Poetry in an April crueler than most
Cruelly, it’s still April, and that means it’s still National Poetry Month, and writers and readers can still gather untogether to celebrate all words unprose.
Because of the crazy present danger that is other people — rather than hell, they just represent death, or at least hard time on the respirator — the coolest annual Southern California celebration, the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, had to be canceled last week.
Those of us involved with the prizes, under the sage guidance of Claremont Graduate University Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities Lori Anne Ferrell, were to have gathered for dinner with the winning poets Wednesday night at the CGU President’s House, and then to have cheered them on at a gala reading at the Huntington Library Thursday night.
Didn’t happen.
May happen in that fabled autumn, when every good thing in our lives has been postponed to, if the fall season of gathering in public again ever really comes to pass.
The Tufts awards are the best ones in American poetry. Along with all the fine conviviality and heavy drinking that comes with toasting the best in literature at feasts and readings, the Kate prize brings with it $10,000 to a young poet who has published a first book, and the Kingsley a cool $100,000 to a mid-career poet hitting her stride.
As I have noted in past years in this space, those are not the kinds of clams ordinarily associated with the poetry dodge. You have never been on a happier conference call in your life than the one in which we annually call the winners to share the news and toast them with Champagne. Shrieks of joy, tears and announcements that she is currently jumping up and down on her bed is the usual response.
Since we couldn’t be with them this month — since we can’t be with anyone but the usual suspects this month — I thought I’d share some of the verse from the winners rather than rant about politics in the pandemic. We can all use a break from that.
Tiana Clark is the winner of this year’s Kate for “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood” (University of Pittsburgh Press). From her poem “My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship to Work”: “I start with a napkin, receipt, or my hand. / I muscle memory. I stutter the page. I fail. / Hit delete — scratch out one more line. I sonnet, / then break form. I make tea, use two bags. / Rooibos again. I bathe now. Epsom salt. / No books or phone. Just water & the sound / of water filling, glory — be my buoyant body, bowl of me.”
Ariana Reines won the Kingsley for her book “Sand.” She’s a rock star of a poet, and on the back of her beautiful hardbound volume from Tin House the blurb is not from some pedant but from a rock star: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. From her poem “A Partial History”: “And sports by that time was the only metaphor / Left that could acceptably be applied to anything. / The images gave us no rest yet failed over / And over despite the immensity / Of their realism to describe the world as we really / Knew it, and worse, as it knew us.”
Most people, even many avid readers, never read poetry. There is no point in hand-wringing about that. Much of it could never be understood without deep study, and some of it without being a poet yourself. But precisely the same is true of physics, and you never hear anyone complaining about physics. Well, not much.
Yet in difficult times people still turn to poetry: art of our inner voices. A haiku came to me the other day, and I scrawled it on the chalk board in our garden: “Spring flies on like this / Too much longer and we’re sunk / I’ll go out on limbs.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.