Melissa Range’s new collection of poetry is called “Scriptorium.” Photo by Justis Poehls.

Melissa Range left eastern Tennessee more than two decades ago but her Appalachian roots are evident every time she opens her mouth. “I refuse to have my Southern way of talking scrubbed off my tongue,” Range says with a laugh.

Her recent collection, “Scriptorium,” is about language spoken by ordinary people and mingles the historical with the personal. In the book’s foreword, poet Tracy K. Smith writes “Range urges her readers to see and claim… who we are and who we’ve been.”

Range’s identity has very much to do with where she was raised. Although she left Appalachia when she became an adult, she says she is constantly exploring through poetry the deep connection she has to that area.

“Those mountains have a pull on you. I don’t feel at home there, but I don’t feel at home anywhere else either. I don’t feel comfortable being where I grew up, but my heart wants to be there.”

Since the election two weeks ago, much attention has been given to this “second America” where people have felt left behind from the rest of the country, Range says. She is quick to note that they didn’t all vote for Donald Trump. Many in her family voted for Hillary Clinton and were Bernie Sanders supporters before that.

She does admit that folks in the region often feel ignored by the rest of the country.

“If Hillary Clinton would have won the election we wouldn’t even be talking about rural people and what they want and need. But because Trump won, people are closely looking and saying, ‘What just happened here?’ Suddenly the spotlight is on rural people and trying to understand them.”

And Range says she is sympathetic to some of the anger rural people have for the “liberal elite.”

“I hear the way intellectuals disparage rural white people, saying things like ‘redneck’ and ‘white trash.’ When I open my mouth to speak— even though I have a Ph.D.— I’m made fun of because I have a twang. If people in rural America feel mad at the rest of the country sometimes, this is partly why.”

READ MORE: A poet’s history lesson on Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood

Range says she wrote “Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg,” a poem that defies gender expectations, as an elegy for her grandmother. Woven throughout is the image of her grandfather, whom she says was a good person, but could not be depended on because of his alcoholism.

“What I saw growing up is that the women in my life were strong and they held it together. Like in many communities, women who don’t have much—working class women— sacrificed themselves and lived for their husbands, their brothers, their sons. I did not like what I saw, and I chose not to do that.”

Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg

Yanking my lank hair into dog-ears,
my granny frowned at my cowlick’s
revolt against the comb, my part

looking like a dog’s shank
no matter what she did, crooked
as the dogtrot path

out the mountain county I left
with no ambitions to return,
rover-minded as my no-count granddaddy, crooking

down switchbacks that crack the earth
like the hard set of the mouth
women are born with where I’m from.

Their faces have a hundred ways to say
“Don’t go off,” “Your place is here,”
“Why won’t you settle down?”—

and I ignored them all like I was one
of their ingrate sons (jobless, thankless,
drugged up, petted to death), meandering

like a scapegrace in a ballad,
as a woman with no children likes to do,
as a woman with crooked roots knows she can.

“When you coming home?” my granny
would ask when I called, meaning “to visit”
but meaning more “to stay,”

and how could I tell her
that the creeks crisscrossing
our tumbledown ridges

are ropes trying to pull my heart straight
when it’s a crooked muscle,
its blood crashing in circles?

Why should I tell her
that since I was a mop-headed infant
and leapt out of my baby bed,

I’ve been bent on skipping
the country, glad as a chained-up hound
until I slipped my rigging?

What could I say but “I’ll be home Christmas,”
what could I hear but “That’s a long time,”
what could I do but bless

the crooked teeth in my head
and dog the roads that lead all ways
but one?

Excerpted from Scriptorium: Poems by Melissa Range, A National Poetry Series Winner Selected and with a Foreword by Tracy K. Smith (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with Permission from Beacon Press.

Melissa Range has just published her second collection of poetry, “Scriptorium.” She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her first book was called “Horse and Rider.” Originally from East Tennessee, Range currently lives in Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University.

The post Through writing, a poet returns to the Appalachian home she left appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Poet Joseph Hutchison says he wrote “The Greatest Show on Earth” four years ago when he was watching yet another chaotic Presidential election process unfold.

“It was a response to the circus that we make of elections and how political figures treat the whole thing as a show and the audience tends to accept it as that and respond to it as such.”

He said that while this is a trend that has been happening for decades, he certainly never imagined that it would devolve into the circus of 2016.

“If journalists had covered Trump as a serious candidate, he probably wouldn’t have won. But they treated him for too long as a sideshow and Americans like sideshows.”

Hutchison said Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 classic book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” was probably in the back of his mind as he composed the poem. Boorstin argues that press conferences and presidential debates are “pseudo events” which are manufactured solely in order to be reported and that the contemporary definition of celebrity is “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Hutchison says as a poet he likes to look beyond those superficial images.

“Poetry has traditionally offered a critique of society, of politics, of oppressive systems. The role of poet is to deepen the understanding of what we’re faced with, the images we’re faced with and reveal the deeper layers and the deeper currents so that people have a context instead of accepting images at face value.”

Read next: This poet worries about not being able to protect his son from violence

Two years ago Hutchison was named poet laureate of Colorado. He says one of his goals is to expand the way poetry is taught in the schools.

“We tend to use poetry to teach technical language like metaphor, meter and rhyme. But poetry is a way of knowledge, just as novels or essays are. Poets address everything from history to science to mathematics to art. And I want to encourage teachers to use poetry across all disciplines.”

The Greatest Show on Earth

The clown car careens into the bright-lit
center ring, buzzing like a baby chainsaw.
Smoke corkscrews from the tiny tailpipe,
the horn bleats and squalls. Now it brakes,
fishtails, skids sideways and heaves to a halt,
rocking on lackadaisical springs. The motor
pops and sputters, the tinted glass doors

stay shut. The audience leans forward.
Nothing happens—only spotlight beams
sweeping over, away and back. And soon,
frustration crackles in the bleachers. Gripes,
scattered curses, threats. Nothing happens!
Inside the car’s a motley gaggle of eager
Armageddonites, ex-CIA think tankers,

talk radio megastars, flaks for Big Oil—
all playing rock, paper, scissors. The victor
gets to clamber out and take first crack
at deceiving the crowd. Oh, how abashed
they’d be to find the Big Top almost empty!
Just a few gloomy diehards left, their eyes
and nostrils stung raw by exhaust, lungs

too choked for cheers. Imagine the rest
headed home: toddlers riding their parents’
shoulders, the older kids kicking leaves,
all gazing up past bare birch branches
into the red-shifting heart of inexhaustible
openness, the profusion of its forms, feeling
small and glad in the star-spangled night.

From “The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.” Reprinted by permission of the author.

The post A poet squeezes the presidential election into a clown car appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Layli Long Soldier’s forthcoming collection of poetry is called “WHEREAS”. Photo courtesy of Layli Long Soldier.

When poet Layli Long Soldier heard news over the weekend that the government was halting the Dakota Access Pipeline project, she was elated.

“I was astonished and excited,” said Long Soldier, who hasn’t been to the Standing Rock Reservation in the last few months but says her heart has been with the Native American activists who are protesting the building of an oil pipeline.

“I took time to let my spirit fly and be happy. But at the same time, I feel a sense of caution. I have a general feeling that this is not the end. The fight isn’t over yet.”

Long Soldier, a member of the Lakota Sioux Tribe, wrote a poem about the standoff earlier this year. It interweaves an interview she conducted with Waniya Lock, one of the Standing Rock activists, with the official guidelines that were developed by tribal elders about how people at the camp should conduct themselves.

“I was so impressed by the position the community took in remaining prayerful. They were firm about having no weapons there and wanted to reinforce the idea that this is a ceremony.”

The poem is part of a collection that will be published next spring. It is called “WHEREAS” and it is a direct reaction to a resolution that President Obama signed in 2010 apologizing to Native Americans for their mistreatment by the U.S. government. The problem for Long Soldier was the way the apology was issued.

“I was shocked when I heard about it. But the reason I hadn’t heard the news was because it was a silent gesture. President Obama signed it but there wasn’t an official ceremony that accompanied it. No tribal leaders were invited to witness the signing. He signed it and tacked it onto the Defense appropriations bill.”

Long Soldier was so angry she immediately sat down and wrote a poem. “And it felt so good to do so that I realized one piece was not enough. I realized I’d have to write much more.”

The result is a series of 20 poems that begin with the words “Whereas,” just as the official apology is written. It also contains seven resolutions and a disclaimer, just like the apology.

“Before I began this series of poems, I didn’t think of myself as a political writer. I still don’t. I had never written overtly political subjects. Maybe it’s because now I’m a parent. I want things to be different for my child. I want us, our people, to be seen. I want to be heard.”

READ MORE: America, I sing you back

Long Soldier says the poems examine the language of the U.S. government over the past 240 years in its treaties and apologies to Native people — and the officiousness and duplicity that is contained in those documents. The Obama apology, she says, is no different. She compares the poor execution of that apology to the most moving apology she has ever received: when her father said he was sory for not being around for her childhood.

“I cooked him breakfast and I suddenly saw him crying. I had never seen him cry. In that moment he said he was sorry that he hadn’t been there for me when I was younger. I could feel his sincerity in that one moment. All those years of heartache and disappointment and grief, it went away. It was done. It was as simple as that.”

Resolution (6)

I too urge the President to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land although healing this land is not dependent never has been upon this President meaning tribal nations and the people themselves are healing this land its waters with or without Presidential acknowledgement they act upon this right without apology–

To speak to law enforcement

these Direct Action Principles

be really clear always ask

have been painstakingly drafted

who what when where why

at behest of the local leadership

e.g. Officer, my name is _________

from Standing Rock

please explain

and are the guidelines

the probable cause for stopping me

for the Oceti Sakowin camp

you may ask

I acknowledge a plurality of ways

does that seem reasonable to you

to resist oppression

don’t give any further info

*

People ask why do you bring up

we are Protectors

so many other issues it’s because

we are peaceful and prayerful

these issues have been ongoing

‘isms’ have no place

for 200 years they’re inter-dependent

here we all stand together

we teach the distinction

we are non-violent

btwn civil rights and civil liberties

we are proud to stand

btwn what’s legal & what isn’t legal

no masks

the camp is 100% volunteer

respect local

it’s a choice to be a protector

no weapons

liberty is freedom

or what could be construed as weapons

of speech it’s a right

property damage does not get us closer

to privacy a fair trial

to our goal

you’re free

all campers must get an orientation

from unreasonable search

Direct Action Training

free from seizure of person or home

is required

& civil disobedience: the camp is

for everyone taking action

an act of civil disobedience

no children

now the law protects the corporation

in potentially dangerous situations

so the camp is illegal

we keep each accountable

you must have a buddy system

to these principles

someone must know when you’re leaving

this is a ceremony

& when you’re coming back

act accordingly

“Resolution (6),” from WHEREAS. Copyright © 2017 by Layli Long Soldier. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press.

Layli Long Soldier is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader and The Kenyon Review Online. She is the recipient of the 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2016 Whiting Award. Her newest collection of poems “WHEREAS” will be published by Graywolf Press this spring. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The post Native poet speaks the language of Standing Rock — and explains how a presidential apology falls short appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Clint Smith is the author of “Counting Descent” published in September 2016. Photo by Elnatan Melaku.

Poet Clint Smith says he began writing “Counting Descent” in response to the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That shooting by a white police officer sparked weeks of protests and led to a national debate about racial bias among law enforcement officers.

“I was wrestling with what my role was in that socio-political moment. For me, as a writer, I wanted to name and humanize the violence that we were experiencing. It was something real and visceral. And it was something that I didn’t want us to become numb to.”

The result is a collection of poems that examine what it means to grow up black in America. Smith recounts moments from childhood when lives were celebrated and juxtaposes them with incidents that have become all too common in the lives of young black men.

“How do you navigate a world in which you grow up in a home where you are loved and celebrated and affirmed? And then you go out into a world where you are followed by the police or discriminated against in the workplace? And how does one make sense of that complicated duality?”

Smith says he experiences that duality all the time, even as he is completing his PhD at Harvard University. He wrote the poem, “For the Taxi Cabs that Pass Me in Harvard Square” after an incident one night when he and several black friends tried unsuccessfully to hail a taxi.

“Cabs continued to pass us until a white friend stepped to the curb of the street and was able to hail one on his first attempt. It is moments like those that disabuse me of the notion that race won’t matter once you attain a certain level of education or credentials or prestige. Blackness remains the coat you can’t take off.”

Smith says black parents have had to develop a new pedagogy in raising children. Last year in a Ted Talk, Smith recalled an incident from his own childhood when he and some white friends were playing with water guns at night until his father pulled him away, sternly lecturing him. “You can’t act the same as your white friends”, his father told him. “You can’t pretend to shoot guns . You can’t run around in the dark. You can’t hide behind anything other than your own teeth.”

And yet in spite of all of the frustration that Smith regularly experiences and witnesses, he remains hopeful that progress is being made. After a year of writing poems that focused on violence, Smith realized that he also needed to write about the small activities of joy that happen everyday, whether it’s his parents dancing in the living room or children playing in the school yard.

“While violence is part of what it means to be part of the black diaspora in the United States, that is not all it means to be black. I felt myself falling into the trap of being defined by acts of violence. But being black is not that one dimensional.”

Read next: This poet releases the beasts to discover her humanity

He penned the poem, “No More Elegies Today” as a way to help illustrate that complexity. He said poetry for him is always about trying to make sense of the complicated world that he inhabits.

“Sometimes a poem should just be about a girl jumping rope. It doesn’t have to be something that is imbued with more despair.”

NO MORE ELEGIES TODAY

Today I will

write a poem

about a little girl jumping rope.

It will not be a metaphor for dodging bullets.

It will not be an allegory

for skipping past despair.

But rather about the

back & forth bob of her head

as she waits for the right moment to insert herself

into the blinking flashes of bound hemp.

But rather about her friends

on either end of the rope who turn

their wrists into small

flashing windmills cultivating

an energy of their own.

But rather about the way

the beads in her hair bounce

against the back of her neck.

But rather the way her feet

barely touch the ground,

how the rope skipping across

the concrete sounds

like the entire world is giving

her a round of applause.

Reprinted from “Counting Descent” with permission from the author.

The post In joy and discrimination, poet explores duality of growing up black appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Poet Daniel Borzutzky’s latest collection of poems is called “The Performance of Becoming Human.” Photo by Angel Dean Lopez.

“Once, I dreamwrote that I found my own remains in a desert that was partially in Chile and partially in Arizona,” writes Daniel Borzutzky in his poem, “Let Light Shine out of Darkness.” “Was I a disappeared body,” the poem continues, “tossed out of an airplane by a bureaucrat-soldier-compatriot or was I a migrant body who died from dehydration while crossing the invisible line between one civilization and another.”

Bortutzky, who was recently awarded the National Book Award for his collection, “The Performance of Being Human,” grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Chilean immigrants, and now lives in Chicago. He frequently explores in his work issues related to immigration, borders and poverty.

“We’ve had a very prolonged period where public resources have been deteriorating, where social welfare programs have been taken away, schools have been privatized, hospitals have been privatized, where unions have been marginalized, if not destroyed, and where we have a real overdependence on part-time labor,” he said.

While he views the election of Donald Trump “a new kind of danger for a lot of people,” he is quick to point out that many of the conditions he tackles in his art happened on the Democrats’ watch.

“During the Obama years, there have been more immigrants deported than any other time,” he said. “While I think there are ways that peoples’ lives will get worse [under a Trump presidency,] I think there’s a liberal naivete to imagine that things weren’t already bad before.”

The title of his poem, “Let Light Shine Out of Darkness”, is a phrase taken from the book of Corinthians in the Bible. Borzutzky says he hopes that articulating the problems around him through poetry will shed light on those issues — and have tangible outcomes.

“Part of what good poetry does is document the various darknesses around us. It does so by creating historical memory of our time. And hopefully by bringing attention to people who are marginalized and discriminated against and violated and destroyed.”

He believes the “great hope” will lie, not in political systems, but “in individuals at the grassroots level who are trying to improve the worlds in which they live.”

Let Light Shine Out of Darkness

I live in a body that does not have enough light in it

For years, I did not know that I needed to have more light

Once I walked around my city on a dying morning and a decomposing
body approached me and asked me why I had no light

I knew this decomposing body

All that remained of it were teeth, bits of bone, a hand

It came to me and said: There is no light that comes out of your body

I did not know at the time that there should have been light in my body

It’s not that I am dead

It’s not that I am translucent

It’s that you cannot know you need something if you do not know it
is missing

Which is not to say that for years I did not ask for this light

Once, I even said to the body I live with: I think I need more light in
my body, but I really did not take this seriously as a need, as something I
deserved to have

I said: I think I need for something blue or green to shine from my rib cage

Other times when I am talking about lightness I am talking about breath
and space and movement

For it is hard to move in a body so congested with images of mutilation

Did you hear the one about the illegal immigrant who electrocuted his
employee’s genitals? Did you hear the one about the boy in Chicago whose
ear was bitten off when he crossed a border he did not know existed?

I want to give you more room to move so I am trying to carve a space, with
light, for you to walk a bit more freely

This goes against my instincts, which are to tie you down, to tie you to
me, to bind us by the wrist the belly the neck and to look directly into
your mouth, to make you open your mouth and speak the vocabulary of
obliteration right into your tongue your veins your blood

I stop on a bridge over the train tracks and consider the history of the
chemical-melting of my skin

Once, when I poured a certain type of acid on my arm I swore I saw a
bright yellow gas seep out of my body

Once, my teeth glowed sick from the diseased snow they had shoved into
my mouth when they wanted me to taste for myself to bring into my
body the sorrows of the rotten carcass economy

Once, I dreamwrote that I found my own remains in a desert that was
partially in Chile and partially in Arizona

Was I a disappeared body, tossed out of an airplane by a bureaucrat-
soldier-compatriot or was I a migrant body who died from dehydration
while crossing the invisible line between one civilization and another

I was part of a team of explorers we were searching for our own bodies

In the desert I found my feet and I put them in a plastic bag and
photographed them, cataloged them, weighed and measured them and
when I was finished with the bureaucratization of my remains I lay down
in the sand and asked one of my colleagues to jam a knife into my belly

She obliged

But when the blade entered my skin it was as if my belly were a water balloon

Water shot into the air

My skin ripped into hundreds of pieces and I watched as the water covered
the feet of my colleagues who were here to document their disappearances
and decomposition

It was at this moment that I saw light in my body not sun over the sand
but a drip of soft blue on a piece of skin that had fallen off my body and
dissolved into its own resistance

Reprinted from “The Performance of Becoming Human” published by Brooklyn Arts Press 2016.

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of “The Performance of Becoming Human”, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books and chapbooks include “In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy”, “Bedtime Stories for the End of the World!”, “Data Bodies”, “The Book of Interfering Bodies” and “The Ecstasy of Capitulation”. He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.

The post Can a poem make the world a better place by documenting the darknesses around us? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A man releases a paper lantern in front of fireworks ahead of the new year in China. Photo by REUTERS/Stringer

“I have always felt that part of my job in this world is to pay attention,” says poet Shelley Girdner. Her great-grandmother used to say that it was important to “find the one miracle in every day.” Girdner considers her work a continuation of that family tradition.

Shelley Girdner’s debut collection is titled “You Were That White Bird.” Photo by David Ramsay.

“You Were That White Bird,” a recently published collection, is filled with poems that capture the details in the natural world around her and the small miracles of her life. Miracles, she is quick to point out, aren’t always joyous.

“Sometimes miracles are terrible coincidences, weird alignments of things.” She said her poem “Shore” is about a walk she took years ago along the New Hampshire coastline where she lives. It begins:

Before God made the shore
he divined a woman walking there,
her sorrow a deep hurt she could not name.

“At the time I was struggling with depression. Depression in and of itself is so painful to live through. But if you can keep yourself moving through that difficult time, you reach a deep appreciation of coming back to a place of consolation.”

Similarly, she says her poem “New Years Day” was a very literal poem that came to her as she was running errands.

“It was the end of a very rough year. My husband had been ill for awhile and there were a lot of other negative things that had happened. It was an unusually warm day which caused some weird fog formations. And the poem just wrote itself as I was driving away from town, driving away from that terrible year with the idea of having a fresh start.”

READ MORE: A poet’s history lesson on Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood

Girdner says she loves it when poems just unfold that way, more an act of translation than crafting a piece of work. But she says more often she has to work hard to get the language just right. She has been writing little stories since she was a very young child, but didn’t become a poet until college. Finding the time to write between duties as a mother and professor of writing at the University of New Hampshire is always a challenge; each year she makes a New Year’s resolution to set aside time for writing as soon as she wakes up. That resolution only lasts a few weeks, she says with a laugh.

“I learn that I just have to be patient with the ebbs and flows of writing. It will always come if I’m patient.”

New Year’s Day

It’s warm after a cold night, and fog
rises into the air like all the badness
of that old year leaving, makes
licking white peaks of the roofs in town,
covers the fields with steeples.

When I drive home, the air won’t be the same;
the sense of fleeing upward will be gone,
so I drive through, one eye on the stream
of every sad thing farewelling.

I let my grief leave too, and what lies down after that
is like faith, a blank sheet, what this year will be.

Reprinted from “You Were That White Bird” published by Bauhan Publishing.

Shelley Girdner’s poems have been published in several journals including “Hunger Mountain” and “Painted Review.” She’s been a finalist for the Slapering Hol chapbook prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

The post Get a fresh start in the new year with this poem appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A girl walks past a house painted in the colors of the U.S. flag in Moneygall, Ireland. Photo by REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton

The Jennifer Century
America! Give to me your 200 years
of names borrowed from the Bible. Anyone
can be a Mary. Australians. A Canadian.
Take instead the all-American sound
of Jennifer. Feel how it Kansases
in your mouth, a flat rectangle of democracy.
Notice in it the guttural yearn,
primal urge for curds, conspicuous consumption
of the doubled-n. Leave for the limeys
their Guinevere, to the Cornish Gwenhwyfar,
the origin stories too. America
did not rise, enfogged, from a lake,
was not pulled from a stone by a king.
We emerged from the stocked shelves
of Spencer’s Gifts and More,
from the aisle of black lights and St. Patrick’s Day
shirts festooned with “I’m So Irish, My Liver Hurts”
and “Erin Go Braless.” Give to our Jennifers
the American J, so goddamned unique
the Commies have nothing like it
and which the French mispronounce.
O beautiful Jennifers, for spacious Camaros,
for amber waves of perms. May you crack
your gum forever, the canyons and forests
and food courts echoing with its snap,
Haileys and Kaylees circling the edges,
watching for the moment your fringed jackets drop
to paw the ground and pounce

“First, you are laughing. Then there is a knife.” That’s how a fellow poet once described the work of poet Erin Adair-Hodges.

It’s a fitting description for “The Jennifer Century.” Adair-Hodges wrote the poem in 2014, but it reads as if in direct, irreverent dialogue with current questions and rhetoric around what makes America great.

Erin Adair-Hodges’ debut collection is called “Let’s All Die Happy.” Photo by Sean McCullough.

“[This poem] looks at the emptiness of American exceptionalism and concepts of our ‘greatness’ but by talking about the name Jennifer… a quintessentially American name,” said Adair-Hodges, who said the poem came out of “thinking about names as signifiers” — not just of cultures but also of specific time periods and value systems.

The title of the poem, Adair-Hodges said, is a nod to the so-called “American Century” — a term coined by Time publisher Henry Luce to describe the era of America’s sweeping influence that began in the middle of the 20th century, and continues to the present day. “I’ve always been fascinated by the term… as it implies a finiteness to our global influence and dominance,” Adair-Hodges said.

There is humor too. In this poem, Adair-Hodges asks us to consider that America’s origins aren’t as noble, say, as the tale of Excalibur (“America did not rise, enfogged, from a lake”). Instead, she suggests that perhaps we are born more out of capitalism (the shelves of Spencer’s Gifts), borrowed holidays (“I’m So Irish, My Liver Hurts”) and the ephemeral trends of our decades (big perms, cracking gum, Camaros).

Adair-Hodges said her work is not necessarily political, but always “motivated by a sense of urgency.” For eight years, she left poetry, but came back to it after suffering from postpartum depression following her son’s birth. The depression became anxiety, which led to a desire to regain control and find meaning again through writing.

It is the responsibility of the poet, she said, to force people to slow down and think in an era of speed and multi-tasking. “The actual physical act of reading requires so much investment and attention that it cannot be done apathetically,” she said. “Poetry asks that, for even a few moments, we become fully engaged.”

Listen to Adair-Hodges’ read “The Jennifer Century” below.

This poem first appeared in the literary journal Boulevard.  

Erin Adair-Hodges’ first book, “Let’s All Die Happy,” which is forthcoming with the University of Pittsburgh Press, won the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholar in Poetry and winner of the 2014 Loraine Williams Prize from The Georgia Review.  Her work can be seen in Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, The Pinch, and more. She teaches writing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The post The all-American essence of Kansas, Camaros and ‘Jennifer’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The “Writers Resist NYC” rally, on the steps of the New York Public Library. Credit: Ed Lederman/PEN America

On Sunday, thousands of writers and artists rallied across the country in defense of freedom of speech and to protest the political discourse of President-elect Donald Trump. Their mission, according to organizers, was to “send a message to an incoming presidential administration that has laid bare its hostility toward the press and other free expression norms.”

The main event, held on the steps of the New York Public Library in New York City, was organized by PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend freedom of expression. There, authors Jacqueline Woodson and Andrew Solomon, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, playwright and activist Eve Ensler, and poets Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, and Monica Youn, and other writers, delivered readings and performances. Other Writers Resist events took place in Tuscaloosa, Fresno, Helena, Denver, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington D.C., among other locations.

Youn read her poem, “A GUIDE TO USAGE: MINE,” which she wrote in response to the election. She recently shared that poem with the PBS NewsHour, and also spoke to arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown in a series of emails. You can read her poem and that email conversation below.

“Writers Resist” protesters march to Trump tower. Credit: Ed Lederman/PEN America

A GUIDE TO USAGE: MINE

By Monica Youn

A. Pronoun

My.

Be-
longing

to me.

how should I define the limits of my concern the boundary between mine and not-mine the chime of the pronoun like a steel ring cast over what I know what I name what I claim what I own the whine of the pronoun hones its bright edges to keenness because there is power in the categorical that prides itself and plumps itself and proliferates till there is no room in here for anything but power till there is no air in here but there would be no need for air if you could learn to breathe in whatever I breathe out

B. Noun 1

A pit or tunnel in

the earth
from which
precious

stones or ores or coal
are taken

by digging
or by other methods.

because the earth does not gleam with the shine of the noun to dig into the earth is imperative to use my fingers or else to fashion more rigid more perdurable fingers that cut or delve or sift or shatter because we are more evolved than animals because to mine is not to burrow because the earth is not for us to live in because the earth is not precious in itself the earth is that from which what is precious is taken the earth is what is scraped away or blasted away or melted away from what my steeltipped fingers can display or sell or burn

C. Noun 2

A device
intended

to explode
when stepped upon
or touched,

or when approached
by a ship, vehicle,

or person.

my devise my device redefined by intent so thinskinned this earth is untouchable a sly simulacrum of innocence concealing an infinity of hairtrigger malice the cry of the noun sealed in a concentric sphere that sheaths its lethal secret in silence unapproachable it sings its unspeakable harvest in this field I have seeded with violence

D. Verb

To dig
away or otherwise remove

the substratum
or foundation
of.

To sap.
To ruin

by slow degrees or secret means.

to dig is to build dark dwellings of negative space to knit a linked network of nothing the seams of the seemingly solid unravel the itch of erosion the scratch of collapse each absence the artifact of specific intention an abscess a crater a honeycomb of dead husks the home of the verb is founded on ruin the crime of the verb hollows out prisons and graves the rhyme of the verb tunnels from fissure to fracture from factory to faction from faultline to fate this foundation is equal parts atom and emptiness this fear invades fractally by rhizome and root what cement could salvage this crumbling concrete should I pledge my allegiance to unearthing or earth

Monica Youn. Credit: Joanna Eldridge Morrissey

JEFFREY BROWN: Tell me first about the poem: I understand it was a commission — is that unusual for you? How did it come about, and why did you want to take it on?

MONICA YOUN: In response to the election, The Boston Review is publishing a chapbook of 40 poems on political disaster — 20 new and 20 previously published, with a forward by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, a man for whom I have boundless respect. They reached out to me in late November to contribute a poem. I also read the poem at the Writers Resist rally at the New York Public Library, organized by Erin Belieu and sponsored by PEN America.

I’d never written a poem on commission, much less one in response to current events (except for a one-off effort as the daily NewsPoet for NPR’s All Things Considered, which was more an exercise than a serious poem). My work is certainly political — among other topics my most recent book of poems Blackacre traces the stigma surrounding female infertility back to our system of inherited property, and outlines the slippery slope from nursery comforts to racial hierarchy. But I’m not used to responding to particular current events — especially one so new, so raw, and so huge.

But I felt that I’ve allowed myself to get a little too fastidious — too comfortable in my comfort zone. Don’t get me wrong — even the most navel-gazing, most abstruse artistic work has inherent political value. If we allow political exigency to supercede the difficult, the nuanced, the individualistic, then the enemies of truth have already won. But I think that poets practice certain skills that we bring to the fray — skills involving the analysis and strategic deployment of language. For me, adopting a more public voice is something concrete that I can contribute to the pushback against the incoming administration, along with phone calls, donations, protests and other more direct forms of political activism. I’ll be interested to see how my more public voice changes and educates my more personal, lyric modes of writing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Was the process of writing a commission different from your usual approach to writing poetry?

MONICA YOUN: Mostly it was different because it didn’t allow me to turn away from a subject that terrified, confused, enraged and exhausted me. As with many of my friends, my reaction to the election has gone through various phases — numb despair, frantic activism, desperate avoidance. Every morning I would wake up in a panic over a different priority — refugees, immigration, global conflict, race relations, climate change, economic justice, reproductive rights, queer identity, constitutional safeguards. But the poetry commission forced me to look for a handle, an angle or perspective on what seemed all-encompassing.

Also, just as a matter of time, three weeks is a very short fuse for me to go from conceptualizing a poem to a completed draft. Usually, once I’ve decided to write something in a particular way, I start gathering material and adding it to the pot — like supersaturating a solution. Not until I sense that the poem is ready to precipitate out — usually months or years later — do I sit down and try to write it. This time, I didn’t have that luxury — given the end-of-semester and holiday rush, as well as an increased burden of political activism, I only had two free afternoons in which to write the poem. I had decided on the “mine” concept several days earlier, but I was on the clock to complete two sections per day. And I finished the draft only 15 minutes before I submitted it, before I had a chance to let it sit for a while or to solicit feedback.

JEFFREY BROWN: “Gathering material and adding it to the pot.” Gathering how – as in ‘research’? Material from where? I’m interested here in the construction of your poems. And then: why is a poem the best or right way to put across this ‘material’?

MONICA YOUN: I don’t know if I’d dignify what I did here with as serious a term as “research.” More just a kind of rooting around. In this poem I started with the definitions and etymology of the word “mine,” of course, and then did about an hour’s worth of on-line research into strip-mining procedures, the construction of landmines, and the history of military sappers. Usually I’d let this process play out a little longer, get a little farther flung, but this time I was on the clock.

I wouldn’t think that a poem – or any other mode of persuasion — is ever necessarily “the best or right way to put across” an argument or point of view. As a lawyer and poet, I’ve written legal briefs, congressional testimony, cable news talking points, op-eds, speeches, letters, law review articles, essays, blog posts, and tweets. And poems, of course. Each genre has its own norms of persuasion, its intended audience, and its means of dissemination, and anyone who considers herself an advocate – whether poet, lawyer, or citizen – would be silly to limit herself to just one means.

What makes this particular “material” – an interrelated series of catastrophes snowballing in the wake of this election – appropriate for a poem, rather than another genre, is its mode of persuasion: a logic that relies as much on sonics as on sense. I’ve always been an etymology geek, and etymologically speaking, the multiple definitions of the word “mine” are pure coincidence – a Germanic possessive pronoun and a Latinate word for ore or metal that, as English evolved, came to sound the same and to be spelled the same.

As a lawyer, I could never use this similarity as the main driver of an argument that we should think of the acquisitive, exclusionary impulse as the common denominator for environmental depredation, military technology, and societal disintegration. As a lawyer, the historical fiction of the etymology would be fatal to its force: for lawyers, historical roots are not mere provenance, they are precedent – what conveys legitimacy to the sovereign state’s exercise of power.

But poets (and politicians) are more attuned to the non-semantic shadows cast by language – the echoes and resonances of particular words that have persuasive force beyond the level of truth or falsity. My former boss had been President Clinton’s chief speechwriter, and we had terrific conversations analyzing, for instance, the prosody of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Engaging the nonrational aspects of language allows persuasion to slip past the defenses of the rational mind, to take effect at the level of emotion or sensation.

JEFFREY BROWN: This poem seems to posit the kind of public / private split you speak of – “the boundary between mine and not-mine”, the various meanings of ‘mine’, and more. You even wonder at the end whether to “pledge my allegiance to unearthing or earth.” If I’m reading this correctly, it makes me wonder if you feel, or how much you feel, this duality in your own life, the various ‘hats’ you’ve worn as lawyer and poet? And to what extent this determines your view of the role of poetry today.

MONICA YOUN: I left the dichotomy between “unearthing” and “earth” open-ended because I wanted readers to be able to apply this duality to their own experiences. But for me, as you point out, the distinction maps onto the various roles I’ve played and my strategies for moving forward at this point in our political reality and in my own life. As an election lawyer and activist, I was very much the pragmatist policy wonk – pushing for incremental change where wholesale reform appeared infeasible. But as a poet, my political work has been more critical, more interested in exposing how deeply rooted our inequities, inhibitions, and malignancies may be. And I’ve seen many of my peers follow different paths in the wake of this election: some argue that we must do all that we can to ameliorate the situation and to work for change within the parameters of the existing system; others claim that the foundations of the republic are so flawed, its institutions so corrupt, that critique is the only ethically and aesthetically feasible response.

I don’t think I have a better sense of “the role of poetry” after the election than I ever have had – I don’t feel that I have the right to speak for other artists or activists, only to consider my own imperatives. I know that personally, in the immediate aftermath of the election, I had an reflexive distrust of any form of comfort – a sci-fi novel, a glass of wine, cuddling my baby son – all of it felt like a drug, like irresponsible escapism enabled by privilege. But I can hardly extrapolate from my personal sense of culpability to a societal prescription – certainly science fiction, chardonnay, and snuggly babies should continue to exist. And the same goes for poetry – to devalue the beautiful, the recondite, the introspective would be to lose sight of what we are fighting for in the first place.

Even as our post-election landscape offers the opportunity and the necessity to deepen and broaden our modes of engagement as citizens, it offers us a similar imperative to rethink and retool our practices as poets. But I couldn’t tell you now what form that will take for me, much less what form it should take for others.

JEFFREY BROWN: Monica Youn, thank you very much.

MONICA YOUN: Thank you for offering an outlet to me and to other poets.

Listen to Youn’ read “A GUIDE TO USAGE: MINE” below.

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which was named one of the best poetry books of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Paris Review, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former election lawyer, she currently teaches poetry at Princeton University and in the Sarah Lawrence and Warren Wilson MFA programs.

The post As ‘writers resist’ Trump, an interview with a poet in protest appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

People protest against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as electors gather to cast their votes for U.S. president at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. December 19, 2016.

Since the election, prominent musicians, artists, poets and other writers have spoken out in protest of the rhetoric and proposed policies of President-elect Donald Trump. On Sunday, thousands mobilized for “Writers Resist” events across the country. But while less visible, there are also conservative writers who, often quietly, disagree.

Among them is formalist poet Michael Astrue, a recipient of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet and Richard Wilbur awards, who goes by the pen name “A.M. Juster.” Though Juster does not write overtly political poetry, politics has in many ways dominated his life.

For decades, Juster, as Michael Astrue, worked as a public servant at the highest levels, holding a position as associate counsel to two Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush), then as general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, and finally as commissioner of the Social Security Administration from 2007-2013.

Until an article in the religious journal, First Things, outed him in 2010, Juster kept his life as a poet private, seeing no good outcome from publicizing it. These days, he is more open. PBS NewsHour called Juster at home in Belmont, MA, to talk about the writer and artist protests, why poets with conservative leanings are often less visible, and whether he thinks poetry can spur change.

When asked about the writer protests, Juster said it brought to mind a 1970 poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur, called “For the Student Strikers.” You can read that poem, and the conversation with Juster, below.

For the Student Strikers
By Richard Wilbur

Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you,
And whom, it is said, you are so unlike.
Stand on the stoops of their houses and tell them why
You are out on strike.

It is not yet time for the rock, the bullet, the blunt
Slogan that fuddles the mind toward force.
Let the new sound in our streets be the patient sound
Of your discourse.

Doors will be shut in your faces, I do not doubt.
Yet here or there, it may be, there will start,
Much as the lights blink on in a block at evening,
Changes of heart.

They are your houses; the people are not unlike you;
Talk with them, then, and let it be done
Even for the grey wife of your nightmare sheriff
And the guardsman’s son.

Courtesy of Michael and Laura Astrue.

ELIZABETH FLOCK: Why the Wilbur poem? When did you first read it, and why does it resonate with you right now, as writers are protesting?

A.M. JUSTER: I think in college is when I first found this poem. It’s a poem I’ve come back to many times, having been involved in politics and government off and on for 40 years. I’ve come back to it at times when people, including me, needed to pull back, and people have to talk less violently. At different times in the election, I’ve come back to it again. I read it on the air in Boston during a particularly ugly time in the campaign. Sometime in December, I also posted it online on a poetry forum, Eratosphere. When I posted it, there was a very uncivil assault on the poem and me, and I thought, well, this is a poem about being open minded and trusting each other; this is exactly what this poem is talking about.

It’s a somber, stately poem, a little sober in its language, but it has a sense of loftiness. It’s shaped a little bit in the form of a classical sapphic. Four line stanzas, and the fourth line is half the length of the other lines. There is both a gentleness and a force to it.

It is one of my favorite poems about the political process, and from a poet I admire. Richard Wilbur is not a conservative poet. He is a poet from the far left, and he wrote it during the Vietnam era for the student strikers. The backstory is that he was asked to write a poem by one of these radical newspapers, and it wasn’t what they expected or wanted, so they crinkled it up and put it in the wastebasket. But after some consideration, they went and got it out.

It’s a poem that is a plea for patience and political civility, and not succumbing to violence that was part of the times. That violence was much more real and palpable than a lot of people realize, they were scary times.

I’m guessing it felt to Wilbur very much like a poem of the moment in 1969, but that’s the thing about the great poems. Even though they are spurred by the circumstances of the moment, if they speak to you, then they will speak to other people again.

[Now, with the writers protests,] I think it’s a great thing that we have the First Amendment, and can express our opinions. I don’t know whether it will make much difference or not. I think they have every right to express their opinions. I guess my main concern is that I’d like to see it done with more civility and grace. I don’t think answering uncivil statements or actions with equally uncivil statements or actions is a good thing.

Poets are consumed with the outcome of this election. I’m on Twitter, and follow mostly critics, poets and editors. At some point after Trump, I noticed that the volume and intensity had started increasing very rapidly. I don’t like looking at my feed anymore, because there is so much politics and so little poetry.

ELIZABETH FLOCK: Is there a reason so few prominent poets are conservative?

A.M. JUSTER: I think part of the reason, the explanation for this, is that poetry has become much more of an academic enterprise, and the poets that become prominent and recognized and reinforce each other, are within academics. And the academy is increasingly progressive in its politics, and increasingly exclusionary. There are poets out there, actually quite a few, who are reasonably conservative in their politics, but you’re not likely to know about them.

This has been the case since at least the 70s. My original plan was to go to graduate school in English. I was a state finalist for the Rhodes and Marshall, and other fellowships. For the Danforth Fellowship, a senior Yale administrator called me into her office and told me I would have won but they had “decided that people with my politics shouldn’t become academics.” And that was with me being moderate in politics — I was a Gerald Ford Republican then. So I decided not to beat my head against the wall, and went into law and government. The bias in top academic institutions was very bad in the 70s, but it’s only gotten worse.

It’s not that there’s uniformity in the poetry community, it’s that there’s uniformity in the hierarchy. If you ask me to name somebody in the conservative poetry community who holds an academic appointment, maybe I could come up with a person, maybe. If you say, are there some terrific poets out there whose politics are conservative, I could name many. But they keep a low profile because to be conservative and a poet greatly limits the places you can get published.

There is a lot of pressure in academia to tow certain ideological and political lines, and people in academia who are independent thinkers are afraid to express countervailing feelings. I don’t think conservative poets think of themselves as part of a community. They think of themselves as scattered people who happen to write poetry.

ELIZABETH FLOCK: Can you name a few conservative poets you admire?

A.M. JUSTER: Jennifer Reeser is very interesting. I think she is one of the best of our Native American poets, and a translator of Ana Akmatova, who is maybe the second greatest Russian poet.Timothy Murphy in North Dakota, who is a strong Catholic and a gay libertarian. Bill Baer, who edited an anthology of conservative poets for the University of Evansville Press. Robert Crawford in New Hampshire, who won the prestigious Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, twice.

ELIZABETH FLOCK: You used a pen name for quite some time. Why?

A.M. JUSTER: Despite being somewhat of a public person my temperament is pretty private. Back then, I felt that in government and business it wasn’t going to help me to have what people considered a frivolous activity.  Theres also a real bias in poetry against people who don’t take low paying jobs. People who have jobs and success at a high level are seen as almost disreputable. This is kind of a turn from how it used to be: T.S. Eliot was a banker, Wallace Stevens was a vice president at a pretty high level.

ELIZABETH FLOCK: Have you ever written political poetry? Do you have any desire to now?

A.M. JUSTER: Not very much. I think it’s hard to write effectively to the headlines. Probably the first successful poem I had, “Moscow Zoo,” which won the 1995 Howard Sonnet Nemerov Award, is in some sense a political poem. The poem came out of a report in the New York Times about how they were literally digging up bodies at the Moscow Zoo that no one knew were there. I found that very moving, and the opportunity for a good poem. Often a good poem can come out of something that is moving and you don’t know why. You sit down and it takes you places you didn’t expect. Sometimes you don’t have the distance and mood to write a poem, or you’re closed off from exploration. So to write a poem you have to sort of let it happen. With this poem it was more of a question of reading this and visualizing it and suddenly it became more tactile, and I kept thinking: Why are you so struck by this?

ELIZABETH FLOCK: What do you see as the role of poetry? Do you think that poetry can spur change?

A.M. JUSTER: Well, one of the things about being older, is that you start to realize that prose, particularly nonfiction prose, changes policy all the time, but fiction very rarely. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is an exception; that book changed agricultural policy, but it’s very rare.

With poetry, I can’t think of a poem that I can honestly say has changed public policy. I think very political poetry generally is going to be a disappointment to the poet. It’s hard to look back and say any poem was a really successful poem from the point of view of changing public policy.

What poetry does, is it it aims at changing people, changing the culture, and that’s part of the draw of it. It’s trying to make the world a better place, but not by any particular prescription.

As in the Wilbur poem, he’s getting people to talk to each other in a more civil way. How people see the world, how people see themselves — poetry can change those things.

A.M. Juster is the author of Longing for Laura (Birch Brook Press, 2001); The Secret Language of Women (University of Evansville Press, 2003); The Satires of Horace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Tibullus’ Elegies (Oxford University Press, 2012); Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles (University of Toronto Press 2015); Sleaze & Slander: Selected Humorous Verse 1995-2015 (Measure Press 2016) and The Billy Collins Experience (Aldrich Press 2016). Forthcoming in 2017 will be The Elegies of Maximianus (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Milton’s Book of Elegies (University of Oklahoma Press).

“For the Student Strikers” from COLLECTED POEMS 1943- 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Copyright (c) 1976, renewed 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

The post Poetic advice in a time of division: ‘Go talk with those who are rumored to be unlike you’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

“Paterson”/ Amazon Studios

Another One
By Ron Padgett 
When you’re a child
you learn
there are three dimensions:
height, width, and depth.
Like a shoebox.
Then later you hear
there’s a fourth dimension:
time.
Hmm.
Then some say
there can be five, six, seven…
I knock off work,
have a beer
at the bar.
I look down at the glass
and feel glad.

This poem is one of four that American poet Ron Padgett wrote specifically for the new Jim Jarmusch film “Paterson,” which follows a poetry-writing bus driver (played by Adam Driver) who shares a name with his city of Paterson, New Jersey. Throughout the film, we both see and hear Paterson recite his poetry, inspired by his daily routine.

When Jarmusch asked Padgett, a friend, to write original poetry for the film, Padgett initially said no. But after talking it over with Jarmusch, Padgett told the PBS NewsHour,“I thought … why do I have to be such a chicken? Why can’t I just really accept this challenge?”  

After the poet read the script, he said he began to form an idea about who the character of Paterson was, and “found myself falling into what I kind of temporarily fantasized to be his world.”

Paterson’s world is full of routines: he drives his bus, writes poetry at lunch, sees his wife at home at night and then goes to have a beer at the local bar. So goes the poetry Padgett has written for him in the film: “I knock off work, / have a beer / at the bar. I look down at the glass / and feel glad.”

Padgett, known for this kind of plain, observational writing, said young people too often have a narrow or inflated view of what poetry has to look like. For Padgett, poetry can simply come, as it does in the film, from the familiar — or the imagined.  “Maybe a film like Paterson will help some people say, huh, maybe I could write something like this too,” Padgett said.

Watch PBS NewsHour arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown’s interview with Padgett and Jarmusch below.

The post For the film ‘Paterson,’ poet Ron Padgett wrote four original poems appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A young girl dances with an American flag while women pray behind her during a protest against the temporary travel ban, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Credit: REUTERS/Laura Buckman

On Monday, Tehran-born poet Kaveh Akbar began tweeting out poetry written by poets from the seven countries — Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria — impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily bans immigrants from those countries.

The poetry Akbar shared includes work from Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet born in Benghazi who emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, Ladan Osman, who was born in Somalia and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and Safia Elhillo, a poet born in the U.S. to Sudanese parents, but who didn’t move to the U.S. until the year 2000.

Akbar said he was inspired to tweet Monday morning while reading the poetry of Persian poet Majid Naficy, and wondering what his life would be like without having read Naficy’s work. Naficy, who was born and raised in Iran, fled to the U.S. after Ayatollah Khomeini established theocratic rule in Iran in 1979, an experience that appears in Naficy’s poetry. His poem, “Allowance,” begins with the lines: “When creeping out of his tight skin / He suffers pain / And the world becomes small for him.”

Kaveh Akbar. Credit: B. A. Van Sise

“I was struck by how I was the very, very lucky beneficiary of this sort of gorgeousness and beauty,” Akbar said. “And how my person would be diminished from a lack of access to these sort of voices.”

Akbar often shares poets from a range of backgrounds on his Twitter account and at Divedapper, a contemporary poetry site he founded and edits. He said he has always felt compelled to share the poetry he loves with others.

This seemed particularly important to him on Monday, after a weekend of protests over the ban. He hoped that in sharing the poetry it would channel the rage people felt “toward a kind of love, and gratefulness” for that writing, he said.

The ban also has personal resonance for Akbar, who was born in Tehran and moved to the U.S. when he was two and a half years old. Though English is his primary spoken language, he said “there is a part of Iran that is hardwired into me.”

Akbar, who now teaches poetry in Florida, and whose debut full-length collection is coming out this Fall, sometimes writes about the difficulty of straddling different worlds and languages, and holding on to the culture of his origin country.

He believes that at its core, poetry is about sharing an experience with readers they might not have otherwise had.

“When you read a poem by a poet who is living in Syria, you are granted access to an experience that is absolutely nothing like your experience living in Duluth or Montpelier,” he said, and with that access often comes empathy. “So I think that engaging in that work is one of the most empathetic things we can do right now.”

Read the poetry Akbar shared below:

The post Read poems from the 7 countries affected by Trump’s immigration ban appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

When the Ebola outbreak hit Liberia two years ago, all schools were forced to shut down to prevent further transmission of the disease. The neighborhood of Westpoint, in the capital city of Monrovia, was ground zero for Ebola and was also the area where most of Katie Meyler’s students lived.

Meyler, an American who had moved to Liberia years earlier as a recent college graduate, turned her school into an emergency response headquarters and raised money to buy two ambulances. She also bribed her way into the quarantined Westpoint so she could provide emotional support to the families of her students.

“Our plan was to do everything you can to keep everybody alive and then when you can’t do anything else, bring dignity in death. Singing to people, praying with people while they died.”

And at a time when many Westerners had left the country, Meyer used social media — especially Instagram — to let people around the world know what was happening. She said she knew that by staying in Liberia, she was risking her life, but she felt it was her duty to stay.

“I’d rather die at 30 years old, living for what I really believe from head to toe in every single way possible, than to live to be 90 years old and not really fulfill what I was born to do.”

For her work, she was named a “person of the year” by TIME magazine, along with other Ebola fighters. Meyler says watching so many people die has forever changed her.

“I don’t want to get over it…. Remembering what it felt like and to see that national emergency, it motivates me and fuels me to fight to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Eleven years ago, Meyler packed her bags and set off for Liberia for a six-month internship with a charity.

“I didn’t even know where Liberia was on a map. I had to Google it,” she says with a laugh.

Her experience running a literacy program in a small, rural Liberian community was transformative. She was shocked to discover the lack of education and extreme poverty that children faced. She knew immediately that she had to stay.

“There’s a saying that nobody chooses Liberia, that Liberia chooses you. I think part of it is, you come here and you see the amount of need the place has and the people are very warm and open and you realize you can make a big difference.”

Meyer initially raised money for scholarships to send children to school. But she became so disenchanted with the existing school system, she decided to start her own. It’s called the More Than Me Academy, and it provides free education, meals and health care for girls in kindergarten through sixth grade.

Meyler believes that improving the education system is the first step to preventing another such catastrophe. Last year she began working with Liberia’s minister of education to help overhaul the entire public school system. Her organization is one of seven private organizations that have taken over nearly 100 public schools in a pilot project.

Meyler, who writes and performs poetry in her spare time, composed “Never Again” as a response to the Ebola epidemic.

Never Again

Thank You, Thank You my Lord

Men in moon suits shovel corpses like their rubble
Bodies piled high in the back of pick ups
Crowds across the street keep their distance
The sounds of mourning screams are constant

People lie like dogs on the street
Their cries for help go unanswered
The world’s afraid to come too close

In my rubber boots on bended knee
The stench of death was mixed with feces
His soft baby checks were against the dirt and dust
There was no ma for his hand to cup
Alone
In a bath of his own blood
His big brown eyes looked at the world with love
I asked him name
He could barely speak
Softly he tells me “I’m Charlie”
He reached for my arm
But I back up
as much as I wanted to hold him
this is an enemy that preys on love

If only my songs
Could hold his face
Encircle him in a warm embrace
The soft notes down his back they’d trace

Thank you, thank you my Lord

Death tolls rising like the tide
Tension is more tangible than touch
Bodies are being buried in mass graves

While experts sip coffees and lattes
Have cocktail parties and all day debates
On the best strategizes and philosophies
That determine the fate of these communities
That they have never even frickin’ been to?

So I beg you now please help!

Boots on the ground is what we need
We are out of water and PPE’s
No bleach, no beds, and no IV’s
Wages for employees??
Hospitals transmitting more disease
A country that lacks complete capacity

And there was Esther
Hairnet on her head
In a woman’s oversized flower dress
All the people around her sang
With arms stretched to the sky in praise
They were thanking God for their lives.

This was a survivor’s party
Except there was nothing about Esther that was happy
She survived Ebola, but when she woke up from a coma
She learned that her entire family didn’t.
She was about to be released
Except there was nobody there to get her

In a country without adoption and with no foster care system
Where will she go? And the world leaves her in the hands of the Liberian Government that is vividly broken as you freak out about an outbreak in
America that will never freakin’ happen
“For God sake get a grip”

Sarah was stronger than any human being I’ve known
I gave her two teddy bears and a telephone

We stood outside the Ebola treatment unit
I looked into her eyes
I told her she was going to be okay.
I lied.
She walked down that dark hall
And she never came back out

“Are you sure? She seemed so strong?”
“Sometimes they just drop dead”

I couldn’t get the words out
I just looked at her mother
My lips quivered
I dropped my head and sobbed
She got the message
And collapsed
She flung her arms in the air and shook

no place to say her last goodbyes
no “I love you baby”, no tears to wipe
no hand to hold throughout the night

Sarah’s life is gone.
The world doesn’t stop, the debates go on, the blame goes on, the fight for attention the corruption.
This circus goes on.
Sarah’s life is gone. Gone, gone.
We let this go on. And now her precious life has slipped gone.

I’m not okay and no one gets it
No one
These images won’t go away
They stain my mind and keep me awake

I think about the little girl just dead on a bench
or Sarah’s mothers face
I sometimes weep thinking about what an inhumane, lonely death small Charlie had

It’s sad and dark but then I think about all of the survivors
Like Esther. All she has lost but she has life
I have life. And you have life.
And we must use it to the max.

This will never be okay until we make sure it never happens again.

The post From the heart of the Ebola crisis, this educator and poet says ‘never again’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Monarch butterflies fly at a butterfly sanctuary in Angangeo, Michoacan. Photo by REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

A few days after the presidential election, poet Kim Stafford was driving east from his hometown of Portland, Oregon, when he was struck by a motto on a passing truck filled with Peruvian soft drinks. El sabor que nos hace únicos, it said. The flavor that makes us one. 

“I thought, I want this in my life, in my writing,” Stafford said. “Personally I am troubled by the outcome of the election, but I am more troubled by the divisions” in the country post-election, he said. “What ‘made America one’ seemed like what we all need to seek.” 

This idea led to Stafford’s post-election chapbook “The Flavor of Unity,” which begins with a poem he wrote on election morning (“We have not done enough to spare our country / this avalanche of foolishness”) and ends with recommendations on how to respond in times of change (“be not afraid… do right / Dark times brighten the life of witness.”)

Throughout the book, Stafford seems to wrestle with two antithetical urges: one, to convince and persuade readers, and explicitly criticize the new president, and two, to unify and move forward.

The first, more strident tone is present in his poem “How to Raise a President,” which gives prescriptions on how to help President Donald Trump as a leader, and which Stafford said he based on the management theory of “leading from below.” “When your leaders acts the bully: silence. / When your leader does something right — no matter how small — celebration,” he writes.

But a very different feeling is put forth in the poem “The Flavor of Unity,” which Stafford said he wrote to answer the question the motto had raised for him: What is the flavor of unity? What is it that really unifies people?

“For me it’s something about home ground, the earth, our common treasure of wind and tree and grass and light and water,” Stafford said. “Because we are all earth citizens.”

In recent weeks, Stafford said he has noticed with some disappointment that local bookstores have begun adding “resistance” sections in addition to their regular subject headings like”nature” and “religion.” He said he’d rather see a “peacemaking” section, or something that was “come one come all” — a section that could attract any reader. Stafford is a professed pacifist, as was his father William Stafford, who was also a poet and served as the U.S. poet laureate in 1970.

“I think my practice as a writer has become a search for how to be a good citizen in a troubled country,” Stafford said. “What I’m really trying to do with my poetry these days is search for common ground.”

Read and listen to “The Flavor of Unity,” below.

Kim Stafford teaches writing at Lewis and Clark College.

The Flavor of Unity

By Kim Stafford       

          El sabor que nos hace únicos.

                       — Inca Kola slogan

The flavor that makes us one cannot be bought

or sold, does not belong to a country, cannot

enrich the rich or be denied to the poor.

The flavor that makes us one emanates from the earth.

A butterfly can find it, a child in a house of grass, exiles coming home at last to taste wind off the sea, rain

falling into the trees, mist rising from home ground.

The flavor that makes us one we must feed

to one another with songs, kind words, and

human glances across the silent square.

Kim Stafford directs the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College, and is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including “Having Everything Right” and “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared.” His poetry chapbook “How to Sleep Cold” is forthcoming in fall 2016 from Limberlost Press. He has taught writing in in Scotland, Italy and Bhutan.

The post A poet’s quest to find the ‘flavor of unity’ in divisive times appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A boy plays in a fountain in New York City over Labor Day weekend. Credit: REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich.

When poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown first met at a poetry retreat in 2012, they instantly connected in discussing fatherhood and the poetry that sprang from that experience. Over time, that relationship grew, and they began writing poetry that came directly out of their conversations. Soon, they were even borrowing each other’s lines or writing stanzas or whole poems back and forth, as a kind of call and response.

And in November, they published their first series of co-written poems, in a chapbook called “Begotten,” which was published by Upper Rubber books. These poems explore with tenderness and anxiety the joys and perils of being a father — especially a black father — and how to escape the mistakes of past generations.

“We like to say that we kind of beg, borrow and steal,” said Brown. “We beg one another to become better fathers, through the work and our conversations. We borrow from the things we are reading, and other people who are working with the same themes. And we steal from one another.”

Davis, who is 33 and has a five-year-old son, said that as a younger father he has often looked to Brown, who is 44 and has two teenaged children, a son and daughter, for answers. “I felt blessed to have this chance to cultivate questions about doubts, worries, and wonders about what it means to be a father,” said Davis, both in conversations with Brown, and in their resulting poetry.

In “Begotten,” many of the poems look forward, to convey advice to a son, or explore how a father can best help a child navigate racism or understand sexuality. Others look backwards, to their own fathers and the fears they have of inheriting the violence that came before. A number of the poems do both.

“In that first conversation we had, we talked about the expectation of what the black father is supposed to do or has not done,” said Brown. “And I think we work against that. People always ask about the vulnerability in our poems, because that is something not readily shown in African American fathers. That, and the love we have offer.”

Both love and vulnerability are present in the poem “What I Mean When I Say Harmony,” though toughness also makes an appearance. Its first line is: “dear boy be the muscle: / make music to the bone.” Centering around touch and violence, the poem is addressed in parts to both a father and a son.

In the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem, there is the echo of a worried parent: “If I ever / catch you confusing / a pulse for a path or a bridge / to beat loneliness you blood / will be the object of discussion.” This line, Davis said, came from the memory of his mother telling him not to engage in the same violence his father did.

The larger poem is about passing a similar message on to his son. “It’s about needing to push my son not to be afraid of contact, but also to understand the risks that are involved,” said Davis.

“It’s that fear doesn’t have to be met with the same violence,” echoed Brown.

Read that poem, and listen to Brown and Davis read it aloud, below.

F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis. Credit: Danielle Mitchell

What I Mean When I Say Harmony

by Geffrey Davis & F. Douglas Brown

1.
dear boy be the muscle:
make music to the bone—risk

that mercurial measure
of contact there are those

who touch a body and leave it
graceful be that kind

of wonder —and if I ever
catch you confusing

a pulse for a path or a bridge
to beat loneliness your blood

will be the object of discussion
I will ask to see it back

if only to know the shared sinew
if only to relight your blessing

if only to rekindle the song
carried in your hands

2. The Remix
ode to the boy in me singing at the table so rude
but the hum-a-long mingles with your husky laughter

ode to the father in you wringing something out of nothing
ode to [dutiful] stitched into your fingers and not:—[obligatory drudgery]

and yes ode to the ghosts now roving your cupboards and bed
ode to your lingering music a mixtape of meals and memory

ode to what you still offer I suckle it down throughout the night
taste everything passed between your fingers

3. Side B
dear boy aint nothing
not about bodies

we have more than one
sun more than one way

to gasp inside the heat
and arms of praise

worship the warmth
of each loaded light let your body

grow fragile an offertory —sweet—
lick bite know the knot

of your desire hold it
in your mouth let it live

let it split do not leave this earth
without tasting what passes

between fingers son
always go deep find the seed

in each fruit’s buried longing
if it is yours sing it mine

The “Begotten” chapbook appears in the third volume of the Floodgate Poetry Series, an annual series of books by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. Davis’ honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His poems are forthcoming or have been published by The Academy of American Poets, Crazyhorse, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New South, The New York Times Magazine, Nimrod International Journal, and Ploughshares, among other places. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas.

F. Douglas Brown is the author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia 2014), the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize recipient selected by Tracy K. Smith. Brown is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), The Southern Humanities Review, The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine. With Cheyanne Sauter, Executive Director of Art Share L.A., he co-founded Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly poetry reading series examining social justice issues, and ways to address police brutality in particular. Brown, an educator for over 20 years, teaches English at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school.

The post Two fathers use poems to teach their kids about growing up black in America appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The 2015 ‘Poetic Address to the Nation.’ Credit: The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture

A week after President Donald Trump took office, hundreds of people gathered in their homes, schools and places across the country to share stories about how they saw the state of the nation.

“Very sad,” some said. “Becoming aware.” “We can get along.”

The story circles were organized by the U.S. Department of Art and Culture, which is not actually a government agency, but a grassroots group of artists and activists whose mission is to fill program gaps they feel the government is missing. The annual story event predates Trump. It began in 2015, as a way of responding to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address with stories of how ordinary people felt about the state of the country. That year, race dominated the conversation as the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. This year, Adam Horowitz, who calls himself the department’s “chief instigator,” said the recurring theme was “belonging and disbelonging.”

“The question of belonging hit me very hard today,” began one story from “Shelle” in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who said her children were biracial. “My seventeen-year-old son got up after a long night of election results … and he says to all of us …‘Let’s all share our biggest fears this morning after this election!’ He says he’ll go first. ‘I’m most afraid of national Stop and Frisk,’ [he said]. No one said anything for a full minute – what could we say?”

Another story, from “Hakim,” also in New Mexico, began differently: “On belonging … I’m a black male in NM. As of 2010 Census NM had a 2 percent black population. And I feel like I belong here.”

While many of this year’s stories seem critical of President Trump and the country’s general political climate, Horowitz said they also reflected different perspectives. “When we got notes back, we heard from a number of people that this was the first time they had a bipartisan conversation that they didn’t think would be possible,” he said.

As Trump prepares to deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, a group of poets are turning these varied stories into songs, sonnets and poems. That work will be read in a “Poetic Address to the Nation” on March 11 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. It will also streamed online.

Among the participating poets are Chinaka Hodge, whose withering poem “What will you tell your daughters about 2016?” was an October Ted Talk, Luis Javier Rodriguez, a Chicano poet who previously served as the Los Angeles Poet Laureate, and Bob Holman, a spoken word poet who has promoted poetry so thoroughly throughout his career that public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. once described him as having done “more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti.”

Holman said to him, a poet is a “civic worker” — and long has been. He cites the passing of the 1973 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which put unemployed workers — many of them artists — to work in public service. Holman was one of those artists. “It was there that I discovered that at every community site that I worked for, whether it was a veterans’ center, nonprofit, or senior center, there was a use for poetry,” he said.

And he believes that using everyday people’s stories to create a “Poetic Address to the Nation” is a natural extension of that idea. “This [event] wants to be the pure poetry of the people, from the grassroots up,” he said, instead of being “words being delivered on high,” as in a president’s State of the Union or address to a joint session of Congress.

“It’s time to listen to what the people are saying,” he said.

Holman is writing two poems for the event. He will deliver both in his trademark spoken word style, which he helped bring to the masses through the Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Cafe and St. Mark’s Poetry Project, all in New York City.

One of his poems is a sonnet written from the stories told in the story circles, while the second, “FREEDOM,” is a poem based on his own feelings about the election.

That poem’s first line: “FREEDOM to put lima beans and black-eyed peas together,” reveals the humor, imagination and metaphor with which Holman often writes. Its second line: “FREEDOM to take off BB King’s watch,” is a reference to the way the legendary blues musician used to play: When King looked at his watch, said Holman, who is a big fan of King’s, it meant he’d only play for 45 minutes; if he didn’t, he could go on for hours.

“When you really think of what freedom means, it is to be able to enjoy life without an arbitrary time system to tell you it’s time to wake up in the morning, or that it’s time for your brilliant [Fender] Stratocaster blues to be finished, because you’ve got to make an appointment some place,” Holman said. “It’s this kind of thinking that can lift you.”

Read “FREEDOM,” or listen to Holman read it, below:

Bob Holman. Credit: Language Matters with Bob Holman, PBS, a David Grubin Production

FREEDOM
Thanks to Darryl Alladice

FREEDOM to put lima beans and black-eyed peas together
FREEDOM to take off BB King’s watch
FREEDOM to shout “Let’s hit it” on every Other beat
FREEDOM to look at everybody whenever you want with a nod and a tie-yr-shoes
FREEDOM to not shut up, Ever
FREEDOM of press-ure points
FREEDOM of speech-ifyng poetics tralalalalalolotratralalalala
FREEDOM of lemonade
FREEDOM to remember what you are doing in Montana
FREEDOM to adjust the height of the floor
FREEDOM to eat an all-poetry diet
FREEDOM to not write the poem, write the Other poem
FREEDOM to the second guy from the left
FREEDOM of the f-bomb when appropriate and when inappropriate, well,
that’s up to you
FREEDOM for a march to be omnidirectional and you might not even be able to move
FREEDOM to turn off reality, and it ain’t on TV, bud
FREEDOM of Neanderthal, we all are
FREEDOM of rulers to measure backwards
FREEDOM of antique roadshow blowback
FREEDOM to sneeze with no “bless you”’s
FREEDOM to scratch somebody else’s itch
FREEDOM to go home again, again
FREEDOM to land a helicopter in the yard at Angola Prison and just see what happens
FREEDOM to knit some pink pussy ears on Trump Tower (with a mighty roar)
FREEDOM to love everybody’s body simultaneously
FREEDOM for the Freedom Riders to finally be able to get off the damn bus
FREEDOM to shout stop at the top of your lungs in the stock market: “STOP!”
FREEDOM to take a cellphone to court
FREEDOM to get back on the horse, knowing you are also the horse
FREEDOM of Omnis Animus Unam: All One Animal
FREEDOM of thoughtless behavior to reanimate itself as a suspension bridge leading to
a new consciousness that continues to invent itself until everyone crosses
over and no tolls either

Bob Holman is the Minister of Poetry and Endangered Language Protection at the United States Department of Arts and Culture (not a government agency! but should be a cabinet position). He became a public poet in 1977 when he was employed by the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) Artists Project, the largest federally-funded artists’ job program since the WPA. Since then, he has published sixteen books, co-created “The United States of Poetry” and “Language Matters” for PBS, taught at NYU, Columbia and Princeton, and founded the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC.

The post As Trump addresses Congress, poets pen a people’s view appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Gwendolyn Brooks, at 32 years old, pictured after winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Annie Allen,” a ballad of Chicago Negro life. Credit: Bettman / Contributor

When asked about her work, poet Gwendolyn Brooks once said: “I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street … There was my material.”

What she saw and heard, as a black woman living on Chicago’s South Side in the mid-20th century, were the myriad struggles — and joys — of urban black life, which she explored in more than 20 books of poetry, a novella, autobiography and other works.

It has been 100 years since Brooks was born, and events are planned this year across Illinois and Chicago to celebrate the centenary. Though she died in 2000, she remains one of the 20th century’s most-read and honored poets, both for how deftly she put forward the issues of the day and for the grace of her craft and style. She was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the first to hold the role of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate. In that role, and as a teacher, she worked to educate a generation of young black writers.

And yet, in 2017, some worry that Brooks is in danger of being set aside. “The Golden Shovel Anthology,” a new book of poems honoring Brooks, seeks to make sure that doesn’t happen. In the book’s foreword, poet Terrance Hayes writes: “I have been, since her passing, returning to her work again and again with the feeling not enough of it has been made of it or her … Perhaps we can never say enough.”

The Golden Shovel Anthology. Credit: The University of Arkansas Press

The poems of this anthology do not pay homage to Brooks in a traditional way. Instead, they seek to carry on her words through an entirely new literary form, called the “Golden Shovel.” In a Golden Shovel poem, a poet takes a line or lines from a Brooks poem, and then uses each word from those lines, in order, as the end words of their new poem. Hayes invented the form in his 2010 poem called “The Golden Shovel,” which used the lines of Brooks’ well-known poem “We Real Cool,” as the ending words in his.

More than 300 poets and writers try their hand at the form in this anthology, ranging from former U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove and Billy Collins, to writer-turned actor/comedian Langston Kerman — who stars in the HBO show “Insecure”– to a number of high school students. The “shovels,” as they’re called, take inspiration from dozens of Brooks’ poems, including “The Lovers of the Poor,” a social commentary about rich charity workers, and “The Anniad,” which was inspired by the epic poem the “Aeneid.”

Peter Kahn, who co-edited the anthology with poets Ravi Shankar and Patricia Smith, said the project began after he first read Hayes’ “Golden Shovel” poem and noticed the “odd enjambment” — where a sentence or phrase in a poem runs over from one line to the next.

“And then the lightbulb came on, and I said, ‘I see what he’s doing here,’” Kahn said. Not long after, he approached Hayes about the idea of asking other writers to play with his new form. Sure, Hayes told him, so long as it is in honor of Brooks.

Like Brooks, Kahn teaches in Chicago. He said he often asks his high school students to underline their favorite “striking line” in a novel, as a way of focusing their attention and getting them excited about the work. The Golden Shovel form, he said, seeks to do the same thing. “In a Brooks’ poem, the striking lines tend to be more often borrowed.” The Brooks poem “a song in the front yard” alone inspired 12 shovels in this anthology.

Among the most striking of the Golden Shovel poems was written by Patricia Smith, the anthology’s co-editor and a much-revered poet and spoken word performer. For her shovel, Smith chose to borrow lines from the Brooks poem “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” — Till being the 14-year-old black boy who was lynched in the 1950s for supposedly flirting with a white woman. A recent book revealed the most sensational parts of the testimony against Till were not true.

Brooks’ short and unnerving poem focuses not on Till, however, but on the grief of his mother, who famously decided to have an open casket funeral “so all the world can see what they did to my boy.”

Smith’s shovel poem, which is called “Black, Poured Directly into the Wound,” also focuses on the sorrow of Mamie Till. “Grief’s damnable tint / is everywhere,” Smith writes, and “The absence of a black / roomful of boy is measured, again, again.”

Kahn said as a teacher in Chicago, he thinks Smith’s poem “is unfortunately so relevant to what’s happening” in the city, where last year there were 4,368 shooting victims. That violence, which disproportionately affects the black community, continues to plague Chicago.

“As I read [Smith’s poem], I thought of a former student of mine shot in a drive-by shooting,” Kahn said. “I thought of going to her funeral, and talking to her mom, and seeing how utterly devastated she was. And how utterly devastated Mamie Till must have been.”

Another shovel in the anthology uses the same Brooks poem to write about the death of Chicago teenager Hadiya Pendleton, who in 2013 was mistakenly shot and killed by two gang members just after her final exams concluded. “Hadiya’s mother has someone else’s eyes,” the poem by Christian Campbell, a Caribbean poet, begins. It ends with “the room of eyes, in black and white, forever unsaying sorry.”

Below, read both Smith’s and Campbell’s shovel poems. Read Brooks’ original here.

A section of ‘The Wall of Respect’ mural celebrating black literary figures, including (left to right): W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin, Lerone Bennett, LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, and John Killen, on Chicago’s South Side, 1967. Photo by Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

Black, Poured Directly into the Wound

by Patricia Smith

Prairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett’s
red yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother.
A pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is
(through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a
grays and shadows child. Listen. Once she was pretty.
Windy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced,
in every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing
chaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of the
sorries, the Lawd have mercies. Grief’s damnable tint
is everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of.
She is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled
and caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy.
Boys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she
killed them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits,
her chair carefully balanced on hell’s edge, and pays for sanity in
kisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A,
she recites (angry, away, awful) the alphabet of a world gone red.
Coffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room,
black garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking,
drinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black
roomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee,
red-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says She
a mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama. Kisses
in multitudes rain from their dusty Baptist mouths, drowning her.
Sit still, she thinks, til they remember how your boy was killed.
She remembers. Gush and implosion, crushed, slippery, not a boy.
Taffeta and hymnals all these women know, not a son lost and
pulled from the wretched and rumbling Tallahatchie. Mamie, she
of the hollowed womb, is nobody’s mama anymore. She is
tinted echo, barren. Everything about her makes the sound sorry.
The white man hands on her child, dangled eye, twanging chaos,
things that she leans on, the only doors that open to let her in.
Faced with days and days of no him, she lets Chicago—windy,
pretty in the ways of the North—console her with its boorish grays.
A hug, more mourners and platters of fat meat. Will she make it through?
Is this how the face slap of sorrow changes the shape of a
mother? All the boys she sees now are laughing, drenched in red.
Emmett, in dreams, sings I am gold. He tells how dry it is, the prairie.

After the Burial: A Stanza

by Christian Campbell

Hadiya’s mother has someone else’s eyes. She
fades behind the black glass, she kisses    
the wind. The dark room of her
eyes is always damp — there the kids killed
time — the shoes, the majorette uniform, the boy-
friend letters, the carpet, the bed, and
the blank dolls. The other mothers sit where she
sits, singing their silence of the way it is,
the room of eyes, in black and white, forever unsaying sorry.

Patricia Smith is the author of seven books of poetry, including “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,” winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and “Blood Dazzler,” a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2014 Guggenheim fellow, she is widely published and teaches for the City University of New York.

Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian-Bahamian poet, scholar and cultural critic. His acclaimed first book, “Running the Dusk” (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection, among other awards.

The post How Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is connecting Emmett Till with the violence in Chicago today appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Emily Dickinson is back. Perhaps she never really went away. But in recent months, she has begun popping up in film, books, online and in a major museum exhibition.

“A Quiet Passion,” a film about the poet’s life starring Cynthia Nixon, is due out in April. Amherst College, Harvard University and the Boston Public Library have digitized a collection of her original manuscripts. And a new exhibition on Dickinson — called “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” — opened in January at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

NewsHour Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown visited the museum, where visitors can listen to Dickinson’s poems, view the only known painting of the reclusive poet and even see a lock of her hair.

While there, Brown also interviewed leading contemporary poet and Dickinson scholar Susan Howe, who read for him “There’s a certain Slant of light” — one of Dickinson’s most-beloved poems.

When asked to unpack the poem line by line, here’s what Howe had to say:

It seems to me to be the essential New England landscape poem of winter … It’s both a landscape, but also a profoundly metaphysical statement.

When the dead, when the soul leaves the body, there’s this extraordinary distance. If you have seen a dead body, it’s true. The distance — it’s an impossible distance between the soul and the body, between life or death. But that she would say ‘a certain slant of light,’ that is so perfect.

[Like] late four in the afternoon, when the light is so intense and there’s that word — ‘slant’ — it’s the perfect word. And then, she [writes]  that it ‘oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.’ Well, she’s not living in a cathedral. America’s not a place, or certainly not New England, of cathedrals. There are churches, but [she used] the syllabic ‘cathedral’ and then, ‘the heft.’ What an odd word to use: ‘heft.’

That is so Noah Webster, because Noah Webster is a Calvinist dictionary. The Webster Dictionary before the Civil War is Calvinist and Dickinson uses her dictionary. If you’re really reading Dickinson, you need to go to Webster and see how he defines the word ‘heft’ — not the Oxford. And then the ‘H’s’: ‘heavenly,’ ‘hurt,’ it does give us heavenly hurt. It gives a kind of hurt in the soul.

‘We can find no scar,’ — where that word ‘scar’ speaks to ‘slant’ — but ‘internal difference where the meanings are,’ that is just so fabulous. Because you know the way you feel when you sit in the late afternoon light? It’s so lonely, it’s like it’s just internal. It’s a difference in what the actual meanings that we don’t talk about — but feel — are.

And ‘the seal despair’ that she [writes], ‘an imperial affliction.’ We’re back with ‘cathedrals’ and ‘imperial.’ Imperial in America — imperial affliction. The L’s, the syllables, it’s just brilliant word use in such brevity.

Howe’s comments have been edited lightly for clarity.

In the video below, Brown takes us inside the Morgan Library and Museum’s new Dickinson exhibit:

The post Watch poet Susan Howe read this Dickinson poem on life and death appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, Derek Walcott at home in Saint Lucia. Photo by Micheline Pelletier/Corbis via Getty Images

Since Nobel laureate and Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott died Friday, remembrances have flooded in for the complicated but mighty writer, who captured the lush beauty of the Caribbean and the brutality of its colonial history.

We’ve collected several of these tributes, from a Caribbean street photographer, poets and other writers. Many pointed to the importance of one Walcott poem, “The Sea is History,” which argues that the history of the Caribbean cannot be stolen, because it is in the sea. The landscape was often at the center of Walcott’s work.

Read those remembrances — along with “The Sea is History”– below. These comments have been edited lightly for length and clarity.

From Ruddy Roye, a Jamaican street photographer whose work often focuses on the lives of the forgotten — the “raw and gritty lives,” he says — especially those of home:

I believe when Caribbean people talk about Walcott, we talk about him under the stars after a night at the club. We sit on our cars or against the nightclub walls reminiscing about how we felt in literature class after reading one of his poems.

We would talk about being imbued with an identity solely scraped up out of the ashes of mediocre lives. In his poetry, his grandiose sentences, Walcott was able to unlock feelings of shame that we felt about being descendants of slaves. His writings were able to inspire the best in many, especially his fellow artists who reached for the spaces to sculpt our own personalities. Caribbean people enjoy feeling like they are from the Caribbean. And Walcott’s poetry made us feel like we belonged — that we were not shaped by the hands of our colonizers but architects of our own stories.

My favorite poem by him is “A Far Cry From Africa.” The culture that Derek Walcott helped to foster in the Caribbean (one of pride, rooted in the voices of our ancestors) is something that continues to inform my photography. I look at how black images have been defined in the past and hope that my work continues to redefine how we, the “other” here and around the globe, see black folks.

From Patrick Sylvain, a Haitian-American poet, essayist and instructor of Haitian Language and Culture at Brown University, who also writes about landscape, as in this poem on Port-Au Prince:

When I met Derek Walcott in the fall of 1989, I had no idea that I was in the presence of a Herculean poet. I was young and relatively unfamiliar with the Caribbean-Anglophone poets. I was with a member of the Dark Room Collective when we went to pick Walcott up from his Boston apartment, and I remember as soon as I entered I was in awe of his books and paintings. The vibrant colors, and the vivid details; such beauty, I thought. I wanted to ask him innumerable questions about St.Lucia, Trinidad, and his paintings, but I was timid, and his piercing gaze reminded me of my grandfather. I remained silent until he said to me: “Ou ka pale patois (Can you speak patois)?” His question puzzled me because I spoke Haitian Creole and not patois. I thought about it for a quick second and answered in the affirmative. He smiled at me and handed me one of his books, “mwen sav ou pa posede liv sa a (I know you do not have this book)!” The autographed book he gave me was “The Arkansas Testament,” the first book of his that I read and fell in love with. I’m thinking of the poem “Saint Lucia’s First Communion” in which the condition of children on the island exposes the ongoing dilemma of being a former colonial subject shackled by rituals and poverty.

That Sunday, after Derek Walcott read his poems to us, I began to realize his grandeur as a poet. I purchased “Midsummer” from him. I was utterly excited by the prospect of entering the Caribbean landscape through the sensibility of a methodical and lyrical poet.

And after our first encounter, we frequently ran into each other at restaurants, his readings, the theater, with friends. We often discussed politics and literature. Despite the controversies that often surrounded him, I knew him as a beautiful, kind, reservedly funny soul, and also as someone who cared deeply about the Caribbean. Just as Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney and Martín Espada have been influential in my work, Derek Walcott has encouraged me to embrace my hybridized, trans-national Caribbean self and to understand that aesthetic has no geographical boundary. And through Derek Walcott’s poetry, I am forever reminded that “The Sea Is History.”

Derek Walcott poses during a portrait session held on May 30, 1993 in Saint Malo, France. Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

From Ishion Hutchinson, a Jamaican poet and essayist, who also examines the Caribbean’s colonial history:

Derek’s works proves and sustains what Hemingway — an author he revered — calls “grace under pressure,” which I take to mean a duty to poetry, a faith in its craft without compromise in spite of failure or success. I am in awe of that devotion, an awe I guard jealously because I am from his world, the Caribbean — though there are marked differences in our experience of it — which he celebrates and holds accountable. I try to avoid telling anecdotes of my encounters with him because they all mean something deeply personal to me. Every single, average moment was magical and I feel talking about it reduces what I cherish and cannot voice about his presence.

But this one I will share, about visiting him one autumn 10 years ago at Boston University, where he was teaching a playwriting class. After the session, he took the students to a Chinese restaurant, and during the walk there he and I sort of tagged along in the back. Even then I was thinking of the strangeness of walking with him, us in winter coats, leaves swirling about; the scene was like from a film. Not a lot was said, and most of it repeated questions. “You really like George Barker?” he asked me a few times, and my answer was the same yes with different words. But when I told him the Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell had died, he stopped in the leaves on the pavement and looked at me for a very long time. I wish now I could remember precisely what he said after the long silent stare, but it amounted to “he was a good man and a good artist.” We then walked on to the restaurant.

From Kwame Dawes, a poet, editor and essayist who was born in Ghana, but spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. Reggae music in particular has influenced his work:

I think I came across Walcott’s work for the first time in the 1970s, while I was in high school in Jamaica. By the time I got to university, Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite were the two major Caribbean poets. There was a tremendous amount of intellectual discussion, like there is with Michael Jackson and Prince, asking: Who is greatest? These were the lines of ideological discourse, which was a lot of nonsense because they were coming from similar grounds. I felt my experience with reading Walcott was that I struggled to understand everything he was writing, but I went back to it because of its sinuous metaphor and the intensity of language. Brathwaite was more immediately accessible, while Walcott had this ambition in writing the landscape of the Caribbean.

I met Walcott probably in the 1990s, and I’ve met him and interviewed him on stage on several occasions. He’s known for being a bit of a curmudgeon in talking about work, but my experience is that I found him generous and thoughtful. In my work I’m often both quarreling with him and being guided by him, and I think he appreciated that — the conflicted sense of that.

I think the poem “Sea of History” is a stunning poem and it’s so iconic. He introduces the idea of the Caribbean and creates this incredible conversation around the Caribbean person being told they have no history, or that they are deprived of a sense of history. But he says our history is in the sea. That’s where our cathedrals, our tombs are. Its Walcott facing tradition, and ruins and landscape, and saying: I still have a place in that landscape. It’s saying art that comes out of the Caribbean, comes out of the landscape. He says that we can write all we want but it’s irrelevant, because the landscape is the poem. It’s a clear political statement being made. And in the poem we see his wonderful rhetorical skills and exploration of place and identity.

Below, read “The Sea is History,” and poems Dawes and Roye wrote after Walcott’s death:

Derek Walcott, a Boston University English professor, sits in his home office in Brookline, MA after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 08 October, 1992. Walcott, who was born in the West Indies, taught literature and creative writing. Photo by BROOKS KRAFT/AFP/Getty Images

THE SEA IS HISTORY

By Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans
to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles
pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:
Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river’s drying lip,
the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges’ choirs,
and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping
to the waves’ progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea’s lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,
that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,
then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges
examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

“The Sea Is History” from THE POETRY OF DEREK WALCOTT 1948-2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott.
Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Faber & Faber.

FOR DEREK WALCOTT
1930-2017

“…For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.” Paul (2Cor.1:20)

By Kwame Dawes

In the black box, the lights isolate emotion
with theatrical efficiency—every gesture is art,
as if in the clean, rehearsed moments, the word
as the beginning of all things, and glorious yes
of possibility, must be followed by the congregants
saying Amen—this is the holy theatre, a world
I have come to think of as a home place, a shelter,
the womb of my art. So there in that black box
deep inside a winter storm in Providence, they
tell me the old man has slipped into his first sleep,
and his editor calls each day to listen to the soft
ebb and flow of the sea in his breathing. No one
wants to say “all is silence now”, but we do know
that after the poem is over, what remains is a soft
pulse of the sea where we the Makaks of history
find our cathedrals, our history, our glorious tomb.
I did not expect the thickening pain in my throat,
as if I could fall down and weep—I did not expect
the moment to be like this, but it was and here
is the beginning of our lamentation. For weeks
I have carried in my head the calculation of greatness—
how ambitious was the madman Lowell, how
full of the privilege of his New England elitism,
how it is that every time I think of the Boston police
coming to secure him and carry him to another dark
asylum, I can only think that I envy him the dignity
they afforded him; and I think that the St. Lucian
would have known that five white Boston cops
would not sit at his breakfast table while he shivered
and ranted and read for them “The Sea is History”,
before deporting him to the asylum of fire and healing.
This is the way history arrests ambition. We migrants stay
sane so that we can live to go mad in our secret chambers.
But the old man has slipped into his first sleep and at last
all his promises of last poems, last words, last
testaments, seem fulfilled. This is not yet an elegy, merely
an effort to clear the glue in my throat, and a way
of saying that his art comes to me burnished with
so many grand yeses; and on this morning of grey
chill, I have learned to pray for language, just enough
to offer a word of company for the old man. The word
is waves—not original, surely, but I offer it—the sea,
the soft waves reaching the coast, the pulling back,
the soft snore of a man waiting to leave the shore at last.

Kwame Dawes
Lincoln, Nebraska
March 16th, 2017

UNTITLED

By Ruddy Roye

The time has come
when,
words no longer respond to the pen,
when,
age is neither shadow
nor fear,
or a new smell,
or the melted smiles that flows out as tears.
At that moment,
when life stops,
when the everlasting sound
that leaves our lips,
is the echo of the “tock”
and the grey hovering realization
that this face
will no longer stare back
is the tick
trying to unhitch its fangs
from the neck and names
of this world,
we stare back at the face
of the broken clock.
to wade across the river
bearing nothing
with only our tired feet
to take us around the dreamy bend,
at the end,
there is no light that shines
through,
only our rattling voices
echoing in our throats
before losing its roots.

The post Caribbean artists remember poet Derek Walcott appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

World Map, 1960, pictured in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

The Map
By Marie Howe

The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.
The girl was going over her global studies homework
in the air where she drew the map with her finger

touching the Gobi desert,
the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,

and looking through her transparent map backwards
I did suddenly see,
how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.

It could be a contemporary encounter between any woman and her child: the girl studying a map for homework, her mother seeing something larger. Seeing, perhaps, how differently the left and right see the world, and how many problems that can engender.

Marie Howe. Photo by Claire Holt

But “The Map” isn’t written from the perspective of just any woman, but that of Mary Magdalene, the biblical figure known as both a devoted follower of Jesus, and, according to the Western Christian tradition, a repentant immoral woman, or prostitute.

“Magdalene,” a new book of poems from former New York Poet Laureate Marie Howe, who was raised Catholic, seeks to reenvision Mary Magdalene for the modern age — and tackles some of our modern-day problems in the process.

In the poem “The Map,” Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a contemplative mother, in stark contrast to how she has often been seen throughout history.

“Mary Magdalene is a woman who has been largely defined by the church fathers… as a repentant sinner, and it was assumed those sins were sexual,” said Howe. “And so I’m very interested in healing the split between the sacred and the sexual. Between Mary and Magdalene. The mother and the whore.”

In another poem called “Magdalene — The Seven Devils,” Howe imagines the seven devils that were said to have been cast out of Mary Magdalene, as told in the Gospel of Luke. In Howe’s portrait, the sins that bedevil Mary Magdalene include worry, envy and being too busy.

These are concerns, Howe said, that existed for women in biblical times — and that exist for women today. Being busy, she said, “is the devil of post-modern life… I see Mary Magdalene as being a woman who has lived throughout time and is here now.”

Just as many women today sit down to practice meditation or to pray, she said, Mary Magdalene sought meaning and understanding by following Jesus as teacher. “She wanted to find metaphysical meaning,” Howe said.

Another way of counteracting those devils in the modern era? Reading poetry, Howe said, because of how it forces the reader to return to their senses.

“[In the modern era], it’s so hard to be in the present, it’s almost unbearable,” Howe said. “But when we read a poem we come back into our body, come back into time, and forget ourselves, enough to recover ourselves.”

Listen to Howe read “The Map” below.

Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry, “Magdalene: Poems”; “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”; “The Good Thief”; and “What the Living Do.” She is the co-editor of a book of essays, “In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.” Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships and was selected by poet Stanley Kunitz for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

The post This poetry uses Mary Magdalene to explore troubles that bedevil modern life appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Pao Ge Vang, age 5 looks out of the school bus on his way home after his second day in kindergarten 4 in Fresno, California, after arriving in U.S. from Thailand with his family as part of a U.S. government resettlement program. Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

By the measure of a year, Mai Der Vang was not born in a refugee camp, as her sister was. But she’s always felt pulled between different worlds. In 1981, when Vang was born in Fresno, California, her parents had only recently arrived in the U.S. from Laos, by way of Thailand, where they had lived in Hmong refugee camps for half a decade. In the states, they did not often talk to their daughter about what life was like before America.

But Vang was curious about the history of her family and of the Hmong people, an ethnic group that has existed for centuries without a formal homeland, though they have lived most often in southeast Asia. Scholars believe the Hmong fled persecution in China thousands of years ago, and migrated to Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar. More recently, after the U.S. recruited Hmong fighters from Laos in the 1960s and 70s to assist in a so-called Secret War against communism, thousands of Hmong were forced to flee persecution in Laos as well. Today, some 250,000 Hmong refugees live in the U.S.

Mai Der Vang. Photo by Ze Moua, courtesy of Graywolf Press

“The Hmong people will sort of be perpetually lost without that sense of a homeland, because we don’t have a way to go back,” Vang said. And so, through her just-released books of poems, “Afterland,” she sought to explore the identity of a people who are always in exile. Many of the elders she knows still talk of returning to Laos, she said, though they know it is not possible.

In some of the poems in “Afterland,” Vang investigates what happened before the Hmong migrated from Laos: the Secret War, reports of yellow rain, the many people that died in combat. But her poetry is just as interested in what came after.

“I started meditation and writing on how often, when we go through something, we end up somewhere different after, a kind of ‘afterland’” she said. “The reality is that oftentimes it’s a place that can be scary… whether it’s the afterland of the refugee, or the afterland of the spirit.”

In the poem “Calling the Lost,” Vang explores the Hmong belief that a person’s spirit disappears when they lose their grounding, and how a Hmong shaman works to heal that. But the poem also unpacks larger questions about the story of the Hmong in exile.

It asks: “Which shaman in this world is going to bring us back to our old world?” Vang said. It is, perhaps, a question without an easy answer.

Below, read “Calling the Lost” or listen to Vang read it aloud.

Calling the Lost
By Mai Der Vang

Hmong people say one’s spirit can run off,
Go into hiding underground.

Only the physical stays behind.

To heal, a shaman checks on the spirit
By scraping the earth,
Examining the dirt.

If an ant emerges,
He takes it inside,

Careful not to crush the ant with his hold
Nor flutter its being into shock
With one exhale.

Sometimes we hide in ants, he says.

He will call for what left
to come back,

and for the found,
to never leave.

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Mai Der Vang is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle and coeditor of “How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology.” Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post.

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