After Meeting Muhammad Ali at Martini's Pizza Shop,
Kalamazoo, Michigan, February, 1998
He's too ugly to be the champ. Look at me, I'm pretty.
- Muhammad Ali
What needs to happen now
Has little to do with accuracy,
Or the mesmerization we feign
For all the obvious reasons
Regarding his single force:
A magic trick that ends
In his quivering left fist
Holding a linen napkin
That flutters like the resignation
Of a touched butterfly.
Let me remind you
That our subsequent applause
May invoke the old imprecations --
"I am the greatest of all time;
What's my name? What's my name!" --
Even as the children continue
To approach, as he hugs them
For so long that we begin to sway
A little with them, forgetting
That our distance is still
An exile from the first love.
If I could stake my claim
For once on the future tense,
Where the stars refuse to emerge
From the orange-flamed horizon
To which we are attached,
Where geometry will not soften
For even God the Man,
We would, with all our overdue respect,
Approach him with our hats and gloves
In one hand, and extend our other,
To shake his hand,
To tremble because of him,
And with him.
To hear more of Alex's work, as well as poems by Robyn Schiff, be sure to join us this Thursday, Dec. 1, Beaverdale Books at 7pm!
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Poetry Pick with Kelsey
Good-Bye Finch
When that which closes
hopes. Better to
measure. Leaner
weaves the raven
nearer the center, our
single reminder which the black bird makes
"find me, I am here" music,
crying out
"this food is not filling." Find me
time, pleasure, ocean, ever,
or pure abstraction
as if the lightness
Forget that which is
rare? ounce? blessed?
Do you know the word for
what you do not
want. Transactions take place
Always a disruption
Transactions take the place of you
-Robyn Schiff
Come hear more of Robyn Schiff and Alex Long's poetry during YAPRS last reading event for this season, December 1 at 7pm in Beaverdale Books. We hope to see you there!
When that which closes
hopes. Better to
measure. Leaner
weaves the raven
nearer the center, our
single reminder which the black bird makes
"find me, I am here" music,
crying out
"this food is not filling." Find me
time, pleasure, ocean, ever,
or pure abstraction
as if the lightness
Forget that which is
rare? ounce? blessed?
Do you know the word for
what you do not
want. Transactions take place
Always a disruption
Transactions take the place of you
-Robyn Schiff
Come hear more of Robyn Schiff and Alex Long's poetry during YAPRS last reading event for this season, December 1 at 7pm in Beaverdale Books. We hope to see you there!
Friday, November 18, 2011
Get to Know the Poets: Joel Nathanael, December 1
Joel Nathanael served three years active duty in the United States Army as an Infantryman. He is currently a student at Des Moines Area Community College; he will be transferring to Iowa State University in spring 2012 to study music and writing. Joel was recently published in the Drake Annual, Periphery 48.
Joel was selected as the winner of the YAPRS Iowa poets performance competition at our benefit in October, and he'll be kicking off the reading with Alex Long and Robyn Schiff on December 1st. We asked him a few questions in anticipation of the reading.
YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you might not expect you to like?
JN: My friends are quite aware of my strange proclivities when it comes to my reading selection. Next to my bed at the moment I have Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Before you Leap: A Frogs-Eye View of Life's Greatest Lessons, The Watchmen, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Book of Five Rings, Bukowski’s Women, and some Carl G. Jung.
YAPRS: What influenced you to begin writing poetry?
JN: I heard Allen Ginsberg’s Howl performed and by the end of it I was hooked. I’ve been consuming as much poetry as I can ever since.
YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing?
JN: I have personal goals to attain with my writing, but none of them are as important as serving my desire to communicate.
YAPRS: Is poetry your main form of writing?
JN: Poetry is not quite my main focus when I write. I alternate between poetry, music, lyrics, and recently just finished plotting a story that I am unsure of how to implement. No matter what creative format I use I hold it up to the same set of standards, and as long as it meets those standards I keep it.
Come listen to Joel read on December 1st, 7pm, at Beaverdale Books!
Joel was selected as the winner of the YAPRS Iowa poets performance competition at our benefit in October, and he'll be kicking off the reading with Alex Long and Robyn Schiff on December 1st. We asked him a few questions in anticipation of the reading.
YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you might not expect you to like?
JN: My friends are quite aware of my strange proclivities when it comes to my reading selection. Next to my bed at the moment I have Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Before you Leap: A Frogs-Eye View of Life's Greatest Lessons, The Watchmen, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Book of Five Rings, Bukowski’s Women, and some Carl G. Jung.
YAPRS: What influenced you to begin writing poetry?
JN: I heard Allen Ginsberg’s Howl performed and by the end of it I was hooked. I’ve been consuming as much poetry as I can ever since.
YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing?
JN: I have personal goals to attain with my writing, but none of them are as important as serving my desire to communicate.
YAPRS: Is poetry your main form of writing?
JN: Poetry is not quite my main focus when I write. I alternate between poetry, music, lyrics, and recently just finished plotting a story that I am unsure of how to implement. No matter what creative format I use I hold it up to the same set of standards, and as long as it meets those standards I keep it.
Come listen to Joel read on December 1st, 7pm, at Beaverdale Books!
Friday, November 11, 2011
Get to Know the Poets: Alexander Long, December 1
Alexander Long is the author of three books of poetry, Vigil (New Issues, 2006), Light Here, Light There (C&R Press, 2009), and Still Life (White Pine Press, 2011). With Christopher Buckley, he is co-editor of A Condition of the Sprit: the LIfe & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington UP, 2004). Long is an Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College.
We asked Alex a few questions in anticipation of his reading with Robyn Schiff and Joel Nathanael on December 1st--here's what he told us:
YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
AL: Ah, you mean the guilty pleasure book? I think the first "big" book I read cover-to-cover was Danny Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, his biography of Jim Morrison. It's pretty lousy, if I remember it correctly. I think I was 9 or 10. The only memory I have from that book is Sugarman's account of Morrison's deep hatred and fear of heroin...but every other substance was OK. But now that I think of it, the people who know me or my work wouldn't find this all that surprising. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction is difficult and fascinating and tedious.
YAPRS: Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?
AL: Beside myself? Of course, there are many, too many. My instinctual response is Larry Levis, who's still in that realm of being a poet's poet. Not a bad place to be. I probably won't get there. But Levis hasn't reached a readership, I think, beyond poets. Levis's work deserves to be held up with other seminal American poets like Frost and Whitman and Dickinson, to be brought up in casual conversation among, I don't know, accountants, or janitors, or florists as they golf. That's how beautiful and powerful his poems are; they penetrate, and then inhabit, the mind of anyone who comes in contact with them. I think, too, Christopher Buckley's poems speak--no, sing--singularly. He's got some 17 books of poems now and why he's not better known is a mystery as well. Bill Matthews is a genius. Phil Levine is a hero and a genius. Bill Olsen's poems are a very real force. David St. John's, too. Mind you, these are poets I love, and a crucial distinction must be made between appreciating and preferring a poet's work. Then there are those who are in my generation: Sebastian Matthews, Curtis Bauer, Beth Bachmann, Kate Northrop, Major Jackson, James Hoch, Elaine Sexton, Patrick Rosal, Jason Gray, Dan Groves...the list goes on, and is too long. Why is it too long? We're a lazy, passive populace, Americans, and poetry--like good jazz and real comedy--requires effort from the audience. We don't want to react. We want to be fed, like a suckling pig.
YAPRS: If you were holed up during an Iowa blizzard and you could choose only one person with whom to ride out the storm, who would it be and why?
AL: Is my wife reading this? No matter. The soul's always held to account. I'd love to meet my grandfathers, both of whom died when my parents were young, before I was a climax, or an accident, or a twinkle in an eye. I'd love to know my parents as kids, and what better source than their fathers. I'd also like to try to keep up with Keith Moon, both on stage and off. And James Brown. What a fucking blast that blizzard would become.
YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing?
AL: Such a grand question. I don't know. Phil Levine put it this way, and I'm paraphrasing: All I've wanted is to be in the room of the great poets. That pretty much sums it up. But, when I was first starting out, writing made me feel better. Not just intellectually or psychologically or emotionally, but also physically. I'd get those Dickinson goose bumps. I'd be awakened to the world in ways I didn't know were there. The poems were crap; they weren't even bad poems yet, but they were necessary. But, you see, these are the selfish aspirations. I'm trying to migrate from selfishness, and my migration was thrust forward a great deal by a comment Marilyn Nelson wrote on one of my poems. I love Marilyn. She's a terrific poet, and a sweet, generous woman. Which is why I was surprised to read her comment on a poem I'd given her to help: "Is this how you want to be remembered? Really?" She let me have it, for I deserved it, and I did a 540.... I asked her about it, and she apologized, and I reassured her that there was no need for an apology; the only thing that needed expressing was my gratitude to her. I'm trying to write poems that have very little to do with me. That's what triggered STILL LIFE, getting out of myself and whatever pain or pleasure I've endured. I'm not all that special, and writing about my unspecial self isn't going to make me any more special. And Marilyn's right: do I want to be remembered as a whiner? Who does? I'm aspiring to be generous, and I should've been doing that from the start. I'm still trying to understand what generosity can mean in the act of writing a poem, and I suspect I'll be trying to for the rest of this life.
YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
AL: The mysterious, but undeniable, fact that all of this is going to end.
YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
AL: An anonymous bass player in a great band.
We asked Alex a few questions in anticipation of his reading with Robyn Schiff and Joel Nathanael on December 1st--here's what he told us:
YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
AL: Ah, you mean the guilty pleasure book? I think the first "big" book I read cover-to-cover was Danny Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, his biography of Jim Morrison. It's pretty lousy, if I remember it correctly. I think I was 9 or 10. The only memory I have from that book is Sugarman's account of Morrison's deep hatred and fear of heroin...but every other substance was OK. But now that I think of it, the people who know me or my work wouldn't find this all that surprising. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction is difficult and fascinating and tedious.
YAPRS: Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?
AL: Beside myself? Of course, there are many, too many. My instinctual response is Larry Levis, who's still in that realm of being a poet's poet. Not a bad place to be. I probably won't get there. But Levis hasn't reached a readership, I think, beyond poets. Levis's work deserves to be held up with other seminal American poets like Frost and Whitman and Dickinson, to be brought up in casual conversation among, I don't know, accountants, or janitors, or florists as they golf. That's how beautiful and powerful his poems are; they penetrate, and then inhabit, the mind of anyone who comes in contact with them. I think, too, Christopher Buckley's poems speak--no, sing--singularly. He's got some 17 books of poems now and why he's not better known is a mystery as well. Bill Matthews is a genius. Phil Levine is a hero and a genius. Bill Olsen's poems are a very real force. David St. John's, too. Mind you, these are poets I love, and a crucial distinction must be made between appreciating and preferring a poet's work. Then there are those who are in my generation: Sebastian Matthews, Curtis Bauer, Beth Bachmann, Kate Northrop, Major Jackson, James Hoch, Elaine Sexton, Patrick Rosal, Jason Gray, Dan Groves...the list goes on, and is too long. Why is it too long? We're a lazy, passive populace, Americans, and poetry--like good jazz and real comedy--requires effort from the audience. We don't want to react. We want to be fed, like a suckling pig.
YAPRS: If you were holed up during an Iowa blizzard and you could choose only one person with whom to ride out the storm, who would it be and why?
AL: Is my wife reading this? No matter. The soul's always held to account. I'd love to meet my grandfathers, both of whom died when my parents were young, before I was a climax, or an accident, or a twinkle in an eye. I'd love to know my parents as kids, and what better source than their fathers. I'd also like to try to keep up with Keith Moon, both on stage and off. And James Brown. What a fucking blast that blizzard would become.
YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing?
AL: Such a grand question. I don't know. Phil Levine put it this way, and I'm paraphrasing: All I've wanted is to be in the room of the great poets. That pretty much sums it up. But, when I was first starting out, writing made me feel better. Not just intellectually or psychologically or emotionally, but also physically. I'd get those Dickinson goose bumps. I'd be awakened to the world in ways I didn't know were there. The poems were crap; they weren't even bad poems yet, but they were necessary. But, you see, these are the selfish aspirations. I'm trying to migrate from selfishness, and my migration was thrust forward a great deal by a comment Marilyn Nelson wrote on one of my poems. I love Marilyn. She's a terrific poet, and a sweet, generous woman. Which is why I was surprised to read her comment on a poem I'd given her to help: "Is this how you want to be remembered? Really?" She let me have it, for I deserved it, and I did a 540.... I asked her about it, and she apologized, and I reassured her that there was no need for an apology; the only thing that needed expressing was my gratitude to her. I'm trying to write poems that have very little to do with me. That's what triggered STILL LIFE, getting out of myself and whatever pain or pleasure I've endured. I'm not all that special, and writing about my unspecial self isn't going to make me any more special. And Marilyn's right: do I want to be remembered as a whiner? Who does? I'm aspiring to be generous, and I should've been doing that from the start. I'm still trying to understand what generosity can mean in the act of writing a poem, and I suspect I'll be trying to for the rest of this life.
YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
AL: The mysterious, but undeniable, fact that all of this is going to end.
YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
AL: An anonymous bass player in a great band.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
December 1st Reading: Jennifer's Pick
Here's a preview of Alex Long's poetry--it's a long one, but so worth every word! Check out more when he reads at Beaverdale Books, December 1st, 7pm!
Prayer #34
We may say he or she
Took his or her
Life, and we will
Have to live with that.
But where? Where
Do we think
They’ve taken it?
May it never occur
To us to take it
Anywhere else
Than toward
This fleeting here and now
Where what we share and have
Reaches like sunlight,
Like a patient hand.
It may someday
Occur to us
To reach back
Toward our suicides
Half-smiling, half-asleep,
So we can bring
Them back.
We may regret it, finally,
But I’m telling you: reach,
Then place your lives
On their heads,
Like ashes or sunlight,
Like little hands.
Our suicides
Will answer this prayer
Only after you swear
You’ve seen them.
You will.
Why else reach toward them?
You will. You will
Miss them entirely,
You’ll look like
You’re waving,
And you will be
Embarrassed,
As if your best friend
Has ignored you.
You’ll stand there
On the platform,
As the trains go
Their separate ways.
You’ll busy yourself,
Pretending to fix
Your scarf
And gloves. It’ll be
Cold, and the sky
A golden room.
I’ll see you.
I’ve been there.
You’ll fix your hair
And search for a smoke
And wait for the next train
You’ve willingly missed
Because you knew—
You did—it was him,
Her. Right there.
You swore it.
You were wrong,
Or you weren’t.
So, wait.
You have to
Get home.
No choice.
The prayer?
May you never
Have to bother
With any of this.
Prayer #34
We may say he or she
Took his or her
Life, and we will
Have to live with that.
But where? Where
Do we think
They’ve taken it?
May it never occur
To us to take it
Anywhere else
Than toward
This fleeting here and now
Where what we share and have
Reaches like sunlight,
Like a patient hand.
It may someday
Occur to us
To reach back
Toward our suicides
Half-smiling, half-asleep,
So we can bring
Them back.
We may regret it, finally,
But I’m telling you: reach,
Then place your lives
On their heads,
Like ashes or sunlight,
Like little hands.
Our suicides
Will answer this prayer
Only after you swear
You’ve seen them.
You will.
Why else reach toward them?
You will. You will
Miss them entirely,
You’ll look like
You’re waving,
And you will be
Embarrassed,
As if your best friend
Has ignored you.
You’ll stand there
On the platform,
As the trains go
Their separate ways.
You’ll busy yourself,
Pretending to fix
Your scarf
And gloves. It’ll be
Cold, and the sky
A golden room.
I’ll see you.
I’ve been there.
You’ll fix your hair
And search for a smoke
And wait for the next train
You’ve willingly missed
Because you knew—
You did—it was him,
Her. Right there.
You swore it.
You were wrong,
Or you weren’t.
So, wait.
You have to
Get home.
No choice.
The prayer?
May you never
Have to bother
With any of this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)