Now that I am officially unable to be a Yale Younger Poet I must be careful and not come off as the fox. It would be insanely easy to say “well, I didn't want to be that sort of poet anyway.” What sort? “Um, you know, a successful poet.” Of course I did. I had no idea how to do it, granted, but there have been numerous times in my life when I bought into the idea that success meant three things: 1) winning cool sounding awards, like the Yale Younger Poet prize, 2) being able to go into any Barnes and Noble in America and find my book in the poetry section, and 3) always taking the Garfunkel comma the Poet approach: use the word like it is a new last name. Note that nowhere is there any mention of how to judge function, how to critique the creative act that defines what a poet does. Ginsberg said, “POET is PRIEST” but we don't believe in religion, we believe in celebrities and that is what I assumed a poet was, a literary celebrity.

Except what does that mean? Regardless of how you feel about other art forms at least many in America have a set of rules the general public can follow to understand how things are judged. You would never get anyone in the fashion industry saying, “all fashion is beyond critique” as I've heard it said with poetry. No, darlings, you will get laughed out the door if you are trying to get to Bryant Park with that attitude. As Mz. Heidi Klum puts it on Project Runway, “One day you are in, and the next you are out.” Auf-Wiedersehen! At least we like to think the judges on that show are looking at the work in question, not the personality of the artist behind it. Over the years people have tried to take a similar poetry as reality TV show approach and it might work momentarily (Poetry Slams being a good example) but poetry, as an art form, doesn't require the sort of materialism other art requires, poets don't need a 30-minute shopping spree at Mood with a budget of $200 and two days to complete their poem in. It's an intellectual activity, which is what frustrates the critics. It's so nebulous. Instead, they try to judge a poet by other things, like performance when reading up on stage, which again fails since that's not poetry, that's acting. Then they start floundering about, defining poetry with lines like, “Poetry should be an extension of a life well or dangerously or doggedly lived.” Or, “poetry is made by people who want (or need) to make poetry.” As the younger generation would say, WTF? These aren't artistic manifestos, they're not even greeting card pap. They mean nothing. All art, everywhere, is made by people who want/need to make it. That is the biggest problem with any American Poetry criticism, no one has any idea what an American Poet is, let alone if s/he is any good. And no one will. How do you define success? Jim Behrle writes:

“It’s not enough to merely have [other poets] like you—like is not a strong enough emotion to propel you anywhere …. Fear is one of humanity’s great motivators. Fear equals Respect. And Success. Most poets are desperate for any kind of foothold in the genre, any sign at all that they are making progress upward toward their dreams of tweed, tenure, and cultural domination.”

I adore Behrle and I am glad to see he is getting steady work. I recall watching him a few years ago on VH1's “Can't Get a Date/ Vulgarian Make-Over” where it was revealed that he posted nude photos of himself on his blog, rated photos of girls he found attractive and, apparently, had terribly, terribly smelly feet. His shtick was being snarky about other poets, from his “What the hell is up with your author photo?” to little cartoons of animals claiming they got a chance to speak at Robert Creeley's funeral. But snark gets old really, really fast and even with all his winking and “this is how the system works” asides he never really says anything other than American Poetry is a cult of personality and here is what you can do to join in. But again, that's not poetry he's talking about, that's being what we call here in the Rust Belt a snob.

One assumption I hear all the time is that American poets aren't real poets or somehow their output is less than what we imagine poets living in other countries/ time periods/ dimensional worlds experience and do. “if these are our creators/ please, please give me something else,” Bukowski writes. And isn't it mind-bogglingly easy to say that? That's the coward's way out because that is the reaction we say to everyone who hasn't published a book and wants to write poetry or has published a book or simply had the misfortune of walking by a bookstore. Collins, Ashbery, the girl in your English Literature class: they are all criticized for being, or not being, a celebrity.

And its here where the entire thing falls apart for me. If you are simply going to judge the poet and not their poetry that's fine but be honest about what you are doing. The older I get the more I enjoy random strangers emailing me something they have written because that's joy. That's why I keep this blog going and why I love open mic poetry readings: anyone can do it. Poetry readings, the Internet, verse in all its forms and shapes and sounds, this is small town democracy in action. This is a world where we all get our 5 minutes up in front of a live audience and best of all we all cheer for each other because, as much as The Best American Poetry anthologies hate to admit it, we are a world of poets more less of equal caliber. You and me. I love that. The only difference between the anthologized poets and everyone else is that they have literary agents. You can get one too, if you really want. I don't know, I've never taken that route, I would be curious to hear if it helped them write better poetry.

Plus, it's really easy to write good poetry. People do it every day around the world with great success. I say this because, after all, no one has put forth what makes a poem good outside the general criteria all art is subjected to (see: duende). And if no one has a definition then you can't say Joseph Auslander's poetry is somehow less than Leonie Adams' because, what? one wrote in sonnets and another villanelles and somehow one form trumps another? (hell, they were both Poet Laureates of America but who remembers that?) And if you do run into anyone who says differently, that says American Poetry belongs in the hands of a select few, or that we have too many MFA Programs in America, too many poets writing (or any other bizarre anti-intellectual claim) they are either the editors of The American Poetry Review or trying to sell you something. Like the song says, “why don't you all f-f-fade away” and we all will. Believe me, we all will.

You can listen to her recording here: «SHAMHAT». What fun and thank you ever so much!

Shamhat

I grow tired of their gossip. They condemn
me. What fool would listen to such stories
told by men? What did you think? None of them
have had to offer up their own bodies.
Men change so little. You hear “temple whore”
and grin. Enough. Already you displease.
The truth is this: when I walk through that door
I am not I. She claims me. Her furies
and her passions are mine. Just how many
of you are connected to the Divine?
Just how many of you even believe?
Not one? At least I have that dignity
to be her daughter. I know what is mine;
a faith deeper than what you can conceive.

I could listen to Janis all day long. Her backup band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, though, never pleases. This video is a good example. The first 3 minutes and 20 seconds of the folktune Coo Coo don't even have her singing. Some unwashed hippie with no vocal range sings with a voice that makes Bob Dylan's sound like a heavenly choir. But that's the tastes of Baby Boomers for you, man.

I am amazed that in an age where Hollywood cranks out endless biopics on every warm body under the sun no one has brought this woman to back to life (or what passes for it up on the silver screen).

But this really isn't about any of that. I was reading Apparition (Favorite Poem) by Mark Doty and marveling at how it's rather Methuselahish to claim that the younger sprat poets just don't “get” the good poems in the same way he does. “The old words are dying” Doty begins but salvation is at hand in the form of some hayseed youth with “loping East Texas vowels” reading “without irony” the famous Shelley poem. See? Texans can read! It's satire, riffing on a line by Stephen Colbert. Doty then closes the poem by simply quoting the good part of Ozymandias, which feels like cheating.

When I first started writing poetry a comment by my mother seems like good advice here too: “When the quote you are using is better than the poem you are writing why read the poem at all?” Reading this particular poem (which was included in The Best of American Poetry 2009 “without irony” as well) was a lot like watching the video posted above: sure, everyone gets their turn at the microphone, but sometimes we still have to wait until the end to get to the good stuff.

Just stop and explain why we're acting
like this? Huh. Eve in the Garden. That's why
we have this Virgin and Whore thing going?
Sucks to be you. That's why we're screwed up, high
on meth or sleeping with (ugh) God knows what
ate up Janis, fucked up on tequila.
This is the ease in which we love: faggot,
dyke and endless breeders. Mamacita,
bless me. I love them all. If love is more
or less letting go why do we still cling
onto this odd myth that calls women whore?
turns sex into smut? this world bristling
with hate. Even then I'll take smut over
it all, everything they have to offer.

A friend and collaborator on many artistic projects, Shelley M. House is one of the finest graphic artists I know. Her mastery of the human body in simple line drawings creates complex anatomy studies and her use of color is breathtaking.

Recently I discovered that one of my poems, Cello, will appear next to her Hibiscus Meditation on its very own mug. I am delighted to have such an opportunity. It is, indeed, an honor.

Yellow
cello,

my love,

I’ll learn to thresh
your strings, tongue
your duskiness, warm
your flesh.

You are a mystery.

Is it enough
to say
I’ve yet
to learn
how to make
you moan?

Your neck
fits nicely
next to mine.

True, others have
broken my heart,
but so has
the hibiscus.

Cello, you are
a mystery and

I guess it is
enough that
mysteries
make me
cry.

About a year ago I made an animated film called THE LAST HIMEYURI, ひめゆり, 学徒隊 — RED LAMB, dealing with the fate of these young girls. It was shot completely in black and white and while while I was happy about the story, the animation itself lacked something. I am trying to reshoot the film using color and different animation styles.

As anyone on the outside will tell you, Sartre was dead-on when he said, L'enfer, c'est les autres, Hell is other people. We are all born to be heroes, we are all born divine, it is only those you meet growing up, those you pass on the street, who cut you down to size.

The truth of the matter is had I been born sixty years ago in Europe I would never have survived. I already would have had two strikes against me. How many mass graves liter the countryside full of effeminate Jews? Would it matter that I am technically not Jewish? Of course not, since it is all about appearance. The Nazis hated the effeminate male. To them it was a curse, a weakness. Heinz Heger's first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, and Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals are both chilling and sober accounts about one people's solution for effeminacy. After all, how does one measure something as abstract as homosexuality? You can't, since desire is not tattooed on our bodies like ink, you can't look at a person and understand the fires that drive them. There is no black and white with passion, it is all shades of gray, which is why, when certain people refer dismissively to gay men as a whole, they are really speaking of effeminate men. That is why there are so many coded words in the gay personals, "SA/SA," straight acting, straight appearing. It wasn't anything as vague as human desire the Nazis were looking for. It was mannerisms. My lisp. My swishy walk. My marvelous, over-compensating personality. That is what would get me in trouble and no one would give a damn who I slept with.

There is so much we train ourselves to accept, so much hatred we train ourselves to ignore. Who could function in a world that reminds them, reminds us, day in and out, that they hate us? that the worse thing a man can be is more woman-like? In a world that hates women "effeminate" hangs in the air between us, ugly with violence. Because when people talk about curing gays what they really are saying is beating the effeminate out of people like me with their hobnailed boots — forever.

KILLING THE FEY

Yoked to my lisp, I want you to know
this compulsive arching and pulling and
expanding of flesh at the gym burns
my lily-livered flesh, honey. I live

in a town where lumbering, stiff
postures serve as reference, where
cropped “Are You Butch Enough?”
buzz cuts act as testimonial.

Where the gym's trainer says: to be totally hot,
to be truly huge, you need this fat burner!
Get jacked! Get slammed!

I hear the body is
our only sanctuary.

Where men at the bars say: I may be gay but
at least I'm not a queen. Or fat. Or femme. Where

I feel that stare at my back: Hey faggot! Hey
faggot! Hey! How do they know? that

I accept, I accept all this.

* * *

Yoked to my lisp, I want
you to know Hitler took us

Hundred-and-Seventy-Fivers
to stretch us out. Recall

Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code
would have defined me

as one of the “unneeded consumers,”
one of the men “incurably sick” with effeminacy.

Is this why I try to reshape my body?
Since I'm judged not by an act, but
rather this sashay?

What do I do with these butterfly hands?

It might still happen. It will
have to happen. It happened before
(I was scared, I cowered, I swore).

I have studied these men: I may
be gay but at least I'm not a queen.
Did it happen to them? A queen?

Yes, laugh! Is that all I am? Here in this
suburban bungalow, behind these drapes,

this cross, this little madonna (what
was it that they saw in us?) alone

in a white room, my lisp singes the air,
infusions of smoke from the factory.

* * *

I accept, I accept all this. There is a word
I carry with me: mannweiber, “man-woman,”
a word used near Buchenwald, at Dora-Mittelbau,
where camphor and elms shivered over the lanes

leading to the underground cement factory
where we Hundred-and-Seventy-Fivers
were to be “bent straight.”

My lily-boy body burns to recall
when we were all incurably sick. Hey,
faggot! my body burns, their words
branded into my frame:

mannweiber — “manwoman”

mannweibchen — “boygirl”

mädchenjunge — “boybitch”

* * *

I've tried to live anonymously, I've tried to live
with it. I've
tried

under the spectator's stare, and I feel
that stare at my back and I accept,
I accept, at least I am
a queen.

(2004)

The Baltimore Sun just posted this. I am sad to report the poet Lucille Clifton has just passed away. Her book Blessing the Boats is one of the best collections of poetry that has come out in the last 50 years. I saw her perform several times at the Dodge Poetry Festival and heard her speak at many lectures and workshops. She is irreplaceable in American poetry and will be terribly missed.

Former state poet laureate Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award winner whose work was lauded for its "moral quality," died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a long battle with cancer and other illnesses. She was 73.

With a mix of profundity, earthiness and humor - amply evident in her 11 books of poetry - Ms. Clifton often defied conventional notions of poetic expression, but in many ways her themes were traditional, Wallace R. Peppers wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

"She writes of her family because she is greatly interested in making sense of their lives and relationships; she writes of adversity and success in the ghetto community; and she writes of her role as a poet," according to Mr. Peppers.

Ms. Clifton, a resident of Columbia, was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and was honored on many other occasions during her career. She was awarded honorary degrees from the University of Maryland and Towson University. She was the poet-in-residence at Coppin State College between 1971 and 1974.

She was the second woman and the first African American to serve as poet laureate of Maryland, a position she held from 1979 to 1985.

She was also the first black woman to win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize award, in 2007, among the most prestigious awards that can be won by an American poet. It included a $100,000 stipend.

In 2001, Ms. Clifton won the National Book Award for "Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000."

A biography on the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame Web site says that Thelma Lucille Sayles was born in 1936 in Depew, N.Y., a small town outside Buffalo. Her mother, a poet, encouraged her creativity, and she began to compose stories and poems as a child. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school and, in 1953, she won a scholarship to Howard University, where she majored in drama. She left Howard after two years after deciding that she would rather write poetry, according to the Web site.

Ms. Clifton had been ill for some time with an infection, her sister, Elaine Philip, told The Buffalo News on Saturday. She had undergone surgery to remove her colon on Friday, but the exact cause of death remains undetermined.

The poet and her husband, Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor at the University at Buffalo, moved to Baltimore in the 1960s and had six children. Her husband died in 1984.

Besides her 11 poetry collections, Ms. Clifton published 20 children's books, and her poems have appeared in more than 100 anthologies, according to her biography.

Besides her sister, Ms. Clifton is survived by her three daughters, a son and three grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.

While researching publishable academic papers at the Library of University of Nevada, Las Vegas University, I came across a reference to a work entitled "The myth of arrival".

[We] specialize in the publication of theses and dissertations. I am therefore wondering if you would be interested in cooperating with us towards a worldwide marketed publication of your work.

Your reply including an e-mail address to which I could send an e-mail with further information in an attachment would be greatly appreciated.

It's no secrete that grad students, especially poetry grad students, are a desperate lot, the question asked by 90% of MFA Creative Writing grads being, “uh, would you like fries with that order, sir?” However this gave me hope. Deep in my heart I knew this was how the publishing industry really worked. Since I am terrible at marketing my own work all I needed to do was simply wait until an editor, trolling through five and six year old dissertations at UNLV, stumble upon my brilliance and out of the blue offer me untold millions for my verse. Ever since I saw The Muppet Movie (1978) as a child I have been waiting for an Orson Welles-like editor to prepare a standard “Rich and Famous” contract for for me.

Did I mention that they ask for my bank account information for the massive royalties my poetry will be bringing in?

Several different blogs weigh in on whether it is a scam or not, from Google Square to The Cranky Conservative and Not Really a Mainlander, an academic writing from Calgary. I suppose signing over one's life savings for a chance at publication might be worth it to some people, but I leave that up to you.

“I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff,” Ned Flanders, The Simpsons.

As religions that have helped shape the last two thousand years go a recent change within the laws of the Catholic Church got me wondering what exactly is going on behind closed doors.

The appeal of Catholicism has always been a bit of a mystery to me, though I recognize that despite its tenets not making a whole lot of sense many, many people have been happy to go along with the story about an invisible sky father and ghost and son who is sometimes a lamb and sometimes not and how we should all follow these religious laws given to us, written in stone no less, because it is what the father and ghost and son who is sometimes a lamb wants. In polite society you are not suppose to question any of this because these laws are fixed and unchanging and things in an organic world that don't change are either cancerous or divine but usually not both. So it doesn't really matter if you are cynical or a true believer since we still base large parts of our Western society and government around these laws. The Anti-Choice movement is very fond of saying that their battle to restrict the rest of us from free and safe birth control and sex education is justified because of these same laws, since without them they'd just be sex-fearing, women-hating bigots and who wants to wake up in the morning and have to admit that?

And yet here is the problem, the Pope recently did away with one of a theological concept of their faith, Limbo, claiming “it has never been a definitive truth” and that it is a “theological hypothesis.” Still, a lot of people believe in the idea, Thomas Aquinas writes about it. It was the place Dante banished the philosophers to. The place where the souls of children “go if they die before they can be baptised” and a major part of the argument the Anti-Choice proponents use to try to ban medical abortions for women, since they say it damns the unborn soul to Limbo. Except that there isn't a Limbo now and that [the] “Vatican concluded that all children who die do so in the expectation of the universal salvation … whether baptised or not.” Which means that these laws aren't fixed and unchanging. One day at the whim of an old man one belief that yesterday an entire religion claimed to be true gets thrown out the window because it is a “theological hypothesis.” What other beliefs that grossly limit our personal freedoms will one day get overturned as pure religious speculation as well? Why is Limbo wrong and a ban on gay marriage right?

Part of me knows it doesn't really matter if Catholic fine print gets changed or not. There will always be men and women who fear the human body and all its desires strong enough to use any excuse to keep it in chains. And yet part of me is also intensely curious how this will effect all those people who feel they are on first name basis with the divine mysteries of the world.

How can you un-damn damned Gallileo?
How can you get rid of Hell's first circle,
Limbo, where all the unborn children go?
One more reason to vote Pro-Choice. Menstrual
blood beats Papal Law; one never changes,
one flip-flops – Oi! mellow! it's just belief.
Who cares if the God-wad cuts whole pages
from the Catholic faith? Sure it's a relief
to say, “oops, me bad.” After all, the Fall?
Limbo? Hell? — so 3rd century zealous.
So what if you never believed in all
of this? Rule 1: never name the Nameless.
Damn! Show some respect, it's a mystery.
No ghost or lamb or law for me, just She.

Unexamined social privileges, narcissism, homophobia, fear and loathing of sex. It's really no surprise why the Baby Boomers championed this book nor why they keep praising it today. Apparently this is what speaks to their generation.