MICHAEL S. HARPER of Providence, Rhode Island
Winner of the 2008 FROST MEDAL

Brother John

Black man:

I'm a black man;

I'm black; I am—

A black man; black—

I'm a black man;

I'm a black man;

I'm a man; black—

I am—

Bird, buttermilk, bird—

smack, booze and bitches

I am Bird

baddest nightdreamer

on sax in the ornithology-world

I can fly—higher, high, higher—

I'm a black man;

I am; I'm a black man—

Miles, blue haze,

Miles high, another bird,

more Miles, mute,

Mute Miles, clean,

bug-eyed, unspeakable,

Miles, sweet Mute,

sweat Miles, black Miles;

I'm a black man;

I'm black; I am;

I'm a black man—

Trane, Coltrane; John Coltrane;

it's tranetime; chase the Trane;

it's a slow dance;

it's the Trane

in Alabama; acknowledgement,

a love supreme,

it's black Trane; black;

I'm a black man; I'm black;

I am; I'm a black man—

Brother John, Brother John

plays no instrument;

he's a black man; black;

he's a black man; he is

Brother John; Brother John—

I'm a black man; I am;

black; I am; I'm a black

man; I am; I am;

I'm a black man;

I'm a black man;

I am; I'm a black man;

I am:

 

Ruth Kaplan , President, PSA Board of Governors on Michael S. Harper

As a deeply respected teacher, mentor, and editor, and—supremely—as a poet, Michael S. Harper, University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970, has contributed profoundly to literary culture in our time. He has published more than ten books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, Honorable Amendments, Healing Song for the Inner Ear, and two collections nominated for the National Book Award, Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems.

Professor Harper has edited the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown and is co-editor with Anthony Walton of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. With Professor Robert Stepto, he edited Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, published in 1979.

He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island and has received many other honors, including the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, G.E.Murray heralded Harper's Images of Kin as the work of "one of the dominant poetic voices of his generation," extolling "his keen sense of political and personal histories, his breadth of expression." "As a vision of America," David Ignatow wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Images of Kin could have been the epilogue to Hart Crane's masterpiece The Bridge.

Professor Harper, your brilliant, uncompromising, and hugely influential poems have earned you a unique place in American letters, and it is with great pride that on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Poetry Society of America, I present to you our highest honor, the Frost Medal.

 

 

ED ROBERSON of Chicago, Illinois
Winner of the SHELLEY MEMORIAL AWARD

Lunar Eclipse

You've seen only a planed circle of moon,

the white wafer; the low sky's flat penny

grow into that dime, flipped in the turn

taken by the earth,

until you see

what's won from behind its veil of brightness

by the lunar eclipse

a red marble,

a pinball of blood and it's your shot, a ball

of red clay before its pinch into a bowl,

what I want to say and its look

that far away from it.

 

I want to say it suddenly

turns three dimensional with shadow

shaded in at the drawn

earth-curtain's darkening;

and that darkness

makes shape-informed light clearer rounding out

midnight,      and moon,

once it is that lighted ball,

falls above a night now floored with depth

so dark above you     you can feel the feet

and meter fill with time. New Years confetti each

speck's fall a galaxy ago back into space.

 

Space back into space restored    beneath the moon

to here in the shading of eclipse. The distances.

We have to feel the spatial in what we see

to see clearly     the eye measure in hands and feet;

as when we kiss,

distance disappears, our eyes close,

and we see bodily

in raised detail

a measure deepen into our world

in each other. And what we are

in the shadow the world makes

of our love, by this earth shine, we see

ourselves whole, see in whole perspective.

 

Lyn Hejinian and C. D. Wright on Ed Roberson

Ed Roberson writes a lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance. This affective power is the very landscape—the topology—of his work, wherein experience (whether of joy or of suffering) endures. To accomplish this, the poems undertake intricate shapings of time; their terrain is layered and, through frequent use of serial structures, unfolding. The impulse toward the serial poem in Ed Roberson's work is not a typically narrative one—his works do not offer accounts of chronological progress from perception to insight, for example. Rather, they are presentations of "thought's torsion," to use the poet Louis Zukofsky's term, and the serial form that Mr. Roberson often (though by no means always) employs does not so much track time as generate a form of re-timing. This, of course, involves re-membering; not as nostalgic grasping after the past but as present configurations. In this respect, reading Ed Roberson's work brings certain musical figures to mind: the riff figures of the saxophonist Steve Lacy, the wondrously strange tonal figures of Thelonious Monk, and the giant fugal figures of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Ed Roberson was born and raised Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a youth, he planned on a career as a painter, and he spent a great deal of time in the Pittsburgh Museum of Art, studying works in that museum's collection and lingering in their company. During his undergraduate university years he worked as a research assistant in limnology (a field of study which generally concerns itself with the physics, meteorology, and biology, etc. of inland, or fresh, bodies of water and their waterways). In this context he spent three summers on research expeditions, mostly among the alpine lakes on the Aleutian islands of Alaska. He worked for a time in the Pittsburgh AquaZoo public aquarium as a diver training porpoises, and then, in what certainly seems to be a radical departure from his interest in rivers and lakes, he worked in an advertising graphics agency and in the Pittsburgh steel mills. He has also taught in the English Departments of Allegheny County Community College, Raritan Valley Community College, and the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers, where his duties as associate director of special programs also involved work in outreach and financial assistance initiatives.

Twice Ed Roberson was a team member on the Explorers' Club of Pittsburgh's South American Expeditions, in which context he climbed mountains in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes and explored the upper Amazonian jungle in eastern Ecuador. He has also motorcycled across the USA, and traveled in Mexico, the Caribbean, and in Nigeria, West Africa.

On occasion, perhaps as a residue from his early interest in painting, Ed Roberson's poems include graphic elements. Some are pictorial, as in Etai-Eken, which uses pictographs and what I suppose one might call text collage (he more or less draws with text here and there in the book). Some are gestural, as for example the horizontal lines that he occasionally deploys to divide pages into upper and lower regions. These horizontal or horizon lines extend the poems both vertically and latitudinally and provide them with countertimes and counterspaces—other skies and seas, perhaps, in which the poems appear not as territories but as, say, shells—seashells emitting musical chords: Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (to quote the title of his 1995 book).

In his most recent book, City Eclogue, the poet Ed Roberson is acutely involved in an ongoing assessment of his environment, and he goes about this business, his business, with equal measures of stealth and brazen attention—"no sleeping through the words" as he has said. Not only a life, but the life inside of a life is his opus—how barriers, detours, and unforeseen associations figure into the whole experience. The city is his scene, its grid, rubble, trains, jittery gulls, and the silent woman at the other end of the bench. In interlocking lyrics of public space, he lays out the facts a little more distinctly than they were heretofore—arranging the bones of language just so; clearing feathers form the mind. You can see him thinking, and you can hear him watching.

Ed Roberson is a man of almost self-effacing modesty, but his poetry attests to his living life with almost over-whelming intensity, and with unbroken dignity. His poetry has the tenderness of water, and like water it is fully capable of rising into waves to smash cliffs or cut grand canyons through the never sufficiently aware cultural landscape.

 

 

JOANIE MACKOWSKI of Cincinnati, Ohio
Winner of the WRITER MAGAZINE/EMILY DICKINSON AWARD

Lightning Eased: Dream

All day I waded a field of corn,

and each stalk bulged a lightning bolt, gold-green

and cracking from the husk: a crop of fire.

I came inside, but the fire came too, hovering

beside me as I read the news and irked the day's

card house from its red hours and blue hours,

wanting a useful house. The fire made clear

it meant no harm; it sought to curl its kernel

within my bones, to keep. And so it's been.

It burns with me, swaying, opening: it gropes

my head with its tassels, rifling my memory's

carbons; it huddles a swarm of bees

in my lungs. When I sleep, I dream of winter, the maples

drumming their glass-gloved fingers on the sky.

 

Donald Revell on Joanie Mackowski

"Lightning Eased: Dream" abolishes, with all of Dickinson's playful tact, the unnecessary distinctions between far and near, between vision and anecdote. Here, vastation is welcomed home even as domesticity itself proves vast. Here is a giddy Calvinist catastrophe, a fire in the bone and an indrawn breath of bees. Dickinson knew the practical terrors of innocence and how they "meant know harm" even as they laid waste the vanities of this world. The poet of "Lightning Eased: Dream" knows them too, and intimately. Such intimacy makes technique transcendent, and so the maple trees are not betrayed but, rather, exalted (and befriended, too) by this poem's closing, most Dickinsonian figure of speech.

 

 

BRIAN HENRY of Richmond, Virginia
Winner of the CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD

Moth Ark
         A painting is a statement of the artist's notions of reality
         in the terms of plastic speech.
                                                         —Rothko

Mere minion of light,

lit, as in liturgy, as in

light, luster a lesser

source of light, a lack.

Locked onto light, moth

minion looks to matter,

the making of matter

by light its lot, light's

lot. Lacking light, moth

looks, lacks less when

it collides: moth & light,

ark of light, moth ark.

*

Light the binder, myth

now emotion. Mass moves

with light, mood moves,

is moved by light. What light

binds, mood lights. What

myth lights, doom binds.

Light binds mood to myth,

doom moves mood to light.

*

Color recedes, the eye

combines. Color combines

to recede. To cover color

with mood. Cover with mood.

Mood recedes to myth.

*

The senses removed,

unmoored & turned

to face those facing them.

The senses picked over,

perceived as senses, sans

organs, sans human thing.

The human thing

unbodied & thinged,

the senses received

without & not within

the shell. The human

plastic shell.

*

The plastic has weight

and is real. The plastic

has substance. The substance

has texture. The plastic exists

through texture. Forms arise

and recede, advance with color

and recede. Tactile plastic

pleasure, the eye traces,

moves with what moves.

Plastic motion, plastic journey.

*

Objects grey as they recede,

blend with the air and haze.

Cold recedes, the warm haze

advances. To push back

the colder, colorless air.

*

Beauty distorts, is

a distortion. Terror,

too, distorts.

The plastic message.

*

Note on poem: Every section is built on phrases from Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art

 

Norma Cole on Brian Henry

Ezra Pound says, condensare! The ode says, "Sing!" Brian Henry's poem anagrammati- cally becomes "Moth Ark," passionately lyric, philosophically abstract, intense, even exalted. Things, subjects, "the human thing" need not be exposed, but these constructs drive dynamic stanzas, lines separated from other lines by rooms of space, of elegant, spare diction, Louis Zukofsky for the musicality, George Oppen for the "small nouns." The poet, the painter conjures "what is space? what is time?" Myth assumes moment, weight, rhythm.

As Hölderlin said,

"All is rhythm; the entire destiny of man is a single

celestial rhythm, just as the work of all

is a unique rhythm."

Vowels scale mountains in consonants' proportions by grounds of knowledge, the love of knowledge. Intellectual rigor enacts the sublime. Transcendental color and light of Mark Rothko's work frames flowing elements, flaming beauty. "Terror, / too, distorts." Interior wonder at the music's rapture, measures of silence, measures of stress build the shared light of The Artist's Reality. Brian Henry himself constructs this poem's luminosity, "The plastic message."

 

 

WAYNE MILLER of Kansas City, Missouri
Winner of the LYRIC POETRY AWARD

[The child's cry is a light that comes on in the house,]

The child's cry is a light that comes on in the house,

when the street is empty and the trees are still.

The light in the window gives voice to the cry,

so when the windows are closed, we still know

her voice is pushing against the walls of her room.

Her cry: a light that comes on in the house,

quivering the filaments in the bulbs, lifting

her parents out of their beds in the dark; at times

a neighbor's light will echo the cry. Her voice

arriving from what seems to be nowhere—

from inside such a tiny body, it comes on

and on, that cry somehow filling the whole house

when her parents are sleeping, when the world

is sleeping. Like a lighthouse beam it swings around

and out of her body, flooding the window, a cry

emerging from inside a dream, a need or fear

she can't yet utter; all there is is her breath

pushing the cry, the light coming on in the house—

and her voice: a light planted deep in the cry.

 

Elizabeth Macklin on Wayne Miller

The deeply attractive work submitted for this year's Lyric Poetry Award included a poem on the Civil War battlefield at Antietam ("Antietam"), one on the disorienting variety of definitions of the word "country," ("Country and Country") and two uncannily near- mirror-image poems, one titled "I foresee the breaking of all that is breakable," and the other, "Large Optimistic Bowl." I finally chose the untitled lyric that begins, "The child's cry is a light that comes on in the house," a nineteen-line contemplation of a localized scene that is just that: in a cul-de-sac at night a light comes on in a house where a child has started to cry. The music of it was important to me: the cry rhymes with the light, as well as being it; and over the length of the poem that "voice" comes to rhyme with the "house." And yet what was most compelling was the continual visual shift, as if in point of view, from stanza to stanza, from the filaments in the light bulbs and "such a tiny body," to someone seeing the lighthouse beam that "swings around and out of her body" while being simultaneously aware of the whole "world [that] is sleeping." For me, a lyric is something that causes itself to need to be reread, over and over, from the beginning, and "[The child's cry is a light that comes on in the house,]" is that. We gradually come to see it and hear it from all sides.

 

 

CHRISTINA PUGH of Chicago, Illinois
Winner of the LUCILLE MEDWICK MEMORIAL AWARD

I and Thou

Must we cultivate our kindness? Can we

book a fellow-feeling for the sake of the fellow,

not the Ghost? Last night, for example, the white-

haired girl told us singing was like praying; and that

iron of naturalized note in the bluegrass made me

want to say sublime, sublime to myself, in the Sapphic

sense that knows sublimity as love (O wash me

green as yonder field); and the girl's reed song did

light from the stage, articulating phrases like Heavens

divided in a quaver between forte and whisper, acute

supple wavers among syllables and slants: and now

may you keep me close within your ear; I can hear

the voice I loved when I wondered at its dialect—

you know, if I'm ever able to speak, I'll want

someone human to answer me.

 

Timothy Donnelly on Christina Pugh

Passionate and crafty, urgent yet meditative, "I and Thou" shares its title with the famous 1923 essay in which Martin Buber distinguishes between the subject's relation to an object that serves a practical function (the "I-It relation") and the relation between two subjects meeting in the fullness of their existence and without objectification (the "I- Thou" relation). True I-Thou relations are few, Buber claims, in part because so many of our relations to other human beings prove woefully motivated by the self-interest indicative of I-It relations. The spiritual repercussions of this condition are immense, especially since I-Thou relations ultimately serve to give our lives meaning and to bring us into con- tact with the divine ("in each Thou we address the eternal Thou," Buber writes.) To complicate matters, insofar as I-Thou relations might be thought to serve these spiritual functions, they come to resemble I-It relations, suggesting that the two categories of relation are ultimately not so dissimilar or incompatible as they may at first seem.

The speaker in "I and Thou" doesn't want to burn through her attachments to particular objects in order to attain some higher, less personal state. She wants instead to luxuriate in all their specificity, to bask in their hæccity, and to experience them with an attentiveness so ecstatic, so exacting ("articulating phrases like Heavens / divided in a quaver between forte and whisper, acute / supple wavers among syllables and slants") that it leaves her speechless. Putting song on par with prayer, positing sublimity as erotic, not transcendent, she doesn't want her I-Thou relations to have to connect to divinity in order to attain their ultimate significance. If and when she regains speech, she writes, "I'll want someone human (italics mine) to answer me,"—not a deity, not some big idea, but a merely mortal individual, fully met, astonishing as is, and deserving unique worship.

 

 

NATASHA SAJÉ of Salt Lake City, Utah
Winner of the ALICE FAY DI CASTAGNOLA AWARD

E

essay, to try, from exagiare, to weigh out, examine

I was eleven and watching the Galloping Gourmet with his British-Australian accent and his glass of wine

learning how to get juice out of a lemon by rolling it hard on the counter

when the doorbell rang

my hair around cans to make it straight

the man next door, his receding hair combed back

erminea, the weasel whose fur turns from brown to white in winter

asked if anyone else were home

I said no

edentate, lacking teeth

asked if he could come in

electric, from Greek, elektron, amber, because it produces sparks when rubbed

I said no, I'm sorry

euphemism, to speak with good words

we stood eye to eye

eutrophic: a body of water with so much mineral & organic matter the oxygen is reduced

until I slowly shut the door in his face

Eve, from Hebrew, living

pushing with both hands

 

originally published in Prairie Schooner, 2006

 

H

O how we hanky panky harum

scarum in our happy home, dancing hootchy

kootchy. Sure, it makes for hugger mugger

but we give a hoot for happenstance.

The yard is full o' hound and hares; the door

adorned by hammer and sickle; in the closets, hand-

me-downs. If Hammurabi and his Queen come

by, we won't be hoity-toity, we'll

offer haggis or humble pie. Our bed

floats on hocus-pocus (our corpore

wholly habeas) and the kitchen hums

a hymn, Hail to Higgledy-Piggledly.

If the world can't call our hurly burly hunky

dory, let it hara-kiri if it dares.

 

originally published in Pool #4, 2005

 

Dean Young on Natasha Sajé

Resourceful, restless, witty and substantially intelligent—what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits. Their range is marvelously wide in both form and tone: lists, riddles, prose poems, musical whimseys, something of a sonnet, biographical narrations, improvisational romps and interrogations, and careful meditations. Sometimes a single poem will swerve between what would seem to be contrary impulses so the dire and the playful often find themselves rubbing against each other, commingling. "E" quite dexterously narrates a scary event recalled from childhood while puncturing itself with some rather arcane e-words and their def- initions creating a conversation between mind and body. "H" begins "O how we hanky panky harum/scarum" and ends "If the world can't call our hurly burly hunky/dory, let it hara-kiri if it dares." in a giddy, all-out topsy-turvy defense of sexu- al play; joissance indeed. But there is also a profound sobriety and seriousness, one so true it welcomes at times buoyancy. Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted and illuminated and stretched.

 

 

CAREY POWERS of Idyllwild, California
Winner of the LOUISE LOUIS / EMILY F. BOURNE STUDENT POETRY AWARD

Postponing

Because I did not rise terrific

in steel mornings—red feet

over the side of the bed, yesterday—

feeling throned on a beach

is tyrannical. I do not have the stomach for raw

waves, seagulls like funny men

leaving.

I did not grow up on skyscrapers

with perfect view of little women

and smog below,

consoling, inescapable.

Sitting with birds,

I watch boys make trenches, own

the earth, and scream

in flashes, sky through a mountain

of tunnels.

Sometimes whistling is useless

and they drown, or else

swim themselves into a love of drowning.

White goes

softly towards desire—

to want it, forever,

waving.

It isn't that I don't go home;

I just often catch a turn of wind,

shriveling away, second thought

from seeing ashes in fire pits below

trembling,

never uplifted,

which is home,

already gone, momentous

like abalone shining on some black

seabed, outlasting.

The moment after a seagull calls I think

of colossal reconciling, sweeping

cathedral organ now wholly

devastated with a red-coated cavalier

calling on angels.

Who knows of temperament?

To feel a grave like a sandpiper wading, to cheer

softly when old men make it

up the stairs—

gargantuan resurrection, boasts of the green river,

lovely wit!

Can you sense the plight of dallying leaflets, lily pads?

Are you injured?

Are you in love?

Given that I project broadly, over

nuances gorged with forgotten fruit dripping

in feverish this is this, that is that

woman skirting the damsel,

the lonely orator,

the sweet loose leaf

hovering above her,

befitting,

laps divinely at insignificance,

goldcrest on a snowy sapling.

 

David Roderick on Carey Powers

The condition of postponement suggests stasis, even paralysis, but the exuberant poetic voice of Carey Powers proves a greater truth, that postponement consists of a sequence of living moments: boys making trenches in the sand, abalone shining on a seabed, daily experience in which poetic impulse becomes a "gargantuan resurrection" of the world. Powers's poetry has some of Whitman's wide-ranging ambulatory effects and his love for the interconnectedness of species. She also has that rare ability to know where and when to focus, zoom, and pan her lens, which enables her to "project broadly" over the many "nuances" around her. There is a frightening sense of flux in this poem, and an existential depth, but a deep reverence for things in motion prevails. In one moment, her speaker can fret over "ashes in fire pits," and then, a few lines later, "cheer / softly when old men make it / up the stairs." All this praise and still I haven't addressed so many skillful elements in "Postponing": its lush, organic form; the shifting weight of its shored cadences; the wild, scattered light she casts over things large and small. "Who knows of temperament?" she coyly asks during a strategic turn in the poem. Yes, Ms. Powers. What indeed.

 

 

THERESA SOTTO of Santa Monica, California
Winner of the GEORGE BOGIN MEMORIAL AWARD

what you see is what you get

the baro

the saya

the abayah   hakama

kimono   oni

oldhani   dhoti   choli

cheongsam   sari

maria clara   dupatta   dishdasha

doh bock and belt

the sweater set   sherwani suit

the tiny tiny shoes

a turban (hair coiled inside)

the nylon   the pineapple   the linen denim grass

Juicy®   porn star   angel

the words sprawled across the ass

the button-down   blazer   bustier   barong

a burkha   (the underthings)

the tighty whitey coconut halves dried and hardened, hung

bare breasts [add rain forest backdrop]

the hip hugger   hip holster

loin cloth jock strap khaki cargo polyester pants

buttons instead of zippers instead of knots

the crop top   the tank top

holoku   seersucker   tux

the veil

the thin one

the opaque

 

Prageeta Sharma on Theresa Sotto

In an introduction to Chinese avant-garde poetry, the poet Wang Ping speaks of the work of the "Misty School," a poetry movement in China interested in a poetry that functions by "infusing landscape (sky, rain, mist, river) with personal emotions through an impressionistic prism, and often turning these images into political allegories, the misty poets strove to transcend the confines of realism and form a new entity between the self and the external world."

In thinking about Theresa Sotto's work, I am reminded of the "Misty School" aesthetic, though Sotto's poems represent a different kind of infusion and political allegory. Her poems unexpectedly transcend the confines of realism through the use of concrete language conjuring many images and allowing the poem to erupt and emote through a kind of oblique line.

Whether it is through words signifying body parts or "tiny shoes," her nouns and/or objects are placed delicately on a truncated line with a lot of space. It is through her word placement that she creates daring tensions. Some poems are to be read horizontally thus allowing her edgy nouns to take more space—becoming impressionistic, sensory, and dynamic. They seemingly bring us to some kind of erudition within the spareness of line.

"what you see is what you get" is a provocative listing poem covering a cultural spectrum of what we cover ourselves with and what this "covering" suggestively reveals and hides. It is dynamic and political. There seems to be a peculiar joy or curiosity for the speaker in how language finds itself oddly placed in popular clothing trends: "words sprawled across the ass." Therefore what we "get" in the last lines of many of these poems are ominous abstractions that manage to wrestle with cultural activity and popu- lar culture. Overall, her work is marvelous in experimenting with its own opacity— strange restrictive lines that oddly provoke clarity and pleasure. No doubt the poems comment in astute ways about our culture at large.

 

 

JOCELYN EMERSON of Quincy, Massachusetts
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD

The Bean Field

"... but infinites also past out of this life, not having any witnesse, how, when, or in what manner they departed. So that few or none there were, to deliver outward shew of sorrow and grieving."—Boccaccio, The Decameron

I.

Continuation before the event.

Elusive in its hue.

 

II.

Gnarled rhizomes (lily)

protect against sudden fever

or the body's response

after exposure

(as the outer, gaseous layers

of a star's core erode in death).

More lilies.

And baths of lavender to bring reprieve—

incarnate—

 

III.

Nature will send

such poison

far from the noble organs....

 

IV.

The moon changed positions slightly

in the night,

but to no great effect.

The plough failed to cut

the field.

 

V.

Sometimes they lived and sometimes

they died, the one or the other,

the earth taking them in

after the unlawful hiding, the illicit care

when stricken, or abandoned.

An accident of pain of the body....

A refusal indistinguishable from salt.

Salt of refusal

in the physical—

in the hammer, the lathe, in the loom—

something revelation could not destroy.

 

VI.

To hide inside the visible,

within the opacity of noon.

Occasionally an appointed official saw the forbidden

oscillation, some movement in a passageway,

or courtyard, or window.

Then an illegal step out of doors—

into the density of that light—

 

Note on the poem: the italicized lines are from Miguel Parets, A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner, 1651.

 

Annie Finch on Jocelyn Emerson

In judging the Robert H. Winner Award, which celebrates a group of poems by a mature poet who has not yet received appropriate recognition, I hoped I might come upon a body of work that had been given room to grow: to develop into its own complete ecosystem without undue interference from outside influences. And I feel that I did. Through the winning group of poems speaks a voice extraordinarily consistent yet not monotonous, unique yet at peace with itself.

I believe that a central goal of poetry is to balance all the aspects of a human life: intellect, senses, emotions, and spirit. A common temptation in contemporary poems is to pull back in one or more of these areas, in order to avoid overwhelming the others; so, for example, a poem will avoid abstraction or complexity out of fear of sounding pedantic, or avoid direct emotion out of fear of sounding sentimental, or avoid sensual language or music out of fear of sounding mannered. But the poems in this group do not pull back out of fear of being overwhelming in one area. Instead, they explore all of the other areas more fully as well.

So, it is all here in these poems. There is the intellect, with the startling and unusual use of complex Latinate diction, and the senses, with the hauntingly consistent and detailed imagery of the sea, always bringing the intellect back to earth (or to water). And there are emotion and spirit, sometimes subtle and sometimes courageously explicit. This is a hopeful poetry. The influences of the tormented poets Crane and Hopkins surface repeatedly on these waves, and finally, ineluctably, they are brought to rest on a quiet beach. I applaud this poet, who has earned the rewards awaiting those who dare to take considered risks.

 

 

CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO of Providence, Rhode Island
Winner of the NORMA FARBER FIRST BOOK AWARD

Communion

I called you names, for the further processing of color or movement, all you were able to get into, a sort of blur. She leaned out against the water. Lay me down like anthozoa to anthozoa, with the other light things that brush against the earth. Breathe. Don't breathe. Breathe. A figure in a constellation was staring off. Did it turn up three days later, did it accept inside its body, a no for universal application, an only mine or yours? Gate One. Open your mouth. If you would only open your mouth. Gate Two. To bridle, to curb, to dam. Gate Three. Anagnorisis. Gate Four. Closed. Gate Five. Hold up. Gate Six. If everywhere that Mary went, the brain was public and exposed. Gate Seven. Do you mind, do you. Gate Eight. Fish moving in the boat's direction will be recorded in our diagram with the more substantial marks. Gate Nine. The rhythm and interval between objects. Gate Ten. Our simplest subject. Our lightest lights. Our darkest darks.

 

Thylias Moss on Catherine Imbriglio

Catherine Imbriglio's Parts of the Mass

—as its start,

It begins with collapse, with a generalized flattening, an apparently leveled playing field, with apparent covert access to everything—the broad path to the meaning of existence

but no; the naked flatness

is not undressed.

There is the matter of scale.

Parts of the Mass of substance also.
The thingness of stuff

which having mass can be subject to measure.

Imbriglio studies the parts in a laboratory into which collapse has flattened,
and here, to expose the components of a generalized flattening,

Imbriglio uses tools that extend scale, that expose deficits in unassisted perception
(so shame can be perceived)

—the spires and valleys, the textured flatness that is less smooth than seemed invited.

Magnify it and this appears, this erupts—there is quadrupling of space;
the peak is huge, holds universes.

There is a rage of momentum in this book

rage of shapes, rage of configurations and reconfigurations
in the close quarters of proximity, for everything touches by degrees, me to what seems
distant by the links between us:

oh the chain, chain, chain process Imbriglio knows well;
no way of looking not also part of what can be looked at,

other sides of ourselves

in the kaleidoscopic patterns predicted by collapses

but actually proven and examined in the many microscopes, each with kaleidoscopic lens systems,
that Imbriglio uses with aplomb.

Things touch, and contact is always, is necessarily a mating of parts,
and a birth results, the birth of a merged distorted hybrid form,

such births occurring in every direction, the touching occurring on all sides of every part and every part within part,

movement that is also music.

Apparently God does indeed play dice,
Catherine Imbriglio's an example of a universe
that resulted from a roll of the dice.

In this universe, the parts remain similar, but the configuration
is unexpected and stunning, and one that this universe should envy.

Reassembly was necessary.

 

 

ARAM SAROYAN of Los Angeles, California
Winner of the WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD

 

 

a man stands

on his

head one

minute—

then he

sit

down all

different

 

Ron Silliman on Aram Saroyan

The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan's minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again. Like all miniaturists, Aram Saroyan uses the poem as a giant magnifying glass on the language of our lives and the processes we use to understand this. A work like "Blod"—that's the entire text—calls up not merely the words blood and bod, but all the sexuality that truncated latter term conveys, refusing to settle on one side or the other. Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan's sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.

 

 

SALLY BALL is the author of Annus Mirabilis, which received the 2004 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Slate, and Threepenny Review, and new work is forthcoming in Boulevard, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is the associate director of Four Way Books and a senior lecturer in English at Arizona State University.

ROBERTA BEARY grew up in New York City and now lives near Washington, DC. In 2005 she received the Kusamakura Grand Prize in Kumamoto, Japan, for her poem thunder/the roses shift/into shadow. In 2006 she co-edited fish in love, the Haiku Society of America's members' anthology, which received a Kanterman Merit Book Award for Best Anthology in 2007. She is the author of The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007).

RACHEL CONRAD teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared recently in the tiny and Harvard Review.

JOCELYN EMERSON is the author of Sea Gate (Alice James Books) and Confirmations of the Rapt (Red Dog Press). Her current manuscript projects are Ashen Light (poetry) and Loves Limbecke: Essays on Medicine and Poetry. Her scholarship includes book chapters on John Donne and alchemy in Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Brill) and A. R. Ammons, Leslie Scalapino, and chaos theory in Science and Literature (forthcoming, Rodopi).

WILLA GRANGER is a junior at Mamaroneck High School, Mamaroneck, New York. She is a winner of a 2008 Golden Key award, Region-at-Large for Poetry, The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards given by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. Her poems are forthcoming in Cargoes Literary Magazine, SLAB (Sound and Literary Art Book), and Compass Rose Literature and Art Journal. She has been selected to attend the New England Young Writers' Conference, Middlebury College and Breadloaf, Vermont, in May 2008.

ALENA HAIRSTON earned an MFA in English and Creative Writing from Brown University where she won the John Hawkes Memorial Prize for Fiction. She is a 2004 Poetry Fellow with the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and a 2007-2009 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. Her first collection, The Logan Topographies, won Persea Books' inaugural Lexi Rudnitsky Memorial Prize for Poetry. She is an English Instructor at Solano College in Fairfield, Ca.

MICHAEL S. HARPER has published more than ten books of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (ARC Publications, 2002), Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (2000), Honorable Amendments (1995), and Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985). His other collections include: Images of Kin (1977), which won the Melville- Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America and was nominated for the National Book Award; Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975), History is Your Heartbeat (1971), which won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Award for poetry, and Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970), which was nominated for the National Book Award. He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island (1988-1993) and has received many other honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award. Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island.

BRIAN HENRY is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Stripping Point (Counterpath, 2007) and Quarantine (Ahsahta, 2006). His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun's book Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008. He has co-edited Verse since 1995. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO received an MA in creative writing (poetry) and a Ph.D. in American literature from Brown University. Her poetry has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, No: A Journal of the Arts, and elsewhere, including The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. She is a recipient of an Untermeyer fellowship in poetry and a merit award in poetry from the RI State Council on the Arts. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown.

JOANIE MACKOWSKI is author of The Zoo (Pitt Poetry Series 2002) winner of the AWP Award Series in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her recent work has appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry 2007. She teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

WAYNE MILLER is the author of two books of poems, Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006) and the forthcoming The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009). He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo's I Don't Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and coeditor of the anthology New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

EILEEN MYLES is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007), Skies (Black Sparrow Press, 2001), Cool for You (Soft Skull Press, 2000), Chelsea Girls (Black Sparrow Books, 1994), and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991). She wrote the libretti for Hell, an opera with music composed by Michael Webster that was performed on both coasts in 2004 and 2006. In 2007 she received The Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writing fellowship. Her next book is The Inferno, a poet's novel forthcoming in Fall 2008 from Counterpoint Press. She currently lives and writes in Los Angeles.

MARSHA POMERANTZ's poems have appeared in Parnassus, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, and (forthcoming) Salamander in the U.S., and in Stand and PN Review in England. Her writing has been supported by two residencies at the MacDowell Colony and by a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist grant; she was a finalist once before for the Robert H. Winner award, in 2004. She works as an editor for the Harvard University Art Museums.

CAREY POWERS is a senior at Idyllwild Arts Academy, where she received full scholar- ship in Creative Writing and where she is senior editor of poetry for the Academy's magazine, Parallax. Her honors include the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Semi-Finalist for Short Story, and the Gold Key in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for three years. She lives in the mountains of Idyllwild, California, and is eagerly awaiting her college admission notifications.

KEVIN PRUFER is the author, most recently, of National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008) and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). With Wayne Miller, he's also editor of New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. The recipient of three Pushcart prizes, he lives in rural Missouri.

CHRISTINA PUGH is the author of Restoration (forthcoming in 2008 from TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press) and Rotary (Word Press, 2004). A past recipient of the Grolier Poetry Prize and the Word Press First Book Prize, she has recently been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Illinois Arts Council, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is an assistant professor in the Program for Writers.

ED ROBERSON is the author of numerous collections of poetry including City Eclogue (Atelos Series, 2006), Atmosphere Conditions (Sun and Moon Press, 2000), and Just In / Word of Navigational Challenge: New and Selected Work (Talisman House Press, 1998). He has received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award and has appeared in The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry anthologies. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago under the Committee of Poetry and Poetics.

NATASHA SAJÉ is the author of two books of poems: Bend (Tupelo, 2004) and Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994). Her awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, the Towson State Prize in Literature, the Utah Book Award in Poetry, the PSA Robert H. Winner award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the M.F.A. Writing Program at Vermont College.

ARAM SAROYAN is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. His poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry are Aram Saroyan and Pages (both Random House). His largest collection, Day and Night: Bolinas Poems, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999. The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards (one of them for his controversial one-word poem "lighght"). Saroyan is a past presi- dent of PEN USA West and a current faculty member of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Gailyn Saroyan.

THERESA SOTTO lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. Her poems have been published in POOL, No Tell Motel, Spinning Jenny, Shampoo, Typo, Word For/Word, and others. Her chapbook Excerpts from a Fair was published in the journal Achiote Seeds (Achiote Press 2007), and her chapbook hinge is forthcoming in the Coconut Chapbook Series. When not writing, she works as an art educator at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

 

 

NORMA COLE is a poet, painter and translator. Her collections of poetry include Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn, 2002) and Desire & Its Double (Instress 1998). She has translated extensively from the French, and edited Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing From France (Burning Deck, 2000).

TIMOTHY DONNELLY is author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003). He is poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts.

ANNIE FINCH's books of poetry include Calendars (Tupelo, 2003); shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award, Eve (Story Line, 1997), and a translation of the Complete Poems of Louise Labé (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Her innovative performance poem The Encyclopedia of Scotland was published by Salt in 2004.

LYN HEJINIAN's recent publications include The Fatalist (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003), My Life (Green Integer Books, 2002), and The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). Among her honors is a of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ELIZABETH MACKLIN is the author of two collections of poetry: You've Just Been Told (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000) and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (1992). She is also the translator of Meanwhile Take My Hand, poems by the Basque poet Kirmen Uribe.

THYLIAS MOSS has published several books of poetry which include Tokyo Butter: Poems (Persea Books, 2006), Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), and Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998). Among her honors are a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

DONALD REVELL is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004), and Apollinaire's Alcools (1995). Revell's criti- cal writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

DAVID RODERICK's first book, Blue Colonial, won the APR/Honickman Prize and was published jointly by The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press in 2006. He is the recipient of the 2007-2008 Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship, and he teaches poetry and creative writing in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

RON SILLIMAN has published over twenty books of poetry and criticism which include The Age of Huts (Compleat) (University of California Press, 2007), Xing (Meow Press, 1996), and Tjanting (Figures, 1981). He is also the author of a memoir, which was named a book of the year by Small Press Traffic.

PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (2004), and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.

C. D. WRIGHT has published numerous volumes of poetry including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003). She teaches at Brown University near Providence, Rhode Island.

DEAN YOUNG's books of poems include Primitive Mentor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), Emryoyo: New Poems (McSweeney's, 2007), and Skid (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). His 1995 collection, Strike Anywhere, won the Colorado Poetry Prize.