INTERVIEW
Robert Creeley

POETRY
Robert Creeley
Pam Smith
Ron Lavalette
Gian Lombardo
Hugh Ogden
Gary Lawless
Jane Eklund
Tom Chandler
April Ossmann
Rich Murphy
Graeme Mullen
Lewis Turco 
Elizabeth Tibbetts
Sydney Lea

2004 PUSHCART NOMINATIONS

The First Annual
Coat Hanger Award

New England Reads

Jack Reviews
Robert Creeley

Puerta

 Dedication by   
Jack Anders   

I am sitting here looking at a decorated coat hanger that was made by Didi Menendez' father.  I remember sitting in her computer room in her small house in Miami as she told me about her father.  He had come over to America and had suffered  not only from the geographical and cultural dislocations that immigration entails, but also from internal psychological ruptures of more mysterious provenance. 

From what Didi related to me, I pictured to myself a man struggling to provide for his wife and his family in a new and alien land, while also struggling inside from a more violent and, perhaps, inarticulate version of the spiritual burning, pain and otherness that (to my experience) all poets know, to varying degrees, and that in the medical parlance is known by such monikers as bipolar II, manic-depression, etc.   I imagined a picture of her father as a man in a little bit over his head, in all aspects of life, eventually dislocated to the core of his existential being, despite his best efforts. Her father spent intervals of time in psychiatric facilities and hospitals for his problem, and later in life, deeply incapacitated, he wove colored strands of fabric around coat hangers as an activity in one of those facilities. 

Didi gave me one of the coat hangers, which hangs in my closet here, as I write this.  It is a regular wire hanger, with a careful, meticulous weaving of brown and light beige strands of narrow fabric ribbon, all over the wire, making the hanger thicker and more pleasant to the touch, softer -- braided with patterned diamonds as if of a snake's skin.  Over the raw nerve wire of the dislocated and exposed soul one would like to think that poetry could have a similar function, to wrap, protect and cover. 

The extreme psychological sensitivity of a poet can feel as if the poet lacks a layer of filtering buffering protective surface, armature, that other people have.  For this reason to concept of psychological or existential "exposure" or "openness" has been so important for writers and thinkers of all cultures and epochs -- whether expressed as a radical openness to the universe (the greek notion of the poet as mouthpiece for the muse, the god or demon that speaks through him); to different points of view (Keats' concept of "negative capability"); to visionary contact with the other (Rimbaud's formulation, "I is an Other"); to dissolution of the self in the divine (Rumi's ecstatic poetics); or to painful inner experience ("exposed on the hillsides of the heart," in Rilke's words).

The patient activity of her father as he wove the wire with the strands of fabric is like the activity of a poet as he or she weaves the barren skeleton of history with the mystical clothing of words.  It is like the double function of a pearl:  the oyster secretes the beautiful pearl in spherical layers around a speck of sand which irritates its flesh -- likewise the poet secretes the beautiful poem in layers of imagery around a speck of death which irritates the psyche.  In this manner the core of beauty may well always lie in psychic pain, in what Simone Weil called "affliction."  The craft of art is "a troubled cure for a troubled mind," in the words of the songwriter Nick Drake, and this extends to run through the entire gamut of art from whittling a piece of wood, to carving a scrimshaw, to weaving a coat hanger, to making a poem.  

The poem is a heartfelt, elegant and mystical way of dealing with, transforming the pain of experience.  Where another person might grab a gun, or a bottle of wine, or the TV control, or the car keys, all in an effort to escape boredom, misery, the fear of death, the poet grabs a pen and starts to write.  In this way, the original anguish is radically reinterpreted as joy, as what Weil called "the love of god in affliction."  For there is nothing more strangely beautiful and joyful than something which reveals human fortitude, hope and love from deep within what Stephen Dunn terms the "fraughtness" of real life.  It is not a question of escape into a false heaven, into the unreal imagery of mass religion, into drugs or money or power or Disneyworld or boob jobs or all the other insanities generated by our society in its fear of death, its shuddering speechless nihilism.  It is something much subtler.  It is listening to what the Other has to say, whether that Other comes to you in the form of a muse holding out a poem, a dove holding an olive branch, a child holding a toy, a corpse holding a bone or a dead man holding out a decorated coat hanger.  In the words of Rilke from his Tenth Duino Elegy:

But were these timeless dead to awaken an image for us,
see, they might be pointing to the catkins, hanging
from the leafless hazels, or else they might mean
the rain that falls upon the dark earth in early Spring.

And we, who always think
of happiness as rising feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.

It is said that once the German poet Friedrich Holderlin became completely incapacitated with schizophrenia, he remained able, from time to time, to craft small and gentle poems for visitors. Likewise, Didi's father was able to craft these gentle artifacts which reflect the beauty in order and care he was still able to achieve, and which perhaps represented a metaphor for how he wished to bandage the raw metal of his exposed and damaged nerves. 

One imagines that it would be the hope of any poet to craft an object of carefully braided words which could have a similar effect of calming and alleviating the psyche of the maker, the poet, while at the same time, bringing a token, an offering, of aesthetic pleasure, peacefulness, beauty and usefulness into the lives of those who encounter it.  The braided brown-and-beige coat hanger that Didi gave me and that her father made hangs in my closet, as a reminder to me, a symbol of the hope of poetry.  I never hang my shirts or coats on it, but I do find myself, as I think about it here, as it were leaning my mind upon it, as a token of what supports me, gives me hope.  The braided coat hanger of Didi's father is a symbol of what all of us, I would imagine, hope that poetry may be, and therefore an apt dedication for the award.

2004 Recipients of the the Coat Hanger Award

Dierdre Dore
A Blue Tree

Howard Camner
36 Minutes to Yeehaw Junction

Our judge for this award was Tara Birch.