Former Iowa poet laureate Robert Dana died this weekend. The 80-year-old Dana had been battling pancreatic cancer. Still, he was writing up until the end. His most recent book, The Other, came out in 2009, and despite dealing with writer's block after its release, he was still working.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dana at his Coralville home in early 2009 for an article about the release of that book. As I wrote, you can stand at the back window of Dana's home, look into the ravine that serves as his backyard, and see the subject matter of many of his poems.

“People are surprised — it’s all right there,” Dana told me. “The longer you live in a place, the more it feeds you. The more it shows you what’s there.”

He knew Iowa, and documented it as well as any other poet, of his generation or any other. His contributions to poetry, and to the state, were invaluable. He taught at Cornell College in Mount Vernon for 40 years, and resurrected the North American Review literary journal.

Thanks to his generosity, I have gathered a small library of his work, and enjoyed watching as he evolved late in life from formal verse to freer, more playful (and, frankly, incisive) forms. The next I'll acquire is New & Selected Poems: 1955 to 2010 from Anhinga Press. It's about time Dana's work has been collected, and it will serve as a fitting tribute to a poet who never stopped reaching.

“I don’t want to be a poet who repeats himself. It’s another reason I keep moving on, lighting out for the territory,” he said last year. “What do you do when you run out of territory?”

Labels: books, poetry

One of the benefits of living in Iowa City is that you get to hear a lot of your favorite authors read and discuss their work. Such was the case last night and today as I heard my favorite poet, Mark Strand, read from his work and then sit for an intimate Q&A about writing.

Strand is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, so he visits from time to time. It has been several years, however, since his last visit (in support of Blizzard of One, if I recall), so it was good to see him again.

The former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner began with a poem he wrote while a UI student in the early 1960s, "Sleeping with One Eye Open." From there, he jumped around, concentrating mainly on his most recent collection, Man and Camel. He pulled out a few older gems, such as "The Story of Our Lives" from the collection of the same name, and "Two De Chiricos: 1. The Philosopher's Conquest and 2. The Disquieting Muses" from Blizzard of One.

He was witty as always. After reading a handful of poems, he said he wished he had more to say about them, such as that they were true and autobiographical. They are not, he added, before saying that some were true, but were not autobiographical. He then read, "I Had Been a Polar Explorer" from Man and Camel. "I don't want to give you the wrong idea," he said. He obviously had never been a polar explorer, but rather read the title line in something by Kafka followed by ellipses, something that begged for completion, he said.

Discussing the poems about De Chirico's work, he said "The Disquieting Muses" was the better poem because it was the better of the two paintings.

He read two new poems, one, "Black Fly," so new that he hadn't settled on a title. The other, "The Golden Frogs of Panama," appeared just two months ago in the New York Review of Books. It was written in response to an article in the New Yorker about the disappearance of golden frogs due to climate change. Strand said he doesn't typically write in response to things going on in the world, and hasn't since Vietnam. After reading the poem, he shared that it is a sonnet, the first one he has saved after throwing several others away.

Today, Strand answered questions from a small group gathered at the Writer's Workshop building. The questioners seemed timid at times, and Strand filled the silences with thoughts that were as engaging as the responses to the original questions. Asked who he reads, he said he hasn't seriously read new poetry since editing the 1991 Best American Poetry anthology. "I don't look back to see who is catching up," he said. adding that he looks ahead at the generation before him. He then acknowledged that he is among the last of the generation that younger poets are looking ahead to see.

He is working on two books. One is a memoir about his parents, mainly about his father, that delves into the false story his father told about his upbringing. His father told a young Strand that both of his grandparents had already died, but they hadn't, for example. His tales were told to cover the fact that he had spent time at San Quentin Penitentiary. His second is to be called 100 Autobiographies, which he said will include 100 short "autobiographies" of "me and the me i wish I was."

Labels: Mark Strand, poetry

So, it's National Poetry Month. Did you know? Do you care? It's easy to say that you should on both counts, but I'm not sure it matters. I know in the past I've interviewed poets and enthusiasts about the month, and they almost uniformly detest it. Rather than highlight poetry for one month, what it does is marginalize it for the other 11, they say.

They have a point, though I don't think anything can further marginalize something already clinging to the edges of the mainstream like poetry. People either like it or they don't, either read it or they don't, and all National Poetry month does is make people feel guilty that they don't read more.

Regardless, the Academy of American Poets soldiers on. It's latest ploy: Poem in Your Pocket Day. On April 30 (just in time for the end end of Poetry Month), people are asked to print out a favorite poem, fold it up and carry it in their pocket. "The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on April 30, 2009." There's an anthology, poems to load onto your iPhone and even preselected poem PDFs to download and print. Will anybody do this? Not likely.

Better are local efforts like we have here in Iowa City that put poems on public transportation. Getting poetry in front of people passively is a good idea. People have to come to poetry; anyone who has taken high school English knows you can't force it on someone.

So, celebrate National Poetry Month however you choose: embrace it or ignore it. Poetry will always be there, waiting and ready.

Labels: poetry

Bob Dylan has two poems in this week's issue of the New Yorker. The first, "17," is longer, with the closing line, "

I really have nothing
against
marlon brando.

The second, "21," is short, just 23 words over eight lines. Being here in the Midwest, we don't get our copy of the magazine until later in the week, so I'm left with the online version as a source. There is no supporting information I can find, but I assume these somewhat anachronistic verses are taken from Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript, the book coming in November that joins Hollywood photos of Barry Feinstein with 23 prose poems written by Dylan. Further evidence comes from the Brando reference, and the fact that "21" begins with the line "death silenced her pool," and the description of the book from Simon & Schuster mentions a photo of "Marilyn Monroe's swimming pool on the day she died."

Feinstein has taken several iconic photos of Dylan, having chronicled his 1966 and 1974 tours, but the subject of this book is other people, with Dylan providing the commentary rather than the object being studied.

These poems divorced as they are from the photos (online, anyway), lack the context that gives them their narrative pop, but they certainly feel of a piece with Dylan's mid-60s writings.

Labels: Bob Dylan, books, music, poetry

I don’t recall where I came across Bob Hicok’s poetry, only that it immediately struck me as something I wanted to more fully explore. I had the chance to hear Hicok read a couple of years ago, around the time of the publication of his collection, Insomnia Diary. What I loved about Hicok’s poetry was that it was funny while making a point. There was wry social commentary going on here, the humor a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.

As an untrained writer of poetry and fiction, I also appreciated Hicok’s background. He was a laborer who wrote poetry. He had no MFA, no academic pedigree. He proved that a guy with talent and wit and a way with words could succeed in a world dominated by academics.

When I picked up his latest collection, This Clumsy Living, I learned that some things had changed. Hicok now has degrees and teaches at Virginia Tech University. Though he initially came from the outside, he has been taken into the fold somewhat. The other thing that I noticed is that humor is not the first thing I detect about these poems. There is wit here; it seems to come too naturally to Hicok for him to simply turn it off. But there is a depth and seriousness to these poems; the wit seems incidental, or tactical – pulled out to drive a point home with a subversive laugh.

It is clear that at least one major factor in this change is the war in Iraq. Hicok seems fed up and has found inventive ways to convey his disgust, dismay and disappointment with the effort. “Happy Anniversary,” with the date noted as “March 19, 2006, the third anniversary of the beginning of the war, begins with the lines

There is a war.

This is a brand of minimalism: there are many wars.

Whenever you are reading this, this is the case:

people running and screaming and sharp things and dull pains.

In “A letter: the Genesis poem,” Hicok offers a short personal essay about the book, writing “We’re at war as I write. In Iraq, in case we’ve moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants. Many people here don’t want elsewhere people to become here people.”

Elsewhere, however, Hicok seems to be coming to grips with the shift in his own life, from working guy who wrote poems to poet who used to be a working guy. “My last factory job” is a poem that details his job “pushing a rod. Steel rod/in a v-channel with a stick.” In “Beasts,” he writes a meeting with a former co-worker where he finds himself trying to explain tenure, “to convince him that the six weeks I have to myself/ between semesters isn’t a layoff. ‘I gotta get me some of that,’/ he says again, lighting a smoke with a smoke.” Later, “I long ago gave up/ trying to explain poetry to people like Carl,/ and have recently given up trying to explain people like Carl/to professors.”

At the same time, life just seems to have given Hicok a kick in the pants in the past few years, and he is challenging himself to find new ways to express these new feelings and sentiments and thoughts, unwilling to let the same old tactics express these new subjects. It makes for a book that was different than I expected – and I’ll admit, differed from what I initially wanted – but one that is obviously Hicok’s best.

Labels: books, poetry