I Like the Way It Hurts

I am Best American Poetried! I sat next to Sharon Olds (sweetheart) and Thomas Sayers Ellis (sweet shoes). I experienced the verbal cat's cradle that is David Shapiro. I was hidden from the audience by Gerald Stern's hat. Here is a video of Amy Gerstler's intro to the evening, followed by my reading of "Unit of Measure."

Beforehand I was lucky enough to be treated to dinner by a quartet of fellow writers--Dylan Landis, Janice Shapiro, Susan Coll, and Joanna Smith Rakoff. There is something very special about women turning out to support each other. (They even sat together in the auditorium, cheering me on.) Afterwards, poet Tom Healy hosted a kickass reception in his Fifth Avenue apartment. I asked him if he'd been able to make the reading, having a vague sense that he'd just been...on the road. Somewhere.

"No," he explained apologetically. "I didn't make it. I just got back from mountain climbing with Russell Banks." All righty then. Best get-out-of-jail-free card, ever.

Now I am back home in DC, and up to my knees up to my neck over my head with edits to Don't Kill the Birthday Girl. This is the nature of it; trying to return to a text and tweak the rendering of facts and metaphor, all while maintaining tone. I feel so lucky Crown is excited about the memoir. While in for a meeting last week, my editor sent out a call ("Sandra Beasley is here--stop by and say hello--") that elicited appearances by five staff-members in the space of five minutes. Still, oof. 200 pages of edits I have to feel confident in by Wednesday.

So I am doing what I often do in moments of crisis: perusing music videos on YouTube. Lately I'd have an affinity for Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie," featuring Rihanna. I don't know which pains me more: that Megan Fox looks so young (she's six years younger than me) or that Dominic Monaghan looks a bit old (and he's only four years older than me). It's the eyes that give him away. "If you've lived well, your smile lines are in the right places, and your frown lines aren't too bad," Sophia Loren once said. But when you're an artist, what equals "living well"? 

BAP 2010 Launch Reading in New York

A year ago, I sat in the audience for the launch reading of the Best American Poetry 2009; tonight I'll be on the stage. Sometimes you just gotta pause and say Wow. I'll be reading "Unit of Measure," which also appears in I Was the Jukebox. 

The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading 

Featuring guest editor Amy Gerstler, series editor David Lehman and a line-up of contributors that includes Sandra Beasley, Mark Bibbins, Peter Davis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Lynn Emanuel, Elaine Equi, Jill

Alexander Essbaum, Amy Glynn Greacen, Kimiko Hahn,

David Lehman, Jeffrey McDaniel, Eileen Myles, Sharon Olds, Gregory Pardlo, James Richardson,

David Shapiro, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier, Terence Winch and Matthew Yeager. 

Thursday, September 23, 7:00 PM (Doors open at 6:30)

The New School - 66 West 12th Street (between 5th & 6th)

Free and open to the public

Publisher's Weekly had this to say about the 2010 edition:

This year's annual roundup of poems published in literary magazines includes the usual big names (John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic) and a sampling of lesser known, newer writers (Sandra Beasley, G.C. Waldrep, Mark Wunderlich) as well as a few true newbies like Matthew Yeager, whose talky excerpted long poem asks some laugh-out-loud-funny questions: "Do you eat the crusts of pizza, or only/ when they're excellent or you're hungry?" James Richardson's aphorisms, fifty of which appear here, will quietly blow minds: "My best critic is me, too late," reads number 40. Lucia Perillo's "Inseminating the Elephant" describes exactly what the title suggests. James Tate takes a rambling walk in prose that amounts to a meditation on what depression really means. In her introduction, Gerstler extols poetry's capacity to serve joyful as well as "darker, maybe more complicated needs." As usual, this anthology has something for every kind of poetry reader, and serves as a helpful introduction for newcomers curious about the contemporary poetry landscape. (Sept.)

My life is a little ragged right now, but you know what? I'm sharing a pair of parentheses with G. C. Waldrep and Mark Wunderlich. I have no excuse not to smile, none. Time to put a fancy dress on and climb on stage. If you're in New York City, I hope to see you there!

John Lee Clark and "Deaf American Poetry"

In March I received a query from a man named John Lee Clark, asking for the Microsoft Word versions of my two poetry collections. After some hesitation--publishers don't love it when you unleash texts into the electronic sphere--I said yes. I was intrigued by his motives: he needed to feed the texts to his book-reader. Having first read my work in the Braille edition of POETRY, John had mail-ordered both Theories of Falling and I Was the Jukebox, only to find that his scanning program ignored my linebreaks.


"I think line breaks are important," he wrote, explaining he'd hire someone to replicate them in a pinch, "and just having all the words isn't it."


I should have known that since a sensitive request was coming from not only a reader, but a writer of poetry as well, and one who has labored mightily to come to his art. When I wrote John back, encouraging him to come to a reading--I promised a vivid interpretation of the poems on the page--he replied that it might be tricky, since he is deaf as well as blind. Whoa. This led to a fascinating discussion of the nature of ASL-interpreted events, and the challenges of "translating" back and forth between ASL and English, as well as this virtual introduction:


"In the DC area, there are four notable deaf poets," John wrote. "Christopher Jon Heuer, Curtis Robbins, Willy Conley, and Abiola Haroun. And to give you an idea of how little we've been able to participate in the poetry world in the past, none of them has given a reading before."


When someone from St. Paul, Minnesota, is telling me something I don't know about my hometown poetry community, I am intrigued. And while it wouldn't be appropriate for me to further quote from John's emails, I can steer you to a fascinating interview John did for Issue 14 of Wordgathering: a Journal of Disability Poetry, online here. One fantastic excerpt below, on how being deaf-blind affects one's handling of craft:

WG: How do you think that being deaf and blind has affected your development as a poet? I'm thinking about Dan Simpson's essay "Line Breaks the Way I See Them" in which he describes how he was asked by the poet Molly Peacock why as a blind poet he was worried about visual line breaks in his poems. Does being blind affect the kind of poetry you write or the way you write it?

JLC: From my birth, it was ordained that I would approach writing a bit differently. I was born deaf to an all-deaf family. My native language is ASL. I did not begin to read until I was twelve years old. Until then, I always got poor grades in school. You probably know how it is in any branch of special education: They move you up the grade levels no matter what. I have old documents here stating that, in sixth grade, my English literacy was at the first grade level.

When I did start reading, though, it was a natural process picking up English. Unlike many deaf students who come from hearing families and who did not have ANY language until they went to school, I was fluent in a language. So it was only a matter of learning a second language.

In poetry, the first thing that is different for me is that I do not recognize rhymes or syllables. They don't exist to me. But one shouldn't assume that this means I wouldn't enjoy reading formal poetry. I have many favorites in traditional verse. I think that poems are often better when they are wrestled into place within a form--the very process of working and re-working the poems makes them stronger.

I do recognize line breaks. For me, they are about pausing and also suspending meaning. Take what James Wright wrote on a notepad to Donald Hall when Hall was visiting him in the hospital. Wright had throat cancer and could no longer speak, so he was writing notes like a deaf man. "Don, I'm dying," Wright wrote on one line, pausing before moving his pen to the next line, "for ice cream." I love it when poets use line breaks in this way, shifting the meaning, giving things double meanings.

Another thing that I recognize is repletion. When a poet repeats the same words in a poem, it does have what I think is a musical kind of effect on me.

When I wrote in large print, I sought out impromptu forms. Most often it would be using stanzas with the same number of lines. It's not a heavy, line-by-line scheme, but it would still require some struggle. It would require me to re-think all sorts of things in different drafts before a poem comes to rest. Some poems would yield themselves better to two-line stanzas than to four-line stanzas. I would need to make sure each stanza made some sense as an unit unto itself, that each would help unfold the poem in meaningful ways.

But when I started writing in Braille, stanzas no longer made much sense. Why? Because the Braille display shows only one line at a time. Sighted people can look at a page and know how long a poem is, that there's another stanza coming up. But in Braille, I have no way of knowing if there is more. So each blank line at the end of a stanza could be, possibly, the end of the poem. I do go on to the next line to find out if there's more. Often I can tell that a poem is not finished, and I'd expect there to be more. Sometimes I'd think a poem is finished, and I'd think, Wow, what a great poem! Wait a minute! There's more. In such cases, I'd often be disappointed by what follows. One poet who does this to me more than any other is Billy Collins. I love his work, but many of his poems are one or two stanzas too long. I think he knows it. He told an interviewer that his wife helps him by telling him where a poem should stop, because he can run away with a poem.

It is logical, then, that I would abandon stanzas and also try not to go on too long in my poems. While I am not particularly interested in line length, I do keep all of my lines within forty-four Braille characters. This is the length of my Braille display. When reading, I hate it when another poet's poem has lines going over this limit, requiring me to move to the "next" line which would only have a few words before the end of that line. This breaks up the experience of that line.

One last thing about Braille: It has many contractions, such as "rcv" being short for "receive" or a single character, "k," when standing alone, meaning "knowledge." This does influence certain word choices I make. Misreading print or typos have produced some famous poems, and my misreading or typos in Braille have given me happy accidents, too. For example, "quick" is "qk" in contracted Braille. The character "Q" is one dot shy of the full cell of six dots. The full cell itself is short for "for" and consequently the word "quick" can feel like "fork." When I misread "quick-tempered" for a split second, I thought it was "fork-tempered." This, in turn, made me think of my mother. She has this way of being kind and mean at the same time, or lofty and base at the same time. Like being two people at once, having two heads, as if her personality is "forked." Soon I had a poem about her that used "fork-tempered"!

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Again, I really encourage you to check out the entire interview. And thanks, John, for opening my eyes.