BAP Guest Blogging Continues with Susan B. Ramsey Interview

Susan Ramsey on center stage today on The Best American Poetry Blog.

Guest Blogging this Week for the BAP Blog

This week I'm guest blogging at The Best American Poetry blog. My first post is an interview with 2009 guest editor David Wagoner, one of my very first poetry teachers. 

When the Wall Came Tumbling Down

Okay . . . let me see if I've got this right.

The Wall came down, and Czechs went wild with glee. Communism was awful. A living hell. The worst part was not being able to travel to places like Paris. (Okay, really: the worst part was being tortured.) Also, artists couldn't make art about their anger and frustrations, their oppression. They were completely censored. It sucked.

Soon after the Wall came down, artist David Cerny decided to paint a Prague statue of a WW II tank PINK. Now as a sort-of democracy and definite imperialism/consumerism become the norm (McDonalds and Benneton: Welcome to Prague), Cherny has unveiled a new sculpture titled "Brownnosers." Visitors to the National Gallery climb a 20-foot ladder "and stare into two giant sculpted fiberglass rectums as their giant white bodies melt into the wall. Inside each giant buttock sculpture is a video screen of someone wearing a puppet-like mask of [Vaclav] Klaus [the country's conservative president] gracefully spoon-feeding slop to the director of the Czech National Gallery, all to the rocking beat of Queen's 'We Are the Champions.'"

I have to say this sculpture tickled my funny bone. When I described it to my kids, they had a few laughs, then had a few questions: "Is poop spraying out of its butt"?

Three cheers to artists like Cerny. Three cheers to Gorbachev for not shooting the first brave souls who jumped the Wall, willing to die for their freedom.

Cliff Mass, WA's weather guy extraordinaire, posted this morning about a huge series of waves coming toward the WA coast. Since then the wave action has begun, with swells over 30 feet.

30 feet waves. JEE-sus. That's like a 2-story-house wave. That's a wall of water. A wave like that could take you out to sea.

Meanwhile, here in Seattle we've had, since last night, graupel/hail, thunder/lightning, high winds, and rain like you read about, plus scattered power outages (thankfully, not yet in my hood).

I have to say I get this adrenalin rush about weather. People think when you talk about weather you're soooooo boring, but to me it's just the coolest.

Okay, and also especially cool when you're supposed to be grading papers.

Sarah Sloat's "Training"

Training

BY SARAH J. SLOAT

• Bio
• Audio

I’m thinking of living forever.
I think that way I might finally
get my gig straight and solve the crosswords.
I’m considering outlasting everyone
although I know I’d have a hard time
explaining not having read Ulysses
past the first chapter.
I don’t care if death smells like nutmeg.
I don’t buy the plotline on eternal rest.
By staying alive someday
I might manage to hail a taxi,
and fulfill my father’s wish
of reaching town without a red light.
I couldn’t expect to avoid anger or brooding
or to make the journey with my beasts appeased.
But I might walk vast expanses
of earth and always be beginning
and I love beginning
or could learn
to love it.

Dear class,

Today's writing prompt: What are you training for? Name/describe your desired outcomes, along with your workout routine. What will you avoid by staying committed to your goals? What might your achievement unleash in you?

Alabanza for Martin Espada

There are poetry readings, and then there is a Martin Espada poetry reading. From the moment he took the podium (he started off with a joke about being cited for jaywalking in downtown Seattle), he had me.

He introduced himself as a guy who grew up in the projects of East Brooklyn. He told us about his father, a soldier turned civil rights activist, a photographer, a revolutionary.

He read a poem about Tito Puente, the Puerto Rican musician who brought mambo to the general public.

He shared his idea for a cockroach coffee table book ("a Republican National Convention of Roaches! An Indianapolis 500 of roaches!").

He read a hilarious poem titled "Thanksgiving" about the first time he met his cannon-possessing, culturally clueless, Yankee in-laws in Connecticut.

He talked about Chile and Pinochet's evil regime ("If you want to know how torture worked, all you have to do is look to Chile . . .")

He read a poem about returning to his childhood projects building in E. Brooklyn, and true to Frost's dictum about surprises, it ends up being an anti-war poem.

"Poetry makes nothing happen? That only applies to poets whose work makes nothing happen."

"The poets I respect most are the poet spies, the ones who bear witness. Neruda was a poet spy, and so was Whitman. They bear witness and testify."

His swan song to Neruda during the Q&A was worth the price of admission.

And in his signature booming barotone, he belted out "Alabanza," his opus about the "army of shadows" who worked atop the World Trade Center at The Windows on the World Restaurant.

I went home energized and found a short interview of him on YouTube. Watching and listening, tears streamed down my face as I learned about Victor Jaba, Chile's version of our Woody Guthrie, tortured and gunned down by militants during the 1973 American-backed coup.

We need to know about the stuff Martin is writing about. We all need to share a little more about where we come from, who our ancestors are (or who they might have been). We need to share what has hurt us and what has made us stronger, with particulars, with language that leaps, that explodes from the page. Not rhetoric and abstractions, but with images and music. With passion.

Obama, you put one on the Supreme Court; why not make a Puerto Rican the United States Poet Laureate? If anyone qualifies for that position--a true poet of the people--it's Martin Espada.

Switched ON!

Co-editors Roberta Feins & Linda Malnack bring us another issue of Switched-on Gutenberg. University of Washington professor Jana Harris's brain child, the aptly named Switched-on reigns in its 14th year of publication with Issue 15: Gains & Losses.

These poems speak to and about the Great Crash of 2009, or don't speak of it, as in the case of Barbara Crooker's "The Stock Market Loses Fluidity," where what's liquid is "this sunlight pouring down / from the west, from the great glass jar of the sky," and where "the bear's fat layer is its IRA."

Each poet interprets the theme in her/his own way, as in Kristin Roedell's "Fifteen and Fifty," where the "unending rooms" of adolescence dwindle down to "the last room, this one" as middle-age looms, and Nick Lantz's humorously ruthless parody of a Rumsfeld press conference:

I look out and I see too many
people and too few, which is a different
way of saying
the same thing, which is a way
of saying I’m tired
of saying the same thing, which is a way
of saying I find no evidence
of change, which is a way
of saying that even

decline can be a kind of steadiness.

It's a wonderful time in our history to pick up a book of poems, but if you want to join in the effort to cut back on clear cutting, as well as reduce your own consumption, let us go then, you and I, to the logical outcome of Gutenberg's wildest dreams.