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Poetry at Bennington is [see tags]

Jericho Brown  //   What is Poetry For?

What do you think poetry is for?

Bennington Students gave Ned Doty, Mark Doty’s beloved golden retriever/muse a whole lotta love.

In a follow-up to her reading in Tishman the previous night, the poet Mary Jo Bang [hyperlinked to her website/Wikipedia page] gave a lecture in the CAPA Symposium on March 14. She was introduced by Mark Wunderlich, dressed in a snappy cardigan.

She spoke about her most recent work, a translation of Dante’s Inferno [hyperlinked to the Wikipedia article]. Her translation uses a lot of colloquial language and modern American pop culture references [whole phrase hyperlinked to the Wikipedia article for Eric Cartman] to bring Dante to audiences that might not have read him before. She made the point that Dante chose to write in Tuscan, not Latin, which was the traditional language to write in. Tuscan was the spoken language of the time and place he was writing, so it was already layered with emotions and associations, unlike Latin, which had none to his readers. Bang feels that writing in colloquial English instead of the heightened language that most translators make use of lends her work some of the same emotional context that Dante’s had.

This raised a point: when you’re translating something, you’re in a dialogue with not only the original author, but with everyone who’s ever translated the work before you. She described this as “a layered ventriloquism.” For instance, we might be able to guess why Dante put the sin of Betrayal in the ninth circle of Hell: he felt that he was betrayed by certain politicians when he was exiled from his city, and he wrote the poem during his exile. There is a kind of power struggle that can take place when translating a very old poem like this. In Mary Jo Bang’s case, there were some elements of that, but she said it mostly felt like “a collaboration.”

She talked about what made her originally want to write the poem – another poem. It’s called [title of poem, hyperlinked to that reading of it you played in class] by [author of poem], and it’s a found poem consisting of every translation of the first tercet of Inferno that the author could find in the New York Public Library at the time she was writing it. There are [# of translations]. This inspired Bang to attempt her own translation of the first tercet, and it essentially snowballed from there. To close out her talk, he said “It was tremendous fun, and when you have that much fun, you just want to keep talking about it.”

She then took questions, the topics of which ranged from Inferno itself (mostly asked by the students from the Readings in Contemporary Poetry class, who had read the book before she arrived) to the illustrations (done by the incomparable Henrik Drescher [hyperlinked to his website]) to her other work (mostly her books The Bride of E  and Elegy.  

She ended her lecture by signing books for her admiring fans. 

-Dylan Scott 

from Mary Jo Bang’s residency 

Mary Jo Bang’s brief residency began with a reading on Wednesday, March 13th.

She read mostly from The Bride of E (Graywolf Press. 2009) and also read a canto from her most recent work, a creative translation of Dante’s Inferno (Graywolf Press, 2012). Juxtaposing high- and low-culture, in the spirit of the original, the updated references are as varied as Plath and Eliot to South Park and The Addams Family. Her voice is especially powerful when reading this poem, incantatory and grave – lending seriousness to the project that could potentially seem gimmicky. 

Bang speaks of poetry as a game. Poems are satisfying for the author to create, but they are also a form of intimacy with the reader. “We’re social animals,” she pointed out, “We banded together early on.” She continued, “How are you means tell me a story.” Bride of E (Graywolf Press, 2009) is a stylistically playful work. To produce her best work, Bang gives herself restrictions. The book, structured as an abecedarius, contains poems of erasure (“A Equals All of a Sudden”) and ekphrasis (“N as in Nevermore”).

It’s also very funny. The first poem in the book “ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is the Bride of Existence” addresses existential concerns, while mocking the pretension of young existentialists. Post-adolescent dreamers who morphed on the dance floor / That night into naughty boys, echoing the girls’ questions / Of “how shall we live,” “what shall we do,” / Words without end, without weight.

She is reluctant to bring autobiography into her work, preferring to focus on inventive forms. During the last event, a public conversation with Mark Wunderlich and Stephen Shapiro, she addressed one of her earlier books Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2007) a year’s worth of poems written in the aftermath of the sudden death of her adult son. She spoke about the difficulty of the project, and how it was a departure from her usual style.

Bang is drawn to masks and personas. She spoke of wearing the mask of the translator; speaking through Dante Alighieri, the poet reveals herself in translation choices, thoughneatly eluding the reader’s question about autobiography.

Process is endlessly fascinating for her. One of the most exciting moments of the reading was when she read from her new, unpublished work. Limiting herself to fifty pages of Mrs. Dalloway from which to sculpt a poem, the original text is almost unrecognizable. Having excised all names, and obscured the narrative, Virginia Woolf haunts the poem, as Bang captures the atmosphere of the novel. She boldly engages with classic texts, which can be considered controversial. When asked about these two erasure poems Bang said she did fifty pages of Mrs. Dalloway, which was fun, and then jumped into the next fifty “because it wasn’t yet lunch time.”

-Laura Creste

Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He has published eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. Doty’s work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K.

“This first book …has the plainspokenness and unguarded candor about writing and ambition more often found in a later book by an established poet - think Robert Creeley….Teicher puts his faith in the hypothetical ‘as if,’ as if being in love with poetry made poetry, as if being in love made love….Part of the charm here is how poetry and love are not suffered ironically, but gathered and won, ‘As if the answer is flowers ’ - a surprisingly sage observation for this young poet who indeed has something to say.”- Publishers Weekly

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University.

She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, andInterior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

About her work, the poet Richard Howard writes: “The resonance of Shaughnessy’s poems is that of someone speaking out of an ecstasy and into an ecstasy, momentarily pausing to let us in on the fun, the pain.”

Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Mark Doty is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award;School of the Arts (2005); Source (2002); and Sweet Machine (1998).

Other collections include Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria(1993), chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991); andTurtle, Swan (1987).

In 2010, Graywolf Books published a collection of essays on poetry titled The Art of Description: World into Word, in which Doty asserts that “poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.”

He has also published Heaven’s Coast (1996), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Other memoirs by Doty includes Firebird (1999), Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (2000), and Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007).

Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2011. He has taught at the University of Houston and is currently serving as a Distinguished Writer at Rutgers University. He currently lives in New York City.

Let's ask a poet with no way of knowing.
Someone who can give us an answer,
another duplicity to help double the world.

What kind of poetry is all question, anyway?
Each question leads to an iceburn,
a snownova, a single bed spinning in space.

Poet, Decide! I am lonely with questions.
What is snow? What isn't?
Do you see how it is for me.

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
for the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

It's true that snow takes on gold from sunset
and red from rearlights. But that's occasional.
What is constant is white,

or is that only sight, a reflection of eyewhites
and light? Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self,

is a blanket used for smothering, for sleeping.
For not seeing the naked, flawed body.
Concealing it from the lover curious, ever curious!

Who won't stop looking.
White for privacy.
Millions of privacies to bless us with snow.

Don't we melt it?
Aren't we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?
Anyway, the question—

if a dream is a construction then what
is not a construction? If a bank of snow
is an obstruction, then what is not a bank of snow?

A winter vault of valuable crystals
convertible for use only by a zen
sun laughing at us.

Oh Materialists! Thinking matter matters.
If we dream of snow, of banks and blankets
to keep our treasure safe forever,

what world is made, that made us that we keep
making and making to replace the dreaming at last.
To stop the terrible dreaming.