New U.S. Poet Laureate: Kay Ryan, Californian

The Library of Congress announced today that Californian Kay Ryan is the next Poet Laureate, succeeding Charles Simic.

Ryan is the author of six collections of poems: Dragon Acts to Dragon Friends (1983, privately printed by a subscription of her friends); Strangely Marked Metal (1985); Flamingo Watching (1995); Elephant Rocks (1996); Say Uncle (2000); and The Niagara River (2005). Flamingo Watching shot her to the notice of readers and poets alike, and Dana Gioia later wrote that he could never quite set the book aside. Her poetry packs twists, irony, and beauty into small packets of precisely chosen words, often in very short lines, often a single stanza.

Her PBS interview is now being widely aired; she says clearly in the program that silence means a great deal to her, and she explores its forms. As an introduction to the poet and her work, I also like very much Dana Gioia's essay that appeared first in Dark Horse in the winter 1998/99 issue.

Here's one of her poems, drawn from the web site of Blue Flower Arts, which has represented her:

ATLAS
Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can't
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.

Who Will Teach the Teachers? A Poet: Baron Wormser Steps Forward

With three books released this year, Baron Wormser is very much in demand -- which made it especially nice that he could speak today with the high school teachers at the Advanced Placement Institute in St. Johnsbury. He just completed his annual session at the Frost Place, where he directs the unique Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Today's session gave a taste of what he delivered on Frost's mountain earlier in the summer.

Long a Maine poet and now a Vermont resident, Wormser served as a K-12 librarian in rural Maine while also writing poetry and building, then living in, a one-room cabin "off the grid" with his family. One of his books this year is the softcover edition of his memoir of that life, THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING, which AP instructor Tim Averill calls "our contemporary Walden."

The teachers today were most sstruck by Wormser's readings from his book THE POETRY LIFE, in which ten fictional narrators talk about the influence of poetry in their lives -- part of the process that Wormser calls "the most important gift you can give your students." Each narrator has a special reason for being drawn to the poem and poet presented; for instance, a teenage girl offers her connection to Elinor Wylie's poem "Address to My Soul." After reading an excerpt, Wormser added, "So that's one way in." He had three more to offer in his challenge to teachers to connect their students with poetry.

For A SURGE OF LANGUAGE: TEACHING POETRY DAY BY DAY, Wormser and his co-author David Cappella made up a teacher, Mr. P., based on their wn teaching practice and opening with Randall Jarrell's poem "Big Daddy," about the football player Big Daddy Lipscomb. The book illustrates how to lead a discussion of the poem, beginning with syntax: "We always keepour eyes on how the poem works.... how the sentences are constructed -- poetry asks for that kind of attention and I think it carries over into how the students write prose."

Third came the memoir, THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING, where among other strands, Wormser follows his attraction to Robert Frost and to Frost's poem "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things." Wormser said, "That's a poem that's haunted me forever. I think one reason Imoved to the country was I wanted to be with the phoebes and find out who they were." He believed that writing poetry and living in the country were somehow the same tihing.

"Frost's example is an important one in our poetry because Frost is really the only American poet who is both popular and a great artist," he assered. He added that teaching poetry includes communicating who the poet was, in terms of the poet's spirit.

At last, Wormser read from his own poems in SCATTERED CHAPTERS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, which covers 30 years of his writing. Again referring to the demand for paying attention in poetry, he suggested: "Whatis that? -- that's the question poetry asks." Poetry tries to experience that questioning, through language. "That means that really the sources of poetry are in awe and wonder."

Between reading the poems "Falling" and "Shakespeare in Mud," Wormser reflected: "I think most poets have a totem from the natural world, because poetry comes to us from our feet, it doesn't come from our heads. It comes from the living earth." His own, he said, is snow -- as painted with words in "Falling."

Wormser's main teaching method is to dictate poems to his students -- he reads it, and the students write it down. He describes the result as "Better even than reading, because they experience the poem word by word, the wayit was written. ... How do you incite kids to ask you about the placement of a comma in a poem? That's one way. How do you get kids to ask you about word choice? -- By writing it down!"

The audience question that received the most intense reply from this "teacher of teachers" was, "Do we have to write poetry to be in the culture of poetry?" Wormser responded that the Greeks saw writing poetry as crucial to being human. "Almost everyone has written a poem in their life. Typically love and death produce poems. You go to one of those places, and that's all that's left standing." Poetry.

Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and Gier mysteries

We were sorry to hear from Soho Crime last week that Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and Gier mysteries, had passed away near his home in Maine. The Dutch-born author (Rotterdam, 1931) not only created a memorable investigative team, but translated his mysteries himself, writing them first in Dutch, then in English. This unusual arrangement allowed the actual texts to vary widely from each other, something an independent translator might not feel the freedom to do.

Van de Wetering arrived in Maine in 1975, to link with a Zen Buddhist community there; it folded, but he stayed. His earlier experiences with this spiritual discipline are retold in his first book (THE EMPTY MIRROR: EXPERIENCES IN A JAPANESE ZEN MONASTERY) and at least two others -- they make good reading, frank and descriptive and unflinchingly clear-sighted. Then he mined his own police experience for his mysteries.

I like the New York Times obituary, which says that his interests also included motorcycles and jazz -- good reasons for settling on this side of the Atlantic!

I won't try to review his work just now, but here's a good listing of the mysteries. Summer is a delicious season for re-reading an entire series, isn't it?

Note that in 1984, van de Wetering won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policiere for THE MAINE MASSACRE, which placed his police team in Maine!

Farewell to one of the most distinctive voices of the police procedural scene.

Grijpstra and de Gier novels

* Outsider in Amsterdam, 1975
* Tumbleweed, 1976
* The Corpse on the Dike, 1976
* Death of a Hawker, 1977
* The Japanese Corpse, 1977
* The Blond Baboon, 1978
* The Maine Massacre, 1979
* The Mind-Murders, 1981
* The Streetbird, 1983
* The Rattle-Rat, 1985
* Hard Rain, 1986
* Just A Corpse at Twilight, 1994
* The Hollow-Eyed Angel, 1996
* The Perfidious Parrot, 1997
* The Amsterdam Cops: Collected Stories, 1999 (anthology)
o replaces the anthology The Sergeant's Cat and Other Stories

SPECIAL NEWS: Soho Press also announced that the press will reissue all of van de Wetering's Soho Crime novels in paperback, starting this fall. What a nice salute to this author's work.

Patrick Donnelly, THE CHARGE -- Poetry of the Unexpected

I don't know how I managed to shelve this book when it came out in 2003, without exploring it first. But I rediscovered it last month, and have been prowling through Patrick Donnelly's rich and surprising poems ever since.

THE CHARGE (Ausable, 2003) is Donnelly's first collection. A poet and teacher of poetry with a well-rounded career, Donnelly is also an associate editor at Four Way Books and at the time of publication was curating and assisting at two different reading series. I mention this as background because THE CHARGE doesn't read like a "first book." It's drenched with cries and prayers to God, mostly the Islamic version but also the Jesus sort. Woven across these outcries are the hard residue of a father who couldn't show his love ("My father gave me a stone / and I ate it."), the continuous shadow of illness and death from HIV within one's own body and among one's friends and lovers, and, fresh green miracle springing here, amazing poems of love and of the bewilderingly beautiful discoveries of young passion.

Here are images that dance in a delight that I don't think I've ever seen in man/man love poems before. From "His Café Con Leche Hands":

Immaculate white apron, tied low
around his supple Little Cuba hips,
like the Guadalupe over the counter
without stain or spot of any kind
(though God knows I long to spill
something of myself across that almost-altar,
stumble into the snowfield of his sheets)--

Yes, this is why it's so hard to draw a line around Love and make it into something holy, when its roots are so often in the teasing pleasures of the flesh. In the Sixties, before the HIV epidemic, there was a short sweet time when sexual liberty seemed safe and delicious and almost accepted. And then... Ah, wait a bit, let's not move so quickly into the shadows. Donnelly takes his time getting there; he offers "Prayer After the Baths" in celebration of another lover, one who takes off his baseball cap "to rub his buzzcut along my belly, / murmuring under his breath a baritonal 'Sweet,'" -- a moment of intimacy that Donnelly braids directly to God, to worship, and to martyrdom.

There are also tender explorations of prayer in Muslim form. From "Baba":

Baba has three small moles
on the left side of his face.
When he prays, we see
the bottom of his socks are dirty.
[...]
He says if you're very quiet
you can hear a sound inside
like crickets singing, then sleeps
with his head in my lap.
[...]
a circle always gathers to ask the hard questions:
what about abortion, what about gay people,
what happens when you die?
In the silence before he answers
I know the stories about Jesus are true:

but Baba, Baba, I can hardly keep up--
my heart runs after you
with my soul in its hands.

There is an expression that we use here in Vermont, where green-furred ridges rise deceptively softly around us, undergirded with granite. It's a saying that came from "out of state" with some of the visitors who bought little farms and hung prayer flags and contributed chocolate cake to the church dinners: "One mountain, many paths." Donnelly's paths are peopled by both Jesus and Baba, by casual one-night flings and gratefully held long-term partner, by "amen" in a sigh, and "Bismillah," Arabic term for "in the name of God (Allah)," in the same breath as it returns.

The book's title comes from its centerpiece poem, "Consummatum Est" -- the Latin phrase translated as "it is finished" from Jesus on the cross, but equally a description of the final portion of a sexual interlude. In this case, Donnelly plays against the mythic certainty of knowing you're "with child" -- a gathering in of Mary giving herself to God's plan -- and he places with great care against this image a similar certainty: of the moment when, being cared for by a lover, the infection of the deadly virus of HIV/AIDS moved into his life:

Yes--certainly I felt it--and broke
into a sweat, the exact moment
the charge leapt from him to me.

Blessings to the book designer, who also took the erotic electricity of "the charge" and issued a cover with a dark green thunderous sky broken by jagged lightning.

The mingling of lover/brother/life/death in this collection is scented with humor as well as sweat. I need more copies, for the dear friends I want to share the book with.

As an added pleasure, I found a more recent set of poems Donnelly is forming into work on and around his mother: http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/donnelly.html. Also in the online version of The Drunken Boat are some Buddhist poems that Donnelly with Stephen Miller translated from the Japanese imperial anthologies (www.thedrunkenboat.com/waka.html).

I thought I came to taste a bit of bread, a cup; I found an exceptional meal.

Charles Todd, A PALE HORSE

A PALE HORSE, the tenth mystery featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge, focuses on a cluster of "leper cottages" where a handful of privacy seekers reside in the English countryside, holding their secrets within the cottage walls. Haunted by his own potent secret -- the cynical and sometimes terrified voice of his dead friend and wartime comrade Hamish -- Rutledge attempts to peel back the reasons surrounding a gruesome death, where the body is discovered wearing a postmortem gas mask and cloak. A manipulative government agency, a painful shame in his sister's life, and the confusion that erupts from insistent sleep deprivation make Ian's pursuit of justice harder than ever.

This is a deceptively quiet book, framed by the white horse inscribed on a rock face, dating back to England's speechless early inhabitants. Rutledge endures less of the fierce confusion and threats that dogged him in earlier volumes in the series -- while at the same time, he loses the camouflage that protected him then. In the Yorkshire countryside, one person after another seems capable of looking in his face and naming the anguish there: the residue of a far more gruesome battle against death, in the trenches in France. Moreover, Meredith Channing, the perceptive psychic from Ian's sister's world, appears repeatedly within this search. What will it mean for the way Hamish sits in his mind?

He cranked the motorcar and got in, sitting there shaking. It had nothing to do with the rain.

Hamish said roughly, "Aye, that was the heart of it. You wanted to die. I wanted to live. And we neither of us got our wish."

"And so we're damned, both of us, because God got it wrong. I wish you had lived and I had died. I would have come to haunt you, and when you married your Fiona, I would have been the skeleton at the feast."

"No," Hamish said, his voice cold. "I would ha' forgotten you, and left you rotting in France."

Some of the deepest questions of the series arise here; some are answered -- some will ride with the death-haunted inspector into the next volume from Charles Todd, the American Anglophile mother-son writing duo.

Calendar Alert: Maxine Kumin, Wed. July 16; and our Poets' Brunch with April Ossmann

The day before an author event is always a long one here at Kingdom Books. We pull out books by the author -- tomorrow, April Ossmann reads here at 11 a.m. from her collection ANXIOUS MUSIC, a debut but far from a beginning for this accomplished poet and long-time editor (she's the executive director of Alice James Books). We also draw forward onto the tables books by poets whose work may strike similarly. In April's case, I reached for Mary Kinzie, as well as for the early Alice James poets like Jean Pedrick. And I added Gregory Orr and Mary Oliver to the table, one for emotion, the other for meticulous detail. Plus there are another couple dozen books of poetry that have just come in, including a first edition of Frost's NEW HAMPSHIRE. There'll be plenty for the eyes and spirit to feast on.

Oh yes, feasting: This is the last of our 2009 Poets' Brunch events. So there's a feast to prepare and assemble, along with flowers from the garden, and of course the circle of comfortable seats.

I've also pulled out books by Maxine Kumin, but I have them set aside in my own office for the moment -- Kumin is reading on Wednesday July 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Black Box Theater on the campus of St. Johnsbury Academy, part of the St. J. Athenaeum's summer poetry series but held this time in a larger, "climate controlled" room. (I sympathize; I spent a chunk of today installing an air conditioner in our event space, after listening to the weather forecast!) At any rate, I've promised to bring Kumin's books on Wednesday; I suppose if someone really wants one or two tomorrow, I'll pull them back out, but for the moment they are boxed.

I'm re-reading Patrick Donnelly's magnificent work THE CHARGE -- more on that, later this weekend.

And a quick note to mystery readers: Yes, the new Charles Todd post-World War I mystery, A PALE HORSE, is another compelling exploration of love, loneliness, and trust. And Dave wants me to remind you all that we have just ONE last copy, with laid-in signed bookplate, of DEVIL MAY CARE by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming.

Teaching the Teachers Who Teach Poetry: RACHEL HADAS, Laws

Are there "laws" for how to teach poetry in high school classrooms? That's not what Rachel Hadas means by the title of her collection LAWS, which has become a hit for Advanced Placement teachers wrestling with how to light poetic flames in their students. But Hadas, guest lecturer at the Advanced Placement Institute in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, this week, offered specific guidance, her precepts for how to write good poetry and thus how to study it -- especially considering that Advanced Placement students will be tested on their ability to write about poetry:

* Think of the poem as a gesture [she raised a hand to illustrate a couple of gestures] -- something that has a beginning and an end.
* The reader cannot read your mind.
* The HOW trumps the WHAT. [Teaching this "might prevent the student from treating the poem as if it were a Chinese fortune cookie, where you peel it away and only keep the fortune hidden inside."]
* Pay attention to the beginning.
* Pay attention to the ending.
* Pay attention to how the poem gets there.
* Make syntax work for you. [She quoed Randall Jarrell as saying, "a great poet is one who after many years of standing in the rain in thunderstorms, gets struck by lightning once."]
* Poetry includes inspiration, interpretation, and revision. ["The poet's job is to squeeze out the excess water from the wet washcloth or sponge."]

Hadas recommends the book IN THE FRAME, in which she has an essay that references her poem "Two Paintings Seen Again" (from LAWS) and others -- the collection is on ekphrastic poems and poetry by women, and is now in press; she also suggested an anthology edited by John Hollander, THE GAZER'S SPIRIT.

Teachers asked Hadas about the classical allusions in most of her poems, as in the one titled "Hermes," seeking her advice "to us, who teach audiences who are largely illiterate to classical allusions."

Hadas in turn pointed to the presence of the Internet and the post-9/11 world in her work, and said that technology gets out of date, but classical mythology doesn't. She explained, "When I write about mythology I like to bring it up to date in some way. This is a poetic impulse that has existed since antiquity."

The teachers also inquired about Hadas' experience as a translator from the Greek. "I enjoy translation," she pointed out. "It makes me pay attention. I do think it's good for poets to enter the minds of other people." She recommended the translations by F. D. Reeve of Robert Frost's poetry into Russian, and the work of Rena Espaya bringing Frost into Spanish.

Hadas brought some new work too, mostly very short poems, where she's looking to pare down the language. Her poem "Loneliness" begins,

Love costs anxiety, joy has a price:
the fragile edge and smoky smell of limits.

The poem concludes:

Nor do we need to doubt that anyone
who once has tasted loneliness will ever
forget its special savor.

Finally, she predicted a fresh trend in upcoming poems: that we'll all see more Milton in poetry, one way and another, due to the drenching in allusion that fits his work to a post-9/11 world where, as she paints it in her poem "The Fork in the Road," "I am not afraid, / and yet I don't feel safe."

Hadas is guest lecturer also later this summer, on August 8, at the Frost Place Seminar in Franconia, NH (www.frostplace.org).