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Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently, we spoke with author David Lehman.

Lehman (pictured, via) has published several volumes of poetry throughout his career. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and has continued to serve as the series editor. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There was a wonderful article and review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review about poetry and a new book by poet Robert Pinsky.

The book Singing School: learning to write (and read) poetry by studying with the masters sounds like an easy going guide to poetry intended for adult, nonacademic readers. The book is so anti-academic according to the reviewer, that one can’t help but wonder what the university where Pinsky works must think of it. I am so intrigued that I have requested the book from the library. I am fourth in line for it so I’ll probably get my turn sometime in the middle or end of December. If it turns out to be as good as the review of it makes it out to be, I will have to buy a copy of my own.

The article mentions something about poetry that irks me to no end. That is the idea that some poets and poetry critics hold that poetry should be difficult and belong only to the initiated. To call a poet “accessible” is an insult. Billy Collins is lumped into this category which means, easy and not serious. But for all the regular, common readers who love Billy Collins, myself included, we don’t care. We love him for his humor and “accessibility.” I have to wonder if poets and critics who look down their noses at Collins and others like him (I’ve heard Mary Oliver so accused too as though it is a crime to be readable by someone outside the clique) are not really jealous because Collins has a larger readership. They must justify their small audience by placing themselves in the starry aether where the air is so much more refined and selective. Gag.

And here is Pinsky with his new book saying you don’t need a Ph.D and reams of notes covering every allusion and metaphor in “The Waste Land” in order to enjoy the poem and the experience of reading it. In fact, the untutored reader just might find things in the poem that the “expert” has overlooked. I must say I agree with Pinsky and I look forward to reading his book when my turn comes up.

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve dug up a video of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reciting Howard Nemerov‘s poem, “The Makers.”

Clinton, who at the time was serving as First Lady, recorded this video for “The Favorite Poem Project” in 1999. Her husband, President Bill Clinton, also participated in this project. This project was founded by the 39th poet laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky. Altogether, 50 short documentaries were recorded for this video series.

In past, Clinton wrote and published several books including the 1996 nonfiction title It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us and the 2003 memoir Living History. At the moment, speculations and rumors are circulating about the new book Clinton plans to pen. What do you think?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

I got to chauffeur him once. He gave a reading at UNC-Greensboro while I was an MFA student there—this would have been around 1992—and as poetry editor of The Greensboro Review it was one of my jobs to help get our visiting authors from place to place. In this case I was asked to pick Mr. Pinsky up at the Charlotte airport (I think it was Charlotte—it was about an hour away, I remember that) and drive him up to Greensboro for the reading. My classmate David Scott (now married to our fellow classmate, author Julianna Baggott, aka N. E. Bode of The Anybodies fame) came along for the ride. We picked Mr. Pinsky up on schedule and for once in my life, there were no misadventures of any kind on the trip.

(But— “Not in your car,” Scott is saying over my shoulder. “Tell me you didn’t take your car.”

Oh yes we did: my fabulous silver 1981 Isuzu Imark with the blue grafitti on the door. The one with no air conditioning. The poet’s Cadillac!)

Mr. Pinsky was warm and kind and voiced no complaints about the unluxurious mode of transport. I remember we spent most of the drive talking about gardening—at one point I told him about my habit of planting imaginary gardens in the places I passed around town, thinking out what I’d plant there if this or that bit of earth were mine, and he said that sounded to him like the making of a poem. Later, I tried to write that poem but it turned into something quite different—became a sort of comic sketch involving an elderly woman planting watermelons on the grounds of her church.

Now, looking back, I think the real poem lies somewhere in that car ride: the shabby silver car speeding past the kudzu and pine; the moist Carolina heat; the esteemed poet discreetly unsticking his skin from the cracked red vinyl of the seat; the young students of poetry hoping not to bore; the imagined gardens that never grew even in a poem…there’s something there. Robert Pinsky could find it, I’m sure.

It’s still (Poetry) Friday here on the West Coast.

The other day I mentioned a book that was ghosting in the corners of my mind:

I wanted a few days to savor the novel I finished earlier this week: Lost by Jacqueline Davies, a spellbinding account of—well, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, sort of, but really that’s a backdrop to an achingly moving tale of loss and grief, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl (whose narrative voice may be my favorite of the year so far) who works in the factory.

And Beth of Bookworm Journal commented:

Melissa, the book by Davies sounds very good — thank you for posting about it. I’m acquainted with the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire only through Robert Pinsky’s poem “Shirt.” You may know it already, but if not, I encourage you to google it (it’s on various websites). Truly an amazing poem, and might be a good accompaniment to the novel…

Before Lost, I was acquainted with the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire primarily via a TV movie I watched as a girl—I remember so vividly the terrible image of a young Irish woman being urged by her desperate chum to jump out the window together before the flames devoured them, and the Irish girl sobbing that she couldn’t jump, she was Catholic and jumping was suicide and she wouldn’t do it, and the other girl stepping out the window as the Irish girl’s skirts caught fire. A horrible image. And would you believe that all this time, until I looked up the link for this post, I thought that movie was The Towering Inferno? Which entirely different film I must also have seen at some point—clearly I have conflated the two because I would have sworn Paul Newman was in the Triangle Factory movie, and now IMDB tells me he was part of Towering Inferno’s all-star cast, along with Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire for goodness sake, and O.J. Simpson.

The film I’m remembering must have been this 1979 TV movie, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal, featuring Tom Bosley, Stephanie Zimbalist, and Charlotte Rae. It won an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling.

There is something terribly poignant about that thought. 146 people died in the Triangle Factory Fire, most of them young women trapped on the 9th floor of a building with flimsy fire escapes, no sprinklers, and no fire alarms. 68 years later, someone won an award for getting their hairstyles right on TV.

Robert Pinksy’s poem, “Shirt,” which I had not read until Beth directed me toward it (for which: thank you so much), captures that disconnect, that jarring history wrapped up in something so simple, so unnoticed, so miraculous when you stop and think about it, as a plain cotton shirt.

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

(Read the rest at the Internet Poetry Archive.)

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Today’s Poetry Friday is hosted by The Book Aunt.

Rachel DeWoskin, author of the forthcoming Repeat After Me (May 2009) is reading her poetry tonight at Boston University along with Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic.

The event is free and open to the public. All are welcome!

ROBERT LOWELL MEMORIAL LECTURES
Celebrating the Legacy of Room 222

A reading by CHARLES SIMIC
with ROBERT PINSKY and RACHEL DEWOSKIN

Thursday, February 19, 2009 / 7:30 p.m.
Boston University Photonics Center
8 Saint Mary's Street, Room 206

Reception and Book Signing to Follow. Hope to see you there!