I’m thrilled to announce that South Arts  gave us a literature grant for the 2011 Slash Pine Poetry Festival! If you’re not familiar with the organization, you can find out more info her. Essentially, they bring a variety of artistic opportunities to residents within 9 states, and we are so happy to be included among them.

More information on festival as it approaches–sooner than you might think.

Gospel (“the good news”).
……………….

Today the good news is that Claudia Keelan will be in Tuscaloosa during the spring of 2011 as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama, and this is the first of several (forthcoming) reminders that now is the right time to begin to seek companionship in her poems. Finishing her new book Missing Her (New Issues 2009) Saturday morning at the Ashe County Farmers Market in West Jefferson, North Carolina, surrounded by gorgeous vegetables, flowers, BBQ, delicious baked goods, cheeses, and wonderful handmade quilts, it struck me again that it is hard to come by poems that are more heartfelt and bluntly earnest in their attentions. Cleaving to “dear life, where we are all in time together,” Keelan is deeply committed to a salvation that speeds towards the wreckage of salvation, to the ecstasy of contact with the world and with others (community!) and to the transformational potential of loss (“Ecstatic Émigré”).

Here’s a link to the first installment of her expansive, amazingly energetic APR column “Ecstatic Émigré”: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_keelan.php

And a breathtaking poem from Missing Her, “Pity Boat”:

I would not blow
         Into the tube
Of the life vest
Not in English
Nyet in Spanish
There were far too many ways to drown
Flying over Texas

        So I’m lying
Next to William Blake
In a big rubber raft
& he’s teaching me how to love
Being dead. A slow study,
I fling my arms
After every cactus we pass.
“You’re dumb, Claudia,” Blake says.
“I am not,” I say and poke
Poor William Blake
With a gun.
William Blake is beyond asking why.
And since the many and/or the few
Fuck everyone and/or thing they can
& since to fuck is to hit with a club,
He moved to Paradise.
I drive each day
Down Paradise Road
& one day I saw myself there.
I was 11 and I was crying
Running home through eucalyptus
To the El Granada motel.
Those trees knew the future,
Sweet tan bark
Shedding perpetually
In the salty air.
William Blake stretches out,
Happily naked and dead
In the what’s next.
He’s singing a song behind my eyelids
Somebody knows where we’re going
William Blake is eating stars
& one, very slowly,
Brightens inside my mouth

Williams: Poetry is “the news.”
Olson: “Some good news/ better get behind”

I was in Lawrence this week visiting friends and I thought to myself well, Kansas, you got yourself here a little gem of place. For a small city, beautiful arts center, seems to have a good deal of cool coffee shops, lots of poets at the university and in the community, not a bad place to write poems, not bad at all.

Of course, if I ate NY prime for a continuous month, I’d be sick of that over time. Meaning: novelty wears off quick.

In other words, I thought if I lived in Lawrence for more than a month, would the writing continue? What about last year in Eastern Kentucky or Woodside, CA in 2004.

I suppose what makes a good place to be a poet is either novelty predicated on work or a place that can be bland as muck but has enough external stimulation to be internally inspired over a long duration.

What says you? Does it matter where you are if you are going to be a poet?

In the spirit of the long poem (Lauren Goodman’s, I think) “Who Would Win”, I’d like to create an absolutely capricious and binary riddled list of who you, dear readers, would prefer to read forced to choose. I take no accountability for historical and canonical accuracy.

WHO WOULD WIN

• Whitman vs. Dickinson
• Pound vs. Williams
• Lowell vs. Bishop
• Goethe vs. Rilke
• Ginsberg vs. Baraka
• Rimbaud vs. Leraine
• Millay vs. HD
• Crane vs. Stevens
• Hopkins vs. Auden
• Creely vs. Oppen
• Levertov vs. Duncan
• Rich vs. Lourde
• Sandberg vs. Percy
• Wilbur vs. Merrill
• Clare vs. Blake
• Keats vs. Cooleridge
• Brooks vs. Clifton
• Levis vs. Levine
• James Wright vs. Franz Wright
• Charles Wright vs. Charles Dickens
• Transtromer vs. Salamum
• Chaucer vs. Joshua Beckman
• O’Hara vs. Ashberry
• Bernstein vs. Silliman
• Elytis vs. Seferis
• Ahkmatova vs. Yuvteshenko
• Cavafy vs. Levertov
• Plath vs. Hughes
• Smart vs. Pope
• Milton vs. Merton

And now my daughter requires attention. Feel free to add more false binaries or correct existing ones.

My friend once suggested we hold a poetry reading at a local, failing mall. Most of the stores are empty and even the food court there has folded up. He thought a joint reading and dance party would be appropriate, but alas, the liquor license would be impossible to acquire and there was something that felt overtly ironical about the gesture of reading poetry in a place that was economically decimated. And even though there is not a malicious bone in my friend’s body, the act of reading and dancing in that place felt–intentionally or unintentionally–cruel.

As the first layers of oil now reach the Alabama and Mississippi coastlines, I’m beginning to see my friend was not intending irony. He was saying, I think, this place, in all its ruinedness, is still a place and we need to honor it as such. Granted, an entire eco-system was not destroyed in a failing mall (no, that is the failure of our presumptions about consumption and making, about how far our money would go and for what, about an economy on the brink of disaster). The Gulf Coast shoreline that will be decimated over the coming months is supposed to be composed of ill-tempered gannets, dunes whose shapes vary by the day, and plenty of horizons, which implies wonder and introspection, humility perhaps.

Of course, the oil barges interrupt those horizons, and now one of those companies wells have ruined the shore. As a poet, I’ve always been interested by space–what it says about its inhabitants, a history and a future. Why we write so much about place: to feel small and part of some larger order. I sit tonight thinking about the time I got lost in a national forest and discovered a family’s grave site dating back to the 1820s. Eventually, I was picked up a guy who did not want to be found by the census bureau, and in his beat up GM truck, he pointed to random thickets and swamps in the forest and said, here’s where the paper mill is, there’s where the Ashtons live–both had ceased in the 1930s, but still he used the present tense. There is no doubt that much of that forest had been altered and ruined due to hubris and folly–though obviously not to such an enormous degree as the present day Gulf. Yet, the forest today remains –cypress and twisted metal, rifle shells and armadillos sleeping–the living and the ruined.

The Gulf’s being destroyed and I don’t believe poetry can do much to stop that–but it can, as the saying goes, bear witness. But to bear witness is not only to be caught in the dead birds or the oil itself, but to see the land–ruined by our own making, altered forever–as a place itself, with a people and a story and a narrative. To see it beyond distaster, worth saving not just now but forty years from now–mostly through the hard work of preservation–but also, in a more minor way, through frequenting it, writing about it, thinking about it as evolving and outside the scope of human intention, even as humans harm it again and again.

–Joseph