New Books in Poetry

James Longenbach‘s The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013) is not interested in the vices or failures found in some poems, so his concerns are not necessarily moral ones, but instead, as the title of the book suggests, he is interested in understanding what makes a particular poem (and poet for that matter) flourish, and therefore what makes a reader flourish. And it is this relationship – the one between reader and poem – that James Longenbach’s book honors through his ingenuity of reading poetry through the framework of virtues, such as boldness, compression, dilation, excess, restraint, and shyness to name just a few he identifies, and he unearths these virtues by focusing on a poem’s prosody and diction and syntax and even the poet’s life – apprehended through letters – as well. The Virtues of Poetry is a joyous book of criticism, written by a poet and critic who does not seek to reprimand poems – which is usually the result of someone mired in taste – but to identify why certain poems can be considered achievements and also to celebrate the paradoxical nature of poetry itself – that poems, no matter when they are written, embody the impulse to clarify the world, while also wrestling with the world’s unsettling mysteries. During our chat, we discuss how poetry found him, the creative similarities between writing poetry and prose, and of course, the virtues of poetry and so much more. I hope you enjoy our discussion as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Joshua Edwards‘ new book and its title, Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), hint at a yearning for a lost world all of us helped to destroy or at the very least forgot. While tipping his hat to the social sciences throughout the book, Imperial Nostalgias is cunningly personal: each page is an intimate window to look out of, a window to take siesta in, a window to shout from, to lean beyond, but never a window to leap from because the poems don’t harass the reader into annihilation. Instead, they are oddly charming and innocent, perhaps a counter-force to what his eye must behold. Most of his poems are like games of tag between imagery and aphorism, between abstraction and the concrete, and this is the direct result of a person devoted to travel, which Imperial Nostalgias seems a direct result of. In fact, when I finished the book, I felt like I hadn’t talked to another person in weeks, as if sitting on a cross-country train ride as the subjects of his poems flashed by: the historical – literary and otherwise – until that moment at dusk when the landscape darkened into the candor of personal meditation. The poet’s voice reflects the plain vernacular of talking to oneself, that most humble act, while simultaneously making the same voice sound as if it desires to be heard by all. Imperial Nostalgias is the labor of a frenzied (but measured) poet and the book reflects this in its restless pursuits: not only do we discover poetry in the book, but strange photographs and severe fragments of language that also accompany us on our reading journey. And not only are these vagrant busy pieces made strange by being collected as one, but the book itself – this bounded object – worked equally strange on me as a reader: because of its modest size I found myself preferring to carry the book in my back pocket and since inside the book several empty panels of white space exist, I found myself drawing and writing inside Imperial Nostagias, and by doing so the book became an amicable traveling companion. It is in this experience when I discovered Joshua Edwards’ generosity as an artist. While his work made solitude palpable for me, at some mysterious point I discovered the poet was with me the entire time I thought I was alone. During our discussion we talk about the relationship between travel and poetry, the genesis of his latest book, the conundrum of being both American and a poet, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

As I waded into Erica Wright‘s first books of poems, I immediately became not only aware of my gender, but the event that is female, woman, girl, and child. In fact, gender – that construction site where culture and biology come together to play out their destructive and creative collaboration – seems at first to be the blueprint for the lyrical arguments made in each poem, but it turns out gender might only be a part of the poems’ machinery. Wright’s speaker, while someone who rejects the wide bubbly grin and feminine pose of the little girl, and indeed someone who prefers dirt under her nails instead of polish painted over them, wants us to understand that the violence of loneliness, regret, and vulnerability have perhaps less to do with gender or sex, but more to do with the fundamental element that makes us all human: the need to be loved and the need to love. Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) is filled with both poems of confrontation and poems of striking tenderness, humor, and honesty. And yet the poet isn’t merely obsessed with the abstractions of the human interior. She draws heavily on imagery – both classical and contemporary; bleak and lush – to serve as the scaffolding we can hold onto while the speaker whispers in our ears one devastating truth after another. During our chat we talk about the poet’s childhood in rural Tennessee, the themes that drive her poetry, her recent adventure into prose writing, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Kevin Goodan‘s latest book of poems, Upper Level Disturbances (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2012), directly challenges modern society in at least one respect: the poems exist as a result of humility, the opposite of boasting which our culture rewards. In the poems, we’re introduced to a speaker whose daily experiences – which involve working dangerously or dangerously at rest – seems nearly shorn of his fellow human beings, and in fact it often feels that his poems might be the only communication he has with anyone beyond the forest and fires and rivers and beasts that populate his verse. Ultimately, however, Kevin Goodan is a poet who is generously private: his voice is totally singular in expression (no one sounds like him), but also belongs to us. We might not entirely relate to his physical labor, his actual work that is represented in these poems, but his spiritual labor and work is undoubtedly our own. But perhaps what is most powerful about these poems, poems haunted by the natural and immaterial worlds, is that the poet – unlike most of us – is fiercely inner-directed: acting in the world not based on established norms, but moving according to his own morality, calibrated and re-calibrated by suffering and grace. In our conversation we talk about growing up on the Flathead Indian reservation in Montana, his work in forestry and firefighting, his eventual path towards poetry, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Sudden Dog, the voice we encounter is a moody one to say the least. We find a poet who at times seems to believe the entire human project is stupid – and I mean all of it. While at other times we meet a speaker so desperate for an authentic experience that he claws violently inside and straight through the visible world to uncover just one thing that can’t be reduced to a physical event – something invisible in each of us that is too bittersweet to stop looking for. But most surprising, after the poet’s cantankerous and difficult spirit stops to rest, we see and hear a speaker of such surprising and provocative tenderness that it made me realize these poems are not complaints of victimization, but doubtful prayers of a man who refuses to surrender his dignity to a sick world. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: his growth as a poet, how his first book Sudden Dog was published, the way his poems behave across the page, and much much more. I hope you enjoy our discussion as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

To read Samuel Amadon‘s latest book of poems, The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), is to know for the rest of your life what it feels like to be punched in the nose. In these poems, we are introduced to a band of misfits who turn deviant behavior into a sublime activity. The poems, written in a street-wise vernacular, are honest to the point of humiliation and despair. Full of rhetorical and formal mania, the poems produce in the reader feelings of anxiety and heightened awareness, and joined with the shocking content, the final effect is devastating. The Hartford Book is a journey to the underworld where the slum and street-corners are enchanted, and there’s only one outlaw – the poet – that seems remotely aware of an alternative path, a path that leads straight out of Hartford. In the interview, the poet and I discuss a variety of topics: the poet in the academy, the process of writing The Hartford Book, the formal aspects of his poetry, and much much more. I hope you enjoy our talk as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it. In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of the Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Curtis L. Crisler is a prolific poet, novelist, and mix-genre author who writes about the American experience. In his work, Crisler turns a particularly keen eye toward the Midwest, masculinity, and jazz. It seems he has published a book a year since 2007, gaining the attention of critics and winning several major awards. Currently, he teaches creative writing in the English Department at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). He has three books: Pulling Scabs (Willow Books; Aquarius Press, nominated for a Pushcart), Tough Boy Sonatas (Wordsong; Boyds Mills Press) and Dreamist (YA mixed- genre novel from Willow Books; Aquarius Press). His chapbook Spill won (the 2008 Keyhole Chapbook Award at Keyhole Press). He edited the nonfiction book, Leaving Me Behind: Writing a New Me (Lulu.com), on the Summer Bridge experience. He is the recipient of Cave Canem grants (a Cave Canem Fellow), also the recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award, the Sterling Plumpp First Voices Poetry Award, an IAC grant, Soul Mountain, and nominated for the Eliot Rosewater Award. His work has been adapted to theatrical productions in Chicago and New York, and he has been published in a variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies. You will certainly enjoy the conversation with this well-read, enlightened, and amiable poet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while guiding us through the sounds and spaces of contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian. Between the Lines proposes an innovative way to read a poem through and with its translations, using a “triangular comparative analysis” that juxtaposes the original poem with a number of its translations to identify shifts in the lines of the poem that serve as landmarks in the conceptual and textual world of the poet. Bruno uses this translation-focused methodology of reading to reveal fascinating dimensions of time, space, and subjectivity in Yang Lian’s work, and to guide our attention to the performative importance of rhythm, blank space, punctuation, and sound in his verse. Readers who are interested in Chinese poetry will find much to absorb and transport them in these pages, and readers interested in the theory and practice of translation will find a clear articulation of a set of methodological tools that could potentially bear fruit when rendering texts across many different genres and languages. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry