Kun­di­man Asian Ame­ri­can Poetry Retreat, June 22 — 27, 2010

February 10th, 2010 § 0

If you’re an Asian Ame­ri­can poet, you should con­si­der appl­ying for this retreat. Kun­di­man does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help men­tor the next gene­ra­tion of Asian-American poets, Kun­di­man is spon­so­ring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham Uni­ver­sity. During the Retreat, natio­nally renow­ned Asian Ame­ri­can poets will con­duct workshops with fellows. Rea­dings, wri­ting circ­les and infor­mal social gathe­rings will also be sche­du­led. Through this Retreat, Kun­di­man hopes to pro­vide a safe and ins­truc­tive envi­ron­ment that iden­ti­fies and addres­ses the uni­que cha­llen­ges faced by emer­ging Asian Ame­ri­can poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tues­day to Sun­day. Workshops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

Richard Jef­frey New­man on The Power of Poetry

November 8th, 2009 § 0

This past Satur­day, my collea­gue and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­vie­wed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her Blog­Talk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive rea­der and won­der­ful inter­vie­wer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favo­rite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Wor­king The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s rea­ding of this piece was her noti­cing my mother’s pre­sence in the poem and how that star­ted me tal­king about something I often encoun­ter but have never given much serious thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­for­ta­ble with their mother’s sexua­lity, and I don’t unders­tand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I unders­tand inte­llec­tually, I don’t get it emo­tio­nally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­tur­bing that I am not made uncom­for­ta­ble not just by the idea of my mother as a sexual being, but by the fact that, when I was gro­wing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sexual rela­tionships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sio­nally go to bars, or dan­cing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick someone up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it see­med to me per­fectly natu­ral. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they socia­li­zed? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expec­ted her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was gro­wing up, and it never see­med strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was having sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is something I want to write about, something I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Wor­king The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
mana­ged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­sel­ves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s han­ging crys­tals
scat­te­ring the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretching
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers tra­cing
the rid­ges of her ribs
as she tug­ged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there gro­wing soft,
squin­ting at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I nee­ded to learn
was on the inside.
I rip­ped the card­board open
and sat rea­ding on the bed’s edge,
thum­bing the foil-packed
lubri­ca­ted circle,
trying to visua­lize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slip­ped from my grasp
and lan­ded under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I pic­ked it up,
it was cove­red with the dust
and small par­tic­les of dirt
that settle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was knee­ling hard
bet­ween Beth’s open legs.
She rai­sed her­self on her elbows,
smi­ling that the second skin
we nee­ded to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the ins­truc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hol­ding water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile disap­pea­red
and bunching the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lif­ted
her butt onto the pillow
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and clim­bed up onto her,
trying with one hand
to be gra­ce­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to balance over her
without falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clam­ped shut and then
sta­ring wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I ente­red her again, trying
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nosing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I pla­ced my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wan­ted so much to be her choice,
I kis­sed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hollow of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giving way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hol­ding her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lif­ting heavy boxes.
She screa­med into the muscle
just above my collar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said nothing after­wards.
We didn’t cuddle
or smile at each other as we dres­sed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wan­ted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

Rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean

September 23rd, 2009 § 0

“My faith lies elsewhere.” When I finished rea­ding Joshua Kryah’s Glean (Night­boat Books, 2007)1 and star­ted thin­king about what I would write in my review of the book, that is the sen­tence that came to me, almost as if it had been wai­ting — who knows how long? — somewhere in the back or just below the sur­face of my cons­cious­ness for me to read the final lines of “Come Hither,” the last poem in Kryah’s book:

Who will draw you out, now
that you’ve given your­self over?

Who dis­solve
your body like a host on their tongue?

What stop­ping place will be pro­vi­ded, what
rest?

Where am I in this emer­gence—
who comes?

The “you” here is God, or, rather, the god that faith pla­ces on the other side of the absence that is all, accor­ding to the monotheism I was taught gro­wing up, human beings can ever really know of the one divine being. Yet the first two ques­tions here are not about this god per se, but rather about those whose task it is to draw this god out into the world and take him into them­sel­ves. In the face of the absence that is also the divine — and that is, the­re­fore, in itself perhaps the dee­pest and most fun­da­men­tal test of faith — who will those peo­ple be? At the same time, the spea­ker of the poem is clear that something is emer­ging — something which, based on the first two ques­tions, we can assume the spea­ker belie­ves to be God. Then, out of that cla­rity another ques­tion emer­ges. What is the speaker’s posi­tion in the emer­gence, not in rela­tion to it, as if he were stan­ding outside of it, watching what was hap­pe­ning, wai­ting to see the end result, but in it, as part of it, and once the spea­ker pla­ces him­self within this emer­gence, who is emer­ging is no lon­ger clear. The pos­si­bi­lity exists in the lan­guage that it is the spea­ker who is emer­ging, that he is watching him­self become, that he has dis­co­ve­red his god within him­self, that he has come to accept that he is him­self, somehow, within his god.

Ques­tions of faith have been impor­tant to me since I was a tee­na­ger and I belie­ved my future lay in the rab­bi­nate. When I set aside the faith that being a rabbi would have deman­ded of me, howe­ver, I did not set aside the strug­gle to come to terms with the final, indif­fe­rent and abso­lute absence that will fill the space where I used to be in the moment after my death. It is a mea­sure of Kryah’s suc­cess that, des­pite the fact my faith lies somewhere very other than his — and since this is a review of his book, I am not going to turn it into an essay about my own spi­ri­tua­lity — the poems in Glean nonethe­less con­fron­ted me with the ques­tion of just where, pre­ci­sely, my spi­ri­tua­lity does lie. In large mea­sure, the poems accom­plish this through metaphors that ground the issues they raise firmly in the body. Here, for exam­ple, are the first few lines of “My Easter:”

Breath­bloom, the resu­rrec­tion lily
spent on its stem,

the pale throat thrown back
announcing — what?

Behold, all at once,
the flesh-like knot
undone, each petal relea­sed, their beauty un–
mis­ta­kably and

already gone.

And here is “O Hie­roglyph (for­got­ten word, spread your lips around me)” in its entirety:

As if the wet vowel might speak.

As if, plun­de­red,
it might give up its blank stare, and
sud­denly, shud­der in my mouth.

We exchange a lan­guage
dumb as flesh, pres­sed into and brui­sed
beyond recog­ni­tion, its only res­ponse the black eye’s dull circle of speech.

Blue, blue-brown
each color off­set by the surroun­ding skin,
the cal­cite thought of your retur­ning again.

I can­not mus­ter
what I should have lost, and in the wish gai­ned
more stead­fast: your curio, what swings from a loc­ket upon my chest,

a mes­sage that now only speaks
with its fist.

The note I wrote to myself on the page below this poem says, simply, “Donne?” The fist in the final line reca­lled for me Holy Son­net #14, “Bat­ter my heart, three-personed God,” and, indeed, I found myself thin­king of Donne’s Holy Son­nets often while rea­ding Glean, so much so that I read through the sam­pling of them in the edi­tion of the Nor­ton Antho­logy that I have on my shelf before I sat down to write this review. Donne’s poems, too, are roo­ted in the body, though very dif­fe­rently than Kryah’s. For while Kryah metapho­ri­zes — if I can coin a term — the body, and the phy­si­cal world in gene­ral, to give pre­sence to the absence in the face of which he ques­tions, asserts and main­tains his faith, Donne posi­tions the body in his poems as Other to his god, whose pre­sence in the world the poems them­sel­ves — at least the ones I read — do not doubt for a minute. I also thought of Donne’s Holy Son­nets while rea­ding Glean because, des­pite the fact that Kryah’s poems are writ­ten in a very free verse — the sen­tence frag­ment and the uncon­ven­tio­nal spa­cing of the poems see­med to me just about the only two for­mal devi­ces used con­sis­tently throughout the book — his poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of lan­guage as something phy­si­cal, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savo­red and then released.

In all honesty, I don’t know that I will pick this book of poems up again. It has said to me what it has to say, and it’s not something I need to hear again. Still, I admire, deeply, the craft and com­mit­ment, the honesty and cou­rage that went into wri­ting it. It is the kind of book I think ever­yone should have to read once, the kind of book that those to whom it truly speaks will trea­sure for the rest of their lives.

  1. This review was ori­gi­nally pos­ted on a lite­rary blog that no lon­ger exists called The Great Ame­ri­can Pinup. My unders­tan­ding is that the blog was hac­ked and that attempts by the peo­ple who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuc­cess­ful. I am repos­ting the review here because I think the books are impor­tant enough that the review should con­ti­nue to be avai­la­ble.

Rea­ding Suheir Hammad’s Zaa­tar­Diva and Kazim Ali’s The Far Mosque

September 23rd, 2009 § 1

Talk about two very dif­fe­rent books by two very dif­fe­rent poets, but there are con­nec­tions, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side.1 I first met Suheir Ham­mad some years ago when she came to Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College (NCC), where I teach in the English Depart­ment, to give a rea­ding as part of a day-long pro­gram on the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict. The pro­gram was spon­so­red by NCC’s Inter­na­tio­nal Stu­dies Com­mit­tee and it gene­ra­ted, even in the plan­ning, a lot of con­tro­versy. I was not invol­ved in put­ting the day together, so I do not know the spe­ci­fics of went on, but I do know that the college admi­nis­tra­tion voi­ced con­cerns about ade­quate secu­rity, about who the pane­lists would be and whether a balan­ced view of the con­flict would be pre­sen­ted. What they meant by “balan­ced,” howe­ver, at least as I unders­tand it, was that no one who spoke for the Pales­ti­nian side should express views that were overtly hos­tile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that peo­ple repre­sen­ting the Israeli side might express views overtly hos­tile to Pales­ti­nians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the spea­kers was a woman repre­sen­ting a far-right Jewish orga­ni­za­tion — not Israeli, but Jewish — who spoke quite for­ce­fully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quo­ting from the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion,2 except that all the refe­ren­ces to Jews had been chan­ged to Arabs.

During lunch that day — her rea­ding was in the eve­ning — Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revi­si­ted)” a poem from her first book, Born Pales­ti­nian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the pre­vious semes­ter called Intro­duc­tion to World Jewish Stu­dies. The poem is a res­ponse to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 mas­sacre of 29 Mus­lims — appro­xi­ma­tely 100 were inju­red — in which the spea­ker, a woman, ima­gi­nes the vio­lence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flat­bush.” The poem is pain­ful to read, not only for the spe­ci­fic details of the vio­lence it desc­ri­bes, but also for the naked­ness of the rage it expres­ses. The spea­ker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel impli­cit in the details of what the woman desc­ri­bes how much she hates her­self for even ima­gi­ning that she would per­form those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my stu­dents, all of whom hap­pe­ned to be Jewish and most of whom came from con­ser­va­tive and ortho­dox reli­gious back­grounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly sur­pri­sed when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a simi­lar anger and that Suheir Ham­mad the­re­fore had every right to express her­self in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shoc­ked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave rea­dings. I don’t remem­ber her pre­cise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so vio­lent that she was not sure how her audien­ces would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that peo­ple nee­ded to hear, that she owed it to her­self and to her audien­ces to read it, pre­ci­sely because the pain and the vio­lence in the poem are so deeply embed­ded in the emo­tio­nal cen­ter of the con­flict bet­ween Israel and the Pales­ti­nians, and no one should be spa­red a con­fron­ta­tion with that center.

My own opi­nion is that, to the extent the spea­ker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City res­pon­si­ble for the views of Baruch Golds­tein and, by exten­sion, the poli­cies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more pre­cise, the spea­ker expres­ses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is com­prehen­si­ble, howe­ver, it is also an excu­sa­ble moment of Jew-hatred, no dif­fe­rent than the way, say, the rage of a Black South Afri­can during apartheid might be direc­ted at all South Afri­can whi­tes, des­pite the fact that there were many whi­tes in South Africa who oppo­sed apartheid. What mat­ters is whether the spea­ker, once she has cal­med down, takes res­pon­si­bi­lity for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remem­ber, frankly, whether Ham­mad takes on the ques­tion of that res­pon­si­bi­lity in any of the other poems in Born Pales­ti­nian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My ove­rall reco­llec­tion of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remem­ber a cou­ple of withe­ring poems pro­tes­ting the way Middle Eas­tern women are exo­ti­ci­zed in the US, and I remem­ber poems that were clearly inten­ded to con­front the rea­der with the phy­si­cal horrors of occu­pa­tion. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state expli­citly that I am not accu­sing Suheir Ham­mad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mis­take to con­fuse a poet with the spea­kers of her poems, but I have met her and tal­ked to her, and I just don’t think she har­bors that kind of hatred for anyone.) » Read the rest of this entry «

  1. This review was ori­gi­nally pos­ted on a lite­rary blog that no lon­ger exists called The Great Ame­ri­can Pinup. My unders­tan­ding is that the blog was hac­ked and that attempts by the peo­ple who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuc­cess­ful. I am repos­ting the review here because I think the books are impor­tant enough that the review should con­ti­nue to be avai­la­ble.
  2. The link is to an edu­ca­tio­nal page about the Pro­to­cols that con­tains a link to a pdf ver­sion of the text, if you want an html ver­sion click here

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