The Last Usable Hour, Deborah Landau

I’d rather watch you doing it

than do it myself.

I’d rather hear about it.

I want to be told.

I’d rather read about it.

I’d rather just sit here.

Hold the mask over my face

while you do it to me.

I’ll put on some music.

Now see how we grow aglow

so young and beautiful

our capillaries all lit up. (“All Else Fails”)

I first became intrigued by American poet Deborah Landau and her second trade collection, The Last Usable Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), when I discovered this post she wrote about one of her methods of composition for this collection:

A few years ago I was in a writing group with some amazing poets—Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Anthony McCann, Damian Rogers, Matthew Rohrer, Richard Siken, and Matthew Zapruder. The idea was we’d each write a poem every day for a month, and we’d take turns giving writing prompts. All of this was done by email, and there was a great pressure to get a poem done and sent out by the end of each day—pressure which turned out to be extraordinarily helpful to me in generating a lot of new material. One day Richard Siken gave the following rather cryptic assignment:

            Poison

            Get a drink and put it in front of you.

            Consider this:

            If I gave you poison, would you drink it?

            What if it made you stronger?

            Now drink or don’t.

            Now write in couplets.

I’m not exactly sure how I ended up writing the poem I did from this prompt, but am grateful to Richard for provoking me to do so. The poem ended up in my most recent book, The Last Usable Hour—a series of linked sequences set in a midwinter, perpetually-nocturnal New York City—and sits in the apocalyptic final section, “Welcome to the Future.”

In The Last Usable Hour, Landau writes a single, extended line in her self-described “ghost book.” Broken into four lyric sections, her “linked lyric sequences” are composed as epistolary love poems, and as Pessoa (referenced within), can her unnamed narrator be a hetronym of sorts, writing out to someone she can’t quite name? Or does the someone not entirely matter? There’s an odd voyeurism to Landau’s depiction of midwinter New York, writing Larkin dreams and Pessoa, as in the first section, where she writes, “Don’t cry, don’t kiss me either, and also don’t stop. / That’s the way he looks when he wants to watch.” Her poems twist and turn, shift the gaze and just who is watching whom, a last desperate hour that holds the uncertainty of the narrator into a plausible strength. Dear someone, she writes, and it almost doesn’t matter whom. Or does it?

I’m thinking of

you tonight Philip

Larkin groping back

to bed after

a piss

and yes

the moon

so cold

through the bars

on the window

the empty

southward

sky

(there’s so much

of it now)

and here

in my

narrow bed (“Blue Dark”)

From the Fishouse: an audio archive of emerging poets

Pearl Pirie recently pointed out this website of American poets' readings and question-and-answer sessions. A pretty large archive of new and newer writers, it includes a ton of worthy American poets: Barbara Jane Reyes, Beth Bachmann, Evie Shockley, Ilya Kaminsky, Kazim Ali, Laura McCullough, Mark Yakich, Mathew Zapruder, Paul Guest, Paula Bohince, Philip Metres, Purvi Shah Betsy Sholl, Rachel M. Simon, Rachel Richardson, Ravi Shankar, Reb Livingston, Reginald Harris, Richard Siken, Rick Barot, Rick Noguchi, Robert Farnsworth, Robin Beth Schaer, Sandra Beasley, Sarah Manguso, Terry L. Kennedy, Thorpe Moeckel, Tim Seibles, Tom Thompson, Tony Barnstone, Victoria Chang, Vievee Francis, Xochiquetzal Candelaria and Yona Harvey.

Pretty envious, this. Should we try to convince them to include Canadian poets as well, or should someone here simply attempt to construct our own archive?

Their website self-describes as:

Poets Q & A:

From the Fishouse is designed to be, in part, a resource for teachers and students of contemporary poetry. What better way to learn about poetry than from the mouths of those who practice the art? Listen to poets talk about writing, the writing process, and about particular poems featured here at the Fishouse. Below are links to more than 500 audio files of poets talking about their craft, arranged by author. These Q&A files can also be accessed through the individual poets' Fishouse pages.

Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist

Canada

By Canada I have always been fascinated.
All that snow and acquiescing.
All that emptiness, all those butterflies
marshaled into an army of peace.
Moving north away from me
Canada has no border, away
like the state its northern border
withers into the skydome. In a world
full of mistrust and self-medication
I have always hated Canada.
It makes me feel like I'm shouting
at a child for letting a handful
of pine needles run through his fist.
Canada gets along with everyone
while I hang, a dark cloud
above the schoolyard. I know
we need war, all the skirmishes
to keep our borders where
we have placed them, all
the migration, all the difference.
Just like Canada the Dalai Lama
is now in Canada, and everyone
is fascinated. When they come
to visit me, no one ever leaves me
saying, the most touching thing
about him is he's so human.
Or, I was really glad to hear
so many positive ideas regardless
of the consequences expressed.
Or I could drink a case of you.
No one has ever pedaled
every inch of thousands of roads
through me to raise awareness
for my struggle for autonomy.
I have pity but no respect for others,
which is not compassion, just ordinary
love based on attitudes toward myself.
I wonder how long I can endure.
In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white-tailed deer
of sadness, and it's clear
that whole country does not exist
to make me feel crappy
like a candelabra hanging
above the prison world,
condemned to freely glow.

Another part of the infamous "poetry bus" that came through Ottawa a few weeks ago was Brooklyn poet and Wave Books editor Matthew Zapruder, with his second poetry collection, The Pajamaist (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006). The author of one previous collection, American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002), he also co-translated the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu's final collection, Secret Weapon (Coffee House Press, 2007). Obviously his "Canada" poem was one of the first that struck me in this collection [see my note here on the poetry of New York poet Lisa Jarnot, where I quoted hers; should someone here put together a collection of poems about Canada by non-Canadians, perhaps?], but there were many places where I was also struck. The moments that Zapruder strings together are small but carry enormous weight, and work against each other in the most intricate arrays of beadwork; craft here is everything, and it’s the human moments that bring these poems up to that kind of radiant clarity that is so often sought, but so easily, and otherwise missed. In the middle of the collection, for example, is the impressive series "Twenty Poems for Noelle," writing his own suite of post-September 11, 2001 New York City poems, where he begins:

Noelle, somewhere in an apartment
symphony number two
listens to you breathing.
Broken glass in the street.
What was once unglowing glows.
Through tiny holes the page
exhales, fire escape white in the sun,
and vaguely parasitic
cramped in the courtyard
endlessly undulate the leaves.
Silos preside over thousands of miles.
Tiny puffs move the flags.
The child of the happiest woman
died and who will save us?
It's good to end something never begun,
but the question always is. Static
in the trees. People in their clothes.
Empty tables facing the street
in open verandas, wait for beautiful
women, they always come.

I'm impressed with the strength of Zapruder's poems, and wonder just how strong he might be by the end of this poetry bus tour, one of the few to be going the whole fifty-one days of it, from coast to American coast and points-in-between (including their few Canadian dates). Will there be new poems from him and others as a result of the tour? After fifty-one daily readings in different towns, will there be anything left of Matthew Zapruder?