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Behind the Byline

G. C. Waldrep

May 5, 2016

20140627_144811_Richtone(HDR)Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which NER shares conversations with our current writers. Poetry editor Rick Barot spoke to G. C. Waldrep about G. C.’s new poem, “Chipping Campden,” which G. C. calls “my favorite single poem of the last five years of my life.”

 

RB: “Chipping Campden” has a visual, emotional, and even metaphysical grandeur that immediately captivated me. Can you talk about the poem’s origin, and the process of composing and revising that led to the poem that’s now in NER?

GCW: I had a sabbatical in 2013–14 and at one point was staying in a 17th-century former banqueting house on the edge of Chipping Campden, in the English Cotswolds. The town is famed for its picturesque qualities, as well as for its role in the early 20th-century Arts & Crafts movement; dwelling for a week in the surviving outbuilding (the mansion is long gone, a victim of the British civil war) constituted a small oasis in my life, which at that time was dominated by an array of creeping neurological symptoms that might have been Parkinson’s—but thankfully, in the end, were not.

I didn’t know that yet, though. Suffice to say I was even less at home in the body than usual. I scrawled the poem longhand in my notebook on 30 June 2014, more or less intact; the revisions were all essentially edits, tightenings. The pear tree in what had been the orchard, the sheep that kept trespassing from their lower pasture—all this is just reportage, as Oppen averred. Midas creeps in on his own terms, which are the terms of misplaced value, not of the reality of any shared experience (and which of course leaves him, in the end, so tragically alone).

 

RB: The poem feels like it’s in conversation with the great lyrics of the Romantic era, from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” to Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree My Bower” to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Were you thinking of the Romantic tradition while writing “Chipping Campden”?

I wasn’t thinking of Shelley or Coleridge, certainly—but it’s difficult to walk in the English countryside, even now, and not be aware of that tradition. I wasn’t thinking explicitly of “Tintern Abbey” either, but I like the idea that this poem is in conversation with that great poem, although the loss of childhood is different from the loss of the body, gradually, that still travels with us, in mutual time.

Oddly, I was thinking of Eliot. The insufficiently acknowledged and deeply gracious poet Peter Larkin, with whom I’d corresponded, had driven down to Chipping Campden to meet me in person, and he offered to escort me on a walk, over Dovers Hill, with the goal of trespassing onto the grounds of Burnt Norton—yes, that Burnt Norton, which, he said, was owned by a gentry family seated in (if I recall correctly) Staffordshire. He’d visited the rose garden and the drained Edwardian swimming pools a few times in the past. We let ourselves in by a back gate and spent a few moments pondering said roses, said pools—they have not much changed since Eliot’s day—even reciting bits of Eliot’s poem. I then wanted to see the house, which we wandered up to, only to discover (a) the gentry were indeed in residence and (b) we had blundered into a swanky garden party. Eventually we were accosted by one Lady Harrowby, who explained, politely but firmly (once she realized we were gate-crashers), that this was private property. We were escorted off.

I had never been evicted from a poem before. It is an experience I recommend (although I did write a formal note of apology to Lady Harrowby once I was back in the USA). “We were warned off the site of life / as we are warned off the site of death” refers to that eviction—as well as to other evictions, of course. The phrase “likely prop of attention” quoted in the poem comes from Peter Larkin’s poem “Pastoral Advent.”

 

RB: With Joshua Corey, you recently edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, a brilliant and challenging anthology. Did the work on that anthology influence the poem in any way?

Not this poem, I don’t think. Our work on The Arcadia Project took place mostly in 2007–10, a good bit earlier in the scheme of things. Other work of mine in more recent years is more directly responsive to ecological stimuli . . . although in the necropastoral sense there is always the reality that we are shepherding physical forms towards their eventual disintegration, whatever else we do or believe. I was very close to that reality, vis-à-vis my neurosystem, in Chipping Campden.

 

RB: Who are the poets, old and new, who are on your radar these days?

The poets who are always with me—Hill, Char, Celan, Darwish, Milosz, Gennady Aygi, R. S. Thomas. C. D. Wright, of course, who has left us, and Alice Oswald and Anne Carson, who have not (and who have new books coming out later this year). Alice Notley, mostly in terms of her epic-length Benediction. A lot of 5th-to-8th-century Syriac mysticism, including The Book of Steps. I was glad to spend time with the new Keith Waldrop Selected Poems, although he (like Leslie Scalapino and Susan Howe) works best in rangier, book-length structures—for instance The House Seen from Nowhere or Transcendental Studies.

Some newer books that have interested me include Martin Corless-Smith’s Bitter Green, Gabriel Gudding’s Literature for Nonhumans, Zach Savich’s The Orchard Green & Every Color, Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property, Robin Coste Lewis’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus, Brian Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and Anne Boyer’s Garments against Women.

This summer I plan to reread all of Nelly Sachs. And also all of Brenda Hillman and Cole Swensen—it has been many years since I read their fine early collections. Hillman insists in Practical Water that the poem “doesn’t abandon you,” and Peter Larkin also refers somewhere, I think in a more ecological sense, to a “counter-abandonment.” I am interested in this definition of poetry, as that-which-does-not-abandon.

Here is the link to where I was staying:
http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/east-banqueting-house-6633

 

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: G. C. Waldrep

New Books for May from NER Authors

May 12, 2015

 

“The most moving and expansive poet to come out of the American Midwest since 9780393246124_198James Wright.”

New England Review congratulates David Baker on the publication of his new book of poetry, Scavenger Loop (W. W. Norton & Company). Baker is an NER author with poetry forthcoming in NER 36.2.

Baker’s latest work layers the natural history of his beloved Midwest and traces the “complex history of human habitation, from family and village life to the evolving nature of work and the mysterious habitats of the heart.”

David Baker is the author of Never-Ending Birds and several other collections, and has won awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. He is editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Denison University.

 Purchase this book at W.W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

riverhouseCongratulations to NER contributor Sally Keith on the publication of her newest collection, River House (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which features poems of absence written after the loss of her mother. Keith is the author of The Fact of the Matter and two previous collections of poetry, Design and Dwelling Song. She is a faculty member of the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, DC. Keith’s poem “Song from the Rain” appeared in NER 24.4, and two  poems, “In the Desert Near . . .” and “What heavenward gesture . . . ” in NER 33.2. In addition, her essay “The Spirit of the Beehive” appeared as an original New England Review Digital piece in our ongoing series, Confluences.

“. . . when you’re finished reading, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again.  I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss.” —James Longenbach, author of The Iron Key

Purchase River House at Milkweed Editions or at independent booksellers. 

 

testament_bookstore“Waldrep offers us his most necessary book, one that asks us that question we fear ourselves to ask: how is this real, any of it, all of it, faith, language, light, history, and that cipher that collects them all, the human heart?” —Dan Beachy-Quick

We are pleased to announce the publication of G. C. Waldrep‘s latest work, Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). From the publisher: A book-length poem, Testament addresses matters as diverse as Mormonism, cymatics, race, Dolly the cloned sheep, and his own life and faith. Drafted over twelve trance-like days while in residence at Hawthornden Castle, Waldrep . . . tackles the question of whether gender can be a lyric form. Intimately autobiographical, Waldrep’s fifth book masterly takes its own place in the American tradition of the long poem.

Waldrep’s most recent poems in New England Review include “What David Taught and Where He Taught It” (NER 34.3-4) and “Their Faces Shall Be As Flames” (NER 35.3). The recipient of multiple awards, Waldrep teaches at Bucknell University, is editor for the literary journal West Branch, and editor-at-large for Kenyon Review.

Purchase Testament at BOA Editions, Ltd. or at independent booksellers. 

 

Russian_Poetry“An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry.” — Penguin Classics

NER congratulates Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk on their new anthology The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (edited with poet Irina Mashinski, Penguin Classics, 2015). From the publisher: This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets—Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them—in captivating modern translations.

Chandler and Dralyuk’s translations and writings have appeared in the special section “The Russian Presence” of New England Review‘s double issue 34.3-4. Chandler is a poet and translator of many works of Russian literature and teaches part time at Queen Mary, University of London. Dralyuk is a lecturer in Russian at the University of St. Andrews and translator of many books from Russian.

Purchase The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry from Penguin Classics or an independent bookseller. 

  “A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” —W. S. Merwin

 

9780224099837-1-edition.default.original-1We are pleased to announce the publication of NER contributor Mark Doty‘s newest collection of poems Deep Lane (Norton 2015). From Publisher’s Weekly: “Having gained renown for his self-consciously beautiful, heart-on-sleeve elegies, Doty remains elegiac and continues to attend to beauty. He also does some of his best work yet as a nature poet.”

Mark Doty’s work appears in NER volumes 13.3-4, 31.2, and 32.1. He has published eight volumes of poetry, and his collection Fire to Fire won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Doty’s work has also received numerous honors including the National Book Critics Circle Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a professor and writer-in-residence at Rutgers University.

Purchase Deep Lane at W. W. Norton & Company or at independent booksellers.

 

New England Review congratulates contributor Lauren Acampora on her debut novel, The Wonder Garden (Grove, 2015). Acampora creates a portrait of a Connecticut suburb through a collection of linked stories that wonder garden coverPublisher’s Weekly calls “intelligent, unnerving, and very often strange.”

From the publisher: “A keen and brilliant observer of the strangeness that is American suburbia. Acampora joins the ranks of writers like John Cheever and Tom Perrotta in her incisive portrait of lives intersecting in one Connecticut town . . . Deliciously creepy and masterfully choreographed, The Wonder Garden heralds the arrival of a phenomenal new talent in American fiction.”

Lauren Acampora’s fiction has appeared in NER 27.3 as well as NER Digital, Paris Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. 

Purchase The Wonder Garden from Grove Atlantic or at independent booksellers.

 

“A brace and necessary set of early flares of the literary imagination into the Panopticon we all find ourselves living inside these days.” — Jonathan Lethem

We are excited to announce the publication of Watchlist (OR Books 2015), a collection of short stories about surveillance society edited by NER contributor Bryan Hurt.

Hurt’s work appears in NER 33.2 as well as in American Reader, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, and many others. He has published a novel, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, and is the winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Purchase Watchlist at OR Books or at independent booksellers.

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, NER Community, News & Notes Tagged With: Boris Dralyuk, Bryan Hurt, David Baker, G. C. Waldrep, Lauren Acampora, Mark Doty, River House, Robert Chandler, Sally Keith

Celebrating our fortieth year!

Volume 39, Number 1
Cover art by Jeanne Borofsky

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Confluences

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

Didi Jackson

Brancusi’s Bird in Space

I move around the gold line
of a bird until I see a single feather,
the sky and song inside reflection,
an endless body balanced on beak,
the foot a hackle of bronze. . . .

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