
onstage. For two hundred points,
what was the song?) Trampled
beneath the procession, her music.

Pieces of sleep like pieces of shale
crumble through my four a.m.
(a flutter of gray that could be
rain), unable to read this thing
that calls itself the present.
She’s lost among the spaces
inside letters, moth light, moth wind,
a crumpled poem in place of love.


—Reginald Shepherd

Denise Duhamel

Poet Denise Duhamel answers a question from a reader once a month at the Facebook group 'Fans of Denise Duhamel OR A Group of Duhalamites'.

This entry comes from a series that was begun by Dustin Brookshire. Visit Dustin's blog to read more from that series.

Christan Cannella asks, "What is the role of pop culture in your poems?"

Denise answers:

This is a great question, Christan. When I started writing poetry, I never used much pop culture in my work. I thought I "couldn't." But then came a pivotal moment: I was taking an undergraduate workshop with Thomas Lux who was looking at a poem of mine with bar of soap in it. The poem was about a craft I did as a child in which I pushed colored push pins into bars of soap to make faces-- eyes, noses, and mouths, with ribbon curled and pinned in as hair. No one really got my poem because bars of soap are usually square (and non head-like) and I found myself defending my poem saying the soap I used was oval, Dove soap. Then Lux asked why didn't I indicated that in the poem, which would have even given the poem more metaphorical layers. Up until then I really hadn't thought of utilizing name brands in poetry. Suddenly the world came alive with all the ways in which product brands could become great adjectives or simple nouns: Tide, Nikes, Cocoa Cris pies, Lexus, Revlon, Eggos...Later I would use such words in my poems to indicated time frames, settings (Americana) and so on. But it wasn't until I started writing about Barbie, the doll, for a book called KINKY, that I truly started exploring the cultural significance of pop.

Using Barbie dolls as muses, I was able to write political satire. I felt that when I tried to write about issues of gender and race head on, seriously, I would often become didactic. Barbie helped me avoid that impulse. I was pulled into Barbie's world when I wrote a poem about20Miss America in which Barbie surprisingly made a cameo appearance. Miss Americas are--like store mannequins and the Columbia pictures' logo--anywhere from 20-30 pounds thinner now than they were in the late fifties. A while later, I wrote about poem about watching my nieces play with Barbie. I was both fascinated and threatened by the image of Barbie, one of the endless examples of unrealistic body images for woman. But slowly, like a child playing with the doll, I began to write in Barbie's personna--sympathetically, trying to get at the rage and fears beyond her bland plastic countenance. She was, for me, a perfect vehicle for feminist issues. She smiles even when she's being poked, set on fire, or having her limbs pulled off. She literally can't stand on her own two feet without toppling over. Yet Barbie seems to have her own income and a number of prestigious postgraduate degrees as she's been a pilot, a doctor, and an astronaut. She is both the ultimate victim as well as the ultimate pioneer of resourcefulness.

Barbie is full of contradictions and dualities. For example, her body, in all its curvaceousness, is actually quite phallic. Barbie's cre ator, the late Jack Ryan, was also a missile designer. In Lucinda Ebersole's and Richard Peabody's anthology MONDO BARBIE, the writer Sparrow's "Barbie: A Memoir" describes Barbie has having "that attenuated airline look--Barbie resembled a stewardess and an airplane." Erica Rand opens her book BARBIE'S QUEER ACCESSORIES with a graphic description of a lesbian pornography spread from a 1989 issue of On our Backs in which Barbie is used as a dildo. In a short Barbie memoir called "überdoll," Heidi Glenn describes her pre-teen friend's unorthodox use of Barbie--"Barbie didn't belong in there and at the same time I marveled at how her leg seemed to fit so perfectly in Elizabeth's pee-pee place." Barbie is, as what mothers knew back in the test markets of the late 50's, a grossly caricatured symbol of female sexuality. The Barbie doll has indeed become so sexualized that at Sierra Tucson, an Arizona substance abuse clinic, women in treatment for "sex addition" are required to lug around Barbies with them as a hideous reminder of their objectified sexual selves.