Program director and poetry faculty member Debra Allbery was recently featured in the Fiction Writers’ Review. Read an excerpt from Allbery’s essay about Sherwood Anderson below:

A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings

Somewhere in my files is an abandoned poem called “The Three Stories My Mother Told Me about Herself.” My mother not being a storyteller by nature, nor one given to confidences, these were cautionary tales—lessons learned, now presented for my benefit. The first, on the wisdom of doing what you are told, was about the time she was supposed to wait after the picture show for her father to come walk her the three or four miles back to their rural southern Ohio home, because there were gypsies camped in the woods. But my mother, displaying a disobedience, or, at the very least, a daring I never witnessed in her as an adult, struck out boldly on her own. Her father, on his way to meet her, saw his daughter coming, hid in the trees and then jumped out to frighten her—to startle her, she said, back into her good common sense.

The second story, on being grateful for what you have, concerned the December in the late 1930s when my mother and her six siblings got off the school bus to find that their farmhouse had burned to the ground. My grandmother stood there by the smoldering foundation holding the only things she managed to grab as she ran out—the family Bible and two dresses on hangers. Everything else was lost, including their savings; in those early post-Depression years, my grandfather did not believe in banks. The neighboring families took them in by twos and threes that winter and (she always presented this as a fitting conclusion) gave them gifts of new Christmas ornaments.

The third wasn’t really a story but, rather, ingredients toward one, which I combined and recombined—a collection of mementos from my mother’s high school years. Her senior yearbook, with its twenty graduates—all those smooth, expectant faces gazing out and up toward a future that even in my childhood, of course, had long since settled into circumscribed lives centered around coal mines and factories. My mother’s radiant photograph captioned in iambic tetrameter: “She leaves a string of broken hearts.” And all the little mementos and keepsakes she kept in a small cedar jewelry box, its neat brass clasp opening with a whiff of past-preserved: twin black Scottie magnets which seemed ever to repel each other, a broken gold watch whose pinching wristband seemed itself a reproach to my encroachment.

What I was drawn to in these stories were all the wrong things. The dark pressured suspense of gypsies in the woods, molten mounds of gold and silver in the snow and charred timbers. The perplexing symbols of those two dresses or Christmas ornaments decorating loss (for years I rehearsed what I’d rescue if our house caught on fire). Souvenirs as synecdoche. Behind it all, the reminder of the utter unknowability of someone I was with every day, the vastness of the absences in a family’s past. The primary lesson, I suppose, was what reticence can teach, or at least coax forth—how we construct another’s life to the extent we can from remnants and fragments, much as I used to try to piece into a whole understanding my mother’s countless letter drafts to her own mother from the scraps in her wastebasket, revised until she’d written out anything that might cause any worry, revised until they said almost nothing at all. Torn in half, torn in half again. We are all fine here, she’d write in her tidy run-ons, the weather is unusually warm. Or sometimes just her full name, written over and over down the page. If, as Eudora Welty learned in her own childhood, one secret is often offered up in place of another, in my own family—which was loving and secure but also securely contained, each of us keeping our own counsel—I was another degree removed from those secrets, trying to assemble a story from whatever images and objects were offered or found or forgotten.

Read this essay in its entirety here: https://fictionwritersreview.com/essay/a-story-tellers-story-a-poets-beginnings/

Poetry faculty member C. Dale Young was recently featured in The Nation. Read an excerpt of “The Falling Man” below:

The Falling Man

The story is missing, so I fill it in—
it’s what a thinking person does to cope.
Without the details, only Death can win.

And so, the panic invariably set in,
the fires on lower floors extinguishing hope.
The story is missing, so I fill it in.

Standing on a desk, he chose the lesser sin.
The floor, too hot to stand on, began to slope.
Without the details, only Death can win.

The shattered glass, the beams then caving in,
could anyone sane maintain a shred of hope?
The story is missing, so I fill it in.

 

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/the-falling-man/

 

Poetry faculty member Kaveh Akbar was recently featured by the Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt of Akbar’s essay below:

Kaveh Akbar on Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It”

Like many writers, I had a formative high school English teacher. Mine was Steve Henn—Mr. Henn to me then—who read this poem for us in class one day. I had never knowingly heard poetry by a living poet. I don’t think I knew there was such a thing as a living poet—not one who wrote entire books of poems, anyway. I heard “Facing It” and it did for me what it’s done to countless people since Komunyakaa wrote the poem in 1984—it awakened me to the potential of language. I was just sitting there, feeling one way. And then a short poem later, I was feeling this whole other thing. This massive, booming thing. I still don’t think I’ve gotten over it, how language, these bizarre sounds and shapes, can surge you from one place to another.

I asked Mr. Henn if I could borrow the book, Neon Vernacular, and he happily gave it to me with a whole stack of other poetry books; not just the Komunyakaa but also a bunch of other people I’d never heard of, poetry journals with crazy names like Nerve Cowboy and Zen Baby. I put the stack in my bag carefully, one by one, and carried them home like treasure, like the bones of a saint.

 

Read this reflection in its entirety here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/first-loves-remembered/kaveh-akbar-on-yusef-komunyakaas-poem-facing-it

Poetry faculty member Jason Schneiderman was recently featured in Poetry Daily. Read an excerpt of “Dramaturgy” below:

Dramaturgy

I’m writing a play about a Kommandant at Auschwitz

who recognizes one of the Jewish prisoners

as a famous poet, and as the Kommandant

has poetic aspirations himself, he pulls the prisoner

away from the work detail to receive poetry lessons

from the celebrated Jewish writer. The bulk of the play

is their discussions of poetry, which the poet

is initially reluctant to have, the power differential

being so stark, and though he flatters the Kommandant

at first, when he begins to see his Nazi pupil’s

true devotion to the art, as well as his untrained

and untapped talent, he goes to work in earnest…

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://poems.com/poem/dramaturgy/

Poetry faculty member C. Dale Young was recently featured in Defunct. Read an excerpt of Young’s poem “Myth” below:

Myth

Of course it begins with loneliness…

What did you expect? When my father

tells the story, he starts at the beginning because

this, as he says, is what one does. The goddess

 

Atabey lived alone for almost an eternity.

She created humans and all manner of animals,

but the loneliness remained. The loneliness

sat with her the way close family does.

 

Read this poem in its entirety here: https://defunct.site/issue/9/authors/72/c_dale_young/212/myth

Ghosts of Ukraine

I am no expert on Ukraine, but I am an expert on my Ukrainian grandparents, Gregory and Eva Smolij, the most influential people in my life. I was born in 1975, when my grandparents were still working in the factories of Detroit. I remember them as a source of endless love. They were sweet, playful, affectionate, nurturing, helpful, and exceedingly generous. They cooked for me, took care of me when I was sick, played games with me, worked in the garden with me, and told me stories, and sang me songs. I called them Dido and Baba.

Read the rest of the essay at this link: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a39224859/ukraine/

BOOK 13

When Odysseus finally gets home
he doesn't know it is his home.
 
Why does Athena love him so much?
 
She, disguised as a boy,
boys are always wandering around, swineherd boy,
oysterman boy pottering along the seashore—
a shimmer in the folds of her/his crappy old clothes—
that’s Athena’s “tell” even when shapeshifted to menial youth—
Athena’s like come on man, it’s Ithaca. You know.

Read the rest of the poem at this link:  https://aprweb.org/poems/book-13

A portion of Dana Levin’s July 2020 lecture on poetry, divination, and dreams—thoughts on Shane McCrae’s The Hell Poem, a tremendous poem in the Visio genre—has been published at The Rumpus.

https://therumpus.net/2021/05/the-last-poem-i-loved-the-hell-poem-by-shane-mccrae/