Poetry Feature
No. 3 in Series
Degrees of Apprenticeship
The Sarah Lawrence Program
WithIntroductionandPoemsby Thomas Lux
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Poetry Feature No. 3 in Series Degrees of Apprenticeship The Sarah Lawrence Program WithIntroductionandPoemsby Thomas Lux |
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Suzanne Adler Lorna Blake Sally Bliumis Laura Caldwell Michael Carman Tricia Chapman Miles Coon Yasmin Dalisay Karin de Weille Lesleigh Forsyth Bruce Frankel Patty Gordon Lisa Horner |
Jenifer Wohl Jonson Kasey Jueds Judy Katz Louisa Lam Alice A. Loxley Christina Manning Victoria Matalon Jamie McNeely Seth Michelson Greg A. Nicholl Baruch November Tara Pearson Gretchen Primack |
Laura Sherwood Rudish Denise Rue Dan Schneider Elaine Sexton Daniel V. Shea Lisa Shirley Louisa Storer Mary Tautin Lisa Titus Byron Weiss Hanne Winarsky Melissa Woertendyke |
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~ . ~ Introduction When I started teaching at the college in 1975, we had two or three students in our MFA program. In fact, there were no classes: graduate students were in undergraduate classes. We—in poetry, primarily Jane Cooper, Jean Valentine, and myself; and in fiction, Joe Papaleo, Grace Paley, and Linsey Abrams—then began teaching graduate students in their own classes. We lacked only one thing for this endeavor: salary. We taught the classes for nothing. For a few years. As we gained more students, the faculty gained a little cash to buy a little sawdust to put in our shrouds. Since about the mid-80's the program has grown and been strengthened year by year. We give what no other program gives: individual conferences with the faculty, and plenty of them, as well as rigorous workshops and craft classes. It's the Sarah Lawrence way, and it's the right way. We have incredible students, many have published books in recent years. Our faculty (look them up on the web site-if I listed all of us here I might develop carpal tunnel syndrome) are all working writers and teaching matters to them. There are approximately 30 writers teaching on campus in any given year. If there is another college or university with more than 7 or 8 (and that would be very rare) writers on the faculty, then I will turn in my Progress Is Coming To Sherwood Forest T-shirt. I am leaving (oracular nutty's taking it on the lam) my Sarah Lawrence teaching position at the end of this academic year, though I'll return next year for several residencies in the MFA program. It has been a great privilege to teach for a quarter century plus, both undergraduates (many now in their 40s!) and graduate students (many now never mind how old) at Sarah Lawrence College. I am particularly proud to have seen the graduate poetry program evolve into something—because of its rigor, imagination, and its spirit of generosity—that honors the art form we love. It is my prediction that you will read some good writing in this issue of Big City Lit. Read until you bleed. Come to the party at KGB Thursday, March 7. Write until your eyebrows turn white. Thomas Lux PS: There are three unattributed quotes or near-quotes in the above. Name them and their authors (poets) and you will be rewarded with a trip to the Bahamas, Paris, or someplace better. |
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—Publishers Weekly Everybody knows that for a ballet dancer, in order to make a gazelle-like leap, you have to practice for years to do that. But people think because they have language, if they have feelings and they put them down, they have a poem. Suzanne Somers has published a book of poetry. [So have] Jewel, Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Carter. I happened to browse through [Carter's stuff] and it wasn't so bad; it's just not poetry, not good poetry. You can call it poetry if you want, but it's dopey and sentimental. Even dopey and sentimental people don't read 'em anymore. A lot of poets don't read their work well, but they still do readings--for the check, obviously. But nothing is duller than a monotone reading of work that's essentially incomprehensible—and there's a lot of that. I'd rather have lit matches stuck in my ear. Sarah Lawrence is not your normal academic college. Sarah Lawrence respects the creative. Half of the faculty here are working artists of one kind or another. If the devil came to me and gave me a fifty-year career as a poet and one year as a centerfielder for the Boston Red Sox, I'd have to think about it. If I could bat about .390 and steal thirty or forty bases and win a gold glove in outfield, I might consider that deal. I just want to keep writing now and reading [Lux reads 100 books a year in all areas, especially history] and raising my child and teaching, and I hope, before I die, the Red Sox win the World Series. Interview conducted by J.M. Spalding Copyright © 1999 The Cortland Review Issue Eight—The Cortland Review |
It Must Be the Monk in Me It must be the monk in me, or the teen-age girl. That's why I'm always off somewhere in my mind with something stupid (like a monk) or spiritual like a teen-age girl). Sometimes, there's vision, by reason of faith, in glimpses, or else and more often, a lovely blank, a hunger, like Moses' hunger when with his fingernails he scraped the boulders of their meager lichen and then fiercely sucking them . . . It's a way of living on the earth—to be away from it part of the time. They say it begins in childhood: your dog gets runned over, your father puts a knife to your mother's throat . . . But those things only make you crazy and don't account for scanning, or actually mapping, a galaxy inside. I believe it happens before birth, and has to do, naturally, with Mom. Not with what she eats, or does, or even thinks—but with what she doesn't think, or want to: the knot of you growing larger and, therefore, growing away. (from Half Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin, Boston1986)) ~ . Postcard to Baudelaire It's still the same, Charles. Every day dislimned, the heart clicking erratically—the sound of amateurs playing billiards. How are you enjoying the high privileges of the dead? The double triple and more turns of the dark, the delicious please of quietude? No one, no thing is different: the oblati swarm, the poor are formed into lines leading poorer . . . There's one good thing, Charles: the few beautiful verses granted you by God sing. Even though you're deaf I want you to know they sing! You should know that, Charles, it's still the same. (from Sunday (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1979; Carnegie-Mellon University Press, January 1989) ~ . Barn Fire It starts, somehow, in the hot damp and soon the lit bales throb in the hayloft. The tails of mice quake in the dust, the bins of grain, the mangers stuffed with clover, the barrels of oats shivering individually in their pale husks—animate and inanimate: they know with the first whiff in the dark. And we knew, or should have: that day the calendar refused its nail on the wall and the crab apples hurling themselves to the ground . . . Only moments and the flames like a blue fist curl all around the black. There is some small blaring from the calves and the cows nostrils flare only once more, or twice, above the dead dry metal troughs . . . No more fat tongues worrying the salt licks, no more heady smells of deep green from silos rising now like huge twin chimneys above all this. With the lofts full there is no stopping nor even getting close: it will rage until dawn and beyond,—and the horses, because they know they are safe there, the horses run back into the barn. (from Sunday (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1979; Carnegie-Mellon University Press, January 1989)) ~ . Aubade Aubade Long bones are loveliest: I love long bones —Roethke O I know you're long, longer . . . And O yes—the slow curve at the base of your spine, you remember, where the moon hides almost half its face: moon, goodbye . . . There is some joy, in fact, lots: your mouth and her ancestors. I know behind your cheekbones there are wings, I said wings, and your face is flying (believe me—this has nothing to do with the clouds conception of motion and speed) towards mine. Goodbye, lost river. Hello, lost river. I have something for you: here, our calm shadow and one more never final sleepwalk. (from The Glassblower's Breath (Cleveland State University Poetry Center (CSU Poetry Series, II) 1976)) ~ . Your Tender Message Your tender message affected me: I fell down a flight of stairs. I wasn't hurt much. My legs had been broken before. I just lay there and shuddered. Then I heard a noise, clink, on the floor beside me: only a small piece of my life falling off, only another small loss . . . Somehow, I got outside, pulled a leaf from a tree, and looked at it. I stayed out there all night, pulling leaves from a tree, reading them—each one sadder and more useless than the first. (from The Glassblower's Breath Cleveland State University Press, 1976) ~ . The Perfect God The perfect god puts forth no dogma, can't, or laws that dim the soul. He lets you sleep and eat and work and love and treats you like a man, woman. He needs no slaves; the self- appointed, meek but cruel—they annoy him. There are old books he didn't write but likes for their rhythms and truths some of the stories tell. He likes, loves these books, I said, but is bored by exegesis too literal, wild. Prose, poems, sometimes suffer the same fate, but this also bores him and he won't, can't, or does not care, or dare, to interfere with either. The perfect god is sad, hurt, when humans fear their lives—those solitudes so small beside the tundra, polar caps, Congo River (whose every curve he loves), the empty, equatorial bliss. He likes, loves what's vast, which seems to us so blank. He loves what's sane, serene, and fiercely calm, which he didn't invent but understands. The perfect god—and god, yes, is perfect— is impassive, patient, aloof, alert, and needs not our praise nor our blame. And needs not our praise nor our blame. (from The Drowned River (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1990)) ~ . Cows Trochee, trochee, trochee—that's how I heard them, the cows, their beings, they walked like that, into the barn each night and out again each morning after giving up their milk. They were always out eating, their heads down, in field or barn, eating grass or grain. The field short-cropped, lunar, dotted with rocks, cow pies. Out of thirty, maybe three or four you gave names to: Bossy, Bessie. They were stupid not cute, and would not love or nuzzle you. They went out in the morning and came back at dusk. They didn't just hand it over, their milk, but you could take it from them, great foamy pails emptied into vats and sold for cash, all but one large blue pitcherful, which stayed home and which, when cold, you poured atop a bowl of oatmeal and ate through a thousand winters, every day safe, tame, broken, and lost. (from Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, NY, 1994). Winner: Kingley Tufts Award) ~ . Virgule What I love about this little leaning mark is how it divides without divisiveness. The left or bottom side prying that choice up or out, the right or top side pressing down upon its choice: either/or, his/her. Sometimes called a slash (too harsh), a slant (a little dizzy but the Dickinson association nice: "Tell the truth but tell it slant"), a solidus ( sounding too much like a Roman legionnaire of many campaigns), or a separatrix (reminding one of a sexual variation). No, I like virgule. I like the word and I like its function: "Whichever is appropriate may be chosen to complete the sense." There is something democratic about that, grown-up; a long and slender walking stick set against the house. Virgule: it feels good in your mouth. Virgule: its foot on backwards, trochaic, that's OK, American. Virgule: you could name your son that, or your daughter, Virgula. I'm sorry now I didn't think to give my daughter such a name though I doubt that she and or her mother would share that thought. (from Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, NY, 1994)) ~ . Barrett and Browning Mr. Browning helped but I think poetry and hatred for her father made Miss Barrett decide to live. I think I believe this dire couple. And for once I believe scholars: they loved each other. Elizabeth, of course, was smarter. Robert, in the beginning, more ardent. He was positive and if his main inventions were in a field other than verse he would have invented the wheelchair and pushed her relentlessly south and warmer. I'm sure this was one reason why she got up and walked alone . . . Love helped, though, and they did love each other—bearing one healthy but dull child and many healthy poems, which, of course, is never enough . . . . (from Sunday (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1979; Carnegie-Mellon University Press, January 1989)) ~ . The Corner of Paris and Porter Meet me there, you remember, the corner of Paris and Porter. We stood on that spot after walking our city all day, dropped-off-the-earth lost each in the other. We'd live in the house there, we said, we loved the sway-back porch, the elms in the yard towering. We stopped in the thick, still shade of one, the sidewalk raised and cracked by its roots. On the curb: a mailbox, agape, flag up, a dry birdbath in the yard, and in the driveway a yellow car: this was lucky, a yellow car, a child once told me. The sunlight a wall slamming down outside the shade's circle. Two old sisters, we guessed, lived there: two lace antimacassars on two wicker porch chairs. We'd knock on the door, tell them we love their house, which they'd then bequeath to us, on the corner, the house we found by chance, chirps and childcalls, the clanking of lunch dishes, though we saw not one child or bird. The mailman (we never saw him but knew his name was Steve) would leave great piles of letters, the grocery and the garden would provide. It was the corner of Paris and Porter, in that part of the city where we'd never walked before—it was south and farther south, past downtown, beyond the meat district, the fish market, past the street of clocks, the tripe stalls, the brick kilns, the casket factories; we turned east, a few blocks north, there was nothing but warehouses and long blocks of lots, tall fences topped by barbed wire, behind which what? We walked over a bridge (the train tracks beneath were thick with weeds) and there it was: a neighborhood—houses, yards, shrubs, we were talking and talking, I don't know how many miles, lost in each the other, and though we did not know where we were, we knew where we were going: the corner of Paris and Porter, remember, the day was blue and clear, I recall the exact path of an ant, the mica glinting in the curbstone, a curtain parting momentarily at your laugh. I could have drowned in your hair. Meet me there, today, don't be late, on the corner of Paris and Porter. (from The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)) All work reprinted with author permission. ~ . ~ |
