Con­trol­ling Ques­tion: The usage(s) of and relationship(s) between the terms “Per­sian” and “Iran­ian” in cur­rent dis­course — lit­er­ary, cul­tural, polit­i­cal and oth­er­wise — is a com­plex one, with each term simul­ta­ne­ously con­ceal­ing and reveal­ing highly con­tested and politi­cized posi­tions regard­ing the nature of cul­tural, national and per­sonal iden­ti­ties. The lit­er­a­ture pro­duced within the space(s) defined by these posi­tions dates back to at least the 10^th cen­tury, when Fer­dowsi com­posed the Shah­nameh using almost no Ara­bic loan words, an act of lit­er­ary sub­ver­sion that almost single-handedly res­ur­rected Per­sian as a lit­er­ary lan­guage in the face of what had been Arabic’s dom­i­nance. Today, the lit­er­a­ture being pro­duced within these spaces is writ­ten in (or trans­lated into) many lan­guages other than Per­sian, in coun­tries far beyond the bor­ders of the ancient Per­sian Empire, and by peo­ple whose con­nec­tions to what­ever is defined by the terms “Per­sian” and/or “Iran­ian” are any­thing but mono­lithic. Given all this, is it fair to call this lit­er­a­ture a world lit­er­a­ture? If not, why not?

For a spe­cial edi­tion of Arte­News, the online jour­nal pub­lished by ArteEast, we are solic­it­ing sub­mis­sions in the fol­low­ing categories:

1. Essays of 1,000 – 1,500 words in response to any aspect of the con­trol­ling question.
2. Essays of 1,000 – 1,500 words that address any other aspect of Persian/Iranian literature.
3. Poetry: 3 – 5 poems, includ­ing trans­la­tions from any his­tor­i­cal period, that fall within the space(s) defined by the con­trol­ling ques­tion. The poems need not have been writ­ten orig­i­nally in Eng­lish, but any non-English poems must be accom­pa­nied by strong, lit­er­ary, Eng­lish trans­la­tions. Trans­la­tors must show proof of the right to pub­lish the translations.
4. Short sto­ries or mem­oirs, using the same guide­lines as for poetry, of between 1,000 – 1,5000 words.

Please send sub­mis­sions, with the sub­ject head­ing Arte­News Sub­mis­sion, to richardjeffreynewman@​verizon.​net.

Amy Unsworth, whose blog, Small Branches Poetry, you should check out, has writ­ten a per­cep­tive review of my book, The Silence Of Men, in The Pedestal Mag­a­zine. (I espe­cially like it when she points out that it would be inac­cu­rate to clas­sify my work as con­fes­sional in any sim­plis­tic way.)

The Pedestal is a good lit­er­ary mag­a­zine, which is worth read­ing. I hope you’ll give it some of your time.

Some­thing new I have decided to do with my blog. I will be, from time to time, post­ing works in progress for peo­ple to com­ment on. Usu­ally, these post­ings will be from my trans­la­tion work, though I might also put up some of my own poems or prose. Please stop by from time to time and let me know what you think.

How does the cur­rent fight­ing between, on the one hand, Israel and Hamas and, on the other hand, Israel and Hezbol­lah, not make one sick with grief and rage? Actu­ally, to call what is hap­pen­ing in the north “fight­ing between Israel and Hezbol­lah” is to make what is actu­ally going on there invis­i­ble, because what is actu­ally going on is a cam­paign of airstrikes against Lebanon that, accord­ing to Louise Arbour, the UN’s high com­mis­sioner of human rights, is quoted in today’s times as say­ing could, because of “the scale of killings in the region, and their predictability…engage the per­sonal crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­ity of those involved, par­tic­u­larly those in a posi­tion of com­mand and con­trol.” In other words, they could qual­ify as war crimes. Doesn’t mat­ter how wrong Hezbol­lah was to cross over into Israeli ter­ri­tory — and make no mis­take; it was wrong — Israel’s response is far out of pro­por­tion to that act, and the argu­ments I have heard to the con­trary do not con­vince me otherwise.

Such argu­ments include the one that I heard Israeli offi­cials giv­ing on BBC yes­ter­day, in which they rea­son that they are, by destroy­ing Hezbol­lah — and they are, of course, arrogant enough not to see that what they are doing might actu­ally increase sup­port for that orga­ni­za­tion — is cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­nity for the Lebanese gov­ern­ment to step in and take charge of its own coun­try. As if, when the bomb­ing is over, and assum­ing that Hezbol­lah has indeed been wiped or suf­fi­ciently crip­pled as to be unable to operate, the Lebanese gov­ern­ment might actu­ally turn to Israel and say, “Thanks for tak­ing our coun­try back more than twenty years and for killing how­ever many inno­cent civil­ians; you’ve really done us a favor.” The rea­son­ing is not much dif­fer­ent from the one we heard when the US invaded Iraq, that the peo­ple would be out on the streets wel­com­ing our sol­diers with flow­ers, and we have seen how accu­rate that pre­dic­tion was.

The other response I have heard — or read; I don’t remem­ber which — from Israel to accu­sa­tions that their response to Hezbollah’s incur­sion has not been pro­por­tional is that the response is in pro­por­tion not to the spe­cific act, but rather to the risk posed to Israel by Hezbollah’s pres­ence on its norther bor­der. I don’t know if I can say this with­out seem­ing to jus­tify what Israel is doing — because I am adamantly opposed to what Israel is doing — but this is a response I have some sym­pa­thy for. What­ever one wants to say about the his­tory of Israel’s found­ing (and, let’s be hon­est, that his­tory is the his­tory of one peo­ple sys­tem­at­i­cally appro­pri­at­ing — some­times legally; some­times not; some­times peace­fully; some­times not — the land of another peo­ple), the fact is that Israel exists now as a sov­er­eign nation and it is no small thing for any sov­er­eign nation to have on its bor­ders even one, and Israel has two, enti­ties sworn to its destruc­tion. More to the point, at least one of those enti­ties, Hezbol­lah, has the strong enough back­ing of at least two nations to the point where it can func­tion almost as a sep­a­rate gov­ern­ment within the sover­iegn nation of Lebanon. In other words, Hezbol­lah is set up such that it can claim the pro­tec­tions afforded by, and gains the “shield­ing ben­e­fits” of being in another sov­er­eign nation, even as it oper­ates inde­pen­dently, or can oper­ate independently, of that nation’s government.

Given that sit­u­a­tion, and the fact of an Hamas-led Pales­tin­ian gov­ern­ment, how should Israel have responded to what, in almost any other cir­cum­stance, would have been inter­preted as an act of war? (And I am talk­ing here only about Hezbollah’s incur­sion. Hamas is the elected lead­er­ship of an occu­pied peo­ple; their sit­u­a­tion is, for me, very dif­fer­ent.) Let me say this again: I do not mean that I think Israel should have responded as it did. I am hon­estly ask­ing what Israel should have done. Nego­ti­ate indi­rectly, as Hezbol­lah demanded?

July 21^st

I started this post yes­ter­day and then got inter­rupted and so I don’t remem­ber pre­cisely what I was going to say next about Hezbollah’s demand that the only way the two sol­diers they hold would be returned would be through indi­rect nego­ti­a­tions for an exchange for pris­on­ers in Israeli jails, but I do know that part of the gen­eral point I wanted to make was this: At some point, Hezbol­lah needs to bear some respon­si­bil­ity for its refusal to rec­og­nize Israel and for the behav­ior in which it engages as it pur­sues its goal of Israel’s destruc­tion. Still, I write this after read­ing yes­ter­day that Israel has hinted there might be a full-scale inva­sion of Lebanon, though in today’s paper, Israeli offi­cials are talk­ing about “pin­point” oper­a­tions to “clean up Hezbol­lah posts on the ground.” Either way, the real­ity of what that inva­sion will mean for the peo­ple of Lebanon seems to make any­thing else I might have had in mind to write seem self-indulgent and point­less. (And I haven’t even said any­thing about what is going on in Gaza yet.) How dare I, it seems to me I have to ask, pose ques­tions about Hezbollah’s respon­si­bil­ity when Israel is clearly doing far more dam­age to Lebanon than Hezbol­lah has ever done to Israel? But I have to admit such ques­tions keep com­ing back to me, not because, I will say it again, I think Israel is right to have responded the way it did, but because it seems to me that Hezbol­lah invited this kind of sit­u­a­tion by set­ting itself up in such a way that it is woven inti­mately into the daily lives of the peo­ple who live in south­ern Lebanon. In other words, if there is such a thing as national sov­er­eignty, and if Israel pos­sesses it, and if Hezbol­lah, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to the destruc­tion of the State of Israel, violated that sov­er­eignty, and if Israel, as a sov­er­eign nation, has the right to respond to such vio­la­tion (indeed, given the fact that some sort of mil­i­tary response on Israel’s part was at some point almost cer­tainly pre­dictable), who bears respon­si­bil­ity for the fact that, in order to attack Hezbol­lah, even the most restrained attack one could imag­ine, Israel would likely have to attack areas where there would almost cer­tainly be sig­nif­i­cant civil­ian casu­al­ties? Should Israel there­fore not attack, ever, at all? Does Hezbol­lah get to keep doing what it does, being who it is, on Israel’s bor­der in per­pe­tu­ity and with impunity?

Israel should have, as the US should have with both its bomb­ing of Afghanistan and its inva­sion of Iraq, gone first to the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity and not acted uni­lat­er­ally, even though it is arguable that, as a sov­er­eign nation, uni­lat­eral action was their right. Whether or not the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity could have secured the release of the two kid­napped sol­diers, such a move would have given any actions the Israeli’s decided to take against Hezbol­lah a good deal more legit­i­macy. Not that it would have jus­ti­fied the car­nage Israel is now inflict­ing on Lebanon; I don’t think any­thing jus­ti­fies that. Instead, though, Israel has cho­sen to act in a way that is con­sis­tent with its sta­tus as an occu­py­ing power, even though it was not occu­py­ing south­ern Lebanon, and the real­ity is that, next to this fact, my ques­tions pale, because even if Hezbol­lah is respon­si­ble for what it has done, for where it is and for how it has set up its oper­a­tions, that respon­si­bil­ity should not be used to obscure what Israel has done and how it has set up its operations.

I have great sym­pa­thy for the bind that Hamas and Hezbol­lah put Israel in: How do you live at peace when your neigh­bors have sworn them­selves to your destruc­tion? How often do you allow those neigh­bors to hurt you, to dam­age you, before you are left with no choice but to fight back? And how, once you decide to fight back, do you not make the destruc­tion of those who would destroy you one of your goals? But here’s the prob­lem, once you start ask­ing those ques­tions, you have almost no choice but to start talk­ing about this his­tory of Israel’s found­ing, and once you start talk­ing about that, the com­pet­ing his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives and claims of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted and so on of the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans – not to men­tion of those who, in the rest of the world, sup­port whichever side they sup­pot – make it impos­si­ble to see how any res­o­lu­tion can ever be reached.

I don’t know. Some­times I get so frus­trated that I think they should all just fight each other into obliv­ion; nei­ther side seems will­ing to do what it needs to do to achieve a real and last­ing peace. But that also is not an answer, and so I go back and forth between and among anger and rage and, most of all right now, deep, deep sad­ness. Because I don’t see a way out. Because whether or not Israel destroys Hezbol­lah, this war will not have the effect Israel hopes it will have. Because if Hezbol­lah and Hamas suc­ceed in destroy­ing Israel, it will be for the Israelis what the cur­rent war in Lebanon and Gaza is for the Lebanese and the Pales­tini­ans, and it will be the vic­tory of a cer­tain kind of reli­gious and polit­i­cal extrem­ism, of reli­gious impe­ri­al­ism, and, on the other hand, it will be hard not to read as yet one more exam­ple of why the Jews need a coun­try of their own (even though I per­son­ally do not agree with that posi­tion). Because, because, because, because, because.…. It all makes me think of a poem by Saadi, a 13^th cen­tury Per­sian poet selec­tions of whose works I have trans­lated. This is from his Gulis­tan. He wrote it at a time when it was the Mus­lims who held real power, but the point of the poem, I think, is well taken today. It’s from the last sec­tion of the book, called, in my trans­la­tion, “Prin­ci­ples of Social Conduct.”

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.

I know I’ve writ­ten this else­where on this blog, but I have more to say about it, so I am going to write it again: CavanKerry Press, a small, inde­pen­dent pub­lisher based in New Jer­sey, pub­lished in May of this year my first book of poems, The Silence Of Men. (That link leads back to CavanKerry’s web­site; if you want to read more sam­ple poems or the text of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Fore­word or to find out more about me and my work, check out my own site.) Aside from the press’ obvi­ous and deep com­mit­ment to poetry, one of the great plea­sures I have had in work­ing with CavanKerry is the fact that they pro­duce visu­ally stun­ning books, and I am talk­ing here not only about my own book, the cover of which Peter Cusack painted specif­i­cally in response to my poem, but also about each of the six CavanKerry books I found recently in a used book­store in Man­hat­tan: Harold Levy’s A Day This Lit, Joan Seliger Sidney’s Body of Dimin­sh­ing Motion, Ken­neth Rosen’s The Ori­gins of Tragedy, Geor­gianna Orsini’s An Imper­fect Lover, Eloise Bruce’s Rat­tle and Andrea Carter Brown’s The Dishelveled Bed. (They can all be found on CavanKerry’s web­site here. I should also men­tion that Peter Cusack has a blog that’s worth check­ing out.)

I wish I could afford to buy the books from CavanKerry at full price, but I can’t. In fact, hav­ing paged through each of the books now a cou­ple of times, and assum­ing they are indica­tive of the qual­ity to be found in all of CavanKerry’s books, I wish I could afford to own the press’ entire output-to-date, but I can’t. Of course, I would not have sub­mit­ted my man­u­script to CavanKerry if I did not like the qual­ity of the work they pub­lish, and I remem­ber read­ing through more than a cou­ple of their books while I was doing the mar­ket­ing research I needed to do when I decided to give up on play­ing the book-contest-roulette that has increas­ingly become the pre­ferred way for poets in the United States to try to get their first books pub­lished. That kind of read­ing, how­ever, is very dif­fer­ent from sit­ting down with a book of poems and giv­ing the poems the time they need really to sink into you, giv­ing your­self the time it takes to let a poem’s lan­guage do its work. That’s what I’ve been doing with these six books over the past few days now that I own them, and, the more I read, the more I find myself hap­pily hum­bled to know that my work and these books are on the same list.

The rea­son I bought these six books in the first place is that, later this month, CavanKerry will be gath­er­ing all of its authors together, or at least all of us who can make it to New Jer­sey on that day, so that we can talk about the press, our own mar­ket­ing efforts and share some of our work with each other. When I read in the invi­ta­tion that we would be read­ing to each other, it sud­denly struck me that I did not know the work of any other CavanKerry author, that I remem­bered only a few of their names, and I felt guilty for this igno­rance. I wanted, when I met other CavanKerry authors, to be able to say some­thing mean­ing­ful to them about their work, and even though it is pos­si­ble that none of the six poets whose books I bought will be at the meet­ing, at least I will have made the effort. (I know there was no rea­son for me to feel guilty, and I cer­tainly am not imply­ing that any­one else in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion — CavanKerry author or not — should feel guilty; it’s just the way I am.) More to the point, now that I have these books, I can offer here, and in suc­ces­sive posts, at least a par­tial appre­ci­a­tion and cel­e­bra­tion of the work they con­tain, first because the books deserve to be appre­ci­ated and cel­e­brated and, sec­ond, because it gives me a chance to share how good I feel know­ing that my work is in their company.

So, for no rea­son other than it was the first one that came to hand when I started read­ing this morning, I want to start with Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed. This is from the Fore­word by Brooks Haxton:

Most mem­o­rably in this col­lec­tion, Brown records the dis­ap­point­ment and courage of a woman unable to bear the chil­dren she and her hus­band want. With­out hedges or illu­sions, the poems present the cru­cial details of clin­i­cal vis­its, mis­car­riage, mourn­ing, and the per­sis­tent dif­fi­culty of sus­tain­ing and recon­struct­ing one­self, one’s mar­riage, and the world.

I’ve only read so far to the end of the sec­ond sec­tion of the book, so I only a par­tial view of the process that Hax­ton writes about, but what I found myself most admir­ing as I read through the first sec­tion, which deals pri­mar­ily with the clin­i­cal details of infer­til­ity treat­ment, specif­i­cally the havoc that the drugs wreak on a woman’s body, was how Andrea Carter Brown finds lan­guage over and over again that uncov­ers in the nam­ing of an expe­ri­ence the beauty that inheres in the expe­ri­ence itself, no mat­ter how painful or sham­ing or frus­trat­ing or what­ever the expe­ri­ence might be. This is from “Ultrasound.”

They direct you to a dark­ened room. You climb

up on a paper-covered table, slide your butt
to its edge, spread your knees. The doctor

enters, slips a reg­u­lar Ram­ses over
the probe that vibrates with sound you can’t

quite hear, squeezes clear jelly from a tube
onto its quiv­er­ing tip.

In “IUI (a.k.a. The Dou­ble Rainbow)” — IUI stands for intrauter­ine insem­i­na­tion — Brown writes about the process of being insem­i­nated with her “husband’s/characteristic pink semen” while lying beneath a rain­bow mobile on which

                                              Red breeds

yel­low and blue, which them­selves pro­duce
orange and green, pur­ple and ultra­ma­rine,
rep­sec­tively, each repro­duc­ing in turn

except the last which, with­out issue is larger,
a coun­ter­weight to its fer­tile sibling.

Up till this point, the speaker’s con­scious­ness is wrapped around her­self and her body, as indi­cated by the third per­son ref­er­ence to her hus­band, but then the rain­bow spin­ning above her head sends her fin­gers to find

…the turquoise tad­pole strung between turtle

and frog on the fetish neck­lace I’ve worn
for luck which you car­ried home in a sock
to sur­prise me for my birthday.

That switch to the sec­ond per­son address of her hus­band is a beau­ti­ful moment in the poem, reflect­ing the speaker’s sud­den aware­ness that she is not alone in her predica­ment, that she is loved, and that even though “lying on the exam­i­na­tion table” makes it “hard to believe/life can be made,” there was a time when she and her hus­band saw their “first dou­ble rainbow…one/spectrum nes­tled within another as we do in bed/before sleep.”

It’s tempt­ing to go on quot­ing from these poems, the pre­ci­sion of their lan­guage and rhythms is so com­pelling, but I am going to stop there and say, sim­ply, that Andrea Carter Brown’s The Disheveled Bed deserves your atten­tion. I hope you will buy it and read it.

The first poem in Robert Hershon’s new col­lec­tion, which is also the title poem, locates the reader firmly in the world of work, specif­i­cally the world cre­ated within a work­place by the slang that evolves there over time, both emerg­ing from and help­ing to cre­ate that sense of com­mu­nity famil­iar to any­one who has ever worked with the same group of peo­ple in the same place for any length of time.

Celeste called work to leave a mes­sage
for Nathan. “Tell him Celeste called.
Tell him some­thing happened”

And the poem goes on to talk about how that phrase some­thing hap­pened became part of the folk­lore of that par­tic­u­lar work­place and how, among the peo­ple who’d invented it,

[…] there was an amused pride in
hav­ing invented such a good piece of
work­place slang, so spe­cial­ized and so secret
and so site-specific

The prob­lem is, of course, that in order for an expres­sion like that to sur­vive, you need a com­mu­nity of speak­ers in which it can be passed from one gen­er­a­tion to another, and it’s here that Her­shon makes the leap that turns this poem into a bit­ingly ironic and won­der­fully sub­tle com­men­tary on racism and cul­tural appropriation:

but before long Nate was gone and then
one by one nearly every­body else
so today the slang is just as good as ever
but com­pletely for­got­ten or unknown
to the present staff

So we see that for slang to sur­vive
we require a body of speak­ers
ini­ti­ated in its use
large enough to pro­vide con­ti­nu­ity
and with a core of permanence

This must be why the lin­guists
invented pris­ons, as lan­guage lab­o­ra­to­ries
so that the whole coun­try can imi­tate
the speech of young black men but
never actu­ally have to see them, so white
golfers can cry You the man
and lit­tle blonde girls can shout
You go, girl

I don’t need to point out that the themes Her­shon weaves together here — race, class, the vio­lence inher­ent in our prison sys­tem, the pol­i­tics of lin­guis­tics as social sci­ence — are among the most vex­ing social and cul­tural issues that we face, and the unex­pected angle from which this poem addresses them whet­ted appetite for the rest of the book in a way that a book’s first poem has not done in a long while. Too few poets are will­ing to take the risks inher­ent in satire, and I was look­ing for­ward to see­ing what other risks Her­shon was will­ing to take. I was not entirely dis­ap­pointed, but my expe­ri­ence read­ing Call From the Out­side World was uneven at best, for while I found myself applaud­ing in admi­ra­tion of the top­ics Her­shon is will­ing to tackle in his poems and laugh­ing out loud at his wit, I also found myself too often unable to hear the music of his poems, specif­i­cally the music of his line breaks.

At his musi­cal best, Her­shon achieves the pace and tone of a wise-ass New York stand-up comic, albeit one with a very dry deliv­ery. This is from “Grover Cleve­land High School, Class of ’53:”

Dur­ing a busy lunch hour, I am walk­ing
down West 47^th St., the dia­mond block,
on my way to the Gotham Book Mart to
see if my new book is in the win­dow,
(so I can stand off to the side and watch peo­ple look­ing
          at it) and
a man in a dirty gray uni­form is sweep­ing
the side­walk in front of a jew­elry store while
a hor­ri­ble blue-haired shrew tells him loudly
and in col­or­ful detail what a use­less, incom­pe­tent
          ass­hole he is.
He is Al Novack, who once held
a knife to my throat in the Grover Cleve­land High
School locker room. Do I catch his eye for a
frac­tion of a sec­ond? Maybe, could be. But do
you under­stand? He is Al Novack who once held
a knife to my throat in the Grover Cleve­land
High School locker room and I think
I’ll have some wine with lunch.

To my ear, the line breaks here coin­cide very nicely with where a stand-up would pause in his or her deliv­ery, maybe to take a breath, maybe to look point­edly at the audi­ence, maybe just for dra­matic effect. In other poems, how­ever, the effect of Hershon’s line breaks is to leave me won­der­ing why he didn’t just write a prose poem. This is from the begin­ning of “Ross Bagdasarian:”

In Rose­mary Clooney’s obit­u­ary
there is a ref­er­ence to her big hit Come on-a My House
which is put forth as an exam­ple of the ter­ri­ble
     shit she had
to sing before she broke through to her qual­ity stuff, but
I don’t remem­ber it as such a bad song.

When I first sat down to write this review, I was tempted to make my point by refor­mat­ting the entirety of “Ross Bag­dasar­ian” as a prose poem, but I’ve decided that would not be fair. Her­shon has been writ­ing a long time; he’s co-editor of Hang­ing Loose Press and has pub­lished twelve books of his own poems. If noth­ing else, he has earned the right to lay his poems out on the page the way he hears them. If I don’t hear them that way, or can’t, all I can do is record that fact. So I want to say that the line breaks not only in “Ross Bag­dasar­ian,” but also “1960, In Memo­riam, the Times The­ater, Stock­ton Street, Now a Chi­nese Mar­ket,” “Every­body in New York” and “Mys­ter­ies of Mar­riage,” so inter­rupt the prose rhythms of the poems that I found the poems them­selves dif­fi­cult to read; but here’s what made the read­ing expe­ri­ence so frus­trat­ing: Once I came to under­stand what the poems were say­ing — as well as what they were, on a deeper level, about — I wanted to like them a whole lot more than I did. Each of these poems has some­thing inter­est­ing and per­haps even impor­tant to say and strug­gling through the awk­ward rhythms of line breaks left me with a merely intel­lec­tual appre­ci­a­tion of the work; I did not feel it, not merely the way I wanted to, but also not the way I think Her­shon intended me to.

Nonethe­less, Calls from the Out­side World is a book worth read­ing. It will teach you some­thing about mem­ory, about how deeply pol­i­tics is woven into every­day life, about poetic jus­tice and the need not to take life too seri­ously. I think what I most appre­ci­ated about this book, how­ever, was the voice, which remains con­sis­tent through­out the poems, even the ones I had dif­fi­culty with. It’s the voice of a man in the process of feel­ing his age, not in the clichéd sense that expres­sion usu­ally car­ries, but rather in the sense of a man vig­or­ously engaged in explor­ing what it means that he has reached a cer­tain age and has, there­fore, a store of mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences and wis­dom that help to make him who he is; a man who is unafraid to bring those mem­o­ries to the sur­face and to feel what it means that they are mem­o­ries, part of a past that can­not be recov­ered; a man who, there­fore, can look his own mor­tal­ity straight in the eye and insist, as Her­shon does in the poem “Locked,” that he is not ready to go:

The body like a ten­e­ment
bath­room The tiles loose
the faucets drip­ping, the rust
stains in the tub, the weak
yel­low light
And the bang­ing on
the door
Hey, you say
Hey, I’m still in here.

Also posted on The Great Amer­i­can Pinup.

…is here. You should check it out, and not just because yours truly has been included.

I was for­tu­nate this year to be able to go to four events dur­ing this fes­ti­val, two on Thurs­day, April 27 and two on Sat­ur­day, April 29^th. Each one raised some really inter­est­ing ques­tions for me about trans­la­tion and about what I will call (though none of the pan­elists I heard made this dis­tinc­tion in quite thie way) poetry that is explic­itly engaged with/in the polit­i­cal moment and poetry that is polit­i­cal in the way that we mean when we assert the tru­ism that “all poetry is polit­i­cal.” Rather than write about all four of them in one post, though, since that would get too long and con­fus­ing, I’m going to write about each event sep­a­rately. The first one I went to, on Thurs­day, April 27, was called Exiles in Amer­ica, and it fea­tured Chris Abani, who is from Nige­ria; Ammar Abdul­hamid, orig­i­nally from Syria; Yiyun Li, who is orig­i­nally from China but who writes in Eng­lish and whose “exile” from her native land and lan­guage is there­fore more cul­tural than polit­i­cal and, more impor­tantly, also a con­scious choice; Greg Palast, who is Amer­i­can, writes in Eng­lish, who has not been polit­i­cally exiled, but whose pres­ence on the panel was meant to place the kinds of eco­nomic and other sub­tle cen­sorhips that take place in the US and which there­fore deter­mine the news we have access to on a con­tin­uüm with the kinds of polit­i­cal cen­sor­ship and per­se­cu­tion faced by most of the oth­ers on the panel; and Huang Xiang, who is from China and who is also a friend of mine. Then panel was mod­er­ated by Michael Scam­mell.

The con­trol­ling ques­tion for the panel, as given in the pro­gram was this: How do exiled writ­ers stay engaged in Amer­ica, where almost nobody cares about their work, while back home they could be pun­ished with a jail sen­tence or death? And it is an impor­tant and inter­est­ing ques­tion, but the thing that has stayed with me since the panel was not directly an answer to that ques­tion. It was some­thing Chris Abani said about how, when he first started to write, he was “per­form­ing his per­sonal pain,” which includes impris­on­ment and tor­ture, for an audi­ence. And what I thought about when he said this was the voice of the speaker in his book of poems called Kalakuta Repub­lic, which is per­sonal and naked and the poems are doc­u­men­tary in tone, though there is a great deal more than doc­u­men­tary in them; and then I thought about Huang Xiang’s poems, col­lected in A Bilin­gual Edi­tion of Poetry Out of Com­mu­nist China, that mod­u­late between a per­sonal, lyric speaker and a Whitman-like bardic speaker; and it made me won­der about the ways in which an indi­vid­ual poet’s speaker(s) are shaped not only by the poet’s expe­ri­ences, but also by the poet’s choices in how to respond to the world in which he or she lives. It made me think about how I incor­po­rate my engage­ment with the polit­i­cal moment, or explic­itly polit­i­cal issues like gen­der, domes­tic vio­lence and such, into my own work, and it threw me back to the work of the poet who is respon­si­ble for my becom­ing a polit­i­cally engaged poet, to the extent that I am: June Jor­dan.

When I was an under­grad­u­ate, I took my first poetry work­shop with June Jor­dan and it changed the way I under­stood what it meant to be a writer. She did not hit us over the head with pol­i­tics, but she talked about poetry as an act of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, some­thing you said to some­one from whom you wanted a response — not that you had to be there to get the response; the response could be entirely inter­nal and you might never know pre­cisely what the resp­nose was, but if you weren’t try­ing to get your reader to respond to what you had to say, then what was the point of putting it in a poem? Related to this view of why you might choose to write poetry was the idea that poetry could change the world, maybe not all at once, maybe only one small part of one person’s world at a time, but it could effect real change in peo­ple and there­fore in the world where peo­ple lived. This brought with it a tremen­dous respon­si­bilty, she taught us, to be rel­e­vant, not so much in terms of cur­rent events, but in the sense that you needed to write about things that really mat­tered to you, things that needed to be said, that the world needed to have said, things that other peo­ple didn’t want to be said. It didn’t mat­ter if you were writ­ing love poems or poems about food or about rape or your father’s favorite song; what mat­tered was that you iden­ti­fied in what you were writ­ing about the thing that needed to be said about it, not just in terms of your per­sonal need for cathar­sis, but the thing about it that gave you the right to demand the atten­tion of a reader, that would make it mat­ter to another per­son for its own sake, for what it meant to them, and once you iden­ti­fied what that was, then you would have iden­ti­fied the pol­i­tics of the poetry that was yours to write.

So, one of the poems I wrote in that work­shop, which was even­tu­ally pub­lished in a jour­nal called Poem, was about what I per­ceived at the time (and which I still per­ceive) to be the hypocrisy and hyp­o­crit­i­cal exclu­sivism with which cer­tain seg­ments of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity teach and talk about the Holo­caust. Towards the end of the semes­ter, June pulled me aside and told me I had writ­ten a “really impor­tant” poem. I didn’t know what to say. I was happy and hum­bled and a lit­tle fright­ened, but I can say now that was when I got my first glim­mer of what the pol­i­tics of my poetry, the pol­i­tics that informs my poetry, would even­tu­ally be, and that moment was also the true begin­ning of my com­mit­ment to being a poet.

But what I am inter­ested in here is the ques­tion, prob­a­bly unan­swer­able, of the rela­tion­ship between that pol­i­tics and how the speaker(s) of my poems talk about them, and I am think­ing of this ques­tion in rela­tion to Chris Abani’s state­ment about per­form­ing his per­sonal pain, because when a writer like Abani or Huang Xiang or Ammar Abdul­hamid chooses to write against a régime — as each has done at great per­sonal cost — the nature of the speaker(s) through whom they speak (per­sonal, lyri­cal, bardic, what­ever) is as polit­i­cal a choice as the choice of sub­ject matter.

I guess I will end there. This is also posted on The Great Amer­i­can Pinup.

More time has passed since my last post than I like, but I have been extremely busy get­ting two books of mine ready for pub­li­ca­tion. First, my Selec­tions from Saadi’s Bus­tan, a trans­la­tion of selec­tions from a 12^th cen­tury Per­sian mas­ter­piece, will be out in the next month or so from Global Schol­arly Pub­li­ca­tions. That book is not yet up on the web­site, but its com­pan­ion vol­ume, Selec­tions from Saadi’s Gulis­tan is. Sec­ond, I have just fin­ished going over the gal­leys for my own first book of poems, The Silence Of Men, which is sched­uled to be out from CavanKerry Press in May. (Inde­pen­dently of the fact that CavanKerry is pub­lish­ing my book: if you are some­one who reads poetry, or if you’re some­one who has never read poetry but is will­ing to give it a try, you should check out their books; they pub­lish good work in beau­ti­fully made books.)

Some­thing else I’d like to celebrate/promote in terms of my own writ­ing is this: Jonathan Pen­ton over at Unlikely Sto­ries has just put up on his site a pdf e-book ver­sion of My Daughter’s Vagina, a long essay of mine that he seri­al­ized last year. The pdf book has a cover by Donna Kuhn that I like a lot. There are some changes/corrections that still need to be made, and I will be send­ing them to Jonathan soon, but since things tend to move slowly and I do want peo­ple to know the pdf book is out, I am link­ing to it here.

My Daughter’s Vagina is actu­ally part of a book-length project, Inside The Men Inside Christy Canyon, that I was once work­ing on quite assid­u­ously but that I have had to set aside in order to work on my trans­la­tions and my own poetry books, since I know that those are actu­ally going to be pub­lished. I am hop­ing that I will even­tu­ally be able to get back to this project, though, or that maybe some­one will read what’s online and con­tact me with some inter­est in pub­lish­ing it. There is a com­pan­ion essay called “My Son’s Penis,” an long excerpt of which was pub­lished in the online jour­nal Mast­head, which is a really good lit­er­ary jour­nal. (I am proud, actu­ally, that the work of mine that edi­tor Ali­son Crog­gon chose to pub­lish appears in the same issue as a series of won­der­ful trans­la­tions of con­tem­po­rary Iraqi poetry.) The third essay in Inside The Men is called “Rel­ish­ing My Soli­tude.” This essay is the least com­plete of the three, though a por­tion of it was pub­lished in Salon​.com about seven ago as “Sex­ual Cha­rades in Seoul,” a title I do not like but that I did not have the author­ity to change.

Any­way, con­grat­u­la­tions to me! And if any­one takes the time to read any of these pieces, I would love to hear what you think.

It’s nice to be writ­ing about lit­er­a­ture again: As a col­lege Eng­lish pro­fes­sor, I am fas­ci­nated by the pol­i­tics of poetry antholo­gies, who gets included and who doesn’t, which works, which time peri­ods, which kinds of poetry, and I have watched with some amuse­ment — and, because of how much they inevitably cost, some hor­ror — as the antholo­gies that I used as man­age­able sin­gle vol­ume texts when I was an under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate stu­dent have blos­somed into mul­ti­vol­ume affairs. In part, of course, the increased size of these books has to do with the sim­ple fact that the edi­tors have to account for the pass­ing of time; there are more writ­ers that need to be included and so the books get big­ger; but the books also get big­ger because there are also more cri­te­ria that need to be met in terms of this greater num­ber of writ­ers a good anthol­ogy has to cover: their need to be enough women and enough peo­ple of color; enough gay and les­bian writ­ers — or at least this should be one of the cri­te­ria — enough working-class writ­ers, and so on.

The books get big­ger, in other words, because our sen­si­bil­i­ties have got­ten big­ger as well, and this is all to the good, though it also results in a dizzy­ing array of spe­cial­ized antholo­gies: antholo­gies of women’s poetry, of Asian (or Asian-American) women’s poetry, of South Asian and even South­east Asian women’s poetry; antholo­gies of poems by African-Americans, by African-American women, by African-American men; of Latino erot­ica; of Jew­ish les­bians; and on and on and on. I am in no way bemoan­ing this state of affairs, though it does raise the ques­tion of the ghet­toiza­tion and balka­niza­tion of poetry, a ques­tion which goes right to the heart of the pol­i­tics that are at work in both the edit­ing and pub­lish­ing of anthologies.

One kind of anthol­ogy that, at least in my lim­ited expe­ri­ence, does not seem to have been given much atten­tion is the anthol­ogy of poetry by men. I don’t mean men of a par­tic­u­lar eth­nic group, though I haven’t seen many of those either. I mean men. About ten years ago, I was given as a gift Robert Bly’s  anthol­ogy The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (co-edited by James Hill­man and Michael Meade), which wore its mythopo­etic pol­i­tics proudly on its sleeve. There were some good poems in the book, but they were so clearly orga­nized to make a point that I deeply dis­agreed with that I found it hard even to page through sim­ply to enjoy those poems that I would oth­er­wise have enjoyed.

It’s not that I think men’s lives aren’t worth exam­in­ing or that poetry is not a legit­i­mate and valu­able lens through which to do that kind of exam­i­na­tion. In fact, I think men’s poetry is liable to reveal to us a great deal that we would oth­er­wise miss, but the pol­i­tics of mas­culin­ity are such that it mat­ters very greatly whether your edi­to­r­ial bias sup­ports or sub­verts the male dom­i­nant sta­tus quo. For me, mythopo­etic man­hood, for all its blus­ter to the con­trary, is noth­ing more than the sta­tus quo dressed up in anthro­po­log­i­cally fash­ion­able cloth­ing, and the edi­tors of The Rag and Bone Shop seemed to me to have fit that cloth­ing so tightly onto their selec­tions that there was lit­tle or no chance for the poems to wrig­gle free into the mul­ti­plic­ity of read­ings that is poetry’s birthright.

Well, some­time in the mid­dle of 2005, I bought a book that con­fronted me with many of the same ques­tions that Bly’s book did, The Poetry of Men’s Lives, An Inter­na­tional Anthol­ogy, edited by Fred Mora­marco and Al Zoly­nas. The book has blurbs from Robert Cree­ley and C. K. Williams, each of which com­ments on the fact that the edi­tors have gath­ered a truly impres­sive col­lec­tion of poems by men from all over the world — more than 250 poets from nearly 100 coun­tries — a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion from lan­guages rarely trans­lated into Eng­lish. This is an accom­plish­ment that should not be min­i­mized, espe­cially in a time when the United States pub­lishes the least num­ber of books trans­lated from other lan­guages than almost any other coun­try in the world. It is inter­est­ing, how­ever, that none of the blurbs — there is another by Jacque­line Vaught Bro­gan, author of The Vio­lence Within/The Vio­lence With­out: Wal­lace Stevens and the Emer­gence of a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Poet­ics—has any­thing to say about the gen­der pol­i­tics that the edi­tors pro­mul­gate quite openly in their introduction.

Per­haps, and rea­son­ably so, since they are lit­er­ary peo­ple, Cree­ley, Williams and Bro­gan wanted to focus on the lit­er­ary mer­its of the book, but both because I care deeply about fem­i­nism and because I have myself writ­ten a lot about sex­u­al­ity and gen­der in ways that are, I hope, crit­i­cal and under­min­ing of male dom­i­nance, I can­not sim­ply over­look the editor’s pol­i­tics. On the first page of the intro­duc­tion, they write, “In the more than a decade since we edited Men of Our Time [their other anthol­ogy, which I will get to below], a sub­stan­tial lit­er­a­ture, both in the schol­arly and pop­u­lar press, focus­ing on gen­der has emerged, espe­cially explor­ing the dis­tinc­tions between men and women in the con­tem­po­rary world” (xix). The prob­lem with the list of books they cite to exem­plify this sub­stan­tial lit­er­a­ture, how­ever, is that they are either overtly hos­tile to fem­i­nism, as in War­ren Farrell’s The Myth Of Male Power or Christina Hoff Som­mers’ The War Against Boys or, like David Deida’s The Way of the Supe­rior Man: A Spir­i­tual Guide to Mas­ter­ing the Chal­lenges of Women, Work, and Sex­ual Desire, they are grounded in a spir­i­tu­al­iz­ing of mas­culin­ity that tends to avoid con­fronta­tion with some of the hard core truths about mas­culin­ity and man­hood as social insti­tu­tions that fem­i­nism has brought to light.

“[O]ur anthol­ogy,” the edi­tors write

is not intended to pro­vide mate­r­ial that reveals men — that is, the male gen­der — as ‘hege­monic,’ ‘patri­ar­chal,’ or inher­ently ‘dom­i­nant,’ but rather shows them to be one half of the human species, dri­ven by both biol­ogy and the shift­ing pat­terns and evo­lu­tion of cul­ture.” (xxi)

This is a laud­able sen­ti­ment. The prob­lem is that, in the real world, in our daily, per­sonal and pub­lic lives men very often are hege­monic, patri­ar­chal and dom­i­nant, espe­cially in rela­tion to women, and it would be a remark­able thing to pub­lish an anthol­ogy in which men con­fronted those issues head on.

I could, of course, put together such an anthol­ogy of my own, and so I should be clear that it is not my intent to crit­i­cize these authors for not pub­lish­ing the anthol­ogy I would have pub­lished if I were in their shoes. What I do want to point out is that the mythopo­etic pol­i­tics by which the edi­tors are moti­vated leads them to view the poems they have cho­sen in par­tic­u­lar ways:

One of the rea­sons it is impor­tant to pay atten­tion to men’s poetry in par­tic­u­lar is that men are noto­ri­ously ret­i­cent about openly express­ing their feel­ings. Because poetry is a kind of index of those feel­ings, through it we can dis­cover rev­e­la­tions about how men feel about their fam­i­lies, their lovers, their rela­tion­ships, their sex­u­al­ity, their child­hood and many other aspects of their lives that they are often reluc­tant to talk about pub­licly. (xxi)

Men’s poetry, in other words, com­prises a kind of col­lec­tive diary left lay­ing open for the peo­ple in our lives to read and gain some insight into who we really are. Not only does this seem to me a very naïve way of look­ing at poetry, which can often be a place to hide one’s true feel­ings — or at least to encrypt them almost beyond recog­ni­tion — but it also has the effect of turn­ing men’s poetry into a kind of ther­apy, which does jus­tice nei­ther to the poetry as an art nor to the men who are seri­ous prac­tic­tion­ers of the poet’s craft.

I do not mean, of course that there is noth­ing to learn from the poetry men write about either man­hood and mas­culin­ity or the way we feel about the world around us. Obvi­ously there is. How­ever, to frame, say, the sec­tion of the book devoted to boy­hood and youth, with this statement

In many mod­ern soci­eties tra­di­tional rit­u­als acknowl­edg­ing the tran­si­tion from boy to man have van­ished, leav­ing a kind of ache in a boy’s soul as he searches for his mas­cu­line iden­tity. (1)

is to fail to find a use­ful crit­i­cal frame for a poem like Shuja Nawaz’ “Ini­ti­a­tion,” which tells the story of a boy’s ini­ti­a­tion into man­hood through his ful­fill­ment of a blood vendetta against a rival clan. The editor’s com­ment — “Inevitably and pre­dictably, such a tra­di­tion sim­ply fuels the cycle of vengeance through the generations” — is tan­ta­mount to say­ing, “Well, that’s the way of the world, and it’s really too bad, but isn’t it nice that Shuja Nawaz has given us this poem about it.” A frame which addressed the hege­monic nature of mas­culin­ity might at least have led the edi­tors to point out to the reader that the poem is not sim­ply an illus­tra­tion of the cycle of vio­lence, but also, and more impor­tantly, a cri­tique of the ways in which hege­monic vio­lence is recre­ated in each gen­er­a­tion as the iden­tity that makes a man a man.

I could say more, but the fact is that I am only a few poems into the book and what I really want to focus on are the poems, not the edi­tors’ pol­i­tics, which I have writ­ten about here as a way of hav­ing my say before get­ting into the meat of what I intend, which is to read through the book and, as indi­vid­ual poems move me, to bring them here to talk about — because what­ever else may be true about this vol­ume, as I said above, this book gath­ers together more poems from more coun­tries by men than any that I know of, and that by itself is an achieve­ment that needs to be cel­e­brated.