Stay Tuned, Followers!

The Younger American Poets Reading Series would like to extend our gratitude to all who supported YAPRS in the Fall, and attended our events; our program had an excellent season thanks to your help!

The program is now under new leadership; I, Vlad Frederick, along with co-coordinators Joel Nathanael and Michaela Mullin, will be working hard to bring another great round of poets into the Des Moines Area!

We would like to thank Jennifer for all her hard work setting us up for success with an amazing Fall Season; thank you!

We also encourage all fans to visit our facebook, twitter, and blogspot for more updates as we prepare for a New Year of poetry readings!

Best,
Vlad Frederick
Coordinator
Younger American Poets Reading Series

Vlad's Poetry Pick -- Alex Long

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!

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!

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!

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.

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.

Poetry Pick with Kelsey

It's Springtime, Elise, and You're Missing All of It

Not the expected robin, or the ragged deer
stepping from the woods
to lip the new green—

but rather the girls in bikinis who stand
in Tallahassee traffic, lifting Car Wash signs,
their pert behinds a greater glory
than pollen count, or
even gravity.

Boxing ring girls, sans spangles,
they leg in heels from corner to corner,
the culmination of suffragettes
and Betty Friedan, their every step

a violin’s reel in the orchestra
of the sunny day, a glare
that makes me lower my shades against it all.

You’d say it was a word like heartbreaking—
how in the coffee shop
the young man’s shirt is open just enough
to see a flash
of curling hair—

Either that or tasty—

Let me put it another way—

even though you’re not sitting here,
the bored policeman directs traffic,
the strolling dogs sniff from ass to ass,
the telephones still ring.

-Rebecca Hazelton

Come see more of Rebecca and Hadara Bar-Nadav's work this coming Thursday, November 3rd, at 7pm in Beaverdale Books

November 3 Reading: Jennifer's Pick

Although my favorite poem in Hadara Bar-Nadav's A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight is "Companion Piece," it's a longish poem--too long for a blog, perhaps--so I've picked a second favorite to include here. Hopefully Hadara will read "Companion Piece" when she's in town for the next YAPRS reading, November 3rd, 7pm, at Beaverdale Books.

GOD OF STARVATION

The iron and rolling pin
           press me paper-thin.


I'm almost a millimeter
           of cotton string.


Almost liquid,
           almost a leak.


Permission to worship
           glorious transparencies.


I'm in love with the ant and skink,
           animals that hunt the ground.


The shrimp and oyster call my name,
           mud and oil in their mouths.


           I'm forbidden to writhe or crawl.
           Forbidden to put pig flesh in my mouth.
           Must throw lobsters back.


When I'm thin, thinner than water,
           not even God recognizes me.


But oh, the page,
           the string, the sea.

Mariah's Pick

The following poem is from Hadara Bar-Nadav's book entitled A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight.

The Last Gesture

My hand grew as big as a house.
It was heavy to carry
and drag through the streets.

I staggered across the lawn
on gravel-burned knees
to watch the home
I could no longer enter.

My wrung wrist turned blue.
My shoulder bled.
Skin tore up my neck
and split open my eye.

I had given too much.
I had taken too much.

The hand grew
as the sky grew,
hand the size of wind

expanding until it was no longer
my own, until the weight
buried me.

Hear more of Hadara's poetry at the reading on November 3rd, 7:00 p.m. at Beaverdale Books.

Get to Know the Poets: Hadara Bar-Nadav, November 3

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the author of two books of poetry, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), winner of the Margie Book Prize, and the forthcoming The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012). She is co-author, with Michelle Boisseau, of Writing Poems, 8th edition (Pearson/Longman, 2011). She teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

We asked Hadara a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Rebecca Hazelton on November 3rd--here's what she told us:

Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?  I’ve been reading and re-reading Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems, as well as her letters.  Her language is so wonderfully strange and evocative and fresh.  Reading her poetry makes little lights go on in my head.  I always find something new.

Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?  Yes, Helene Johnson, a fantastic poet from the Harlem Renaissance. Like many accomplished women poets of the period, she was unable to publish a collection of poetry in her lifetime.  However, Verner D. Mitchell edited This Waiting for Love (U Mass, 2000), a collection of her posthumously published poems—and it’s brilliant.

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?

My husband and my poodle (does that count as 2 people?).  They are great at keeping me centered, happy, and calm.  Plus, my poodle is very warm and great to cuddle with when it’s cold.  

What drives you and/or your poetry?

I suppose what drives me has changed over time and might even change depending on the poem.  Right now, I’m working on a manuscript of elegiac poems that riff off of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  So that project is driving me now, as well as exploring the elegy, discovering its language and form, and considering mortality, which I suppose we all must do eventually.  I’m also simply inspired by Dickinson’s fantastic and weird language, her electric, elastic syntax, and her absolute bravery in the face of loss and death.

If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?

If I weren’t a poet, I’d be a painter.  Equally realistic and lucrative, I know. I was a painter for many years, but have found that I don’t really have the time I’d like to, to invest in it.  I channel my love of art into poetry.  Both my first book, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, and my forthcoming book, The Frame Called Ruin, are largely inspired by visual art.

Vlad's Staff Pick Poem- Rebecca Hazelton

This is just a teaser of Rebecca's amazing poetry.


You Say the Burning Bush is Rhetoric

So what would you have me do? Flick his thigh
and wrestle him to the ground? You can't pin

a god. Such a thing unknots your hands, unweaves
your braided structure. Water can be wine as easily

as I might be a cricket chirping to the luminous bug zapper,
Oh Big Light, you are so very large. But you find even this

small bit of God vulgar, especially the cricket. God might
as well be a fingernail clipping. Cut the cricket —

just as the landlord trimmed a limb from the camphor tree.
For days our bedroom smelled like lip balm,

the kind I wore as a teenager to protect my mouth
from the rigors of unanswered lust, kisses that wore

me down until — how can there be no God, even a small one,
if you are always singing his name? You're not listening;

let me chirrup closer and I'll spell it out on your skin,
then you'll climb into the camphor's branches,

rhetorically, shake the leaves, and rustle its medicine down on me



Don't miss your chance to hear more of Rebecca's work, as well as that of Hadara Bar-Nadav, at our November 3rd Reading at Beaverdale Books!

And our first place reader, Joel Nathanael, reads his poetry and will do so again at one of our upcoming reading events at Beaverdale Books! Congratulations, Joel!

Peter Ripple, second runner up from last Friday's poetry benefit, reads his poems titled "Love Next Door" and "Fuck Poetry."

YAPRS Benefit Reading

The Younger American Poets Reading Series hosted a benefit last Friday at Mars Cafe.  The event presented an opportunity for local poets to read their work.  At the end of the evening, Stacey Waite selected Joel Nathanael as the winner of the benefit contest. Joel will be reading more of his poems at an upcoming YAPRS event at Beaverdale Books.  If you couldn't make it to the benefit, here are some recaps. 

Stacey Waite started the event by slamming a poem.

Christine Her, the 1st honorable mention, wows the audience. 

Peter Ripple, 2nd honorable mention, gives everyone his take on poetic history.

Joel Nathanael wins the evening's contest.

Stacey slams a final poem, bringing the evening to a close. 

Get to Know the Poets: Rebecca Hazelton, November 3

Rebecca Hazelton attended The University of Notre Dame for her MFA in poetry and completed her PhD at Florida State University.  She completed a fellowship year as the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Creative Writing Institute. A nominee for Best New Poets 2010, she currently teaches at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

We asked Rebecca a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Hadara Bar-Nadav on November 3--here's what she told us:

Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?

I feel like most of my reading choices show up in my writing -- my circular obsessiveness and overriding concern with love very much stems from an early exposure to Marguerite Duras, whose book The Lover (as well as The North China Lover,  and The Ravishing of Lol Stein) had a huge effect on my ideas about love and about writers (probably to my detriment). I read lots graphic novels, I read comic books, fantasy novels, blogs on science fiction, Victorian novels...none of that is terribly surprising because elements from that show up in my work (apocalypse, transformations, concerns with sexuality). I suppose the surprising thing might be that I have a soft spot for male writers who write in an aggressively macho way--Frederick Seidel, John Updike, a little Henry Miller here and there--the kind where it's not clear whether that attitude is a sort of posturing or an uncompromising honesty. 

Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?

Frederick Seidel -- he doesn't need your financial help, but he's a fascinating read and just as worthy for how he might aggravate you as for how he might please. I'm in awe of Inger Christensen's Alphabet, and I think that's a poet a lot of American readers aren't aware of. I really like what I've seen of Angela Vogel, whom I first ran across as an editor at The Southeast Review.

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?

I need more parameters. Do I have food? Do I have shelter? What's the warmth situation? If we're talking some sort of cozy bungalow deal, that's one thing, but if it's dire, I want a survivalist. Someone who is going to know how to make a shelter out of sticks and discarded Cheeto bags. Who always has fire at the ready. Who can kill animals I don't find cute. Whose skill at survival is only exceeded by his need for a good woman who understands him.

To what do you aspire in your writing?

For someone to read the whole poem. Seriously. I want to write lines that compel the reader to go forward, either out of curiosity or for sheer enjoyment of sound. Then I hope to god they have a desire to reread. That sounds so basic, but I think if we boil it down, that's what most writers want -- to be read, to be read with attention, to be remembered. Not to be speaking to indifference.

What drives you and/or your poetry?

The poems I write are usually a result of me trying to tease out what I think about things. I find verbal communication difficult. People who have met me might find this a strange statement -- I'm pretty talkative and social -- but to actually convey feelings, thoughts, and not just be funny, entertaining, pleasant? Really damn hard. My mouth sometimes cannot even shape the words. The more I care about someone or something, the less I can speak. I don't think in words, I mostly feel, which is a hard way to live, for me.  So poetry is a way to find language for those things I can't say out loud, to articulate the roaring in my ears when I am upset or the flush on my cheeks when I am embarrassed or ashamed. Many of my poems take contradictory positions, and in those I am often trying on different scenarios, to see which one feels "true" to me. 

If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?

This is a terrifying question.

The YAPRS Fundraising Challenge Is Back!

Dear YAPRS Fans:

We have two more readings left in the Fall 2011 Series, and yes, we're still fundraising! To help meet our goals for the fall, we're offering a special gift--if you contribute $50 or more by November 1st, we'll give you a signed copy of your choice of the books authored by the poets reading this fall. Just donate by one of the methods below, then email us at youngeramericanpoets@gmail.com with the title of your chosen book.

To donate:
1. Send a check payable to Metro Arts, 305 East Court Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50309. Include a note that the donation is for YAPRS.


or  

2. Visit the Metro Arts Alliance Homepage to enter your desired donation amount and to pay by credit card. Donate here! After your payment is successful, please remember to email youngeramericanpoets@gmail.com with the name(s) of all donors you wish to be credited by Metro Arts for your gift, and the amount gifted. Gifts donated without a reply-confirmation will still be processed by Metro Arts, but will not be applied directly to the Younger American Poets Reading Series. Please, help us by letting us know after your donation. 

October 6 Reading: Mariah's Pick

Susanna Childress will be reading at Beaverdale Books on Thursday, October 6th at 7pm.  Here is a poem from her new book Entering the House of Awe.

Torn

            Recently a friend admitted his fear of birds, how

                        as a child he’d meant to rescue a fallen robin,

                                                                                                  had reached up

to return the bird when a grey sprawl of lice

                                                                        left its body

            and scattered on his hand, so he dropped the bird and ran.

                                                                                                          It made me

                                    think of you, the way a grown man relives

his ancient anxieties more vividly with time—that field

                        of sorghum stretching before my friend

                                                                                      like the rest of his life, each

white cedar humming under its scabs of bark,

                                                                       branches promising

            oriel, blackbird, grackle as he flapped the lice from his arm.

                                                                                                         It may

                    be true, that even the smallest deaths are mother

to beauty, but you spared your children stories of their grandparents launching

        plates at each other, of LA gang fights,

                                                                     you traded your buddy’s

        blown-off face in Nha Trang for the kneaded silence of its truth

                        beneath your red red sangre:

                                                                    you knew what it was to fear,

                                                                                                                you let me

        believe man is good, the four chambers of the heart

                     more like a cow’s prodigious stomachs than the cavities

of a pistol.

                I crawled beneath your knees to watch

                        cop shows on TV,

                                                     hollered my long midnights

when the closet kicked with deer,

                                                    the woman’s ears bled bees,

                                                                                                the neighbor boy

            clamped his penis against my cheekbone at someone’s

                         birthday while upstairs they pinned the tail on the donkey—

green and blue balloons floated down, popped

                                                                        at his elbows. My friend says,

A bird’s most terrifying

                                    feature is its tongue—blanched, cracked—think of it

            coming straight for your face.

                                    I mean to laugh

            a little, his arms raised, fingers aimed at my eyes

like claws.

                Instead I hear myself gasp, as though I could begin

              to understand this, his personal horror.

                                                                         I cannot. I think

           

              of Philomela—human turned nightingale

                        whose tongue, torn ragged like the kitchen curtain,

continued to sing.

                           Papi, how could you know that balloons,

                                                                                          to this day, loose

            my bowels? I never told you.

                                                         I swore it was a dream.  

Get to Know the Poets: Susanna Childress, Oct. 6

Susanna Childress holds a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Florida State University. Her first book, Jagged with Love, was awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from the University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, the National Career Award in Poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Lilly post-doctoral fellowship. She lives in Holland, Michigan.


We asked Susanna a few questions in anticipation of her reading with Stacey Waite on October 6--here's what she told us:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like? 

SC: Um, I'm a big fan of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables; probably the attraction is sentimental nostalgia from my childhood/adolescence but I do love going back to those books and reading over Anne's dialogue and mischief. She's so strange and spunky and treacly. I do love her. 

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?

SC: I can't pretend to know who poetry-lovers have and haven't read, as I can't keep up with who's in and who's out and all that, but I would suggest Robinson Jeffers for anyone who is interested in environmental concerns and how those concerns were voiced by an idealistic, "outsider" poet way back at mid-century. He's Whitmanesque (but angrier) and has influenced most of the ecopoets today even if slightly unacknowledged (I know he was championed by Dana Gioia but I still don't hear much about him or his influence today)...

YAPRS: If you were stuck in an Iowa blizzard with any one person in the world, who would it be and why? 

SC: I'm afraid of famous people; I'm even afraid of people I admire, so I think I'd like to be stuck in a blizzard with my husband and my son--I know that's two people, but they're sort of one "unit"--because we could sing and read and make pancakes and watch movies and stay warm together and I wouldn't feel an inch of discomfort or oddness. 

YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing? 

SC: Transporting the reader. 

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?

SC: I'm terrified of being erased, whether by circumstance or my own mortality; what drives me is knowing I am a thinking, feeling, dervish-whirling human being--I need to get it down, as a record and a remembrance, of who I am, who I was, who I'm becoming... 

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be? 

SC: A patient in a mental hospital. 

October 6 Reading: Jennifer's Pick

Here's a preview from Susanna Childress' new book, Entering the House of Awe:

Instructions for the Twitterpated, Nightingaled, and Sore in Love

           Begin by throwing something away: the microwave,

for example. This will be easier after the crimson hibiscus

fall from where you hung them to dry, their huge corolla spilled

like dark tortillas and your own ticking pulse

won’t stop you from sagging to the floor with a heady,

comprehensive loss, those flowers you strung up by the broom

stunningly ruined, their long stems, too, snapped like the legs

of a praying mantis.                 After this, sweep your arm

across the cupboards and fill a canvas sack with the butter pickles

and wheat germ nobody bothered to open, the prize-winning box

of cereal, the spindled cheese grate. Whatever you do, do not

toss the egg shells, which, after having broken each open,

you returned to the carton like a dozen viscous sockets

that might yet sing. Run your fingers over their fractured edges

and don’t be surprised if you’ve never touched

such a thing, parchment-thin, specked with the memory of locust,

millet, wind, now crooked halves of a yolky hollow,

cupped grottos of sound you’ve become deaf to, ears dwarfed

with your own importance—to thy high requiem become a sod—

so that when you’re standing here with me, wondering

what you’ll do without the toaster oven and why my face

is an insouciant cheddar pink, you must offer the old knife with one hand

and arch my back with the other. Watch me slice open two avocados

and with palpable shock behold their pits, so beautiful

that after you leapfrog the gates of heaven and get a good look

at God’s knuckles it’s these you’ll recall, not the trash bin,

not the emptied palms, goose bumped with secret. For now,

stand still a decent while: turn your hand over, let them go.

Check out more of Susanna's work at the YAPRS reading at Beaverdale Books on Thursday, October 6th at 7pm.

Poetry Staff Pick with Vlad

It was hard to pick which of Stacey's poems I liked best, but I finally fixed on this one as just one of my favorites.


Fixing My Voice
When Dr. Rosen says he can “fix my voice,” he means
he will give me shots of estrogen that will surge through
my body like electric shocks, sending the hair on my chin
and stomach running for cover. He doesn’t want me to be warm.
He doesn’t want to listen to my large truck voice
fill his office like his soy milk
bursting up from his coffee’s deep bottom.
He wants to imagine me as an affirmation.
He wants me perched upon his plastic table
with my smooth naked legs, singing hymns
in the voice of a woman who needs him
in order to recover some piece of herself
that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone,
opening and closing hard like the doors of angry lovers.
He doesn’t exactly know that he hates me,
the feeling is more like gender indigestion,
how the sound of my voice keeps rising
up in his throat and he can’t rid himself
of the image of my lover who stretches out
nude in the dark bed, presses her hand
above my chest saying,
“talk to me, please, talk.”


-Stacey Waite

If you want to hear more of Stacey's unique and powerful writing, please join us at Beaverdale Books on Oct. 6 at 7pm for our next reading!

Poetry Pick with Kelsey, Part 2

Okay, so I couldn't pick just one...

A Poem in Response to Those Who Argue that my Desire
            to Purposefully Remove my Breasts is an Anti-Feminist Notion

Keep in mind I weigh a buck eighty five 

and this is not about a desire for less flesh 

Keep in mind that celebrating womanhood is a trap 

and that the men’s shirts I like to wear 

are not conducive to a breast environment

Admit that it is your body that you want me to celebrate 

that in fact you want my assurance that your own breasts 

are a part of your picture ID card at the woman club.

What a paradise it is to not think in halves but tops and bottoms 

I’m all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

see how that works, all man on the top and woman on the bottom

You may want to inquire about my mind, after all, 

we wouldn’t want my mind to me male and it happens to be on top 

Mind on top, woman on the bottom 

See how that works? 

Mind on top and woman on the bottom.

My mind is not a man. In fact, my mind 

hates my man because my man is trying to be on top 

and mind is on top, mind has to be on top

You still want to me to tell you what I would call myself then 

being all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

You still want me to name it, to name 

what my vagina and breast-less chest

would mean or be called, and I say, You do it. After all, 

it is you who have been naming me all along.

                                -Stacey Waite

Come hear Stacey Waite and Susanna Childress read their poetry October 6 at 7pm in Beaverdale Books! The reading is FREE and open to the public. "Like" us on Facebook at Younger American Poets Reading Series for more information about upcoming readings!

October 6 Reading: Poetry Pick with Kelsey

Poem for my First Girlfriend

Jessie fell through me 
like wind slipping through a screen,

the way hands push through water. 

For sixteen years before we met, 

I never knew the feel of my own body, 

how I might look at myself 

if I had entertained the possibility 

of not lying beneath 

but lying with, one sound— 

no ocean for the shell to hold.

                -Stacey Waite 

Thank you Rick and Sandy Soria!

Rather than having our poets stay overnight in a hotel, we thought it might be fun to send them away for a night. Now, we're able to do so. Thanks to Rick and Sandy Soria, our poets will be staying in one of the century-old farms of Iowa for the night. We think they'll really enjoy this!

Thanks again, Sorias. Without your donation this Fall, we might have had some unhappy poets sleeping on couches.

Thank you Ace Body & Motor!

Thanks to Ace Body & Motor, a locally owned auto repair shop in Des Moines, our first reading on September 1 was a success!

Find yourself needing body or motor work? Check out Ace Body & Motor on NE 45th Street. While using their free Wi-Fi and drinking complimentary coffee, you can wait for Larry, Keith, and Jason (and the rest of the guys) to take a look at your car. See more at their website: www.acebodyandmotor.com or "like" them on Facebook at Ace Body & Motor for more information, special deals, and the occasional car tip from Larry!

Thanks again AB&M!

Get to Know the Poets: Stacey Waite, Oct. 6

Stacey Waite is originally from Long Island, New York. S/he majored in English at Bucknell University and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. S/he now teaches as an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite has published three collections of poems: the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), winner of the Snowbound Prize in Poetry; Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007); and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize. A new book, Butch Geography, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012.

YAPRS asked Stacey a few questions in anticipation of her October 6th reading with Susanna Childress:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
SW: The saddest part of trying to answer this question is how predicable my reading tastes are. I can't think of a single book that would be all that surprising. But perhaps it would be surprising to know that I am embarrassingly compelled by the show Project Runway, and that any time I see Fun Dip, I feel the need to have some.

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?
SW: Well, it's hard to say what poets people might or might not know about (my goodness I am being very evasive of these questions) but I think lots of poets should read Antonio Porchia, and a book by Carol Potter called A Short History of Pets.

YAPRS:To what do you aspire in your writing?
SW: I know a lot of poets who say they write for themselves or even for the poems themselves, but the truth is for me that writing has always been about connection, about trying to connect with the world outside the poem, about trying to bring queer lives, queer epistemologies and queer bodies into view, about trying to make the world more bearable for those of us who fall outside the sanctioned categories for being. It's not that I believe in some romantic notion that poetry can change the world, it's more that worlds can change inside poems, and sometimes that's all the possibility we need, at least for the moment.

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
SW: I think the answer to this question changes quite often. But I think, for this moment, my poems are driven by my own desire to say something meaningful, something terrible, something beautiful, something queer, something completely unlike the last thing I said. And when I fail to say something meaningful, I just try to enjoy the music of having failed.

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
SW: I always wanted to be a musician (yes, this is another cliche of poet as failed rockstar), but in all honesty, I bet if I weren't a poet, I'd probably want to be a carpenter, but then I'd realize how much math is involved. So maybe a postman (I am drawn to uniforms and task completion). Or, maybe a wildlife chainsaw artist. Those guys turn dying trees into birds, into hands, into mailboxes. Again, with the mail. Postman. Postman it is.

Sept 1 Reading: Mariah's Pick

This is a selection from Michaela Mullin's Tenable Cant.

Family Portrait

We are hungry,

kneeling.

        

With our hands

                 we dig into earth

                                as if chased by oxygen.

Not situated in, but near

         what we wet.

We drink each hand free

of deep-red clay.

You can hear more of Michaela Mullin's poetry on September 1, 7pm at Beaverdale Books.