When I was in a junior in college, I thought I had this poetry thing figured out. I was convinced that the first draft of everything I wrote put Paradise Lost to shame. I would wait a good 24 hours after that first draft before sending my work to publications like The New Yorker.  I think you see where this is going.

WORD RIOT, an excellent online publication, had the good sense to reject those poems. I remember pitying the editors; the poor things couldn’t see the brilliance I had given them the privilege of witnessing. Oh, well, on to THE NEW YORKER.

Rejected, rejected, rejected. And thank goodness.

Now, the mere thought of having those poems published anywhere makes me gasp with embarrassment. I read somewhere that a good editor can’t afford to publish bad poems & a poet can’t afford to have bad poems published.

All of this is to say: WORD RIOT has just published 2 of my poems. They aren’t perfect; Paradise Lost would laugh them out of the room, but I love these poems. More importantly, I’m proud of them now & I will be proud of them years from now.

To all of the editors who have rejected me because I wasn’t ready: Thank you. I’m working on it.

from “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” by June Jordan

“It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery, to be turkey/horse/cow, to be cook/carpenter/plow, to be 5′6″ 140 lbs., in good condition and answering to the name of Tom or Mary: to be bed bait: to be legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master’s son/the master’s overseer/the master’s visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in your heart: to live forcibly illiterate, forcibly itinerant: to live eyes lowered head bowed: to be worked without rest, to be worked without pay, to be worked without thanks, to be worked day up to nightfall: to be three-fifths of a human being at best: to be this valuable/this hated thing among strangers who purchased your life and then cursed it unceasingly: to be a slave: to be a slave. Come to this country a slave and how should you sing? After the flogging the lynch rope the general terror and weariness what should you know of a lyrical life? How could you, belonging to no one, but property to those despising the smiles of your soul, how could you dare to create yourself: a poet?”

from “Education of the Poet” by Louise Glück

“The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: want to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.”

from “372″ Emily Dickinson

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes –”

from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

1. With the help of essays like “A Question of Class” by Dorothy Allison and “Gender, Class, and Terrorism” by Michael S. Kimmel, my students and I have been thinking about class quite a bit this semester. To borrow a phrase from bell hooks, if anything is true, we are desperately trying to figure out where we stand: the pink slips, the credit card bills, the student loans, the knock-off designer purses. But – I have to ask – what about the poetry?

2. In “Where We Stand: Class Matters” bell hooks argues that, unlike race and gender, we don’t have a vocabulary for class. Most Americans refer to themselves as “middle class” while statistics show that most us aren’t “middle class” by a long shot. The language of class seems to be hyperbolic at best. Sure, we can name what it means to be exorbitantly wealthy or extremely poor, but where are the words to describe the rest of us?

3. If I accept the idea that poetry emphasizes creative and innovative use of language; that poetry allows us to name what, previously, was beyond the grasp of words, how can I not think about class? How can I not think about the potential of poetry to help us feel our way through these uncertain times?

4. As we continue to search for subject matter worth putting into words, perhaps it’s well past time that we, as poets, contributed to the conversation about class in America. It’s not only a matter of writing poems that examine, depict, and voice economic struggle. It’s about mining our libraries for work that already does so. Think of Walt Whitman’s apostrophe to a prostitute. Think of Langston Hughes’s poems about landlords and tenants. Think of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago.

5. Who among us will write poems for Gary, Indiana? Who among us will write poems for Detroit, Michigan? Who among us will write poems for Newark, New Jersey?

6. As we continue to decry the lack of an audience for poetry, the lack of interest in what we do as creative writers, perhaps the poetics of class offers us a responsibility, but also an opportunity to make our work relevant again (whatever THAT means).

7. Praise to all of you already writing these poems. Praise to all of you already reading them.

1. My 11th grade English teacher wore kimonos; a hip, young white woman who wore kimonos and assigned poems by some dead woman named Sylvia Plath. I remember reading “Mushrooms”. “We shall by morning / inherit the earth.” I went to the library that day and checked out a copy of The Bell Jar.

2. I don’t remember who I was that year. I couldn’t tell you if I was happy all the time or depressed; what music I was listening to; what R-rated movies I begged my mom to let me see. I remember sitting at my desk and mouthing the lines of “Mirror” as I read them in our textbook. “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately.”

3. Before Sylvia, I didn’t know that the open mouths of ovens were fatal. I couldn’t understand why she killed herself. I read The Bell Jar for answers and found none. The woman in the book was Sylvia and wasn’t Sylvia at the same time.

4. My favorite part of The Bell Jar was when the young woman goes home and takes a bath. She sinks into the hot water and stays there until she feels better.  I had taken baths like that before. I loved how my heartbeat sounded under water; how the rush of blood filled my ears; how water felt as it pressed against my closed eyelids. I’m not coming up for air until the air changes.

5. Sylvia Plath was my imaginary friend that year. After taking a bath, I would stand in front of the mirror and think about what Sylvia would say. “Whatever I see I swallow immediately.”

What the Right Hand Knows by Tom Healy

If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting by Anna Journey

A Question of Light and Gravity by Blas Falconer

Horse Dance Underwater by Helena Mesa

I just read a great interview with Major Jackson in which he discusses, among other things, how he came to write poetry and his current project “Holding Company.” It’s a great read. Here’s a taste.

AT: How much of your personal experience and research feeds into your poetry?

MJ: The creative process is a grinder into which you throw carrots, celery, lentils, shrimp, flowers, music, earrings, kisses–all of that. By the time a poem is done, I don’t know how much of my personal life is in. Granted, there may be some poems triggered by a memory, and trust me you, I’m one of those writers who is addicted to memory, but I am lying a lot of the time. I’m also addicted to the imagination. So what finds its way onto the page is an amalgam of everything sifted through my eyes, my nose, my fingers, and my brain. You know, cognition is a fascinating thing because I believe there are certain kinds of knowing, certain kinds of understanding, but what I find pretty amazing about the human mind is that cognition stops at some point and another kind of exploration, of knowing starts to take over. 

There’s a poem that I have called “Blunts”: did I get high in my teen years? Yes, recreationally with friends. Did that actual scene happen? No. I never had a friend named Malik, never had a friend named Johnny Cash. I played basketball with a guy named Johnny Cash, but only knew him on the basketball court and loved his name. I love the metric and the meter of that name. That hard ‘k’ sound. So the aesthetic demands are like the carrot pushing the cart. Oftentimes, I’m really just paying attention to what kind of sound I need, rhythm or cadence I need. I need to find that combination of words and syntax that will lead me to that. Then, I step back and say, “This is why poetry exists, because I never would have uttered something so weighty.” I’m not a profound person. The creative process–sitting down and writing poems–leads me unto regions of knowing that I didn’t know I possessed.

I just finished working on the 32nd poem I’ve written for this manuscript. With each poem, I marvel at the ways words arrange and re-arrange themselves to create new meanings and revive old ghosts. Even more impressive is that two weeks into what already promises to be the busiest semester yet, I’ve realized that being busy actually inspires me to write more frequently. That’s right. Grading papers, reading 2 four hundred page books on Ralph Ellison at once, attending workshop, teaching, and whatever else I do in a given day has resulted in me writing more often & better. In fact, I’m writing almost every day.

During the summer, when I had all the time in the world (it seemed), I wrote every 3 or 4 days. A caveat: writing more frequently doesn’t always translate into better writing, but as I work on this manuscript, it’s helpful for the space between efforts to be minimal. I want these poems to speak to each other. I want the overall project to be a dialogue of sorts. By making the effort to write every day, I increase the likelihood that one poem takes over where another one left off.

I would love to blog more about this epiphany, but I have papers to grade..

As I tribute to the giant spider my roommate & I just found on our front porch, here’s “Black Widow” an essay by Lee Zacharias.

I hadn’t thought they would be so small. In my imagination they were huge, and why not since my only previous encounter had come in a Nancy Drew book? I no longer remember which one, only that when the crook—a counterfeiter or a jewel thief, some sort of greedy schemer—locked the girl detective in a room full of black widow spiders and turned out the light, a shudder slipped down my spine. I could feel them crawling closer, deadly with venom and villainous intent. Never mind that I knew she’d survive, knew even then that there was no real mystery at the heart of the mysteries she solved. Evil in her world was all menace and no force, the evil-doers stupid, and the evil itself easily parsed. But if the villains were petty, the spiders were mythic, black-hearted, potent, larger than life, on a par with tarantulas, piranhas, cobras, boa constrictors, exotic creatures of unspeakable horror.

I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process of working on this MFA thesis. For one thing, I’ve discovered that I might be a closeted-pyromaniac (on the page at least). So, it’s fitting that this morning I came across “Self-Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon” by Oliver de la Paz.

Let me start with fire. A little blaze lit to clear back the scrub brush
brought by the winter storms. Let the air ting with each leaf pop
as the ash of prairie grasses rise skyward. 

And let that fire grow with each gust 
shot straight out of the Cascades far to the west.
The curlicues of smoke fill a sky, void of mountains,

while the corralled horses several hundred yards away
pace nervously back and forth. 
I’m trying to remember how everything settles down

after a fire. How the outcroppings of rock stand out farther
in those charred, moonish surfaces. I’m trying to remember
the nonchalance of a boy used to such things.

I’ve also been reading…

“Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles (translated by Robert Fagles)

“American Sublime” by Elizabeth Alexander

“The Birthmark” by Ralph Ellison

Alex Dimitrov is the recipient of a Roy W. Cowden Fellowship from the Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan. His poems and reviews have appeared in Best New Poets 2009, Poets & Writers, Crab Orchard Review, The Cortland Review,Gargoyle, and The Portland Review among others. He is the awards coordinator of the Academy of American Poets and the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City.

Go to Diode and The Cortland Review to read some of Alex’s work.

You’ve asked me this question before and now I’m asking you: How did you come to poetry? And why do you stick with it?

As a child I used to take piano and French lessons back to back after school.  I hated both, and for my own amusement I started making up songs, in bad French, in some off key melody I banged out on the piano. That’s how I came to poetry. And I’ve stuck with it because I believe it’s possible, though difficult, to create something beautiful. Beauty is truth, like Keats said.  And I know art can wake people up and help them live in the world. I’m interested in lifting people up. One of my favorite performance artists, Marina Abramović, says that her purpose as an artist is to elevate the public spirit. I try to remember that when I sit down to write.

As a recent graduate of the Sarah Lawrence MFA program, do you have any retrospective thoughts on the MFA experience?

I went to an MFA program to meet my family. My teacher Marie Howe calls it “tribal recognition,” that feeling when you meet another writer and you’re instantaneously drawn to one another on this metaphysical, emotional level—which your love of language (and of life and all its details) has made possible.

Could you talk about the process of writing your MFA thesis? How did you approach the project & how did you sustain the energy needed to get through it?

I wanted to write poems about God and time and the power of place. I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and I immigrated to Detroit, Michigan with my family when I was six years old, after the fall of communism in the early 90s. I had a story but like you say, I needed to sustain the energy of the experience, I needed to hear a voice from somewhere so I could start writing and transform that experience. So I sat and waited, and read a lot of Eliot and Dickinson and Glück. And then I’d write a little. I’m constantly amazed when I finish a poem. I always think it’s going to be my last. It’s a kind of melancholy euphoria. The only thing harder than writing is living.

How would you describe your own work? What are your priorities as a poet?

My priorities are clarity and beauty. Anne Carson, who was my teacher at the University of Michigan, has these great lines in Decreation where she says, “I just want to be clear/ and be more and more clear/ until finally/ all you see/ is the line/ left by the cutting tool/ in the heart,/ not even the heart.” That’s what I want. To make something true and devastating, yet stripped down, so it gracefully disappears at the same time. An art so bare, it almost seems effortless, artless.

Thinking about the poetry community, what do you love and what do you hate about the state of contemporary poetics?

I love how aesthetically diverse contemporary poetry is right now.  I was reading Brenda Shaughnessy and Jack Gilbert one after the other on the train today. It was a good train ride.

What I want to do is bring glamour back to poetry, like Anne Sexton in the 60s—holding a cocktail in one hand and her book of poems in the other.  I’m interested in the idea of the poet as a public figure. A man, or woman, of the people. Poets understand and believe in the internal, but the external is an art in itself. The way you look, and the persona you adopt has everything to do with how you imagine yourself in the culture. There’s a lot to be valued in that kind of aesthetic imagination. I’d love to see poets dress up and be fabulous, craft more of a visual identity for themselves.

You recently founded the Wilde Boys Queer Poetry Salon. Can you talk about the group & what it means to you (and others)?

I’m just so happy that once a month I get to be in the same room with an incredibly diverse (and cute) group of young gay New York poets. I love that we argue over the relevance of phrases like “queer poetry” or “AIDS literature,” or what any of these things even mean. We read James Merrill and Henri Cole, Mark Doty and Hart Crane—it’s a big mish mash. And the boys can swap numbers if they want to. Poetry’s about language and desire after all.

Has the Salon affected your thoughts on what makes a queer writer (or reader for that matter)?

I don’t know what makes a queer writer. The first poetry I ever read was Emily Dickinson, followed by Anne Sexton. And those two women are more queer to me than say Thom Gunn, or even Cavafy.  I think being queer has to do with how we transform our disidentifications into something beautiful, something which enables us to keep living.

Now to speak of identification—I’ve always identified more with women writers than gay male writers, but I’m interested in queerness as a kind of vehicle to transcend misery. But I guess that’s all art—all art is queer.

Are there any poets you’ve been reading that you feel deserve more attention?

Victoria Redel, Donna Masini, Thylias Moss, David Groff, Honor Moore, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Raymond McDaniel, James Allen Hall…I could go on.

Creatively speaking, the last week has been a difficult stretch. I refuse to accept the term writer’s block. I believe (or at least, would like to believe) that creativity is about rhythm and, like everything else, that rhythm has ups & downs. With the Fall semester a few days away, my poetic mind seems to have been inundated with anticipated faculty meetings, appointments, classes, papers, papers, papers. So forth & so on.

Of course, you know this reality. Any emerging writer has to deal with the collision of creative & ‘real world’ responsibilities. It’s often frustrating, but unavoidable. So, instead of whining, I want to take this opportunity to remind myself why I am writing these poems.

1. I don’t believe in art for art’s sake. I believe in creativity with a purpose in mind. My purpose is to write poems that act upon the writer (myself) and the reader. Lately, I’ve noticed that I don’t write with an audience in mind so much as a question that I desperately need to answer. While I rarely arrive at a definite answer, the process of writing gets me a little closer. That’s what I get from my poems: the beginning of an answer. Hopefully, readers will use the poems to voice their own questions.

2. I’m writing these poems because I haven’t read them elsewhere. Yes, I am motivated but a lack, an absence of voices that resemble my own. Yes, this has to do with identity & representation. No, I do not shout about identity & representation in the content of my poems.

3. The process of writing this manuscript  allows forces me to confront anger, hurt, and joy that I forgot I had. Poetry requires a brutal attention to detail and so, the act of writing a poem about my personal experiences pushes me within inches of a past that (sometimes) I’d rather take a few steps away from. To write these poems is to talk to ghosts and, more importantly, let them talk back.