A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

Poet of the Week: Ted Kooser

I worked on a creative Valentine’s Day gift guide; more on that soon. While doing research — and thanks to the recommendation of a new freelance writer friend — I came across the book “Valentines” by Ted Kooser.

Kooser, who has won the Pulitzer Prize, started a tradition in 1986 where he’d send Valentines to the wives of his friends. They were harmless flirtations — or so he says. Because the poems themselves were incredibly romantic. Over the years, whenever he’d do a reading, he’d ask the women in the audience if they’d like to receive a Valentine from him. He postmarked them from Valentine, Nebraska, written out on a postcard.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Tracy K. Smith

I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith this weekend, in my Internet wanderings. (That previous sentence=barf.) She’s a relatively young female poet (she just turned 40) who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, “Life on Mars,” which she wrote in the wake of her father’s death. He was a scientist who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope’s development; she is a beautiful woman whose work, from the very little I’ve read, deals largely with questions of God, the universe, and human existence.

The topics themselves seem rote, at least on the surface; what sets her apart is that she frequently explores them by speaking to an unidentified “you.” It makes them feel secretive, romantic. Like the two of you are old lovers, and you’re sitting at a table, reminiscing. 

Read More

Poet Of The Week: Pablo Neruda

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Poet of the Week post. In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything worthwhile on this blog. I feel ashamed about it. I feel like I’ve forgotten about humility.

It’s been a long few weeks, with lots of work. Yesterday, I finished the first wave of it. Today, there’s a lull, and I’m having a hard time dealing with it. The air is getting cooler, and the clouds, as I was driving over the Manhattan bridge this morning, descended gray, not stormy. Soon, I’ll feel better being indoors most of the time, because it will be cold, and sweetly lonely.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Rabindranath Tagore

I once worked for a photographer, who now is something of an uncle to me. He taught me how to travel as I do now—in the second week that I worked for him, he flew me to meet him and his crew in the jungles of Belize. I carried with me nothing but a tripod—which, when wrapped, looked like a grenade launcher—a few rolls of film, and his favorite kind of chocolate.

(A picture I took of the Zocalo in Mexico City on the opening night of one of his shows.)

Accustomed mostly to traveling to safe places, I brought with me some pretty dresses, and some cork wedges. I expected to be somewhere warm and tropical, and thus resort-like. When I disembarked from the plane, I was greeted by a man in a pick-up truck, who drove me two hours out into the depths of the jungle. There, I was deposited in a crude camp for a week. During the day, in the heat, I watched the crew film and photograph animals in muddy waters and insect-ridden forests, listless from the humidity, panicked at the emptiness of each hour. At night, I slept in an open air hut, with nothing but a mosquito net to protect me from the wild. If I lay still, the sheets roiled from all of the bugs in the bed. If I turned on the light to try to get rid of them, a jaundiced French camera assistant named Bertrand watched me from his own hut, ten feet away. In the morning, I woke up, and my sheets were speckled from blood from bites, and the bites were not from the Frenchman.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Jen McClanaghan

It’s been a while since I last read a poem that really something struck me, in that deep, stomach churning, “I’ve lost something too” kind of way.

I don’t know why, but Jen McClanaghan’s poem, “My Lie,” which appeared in the New Yorker some weeks ago, really moved me. I first read it on the subway, surrounded by idiots, some weeks ago.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Chungmi Kim

(Image by Rikard Karl-ludvig Lindstedt)

This morning I spent a while reading poems by Pablo Neruda, which can be quite beautiful on love, but are mostly about dying. Today, I wanted to find a poem that was devoid of darkness.

So I searched for love poems, and found mostly the ones about eyes and ears and skin and hands, all yearning to be touched or seen. Reading them led me on a chase for a poem that could speak of my awakening this morning, curled on my side, both of my hands wrapped in the single one of someone else—the right curled around a thumb, the left cradled in a palm. I never even noticed, in sleeping, how I was all bound up. 

Read More

Poet of the Week: Ethan Coen

I want to try to class this blog up, in anticipation of a piece I have coming out this weekend (which will drive traffic that will spike my analytics, and them promptly disappear, leaving me writhing on the floor, broken and alone). So I decided to do one of my abysmally unpopular “Poet of the Week” posts, which generally are pretty dull and cultured and won’t get me into any kind of trouble.

To begin, I did a little browsing on my favorite poetry sites—Paper Cuts and Harriet the Blog. On the former, I found a piece about apocalypse poetry published in honor of 9/11, and on the latter, when I typed in “apocalypse,” I came upon a news item about a new book of poems by Ethan Coen, the infamous director of films like “Pride & Prejudice” and “The Notebook.” Just kidding, fuckers, he directed (with his brother Joel) bloodbaths like “No Country For Old Men.” But could you imagine if he re-did “The Notebook” outlaw style, starring Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin? I can’t either, so I guess the idea is not that funny.

Anyway, Ethan Coen has apparently published two books of poetry—the first being I’m too lazy to look up the name, and the second being “The Day The World Ends.” The latter was released on the day after the apocalypse was supposed to happen in May, which is a witty “fuck you” to those of you who thought you were going to win the God lottery on judgement day!

Read More

Poet of the Week: Philip Levine

I am going to the Catskills this afternoon, so I spent a while this morning looking for a poem that would encompass all I hope will happen this coming weekend.

But then I remembered that most people writing poems about being in the country—especially in New England—talk about the rain, and the little bird that twitters at them in the morning, and the way that their wife looks as she walks away from them down the path before they have their coffee.

BORING.

(Not you though, Larry Clark.)

I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about how writers are so nostalgic, and also cowards. It makes them into copycats, and it makes their language sound stiff and antiquated. Everyone’s afraid to write in the language of “their time,” as if the present demeans their intelligence.

But seriously, I don’t want to read another poem in quatrains about someone padding down the stairs and mourning the passing of youth in the style of a 21st century Walt Whitman. I want to read a collection of young writers’ thoughts in the style of Gchats.

Gchat conversations are all about pacing, and tone, and spontaneity. Shit is something that I could get lost in. In fact, I already do, for up to 8-10 hours a day.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Federico García Lorca

When I first started this blog, I did a weekly feature called “Dead Men I’d Like To Have Married.”

Then I ran out of old movie stars that weren’t gay, and I stopped. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t have married them anyway.

Federico García Lorca is definitely a dead man I’d like to have married. He was also most definitely gay.

Never thee mind, Federico, my ovaries are calling to you. Can you hear their feeble yearning?

Read More

Poet of the Week: David Huddle

It took me a few reads, but I really liked the poem by David Huddle in last week’s New Yorker. 

At first, I couldn’t place the scene he was describing. Interestingly enough, the first thing I searched for were photographs of “Appalachia” in the Library of Congress. The hill countries and knotted forests, the dying trees on the coal-mined mountains, the long driveways full of old cars. The houses, rotting and peeling, peering into yards through the barrier of wrap-around porches.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Dobby Gibson

I’ve been digging around for a few days, asking my friends whom I should make my poet of the week. I actually only asked two people. One ignored me, and the other, Rony, was full of ideas, all of which he qualified by warning me that they were “very pretentious.”

Each one, I rejected, saying they weren’t high brow enough. Larkin, Shelley, Catullus. Eliot and Nash. Bob Dylan and Jay-Z. Here’s what Rony ‘ould say to that:

 “Anyone who says that Bob Dylan is their favorite poet should be executed.”

Finally, he wrote “Odi et Amo,” and blocked me on Gchat. 

Read More

Poet of the Week: Werner Herzog

Tonight, I’m going to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s new film about the world’s oldest paintings at Chauvet. I cannot wait to hear the crazy shit that is going to come out of that old bat’s mouth, and I also cannot wait to see his footage, which I anticipate will be characteristically off-kilter and dreamy and rare.

Thinking about Herzog led me to search for Encounters at the End of the World, his 2007 documentary about the remote terrains of Antarctica, and the human beings who inhabit them: the researchers in tents in the middle of snow deserts, the scientists studying rare life forms, the divers who drill through the thick layers of ice to swim through the waters at the end of the world, in ethereal, dark blue waters.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Ellen Kennedy

The poem I’m posting today has endless layers of references, all of which are deeply intimate to me. 

The poet who wrote it, Ellen Kennedy, is a young woman whose first collection of poems, Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (2009), perfectly encapsulates the difficulty I’ve been having breathing as of late. Also, if her name betrays her, she’s an Irish Catholic, which means that our wild veins run the same color, dark green and constantly in doldrums.

(Without mascara, my eyelashes, too, are fey and transparent.)

Read More

Poet of the Week: Tennessee Williams

I spent a majority of my time this weekend interviewing people about the impending apocalypse, and watching clips on YouTube from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, so the poem I’m posting below is especially timely.

I never knew that Tennessee Williams was a poet. I actually probably did, but I don’t think about Tennessee Williams very much at all, and I’ve never been the biggest fan of his mostly misogynistic, very heavily monologue-centric plays, not even when they’re read by a steely blue-eyed, stiff and cruel Paul Newman.

Read More

Poet of the Week: Dorothy Parker

My neighborhood buddy, Silky Wilky, a Southern gentleman painter, has very opinionated thoughts on my blog, which he thinks is a waste of time, and also a bit of embarrassment. “Anyone can write a blog,” he tells me. “It makes you look like an idiot.”

In his opinion, I should be doing more useful things, like getting wickedly drunk with him at James, the fanciest of casual restaurants in our neighborhood, or, as he puts it, “relaxing.” 

It is his fault, however, that I am writing this post, because he’s the one who told me that I would love Dorothy Parker. 

Read More