Poetry

A primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages.

A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or "regulated verse poem," a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.

This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.

Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville’s epic in bold new light

Come sail with I.

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.

This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.

Jennifer Clarvoe’s Invisible Tender is the first winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize for a book of poetry published each year by Fordham University Press in coordination with Fordham’s Poets Out Loud program. Poet J.D. McClatchy, the judge for the 1999 Prize, chose Invisible Tender from among nearly 500 manuscripts entered by poets from around the world. His introduction is included in the volume.

The poems collected in Invisible Tender chart the terrains of childhood recollection and adult loss, of meditation and celebration. Intensely lyrical, both employing and altering traditional poetic meters and forms, Clarvoe’s poems are rich in philosophical reflection in subjects ranging from art and, popular culture to the elusive languages of the natural world.

Composed of several distinct yet inter-woven long poems, On Generation & Corruption is structured around the conceits of location and dislocation, as it deconstructs a picture-postcard American town. Its title is a clue: in printer’s terms, each “generation” reproduced is more “corrupt” than the last. Through this metaphor, Chiusano alludes to the distance from confessional speech that the book embodies in its complex tales and Escher-like syntax.

from “daybook”


JULY 1
Bog. Spillway. River bank. Cow shit. Shade pools. Boot prints.
Tadpoles. Reed beds. Shallows. Eddies. Snags. Cottonmouths. Cobwebs.

JULY 2
The stare stares behind-the-back, bright, between butt-crack and
thigh. The stare widens into a paddle, wide and flat enough to make a
draft when it flaps. The stare picks its nose. The stare halfway wonders
why the closet door is only half-closed.

* * *

When ecstasy is parted from its practice, when rapture is forced to
choose, that’s me: the first efforts, independent principalities.

JULY 3
If I draw a hand, say, or a foot, I tow it into view. If I name, a slender
ankle, a napping neck, I pull it like a dove out of a derby, pigeon out of a
porkpie hat.

Julie Sheehan’s Thaw is the second winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize for a book of poetry published each year by Fordham University Press in coordination with Fordham's Poets Out Loud program. Marie Ponsot, the judge for the 2000 Prize, chose Thaw from among nearly 500 manuscripts entered by poets from around the world. Her introduction is included in the volume.

The landscape of Thaw is America but the vast field of language is bravely Shakespearian. Sheehan's poems roil through catalpa, maurade through familial and domestic brakes, and, ultimately, brim to the top of the old earthen pot. Everywhere the poems remind that the endless—were we truly able to grasp it—would astonish. Each poem celebrates the ingredients, practice, and serving up of the fugitive mortal banquet, from pudding to bone.

Winner of the 2001 Poets Out Loud Prize, Door to Door ranges from the wry romance of “Changing the Oil” (“You make love the way you change the oil in your Oldsmobile”) to the salesman in the title poem who sees “what the glacier sees in the onslaught of spring.” The poems stand at the crossroads of mystery and love, hoping to trade their soul for Federico García Lorca’s guitar, or perhaps Jimi Hendrix’.

In a stunning cycle of persona poems, Daneen Wardrop offers us a panoramic view of the inner lives of those forgotten among the violence and strife of the American Civil War: the nurse and the woman soldier, the child and the draftee, the prostitute, the black slave, and the Native American soldier. Each one speaks out to be seen and heard, bearing witness to the mundanity of suffering experienced by those whose presence was ubiquitous yet erased in the official histories of the War Between the States. Cyclorama takes its name from the theater-sized, in-the-round oil paintings popular in the late nineteenth century, and with each poem, Wardrop adds a panel to her expansive, engrossing portrait of the bloodshed and tears, the tedium and fear experienced by the Civil War living and the dying. With pathos and lyric force, she brings sharply into focus perspectives on an unfathomable experience we thought we already knew and understood.

from "Women's Sanitary Corps"

Sister, I link arms with you
as we enter this log-steepled tent,
white on the outside,
but on the inside the deep maroon
of thick-spackled, internal things.
How can it be
so simple here? Bed,
man-- bed, man--
where the pain leaves
no room for anything else.
My mouth is dry.
No, stay with me,
these sheet-smoothed
boys need us
with their nocturnal eyes,
not predatory but grieving,
as good animals the body,
not ready, not able to be ready.
La, where did they put
their good body?

A world of history is a world of destinations and possibilities. In Tin Can Tourist Scott Hightower draws from a legacy larger than the limits of personal history, body, and brand. From the harsh Protestant landscape of his native central Texas to the pageantry of the historical architecture of St. Maria in Trastevere, Rome, he persues the limit of the poet. Where exactly does one begin and the world start? Hightower reflects a world containing AIDS and cancer, Caravaggio and van der Werff. Nature, interpersonal relationships, and the culture of the world—from simple to extraordinary—are all fair game. His partaking, erotic self, in search of its own truest and most urgent expressions, takes seriously Blake’s warning of error that could reduce the human heart to a dull cog of a machine (Blake’s exact words are “a mill with complicated wheels.”)

The breadth and mastery of this awaited debut volume is matched by the poet’s insistence on the healing and transforming power of the human imagination. These are not notes from an artless heart—but observations from a simmering world.

This Minute is a connected whole, in which the verse is driven by strong intellectual excitement, evident in the energetic movement of the lines and in a vocabulary that switches easily from the colloquial to the exact. There is an urgent voice, felt close at hand. And there is a skill in handling and matching the size of a poem to its subject that makes each invigorating to read—one arrives slightly out of breath. These poems convey a “metaphysical” meaning as well as a bodily intimacy. They are luminous, discovering rather than manufacturing their metaphors as the most exact way of speaking.

The Early History of Photography

The first photographer’s sister spent the summer
watching the leaf-imprints disappear.
Just like life, she wrote to him, but a little slower;
like a chemical recipe for gratitude.

Shhh, the first photographer said, hovering
over the silver salts arrayed like listening devices.
Don’t let the sun know what we’re doing.
This is a god we can capture and he’ll never know it,
never miss these little fistfuls of glitter, dumbed down.

Dear sister, you must know the miracle is in the stoppage.
Motion is cheap and plentiful;
standing still is what costs and costs.


Jean Gallagher is Associate Professor of English at Polytechnic University in New York City. She is the author of The World Wars Through the Female Gaze.

To read a sample of Jean Gallagher’s poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com

Natural Trouble continues Scott Hightower’s investigation begun in Tin Can Tourist . Themes of inheritance extend through changes of landscape and bad weather to hungers, urgencies, inequities, and bereavements. Hightower also reminds us that the practice of writing is at the core of democracy: poetry seeks a foundation in the truth of the individual, guaranteed and restored through the integrity of language.

The Glazier’s Country is a book of history and ethics. The poems follow the life of a survivor of Eastern European pogroms, but the theme is larger: notions of victimhood as an identity, moral certitude, and the differences between justice and revenge are questioned and explored. The poems’ formal qualities mirror the fractured lives of the people in them: seemingly disparate voices break in, words are scattered across the page. But the ultimate message of The Glazier’s Country is an insistence that we can choose wholeness, “choose good / solo & each day / over faith / over clan or country / it is an art / & each day again.”

Hearsay celebrates a woman's life from childhood to middle age, including
the often-ignored subject of work, with a voice that is sometimes tender, sometimes whimsical, but always strong. The winner of the 2003 Poets Out Loud Prize, this collection "proffers craft and vision; it begins, one might say, in delight and ends in wisdom" (Robert Wrigley, judge).
To read a sample of her poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com.

Whether

Aligned with the mechanism
whereby the spirit is borne aloft
through song comes again

the question: whether. And not soothed
so much as opened by the boy
soprano’s Sanctus, what moves

in the mind as the throat constricts
in sympathy, one note peeled
from the last, fine as paper slipped

from a garlic bulb, veined,
translucent, is whether—as if
wound through the spiraling

amplitude, purpled, fretted,
one voice suspended
in concentration of prayer or terror

wills itself above faltering,
more perfect since time must
soon break it. And made it.

Whether and by whatever impossible
arrangement of stars, harmonies,
correspondences through which

the music finds the spirit and like
a blade slits and releases,
circulates the question

through the phrase, the delicate
engine—as if it matters: the song
rises, everything goes with it.

The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and
memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.

Corinna, A-Maying the Apocalypse simultaneously celebrates and laments that “we are but decaying.” Betraying a love of old poems and symbols and new words and forms, these are poems where “the moon’s spritzing its perfumes and the phlegm is thick and fast” over cities and Starbucks and suburbs. The poet is in love with the rhythm of the man-made world, and “the rhythm is so strong sometimes / it blows up the room.”

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes:

I like objects for company,

to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum
and
I amass details,
jade bracelet, her animal-print
dresses, an oval coral cameo.

How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave?

In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it.

And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores [dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko’s red: his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race [hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these “invisible” cultural borders repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong. She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at “home.” She is cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is [neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko’s Seagram murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.” The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she ultimately wants to “acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed” so that she is not held to false measures of “purity.” Continuous Frieze Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of “hybrid” and embrace the monstrous self.

The Hello Delay asks what happens around the saying of a thing and the receiving. Inside and outside of our daily communications, there are events, there are silences, déjà-vus, and intentions. These poems question the determined nature of our relationships to one another: What if this territory isn’t familiar after all?

I Will Whisper
it to you so that someone else may hear it. whether or not it’s heard by you, whether or not I hear it myself—that it is heard by a stranger.
stranger and stranger. get out the fires and fire hoses, put away the stars. daybreak breaks into noon breaks into after, and after is a song, and singing makes you calmer. that’s okay but what are they saying down the street and lost on you, lost on you, lost on you.

In this human ecology, language is king. In this book, familiarity resides in memory or song, but perhaps nothing is so familiar as the experience of the present. What is it then to be present, when meaning persists among us? We are more than what we say and what we think, but these words are the lucite passages we travel to that aggregate.

In this place where understanding means being wrong together or just pretending to be right, Choffel’s poems honor the grandeur, the danger, and the mediocrity in manifesting what we make up as we go along. The Hello Delay might be experimental, but it is mostly experiential. It calls us out not to see how we will answer but to linger in the gaps of our refrain.

The Revolver in the Hive takes place in the aftermath of tragedy, where grief is recognizable but contorted into unsettling forms. In this remarkable debut, Nicolas Hundley’s poems chronicle with honesty—and often bitter humor—a harrowing journey through loss, death, and mourning. A widow “hauls a sack filled with the
limbs of statues,” and mourners become “familiar as a pet is familiar, returning years later, / stitched up from experimentation.”

Juxtaposing such incongruous images, Hundley creates uncanny worlds in which antiquated objects and characters coexist with those from a sinister future, in which wound-dressers and alchemists coexist alongside “heretical machines enacting misdeeds.” Religion, fatherhood, and masculinity are all explored in Hundley’s tales: A bicycle becomes the subject of worship, inventors act as parents to their machines, and an industrialized human reproduction takes place in factories.

In Hundley’s hands, words clang together in startling ways, and the repetition of phrases and images leads to unexpected transformations. The poems brilliantly use dream logic to fuel their imagery, even as they call upon a variety of poetic forms—from the prose poem to the sonnet—to evoke literary traditions that recall the gothic
and the surreal. Moving and strange, Hundley’s poems are unforgettable.

Materialist, feminist, queer, hybrid—channeling the sensibilities of Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Castellanos, Mary Kelly, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Patssi Valdez, Bernadette Mayer—Carroll’s second collection of prose poems and wordimages contemplates the cost of living in an era of “cruel optimism.” Procedurally
formalizing self-editing and indecision, Carroll undocuments the quotidian’s shades of gray/grey, the contingencies of post-Fordist relationality in the pre-Occupy window of time between September 11, 2001, and the 2008 recession. “Cognative dissonance” meets “the rite to be a citizen.” “What is the difference between
neoliberalism and globalization?” tempers the countercultural question “And, me?” In Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography, Carroll muses, “Like Sammy and Rosie, Fannie and Freddie got laid.”

Off-grid, she mixes metaphors, criss-crossing the borders erected between the lyric and the conceptual “I.” She crosses out the dividing lines elected to maintain performance art, visual culture, and poetry as discrete, clairvoyant media of social engagement. She layers jokes, puns, riddles, platitudes, hackneyed phrases, adages, boilerplate, buzzwords, mottos, proverbs, rubber-stamp rhetoric, slogans, threadbare phrases, trite remarks, and truisms over one another to provide a portrait of the contemporary American landscape as experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. Carroll offers an elaborate palimpsest of text and images—text that is often shaded, crossed out, or printed over other text or images.

Claudia Rankine, who chose the volume for Fordham University’s 2011–12 Poets Out Loud Prize, succinctly sings its praises: “The intelligence, compassion, and dimensionality of this collection place it in a category all its own—it belongs to and is crafted out of the psychic anxieties of the twenty-first century. I, for one, was both
exhilarated and humbled by Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post–9/11 Pornography.”

Gray Matter navigates the slippage between waking and dreaming, thinking and being, reflecting the dynamic interplay of inner and outer worlds. The poems unravel the constructs of identity and the strange, subjective flow of experience as it intertwines with place, from the rugged American backcountry to vibrant terrains abroad—always tethered to childhood’s grounding pull. A celebration of the unknown, the poems honor the innate curiosity that drives scientists, philosophers, and poets to pursue the mysteries of the brain. “At the heart of all of the questions in Gray Matter,” writes Susan Wheeler, “is the dance, the negotiation, between imagination and science, perception and thought.”

Spoken on the margin between death and birth, reading and writing, separation and union, the poems of Errings address the absent—a lost leader, a remote love, a protege not yet born—and across those distances delineate the motion of consciousness as it passes from one body to the next. “Videos of Fish,” the opening sequence, speaks to the spirit of the poet’s late father, adapting devices from Dante, Tibetan metaphysical
philosophy, and the biomechanics of the most primitive of vertebrate bodies, the fish, to envision paths of the disembodied soul. “How difficult it is to remain one person,” the poet claims, echoing Czesław Miłosz; in its progress between persons, the collection’s regular shifts in mode and form include the purgatorian tercet,
the Japanese poetic diary, didactic verse, the Persian ghazal, the erasure, and the miniature.

THE READER
Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field.


Each year he grew another soul, oblong, slightly pointed at the end, like
an oar, its surface turned to the light.

Blacken now and lift your news into the air.

Footdreams and Treetales is a collection of ninety-two poems spanning several decades. Like paintings that attempt to render visible the invisible, the poems reflect Wolfson’s interests in philosophy, the history of religions, and, in particular, the mystical dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

Although explicit references to the divine are rarely found in the poems, they issue from an encounter with the mystery of transcendence, performatively embodying the dialectic of concealment and disclosure.

Seeking to articulate the unsaying that makes possible all saying, a response always on the way, a word as yet unspoken, these poems can be imagined in liturgical terms. They do not utter words of conventional prayer but are a contemplative gaze at what eludes contemplation—a present that comes to be in the future awaiting its past. For Wolfson, the poem is an opening to time, which is, at once, an embrace of life and a preparation for death.

friday’s hymn
pour oil on my head,
before the burning ends,
let us rise to count the minutes,
to dot the hours,
let us rise to wake the children
who must bury the dead.
night approaches day,
neither black nor white,
her sun is my moon.

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side.

Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.”

The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity.

Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.