I recently had a chance to sit down and talk to Dr. Steve Kistulentz, a local writer, about his new book of poems entitled The Luckless Age.

If you skim through the titles of the poems, you may find yourself laughing. Only a child of the 1980s with a PhD in English could write a poem called, “The Rick Springfield Sonnet.”

“The persona in the song Jesse’s Girl is really just a jerk,” Kistulentz explains to me. “I mean you tell me who screws who in that situation? In the poem I ask, ‘Is Jesse really your friend?'”

Kistulentz doesn’t stop with Rick Springfield; many elements of his youth are referenced throughout these poems. Evel Knievel, Hank Williams Sr, and Frank Sinatra are among the many cultural icons who receive a shout-out. For example, he adopts the narrative voice of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island in “The Skipper Talks to His Therapist.”

By the time I’d been on the island

A year, I’d wasted maybe three months

Of it beating off to a torn magazine pages

Of an unattainable beauty, a redhead

Who was fading before my eyes, going soft

Like the bananas I ate every damn day.

But this book is not all throwback jokes about popular culture. In his first poem, “World’s Forgotten Twentieth Century Boy,” he opens, “Here is my century, as it actually was.” I’m going to pay him the highest compliment I can and describe some of his language as distinctly Joan Didion-esque. There is a sense of foreboding in the poems , a grisly fear of the overly-genial Reagan era and a distinct feeling that perhaps this is it, perhaps life can fizzle away at any moment. This is a book of poems with the fullness and scope of a novel.

Like everyone else, I wondered about the title of this collection. What is this so-called “luckless age?”

“The best answer that I can give is that it is the period of time bookended by the end of the Second World War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent anti-communist revolutions that swept through Eastern Europe,” Kistulentz says on his Web site.”I was looking for a title that could at least make the honest attempt to encompass both what the novelist and short story writer Richard Yates called the Age of Anxiety (he was referring to the post-hydrogen bomb and Sputnik escalation of the Cold War) and what I saw as the false optimism of the Reagan era. It’s a landscape populated by the forgotten and marginalized, reported from the mosh pit and the boardroom, the bedroom and the bar. Its voice emerges above the white noise of modern broadcasting to paint a portrait of America at once brutal, honest, and yet hopeful at its core.”

The book is split into three sections, but Kistulentz encourages readers to tackle the 80 pages of poems from start to finish. My personal favorite poem has changed multiple times, but I can’t stop reading “Wild Gift” and “Bargain.” I don’t want to try to explain what the poems are about because I’m still discovering new phrases throughout the collection that blow my mind. It takes a real gift to tell sardonic tales of teenage romance alongside stories of addiction and death. His voice is self-aware, connecting tales of adolescent floundering with a real grip on the rawness of loss. These poems express a complex longing for a era much deserving of such eloquent reminiscence. -Nell

Steve Kistulentz was at Lemuria Thursday, February 10, 2011.

The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz (Red Hen Press, 2011)

When I was a student at the University of Southern Mississippi, I was lucky enough to have Angela Ball as one of my academic advisers.  During my years there, I went to several of her poetry readings.  And I should tell you now that I’m not really a big poetry fan, but Angela’s poems are lovely.  So you can imagine that I was pleasantly surprised to find her poetry here at Lemuria.

One of my favorites is her poem “The Dress with Books on It Is Too Small” from the collection Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds. I thought I’d share it with you right here. So here goes.

The Dress with Books on It Is Too Small

In a local salvage outlet, a meta-store avid

For disaster, there’s a dress with books on it:

Printed shelves of “classics.”

Perfect for the girl with boundaries

For her dates: “Get your hand away

From The Mill on the Floss,” she could say, or

“Ethan Frome is off-limits.”

Buy it, why don’t you, and take it folded

To the library, to be the slim librarian’s plumage

As she haunts the stacks. Or convert it

To a tablecloth, so that you may eat risotto

Off Great Expectations and rest your wineglass

On Moby Dick.

Imagine the textile mill: Clack,

Darcy asks Elizabeth for her hand, Whirr,

Anna Karenina throws herself beneath a train.

Frenetic weavings of stories, till they’re whole cloth.

Soon, a reporter will write MIRACLE

FABRIC TAKES SURFACES TO NEW DEPTHS,

SAVES LITERATURE.

-Kaycie

Lately if I have been in a mind to read poetry, it has been that of Rainer Maria Rilke. A collection of selected poetry was given to me as a gift awhile back, might have been Christmas; but I think that it is one of the only gifts that is still giving as much as the day I got it. I was not very familiar with Rilke before I received this collection but now he fascinates me beyond most. Coming on the scene in the late 19^th century he became one of many powerful transitional figures of the time, along with his mentor and friend Rodin. Rilke is able to paint his poems in such a beautiful way and communicate the goods. I made the mistake of reading one of his Elegies over lunch one time, and I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to come back down. Lines like:

Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living

they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

have a tendency to put a hitch in your giddyup. It is easy in our time to scoff at anything that resembles a Romantic “troubled soul,” but if one is so inclined there is much to gain concerning our own troubles. It has been a wonderful benefit of picking up his Letters To A Young Poet. I like to do. I like to write music and what not, but still consider myself very much an amateur. And this collection is like having a renowned artist write me several letters. Even though it was written a century ago, young artists tend to be very similar in nature and problems. Its been a very useful tool in swinging around a few curves and decisions. Bottom line really is that, if you like poetry, you can’t go wrong with this guy: if you’ve read him, you can read him again; if you haven’t read him, read him.

-John P.

I have not read much in the past few days. Sometimes you just have to let your mind empty out. Once emptied, it can be used  and filled up again. Emptiness is often thought of as a negative condition, but I am thinking of it in the positive sense. It seems to me that Kay Ryan’s poem relates to the condition I am describing.

“Emptiness”

Emptiness cannot be

compressed. Nor can it

fight abuse. Nor is there

an endless West hosting

elk, antelope, and the

tough cayuse. This is

true also of the mind:

it can get used.

(from The Best of It: New and Collected Poems)

See my previous blog on Kay Ryan, our national Poet Laureate. Also somewhat related is John P’s posting about Reader’s Block.

Pearl London with students (featured in Poetry in Person; Estate of Pearl London)

I think most people have had a teacher who made a difference in their lives. Margrethe Alschwede taught a class entitled “Women’s Lives” where I went to college. I still reflect on that class as it continues to help me in so many varied and unnameable ways.

No doubt Pearl London was one of these teachers. As a new teacher, she started a course at New School in Greenwich Village entitled “Meet Poets and Poetry, with Pearl London and Guests”. Despite a list which included W. S. Merwin and John Ashberry, nobody really payed attention; few students signed up. Then Pearl spiked thing up a bit; she asked the poets to brings in works-in-progress, doodles, scrap pieces of paper that revealed the process of writing poetry for such poets as Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, Muriel Rukeyser, and Derek Walcott, to name a few.

Set in an usual room with a nine-panel mural by Thomas Hart Benson, the course soon became sought-after by students and (future) prize-winning poets alike. And Pearl was not to be forgotten with her colorful style and excitement for poetry.

As I put up a new display for National Poetry Month, I came across Poetry in Person. Alexander Neubauer, also a teacher New School, learned of Pearl’s class and eventually became aware that there were tapes of these meetings with famous poets. He carefully edited and compiled the transcripts with background information on the poets. Neubauer writes about his editing process for Poetry in Person:

“My primary goal was to capture the poets’ voices and habits of thought as faithfully as possible, whether they spoke in complete paragraphs, like Walcott and Matthews, or sounded like telegrams. In short, poets not only spoke for themselves, they were also allowed to sound like themselves. Since cuts had to be made, much of Pearl London’s voice was lost in favor of space for the poets.”

Despite the focus on the poets, I think it is easy to feel the behind-the-scene energy of Pearl in the book, as Neubauer explains: “. . . Edward Hirsch repeats a line from Robert Frost to the effect that if a book of poetry holds twenty-nine poems, the book itself becomes the thirtieth poem . . . Pearl London loved that thought, and I think I know why. There was a narrative drive behind the rhythm of her questions, energized by a deep love of poetry–and poets. Her classroom became the thirtieth poem, and, one hopes, that energy and love will be present in this book.”

Thanks to all the Margrethes and Pearls in the world!

The Best of It, March 1, 2010, Grove Press

Poet Kay Ryan “starts with details, oddities, categories, then unscrews and rebolts them, magnetizes them so that in turn they draw all the bright filings the world throws out. Each of her poems is like a telescope that keeps the observer at a distance while focusing on her subject with disconcerting intimacy.”  (J. D. McClatchy, Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry)

Kay Ryan is our Poet Laureate 2008-2010.

I thought that “The Edges of Time” was apt for the season of Spring, when suddenly we shake off the winter funk and ambitious energy flows once again, “a humming begins.”

“The Edges of Time”

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things  or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

Nick Flynn’s Some Ether (Graywolf Press, May 2000) was his first collection of poetry. I read it based on a recommendation from a friend of mine who is a poet. I was coming off of a long Yeats binge and was wondering what was being read by the people writing poetry, and this was one of ten collections he suggested.

This is a dark collection based on several themes, but almost always coming back to the event of his mother’s suicide. The latter portion of the collection deals with Flynn’s homeless father. But the weight of the material doesn’t cripple the collection. Flynn’s not really taking any cheap shots at you. Sentimentality is risked and earned. The dark themes are honest so they’re not thin. The imagery is well-crafted. The collection is  not cumbersome and it’s not too long. Thanks Mr. Flynn.

-Hunter