When the poet Frank Bidart came to speak at my father’s memorial service in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I was touched. Bidart had been my father’s favorite student at The University of Riverside in California and was often the subject of dinner-table conversation. After moving to New Jersey, where my Mayflower father taught at Rutgers, we’d periodically receive phone calls from the man Louise Glück called “one of the greatest poets of our time.” One day a babysitter informed my parents that she’d received a sinister phone call: “I think he said his name was Frank the Dart!!!” Which became a family joke for decades. Sure does sound like some underworld figure. But there is nothing underworldy about Frank Bidart’s poetry. Take for instance these otherwordly opening lines from For the Twentieth Century:

Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
Technologies of ecstasy

Boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
Rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:–

Or the universal minutiae (and elusiveness) of the poem “The Poem Is a Veil”:

V E I L,–as if silk that you in fury must thrust repeatedly
High at what the eye, your eye, naked cannot see

Catches, clinging to it’s physiognomy.

Hence, it’s no mistake that Bidart’s work Music Like Dirt (2002) became the first chapbook to ever become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (It now makes up part 1 of Star Dust.) Bidart’s work achieves an originality and breadth of scope that is dizzying in its implications. His emotional depth is matched only by the brilliance of his poem’s semi-immaculate conception. I won’t pretend to be a formal scholar of poetical techniques (I can’t tell a dactyl from a spondee), but I can safely say that this is the most readable collection of modern poetry I’ve ever leafed through. It makes an excellent X-mas gift for anytime in the new century, and might indeed in the future be used for making “evolved” peace with colonizing immigrants from the outer planets who say with an alien warcry, “This Bud Is For You!”

Nominated for the National Book Award, Star Dust is a must to chuck in your Amazon.com cart. It both reaches out into the cosmos like Steven Hawking and withdraws inward like The Incredible Shrinking Man. Bidart says he hoped to make a sequence “In which the human need to make is seen as not only central but inescapable,“ a celestial tapestry seen in the context of other processes—sexuality, mortality—and inseparable from it. Clearly Bidart is on the make himself, but it is hard to figure out what direction he’s going in before a surprise enjambment wakes us up. In Little Fugue, for example, we have a haunting lilting melody worthy of a young Mozart: “beneath every journey the ticket to this/journey in one direction.” Or in “In Luggage” there is the hint of unconsummated sexuality: “In your stray moments, as now in/mine, may what was not/rise like grief before you.” Here we have the urge to create and destroy united like polar opposites, or a couple who love each other to death in a classical domestic dispute. In Advice to the Players, the rules of the game are set forth in Bidart’s definition of a human being: “We are creatures who need to make.”
This takes extreme form in the first section’s end poem, Lament for the Makers:

Until my mother died she struggled to make
A house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me

Many creations must

Make, but only one must seek
Within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

*

Teach me, master who by making were
Remade, your art

Bidart’s fantastical book, reminiscent of Italo Calvino on shrooms and divided into 2 parts, continues with a “Curse” where “Each time you enter them/they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.” The “you” addressed in the poem is–at least when we ask Frank outright “whom” he means–whomever brought down the World Trade Center, though the poem can be read on many other different levels. Since I was born on 11/9, the 9/11 timing of the terrorism seems the topsy-turvy stuff of rank nightmares and emergency rooms. We all feel numb from numerology. And then there is my personal favorite, Phenomenology of the Prick, one of the best titles of a poem I can think of—with its hint of sexual games gone awry: “You make sure/I see how hard/your wife makes it . . .” Bidart’s humor is both ferocious and farcical; there is more here than meets the eye. Experience and imagination collide, like worlds and words.

What really makes “Star Dust” move, though, is the semi-epic longpoem called The Third Hour of the Night, a powerful autobiographical monologue of sorts attributed to the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor of Perseus With Head of Medusa. Set in a believable historical context, the poem describes the dual aspects of both sublime creation and destructive energy. Throwing everything into the forge—including cutlery—Cellini finds, “Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay/sheath had been with great care removed I found/what was dead brought back to life again.”
In effect, the Promethian Bidart says through his soullmate Cellini, “My art is my revenge.” The last part of the poem jumps in time and space into the songlines of a murderous Australian Aborigine, who brutally destroys a woman with his “killing stick”:

He smirks, and in silence repeats that all life exists
At the expense of other life.

What is made is ultimately destroyed.

Bidart’s Imagination and Power (a nod to my dad, Thomas R. Edwards Jr., whose book of that name was nominated by the poet C. Day Lewis, Daniel Day Lewis’s father, for the National Book Award) is almost cinematic in scope. The prose is delivered with the controlled suspense of a Coppola flick. Like the great Jacobean dramatists, Bidart is aware of the possibilities of violence. In Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words, he provokes, “Kill whatever killed your father, your life/turning to me again said before your death.” Ah, the possibilities of the page: the pared-down poems are not so much printed as sculpted. Bidart’s “which” craft resembles sort-of creation itself. Just blow off a little star dust. With its classical and revolutionary forms and themes, seething imagery, and complex ideas, Star Dust places the Spanish-French-Californian “Basque” American Bidart as one of America’s most important poets.

But to me he’s still “Frank the Dart,” a made man of the made-up poetry world. His work seems as accessible to me as a bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats eaten by Grandpa Bob. As a primary source, though, he is unknowable: a friendly stranger who comes alive on the podium and pulls an alien alphabet out of thin air.

Text by Annie DeWitt, images by Jerome Jakubiec

My mother never said, Don’t Usher The Good Times In.  She never took the pot from my hand and said, Don’t Beat On It With A Stick.  Don’t Make Noise.  She never threw up the window shade and said, Don’t Look Out.  Or, I Remember Chilly Scenes of Winter.

I remember sitting around the fire while my father sang a song about a railroad that stretched all the way from our living room to Kansas.

“What else,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.  “Never mind. Teach me to dance in the kitchen.”

*

“The bus dropped me off at the corner of 9^th and 10^th,” you said.

“I thought,” I said.  “You said that bus stopped in the Bowery.”

“I thought so too,” you said.

Or maybe you said, “That fair went on for a year.”

It kept going round.

The ride I meant.

“Right here,” you said before I left with my belongings.

“Yes,” I said patting the trunk.

You said, “I sure will miss it.”

You were speaking about the chair.

I thought, Maybe I should sit in that chair a little longer.  Maybe if I sit in it I will start speaking upwards.

“Sightlines,” I think they call it.

*

“You can borrow my name,” you said that afternoon in Reno.  “If you need it at the Motel.”  We were chasing down my Uncle again.

“Who’s following whom,” Uncle said when we caught him.  He pointed out the window at a neon yellow Thunderbird sailing down the highway.

“Birdwatcher,” you said.  “Sightlines, they call it.”

Maybe they call it night driving in the west.

Maybe they call it fishing for sticky.

*

I could say I did not keep dirty laundry.  I never took his shirts and folded them out so the pit stains were under my head.

“What’s this mean,” he used to say whenever he freed something from my body.

“Just a drop in the pan,” I’d say.

These sort of rarities.

I remember happy.  Just like that.  Old boating shoes.  Faded red sweater.

*

You said you would pack my knitwear and drive me there.

You wanted to do things that made you look humble.

On the highway you drove with your hands over your eyes when we hit those square patches of sun.

When we arrived we unpacked me.  There was an old woman sitting at the entrance to the clinic.  She asked what I wanted with her mess.

“It’s MISS,” I said.

Afterwards, we stood on the street corner just outside the riverbank.  I cannot say I didn’t wear that white sundress.  You kept your car running.

“I guess I leave you off here,” you said.

*

Across the river, that ewe was struggling, hefting her rear back and forth so that her tail looked like it was swatting at a horde of fruit flies in summer.  Her calf must have been half way down her chute.

“The problem,” I said, “Is finding a small enough dropper.  One big enough to stick in the corner of our mouths yet small enough that it doesn’t emit so much that our nostrils start to fill.”

*

We watched the backs of that ewe’s shoulders.  The way she held her small frame.

*

The old woman keeps the apartment across the hall from mine.   The night after our first meeting she entered my room.  She turned the knob with her palm – gripping the teeth of the thing hard against her.  All you could see was the tops of her nails tapping at the brass.

She said she was wearing the coat her Grandmother gave her.  “In here,” she said, throwing wide the lapels and drawing me close to her body.  There was a small silk label.  Dear China it said.

In the cleft of her stomach there was a small pit where she kept all her food.  It was fair and broad and when I looked out of it I saw the place where I used to be before I came out here.  That spot inMcLean’s field.

When I’m stood there in that spot I noticed a good clean breeze coming on.

“I never said,” the woman said.  “I wanted to gather my own stale air.”

On the Trail of the Book

At dawn stanchions
stand at attention
when the pearl

sky with smudges
stretches
The bridge is the zone

of dull shadows
nosing around
the washed out snapshot

where the word oblivion
affixes wings
to the paperboy

and the road
is a partisan
smuggling colored thread

inside the cinder
garden The flickering
maiden will unfold

a garment of smoke
and embroider the name
of the air

_____________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin Gantcher’s poems have appeared in many journals, including Slate, The Brooklyn Rail, and Tin House. His first book, If a Lettuce, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series contest, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Painting: Ryan Schneider, I’m All Around You Now, oil on canvas, 96″ x 144″, 2010.

Love is War for Miles

Aquarius Heaven…
Blu and Exile (letter)
(Quit it) Nat Adderley (Give me my month) Blake
(Mike and the Sensations) Nico Jaar
(Anything Goes/You used to think) Erica Pomerance
(The Idea of Ancestry) Etheridge Knight
Blue and Exile (Don’t be…)
(Tia) Arthur Nunes
Gonjasufi (Love of Reign)
(Black Christ of the Andes) Mary Lou Williams
(I only know (what I know now))Blake
(Black Swan) Nina Simone
(Hello to the Wind) Bobby Hutcherson
(Seasons) Blu/(Tom Waits (The World Keeps Turning)
Nicolas Jaar (Why didn’t you…)

Awful Math

The commotion surrounding the awful math grew to a hollering, and soon Jenny pitched in an extra twenty dollars saying, “I’ll just give more, that’s all.” But that wasn’t all, and once we were in the car, she was off on a steady pace about which one of my moron friends was going to be wheeled out on a gurney from the force struck beneath his brow. I said, “Calm down,” but she turned back stern and spit, “How many twenties would it take for you to make your spidery arms into fists and cuff those assholes?” and I said, “Four,” thinking of a hundred, and she said, “That’s it? Eighty bucks?” and I said, “Oh wait,” then I said, “Five,” and she said, “You’re just as dumb as the rest of them,” and folded her arms tight like stuck drawer. By then we’d driven out so far that we were once again surrounded by cedars, tall and unflappable, and I tried to think about money and how it was made.

________________________________________________________________________________

Sophie Rosenblum’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, New Letters, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is currently finishing her first novel, which was recently a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. You can find links to more of her writing at www.sophierosenblum.com.

Photograph: Spruce Pond, by Bob Gates.

Congratulations to Bruce Smith and his incredible new collection of poetry, Devotions, which has just been named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Awards. What better a time than now to give our online readers a sampling of his work. This fabulous poem, Devotion: Midrash, originally appeared in Issue 6 of Dossier.

—————————

DEVOTION: MIDRASH

Strings did things to you: held you at one end while you

became deranged, made you forget the inamour, swerved

around the realpolitik, the stink, made a cup for the god

thirst, hid the tent city, relieved the money grief for three bars,

four, bandaged the open sore, realized and blamed the systems

for a blink or two, made (poem) the consternation of coins

falling through the slot on the coffer of the bus (chromatics

and discords) seem like the truth of the end of suffering

(the third noble truth).  They took things far.  Strings made

wings of things, (nouns verbs), held down Gulliver, made

flavors and spins of our duration, made the guitar

a question mark, lost the thread.  They made the rain

come down for a couple of beats, which was the riches,

the tender, the fat stacks, the math.  So the poem (the great film

festival of spirits and sobs) goes on with its fornicating ways

and its clemency for the engines (little, think, could)

which keep it suffering (the first noble truth).  The audience

for this (we can’t agree) will be you or homies, Buddhists,

Prince Hal in Birkenstocks, birds, texting men, enraptured,

ruptured girls left alone in the tent city where they summon

their darlings through perplexed strings.  How do you know

the levels of our sadness without a string across an opening?

How do you get a flood in a bowl, a core sample of the unsung

summoned from pluck (you), the synthetics or cat gut

of zero sum?  Strings made you midrash the stuff, sniff

out the perfume (the ocean, the flower), chew the root, express

the part where we’re talking to ourselves from the part

that’s not.  We have a way (fourth truth) we employ

against the day depending on whether you’re Keats

with your nose pressed against the window of the sweet

shop (devotion, attachment – the second noble truth)

or whether you’re the woman on the bus –

two kids, one crying, eating a cracker from the floor,

one about to cry from the what for.

—————————————

Photograph by Eric McNatt

THE WANDERING POETS (by Philip Levine, from Dossier Issue #5)

As they return from their pilgrimage,

footsore and disgusted, only a few

wear jackets and ties.  As usual

Gerald is the most emphatic: he stands

at the corner of Broadway and Spring

and demands that an angel descend

carrying a glass of tea sugared

with a little lemon and milk—

not a big deal when you consider

how far he’s come without the least thanks.

It’s early April at the center

of the known world, somewhere tulips

nudge their way heavenward, forsythias

blaze until you have to look away.

Somewhere an axe falls, somewhere a boy

hurls a rock, somewhere the answer

is waiting to spring from the black leaves

of a mountain oak.  Gerald has fallen

to the sidewalk and the lunch crowd

steps carefully over him; the lesser writers

scurry toward their cars or descend

into the subway to make their appointments.

It’s so quiet only you hear the poem

he’s polished all his life, delivered on

a froth of blood and meaning everything.

Jean Hartig is a poet living in Brooklyn.  Her chapbook, Ave, Materia, was published by the Poetry Society of America in 2009.

Image: Pierre Bonnard, “La Cheminée” (“The Mantlepiece”), 1916

Sommer in Europa

Bären schleichen über gefrorenen Boden und kratzen an deiner Tür. Ihnen ist kalt und sie hören die Grille, die du um den Hals trägst. Gefangen in einem ausgehöhlten Kürbis. Immer auf deiner Haut. Warm und sicher. Ihr Zirpen erinnert dich an den Sommer. Die Enge und die Dunkelheit sind nur temporär, nur für ein paar Monate. Dann darf sie wieder gehen. Du sagst, das sei ein fairer Deal für euch beide. Und dass du im Winter auch nicht viel aus deinem Kürbis kommst. Du hast einen Felsen von Innen vor die Tür gerollt, damit die Bestien nicht herein können. Jetzt macht dir das Klappern der Schlösser keine Angst mehr. Ihre Pranken haben scharfe Krallen, aber du hast Holz und Stein und Eisen zum Schutz.
Neuerdings trägst du immer Holz und Stein und Eisen im Körper. Seitdem du durch das Dach auf den Haufen Schrott gefallen bist. Deine zerschnittenen Händen hatten rostige Abdrücke auf dem halb geöffneten Fenster des Taxis hinterlassen. Der Fahrer hatte die Scheibe wortlos nach oben gekurbelt und war davon gerollt. – Gegenangebot. Fick dich!- hattest du ihm nachgeschrien. Auf der Rückbank eines anderen Taxis konntest du dich nicht entscheiden ob deine Hände grauenhaft oder fantastisch aussahen. So cool! So abgefuckt! Dann wolltest du mir dein Bier über die Haare leeren und mir ins Gesicht schlagen. Alles was nicht nach deinem Kopf geht ist für dich langweilig. Ich hätte dich einfach küssen können, damit du bekommst hättest, was du wolltest, aber der Frieden war die Konsequenzen nicht wert. Du bist ein betrunkenes Einzelkind, das allen die Finger bemalen will. TOFU LOVE, GOOD TOGO, READ Y2GO, DUTC HRUB. Jon meinte, dass keiner mit Moral dir je eine Tätowiermaschine verkaufen würde. Dann hatte er einen unmoralischen Laden empfohlen.Vielleicht hatte er sich in dich verliebt. So wie sich alle immer in dich verlieben.
Unter deinem T-Shirt, das aussah, als ob du es schon in der Grundschule getragen hättest, hattest du keinen BH an. Du hattest behauptet, dass man in Mexiko und Japan zu Titten Chichi sagt. Zuerst dachte ich, dass du vielleicht zu viel geraucht hättest, aber dann war mir aufgefallen, dass du einfach nur ungeschminkt warst. Am liebsten hätte ich es dir gesagt, aber dann hatte ich es doch lieber bleiben lassen. Ich kenne dich nicht gut genug. Vielleicht wärst du beleidigt gewesen.
Du meintest, dass du dir heute Federn auf die Haut kleben wolltest, um dich frei zu fühlen. Weil du keinen Klebstoff mehr hattest, hast du dir über beide Arme Gummibänder gestreift und die Federn darunter geschoben. Aber du warst zu ungeduldig und dann sahen die Federn nicht mehr nach Federn aus und du hattest nur die Ärmel eines Pelzmantels an. Du hast mit einem Küchenmesser die Bänder zerschnitten und jetzt stehst du nackt zwischen zwei Daunenhäufchen und bunten Plastikfäden und deine Arme sehen aus, als ob du zu lange in einer Netzhängematte gelegen wärst und zwischen roten Striemen leuchtet getrocknetes Blut wo das Messer zu scharf war, der Gummi zu spröde und du zu hektisch und dein Kopfkissen ist leer.
-Warum drehen sich die Discokugeln in dieser Stadt nicht? – hast du gefragt und versucht einen Lichtpunkt in deiner Hand zu fangen. Je länger du weg bist, desto froher bin ich, dass du weg bist. – Das ist der, in den ich verliebt bin…äh, war. – und Asche fällt vor Nervosität von der Zigarette und – Es bricht mir das Herz so gehen zu müssen – wird zu – Hoffentlich können wir dann zusammen spazieren gehen – zu – Lass uns zum Mittagessen treffen – zu – Vor meinem Auftritt ist ganz schlecht – und kaum habe ich dich aus deinem Koffer steigen sehen wird es auch schon wieder dunkel. Trotzdem würde ich dir gerne eine Nachricht schicken und dir sagen, dass ich dich vermisse. Nur so. Um zu sehen, wie du reagieren würdest. Ich habe Kleister an meinen Fingern und lege sie auf die Kugel und drehe mich und die Punkte drehen sich mit uns und wir bauen ein Floß aus unseren Körpern und treiben auf dem Regen nach Hause und hören das Zirpen und das Kratzen und sind nichts als das Licht, das wir reflektieren.

This is another excerpt from a forth-coming book by Thomas Mader and LNY.

Text by Thomas Mader
Image by LNY