But then four crows—no, maybe ravens—those large, black birds big as dogs, like gentlemen, crossed the path, looking up, contemplating something invisible,
feathers on their crowns at attention, as if waxed into style, sun polishing each upright stalk, asphalt, grass visible between each black spear, the way, when younger, we spiked
our hair before dancing all night at an after-hours club, but I don’t know what it means now: Rocking gait: slow procession: pondering a shared question—
unseen force drawing them across the road or a predator overhead or walking away from despair hidden in the heart. She looks
to be holding a miniature man in her lap, the Mary of Kells. He has two left feet. And she stares, her face a mask of sorrow, eyes flattened, looking ahead.
[…continue reading “The Book of Kells” at Poetry.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-02 16:29:002022-02-25 17:14:57“The Book of Kells” by Joy Manesiotis (poetry ’86)
Two poems by Amanda Newell (poetry ’17), published byCultural Weekly.
Permanent Girl
She’s fifty now tired of riding the blue anchor etched into his left bicep tired of being his USNA pinup girl always fighting gravity bubbled
tits & ass sagging on the freckled folds of his skin. The things she’s seen! The pool halls! Sundays at Charles Town the Hollywood Casino his favorite.
[…continue reading “Permanent Girl” as well as a second poem, “Black Angus,” at Cultural Weekly.]
One of the first things I noticed about the book is the cover, which features the art of Titus Kaphar. You and Kaphar collaborated on “Redaction: A Project,” an exhibition at MoMA that draws on source material from lawsuits filed on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. You have four poems in Felon that are erasures/redactions with specific titles (“In Alabama,” In Houston,” et cetera). They’re all mappable, yet the erasures show the systematic obliteration of black life. Could you speak about this?
BETTS
I’m trying to find ways to connect my identity as a lawyer with my identity as a poet. I’m on the board of the Civil Rights Corps, which deals with money bail. They are specifically trying to challenge the fact that many states incarcerate people and leave them incarcerated just because they can’t pay their bail or because they owe fines for traffic tickets or things like that, citations.
But nobody can understand these court documents. I mean, you get sixty to seventy pages. It’s like reading a novella, and you don’t want to really read a novella that’s talking about things like jurisdiction. But what I thought about was this poetry-ness, and if we can find the poetry. Instead of thinking that redaction is a tool to get rid of and hide what is most sensitive, what if we thought about it as a tool to remove the superfluous? What if I tried to find the rhythm, the poetry, the character, the story, the person? If I allowed the document to actually be a voice of the person writing it? That’s what I attempted to do.
For me, this says a couple of things. It represents the attempt of the state to physically remove you, but then it also represents the attempt of people to reassert their existence. Those two things get to exist as one. In the same way that these two things are happening, there’s this fight against erasure. I think that’s what the poems end up mimicking. Even though the portraits on the cover represent that erasure, they also represent the existence of something underneath. It’s pushing back against that.
Brambles knotted into the Klamath mist, swamp pop on the radio, bad coffee in a good doughnut shop: some things you love more than me. And the guy who picked you up when you hitchhiked to Minneapolis, when you had to go AWOL from the sun. The way he didn’t say a word and then he did—how the sky blushed over Utah as if it knew you were hitting on it, and I love that you hit on everything: fig jam, for fuck’s sake, and closets and clocks and libraries Open 24 Hours. . . . You love them more too, and there’s real snow now falling like secrets in the Oakland hills.
[…continue reading the award winning sonnet crown at Nimrod.]
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An excerpt from an interview conducted by Curtis Smith with J. C. Todd (poetry ’90), published by Small Press Reviews.
Curtis Smith Interviews J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)
Curtis Smith: Congratulations on The Damages of Morning. There’s a lot of history in these pieces. Have you always had a thing for history, especially this particular, horrible time? If so, what attracts you to it?
J.C. Todd: Thank you, Curtis, for all these questions that go directly to the core of the poems. They’ve sent me back to the origins of this long project in the seeds of poems from travel journals dated eighteen years ago.
I’ve always had a thing for people and their stories. Where they come from, how they got to where they are. The stories that underlie this book led me to historical and cultural museums and documents, to diaries, recollections, histories and fiction and poems and visual art that reveal life during the twentieth century wars in Europe. Many of the poems in this chapbook include bits of stories I’ve heard or read and snatches of visual memory from travels to Central and Eastern Europe
CS: Was the idea for a book dedicated to this time and these themes part of the plan from the beginning, or did you find yourself with a few poems and then discovering a current you wanted to follow? If that’s the case, when did the notion hit?
J.C.T.: I write poems. When recurrent images, themes, or tonalities draw together in a critical mass, I begin to wonder what argument they are making, what dilemma or bewilderment they are investigating, what they are searching for. I have in the back of my mind Denise Levertov’s observation that after gathering poems into her first book, she decided she would no longer write poems but instead write books of poems. I wish I could do that, but my interest and pleasure is in the close work of drafting the poem.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-28 15:34:002022-02-25 17:14:54An interview with J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)
An excerpt from a poem by Rosemary Kitchen (poetry ’13), published by Painted Bride Quarterly.
How to Cauterize
Pack with clove oil and minced garlic. Dress with poultices of peppermint, a tincture of myrrh. Count the beats of your pulse with the underside of your tongue pressed against the opening; count the seconds since he went.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-26 16:48:002022-02-25 17:14:53“How to Cauterize” by Rosemary Kitchen (poetry ’13)
An excerpt from an essay by Marit MacArthur (poetry ’13), published by The Paris Review.
John Ashbery’s Reading Voice
The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings—it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949—and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets’ voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets—Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters—Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets—tributes to Frank O’Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). Ashbery, who made regular Poetry Center appearances from the ages of twenty-four to eighty-seven, is on a short list of poets whose Y readings spanned so many decades (others include W. S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell).
As a scholar and poet who uses software to analyze performance style in poetry recordings, I was thrilled when Bernard Schwartz, the Poetry Center’s director, invited me to study the archive. The Ashbery readings seemed, to me, like a perfect corpus to begin with.
But even those who loved attending Ashbery’s poetry readings (I am one of them) might feel that he’s the last poet in the world whose performance style is worth studying. He typically read in a restrained, unassuming voice, and the unofficial consensus is that the performative energy of his poetry plays out not in the vocal delivery, but in the slippery syntax, the sly comedy of skewed idioms, the rich mixture of vocabularies and startling tropes, the momentum of swerving thought. His poems can elude the audience’s understanding in a live reading, and they elude many readers on the page as well.
An excerpt from “Penelope’s Song” by Megan Pinto (poetry ’18), published by The Cortland Review.
Penelope’s Song
Somewhere, Odysseus dips his cracked lips into the sea. A cloud sinks. The porpoise cannot taste. And tonight the tide runs low in the estuary where she waits, where little fish dry out on the banks. This is a moon song, for when the moon is gone: Odysseus lighting the night with a candle, Odysseus, loving his boat as he loves the sea.
An excerpt from “The Unvisited” by Daniel Jenkins (poetry ’18), published by Medium.
The Unvisited
Route 91 South curved on tight, Sided right by the thin-deep clear of Stream and creak babbling over stone, Sided left by a rock-face colored In layers — one shade like pencil lead, Others the shade of caked mud on Boots spent hours in the afterlife of Daytime. From the layered rock face Icicles dripped like sweat, unexpected, Beautiful maybe. Even the wax green Rhododendron leaves clamored from Dirt clumps crusting under the whiz The rock facade was by the velocity.
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