June 15, 2017

Poets’ Roundtable

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Tracy K. Smith, New U.S. Poet Laureate, Calls Poems Her 'Anchor'

June 14, 201712:00 AM ET

CAMILA DOMONOSKE

The new poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, visits the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center in Washington, D.C., last month.

Shawn Miller/Library of Congress

Tracy K. Smith knows many readers are intimidated by line breaks. She knows people don't like identifying consonance, assonance or alliteration.

But Smith — the newly announced 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States — wants to help America push past that anxiety.

"What do you hear? What do you feel? What does this remind you of?" she asks NPR. "These are all real and valid reactions to a poem."

The poet laureate is appointed by the librarian of Congress and fills the role for a year. Smith takes the mantle from Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served two terms.

Juan Felipe Herrera Named U.S. Poet Laureate

THE TWO-WAY

Juan Felipe Herrera Named U.S. Poet Laureate

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement that Smith's work "brings history and memory to life" and "calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion and pop culture."

The job doesn't come with a lengthy description. The Library of Congress "keeps to a modest minimum the specific official duties," as the statement put it, so each new poet can have maximum freedom. But the library notes that many recent poet laureates have sought to expand the audience for poetry.

Does Poetry Still Matter? Yes Indeed, Says NPR NewsPoet

POETRY

Does Poetry Still Matter? Yes Indeed, Says NPR NewsPoet

"I think the responsibility really is to just help raise the awareness of poetry and its value in our culture," Smith tells NPR. "To me that means talking to people — getting off the usual path of literary festivals and university reading series and talking to people who might not even yet be readers of poetry.

"I would love to go to places where people might be struggling, where people might wonder if there are voices out there for them," she says.

Smith, 45, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three books of poetry. Born in Massachusetts, she grew up near an Air Force base in California as the youngest, by far, of five children. She went to Harvard and Columbia, was a poetry fellow at Stanford and now teaches at Princeton. You might have heard her voice on NPR. Several years ago, she spent a day with the network and wrote a poem about the news.

NewsPoet: Tracy K. Smith Writes The Day In Verse

NEWSPOET: WRITING THE DAY IN VERSE

NewsPoet: Tracy K. Smith Writes The Day In Verse

In recent years, Smith has been exploring other forms. Among other things, she's currently working on two operas. One, with composer Judd Greenstein and video artist Joshua Frankel, is about two competing visions of progress in New York City. The other, with composer Gregory Spears, is about the legacy of slavery "and how it shapes our sense of what is possible for moment to moment in our everyday lives," she says.

She has also written well-received nonfiction. Her recent memoir, Ordinary Light, describes her mother's death from cancer and explores her experiences growing up black in suburban Northern California reared by parents with deep roots in the American South.

"I feel that as a person of color I've always been interested in the stories that are quiet and the stories that often get overlooked," Smith says. "I think that inevitably I'm aware of these margins and I'm curious about them because I know what it feels like to be [outside] of one."

As poet laureate, she says, "I think it will be very easy to say, 'Let's have a diversity of voices, perspectives, experiences, aesthetics that we draw from. And let's listen.' "

Poems, Smith says, house contradictions and disrupt certainties — and, fundamentally, "connect us more fully to our own inner lives and to the lives of others."

Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 collection, Life On Mars, explores the infinite expanses of space and plays with the tropes of science fiction. It also draws on her father's experience as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

But sometimes no telescope is necessary. Smith can find the vast and profound in the smallest of domestic spaces. In "The Universe as Primal Scream," reflecting on a noisy neighbor, Smith wonders if the children screaming upstairs will "hit/the magic decibel" and carry the whole building off to the afterlife:

... If this is it — if this is what

Their cries are cocked toward — let the sky

Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold,

To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.

... I'm ready

To meet what refuses to let us keep anything

For long. What teases us with blessings,

Bends us with grief.

And she traveled from the "workaday" world to the "brief ecstasy of being" as she addressed her daughter before conception in "When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me," which she read for NPR in 2013.

Tracy K. Smith Reads 'When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me'

Listen

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/14/531784281/tracy-k-smith-new-u-s-poet-laureate-calls-poems-her-anchor

Smith tells NPR that poetry, as a form, is comfortable with the expansion from the personal to the cosmic. "It's most closely akin to the logic of our dream lives," she says. "I think poems trust that quick associative leaping, that disruption of the ordinary. "

Another poem leaps from one glistening star to another — from outer space to the genius of David Bowie. "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" found new readers after Bowie's death as it circulated online, passed from one mourner to another. The poem reads, in part:

... there are occasions

When a man his size can meet

Your eyes for just a blip of time

And send a thought like SHINE

SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE

Straight to your mind. Bowie,

I want to believe you. Want to feel

Your will like the wind before rain.

"A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea," Smith said. "When that poem became useful to other people I was — I was grateful."

Smith says she's been thinking, lately, about how people turn to poetry in fraught times.

"It's often those large moments where big things happen, where loss occurs — or in moments of isolation, where a voice on a page that's saying, 'I have lived, I have felt, I have questions, and I have wishes,' where that's consoling."

One of her goals as poet laureate is to make even more people aware that poems are, as she puts it, "another resource that you can turn to" in times of uncertainty.

"What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life," she says. "I think that's good news."

The Good Life - Poem by Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money

They speak as if it were a mysterious lover

Who went out to buy milk and never

Came back, and it makes me nostalgic

For the years I lived on coffee and bread,

Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday

Like a woman journeying for water

From a village without a well, then living

One or two nights like everyone else

On roast chicken and red wine.

Tracy K. Smith

In searching the news I found the following obituary for Chana Bloch. I had never heard of her and am knocked out by her wonderful poems, a couple of which will appear after the article.

First, here’s the link to the original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/chana-bloch-died-poet-and-translator.html

Chana Bloch, Poet and Hebrew Translator, Is Dead at 77

By WILLIAM GRIMESJUNE 9, 2017

The poet Chana Bloch in an undated photo. “I value clarity — an old-fashioned virtue — and concision,” she once said in an interview about her work. Credit Lonny Shavelson

Chana Bloch, a poet and an acclaimed translator of Hebrew verse whose intimate lyrics explored the mysteries and pains of love, her own illness and the unraveling of her first marriage, died on May 19 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 77.

The cause was complications of sarcoma, her husband, Dave Sutter, said.

Ms. Bloch, an admirer of poets like Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova and Elizabeth Bishop, specialized in taut, pared-down verse that fused disarming simplicity with emotional depth. Her subjects — family life, children, sex, aging — lay close to hand but resonated with deeper meanings, often enriched by biblical allusions.

“I value clarity — an old-fashioned virtue — and concision,” she told The San Francisco Book Review in 2011. “I like poetry that appears to be clear on the surface, with unexpected depths.”

In her later work, Ms. Bloch linked her short poems into longer sequences that allowed her to range over difficult terrain. “In the Land of the Body,” included in her collection “The Past Keeps Changing” (1992), addressed her struggles with ovarian cancer, which was successfully treated.

“Mrs. Dumpty,” a sequence of 44 lyrics published in 1998, charted the decline of her marriage to Ariel Bloch, a scholar of Semitic linguistics, after he sank into a crippling depression. She called it “a memoir-in-verse about ‘a great fall,’ the dissolution of a long and loving marriage.”

The subject was harrowing but enlivened with flashes of wit in poems like “Tired Sex”:

I catch myself yawning. Through the window

I watch that sparrow

the cat keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned —

You ought to read it, she said.

It’s great literature.

Ms. Bloch produced sparkling translations of the Israeli poets Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai, and, with her first husband, rendered the biblical Song of Solomon into English that the poet Jeredith Merrin, in The Southern Review, called “accessible, joyous and frankly erotic.”

She was born Florence Ina Faerstein on March 15, 1940, in the Bronx. Her father, Benjamin, was a dentist. Her mother, the former Rose Rosenberg, was a homemaker. Both were Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine.

She grew up in the Pelham Bay neighborhood and, after graduating from Hunter High School in Manhattan, enrolled at Cornell University, earning a degree in Semitic studies in 1961. She went on to receive two master’s degrees from Brandeis University, in Near Eastern and Judaic studies in 1963 and in English literature in 1965.

In her early 20s she changed her first name to the Hebrew Chana (pronounced Hana). She taught English at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for several years, an experience that led to her translation work, which began with two volumes of poems by Ms. Ravikovitch, “A Dress of Fire” (1978) and “The Window” (1989).

Her other translations included “The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai” (1996), with Stephen Mitchell, and, with Chana Kronfeld, Mr. Amichai’s “Open Closed Open” (2000), his last volume of poetry; and “Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch” (2009).

She married Mr. Bloch, a professor of Near Eastern studies and Semitic linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, while there pursuing a doctorate in English, which was granted in 1975. She wrote her dissertation on the metaphysical poet George Herbert, whose limpid, fervent verse touched a nerve.

“We made a very odd couple,” she told the web journal Talking Writing in 2014. “I was a Jewish girl from the Bronx, and he was a 17th-century Anglican minister. But his poetry was about the inner life, and that drew me.”

Her dissertation was published in 1985 as “Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible.”

In 1973 she began teaching at Mills College in Oakland, where she helped found and for many years directed the creative writing program. She retired in 2005.

The poems in her first collection, “The Secrets of the Tribe” (1981), touched on her multiple roles as a daughter, wife and Jewish woman — “a member of the tribe” as she put it — and displayed her gift for the telling metaphor and wry turn of phrase.

“Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015,” published in 2015, gathered work from her first four collections, including “Blood Honey” (2009).

“What interests me is the inner life: how we are formed by our losses and those of our parents, how we learn what we need to know through our intuitions and confusions, how we deny and delay and finally discover who we are,” she told the reference work Contemporary Authors.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sons, Benjamin and Jonathan; a brother, Saul Faerstein; and two granddaughters.

“The Moon Is Almost Full,” her most recent poetry collection, is scheduled to be published in September by Autumn House Press.

A Child is Something Else Again

BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

TRANSLATED BY CHANA BLOCH

A child is something else again. Wakes up

in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,

in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,

instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him

but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body

for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.

They're training him to be a polite Job,

to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,

to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.

A child is a missile into the coming generations.

I launched him: I'm still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day

glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,

kissing him in his sleep,

hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.

A child delivers you from death.

Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Yehuda Amichai, "A Child Is Something Else Again" from The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Copyright © 2015 by Yehuda Amichai.  Reprinted by permission of Hana Amichai.

Source: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Blood Honey

BY CHANA BLOCH

Apprehended and held without trial,

our friend was sentenced:

brain tumor, malignant.

Condemned each day to wake

and remember.

Overnight, a wall sprang up around him,

leaving the rest of us

outside.

Death passed over us this time.

We’re still at large. We’re free

to get out of bed, start the coffee,

open the blinds.

The first of the human freedoms.

If he’s guilty

we must be guilty; we’re all made of

the same cup of dust—

It’s a blessing, isn’t it? To be able,

days at a time,

to forget what we are.

            *

These numbered days

have a concentrated sweetness

that’s pressed from us,

the dying man most of all.

Today we eat brunch at Chester’s,

poached egg on toast,

orange juice foaming in frosted glasses.

He remembers the summer he packed blood oranges,

stripped to the waist,

drinking the fresh-squeezed juice in the factory

straight from the tap.

He cups his left hand under his chin

as if to a faucet, laughing.

He is scooping sweetness from the belly of death

—honey from the lion’s carcass.

We sit with our friend

and brood on the riddle he sets before us:

What is it, this blood honey?

         *

A shadow is eating the sun.

It can blind you

but he’s looking right at it,

he won't turn away.

Already his gaze is marked

by such hard looking,

though just now he asked,

plaintive as a child,

Why won’t it go away?

Day after day breaks

and gives him

back to us

broken.

Soon the husk of his knowing

won’t know even that.

         *

A man lies alone in his body in a world

he can still desire.

Another slice of pie? he asks.

As long as he’s hungry

he’s still one of us.

Oh Lord, not yet.

He drums out a jazz beat on the bedrail

with his one good hand

when the words stumble.

See? he says. I can trick the tumor.

He can still taste and see.

The world is good.

He hauls himself up in bed,

squinting his one good eye at the kingdom

through a keyhole

that keeps getting smaller

and smaller.

It is good. It is very good.

Chana Bloch, "Blood Honey" from Blood Honey. Copyright © 2009 by Chana Bloch.  Reprinted by permission of Autumn House Press. www.autumnhouse.org

Source: Blood Honey (Autumn House Press, 2009)

The Current Assignment

I told you what trouble I had with this assignment. How about you?

The Next Assignment

Write a poem about fire.

The Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on July 6, 2017. Same place, same time.

Other Jabber

From https://engl1191.wordpress.com/assignments/poetry-workshop-assignment/

• Question the existence of all adjectives in your poem. Could something more complicated and original be used to describe what you are attempting to describe?
• Avoid abstract language like truth, god, beauty etc.  The more your reader can feel, see, taste, touch, smell in your poem the better.
• Poetry is not a lineated speech/story/memoir – it is its own art form that uses language the same way a sculptor might use clay or wood or metal.  Never forget the relevance of the materiality of language while you’re writing your poem.
• Reading a poem should be more like the feeling you get riding a roller coaster than the feeling you get from reading the newspaper. In other words, feeling and experience should be as or more important than meaning.
• On a similar note, what makes poetry so difficult is that most of us don’t sculpt clay everyday, but we do use language everyday.  We are inundated with language in our lives, taking for granted or ignoring its flexibility, its failures, and the way it constructs our realities.  Stop taking it for granted and take advantage of having a new awareness of the function of language.
• Conservative is the new radical.  If you’re stuck (or even if you’re not) give yourself some kind of restriction.  When you have every word in your lexicon at your disposal it can be overwhelming.  If you can’t think of a restriction, ask me for one.
• Good poets borrow, the best poets steal.  Use devices by poets we have read.  This does not mean plagiarize.
• Take out cliches!!!!
• Play and get weird.  Let go of some control over your poem.

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