For the most part, I don’t have favorite poetry books of all time, rather books I am most excited about right this minute, so I’d like to recommend five of those. I continue to be dazzled and excited by books as I read them, and I wouldn’t want to limit myself to five (five hundred maybe.)

Having said that, here are five I’m crazy about right now, that I would highly recommend.

Elegy on Toy Piano by Dean Young is a beautiful, compelling book. The process of discovery for the poet becomes a process of discovery for the reader. In spite of Young’s focus on death as an end (rather than a new beginning), I found his work uplifting in its honesty in its raw beauty, and in its sly and generous humor.

The fascination in Tomaz Salamun’s poems lies in the disparate things that are brought together, their majesty lies in the way they contain the world, both of space and time, and their fun lies in not knowing where the poet will go next. In The Book For My Brother, danger lurks everywhere: in an oppressive political landscape, in nature, in the universe’s dark humor (which becomes the poet’s), in religion, in God, in relationships and in the poet’s isolated self. The poems unfurl like the clay and silk flags and the river in “To the Heart.” (The oppressiveness of the culture and of nature are reflected in the fact that the flags are made partly of clay. They are not free, cannot fly in the breeze.)

The poems in Home Deep Blue embody Valentine’s grace and generosity as a poet. Valentine is a visual poet, a poet of color. While the subject of Valentine’s poetry is often other people, in many of her poems I feel like I’m seeing a painting. In “To Raphael, angel of happy meeting,” “The pear tree buds shine like salt” (what a beautiful image), and in the last stanza, “the abundant tree/open out its branches, white-gold wings…still too light for us to hold.”

Yehudi Amichai’s images are always fresh and always apt. Each image, though straightforward, tends to contain its own universe, and he writes with great irony, yet without cynicism. An exquisite example of Amichai comparing the human to the inanimate is from “Letter of Recommendation”” “Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman!/This is not a scar you feel under my shirt./it’s a letter of recommendation/folded from my father:/”He is still a good boy and full of love.” The image creates a second simple scene, complete with dialogue.

Finally, my heart will always belong to Guillaume Apollinaire, the first poet I fell in love with, and his book Alcools, in French. The music of the poems flows as beautifully and mysteriously as the Seine in “Le Pont Miraubeau.”

BIO: Elizabeth J. Coleman’s poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, 32 Poems, The Raintown Review, “J” Journal, Per Contra and Blueline among others. Her chapbook, The Saint of Lost Things, was published in 2009 by Word Temple Press. Elizabeth’s translations of poetry into French have appeared in Per Contra. In 2009, Elizabeth was the featured poetry reader, chosen by 32 Poems, at “Periodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introduce Emerging Writers at the New York Public Library.” Elizabeth is a candidate for an MFA in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, a member of the New York, Georgia and Washington DC Bars and a classical guitarist. Visit her website to see links to some of her work and to purchase her chapbook, The Saint of Lost Things.

1. Promote contemporary and, hopefully, new-to-you books.

2. Promote the work of the writers taking the time to recommend their favorite books.

Please consider ordering the recommended books and also checking out the work of the recommenders. We include a bio at the end of each post.

With no further ado, Daniel Nester shares his five favorite poetry books:

1. Amanda Nadelberg, Isa the Truck Named Isadore. A tour-de-force of a debut. From the first time I read her poems, I published it every chance I could get. Check out her sestina here.
2. Barbara Louise Ungar, Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. My colleague at The College of Saint Rose writes a poem-cycle on “was-bands,” life, love. Torch songs au go-go.
3. Jeanann Verlee, Racing Hummingbirds. When will we finally admit so-called slam poets can hang with we elbow-patchers on the page? This is a good place to start.
4. Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence. A big leap forward from an already forward-looking poet. This is an important book.
5. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! I just ordered this, so I can’t offer a blurb. I’ve just heard good things about it—use of source materials with poems. Looking forward to reading this.

BIO: Daniel Nester is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. His first two books, God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared in a variety of places, such as Salon.com, The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, and Bookslut, and has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. He is managing editor of the group culture-slash-literature blog We Who Are About To Die. Find him online at danielnester.com and on Twitter.

BIO: J.J. Penna is a musician and poet residing in New Jersey. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2007 and is the recent recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Atlantic Center For The Arts, Ragdale and the Vermont Studio Center. Recent work is forthcoming in Brilliant Corners, Fugue, Chautauqua Literary Review, Eclipse and Nimrod.

1) Deepstep Come Shining, C.D. Wright–I recommend this book all the time, a lyrical, nonlinear road trip that nonetheless benefits from a cover-to-cover reading, and everyone I recommend it to loves it. To my mind, it strikes the balance between accessibility and innovation in a way few books of poetry do. And it’s so deeply American, and regional. That aspect of it makes me very happy.

2) Fort Red Border, Kiki Petrosino–a new book, a first book by a young poet, this knocked my socks off. Bold, heartfelt, full of lush language, at once elegant and honest, engaged in issues of class and race and gender, this book is absolute pleasure. My students adore it, too.

3) Museum of Accidents, Rachel Zucker–Rachel is one of my best friends. It’s nice to have a best friend who is also one of your favorite poets. I really love every one of her books, and this just happens to be the latest, but yeah, it’s incredible. In it, she’s really funny and also really, really serious, and really introspective and also really outward-looking. I love that people sometimes tell me, very sincerely, that they love this book called Museum of Accidents, without knowing that I talk to its author almost every day of my life.

4) Lucky Coat Anywhere, Michael Burkard–I actually have not read this book, Michael’s latest, yet, but I will love it, I promise. Michael was my mentor in graduate school and I am indebted and in thrall to his singular voice and vision of poetry as a medium that can be utterly without pretension while still being one of the strangest, most dreamlike means of expression possible. I think of Michael’s work as visionary. I think of Jean Valentine in the same breath. (So here’s how I sneak Jean Valentine illegally on to this list.)

5) Poetry State Forest, Bernadette Mayer–I find this book, like some of Mayer’s other books, a bit hit or miss: it’s kind of a mess in some ways. Some poems are incredible and others just don’t work for me at all, and the chronology is completely confusing. But that’s also what I admire most about this work: it’s completely human, completely flawed, and totally fresh and present and funny and serious and wild. I read this book this past fall and it had a huge impact on my own writing, I think, more than perhaps any other book I read this year (and I’ve read a lot of great books this year), so I’m choosing it for that, even though I think Mayer’s Midwinter Day is, page for page, probably more of a “masterpiece” than this book is. I feel like I don’t always want to read a masterpiece! (In fact, I maybe mostly don’t.)

BIO: Arielle Greenberg is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and author of My Kafka Century, Given and several chapbooks. Ugly Duckling Presse will republish her chapbook Shake Her in 2012. She is co-editor of three anthologies, most recently Gurlesque
with Lara Glenum, and is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She left a tenured position in poetry at Columbia College Chicago in 2011 to move with her family to a small town in rural Maine.

When I moved to Berlin, I hoped blogging would help me come to terms with my new surroundings. Living abroad is an enriching experience for a poet, but it’s also traumatizing. You lose yourself to it, you fortify yourself against it, and (hopefully) you eventually negotiate a personal relationship with it.

That goes for your own writing, but also the literature you consume. I wanted a platform where I could write about the fascinating (sometimes, to an American eye, profoundly weird) book culture I’m immersed in, much of which is otherwise completely inaccessible in English.

Which is how Readux, was born. What started as a modest personal blog developed into a multi-contributor site with an editorial concept: Readux is a Berlin-based online publication with English-language reviews, interviews, and articles on German and French books and events.

When people read Readux’s about page, “literary therapy for the lingually displaced” seems to be the line that catches their eye. It’s funny, but it’s also true. Sometimes I feel as if, before I can process anything in German, I have to write about it in English.

But there’s another kind of “literary therapy for the lingually displaced,” that’s indispensable for expats like me — the network of literary blogs like 32 Poems’ that connect me to a culture I feel a part of, rather than the well-integrated outsider I am in Germany.

I recently wrote a couple of Readux entries on perceptions of race and diversity in the German literary world — they’re critical pieces, and they bring a distinctly American perspective with them — how could I have written them without understanding the situation in the US? Keeping up with the controversy surrounding Claudia Rankine’s indictment of Tony Hoagland’s “The Change” at AWP is in some ways as essential to my understanding of German literary society as reading the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung each Sunday.

What I’m talking about is ballast, something I can push against, fall back on, use to check my own reactions to the constant flood of foreign media I’m swimming in. And then there’s the poetry; the longer I’m gone, the more urgently I feel the need to know the essential beating heart of American poetry right now, and the more magazines like 32 Poems mean to me.

Partly it’s an identity issue: if I’m an American among Germans, and a poet writing an awful lot about prose, I’d better understand American poetry if I want to know who I am. But it’s also about feeling at home and remaining connected to the things that made me want to engage with books in the first place. Sounds like great therapy to me.

Stop by Readux between Thursday March 31 and Sunday, April 3, 2011 to enter to win an illustrated copy of Robert Walser’s Answer to an Inquiry from Ugly Duckling Presse.

BIO: Amanda DeMarco’s poetry is forthcoming in The Believer and elsewhere. In 2009 she moved to Berlin on a Fulbright Grant. In addition to editing Readux, she writes reviews and articles on German book culture and international publishing for a variety of print and online venues. Her very first publication was in 32 Poems.

1. The Last Predicta by Chad Davidson
I’d rather read a new poem by Chad Davidson than any poet of my generation. For word play, gigantic conceits, line by line surprise, and contemporary culture looked at with wisdom rather than condescension, you just can’t beat it.

2. Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman
One of the smartest poets we have, enamored of silence and able to make beautiful sounds with it. Some have blamed him for sounding like Hopkins, Donne, and Herbert. I praise him for that, but he’s really doing his own thing, completely, writing some of the most daring poems of our generation.

3. Half Life by Meghan O’Rourke
Lines chiseled from stone, yet poems that make you feel deeply. I’ve read this book over and over, and I never change my mind about it.

4. Things Are Disappearing Here by Kate Northrop
One of the most subtly gorgeous books I’ve ever read.

5. Bucolics by Maurice Manning
So idiosyncratic you’d think no one could pull this off, but he does. I wish I’d written it.

BIO: John Poch’s most recent book of poems is Dolls (Orchises Press 2009). He teaches at Texas Tech University.

Some writers don’t understand why I’ve kept my rejections.  (Even the email ones, which are probably triple the physical copies, are archived in my Gmail account.)  It seems masochistic — who wants to be face to face with their own failure?  But that’s not how I see it.  Rejection isn’t failure.  It’s an opportunity to learn.  Every time I get a rejection — and most of them were, in fact, form rejections, sometimes on a quarter-sheet of paper that many poets consider insulting (it’s not, it’s just economical) — I gain a little insight about the process of publishing. With each rejection I figure out something that isn’t working — and usually it’s not even about my writing.  It’s about my submissions.

Here’s the thing about publishing:  Whether you’re querying your first novel, submitting to publishers, or trying to get a piece into a lit mag, it can feel like you’re throwing spaghetti at a wall, just hoping something will stick.  And after the first batch or two of rejections, you start to think, hey, being picky isn’t working.  I researched the crap out of these magazines, and none of them wanted my work.  My work is genius, I just need to find a home for it, and the only way to do that is to send it everywhere.

Oh, yes, I made this mistake.  I had pages in my notebook where I wrote down every poem submitted and where I had sent it. I had poems out at twenty journals at a time, garnering rejections.  I collected paper for the shoebox and emails for the archives.  I am thankful for the strange quirk that lets this admitted clutter-bug be organized in one or two areas of her life (one is writing, I’ll let you know what the other area is if I can ever think of it), or else I would have pissed off a lot of editors, no doubt.  My point, however, is this: Throwing spaghetti at the wall does NOT work.  What works is patience.

Almost a year passed before I published anything.  And I knew the editor of the magazine.  It was their second issue.  And, yes, the magazine was wonderful and the editor was discerning.  This doesn’t change the fact that having a human face on my pieces definitely had an effect on my rising to the top of the slushpile.  Or the fact that it took another six months to land another “sale.” (I have quotation marks around the word “sale” because the most I’ve ever made on a poetry sale is $10 a poem, and 95% of the time the payment is in copies of the magazine.  This is a truth, even if my mother is convinced I am being taken advantage of.  No, Mom.  This is industry standard.   Every few months after that, as long as I continued submitting, I published poems.  I’ve been in about two dozen magazines now.  It feels great.  But, the key was knowing what to submit where.  Or, rather, knowing (and learning) which wall to throw my spaghetti at.

In my spaghetti-throwing heyday I sent my very-non-experimental work to experimental-themed magazines.  I was desperate to get in anywhere.  I submitted to mags like Tin House (now there’s a dream for a new kid) and mags that folded after one issue.  I was not thinking from the point of view of editors, with jillions of submissions to pick through, trying to figure out what would look best in their magazines.  I was not reading the magazines critically, and only sending work that fit on those pages.  I was trying to.  I convinced myself that I was a very careful poet who was choosing her poems with great discretion and reverence for the magazines to which she submitted.  I was a liar.

Anyway, back to my Box o’ Rejections.  I like my box.  I talk about it a lot with fellow poets, especially when said poets are looking to start submitting their work.  Because this business is like 99% no.  If you want to put your work out there, you’re going to hear “no” a lot from agents, publishers, and magazines.  If you get a magical yes and end up with your work in print, you’re going to hear more nos.  No from reviewers.  No from readers.  Let the rejections you get now serve as armor — both armor against the No Army, and an armor of knowledge in your submission process.  As someone who spent the beginning of her writing career publishing exclusively poetry, and exclusively in magazines, I was prepared by my Box o’ Rejections when I began querying agents with my first novel.  I was prepared for the Nos, and prepared to query not only widely but carefully.  The spaghetti-flinging method, while tempting, is kind of a mess waiting to happen.

So, I guess this post is to say this:

1. Do not fling spaghetti.

2. Get used to hearing no.

3. Let your rejections build you up.

4. The spaghetti thing again.

All Best,

EKA

PS: I’m sorry if my spaghetti metaphor made you hungry.  I’m very susceptible to this as well.  At least I didn’t use a Taco Bell metaphor.  Okay?

No Shoes Required for this Kind of Poetry Reading

Online journals, workshops, and literary relationships existing entirely online have reinvigorated poetry and hardened it against accusations of it being a dying art. Part of this effect, I’m sure, is the immediacy that the internet can provide. An immediacy which HTMLGIANT is using to its fullest with their series of ‘Live Giants’ online poetry readings. Can’t get to New York or Chicago to experience Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey read? Just tune in online, instead. To be honest, the virtual ‘crowd’ that gathers for these readings is larger than most poetry readings I’ve ever been to. Not only does it allows the wonderful poems to be heard by people who are geographically inaccessible, but it provides yet another online platform for poetry folk to come together. Who doesn’t enjoy a love-in? Ok, so the animal masks are a little scary, but it all adds to the experience. HTMLGIANT are up to number 8, and previous readings have included Mairéad Byrne, Zachary Schomburg and Sam Lipsyte

Best of all, HTMLGIANT’s archives mean you can replay the readings over and over and over until your heart’s content. It’s always frustrating when you grow to love a poet’s work after you’ve seen them live and can’t quite recall the poems in the same way. Well now you can, whenever you like. Doing laundry, cleaning, jumping up and down… the possibilities are endless.

Who wouldn’t want poets in animal masks reading you to sleep?

This photo is from a trip I took with the daughter to the Maryland Science Center. Marie Howe—who is coming to read at American University in DC on October 27th—wrote a poem in which the speaker hurries the daughter along and then wonders why she’s doing that. I find myself in that position (hurry, hurry) and really why am I hurrying so often? When the daughter wanted to stop and watch one of the dinner cruise ships move away from the harbor, I stood there patiently. Okay, maybe I wasn’t the most patient, yet I did not tell her to hurry. We watched every single thing they did to move the boat, and I took many deep breaths.

In this photo, she was running towards dessert. Although it was cold, we resisted the end of summer with a last Italian ice at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Now…on to crackling leaves and fires.

I submitted the poem three times between 1998 and 1999, which was a lot for me back then. I didn’t send it out again until I submitted it twice in 2008 and then once in 2010. Why all the gaps you might ask?

In 1998, I received my BA in English. I took a job as an insurance claims adjuster and my writing stagnated. I didn’t have a writing community around me, and I still had not reached an understanding of how revision was often “re-visioning.” As a result, my poems didn’t change much as I sent them around.

I stopped submitting work (and I didn’t write much) from 2001-2005. Since I’d kept most of the poems I wrote in the 90’s, I’d go back to the stacks of old poems to see what was there when I started writing in 2006.

As I made my way through those old poems, I came across “Power” in one year into starting an MFA program. There were many pros to my MFA experience, but perhaps one of the biggest was opening up my ability to revise. I revised the poem and submitted it. After two rejections, I just wasn’t quite feeling the poem anymore. I liked it enough to keep it though. It sat in a file until I read a poem on a similar topic (a sibling convincing their other sibling to touch a wire fence) and I decided that maybe my poem deserved another look. Although, to be honest, the other poem on that topic The Bells in My Skin Still Ring by Rhett Iseman Trull, was so good, I initally wondered why I should bother!

I put the piece through one more revision and sent it out in July 2010. It was accepted for publication in September 2010. It is now online in Rose & Thorn.

So, what does this all mean? Is this a story of why you shouldn’t throw things you’ve written away? Is this a tale regarding the thrill of revision? Is this a parable of patience? Is it, most of all, a lesson that you should always revise the word “dappled” out of a poem? I think my poem’s journey shows a little bit of each. It also has something to say about how much being around other poets can help you develop as a writer.

I am glad a magazine published “Power,” and I think it’ll be added to my second full-length poetry manuscript. However, I hope it doesn’t take every poem I write over 10 years of revision and submission before they are published.

Jessie Carty is a regular blogger for 32 Poems. She’s a blogger, poet, and teacher. Find her on Twitter.