Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy battles ghosts assassins, flees morality police, and has his thoughts crossed out by a writer trying to get his story past the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Welcome to Censoring an Iranian Love Story, Shahriar Mandanipour’s innovative novel that braids together the story of a writer attempting to pen a romance acceptable to the censors and the tale of two young lovers trying to connect in a country where being together could cost them their lives.

“I can’t get back inside the country because of this book,” Mandanipour told the audience at his City of Asylum/Pittsburgh reading. Mandanipour is regarded as one of the most accomplished contemporary Iranian writers, but was unable to publish in his native country for six years. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Censoring an Iranian Love Story is his first novel translated in English.

As he explains in this interview with Sampsonia Way, censorship “dominates his soul,” even though he lives in America. But the Iranian imagination, according to Mandanipour, can create subversive and sexy stories in the blanks of the censor’s redactions.

Why did you leave Iran?

In 2006, I came to Brown University with the intent of going back after a year. Then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected and censorship got worse. After I spoke out against censorship, my friends told me not to come back. Then I published my novel, got an appointment at Harvard, and year by year, time’s passed. Sometimes I can’t believe that five years have already passed.

How did censorship get worse under Ahmadinejad?

Under the Islamic constitution, censoring books is forbidden, but the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance created a trick. You can publish your book, but you have to get a permit to get the book out of the publishing house. To get the permit you have to be cleared by the ministry.

How strict they are depends on the political situation. Under Ahmadinejad it’s insane, really insane. The censors know nothing about literature. They are foolish people who are afraid that if they permit a book, they will find out later there’s something behind the sentences and it will be a headache.

When you are living under a regime like Ahmadinejad’s, censorship dominates the environment. It dominates the soul of the people. When they assassinate a person from the opposition party, that is a form of censorship. When women are forced to wear a chador, that is a form of censorship.

If it dominates your soul, can you be free of censorship even after you leave Iran?

After 30 years of writing in censorship, I’m not sure if I can write freely. I try to open my mind, and my prose, but censorship is complicated. I’m not sure if I can get rid of censorship yet. Censorship doesn’t just come from the government, it’s a phenomenon in Iranian culture.

You began writing seriously while fighting in the 1979 revolution, which overthrew the monarchy and replaced it with an Islamic republic. What was that experience like for you?

I told myself, “Shahriar, you are going to be a writer and there is a war. You shouldn’t be at your house.” I don’t regret that experience, although war is regretful in the end. You have to kill or be killed. You will lose your best friends, your best soldiers. Around 15 soldiers in my platoon died, some in my arms.

To keep my mind safe I wrote. Because of the violence, I decided to write a love story. As I wrote, I would hear the Iraqi artillery shooting mortar shells. It takes a shell about three seconds to get to you. You hear them shoot and know a mortar shell is on its way. Sometimes, I’d have to choose a word in those few moments between death and life. It could be my last word. Never mind if I died and nobody read my story. If I could find the best word, it’s life. It’s good, it’s beautiful.

Mandanipour in front of COA/P’s Jazz House, which features a mural designed by Oliver Lake. Photo by Laura Mustio.

You fought for the country that now censors you and forced you into exile. Do you feel betrayed by your country?

I didn’t think about it that way. I love my country. It gave me everything. It gave me my language and my prose. But right now it’s a place of great suffering. Iran is a rich country, but Iranians are getting poorer and poorer as a result of this regime. Hundreds of students are in jail, being tortured, in solitary confinement. Hundreds of Iranian activists are in jail.

Don’t judge Iranians on the basis of Iran’s government. The government is not representing Iran. They are aliens who’ve captured power. There is a sort of monster in this country. Because they come from Iran, the monster could be family. We have to find a way to tame it, to enlighten it. We have to show them how much of a monster they are and how much of an alien they are.

What is the responsibility of the writer in a situation like that?

I don’t believe in any inherent commitment or responsibility for a writer. The only responsibility is to write well. Unfortunately circumstances force responsibility on you and you can’t ignore it. For instance, in 1994, I was one of 134 writers who signed a declaration against censorship. If we were living in a free country, there would be no need to write a sort of political statement against the regime.

I have to write an artistic story, not a political story. But when you are living and writing in a tyrannical regime, everything you write, even a love story, can be political. If you write beautifully you shoot a bullet to the heart of the monster.

What sort of dangers did you face because you took a stance against censorship?

After that statement, 23 of us were invited to Armenia by the Armenian Association of Writers. As stupid writers we accepted and took a bus to Armenia. At 5 a.m., the bus driver tried to drive into a deep valley and jump out. Luckily the bus stopped at the edge. He wanted to kill us like lambs. After—I couldn’t believe it—they arrested us. Then the police came to see if the assassination was successful and found us on the side of the road. We spent the night in jail, then the secret police told us to go home.

You have published in Iran. Are you willing to make compromises so your work can get around the censors?

I don’t agree with censorship, but I have to publish. It’s my personal war. Writing is my gun; I have to use it. If the censors force me to change the word “breast” to because it arouses, and it doesn’t affect the rest of the story, I will do it. If the censor asked me to change a group of sentences that would ruin the story, I prefer not to publish it. I publish a lot outside of Iran right now.

Mandanipour in front of COA/P “House Poem” featuring the work of Huang Xiang. Photo by Laura Mustio

Censoring an Iranian Love Story dramatizes that dance with the censors as the fictional narrator struggles to write a love story without subversive words. What made you want to approach the subject of censorship in a novel?

I was tired of talking about censorship, so I got the idea to write the story and censor it to show how you can write in a way that the censor won’t understand but the reader will. I wrote 15 pages and read it at a conference at Brown University. I realized American audiences didn’t understand it, but they were touched by it. That gave me energy to turn it into a novel.

The novel has a very unique form with changing typography and sections that are crossed out. Do you consider it a postmodern novel?

All the stories have been told. The brave writer doesn’t find a new story, but a new way of telling an old story. If he can, he will make a masterpiece. We have to find a new way of narrating. The story will tell him how to do the job, not the aesthetic school. I love postmodern stories, but I don’t want to be buried in the grave of a label.

If you can find a fresh narrator, then the story goes easily. You find something that wasn’t in your mind before. You find something that is greater than you. When a writer starts writing a story, he is like an egg. He feels weak against the story, against the art, against creativity. He feels very weak, but, if the story works, sentence by sentence, he can feel he is creating. The best pleasure in this world is the moment you finish a story and you feel that it is a masterpiece. You say, “Ah, I’ve made it.”

In Censoring an Iranian Love Story, the censors are no match for the imagination. When they take out a word, your protagonist imagines something much dirtier than what was originally there.

Even if you cross words out, you can still write the sexiest stories in the world. Particularly in a country like Iran where people are familiar with censorship, I can censor the word “the hand” and make ellipses, and the reader will think of many, many different things. It is the power of literature and the power of the word. Words have souls and many voices.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Colleen J. McElroy on Sampsonia Way. Photo © Renee Rosensteel

“There are words that need to get out,” poet Colleen J. McElroy told Sampsonia Way in order to explain how poetry helps us survive.

In this interview she describes a lifetime collecting words and sounds—as a child hidden under the table eavesdropping on adults, as a dancer responding to music, as a speech pathologist working with impaired patients, and as a folklorist recording storytellers from all over the world.

Eventually, all those sounds built up and needed a place to go. They poured out in poems packed with the rhythms of jump rope games, the hum of her native St. Louis, and the stories of African-American women struggling and surviving.

She is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Sleeping with the Moon, which won the 2008/PEN Oakland Award. She has also written several nonfiction works, including Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar. Her awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and a Fulbright Creative Writing Fellowship.

In June, Cave Canem, an organization for African-American poets, held its annual retreat at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus and joined City of Asylum/Pittsburgh for a free reading on Pittsburgh’s North Side. This is the final interview in a series of interviews with the poets who participated in that event.

Read the interviews with Carl Phillips, Sapphire, and Claudia Rankine.

You were an English professor for 35 years at the University of Washington before teaching at Cave Canem. How is Cave Canem different than a writing workshop in a university setting?

In a university you have a closed system where students must to do their work within a specified time period and show how good they are at doing it for a grade. They have less chance to experiment because so much is at stake. Cave Canem, on the other hand, is like a lab. You go into the laboratory and experiment to see if something works. Because they are outside the academic box, Cave Canem fellows can find freedom of expression.

Do you think that MFA programs discourage experimentation?

The MFA program has set the stage for a certain kind of writer. That’s the nature of the beast. You go into an MFA program, work with certain writers, and leave with some of the qualities of your professors. It’s not bad but it doesn’t necessarily show you the full spectrum.

How would you describe your education as a writer?

I didn’t attend an MFA program. I started writing when I was 35, so I had a couple of pre-careers. One was as a speech pathologist working with neurologically impaired patients. A lot of what I did was to tell stories in order to elicit speech from them. I would find out something about their background, and then I would set up dolls you could move around and try to elicit words.

My first poems were stories. Narratives mainly about where I grew up, home stories. Also, I’m a folklorist and I’ve been all over the world collecting oral tradition poems and stories, and that influences my work greatly. I’ve had different influences, folklore, speech pathology, dance…

How has being a dancer influenced your writing?

Dance allows me to hear the rhythm. You can’t intellectualize the rhythm of dance. Your body has to be involved. Very often I’m moving as a write a poem and can work up a sweat in the same way as I would if I were dancing. I can’t dance anymore, but I hear it. I hear that rhythm. Some people meditate. I listen to music. Music puts me in another space so that my imagination can take over.

I love this idea of you dancing as you write. Can you describe your composition process?

I hear something and I take notes. Then I go to the computer and copy what I’ve taken notes on. It might be four lines, it might be 15 lines. I start to read it and I start to move. I might spend all morning with those lines to see what else might happen. When I first started, I would record what I’d done and listen to it while I was putting away the dishes, or when my kids were small, ironing. I would hear what that rhythm was doing. Today, I heard the word “match” in a poem and I closed my eyes suddenly I heard “match” and “itch” and “switch.” It just threaded through the poem.

It sounds almost instinctual.

Much of what I wrote in my first collection was about my childhood. I said to someone, “I never write rhymed poems,” and they picked up my first book and said, “So what’s this?”

It was a poem about my cousins with a rhymed pattern that comes from jump rope songs, from nursery rhymes, and from ads on the radio. I can still remember, “Old Dutch Cleanser’s got it, no other cleanser’s got it.” You inhale sounds like air and you don’t even know it’s there until suddenly it pops forward. I grew up during the time of radio and you’d have to imagine because there was no video. You had to imagine the picture.

In your work, it often seems like the emotional information is contained in the sound of the words. In other words, the rhythm, the rhymes, and the alliteration work together to tell the reader how the speaker is feeling.

Oh yes. The pacing in the poem, the number of breath pauses. It’s a balance of silence and sound. Once you get that rhythmical quality in it, it becomes very hypnotic.

How do you teach that in a workshop?

Part of what I’m teaching is how to listen. The poet reads the poem and then someone else reads it, but the poet has to turn over the page so they can only hear it.

That helps them not to be fixed on the visual. We’re a very visual culture, but we need smells, sounds, tastes. You walk into a space and you think, “Have I been here before?” And it’s not because you see the space so much as there are other clues that tell you, warn you, that you’ve been here before. We call it different things like déjà vu, second sight, but it’s because the primitive sensory system is ignited. Today, I smelled the rain before I saw it and this particular smell of rain in Western Pennsylvania is different from the smell of rain in Seattle.

It seems like the sound of words is more important than the ideas the words convey.

Words aren’t simply words. They represent something. As I would say, take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. The words may be ordinary words. I was in Mali at the cliff dwellings in the Bandiagara escarpment. That is where the first astronomers lived. I wrote a poem that begins, “From the cliffs of Bandiagara the sky is full of stars/ Some are falling, some are not.” There’s nothing extraordinary about that, except that when you hear it the rhythm is there.

You’ve also worked as a folklorist and have collected folktales in many different languages. How has that contributed to your understanding of the importance of sound in storytelling?

Sometimes when I’m listening to a folktale I’m recording, even though I don’t know the language, I can tell when the story gets to that archetypal point where the protagonist has to go through three trials. You can always hear it even though you don’t know the language.

When I was in Japan for the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima, I met with a poet who had survived the bomb. We were talking through a translator, and then suddenly I noticed that the translator wasn’t doing anything and I said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “You guys don’t need me.” We had gone past words. There are some things that you don’t need a translator for; the understanding of two souls that happens below the surface of language.

Do you think that your role as a poet is similar to your role as a folklorist?

In a way it is. The stories that I investigate are stories that bridge the space between the ancestors and now. I have told many students they need to go home to collect those stories from their elders because those people will not be here forever. No story is trivial. Some of the students are hesitant because they don’t know how to ask. And I said, “Well just go up to an elder and say, Can you tell me about…?” And also understand that sometimes they are not quite as clear as they might be, which means you have to ask more than one person.

Is that something you did as a young person?

My mother had a large family and I would hide under the table and listen. I was an only child and spent a lot of time by myself thinking. I’ve spent all this time with stuff bottled inside, ideas in my head. I had lots of stuff to get out, lots of words to get out, and I wanted to see how I would use those words. I love words. I love language. I love how it feels when say it. I love how it sounds.
I also read reference books. I haven’t been doing so recently,because I have an illness that keeps me on chemo so my attention span is shorter these days. I used to just read anything, everything. Read the dictionary, the dictionary of culture, the dictionary of architecture, just read, read, read.
I love books. I love the physicality of the book, the smell of a new book, the history of an old book. I just love the idea of the book, even though there are new ways to make a book and I haven’t tried that yet. I sometimes wonder where all those books will go if I’m not using them. They’ll be electrical impulses somewhere.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Terrance Hayes reads one of his poems at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s 4th annual Jazz Poetry Concert. It was part of a commissioned work, scored by composer-jazz musician Oliver Lake, called “What is Home?”

The poet Terrance Hayes is “bringing the National Book Award home to Pittsburgh,” as he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hayes’ Lighthead beat out the works of four other poets, including established writers such as C.D. Wright. The award was announced at a ceremony at the Cipriani ballroom in New York City on Wednesday, the eve of Hayes’ 39th birthday.

The National Book Foundation has organized the award since 1950, which is for the best book published last year by a United States Citizen. Winners are chosen by a five-judge panel.

Hayes attributed his winning, in part, to the “writing community of Pittsburgh.”

Here is an excerpt of a conversation between Hayes and fellow Pittsburgh poet Lynn Emanuel posted on Sampsonia Way in May.

Terrance, do you find you face a kind of pressure to “take sides” as an African-American poet?

Hayes: I did a reading at a community college in Houston, and the audience was predominantly Hispanic and black. Afterwards, this guy came up to me and asked, “What do you think if your poems make black guys look bad?” And I said, “I am usually the one who looks bad, so I don’t have any problem with that.” The conversation veered toward obligation. I eventually said to him, if you are rigorous with a poem it will be righteous. If it fails to illuminate and make things complicated, then it’s not done. I don’t go into a poem saying this is the side I take but I know I have to work through them, so they become righteous and virtuous. Writing into a moral stance is the object of craft.

Emanuel: That’s an interesting idea, that poetry should be virtuous in some way.

Hayes: Well, what does art do? Does it bring on evil or does it bring on good? Bad art might bring on evil.

Emanuel: I think Robert Lowell embodies an indigenous American poetry. He had a way of being a really complex political poet.

Hayes: No one talks about Lowell as a political poet, but he was engaged. He refused to go to dinner at the White House. He’s the kind of poet—just like Lynn—where you just get to see the mind engaged. You see him processing all these things that are going on around him. It becomes political because politics floats into his consciousness. That’s what I want to do in my own poems: float between those spaces instead of just writing a poem about one thing. Instead I want to look across and get Obama and French fries.

Emanuel: Lowell absolutely implicated himself in everything. He was in a privileged position because he was a Lowell. He could have just partitioned himself behind gorgeous writing and disengaged. But he never did that. He knew he was implicated because he was a Lowell and because he was a white male. I don’t think enough poets do that.

Hayes: That stance won’t work in politics. Imagine a politician standing up and saying, “I’m what’s wrong, I’m what’s wrong.” It’s the right position but then people are going to say, “Hey, I’m going to follow someone else.”

How do you think living in Pittsburgh has informed your work?

Hayes: I don’t feel like a Pittsburgh Poet the way Gerald Stern is or Jack Gilbert is. But being here has made me think more about being Southern.

Emanuel: I don’t yet feel like I have a right to write about this city. There is a special culture here that I am still on the outside looking into. This city is the most interesting city—geographically, architecturally. It’s like a hallucination. There’s always some bridge or some body of water, and you’ll get lost somewhere that looks like the place time forgot. Then suddenly you’re in some stainless steel hallucination of what a building should look like.

Hayes: I feel that way too. Of course, I don’t get lost.

I wanted to talk about humor. There is a lot of humor in both your books.

Emanuel: I think we come by it naturally. You can’t fake it. If you do . . . boy, that would be embarrassing. Humor for me comes out of a certain rage, from when you are really afraid or really angry. It’s a coping mechanism.

Hayes: The kind of humor I shoot for is an uncomfortable laughter. The kind where you’re laughing, but you’re also thinking something deep.

Emanuel: The interesting thing about humor is that it can change really fast. It can really twist a reader around. It is also a way to guard against being sentimental. It’s a ballast against sentimentality.

Read the entire interview.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Musicians of the 2010 Jazz Poetry Concert

Video production and editing by Glen Wood

At age 4, Alfred Patterson hopped on the piano bench next to his older sister and tried imitating her lessons. Suddenly, he realized he was having fun. Thus began his peripatetic musical career from piano to cello to trombone to soprano saxophone, then back to trombone.

He moves just as easily between musical styles: he was a member of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, toured with the American Ballet Company, played in the pit orchestras for musicals such as “Dreamgirls” and “La Cage Aux Folles,” and jammed with the Count Basie and Duke Ellington Orchestras.

For Patterson, “Sounds are a visceral thing, man. Sound makes you purr. Sound turns you on.” Judging by his ever-present smile and bopping movements, Patterson is as turned on by talking about music as he is by playing it. While he told his musical autobiography, his free hand moved to the beat of the words while the other held his trombone.

At the 2008 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians performance, Patterson tapped into that visceral quality of sound when he opened the show with an extended free-improvised solo that All About Jazz described as “a long paragraph of broken phrases.” At that concert, he also read excerpts from Malcolm X’s speeches for a piece entitled “Malcolm 6365.”

Patterson ‘s connections with poetry run deep. Not only do the sounds of the words themselves interest him, but he views poetry’s spontaneity and fluidity as directly related to improvised music. “It only happens once,” he said, smiling.

In this video, Patterson discusses sound, poetry, and the time-sensitive nature of improvisation.

You can hear (and see) more of Alfred Patterson on CD/DVD, “Joseph Daley Earth Tones Ensemble: The Seven Deadly Sins” released last month.

Read Joshua’s bio.

Claudia Rankine on Sampsonia Way, Photo © Renee Rosensteel

According to Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine, “the realm of poetry is everything.” In her ambitious fourth collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, readers will find private reflection on a loved one’s death, discussion of police brutality, and stills from Sam Peckinpah’s films and news clips.

The way Rankine recombines these fragments is idiosyncratic and personal, but together they become social commentary. The book is a meditation on collective loss as the narrator travels throughout New York City trying to make meaning in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A reviewer in Pleiades magazine writes, “I don’t know of a book of poems that so unabashedly, startlingly, successfully partakes of this contemporary combination of turbulence and torpor. It’s consuming to read, engulfing. Raw.”

And yet “book of poems” seems an inadequate moniker for this book that fuses poetry, photos, essay, and memoir. Rankine, who earned her MFA in poetry from Columbia University, has been challenging generic conventions since her first book Nothing in Nature is Private was published as the winner of the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

She also experiments with theater; her most recent work, Provenance of Beauty, is performed on a bus and consists a poetic travelogue through South Bronx, where Rankine was raised.

In June, Cave Canem, an organization for African-American poets, held its annual retreat at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus and joined City of Asylum/Pittsburgh for a free reading on Pittsburgh’s North Side. This is the third interview in a series of interviews with the poets who participated in that event.

Read the interviews with Carl Phillips and Sapphire.

You’ve mentioned T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery—two poets known for their densely allusive verse—as poets you admire.  How have they influenced your work?

The modernist placed a lot of trust in allusions. For Eliot, that trust was necessary to write the poem. Ashbery is wonderful because he creates a space in poems where everything can exist. I love the idea of being in conversation with other poets, philosophers, artists, and the visual world. I love that if I include a photo in the poem, the signifying possibilities of that photo will take the reader so far beyond anything that I can think of. I love opening out the text in ways that I can’t control. That to me is exciting.

There are poets who feel that the realm of poetry is x-thing or y-thing, but I believe that the realm of poetry is everything. If you can think about it and negotiate it and talk about it, then it belongs in the poem. I don’t feel any pressure to resolve any conflicts that arise when you put disparate things together. I want that conflict.

The lyric is most often associated with short poems with a single speaker expressing personal thoughts and feelings. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a book-length text with a multiplicity of voices. Why did you choose to subtitle the book “An American Lyric”?

Much of the thinking in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was inspired by lyric poetry, by people like Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson. It wasn’t an enterprise of information. It was an enterprise of emotional investigation into private thoughts. To me that’s the lyric.

I think of the lyric as creating a meditative space. There’s such a desire to separate our political and social condition from our domestic and private space. To me, they’re intertwined; what’s happening in the government determines where you live, how you live, who your neighbors are, how much money you have in the bank. I wanted to bring the entire political and social condition into a lyric meditative space. All of the best poetry—W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman—take on both our social and political condition and view it through their uniquely personal lens.

In 2003, Kurt Vonnegut told The Progressive that a protest by artists is as effective as  “a banana cream pie three feet in diameter dropped from a stepladder four feet high.” Why bring politics into poetry? What can poetry actually do?

The irrelevance of poetry is also the power of poetry. You can go as far as you can go without having to negotiate people in your way. The only thing in your way is your own imaginative possibilities.

One of the ways you bring politics into Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is through repeating motifs. You keep returning to an image from a news clip about Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, two victims of police brutality in the late ‘90s. In our normal daily life, that image wouldn’t be lingered on. The news would switch to another topic or we would change the channel. You refuse to change the channel.

One of the products of modernity is that we have so much access to what’s happening. We have a stream of information coming in. It is unprecedented when you think about how—between Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet—you can know everything right away. But you can also forget it right away because it’s being replaced the next second by different information.

There are certain ways in which we are being wounded that we shouldn’t forget. What happened to Louima – all the violence that happens to black men in this culture – is not something that should be forgotten. There have been moments when I’ve felt that if we could still them and keep them present, you could remind people, myself included, of these terrible things that are happening.

Rankine reads her work at an event sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh and Cave Canem
Photo © Renee Rosensteel

But doesn’t including references like that date your work?

When people say, if you write about certain things it dates your poetry, I just ignore them. It’s presumptuous to think that what you’re writing will exist for all time, then consequently disallow yourself from engaging in things that might date your work.

I think this really comes down to something as mundane as poets thinking that they don’t know enough or that their own reactions to public events aren’t valid even though they are also subjected to the ramifications of those events.

Politics is part of life and poetry is about life. The desire to designate poems that engage politics as some kind of “lesser than” poem seems to be naïve. Some of our most stunning poets took on politics—poets like Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, Emily Dickinson.

Yeats, Whitman, Ginsberg, and Milosz all take on politics very explicitly in their work. Why do you include the famous recluse Dickinson in that list? She barely published in her lifetime.

Even though she doesn’t refer to things directly, she wrote during the Civil War, which was the most harrowing war this country has experienced. When you consider that, the depth of despair in some of her poems begins to make sense.

In the letters between Dickinson and her editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she writes about poetry and publication. In those letters there is anger, but there is also choice. I love that she chose to keep her poems the way that she wanted them, even if that meant not publishing them. She actually showed a lot of agency. You might say that she allowed herself to be shut down and she was shut down, but I think it’s also incredibly progressive to continue to do what you want to do on your own terms, without public recognition.

Your work often structrually inventive is hard to categorize. Like Dickinson, did you face pressures to change your work for publication?

When I wrote Don’t Let Me Be Lonely a lot of people said to me, “This is really bad, you can’t publish this.” My original publisher said, “We’re not publishing this, this is not poetry.” You have to decide: I’m going to do it because I’m going to do it, even if it means nobody publishes it.

As a person of color, do you face additional pressures in terms of how you’re expected to write and what you’re expected to write about?

Not for me, which is the only person that matters. I’m very glad that I started out defining myself as a poet, but at this stage I see myself as a writer and an artist and so I just do whatever I want. If people want to say, “No, I can’t read this because it doesn’t satisfy my own understanding of poetry,” that’s fine with me. I love my education in poetry. I love poets. I love reading them. They are the people who have guided me through my life, who are necessary to me. Now I make films, I write plays, I do whatever I want. And it’s been working out for me.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

As he sits back
locked in his room
isolating himself
from the world
he cradles back and forth
too afraid to even think
as if it will harm him so
just as himself
he also keeps them locked up
hoping just one day
there will be a better place
where he can let
all his thoughts out,
but three years later he is at a
private school expressing every
thing he feels.

My name is Huang Xiang. I was born in 1941 on December 26 in Wugang in Guidong county Hunan province. My father was a general. I was raised by my paternal grandparents. China was so was ruled by a dictator and everything was supposed to be seen how the government wanted to be seen. Although Communist China took away freedom of speech for me, and I was jailed and exiled, I still became a human rights activist (Huang, vii).

My childhood was rough. When I was born my dad was in a war because he was a General. I went to school but it wasn’t like real school to me or how any regular person went to school. I had to clean toilets and wash walls and I wasn’t allowed to go to school after 4th grade. I found my dad’s hidden books in the attic that were translated in Chinese and English and taught myself. As a kid I found a fish in a well and everybody thought it was contaminated. I was paraded around town and was jailed. After the specialist looked at it and found out the fish was not disease ridden I was freed. I never got an apology. One morning I was talking with my mom and we were told that dad had been executed. When I turned 15 I moved with my uncle and worked in a factory (Huang vii-viii).

My childhood was
Terrible
Not knowing when
My dad was coming
Back and not being able to do
Regular things
Or to see how I wanted
Was being blinded
And deprived of what I
Wanted I
Just grunted
Because I couldn’t do what I wanted
again I just grunted
And I wasn’t the only
we could change this.

In 1958 I got two poems published and they were my first ones. That same year I escaped the factory and got on a train I went to Chasidim. I got caught at the border and border patrol sent me to jail, sentencing me to three years and four months. Because of this I got kicked out of the Writers Association. I got a job at San Jiang and I wrote two poems (“Singing Solo” & “The Greeting”). One of my coworkers told on me about writing one of my poems and I got my citizenship taken away in front of everyone. I ran away again to the north. When I returned home, I worked as a coal miner. I also worked as a farmer on tea farm in Meitan. I made a literary club with my workers (Huang vii-xi).

I’ve been jailed a lot for a bunch of nothing. I got married in 1964 to Ai Youjun. I made my own salon in 1968. 1970 was one of the saddest years of my life because my son died, he died because they wouldn’t treat him in the hospital. I was also put in an insane home. In 1971 my daughter was born. I tried to do a nice deed and give little kids books, but the government said I was messing up their minds. On October 1978 I was in Beijing with a couple friends. I was arrested for being free and being with my friends. I had to do a lot of hard labor. That same year I got another poem published and my worked had been getting noticed more. In 1980 another one of my sons was born. In 1981 I made 15 poems all under the name of “Sonata”. They were entered in a contest, but the authorities took them out and fired the person who put them in (Huang viixi).

As I See
I write
As I see
Not how
You see
Because I
Am true
Not to you
But me
See it differently.

My adulthood was rough too. In 1983 I met the love of my life and she was in a university. Her name was Zhang Ling, and she was expelled and jailed for refusing to incriminate me for being called a rapist. I was jailed from June until September again. The next year I divorced Zhang Ling and got custody of my kids. From 1987 to 1990 I was sentenced to three years of labor for publishing my work underground. Zhang Ling took care of my son by hand-washing clothes for pay. After I was released we lived in the country outside of Guiyang. In 1992 I married Zhang again. I was nominated for my human rights work in China for Hellman Hammett Prize, and I won it in 1994. I got a book of poetry published by prestigious Writers Press in Beijing, but the book was confiscated and banned before it could circulate. I got harassed by cops a lot so I moved to Pittsburgh with my wife and kids. From 1997-2004 we lived in New Jersey, where Zhang found jobs to support us. I lived on the North Side of Pittsburgh from October 2004- August 2007. The mayor, Tom Murphy, made November 20th my day. In 2008 I went back to China for a visit for the first time since I left in 1997 (Huang vii-xi).

Toilets
As I sit, toilet brush
In hand, dirty smelly
Toilet in my face
I think why
Am I taking
This? One day
I’m going to change
This, but how do I do it?
I follow my dreams
Push hard and
Keep writing for life
But I’m not the only one you can change
The world too

In China, Communism succeeded. It succeeded because Mao (he was a leader of a Communist Party) preached a philosophy that appealed to China’s poor. He promised many years of oppression. The support of educated Chinese helped too. After Communists got power they created a new constitution. Communist party members got all the good jobs and high paying jobs. They also controlled the government and economy (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD HISTORY).

Through their eyes
Looking through
Glasses painted by the government
What they wanted
Me to see is
What I refused to do regardless
But still they kept
Trying just
As I did but
Succeeded because hard
Work and trueness
Is power
And not government power
But your own
Type of power
Never let anyone
And I mean any one
Tell you what you can’t do
What you
Want

I have a great legacy to leave on earth. I am satisfied that I helped writers be able to be free and write how they see the world. I will leave behind awesome poems to show how I thought. I will leave my words on a house on the North Side of Pittsburgh. Before, I couldn’t even write in a book without going to jail, but then I got to Pittsburgh and I was able to write on my house. To me Pittsburgh is the land of the free. I have a Hellman-Hammot award to show how much of a human rights activist I am. I helped children now go to regular school and write when and how ever they want.

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“We are at our best when our poems are as vast and varied as the American people are,” poet Jericho Brown said during last week’s 2010 Poets Forum. Brown was one of 35 acclaimed poets who gave readings, lectures, and panel discussions during the three-day conference, presented in New York City by the Academy of American Poets. His statement encompasses the array of opinions, topics and styles the forum represented in its three days.

Victor Hernandez Cruz reads at the 2010 Poets Forum Opening Night. (Olds, Padgett, Phillips, Pinsky seated, left to right) Photo: © Renée Alberts

Events opened with a deeply moving reading from 14 of the Academy’s chancellors, including Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gerald Stern and Robert Pinsky. During brief sets of their diverse work, their steady voices rang with hymn-like tones and crackled with humor. Nye intoned in a poem about her father’s struggle with exile, “We live on puzzles of power/unraveling around us.”

Moments later, former US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan introduced her pieces with lighthearted remarks. “Maybe what contemporary poetry is doing is preserving Wikipedia,” she joked, after noting that she’d found a detail for one of her poems there.

During the forum’s second and third days, panels and discussions addressed questions relevant to practitioners of the craft: How do writers negotiate concepts of self and truth in their work? What risks accompany poets’ technical choices? How do we respond to the work that precedes us? What effect should a poem achieve? The notable poets engaged in lively debates resounding with their esteem for the written word. In moments of disagreement, panelists often turned to definitions and etymology to tease out their arguments’ threads. In the panel “The Mystical in the Mundane,” Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, and Khaled Mattawa’s exploration of terms led them to distinguish between the connotations of sacred and profane, religion and spirituality, and the threatening nature of mystical experience to organized institutions. “Poetry is unauthorized testimony,” Hirsch asserted.

2010 Poets Forum: Sharon Olds and Edward Hirsch discuss the meanings of words. Photo: © Renée Alberts

In the Emerging Poets Panel, “Sincerely Ironic” outlined the influences, dangers and thrills along the continuum of cynicism and sentimentality. In the panel “Wild and Strange Language,” Lynn Hejinian, Ron Padgett, Carl Phillips, and Kay Ryan read examples of avant-garde and traditional poetry that employed sound dramatically. “We only understand what’s wild in the context of what’s strange,” Phillips stated.

In response to an audience member’s concern for the future of poetry in the face of technology, Naomi Shihab Nye stated that the hunger for verse she encounters in young students reassures her that there is no cause for worry.

These poets, whose works have inspired many people, emphasized the importance of reading to their creative processes. Robert Pinsky even produced a binder in which he collects his favorite poems; he rewrites or retypes them himself to collect and carry around. He urged the audience to do the same—fitting homework for a gathering of poetry lovers.

Read Renée Alberts’ bio here.