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Author Archives: Adam Tavel
The Ghost of César Chávez
Much like Gary Soto and Larry Levis, David Dominguez is a child of California’s schizophrenia: urban and pastoral, bountiful and barren, Mexican and American are just a few of the wondrous dualities that have helped the nation’s most populous state carve its place in our collective imagination. This complex Californian identity is at the very heart of The Ghost of César Chávez, Dominguez’s lush and expansive second collection, as its plainspoken narratives cast the poet’s beloved landscape as an evasive muse in a quest for ancestry and belonging. While The Ghost of César Chávez suffers from discursiveness in its weakest moments, it remains a compelling catalog of one fierce heart’s search for the sublime, rendering its chief subjects—work, heritage, gardening, and the tenacious majesty of love—with candor, precision, and verve. Continue reading
Assateague Shells III:
Notes Toward An Ecumencial Poetics
- The poet’s desperation is the outlaw’s desperation. The only difference is a loaded gun.
- To advance one’s reputation by attacking those who have already fallen out of favor—as Rexroth did with Jeffers—or by savaging the aesthetics of a bygone milieu—as Woolf did with Dickens—is to open fire on a white flag.
- Resentments are inevitable, but making enemies is avoidable.
- Division is not an ethos.
- The delay between acceptance and publication is just long enough for a poet to doubt what she’s written.
- Letting graduate students run a university-funded magazine by themselves is to subsidize a tree-house club.
- A poem should not be a commodity.
- The moment a poem is published it becomes a commodity.
- A book of poems is the most tragicomic of commodities.
- To praise or condemn conceptual work for its length, grandeur, or myopia is to merely describe the mode and skirt the poems at hand.
- It’s always easier to skirt the poems at hand.
- One hypothesizes that future generations will justly condemn much of our contemporary verse for being falsely haunted. The first lesson of Hamlet is ghosts demand our blood.
- Arrogance is a necessary ingredient.
- The worst thing that can happen to a young poet is ego validation.
- The best thing that can happen to a young poet is passive underestimation.
- The best starve.
Stacie Leatherman
An Interview
Your first two poetry collections, Stranger Air and Storm Crop, were published within weeks of each other earlier this year. What were some of the personal and professional challenges you faced due to this coincidence, and have any hidden blessings resulted from their simultaneous release?
Luckily, there weren’t any challenges. The fact that they were published so close together was purely coincidental. I had written the first manuscript as my creative thesis at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and as soon as I finished it, I began the second book. Storm Crop, my second book, came together relatively quickly. I knew the formal structure that I wanted, the abecedarium, and everything I was beginning to articulate in my first manuscript was carried out more fully, but in a very different way, in the second. It simply took a bit longer to find a publisher for the first manuscript, and its publication date was pushed back a little. So the second book followed closely on its heels because of that circumstance. The blessings aren’t so hidden: I had two books published, so I can hardly complain about that. I guess the only other thing I could mention was my paranoia that my readers would get the publication order confused. I was very set on my books being viewed as a progression of thought, idea, and form.… Continue Reading
Silent Music by Adam Wyeth
To ask an American poet about international verse is often a waiting game, wherein one counts how many ticks of the second hand it takes for the responder to sing Neruda’s praises, quizzically gaze out the window, and deftly change the subject after a dramatic pause like a Wes Anderson protagonist. With the proliferation of, and plurality within, our many aesthetic cliques, it is lamentable that so few of us (this reviewer included) break out and explore the many emerging voices in the grand chorus of English language poetry. Such were my sentiments as I recently devoured Adam Wyeth’s mature and emotionally nuanced debut, Silent Music, as its central themes of divorce, transgression, and identity (in this case, Anglo-Irish) are vital to our Yankee discourse, but more importantly, his is an impressive and rangy collection that sidesteps the plangent gestures that so often mar first books. Continue reading
Assateague Shells II:
Notes Toward An Ecumenical Poetics
- What we abandon is more important than what we salvage.
- It is wise to comprehend the poetic line before abandoning it.
- When a poet argues with the ghosts of her teachers, she is really arguing with the ghosts of her younger selves.
- The posturing poet habitually risks losing the capacity to distinguish between her true self and the act.
- It is difficult to tell which is more dire: the tangible self in the mirror or the near-self in the poem.
- A voice that doesn’t sing isn’t much of a voice.
- Feigned preciousness isn’t lyricism.
- In its brief flowering, a good poem knows more than its maker.
- The trick to being prolific is to not make writing an occasion.
- For the overzealous poet, today’s publication may be tomorrow’s humiliation.
