NPM Days 6, 7, 8 : Chen, Coultas, and Catch Up

The best laid plans, hmm? I realize I have created quite the little pickle for myself by insisting that I post my new poems alongside the other work, because the timing doesn't always work out quite right. From here forth I will do both whenever possible but there may be some that come more in fugue form. So be it. I didn't choose this life to choke myself on my own strictures! Amen to that.

Today I want to feature two contemporary poets who you are less likely to know, but who are well worthy:

KEN CHEN!!  Deservedly, Chen was the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award (the oldest annual literary award in the country) in 2009 for his book "Juvenalia." When I heard him speak and read from this book some months ago I was floored by how he had seamlessly combined legal logic (from his other profession) and traditional Chinese poem forms with his own deftly expressed emotions/observations. It was smart, disciplined, and strategic while remaining all the time natural -- a feat I seek to master.

I want to bring your attention to the very smart, very fun piece, "Walt and I: What's American About American Poetry?" that he did for the Poetry Society, even if I can't reprint it here in full, and I'll give you this:



Echo

“Such omissions of the subject allows the poet not to intrude his own personality upon the scene…”

– James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry

            I can tell the wind is risin’, leaves trembling on the tree,
            trembling on the tree.

My father’s father holding still, holding still a traffic jam of coughs.
My father’s mother steaming chicken, boiling soy and air.
My mother’s father dangling years – a broken pocket watch.
My mother’s mother bearing a wedding dress.
My mother with such passion, sad beneath her silent face – frozen, a fashion ad.
My father pressed in black and white – a single paper lantern pasted in the air beside him.
            I got to keep movin’, I’ve got to keep movin’
            Blues fallin’ down like hail…
I close the album and my family members fold
against each other. Faces that would not kiss in life
press together as the pages close.
            Yeah standin’ at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
            Ooo eeee, I tried to flag a ride
            Didn’t nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
When pages have deserted books and hair from heads.
When pictures yet to be taken seem old and worn.
When my family now long gone resurrects itself, the ghosts
roaming through our dinner table –
The steam from the vermicelli broth rises up like an apparition.
My grandmother’s cooking. Our knives and forks
tick against our plates while we eat, unaware that we are achieving
ourselves.
We conjure our ghosts with these photographs in words.
I will cough my grandfather’s cough and my wife smiles her mother’s smiles.

BRENDA COULTAS!! I first met this exceptional poet when she was invited to give a reading at Columbia by Mick Taussig with whom I share many opinions not in the least that poetry and anthropology are necessary bedfellows; Coultas's self-described "archeological" poetry was a natural fit.  She had just finished A Handmade Museum: Excavations (Coffee House Press) which won a "First Book" award from the Poetry Society, the copy for which describes her as a Poet-Phenomenologist, which is apt. I was sold from word 1.


From The Abolition Journal in The Marvelous Bones of Time


Looking from the free state
there is a river then a slave state 
Turn around and there is a slave state,
a river
then a free state

I was born between the free side and the slave side, my head
crowning on the bridge. I fully emerged in an elevator traveling
upward in a slave state. I have shopped in the slave state and eaten
barbecue there. I have walked along the riverbank in the slave
state and looked out at the free state.

Lincoln looked out over the river and saw a slave state and he was
Born in one (Kentucky), like me, but was raised in a free state
(Indiana), like me. We were white and so could cross the river.

Question: are there any abolitionists hanging from my family tree?

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Enough, then, enough. I was going to post three for today and the two that have passed but perhaps there's been enough to take in. Here, then, from the Book of Lynne: (written over these three days)


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Into the pillowed coffin
clinging like a barnacle to upstairs
Into this nest I was
flinging
a spent self
with the haphazard toss of done
when
making the sound of hammered coconut
my head and a rafter met inopportune:


OUT! like the milk of that wooden orb
OUT! my athena, raging
OUT! steam then boiling, as a radiator bleeds
OUT! slow then faster, with fist raised


like an uninvited guest changes the course of the evening
the anger arrives
and makes itself known


Did you hear it howl, neighbor?
Did you hear it shriek
Did it shake your bones,
shock you awake from slumber deep?
Or did it come quiet, a sneaking low cry
that gutteral sob a stomach punch
that seeped into your skin
clawed like the sharp edge of damp chill
carried on the wind of this night?
Did you pull close your coat or covers, 
a wary ward against its scent of sickness
and melancholy?
Did your shoulders meet your ears, arched
like a street cat against the winter of my cry?


with the heart having sent her packing
the brain dissembled, (always of two minds)
allowing residence but keeping hidden deep
the key to her dark chambers --
such a small space for this goddess
wet in fury's juices --
we have lived in strained silence for some time
she and I... the type of silence marked by the timeclock
of a ticking timebomb
so that now explodes
an early easter resurrection of rage.


CRACK! hiss sizzle
a bedded breakfast 
of girl and goddess omelette
but it is I who am consumed:
leaving no lines between me and myth
when the howling subsides
a faint but insistent drumming sounds constant in the temple
and it is she abed but aquiver, taut
and ready for battle.