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Table of contents
Section L
5 6 8 10 12 14 15 16 18
Night Time Andrew Saviano For Sally Mann Emily Hoffman L.ad Lucinium Catallus Amanda Gorton
Dutch Elm Disease Eric Ward from Vecchi Versi Eugenio Montale Laura Kling
Duck Fat Lizzy Star Need Christine Kwon An Outing Katy Waldman Prospect Alice Hodgkins Section M
Photos Izzy Chafkin Eliot Brady Section S
An interview Henri Cole
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The Yale Literary Magazine
Night Time Andrew Saviano
After dinner we went to my apartment and sat together with a bottle ofwine and the crossword It has one hundred seats he said pressing the pencil to his lips his knee on my knee I could barely form a thought that wasn't his but suddenly it struck me like a memory Senate I said a bit smug but brilliant for a moment before the next clue When the puzzle was nearly solved and only one or two bits hung us up we finished our glasses and moved to the bedroom where we undressed ourselves took our sides ofthe bed and lay together like two trees branches entangled reaching out to touch because it is the nature ofbranches to reach Four hours later I was still awake belly up the shadows ofleaves moving on my chest like hands asking myself what use is the body so late in the night?
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L. Ad Lucinium Catullus
HESTERNO,Licini, die otiosi
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multum lusimus in meis tabellis, ut conuenerat esse delicatos: scribens uersiculos uterque nostrum ludebat numero modo hoc modo Aloe, reddens mutua per iocum atque uinum. atque illinc abii tuo lepore incensus, Licini,facetiisque, ut nec me miserum cibus iuuaret nec somnus tegeret quiete 째cellos, sed toto indomitus furore lecto uersarer, cupiens uidere lucem, ut tecum loquerer,simulque ut essem. at defessa labore membra postquam semimortua lectulo iacebant, hoc,iucunde,tibi poema feci, ex quo perspiceres meum dolorem. nunc audax caue sis, precesque nostras, oramus,caue despuas, ocelle, ne poenas Nemesis reposcat a te. est uehemens dea:laedere hanc caueto.
The Yale Literary Magazine
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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE
.Frorn_c_o_Yer Jenny Holier light projection in Venice, Italy of "Blur'' from Middle Earth by Henri Cole @ PBS
Back coy& same
In your poem "Self Portrait with Hornets," you write, "Ordinary things are like symbols." But this simile implies that ordinary things are precisely not symbols. Could you explain that paradox? I like your question because there does seem to be simultaneously in me both a pull toward the ordinary and the symbolic. I don't know how I can explain this except to say that I contain contradictions. The poem you speak of was written in the small mountains north of Kyoto, where I lived for a time. The thing I was trying to get away from in my poetry was always looking outward and describing the world, as I'd done in my first books. I wanted to turn the lens inward instead and to scrutinize myself. This had something to do with gender, I think, because I had been raised to believe that men were supposed to look outward and narrate the events of the world, whereas women did the inward thing. This is crazy, I know, since the lyric is a snapshot of the self in a moment of being - it is not narration - whether the poet is a man or woman. Also, for a time, it seemed to me there was too much narrative poetry around; I wanted to write something different. The Visible Man was largely written in Italy, and Middle Earth in Japan, but the poems in Blackbird and Wolfseem to have a universal quality, in part because they are not tied to specific locations. Is setting a trigger of memory, or a template onto which you graft the emotions you experience? A lot about the writing process is not chartable. When and where I write is often connected to the circumstances of my teaching. I don't usually write when I am teaching. But in between my teaching stints, I have enjoyed long periods of composition in France, Germany,
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Italy, and Japan. I grew up in Virginia in an ordinary lower middleclass household, but since my parents had been stationed in Japan - where I was born - there were unusual objects in our house: lacquer bowls, silk painting, a Geisha doll, etc. Also, because my mother was French (and her parents Armenian immigrants through Marseilles) this made me aware of language as something both near and far.
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That reminds me of your "horse-mother" poem. Yes, Mother was born in Marseilles - her brothers lived there their whole lives and my cousins still do - and though she spent fifty years trying to become an American woman, at the end of her life she became a French woman again, only speaking French. When I was 35. I got to go live in France for the first time and to know my French family. I think we're all hybrids; this makes us each unique. There is a good deal of tension and death imagery in the poems featuring your mother, as in "Mimosa Sensitiva," where you write,"I push a needle into you / and bright beads run out, as from a draining bird." The poem "Beach Walk" describes a baby shark with its eyes eaten and ends with the line,"the dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on." I was wondering if you have in mind the analogy between mother and the ocean and death that critics like Harold Bloom have posited. When I am writing poetry, I am unable to think globally. I am unable to think Mother=Ocean.Death. I only see a few lines on the page in front of me. I am like a MRI machine. But your question reveals that
you are able to see things globally (like a critic or novelist), and this fills me with admiration, though it embarrasses me a little, too. In response to your question about death, let me say that I think we're all living and dying simultaneously as biological organisms. The deaths of my parents are a back story to my last two books, Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf."Mimosa Sensitiva" is a nursing home poem. The title comes from a Louise Bourgeois print. When the body in which one was formed (and from which one emerged) is dead, one's relationship to the world changes. Mother died only two summers ago; I'm still processing this fact. You've collaborated with visual artists in the past, and you mentioned that The Visible Man was influenced by viewing a lot of art in Italy. How does visual art inform your work? Visual art very often goes farther than poetry. I am always trying to think of ways to go farther in my little non-sonnet sonnets. It seems to me that there is too much containment in American poetry. And too much tepidness. This, of course, is true for my own first books. I don't want to write poems like that anymore ... or to read them. Visual artists are liberators. You say, "I don't want words to sever me from reality. / I don't want to need them. I want nothing / to reveal feeling but feeling." How do your words bridge language and reality? Those lines are from my poem "Gravity and Center" and contain another example of a contradiction within me. My books are full of poems that are made of words that are meant to reveal emotion.
This is, in part, why I write. But also, I want them to be aesthetically dignified. After my father died - he was an engineer and owned many books that never interested me - but after his death I looked at them in a new light and was drawn to the technical graphs and illustrations. There was one in particular, titled "Gravity and Center," which moved me. Some of the language of my poem ("the force of attraction" and "the force of repulsion") is borrowed from it. My father was mostly silent about his own feelings, but these graphs unexpectedly gave me access to him. I hope this would make him happy. Your long sequence "Apollo" is a poem that deals with masculinity and desire. If the project of your book is to gaze inward and scrutinize the self, how much interaction with the world (or the beloved) is necessary, if at all, to accomplish this? Once again you highlight a contradiction, which is that there is simultaneously in me a longing for connection with the world and a need for solitude. I feel a strong impulse toward both, and this is irreconcilable. One of the troubles with marriage is the idea of the couple, which is at odds, in my view, with the creature that wants to make something out of his or her inwardness. Do you think it's more difficult to write or produce art as a married person? I've never been married, so I can't say, and I don't have children, but writing requires a kind of self-centeredness that probably isn't healthy for love. My ideal working conditions are being simultaneously
L. Ad Lucinium Amanda Gorton
Yesterday, Licinius, (it being the weekend) we fooled around a lot in my little notebooks — indulging our art, as agreed. We composed our little verses, each ofus fooling around with meter — a line ofthis, a line ofthat — passing our poems back to the other through laughter and liquor. And I departed from your charm on fire, Licinius, and from your wit. Directly!(alas!)lost my appetite, and couldn't get a wink ofsleep. I tossed all over my bed, unbearably hot,longing to see the light ofday, so that I could talk to you (and likewise be with you). But once my limbs were exhausted from exertion and lying half-dead on my little bed,I made you this poem, my charming friend,that you might appreciate my suffering from it. Don't get cheeky now,and pray, don't spit on our prayers, lest Nemesis make you pay the price. She's a brutal goddess — Thou shalt not provoke her.
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Dutch Elm Disease Eric Ward
Sister halfway over the fence foot on the middle rail on the bottom rail. Sister hugging the pumpkins accidentally sprouting in the mulch pile brushing offtheir faces. 10
Sunlight streaming through where the tree once stood. Sun covering the vegetable dirt and the pale stripe where the tree fell in the dark grass. Night, the great dead limbs dropping into the pond, The Yale Literary Magazine
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Dutch Elm Disease Eric Ward
then the whole tree lying down slowly i like an elephant. 1 Hands cradling the warm eggplant, fingers working through the blackbird net to the tomatoes \ Sister lounging beside the pond in the bright impression ofthe tree The empty sun, her hair sawdust \ I
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from Vecchi Versi Eugenio Montale
Ricordo la farfalla ch'era entrata dai vetri schiusi nella sera fumida su la costa raccolta, dilavata dal trascorrere iroso delle spume. Muoveva tutta l'aria del crepuscolo a un fioco occiduo palpebrare della traccia che divide acqua e terra; ed il punto atono del faro che baluginava sulla roccia del Tino,cerula, tre yoke si dilato e si spense in un altro oro.
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Mia madre stava accanto a me seduta presso il tavolo ingombro dalle carte da giuoco alzate a due per volta come attendamenti nani pei soldati dei nipoti sbandati gia dal sonno. Si schiodava dall'alto impetuoso un nembo d'aria diaccia, diluviava sul nido di Corniglia rugginoso. Poi fu l'oscurita piena,e dal mare un rombo basso e assiduo come un lungo regolato concerto,ed il gonfiare d'un pallore ondulante oltre la siepe cimata dei pitosfori. Nel breve vano della mia stanza, ove la lampada tremava dentro una ragnata fucsia, penetro la farfalla, al paralume giunse e le conterie che l'avvolgevano segnando i muri di riflessi ombrati eguali come fregi si sconvolsero e subo scialbo corse alle pareti un fascio semovente di fili esili.
The Yale Literary Magazine
connected and apart, like writing alone here in my apartment, while also hearing a tub being drawn next door and a basketball game down in the park below. Do you consider yourself a confessional poet? You seem to be at times both confessional and abstract. I think of myself as an autobiographical poet, if I can make this distinction. Autobiography and memory are the sources of many poems. But I don't find "confessional" a useful term, because it suggests a kind of emotional striptease, which doesn't interest me. Poems need to have primary emotion, of course - fear, grief, desperation, triumph, etc - and this is something, more and more, which I feel the need to defend, especially since graduate students are drawn to the fashionable poem of the moment, which is shapeless, disconnected, and unemotional, with playful language and references to contemporary culture. Something I really admire about Cavafy, one of the poets you cite as an influence, is that he doesn't use much figuration, namely simile and metaphor. His "you" figures, without specificity, are universal but can also come across as vague. Can a poet's language be withholding, self-protective? Behind a lot of Cavafy's language is the pain of unsanctioned desire, which might explain the oblique "you." This is also true in the work of Hart Crane and James Merrill, where highly wrought language is sometimes deployed to create a closet or mask that is self-protective, as you say, but probably necessary. In my own poems, I have created a closet by writing often about
animals. Given a mask, one is able to speak to the truth of one's predicament. I wonder if form can also serve as a mask. The sonnet appears throughout your work as a form you feel comfortable with. Why is this, and are there particular sonneteers you admire? When I lived in Japan, I didn't know what kind of poem to write. If I'd written tankas and haikus, that would have been an idiotic American tourist thing to do. So I wrote in the shortest lyric form which my own language had a tradition in - the sonnet - and I brought to it some of the qualities of Japanese poetry.
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What qualities of Japanese poetry appeal to you? The use of image as symbol, without exposition of feeling, a public dimension, a regard for authenticity over artifice, the use of simile. I call my poems nnon-sonnet sonnets," because they don't have iambic pentameter and they don't have rhyme, but I want them to have the same psychological journey that the sonnet form enables, with its quatrains and couplet or octave and sestet, with its voltas, its fractures, its leaps, and its resolutions. James Merrill and Seamus Heaney wrote some of the finest in the last half-century. Do you start poems with phrases or with ideas? I keep a folder (here it is, lookl); it's stuffed with a thousand little things that I've written down.
Take it and run, guys. Let me read to you from one or two scraps: "I always knew I'd be no one's husband. I cut my hair to change my life." I wrote those two sentences down from somewhere ... I don't remember where. A movie? Here's something Woody Allen said, I think: "The heart wants what the heart wants." I think this was the title of an artwork I liked: "Dream of an Opium-Smoker" - I want to write a poem called that. Sometimes, I start with the title of a poem, instead of a phrase or memory. I like to give my students exercises - they're writing a poem now titled "Yellow Bathing Suit" - it's an exercise in free-associating. My goal is to push them out of their comfort zone. We all have our little safe room of composition, and I'm always looking for ways to evict myself from mine. One of the reasons I adore teaching undergraduates is that they are so much freer than graduate students, who are already affiliating themselves with one aesthetics or another, and, therefore, professionalized in a narrow way. They are not free. It's very disappointing. This is from your poem "The Coastguard Station": "Strangely, watching them tranquillizes me./ Their big clapboard house/ is illuminated all night, / like the unconscious, though no one enters." Do you think of yourself as a poet who relies on the unconscious? Oh, yes! I think the most important thing for writing is sleep, which nurtures the unconscious and helps us to process experience. Without sleep, I would not have the power of concentration necessary for composition. There's a time just after waking in the morning - a kind of in-between zone - which I love. I misread things, words get mixed
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up; is a fecund zone for poetry because I'm able to go behind the literal boundaries of things. The two biggest influences on me are sleep and reading. Is there an unconscious aspect of reading? Reading is like putting high-test gasoline in your Volkswagen imagination. It's nurturing the self in a different sort. It's nurtures the imagination, but also it helps us to become ourselves, which is the most important thing in life. Do you have another book planned after your Selected Poems (Pierce the Skin)? I hope to turn in a new manuscript soon, in the fall, perhaps. I've written everything except a longish poem, which I'm working on now. 10
Is your tradition of ending books with a long poem meant to give a sense of closure to the books? That is one of my goals, but also I like to end with a poem of a new sort for me, if I'm up to it. Robert Lowell loved his sonnets too - has he influenced your sonnet work? Yes, certainly. I taught a course on the sonnet last term and we read many of his. There are some real beauties, but they are uneven with lots of airport poems, Whom do you read? Louise Gluck is my favorite American poet. In her generation. other
favorites are Anne Carson and Frank Bidart. Bidart's Desire is a breakthrough book with that long magnificent poem about Myrrha ("The Second Hour of the Night"), but also I admire his crazily intense, slightly cryptic, lyric poems. Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is splendid, too. My favorite living world poets are Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Szymborska. They give me the courage to keep going.
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. The recipient of many awards, he is the author of Middle Earth (2003), a Pulitzer Aim finalist, and, most recently, Blackbird and Wolf(2007)Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, 1982-2007(2010). On April 3rd, YLM and Cole discussed poetry at his home in Boston.
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From Vecchi Versi Laura Kling
I remember the butterfly that had entered through the open window in the smoky evening on the coast that was gathered, washed away by the furious pounding ofthe surf. All the twilit air was shifting to a dim western blinking ofthe streak that divides water and land; and the blank point ofthe lighthouse that flickered over the cliffs ofTino,cerulean,three times it widened and extinguished itselfin a different gold. My mother was next to me sitting beside the table cluttered with playing cards raised in pairs like miniature tents for the soldiers ofthe grandchildren already lying down for sleep. From the violent heights a cloud oficy air was unleashed and poured down upon the rusty haven of Corniglia. Then the darkness was full, and from the sea a deep and steady rumble like a long continuous concert, and the inflation ofa balloon swaying over the pruned pittosporum hedge.In the small space of my room,where the lamp trembled inside a frayed fuchsia, the butterfly entered,and reached the lampshade and the glass beads that surrounded it, marking the walls with reflected shadows just like friezes, they shook and across the plaster ran to the walls a self-propelled bundle ofslender threads.
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.' Perched on someone's stoop in Portland, Maine with a handful offries cooked in duck fat, you spent a long time saying nothing. The wind was picking up,throwing my hair around, and you kept your face low,out ofits way. I asked ifwe could go down by the water. Too cold, you said. We sat. The wind did what it does in port cities. Your bearing, easy—a bird, waiting for the next call said that even the docks would be heavy with quiet, sharp in the air like the salt. Je4s Azzn ied >pna
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Need Christine Kwon
I want to spend my life making memories, cooking with my lover, telling him I love him in peculiar places. My mother tells me to think of my potential. But I have won some awards. When I come home after rolling, or lighting up, I feel righteous. Awful,tender trust. I had felt I was missing out on something wonderful and I was.I was in love once. Billboard love, like I had been flattened out and hung above a city. The world is filled with people who have such good timing. I cannot remember how much I needed his eyes, his stomach, without a draft entering my body, like I have just come across a dying animal alone and stricken in the heart ofthe woods.
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An Outing Katy Waldman
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After sixty years, you try to recall the shape of trout on your river, you were twelve, they swam too fast, stung gleams oftrout vanishing in the shallows, you were holding a net and feeling how efficient it all was, this scene with you, your friend, your friend's father noteerie, really, but the row ofspruce already a blur fanning out across the water where you spread nets to catch a part oftime left over like hair in a brush; even so, how lovely to leave empty-handed, to be persuaded when the argument eludes you,remembering The Yale Literary Magazine
An Outing Katy Waldman
black fibrillations offence, rails where you balanced, arms spread on one side,sky sky,the other, not yet having lost your childlike way ofgoing in and out bare legs, chilly day leaves wet,flat, splayed in gutters feet stamping bright centers.
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I was told to look out — The road westwards through the woodlands losing light But I was already looking up — A branch divides into three parts, A yellow flash: the Blackburnian Warbler displays By its cup-shaped nest.
Ifthe ear could capture all the sounds ofthis world I would still hear his steps Clanging around inside of me As echoes ofsome great inner temple bell.
Watching daily at my door And waiting on my doorstep — No one has arrived on time.
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And made a move to chase it inside Through the blue door,freshly painted.
Stopfollowing me,I said
Into my bosom,and be lost in me.
Shadows,all attended, cover the stoop And the warbler sings Sofo/d thyse(f, my dearest, thou, and slip
It would have been enough To follow the hallways in the evening Rereading his letters But now each room inside is similar to another room.
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Colophon and endnotes
Awards
Eric Ward is the winner of the Frances Bergen Memorial Prize (Section L, page 10,judged by J.D. McClatchy), Eliot Brady and Izzy Chafkin are the winners of the YLM Photography Contest (Section M), Amanda Gorton and Laura Kling are the winners of the YLM Translation Contest (Section L, pages 8 and 12, respectively).
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The contents of The Yale Literary Magazine are copyright 2010. No portions may be reprinted without permission. All rights reserved! Library of Congress catalogue number 7-19863-4.
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Colophon
Typefaces used here are Verlag by Hoefler & FrereJones and Caslon Pro by Adobe. The text is set in black and Pantone 2615 C on Grape Jelly (S), Grapeside(M), and Newsprint White (L) papers by French Paper Company.
Thanks
Ken i Bronk, Daniel Koppich, Julian Bittiner, Mindy Lu, Carmen Cusmano, and Joseph Solodow.
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Geoff and Adeline 16" x 19" Color inkjet print
Untitled II to" x to" Silver gelatin print
Cary and Jamie 16" Silver gelatin print
Untitled III to" x to" Silver gelatin print
Morgan 41" x 48" Color inkjet print
Untitled IV to" x to" Silver gelatin print
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Untitled VII to" x to" Silver gelatin print
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Abandoned Motel 41" x 48" Color inkjet print
Katherine after accide_n_t 16" x 16" B&W inkjet print