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American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Could also be titled: Experiment for Experiment’s Sake.

I only got through 2/3 of the book (has to go back to my local library) but what I did read was very mixed. My chief concern with this anthology is how it breaks down the tensions in United States Poetry to a “fundamental division” between narrative and experimental texts when all that is explored in this volume is the negotiation between variations in U.S. English non-linear narrative in contemporary academic poetry without putting any focus on hybrid texts outside of academia and/or explore the boundaries of English.

Many of the selections from the poets really only hint at the possibility of hybrid text as the samples rarely show a collision of the two coming together with only a few poets actually able to balance plain language and disrupted text in a single poem or even a few pages. Some of the poets who do show the best of all worlds in this collection include Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, John Yau and Harryette Mullen.

With a shaky premise to begin with (poetry has always benefited from a collision between various camps, not just a late 20th century argument between academics), a very loose definition of “academic poetry” (probably included because almost every poet is in academia), and a mandate that hybrid poetry can lead us back to a “purer sense of language” and help in the “renaming of the world” (I thought that was the job of all poetry), this collection doesn’t offer a plurality of voices but instead seeks to limit the definitions of what new poetry can be.

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The summer of 2005 was a trip for me. I moved out of the Bx and defected to the dark side (aka Brooklyn), decided I would no longer be curating/hosting Acentos, met Barb, and was fresh out of poems. Yeah, I was sure as hell that I had no new poems in me and, for the first time in my short time writing poetry, was very cool with that fact. So I was living a paradox of not writing poems but more confident than ever that I was a poet since I was sure that a summer of not writing but doing some intense and varied reading would make up for my lack of poetic output.

The other dope thing that happened was reading Miles by Miles Davis because it showed me that greatness (in any art) takes time, practice, a plan, more time, and risk. Reading on how Miles put together the Birth of the Cool session then moved on to Kind of Blue and transformed again for Bitches Brew put me in some hard check. Here I was thinking the world owed me something after writing poems for three years when Miles was out there working on his craft for decades, had the world knocking for more of the same, and then went off for a decade to remake himself.

The funny thing about the summer of ’05, the summer I resigned not to write any poems, was that it was one of my most productive time periods with some of my first Bronx and mythic poems coming out of me. (Barb was sending some great poet challenges my way and that was where most of those poems came from.)

One more thing I got from reading up on Miles is what a bad human being he could be. Great artist doesn’t always equal great person and in the case of Miles it doesn’t even equal a fairly decent role model. He was a junkie and abused the hell out of women, sins that no amount of great music can ever make right.

Thanks for showing me the ways, Miles. The good ones to follow and the bad ones to avoid.

A few unexpected things happened during National Poetry Writing Month:
• I finished a chapbook that was in production for about 18 months.
• I started a new chapbook of poems completely different from the voice I’ve been using for my Anywhere Avenue poems.
• I failed in writing a new set of remix poem to accompany my Anywhere Avenue poems.

Heaven Below
This chapbook started out in the summer of 2007 as Anywhere Avenue II and it was just going to be a continuation of the poems from the first chap. The big wrench in my plans was writing “Psalm for Anywhere Avenue,” a poem that (duh!) should be in the first chapbook but was written a few weeks after I finished the original chap. My first thought was to just strike one poem out of the original chap and replace it with “Psalm.” Good plan except I had a whole ‘nother group of poems come out of my IWL, VONA and Kearny Street poetry workshops, enough poems that I would have to do a major revise of the first chap by eliminating all the poems I wasn’t happy with and changing the complete order of the book. I almost went through with this plan cuz a chapbook contest I had my eye on was coming up and I figured my best shot at winning this contest was to just send out all the best poems I had at the moment, wrap em up in the best order possible, and send it off.

Good plan (the sequel) was thwarted when I decided that as flawed as Anywhere Avenue might be it was still the best work that I had when I put the chap together and it wouldn’t be the move to just keep moving poems around to make room for the world’s best chapbook. This might be the first time I really started thinking about manuscript and that there was no reason why my MS poems couldn’t be all about Anywhere Ave but also come from different corners of Anywhere Ave as well.

Good plan (the return) got knocked out the box with the arrival of NaPoWriMo 2008. For whatever reason I thought it would be a good idea to attack NaPoWriMo with a plan and the plan was to write poems around one theme: Palimpsest. This time, the plan worked and by the time NaPoWriMo was over I had almost all the poems I needed for a new chapbook all that was missing was a few pages which got done in the summer with “Fire Escape.” Now I had a brand new chapbook still connected to my MS project but without double dipping into any of my previous poems.

Now here I was with these orphaned poems who were getting edited and revised as part of the MS but didn’t have a chapbook home and who I had no idea how to connect together. When in doubt, retrace your steps, and so I went back to the work of Jack Agüeros and re-read Sonnets from the Puerto Rican and was struck with one poem in particular–Sonnet for Heaven Below. This poem of subway magic with angels living underground in the City helped me find a new start point for my orphaned poems and off I went to make a magic #4 train line where the Pope, Pedro Pietri and Ronald Reagan all get to share space with a Nathaniel Mackey inspired “We” of Anywhere Avenue.

For whatever reason, I always thought that this group of poems was a little shy of the 16 pages I needed for a chap but once I stepped it into gear I realized I had 20+ pages. So I had enough poems, already had secured the cover art back in ’07 and now only needed one more thing to make it complete, a “Heaven Below” poem.

This poem was living in my head for about six months, just a constant refrain of what I know from City and what I really know about City, comparing and contrasting the good and bad of urban livin that finally came out on at the start of NaPoWriMo.

Three weeks later, book is all done and ready to be shared with the world. In the “Not So Good Plan” Dept, doing this while writing NaPoWriMo poems, submitting to two national poetry workshops and day-to-day livin was not the smartest move and probable accounted to why my original plan for NaPoWriMo ’09 went very much to the curb. Luckily, it was a real good curb pretty much as far from Anywhere Ave as my imagination could take me.

From the official web site:

Our 35th Chicano/Latino Literary Prize Contest has been cancel for this year.

We will keep you updated for the up coming year. We thank you for all your support.

I’m not surprised to find this out as the website has had no information for the last few weeks and the e-mail contact and telephone numbers listed have been down as well.

This was one of the contests I was looking forward to entering this year and (cue the cry of the optimist) felt I had some chance of doing well in. This isn’t a boast or brag, just an honest assessment of where I feel I’m at in my progress right now. I don’t enter every contest that comes down the pipe hoping that “Yes, this is the one!” but pick and choose where I’m sending out my stuff. The upside is I am not throwing away all my extra money on the Poetic Industrial Complex’s version of “la bolita.” The downside is every rejection letter I get hurts, big time. One I got last summer put me into a funk for at least a couple of months.

But that’s the game of endorsed publication, you gotta be in it to win it and you can never take it personal. Two lessons I learned when I was poetry slamming but it was cool back then cuz I never had my heart invested in becoming the next poster child for slam/poetry jams/spoken word/performance poetry. My heart is all about getting a book out there through a quality press that will work with me to produce the finest piece of book art possible and include me in a lineage of artists whose work has inspired me.

All that said, I know the decision to cancel this year’s Literary Prize can not have been an easy choice (especially with the current fiscal state of California and its impact on the UC budgets) and I hope the rich tradition of this very necessary institution can continue on for next year and beyond.

Imagine if all sports news conferences were like this: LeBron James reciting “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Mark Sanchez reading “So Mexicans are Taking Jobs from Americans,” Tiger Woods dropping “The Tragic Mullato is Neither,” Barry Bonds going off with “The Pure Products of America Go Crazy.”

Of course, we did have Muhammad Ali being, well, Muhammad Ali back in the day but more sports figures are more interested in either canned catch-all phrases (We’re going to give 100%), overwrought hype (I’m giving them 1000% of me!) or just some straight up nonsense (I’m expecting my teammates to bring 50&, our coach to do the same, and I’ll take care of the rest.).

Looks like for now, I’ll have to settle for my own version of fantasy poet sports and keep listening to this reimagined Blake looking to charge up England for this Saturday’s football game.

Props to Author Scoop for first pointing me to this video.