Serving poetry with your pumpkin pie

Many of our Thanksgiving traditions are slightly twisted versions of what really happened. There wasn't any turkey served; the first one was probably in Texas, not Massachusetts; Pilgrims didn't dress in black or wear tall hats. But if our myths aren't really based in history, we might as well invent some new ones -- and, for example, bring poetry home for the holidays

The Poetry Foundation has collected 21 poems just right for Thanksgiving. There are those that celebrate fall -- "To Autumn" by John Keats, "The Garden of Proserpine" by Algernon Charles Swinburne -- but aren't particularly American. But there are also Americans like Robert Frost ("The Gift Outright") and Paul Laurence Dunbar ("Signs of the Times") if you'd rather keep your holiday poetry close to home.

Other poems are focused on food and its legacies: "Yam" by Bruce Guernsey, "Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo and "Butter" by Elizabeth Alexander, who read at Barack Obama's inauguration.

And there are a few that give thanks. Like Robert Herrick's "A Thanksgiving to God, for His House" the call-to-action "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson and "Thanksgiving" by Edgar Albert Guest, which begins:

Gettin’ together to smile an’ rejoice,

An’ eatin’ an’ laughin’ with folks of your choice;

An’ kissin’ the girls an’ declarin’ that they

Are growin’ more beautiful day after day;

Chattin’ an’ braggin’ a bit with the men,

Buildin’ the old family circle again;

Livin’ the wholesome an’ old-fashioned cheer,

Just for awhile at the end of the year.

Best time for reciting your Thanksgiving poem of choice: after the wine has been served yet before the food coma kicks in.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: "The First Thanksgiving," by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

LA inkSlam poetry festival includes heavy-spitters

Those who want to see lively live poetry should not miss the inkSlam Los Angeles Poetry Festival, which kicks off Wednesday and runs through Saturday The lineup features more than 50 poets, including seven national poetry slam champions and nine regional champions. Shihan, above, is one of four poets who have appeared on "Def Poetry Jam" on HBO.

Shihan is one of the four founders of "Da' Poetry Lounge," L.A.'s largest weekly poetry open-mic night. It takes place every Tuesday at the Greenway Court Theater, which is where the inkSlam festival is being held. The theater is at 544 N. Fairfax Ave., adjacent to the Fairfax High School campus.

The Greenway Arts Alliance operates arts education programs for Fairfax High students as well as the theater, and is a sponsor of the inkSlam festival. It's keeping the theater open during the day for workshops, focusing on the art and the business of being a poet. At night, there are performers' showcases -- and the high-octane poetry slam competition. Tickets run from $5 to $20.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Lord Byron letters sell for a record $459,000

Today in London, a collection of letters from British poet Lord George Byron sold at auction for $459,110.67, exceeding the highest pre-sale estimates by more than $160,000 and selling for more than any other letters or manuscript by a British Romantic poet. Although the letters were written to a clergyman, they were -- in keeping with Lord Byron's reputation -- somewhat scandalous.

In the letters -- more than 71 handwritten pages -- Byron mocks fellow Romantic poet Wordsworth, a rival, calling him "Turdsworth" and, according to the Guardian, pens "details of a squalid affair with a serving girl, fruity remarks about foreigners and literary vitriol."

Sotheby's specialist Gabriel Heaton told the Guardian, "Byron clearly enjoyed writing slightly outrageous things to a clergyman, but you do also get a very strong sense of the depth of friendship they had. There's a real intimacy."

Born poor and with a club foot in 1788, Byron grew up to be legendary lover of both women and men, to inherit a Lordship and then overspend his wealth. And, also, to write "Don Juan" and "She Walks in Beauty." The Poetry Foundation gushes:

He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era's poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence.... In his dynamism, sexuality, self-revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon nineteenth-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism.

Lord Byron remains one of the most dynamically faceted and colorful figures in English letters, one who has been studied up and down. About 15% of the letters have never been published, and remain unstudied. No doubt scholars would love to get their hands on this set of letters, which has been owned by a single family since 1855 -- but so far, the buyer's name remains under wraps.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

When poetry goes bad, on purpose

There is a certain anxiety around high art. What are those opera singers saying? Is that Giacometti sculpture a little unsettlingly skinny? Is Stockhausen supposed to sound this way? And if I don't like something, does that mean I don't get it? Poetry too. Maybe especially poetry.

But with "B is for Bad Poetry," Pamela August Russell does away with those fears. It's all bad. With titles like  "Despair, Party of One," "Popeye, Hamlet & Sartre (A Rendering)" and "Donner Party Review," it couldn't possibly be good -- could it?

The poems are so deliciously bad that they're fun. Here's "Joni Mitchell Configuration":

Oh, I could drink
a case of you
and then pass out
in my own vomit.
When the EMTs arrive
to pump my stomach,
I'll still be slurring
your name.
Oh, I'll still be slurring
your name.

That's not the only lyrical reference (Dean Martin's signature song makes the bad poetry grade too). And I recognized a few genuine poetry referents -- e.e. cummings here, Rainer Maria Rilke there -- it might just be that there's a little bit of serious poetry play giggling behind the scenes.

The giggler is Pamela August Russell, a writer who, her bio says, "lives in Los Angeles by the freeway." That's where all of us writers go when we're not visiting museums, attending concerts or trying to read the subtitles at the opera.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Celebrating Robinson Jeffers, today at Occidental College

Robinson Jeffers, one of the earliest literary heroes of California, will be the focus of a five-week Big Read project at Occidental College, kicking off today with readings and the opening of an exhibit, "Robinson Jeffers and the Ecologies of Poetry."

Jeffers and his wife Una, after they married in 1913, had hoped to move to England but were dissuaded by the onset of World War I. Instead they traveled west, and found a home along the wild coast near Carmel. "For the first time in my life," he later wrote, "I could see people living -- amid magnificent and unspoiled scenery -- essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer's Ithaca." In his poem "The Continent's End," he put it this way:

At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,

The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established sea-marks, felt behind me

Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent, before me the mass and double stretch of water.

The Big Read, a project of the National Endowment for the Arts, supports community-based reading focused around a single book or author, supplying teaching materials and other resources as well incidentals including bookmarks and T-shirts. There will be, Occidental's blog about the project promises, T-shirts tonight; donations will support the Wildlife Waystation.

Nature was essential to Jeffers' work. "To feel / Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural / Beauty, is the sole business of poetry," he wrote in "The Beauty of Things." The exhibit "Robinson Jeffers and the Ecologies of Poetry" will feature rare Jeffers artifacts, photos, and books, as well as works of other poets who have been influenced by Jeffers, water-themed artwork by Los de Abajo Printmaking Collective and exhibits on North Los Angeles ecology.

Through Jeffers' critical ups and downs -- his environmentalism and criticism of mankind hurt his popularity -- his connection to California remained constant. He helped to build his home, called Tor House (pictured) on the Monterey coast, learning from the contractor and later constructing the stone tower on his own. He died there in 1962, 48 years after first catching sight of its rocky promontory.

Many of Occidental's events celebrating the work of Robinson Jeffers are open to the public; here is the complete schedule.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation

National Poetry Series: five new winners

The National Poetry Series has announced the five winners of its 2009 manuscript competition; each winner's work will be published in 2010.

Erica Meitner, who teaches at Virginia Tech, will see her work "Ideal Cities" published by HarperCollins. Penguin will publish "Burn Lake" by Carrie Fountain of Texas. Georgia University Press will publish Colin Cheney's "Here Be Monsters."

Fence Books will publish "The Network" by Jena Osman, who teaches at Temple University. Julie Carr teaches at the University of Colorado; her book "Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines" will be published by Coffee House Press.

The series has published five books of poetry annually since 1979. Mark Doty, Denis Johnson and Billy Collins are past recipients of the honor.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Luis Argerich via Flickr

When the Beats moved to Paris

In 1956, as the obscenity trial of "Howl" was underway, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso decamped to Paris. American and British artists and associates joined them there, at a cheap, dirty hotel at 9 Route Gît-Le-Coeur in the city's Latin Quarter. The hotel already had a clientele of oddballs and prostitutes, pimps and police, but it became known among a certain set as the Beat Hotel.

That's also the name of a coming documentary by Alan Govenar and Alan Hatchett. Its main window into that time is Englishman Harold Chapman, who left a job waiting tables and hitchhiked to Paris to photograph it. He wound up meeting Ginsberg and Corso, moving into the hotel and, some said, trying to become invisible so he could photograph the people who passed through. But he's not invisible; he's interviewed extensively in the film, and his photographs constitute much of its visual content.

In the trailer, he says Ginsberg had "quite a different style." He continues:

That's one of the things I learned from Allen. That you don't have to worry about the conventions of  composition in photography, or anything, you just invent your own, and so forth. Just do whatever you like.

Chapman's pictures appear in the photo book "The Beat Hotel," published in France in 1984. Copies are available from AbeBooks for $100 to $300. A cheaper version of the story -- if a longer, less pretty read -- is Barry Miles' 2001 history "The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963."

And then there's the coming documentary, which will have the pictures, older men looking back on the period, and, if the trailer is any indication, a really snazzy beat-jazz score.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Want to live like Robert Frost?

Poets who have published at least one book are eligible to apply to live in Robert Frost's homestead next summer. The two-month residency is in the farmhouse in Franconia, N.H., where Frost lived with his family from 1915 to 1920; in later years, he summered there. The home is now the Frost Place Museum, which, its website says, "sits on a quiet north-country lane with a spectacular view of the White Mountains.... Accommodations are spartan but comfortable."

This summer, Rigoberto Gonzales will be in residence, doing readings in and around the area.

There seem to be plenty of places for non-poets to stay if they want to stop by the museum or hear Gonzales read. This despite the fact that the town remains small -- in 1920, the population was 440, and by 2000 it had only grown to 924.

Which is probably good news for those wanting a truly authentic Robert Frost experience. There have to be some woods left nearby ... with some roads less taken. You know, like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

Read the rest of "The Road Not Taken" and more of Robert Frost's poetry at the Poetry Foundation.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Robert Frost in 1954.

Credit: File

Upcoming LBGT arts festival heavy on the literary

Eloise Klein Healy, pictured, is one of the poets making the trip from L.A. to San Francisco for the National Queer Arts Festival, a six week-long festival of music, dance, visual art, spoken word, poetry, comedy, fashion and theater. 

With hundreds of events taking place in 18 venues across the city, you might think that poetry and literature would be drowned out. But in fact, one of the highlights is Testimonies, Chisme, Spilling the Tea on Monday, an evening of poetry featuring Dorothy Allison, Rigoberto González, D.A. Powell and Angelenos Healy, Ching-In Chen and Griselda Suárez. Tickets run from $12-$20.

The festival, which began in late May and continues through July 11, is organized by the Queer Cultural Center. It's now in its 12th year.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times

Shakespeare: the immortal bard(s)?

Were William Shakespeare's "Sonnets" the "Basement Tapes" of the Elizabethan age? The idea, suggests Clinton Heylin in "So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets" (Da Capo: 280 pp., $24), is not as farfetched as it sounds.

The first edition of the "Sonnets" -- which appeared 400 years ago today, on May 20, 1609 -- was put out by Thomas Thorpe, a fringe figure in Elizabethan London's literary culture, less a legitimate publisher than what Heylin calls a "booklegger." In that sense, the "Sonnets" may have been an early bootleg -- published without Shakespeare's knowledge or permission, much as "The Basement Tapes" were when they leaked out in the late 1960s and essentially started the rock 'n' roll bootleg industry.

As to why this is important, partly it's a matter of historical curiosity, because the provenance of the "Sonnets" has long been questioned, as has the identity of the "fair youth" to whom they were addressed. (Heylin believes the intended recipient was William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke.)

But more to the point, it has to do with the line between public and private art, between what writers (or singers) create for public consumption and what they create for themselves. In much the way Bob Dylan did with "The Basement Tapes," Haylin argues, Shakespeare used the sonnets to try new things, including writing in a nakedly autobiographical voice. Would he have been so daring if he had been writing for an audience? Would he have felt so free?

Heylin was on NPR's "All Things Considered" this morning, talking about his book. At the end of the segment, NPR asked listeners for their selections of works that might still stir people 400 years from now.

This is the sort of mind game for which I generally have no use, because it operates from a false premise: that the value of a work of art is in posterity. No, if "Sonnets" -- or "The Basement Tapes," for that matter -- have anything to tell us, it's that the power of art is its immediacy, its ability to speak to a particular moment or situation, and in so doing take on issues (love, longing, mortality) we all share.

But then, this afternoon, I came across the new book by Albert Goldbarth, a collection of poems called "To Be Read in 500 Years" (Graywolf: 186 pp., $16 paper), and I began to wonder if 400 years was not enough.

Of course, the premise of Goldbarth's collection (or one of them, anyway) is that the future is a place we can't imagine, which only makes the issue of posterity more elusive -- and the longevity of the "Sonnets" more profound.

-- David L. Ulin

Photo Credit: Folger Shakespeare Library