New Books in Poetry

Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a book of poems written by both a grownup and a child and each seem quite aware of the other. This split-consciousness, if you will, hangs around most of the poems, but not in a tense or obvious way, but from afar, after one has put the book down. Belmont is written by a confident adult, with the disassociated charm of a child playing alone: the one doesn’t need to be validated by us, while the other doesn’t know we’re even in the room. This is the book’s strange disposition: a warm and loving indifference. When young poets are eager to impress, they often just bully the reader with novel forms and precious philosophy. This sort of aesthetic nervousness doesn’t exist in Belmont. Instead, Stephen Burt‘s virtue of clarity is reflected back to us in a number of ways: the humbling attention to craft, the amicable but rambunctious diction, and being unapologetic about subject-matter that is both public and private. How many poets have the guts to write about the suburbs and family life without either great cynicism or great sentimentality? Burt’s poems remind us, without ever saying it (which would be indulgent) that for the soul to be quiet and easy, a person has to suffer through nostalgia. Belmont, however, spares us most of that suffering because the poet is looking at what is right in front of him – flourishing – even if the present is sometimes the past. Throughout the book, Burt puts an interesting burden on a reader of contemporary poetry because in order to find pleasure in the poems, one must allow the poems to befriend them, and for them to befriend you, one must be willing to be as vulnerable and mature as Burt is throughout Belmont. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The poems in Katy Didden‘s debut The Glacier’s Wake (Pleiades Press, 2013) are civilized and dignified and so are their surfaces: sophisticated soundscapes, pitch-perfect diction, a humane voice. And in The Glacier’s Wake, we do, in fact, encounter poems that exhibit a high-level of competency as it relates to craft. And it’s certainly true that someone who devotes time and energy and improves their skills is indeed involved in a virtuous endeavor. Dedication to poetic craft, however, is not only a bulwark against vice, but almost always a sign that a poet is using craft to veil a great suffering, and I sense Katy Didden’s poems are doing exactly that. Didden’s technical abilities have less to do with a deference to tradition, but have to do with a more urgent obligation – protecting both the reader and the poet from her grave interior life, which is one of the most generous gestures a poet can make. We flourish in her poems because the poet protects us from her. But so adamant and gigantic are the poet’s ideas and feelings, it doesn’t seem like an accident that Didden uses as her primary metaphor, as a counter-force to her crushing sensitivity, our planet’s geological history and Earth’s around-the-clock mysterious behavior, juxtaposed with her own miniscule performance in the world. Time and time again, Didden cannot help but see our lives informed and humiliated by the mindless movements of the Earth, movements we are designed to desire to understand, yet we are ultimately barred from really knowing: can we ever know what it feels like to be a glacier, a wasp, a sycamore? It’s as if The Glacier’s Wake is Didden’s pact with nature, but what would nature want with us her poems simultaneously seem to acknowledge. Nature out-performs us all the time her poems show. It lives and dies and lives again, while we modest creatures go about our lives – then gone. And despite always being present throughout the book, the natural world isn’t capable of caring for us because it doesn’t need us. All it does is hand down decrees. But if we are destined to be both connected to and alienated from the planet’s vast environmental drama, Didden attempts to resolve this trauma by celebrating the very brute force that ignores us by employing the language of science – as if, by doing so, calling a momentary truce with indifference, or that the syntax of science is a sort of offering – but then she has a completely opposite impulse: to attack attack attack, which is to say sing sing sing with the language of poetry, which is to say the language of the heart is for Didden a sort of death for death itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

James Longenbach‘s The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013) is not interested in the vices or failures found in some poems, so his concerns are not necessarily moral ones, but instead, as the title of the book suggests, he is interested in understanding what makes a particular poem (and poet for that matter) flourish, and therefore what makes a reader flourish. And it is this relationship – the one between reader and poem – that James Longenbach’s book honors through his ingenuity of reading poetry through the framework of virtues, such as boldness, compression, dilation, excess, restraint, and shyness to name just a few he identifies, and he unearths these virtues by focusing on a poem’s prosody and diction and syntax and even the poet’s life – apprehended through letters – as well. The Virtues of Poetry is a joyous book of criticism, written by a poet and critic who does not seek to reprimand poems – which is usually the result of someone mired in taste – but to identify why certain poems can be considered achievements and also to celebrate the paradoxical nature of poetry itself – that poems, no matter when they are written, embody the impulse to clarify the world, while also wrestling with the world’s unsettling mysteries. During our chat, we discuss how poetry found him, the creative similarities between writing poetry and prose, and of course, the virtues of poetry and so much more. I hope you enjoy our discussion 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

Joshua Edwards‘ new book and its title, Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), hint at a yearning for a lost world all of us helped to destroy or at the very least forgot. While tipping his hat to the social sciences throughout the book, Imperial Nostalgias is cunningly personal: each page is an intimate window to look out of, a window to take siesta in, a window to shout from, to lean beyond, but never a window to leap from because the poems don’t harass the reader into annihilation. Instead, they are oddly charming and innocent, perhaps a counter-force to what his eye must behold. Most of his poems are like games of tag between imagery and aphorism, between abstraction and the concrete, and this is the direct result of a person devoted to travel, which Imperial Nostalgias seems a direct result of. In fact, when I finished the book, I felt like I hadn’t talked to another person in weeks, as if sitting on a cross-country train ride as the subjects of his poems flashed by: the historical – literary and otherwise – until that moment at dusk when the landscape darkened into the candor of personal meditation. The poet’s voice reflects the plain vernacular of talking to oneself, that most humble act, while simultaneously making the same voice sound as if it desires to be heard by all. Imperial Nostalgias is the labor of a frenzied (but measured) poet and the book reflects this in its restless pursuits: not only do we discover poetry in the book, but strange photographs and severe fragments of language that also accompany us on our reading journey. And not only are these vagrant busy pieces made strange by being collected as one, but the book itself – this bounded object – worked equally strange on me as a reader: because of its modest size I found myself preferring to carry the book in my back pocket and since inside the book several empty panels of white space exist, I found myself drawing and writing inside Imperial Nostagias, and by doing so the book became an amicable traveling companion. It is in this experience when I discovered Joshua Edwards’ generosity as an artist. While his work made solitude palpable for me, at some mysterious point I discovered the poet was with me the entire time I thought I was alone. During our discussion we talk about the relationship between travel and poetry, the genesis of his latest book, the conundrum of being both American and a poet, 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

As I waded into Erica Wright‘s first books of poems, I immediately became not only aware of my gender, but the event that is female, woman, girl, and child. In fact, gender – that construction site where culture and biology come together to play out their destructive and creative collaboration – seems at first to be the blueprint for the lyrical arguments made in each poem, but it turns out gender might only be a part of the poems’ machinery. Wright’s speaker, while someone who rejects the wide bubbly grin and feminine pose of the little girl, and indeed someone who prefers dirt under her nails instead of polish painted over them, wants us to understand that the violence of loneliness, regret, and vulnerability have perhaps less to do with gender or sex, but more to do with the fundamental element that makes us all human: the need to be loved and the need to love. Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) is filled with both poems of confrontation and poems of striking tenderness, humor, and honesty. And yet the poet isn’t merely obsessed with the abstractions of the human interior. She draws heavily on imagery – both classical and contemporary; bleak and lush – to serve as the scaffolding we can hold onto while the speaker whispers in our ears one devastating truth after another. During our chat we talk about the poet’s childhood in rural Tennessee, the themes that drive her poetry, her recent adventure into prose writing, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our talk 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

Kevin Goodan‘s latest book of poems, Upper Level Disturbances (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2012), directly challenges modern society in at least one respect: the poems exist as a result of humility, the opposite of boasting which our culture rewards. In the poems, we’re introduced to a speaker whose daily experiences – which involve working dangerously or dangerously at rest – seems nearly shorn of his fellow human beings, and in fact it often feels that his poems might be the only communication he has with anyone beyond the forest and fires and rivers and beasts that populate his verse. Ultimately, however, Kevin Goodan is a poet who is generously private: his voice is totally singular in expression (no one sounds like him), but also belongs to us. We might not entirely relate to his physical labor, his actual work that is represented in these poems, but his spiritual labor and work is undoubtedly our own. But perhaps what is most powerful about these poems, poems haunted by the natural and immaterial worlds, is that the poet – unlike most of us – is fiercely inner-directed: acting in the world not based on established norms, but moving according to his own morality, calibrated and re-calibrated by suffering and grace. In our conversation we talk about growing up on the Flathead Indian reservation in Montana, his work in forestry and firefighting, his eventual path towards poetry, 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 Sudden Dog, the voice we encounter is a moody one to say the least. We find a poet who at times seems to believe the entire human project is stupid – and I mean all of it. While at other times we meet a speaker so desperate for an authentic experience that he claws violently inside and straight through the visible world to uncover just one thing that can’t be reduced to a physical event – something invisible in each of us that is too bittersweet to stop looking for. But most surprising, after the poet’s cantankerous and difficult spirit stops to rest, we see and hear a speaker of such surprising and provocative tenderness that it made me realize these poems are not complaints of victimization, but doubtful prayers of a man who refuses to surrender his dignity to a sick world. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: his growth as a poet, how his first book Sudden Dog was published, the way his poems behave across the page, and much much more. I hope you enjoy our discussion 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

To read Samuel Amadon‘s latest book of poems, The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), is to know for the rest of your life what it feels like to be punched in the nose. In these poems, we are introduced to a band of misfits who turn deviant behavior into a sublime activity. The poems, written in a street-wise vernacular, are honest to the point of humiliation and despair. Full of rhetorical and formal mania, the poems produce in the reader feelings of anxiety and heightened awareness, and joined with the shocking content, the final effect is devastating. The Hartford Book is a journey to the underworld where the slum and street-corners are enchanted, and there’s only one outlaw – the poet – that seems remotely aware of an alternative path, a path that leads straight out of Hartford. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: the poet in the academy, the process of writing The Hartford Book, the formal aspects of his poetry, and much much more. I hope you enjoy our talk 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

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it. In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of the Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry