By Amos Jasper Wright IV

Featured Image: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau

Forty days passed without landing a sale. For a while, I felt sorry for myself, and then self-pity shifted gears and boiled into a rage that curdled everything   I touched. The BP spill down in the Gulf had put a damper on auto sales. The economy in general was in shambles, but this town hadn’t prospered much since the Red Mountain cut. Meanwhile, we’re dumping good, hard-earned USD into foreign countries and our Harvard-educated Kenyan president was doing all  of jackshit about it. Instead of buying new cars, people just drive them longer. Used to I could sell forty cars in a month. You don’t need a Harvard degree to do that.

When DOT took a slice out of Red Mountain, most of downtown Birmingham reverted to a giant used-car lot, a smooth asphalted prairie where trash and news blew before the winds. I managed a downtown lot on 20th Street. My office was in a portable trailer stacked on cinder blocks. Long strands of razor wire outlined the perimeter of the lot like a concentration camp. The warehouse next door had probably been abandoned since I got my driver’s license. Sale banners flapped and whipped in the hot winds and the flat air in that metal can was tight as my collar. We parked cars on the sidewalk. On Saturdays, when the urban prairieland was empty and dead, looking more and more like a southern Detroit, instead of getting hung up on by irate voices, I played lonely games of golf, as blue and red klaxons dopplered by.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “Tingletangle” by Edvard Munch

I’m not like those crazy people.
The people that watch me
are real. I can see them.

Never mind the mailman. That blue coat
nearly swallows him. You never know
what’s under there—and he’s, well,
rather strange looking,

like a boy with a bald spot
bent over thick black shoes
and that bag he cradles

like a smooth gray animal
he does not recognize
is dead. Sometimes I believe

he really is a little boy
and I have to stop myself
from running after him.

Isn’t the mind amazing?
I’d like to know
what he’s doing when he’s not
walking through front lawns

or talking to the man
across the street. I’d like to know
what he’s delivering,
if it will require a deep breath

and more wine
than I’m willing to drink. If it’s even worth

the paper cut I’ll get
opening the envelope. And what about
that man across the street?

By Ron Padgett

Featured Image: “Antique Illustration from The Grammar of Ornament” by Owen Jones

I don’t remember who suggested the idea of an evening of spontaneous poetry collaborations by Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch, but I think it came up during a taxi ride the three of us took, six or so months before the event, in which Allen and Kenneth started joking about and even parodying each other’s work. This playful conversation culminated in their public performance of Wednesday evening, May 9, 1979, at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

As the date approached, both Allen and Kenneth—who had never taken part in such an event—started to express some misgivings, as did I. A month before the event, I wrote to them, “I’ve been wondering about some details of your May 9 extravaganza here, and I thought I would ask you about the format of the evening. Do you want to set any rules? Or would it be better to set none and just let fly?” Both poets thought it best to have some structure to work with, but they left it up to me. So I drew up a list of poetry “assignments” to surprise them with.

By Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon

Featured Image: “The Seasons” by Alphonse Maria Mucha

As we wrote “Class Action,” our first poem together (alternating one line at a time, on email), Amy noticed we were writing in abba rhyme, which gave her the idea of writing tangentially about ABBA, the pop group. This lucky association led us to begin a series of poems with two constraints: the stanzas had to be written in abba rhyme, with a mandatory mention of ABBA, the singing group, in each. As we built up our confidence, we sometimes added a third constraint. In one poem, each line had to end in a long “o” sound; and in another, each line had to contain a palindrome, as ABBA is a palindrome. Although we stuck with the rhyme scheme (with allowances for occasional, or more-than-occasional, slant rhymes), we liberated ourselves from metrical restrictions. While Denise is comfortable in the prose poem and free verse, Amy tends to write almost unconsciously in a loose iambic pentameter or tetrameter. But we didn’t insist on uniformity of rhythm. This gave us the leeway to go with the flow, quoting lyrics or song titles, creating dialogue between characters, and injecting other bits of pop culture into the poems.

By Ron Horning and David Lehman

Featured Image: “Four Crowned Cockatoos” by Samuel Jessurun de Masquita

We met late in 1972, when we lived two blocks from each other on Riverside Drive. Though Ron’s room in his apartment was easily quieter than David’s room in “The Barracks,” thus named because of the decibel levels achieved by the inhabitants (David’s roommates were a jazz disc jockey and poet, a veteran of the Marine Corps just back from Vietnam, and a TV-watching, football-twirling specialist in East Asian studies) and their many guests, Ron’s room was also less private, more subject to interruption, and did not have its own bathroom. The first poem we wrote together was written at the Barracks, and so were most of the others in 1973 and 1974. From almost the beginning, the idea was to write a book of poems, but the book never really gelled, either because there were too many other things to think about or because we didn’t know what, if anything, the poems and lines we were typing and writing added up to. We had a working title, or at least we toyed with some candidates. (A Phone of One’s Own captured David’s fancy for a time.) Many poems we started were left unfinished, and even the attempt to write poetry together stopped abruptly in 1975, when we both married for the first time, David in January, Ron in July.

By Patty Mitchell

Featured Image: “Little Penguin” by Elizabeth Gould

Located in Athens, Ohio, Passion Works Studio supports collaborations between artists with and without developmental disabilities. The studio began as an experiment in 1996: what would happen if I set up a collaborative art studio within a sheltered workshop, a supported work place for people with developmental disabilities? A grant from the Ohio Arts Council allowed us to put the idea in motion, and through additional grants and sales a second professional artist was added to the staff, Wendy Minor. Wendy and I brought to the table our understanding of materials and our art process; the participating individuals brought with them their unique way of experiencing the world and a natural ability of fearlessly jumping into art-making. For fifteen years now, Passion Works has offered a relaxed and informative environment for people to collaborate and investigate ideas. The synergy of excitement and discovery is conveyed in the resulting artwork: playful, vibrant, unpredictable.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Image: “Path Through the Fields from Momoyogusa-Flowers of a Hundred Generations” by Kamisaka Sekka

Many years ago—and I really don’t want to remember exactly how young we were—Stephen Dunn, a friend but not yet a collaborator, was traveling from New Jersey to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He stopped for the night at our house. During the course of the evening I recall bemoaning the fact that I hadn’t written a poem—maybe not even tried to write one—in over a year. I had writer’s block, I announced, as if it were an identifiable disease. I had not yet learned the wisdom of William Stafford’s famous—or infamous—remark that there is no such thing as writer’s block; all you have to do is lower your standards.

Of course Stafford didn’t mean you ultimately aim for less. You just have to give yourself a break to get started, and accept whatever occurs to you because “something always occurs” to us, as Stafford says in his essay, “A Way of Writing.” Let the act of writing carry you beyond your first inevitably dull words, to better words, better sentences that may give you access to something waiting in your mind “ready for sustained attention.” This is the writer’s daily work—putting some words down, then rearranging them, adding, then subtracting, looking for a shape, a focus, “the poem’s informing principle,” as Stephen Dunn puts it in his wonderful essay, “The Good, the Not So Good.” If that’s inspiration— and I like to think so—it’s earned by the work of writing, not given as a gift of the gods, like an autumn leaf fluttering down significantly on the poet’s head.

by Tracey Knapp

Featured image: Félix Vallotton. Five O’Clock, Intimacies VII (Cinq Heures, Intimités VII), 1898. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

All those times I crossed the bridge to see you
and not one lap dance. We haven’t held hands
since that time in the rain forest, chanting Lord
knows what in Sanskrit. I saw my first wild boar there
but even he took off for the brush. Someone always ends
the moment. Another call dropped on your iPhone,
the cosmic forces at work. My dog sighs and stares
at my flip-flop from his pillow. At work, the office
is separated into orderly earth-toned cubes.
My friends, we gather here today
to sit exactly ten feet apart. I am exactly
one hour away from being drunk enough
to call my psychic in Tuscaloosa, two
commercials away from another headache
and Nova on TV. The universe expands, shifting
its contents accordingly. There was a time when
we were closer. Helen Keller learned to speak
by holding her teacher’s face, feeling the words form
and fall out of her mouth, the throat buzzing with thought.
I also like to touch people while they talk,
but not about professional sports. I love
and hate eye contact, don’t you? One glance
from the Girl Scout and I get the thin mints. I don’t get
all that crap about divine connection,
but there is something to be said about
a collective consciousness if you consider how
everyone likes vampires again. If I had a spirit
animal, I think it would be the wild boar.
We never talk about it anymore and I miss that
about us. The only thing that could prevent
a greater distance forming between two stars
hurtling though space would be some entropic net,
a giant wet towel. While you’re crossing
the state line on your last gallon of gas,
a streetlight deteriorates over the Safeway
parking lot. A shopping cart rolls
into my Dog Chow and the whole bag
splits open, the pellets skidding and colliding
across the pavement, two strangers scrambling
to gather them, to fill the bag together, to make it right.

by Rodney Jones

Featured image: Gustave Courbet. The Source of the Loue, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A few sonnets about nature and the Greek gods.
Many free-verse poems in all lowercase letters.
Huey wrote of madness, Maddox of possums.
John played the sadness of empty stadiums.
Two berets, one silver-tipped cane, tweedy blazers.
In most Natalie poems, she took off her clothes.
The year of the Tet offensive. Wallace in Montgomery.
We read James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton.
One Friday an ex-guidance counselor from Jasper
leapt through the window of the cafeteria, shouting
“I am the son of Jesus Christ! Behold the rapture!”
But nothing much happened in Poetry Writing 301
until Walter C. Avery wrote that a black swan,
born in the infralapsarian brain of a garbage dump,
would crack the codes of the Southern Baptists.
And for this jack-surreal, mildly apocalyptic truffle
was taken for near-genius material, practically
a second Edgar Allan Poe, until Sam Maisel
submitted his “Poem for The Worksheet Typist,”
which made everyone consider how scandalous
it must have seemed for her, a local woman,
a seamstress, and mother of Christian athletes,
to run across “I know you think you’ve seen it all before,
but this is duck rape, feathered love.” And some
in the critique afterward, praised the line-endings;
one person even mentioned “The Second Coming,”
which, admittedly, made me blanch with envy,
so I wanted to say something about how
sometimes the subject is not what you think
or the ones you imagine you are talking about
stand abruptly and begin to talk back to you,
but spring was bearing down on the workshop,
ripping out pages, grinding the opinions to nubs.
So much energy in the streets—demonstrations,
happenings, awakenings—so many instances
of sudden and involuntary enlightenment,
though mostly my friends and I spent our nights
on Sixth Street drinking beer at The Chukkar
or crouched in a huddle around a record player.
By the time I thought of Sam’s duck again,
May had slipped into June and June into July,
and what is poetry in a copper tubing factory?
A cloud would fan out around the tubes
as the crane lifted them from the soaping vats
after they had softened in the furnace.
My job was to crimp a point on each of them.
Then the next man would carefully run them
through a die. Down the line I could see
the process repeating: the furnace, the point,
the die—the tubes and men diminishing.
All night the saws screeched and whined.
The pointers clattered. The press roared.
That was the beauty of it. You could sing.
No one would hear. You could say anything.

by Mark Kraushaar

Feature image: Berthe Morisot. Forêt de Compiègne, 1885. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Saxophone, and trombone, trumpet,
trumpet, trumpet. And there’s Roxanne
and Dick, and Betty Mayfield and the Laurie girls.
And there’s George Betts on clarinet.
Of course, it’s so jerky and grainy though,
which is just as it should be,
and here we suddenly actually
are, or, and isn’t that
Malcolm Sproul and Claudia French and isn’t that,
or wouldn’t that be Dick Benck, and there’s
Kit Powell, and Kathy Frey.
And now, somehow, look,
someone in somebody’s yard,
a boy in a foot-deep plastic pool,
skidding sideways and pitching forwards,
euphoric in jaunty fedora, a giddy private eye
in blue shirt and shorts,
waves once and as his mother laughs
she turns, and with her, wistful, and trying,
and troubled by longings, here’s
Jim Jahovic with my best
friend’s strange father Dr. Callahan, and quickly
someone else, and someone and someone and then,
no, yes, that’s, that’s What’s-Her-Name,
judicious and afflicted, nice enough,
yes, and yet, there’s a way she tips forward,
or inwardly anyway, as if picking up the faintest
oracular tappings.
There’s the Roundies and the Levi boy.
And there’s that flirty, sparking Mrs. Archer—
and I want to run it all again.
Oh friends, where were we going
in that shaky dawn?

by Mark Kraushaar

Feature image: James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water, 1872. The Art Institute of Chicago.

My wife was nodding, Yes, sure, and, Yes,
and I was thinking of my parents, their sadness
and silence, their every evening’s weeping,
whispery buzz beside the stove.
My wife was nodding, Yes,
and leaning forward when the pastor said, You’re
like two ships passing in the night, and he seemed so
pleased I thought, So one’s a brig-sloop the other a tug?
Or one’s a tanker the other a trawler?
Troop ship and submarine?
Grain barge and gunboat?
I was quiet though.
It was August,
and there were two fans working,
and I thought of those salt-washed gray gulls
with their weird pink feet, and I thought of moonlight
shooting down the starways and cooling the decks.
I thought of two cruise ships next,
couples waving by the railings,
the faintest, farthest sounds of bands and laughter.
But there was nothing funny here.
He was talking or maybe she was, but
here we were, the two of us, our long, horizontal
journey almost over, no frenzied waves,
no reckless wind.
We were quiet, and she was crying,
or we both were, but we were perfectly still.

by Jeffrey Harrison

Feature image: Alfred Stieglitz. Car 2F-77-77, 1935. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I’m learning to be a Buddhist in my car,
listening to a book on tape. One problem
is that, before I’ve gotten very far,

my mind gradually becomes aware
that it has stopped listening, straying from
the task of becoming a Buddhist in my car.

I’m also worried that listening will impair
my driving, as the package label cautions,
but I haven’t noticed that, at least so far.

In fact, I may be driving with more care.
There’s a sensation of attentive calm
that’s part of becoming a Buddhist in your car.

A soothing voice drones on until the car
is transformed into a capsule of wisdom
traveling at high speed, and you feel far

from anywhere but where you really are . . .
which is nowhere, really. The biggest problem
is getting the Buddhism out of your car
and into your life. I’ve failed at that so far.

by Jeffrey Harrison

Feature image: Adriaen van de Velde. Pastoral Landscape with Ruins, 1664. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I saw Antonioni’s The Passenger in September or October 1976, at the beginning of my freshman year at Columbia. It was the first “art house film” I ever saw, well before I’d heard that term. I was from Cincinnati, where apparently they didn’t have such things. I had just turned nineteen, or was about  to. I was taking a writing class with Kenneth Koch, discovering Frank O’Hara and Rimbaud, and doing everything I could to peel or dissolve the suburban Midwestern scales from my eyes. In that pursuit, this movie was as important as the LSD I would drop for the first time a few weeks later. Not that it was hallucinatory—just the opposite, in fact . . . though in both cases, perhaps, it was “the visuals” that I liked best.

The film was playing at an auditorium on the Barnard campus, and I remember walking over there alone, being completely amazed by what I saw, and hurrying back to my Spartan dorm room to write excitedly about it in a notebook that is now long gone. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I know it wasn’t focused on Jack Nicholson, who plays a television reporter disillusioned with his life and work. Nor did I write much about the plot involving switched identities, riveting though it was. If I wrote about these things at all, it would have had to do with the way Antonioni de-emphasized Nicholson’s movie-star status and took the weight off a plot that would have been handled ponderously in a Hollywood movie, accompanied by ridiculous, tension-building background music. (I’d seen Jaws just the year before, which suddenly felt like ages ago.)

by George Bilgere

Feature image: John Clerk of Eldin. Sheriff Hall, n.d. The Art Institute of Chicago.

I saw No Country for Old Men (Academy Award winner,  2008) ten times  on the big screen at close to twenty bucks a pop (including popcorn by the bushel and cola by the quart). If that ain’t obsession, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones’s oracular Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, it’ll do till the obsession gits here.

When the movie left the theaters I bought the DVD and raised my madness to a new level by slipping the disk into my stereo and listening to it. Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue, as adapted to the screen by the Coen brothers, has an understated lyricism and humor, thrillingly true to the laconic rhythms of the southwest (I lived in Oklahoma for a few years and I know my laconic rhythms). In fact, the soundtrack is one of the film’s most striking features, which is odd, given that there is no music whatsoever. Just the pitch-perfect dialogue and the silence of the plains, where the smallest sounds—the squeaking of a hinge, the unscrewing of a light bulb—acquire an ominous eloquence.

By Lloyd Schwartz

Feature image: P. Roberts. Allum Bay, c. 1794. The Art Institute of Chicago.

It’s probably hard to remember, but there once was a time when Hollywood took for granted from its audience a certain level of cultural knowledge. I mean high culture. Art. Literature. Classical music. My favorite example of this assumption occurs in a 1937 romantic comedy-drama called Angel, a generally overlooked film by the great German-born director Ernst Lubitsch, still admired for his inimitable “touch” in such stylish masterpieces as The Merry Widow, Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka (“Garbo laughs!”), and The Shop Around the Corner. His earlier Lady Windermere’s Fan, based on Oscar Wilde’s play but without any of Wilde’s dialogue (just as my nominee for the greatest Shakespeare movie, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, hasn’t a line of Macbeth), might be the most sophisticated silent film ever made.

In Angel, the glamorous heroine, played by Marlene Dietrich, perfectly cast, is married to a British diplomat (the touchingly stolid Herbert Marshall) who devotes more time to the League of Nations than to his wife. She loves him, but is frustrated by how much his desire to save the world from war   has blinded him to his need to save their marriage. So she slips off to Paris to visit an old friend, a Grand Duchess (Laura Hope Crews—soon to be Gone with the Wind’s Aunt Pittypat) who runs a social (very social) club where people connect anonymously (there’s a delicate post-Production Code innuendo that Dietrich may have been an active member of this “private club” before her marriage). On this impulsive visit to Paris, she meets at the club Melvyn Douglas, who instantly falls for her. Hard. Since she refuses to give him her name, he calls her “Angel.” Their negotiation for their first rendezvous has some of the film’s most deliciously teasing double-entendres (screenplay by Samson Raphaelson). But Dietrich becomes frightened by the intensity of this fling and disappears, returning to London without even saying goodbye, leaving Douglas no way to reach her.