New Books in Poetry

The Late Parade (Liveright, 2013) has received a lot of attention and it’s well-deserved. Adam Fitzgerald‘s poetry is a berserk love song and between his high-rhetoric and experimental disposition, the reader is treated to a performance that pushes delight into zones of trauma. The poems in The Late Parade nearly outbrave us with their will, except each stanza and line, though dense with wattage, is also heavy with vulnerability and yields – almost as an act of compassion – a strange and emptying alchemy we associate with a poetry that exonerates us from ourselves. During our chat we discuss the malls of New Jersey, his formation as a poet (and reader), his friendship with John Ashbery, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Marvelous Things Overheard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Ange Mlinko‘s poems exhibit a sonically rich landscape articulated by a beautiful voice that is so measured and covert that history itself is seduced into singing to us who are decaying in the present. Mostly centered in the Mediterranean, Mlinko’s poems guide us into the prefectures of time to recover and reinvent the enchantment of our beginnings and by doing so enlarges our imagination as we move into the future. While her themes are global, her eye is local, and the combination yields a sort of prudence most of us have forgotten we need in order to live more truly and more fiercely. During out chat, we talk about her childhood in Philadelphia, her years in Morocco and Beirut, the Mediterranean’s impact on her poetry, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

At the age of five, poet Stephanie Strickland and her sister received a book from their grandmother that included a poem by John Farrar called “Serious Omission.” I know that there are dragons St. George’s, Jason’s, too, And many modern dragons With scales of green and blue;   But though I’ve been there many times And carefully looked through, I cannot find a dragon In the cages at the zoo! The poem stayed with Strickland.  “What is the serious omission?” she asks.  “To not be able to find that dragon?  To fail to discriminate the hugely many implicate orders of life?” These questions, not to mention dragons themselves, drive Strickland’s new book of poems, Dragon Logic (Ahsahta Press, 2013).  Her fiercely intelligent and morally acute work captures e-dragons and sea dragons, as well as a beast she calls the “Hidden Dragon of Unstable Ruin.”  The poems even offer “Dragon Maps,” that take “catastrophic forms and safepaths,” finding and figuring their way through the physical, mechanical, virtual, mythical, chimerical, and hypothetical environments we now inhabit. And if you find yourself wondering just what a dragon is, that’s the right question.  “Dragons are mythical and abstract,” explains Strickland, “mythic embodiments of abstract power, from the snake in Eden, to devouring sea monsters, to the latest special FX apocalyptic creation from Hollywood. The dragon hunt that matters for me is tracking the beast as it slips, dizzyingly, from real to configurational (electronically generated) space, always aware that where we live, in either case, is the belly of this beast.” *Photograph courtesy of Star Black (copyright). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Mary Ruefle‘s newest book of poems Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) is brilliant. Her poems have the confidence of a poet who is utterly fearless, but wise enough to never come out and brag about it. Her poetry is honest, but dignified, thoughtful and bizarre, and with a fidelity to lived experience that is heartbreaking. During our chat we talk about childhood, the life and mind of the artist, her neighborhood in Vermont, and so much more. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013). Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what she would later write in The Bell Jar. The summer is of not just biographical interest, but literary significance as well. There is about Pain, Parties, Work an inevitable sense of clouds brewing- the summer will end, Plath will return home, and she will attempt suicide by taking pills and crawling under her mother’s house- but there’s also a sensation of joy: the joy of young women alone in a big city, experimenting with boys and clothes and make-up and work. Pain, Parties, Work is bolstered by the fact that Winder was able to secure interviews with many of Plath’s fellow interns, voices that have been notably absent in many of the earlier accounts and which lend an immediacy to a well-known story. The interviews with these women do much to flesh out the concrete details of the experience as well as Plath’s unique struggles within it. The Plath we have here is young and eager, fond of make-up and boys, and already displaying a rare gift for words. The clouds are on the horizon, yes- we all know that- but, in the meantime, the city and the thrill of discovery provide an intoxicating distraction. Summer is a time in which anything can happen. Reading Winder’s narrative and meeting Plath in this context, one feels that keenly: the excitement of a girl in the city, the hope and heat of New York, an electricity in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

William Logan is often thought of as a critic first and a poet second, so his verse doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. In Logan’s poetry we don’t find the spooky discursiveness or the back-breaking effort to avoid lyrical expression we often encounter in contemporary poetry. Instead, what we find is a poet who writes poetry simply because he must. He’s inspired to write and doesn’t write to be inspired. His poetry is meticulously crafted and sensitive to the seen and the unseen world we inhabit. The poems in Madame X (Penguin Books, 2002) are the result of what happens when you put tremendous pressure on yourself and language at the same time: beauty, death, and love emerge with terrifying clarity. In our conversation, the poet and I discuss his time living between Florida and England, his undergraduate years at Yale where he worked closely with poet Richard Howard and television writer David Milch, teaching poetry workshops at the University of Florida, old girlfriends, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Paul Killebrew‘s latest book of poems, Ethical Consciousness (Canarium Books, 2013), the speaker inhabits the everyday structures of our lives, but responds to those structures in an entirely uncommon way. For Killebrew, his severe poetic lines (which he explains the origins of), once latched together create poems that act like tire-irons that the poet uses to pry open anything he chooses to attach his attention to. Once object or idea is uncovered, his depth of vision achieves its beauty by allowing the poems to travel freely within those newly revealed districts where they must. In short, he guides more than he directs, which is always a gift to the reader. In our conversation we talk about his childhood in The South, his parallel loves for the law and the poetic, how his books came to be published, and so much more. I should mention that we conclude the interview with a reading of his epic poem “Muted Flags”. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Books, 2012), has gotten a lot of attention for his book of poems because of his relentless mashing together of pop-cultural references with literary and scholarly ones. Also, his ubiquitous use of rhyming was strangely considered noteworthy by poetry readers. Why has a mode of expression that is found everywhere in popular culture and art history so provocative to the poetry community and the general reader? Because most readers focused on the hypnotically vulgar surfaces of his work, without bothering to discover why the poet was writing the poems that way. While Alien vs. Predator is certainly a sharp critique of the plasticity of a fallen world, that isn’t the only thing that drives him to be a bit trashy and sinister. That impulse happens to spring from Mr. Robbins’ gentle and awkward heart. We explore the spirit of his work in our discussion, along with other topics like cats, Heidegger, pessimism, book reviewing, his next poetry manuscript, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Dana Gioia‘s deference to poetic tradition and artistic beauty is intolerable to those who taste the venom of ideology in every linguistic expression of experience. But what ideology is present in the poet’s response to having lost a child? More broadly, what ideology is at play when our bodies find pleasure in the music of words, what ideology is at play when form is not used to preserve some aristocratic sensibility, but to protect the self – poor or rich – from its own nature, and what ideology is present in a poetry that celebrates the act of reading by seeking common ground with the reader? Ideology is not at the root of Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf Press, 2012). Instead, one discovers an uncanny humility, sadly so foreign to us in our Age of Boasting, an age that exists because we let others convince us we lack so much. But it isn’t that we lack so much, but that deep down we sense that this world is not quite our home; that there is another home hidden from us – a home poetry is best equipped to help us find. The poems in Pity the Beautiful are provoked into existence by a poet acutely aware of the mystery of creation and the suffering that often animates it. But he is equally aware of the gift that each of us are made to not only apprehend it, but to wrestle joyfully with. Dana Gioia’s poetry is a reflection of his wrestling, a wrestling he has faith we can recognize as our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Lisa Olstein‘s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a book that is responding to the twilight of privacy, in which delivery systems of information are networks networking with other networks. Information ricochets into individual lives in a stream of binary extremes: on the one hand we have unprecedented access to knowledge, while on the other hand we sense the great proximity between ourselves and the authentic. At times, one can feel trapped into making one of two extreme decisions: to retreat into social fantasy or devote one’s life to resisting a world that seeks to know our every move as if to empower us, when actually it often does the opposite. But the poems in Little Stranger reflect a more realistic picture of the reader. Olstein’s humility is her greatest quality because apathy, wherever it multiplies hopes to quiet us, and her poems simply do the hard work to make sense of those pressures, but on a personal level, with a voice we recognize as genuine. One of the most provocative features of contemporary life might be the dissolution of all boundaries, where formerly held categories of the physical now blur and lose their singular expression, making personal experience a hybrid of the personal and the political, a hybrid of the domestic and the civic, and a hybrid of the commercial and the familial. Olstein’s poetry seems particularly sensitive to the new remixes of daily life and her language reconciles this almost seamlessly (but also fights it at times with naturalistic vocabulary) by not so much accepting the new reality, but tolerating it long enough to integrate into her poetry a still recognizable language so that she may communicate with us, human to human, which gives her poems their moral force. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry