Never have we worshipped
so many suns:

the morning sun
with its golden tassels,

the evening sun
with its mask of moon,

the sun on the sea
of undulating eyes

that refract the giant eye
watching from space.

Remember when the ocean
was forest.

We used the big razor
to reveal a clearing

of water that could worship
for us.

—Christopher Kondrich, FCRH ’04

About This Poem

I’m fascinated by the ways in which our conceptions of religion and the natural world converge and intersect. When I wrote “Clearing,” I was thinking about the common trope of the forest being a dark and ominous place, about the origins of this trope. Did it come about, as Robert Pogue Harrison discusses in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, because the treetops obscured our view of the sky and, by association, God? And how does this relate to the modern practices of clearcutting and deforestation? These questions haunt me every day.

About the Author

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series and by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. After graduating from Fordham, he earned an MFA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in English and literary arts from the University of Denver. He is an associate editor of 32 Poems magazine.

plucked from the folds of my skirt
and perfumed with citrus and sweat.

Behind me, las cabras and my cousins
calling baaaa-baaaa-baaaa.

In front, foggy glass pitcher
of sugar water in her hands.

I want to steal a lemon, feel the sting
of spring on my pursed lips.

Want to see her, squeezing
fruit again. Her, filling

the pitcher. Her, filling
each of our glasses to the brim.

—Li Yun Alvarado, Ph.D., GSAS ’09, ’15

About this Poem

My brother and I spent our summers with our extended family in Puerto Rico when we were kids. My grandparents had a limón tree in their backyard, and beyond the yard’s chain link fence there was a huge field full of goats that my cousins, brother, and I would spend hours imitating. I wrote this poem to honor Mama Merida, who passed away in 2007, and the many happy memories we had in that backyard. This poem has even more significance for me now that my papi, Jun Alvarado, has joined Mama Merida after he passed away in December.

About the Author

Li Yun Alvarado is the author of Words or Water (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She earned a Ph.D. in English at Fordham, where she also served as the graduate assistant for the Poets Out Loud reading series. A native New Yorker, she lives in California and takes frequent trips to Salinas, Puerto Rico, to visit la familia.

Christopher Kondrich, FCRH ’04, writes poetry that deals largely with human connection—our connections to each other and to the world around us.

In his newest collection of poems, Valuing—a 2018 winner of the National Poetry Series prize—he explores the personal value systems we form through these connections, and through the meanings we place on intangible concepts like faith, love, ethics, and mortality.

In “Asylum,” Kondrich writes, “I choose to love our auspices / because they brought us here, to love / disobedience because it shows the freedom / to love or not love. Or value.”

As one of five poets to win the National Poetry Series competition last year, Kondrich received a $10,000 cash prize and a contract with the University of Georgia Press, which published Valuing last month. The poet Jericho Brown selected Kondrich’s manuscript from more than 1,500 submissions, describing it as “a philosophical work of art,” with “potential for influence on poetry and on any mind made vulnerable to poetry.”

New Yorkers will have a chance to hear Kondrich read from his award-winning work at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 16, as part of the University’s 2019–2020 Poets Out Loud reading series. The event, which will also feature poet and memoirist Kenny Fries, is free and open to the public.

Attendees will find that Kondrich is unafraid to tackle big societal issues in his work, as he did with gun violence last April as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. In “Common Things,” he wrote:

“Even if you do not own a weapon, you could. / And because of this you are complicit. / But you cannot do anything about most things. / You cannot put the arms back onto a statue / is another way of saying you can’t put a bullet back into a gun.”

Since 1992, Poets Out Loud (POL) has presented free public readings featuring dozens of emerging and renowned poets, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kay Ryan, Yusuf Komunyakaa, and Tyehimba Jess. The POL Book Series, run in coordination with Fordham University Press, issues two new full-length volumes of poetry each year.

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series, opened the Feb. 26 event with a few meaningful words about how the organization goes about selecting its readers:

“The quality of the poetry is always the main criterion,” she told the audience, “But tonight’s reading also fulfills one of POL’s real aims: a commitment to representing a range of styles, ethnicities, and sexualities.”

Meg Day and Sharon Wang, the evening’s featured poets, embody both of those ideals—excellence of craft and a commitment to representation—in personal and unique ways.

Meg Day, whose 2014 book Last Psalm at Sea Level won the prestigious Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, is a poet whose work is difficult to pin down in terms of style or subject. In fact, that might be the point: a self-identified member of the LGBTQ community, Day often focuses on the interstitial nature of bodies and identity. And as a deaf poet—there were two American Sign Language interpreters on hand Tuesday night—Day also tackles issues of access and interpretation.

Take, for instance, “Portrait of My Gender as Inaudible,” a new poem that Day introduced by noting: “[It] came out of my frustration with closed captioning, and the way that closed captioning is evidence of sound—but oftentimes it’s evidence of sound that people can’t hear, the irony of which is hilarious to me,” she said, referring to captions that deem something “inaudible.” The poem concludes with this almost ineffable image:

I made a photograph of my name
It was a shadow in a field and I put my shadow in it
You can’t hear me, but I’m there

Day prefaced their next poem with a brief history of the Americans with Disabilities Act, explaining that it “states that reasonable accommodation is all that the government has to provide for you if you’re disabled.” Day continued: “Reasonable accommodation is really just trying, like, ‘Well if you’re trying to provide access that’s enough, that’s reasonable.” The poem, aptly titled, “Reasonable Accommodation,” begins:

You’ve met me halfway between the door to our bedroom
And the other we know is real only because you are always gesturing, “There it is.”

The evening continued with Sharon Wang, who earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and won the Kundiman Poetry Prize in 2016. Tuesday night’s reading was co-sponsored by Kundiman, an organization dedicated to cultivating Asian-American creative writing that holds its annual retreat at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Wang’s work is often concerned with the natural world, the sense of touch, and loss. As Dubrow described it, “Her emphasis on what is unattainable is reflected in how often many of her titles refer to elegy, those poems of loss and death.”

Wang read both from a new collection of epistolary poems and from the book that earned her the Kundiman Prize, Republic of Mercy. The first poem she read, titled “Dear Sentient Being,” set the thematic tone for all that was to follow, with its descriptions of nature that conflate the natural world and the human body:

I want a world that clicks into place like my molars
When I wake up my teeth are worn down from the night

Wang wound down the evening with an elegy called “Mea Culpa,” a selection of which reads:

I thought I could hone my mind until intellect and emotion were a single organ
The way a snake’s motion comes from the musculature of its entire body, and when it moves
There is no part of it that has not moved.

The event was also sponsored by the FCLC Dean’s Office, the Fordham English Department, and the Axe-Houghton Foundation, with additional support from the Gerald M. Quinn Library. It was funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

The next Poets Out Loud event is on Monday, April 8.

–Dane Gebauer

Nausheen Eusuf is a celebrated Bangladeshi poet.  She’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Boston University, and holds degrees from Wellesley, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Georgia. Her academic credentials are relevant because her poetry is, well, academic—but it’s also relatable, conversational, playful, and heartfelt. Among her many other accomplishments, she was included in Best American Poetry 2018, which she jokingly acknowledged at Monday night’s reading: “I’m a citizen of Bangladesh,” she quipped, “I don’t know how I got into Best American, because I’m not American.” Eusuf then dove into “Allegiance,” a love poem that, as she described it, “takes the immigrant experience as a metaphor for the foreign territory you enter in a relationship”:

I said I have nothing to declare, no valuables,
no currency, contraband, nothing. An alien,
I feared deportation. What if I can’t assimilate?

Later, in one of the more emotionally charged selections of the evening, Eusuf presented “Not Elegy, But Eros,” a poem dedicated to Xulhaz Mannan, an LGBTQ activist who was murdered in 2016 in Bangladesh. The last stanza of the poem reads:

I have faced the flash of steel, the howl
of unholy voices. But it was their eyes,
their hard unloving eyes, that undid me

Renato Rosaldo took the podium next.  It’s difficult to recount his background concisely: his work is widely influential in the field of anthropology, he’s a professor emeritus of anthropology at NYU, and he’s a founding figure in the Latino studies world. In 1996 he began writing poetry, and what followed was a blend of multilingual phrases, distant voices, and remembered scenes, a style he dubbed antropoesía, or “ethnographic poetry.”  Rosaldo read first from his 2014 book The Day of Shelly’s Death, which focuses, as he told the audience, “on the accidental death in the Philippines, on October 11, 1981, of Michelle Rosaldo, my then wife.” The poems are tragic and deeply personal, as they take the point of view of various persons and objects he was surrounded by on the day his wife died.  Take, for example, the second stanza of, “The Tricycle Taxi Driver”:

After noon the soldiers arrive breathless,
say an American woman fell
from the precipice near Mungayang.

The night ended on a more jubilant note, however, as Rosaldo shared poems from his forthcoming book The Chasers. They recalled his time at Tucson High School with a group of his Mexican-American friends, “more club than gang,” whose “jackets made them visible at Tuscon High.”

The next Poets Out Loud event is on Thursday, October 18.

–Dane Gebauer, FCLC ’13

The group’s last reading of the season featured poet Tyehimba Jess, who read from his second book Olio, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Also reading were three teen students who took part in Poets Out Loud’s high school outreach program.

Jess—known for his poetry slam skills—read from his series of sonnets on conjoined twins who were born into slavery, made to perform in freak shows, and eventually earned enough money to buy the land where they had been slaves. (See him read from these sonnets at a Tedx talk.)

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., Fordham’s John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination and director of the Poets Out Loud reading series, said having an accomplished poet like Jess was a great way to end the season.

“We were delighted to have Pulitzer Prize winners at both the beginning and the end of this year’s series,” she said, referring to poet Kay Ryan, who read in October.

“We like to represent poets at all stages of their careers, from emerging writers to very distinguished ones. It was wonderful to include Tyehimba Jess, not only because he is distinguished but because of what he offers in other ways. The poetry is splendid; it draws attention to many contemporary experiments with poetry and it engages with historical issues and some of the most shameful issues in our country’s history.”

Jess had a tough act to follow. Before he took the mic, the high school students got up to read their work, which dealt with issues both personal and global. Laurynn Laurore, an 11th-grade student from East Side Community High School, read her poem “Music”:

Music

Music wrapped around the peaks of my ears
And placed a kiss on my ear drums
The sounds bounced up and off the shaking of my hips
To cascade down my body
You watched in amazement
You had never seen me like this
So completely lost in something
You might have been a bit jealous

This is what I wanted for you
To get lost in the magic of music
So I pulled you close and sung the tune in your ear
Hoping it would kiss you too
Hoping it would flow through you
And teach you how to move with me

Laurore was joined by Alesha Alli, from Bronx Early College Academy, and Deliana Rosario, from the School for Excellence.

In a loud, strong voice, Alli read from her poem called “Perspective”: “We complain about the rain/and when our food is too plain/While there’s children in Africa/ suffering endless pain.”

Rosario read softly from her poem, which focused on a relationship: “You’ll never know my story/because it’s never been told/Maybe it’s just toxic/the little hope that we hold.”

Poets Out Loud’s high school outreach program, started by Dubrow in 2009, aims to fosters an interest in reading, writing, and listening to poetry among high school students in underserved communities in the city.

Just before each event in the reading series, these students gather for a workshop—run by a Fordham graduate student—on the poets who are going to read. The poets themselves join for the final 10 minutes. Then the students join the audience for the reading.

Dubrow said that many audience members express how they never thought they were interested in poetry, but that their teachers encouraged them come to the event and that got them excited about future readings.

“The series is challenging and exciting because we bring poetry to so many people, both those who have long been seriously involved with it and those who, through the readings, realize how much it has to offer,” said Dubrow.

U.S Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan, who grew up in the San Joaquin and the Mojave Desert, told PBS’ Jim Lehrer that she became interested in poetry, or “compressed language,” because it can be “highly selected” without making one feel as if they’ve “just had a vitamin pill.”

For Rajiv Mohabir, an acclaimed Indo-Caribbean-American poet who has lived in New York, Florida, Alabama, London, and Hawaii, poetry serves as a conduit to his cultural oral traditions and the different places he has called home.

“I can’t help but pick up pieces and leave pieces everywhere I go,” he said.

As part of the 2017-18 Poets Out Loud reading series, Ryan and Mohabir will deliver readings of their award-winning work on Wednesday, Oct. 25 at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. The event, which is co-sponsored by the college and Kundiman, will be held in the Lowenstein building from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

“Poets Out Loud has a longstanding commitment to represent a range of ethnicities and poetic styles, and audience members may well be intrigued and excited by this particular pairing,” said Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., holder of the John D. Boyd S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination and director of the Poets Out Loud reading series. “Mohabir’s language is luxuriant and multilingual and Ryan’s language is spare, with apparently straightforward words often juxtaposed with startling ones.”

Kay’s collections of poems include Erratic Facts (2015), The Best of It, New and Selected Poems (2010), Flamingo Watching (2006) and The Niagara River (2005). Besides her Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has received a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a National Humanities Medal.

Despite these accolades, Kay, who has taught remedial English at the College of Marin for more than three decades, has created equilibrium between her own independence and the literary spotlight she is often thrust into. In the cleverly titled, “Lime Light,” from Say Uncle (2000), she affirms: “One can’t work by/lime light.” Meanwhile “Blandeur,” another poem from the same collection, finds Kay endorsing a similar refrain: “If it please God, let less happen.”

In contrast, the poems of Mohabir, a professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama, Georgia, may seem expansive. “Ode to Richmond Hill,” recalls the vitality of the Little Guyana community in Queens, New York, the words pulsating like the soca, calypso, and Bhojpuri folk music of his ethnic customs: “eyes in disbelief, Pick up yuh/paisa, na man! no worry/on this slate day youths dem/speak no Hindi to know paisa/means money, a taxi speeds/by blaring chutney remix.”

Mohabir will be reading poems from his debut poetry collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016), and The Cowherd’s Son (2017), for which he received the 2015 Kundiman Prize.

“As a student, I remember going to these types of readings and saying, ‘Oh my god! Is it possible that I can write like this?’” he said. “I feel like it’s cool to be in such dialogue and inhabit that space where people are actually listening to what I say, but then also thinking about how to include the things they never thought they could do in their own writing.”

Ryan, who will be reading poems from The Best of It and Erratic Facts, enjoys the unique perspectives that  poetry readings can bring.

“What I most enjoy about reading my poems to an audience is the sense I get of a big collective mind receiving them, a mind bigger and more convincing than any individual mind,” she said. “It’s nice to read to a really big mind.”

Castillo-Garsow said she wrote the poem while living in the area as a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute.

Gary Keenan, a New York City poet who was chosen as the POL prize winner for his manuscript Rotary Devotion, and New Englander Michael Snediker, winner of the Editor’s Prize for his manuscript The New York Editions, who is currently teaching in Houston. Next fall Fordham University Press will publish the winners’ submissions, and a book launch will be held.

After the sudden and tragic death of the poet C.D. Wright, who had been chosen to decide this year’s POL prize winner, fellow poet Alice Fulton was asked to step in as a judge. On Keenan’s Rotary Devotion she wrote: “Rotary Devotion is deeply attentive to the rigors and joys of being alive, and it conveys this consciousness with delicacy and wit.”

POL co-director Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., who edits the book prize series, selected Snediker as the Editor’s prize winner and wrote: “I am familiar with no other poet who creates such a sensual and embodied language, while at the same time providing such intellectual richness.”

Founded in 1999, the POL book prize series selects between hundreds of entries each year. Two are published. “We receive manuscripts of extraordinary quality and beauty,” writes Frost. “We truly regret that our resources do not allow us to publish more volumes.”

POL co-director Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., assisted in the competition as a preliminary reader, and screened over 25 entries. “Any screener of these manuscripts realizes how much first-rate poetry there is out there, and hence what an honor it is to win or be listed as a finalist,” she said. “The prize books bring national visibility to the POL program.”

In 2017 the Poets Out Loud reading series will celebrate its 25th anniversary. The series hosts free public readings at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, wherein poets are invited to read their work to an audience. You can learn more about these events here.

– Kiran Singh

Your new book is a collection of poems. What made you choose Arsonville as the title? 

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, about a mile and a half from the Boston city line. When I moved to the area 20 years ago, Somerville had a horrible nickname: Slummerville. In the years that I’ve lived here, the town has gotten more and more gentrified, and I think my title captures something of the juxtaposition between the old city and the newer city.

Arsonville also speaks to me about global warming and environmentally destructive and other self-vexing aspects of the country as a whole. About a year after I decided the book was going to be called Arsonville, there was a big outbreak of arsons in Somerville.

You studied philosophy at Fordham. How does philosophy contribute to your poems?

I learned to be a close and careful reader in both my philosophy classes and my literature classes. The first great philosophy class I took was on Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel with Dr. Kenneth Gallagher, when I was a freshman.

All of my poetry friends at Fordham took Father John Dzieglewicz’s classes on the Symbolist Movement. He would actually play bits of Debussy on the piano when he taught Verlaine. His sense of poetry as being un-siloed and related to all of the other arts, music in particular but also painting, made a huge impression on me.

The philosophy core was heavy on Aristotelian naturalism. The importance of the physical world and sensation that I found in my partial reading of Aristotle and Aquinas pre-disposed me to favor image-driven and concrete modernist poetry by William Carlos Williams and a similar tendency in Walt Whitman. New York City is the ideal place to read and discover poetry.

Comparisons are sometimes made between you and dead poets, like Frank O’Hara. Who’s still alive that you admire? 

There are an enormous number of amazing poets right now. Living in the Boston area, I’ve gotten to hear poets who live around here­­. If I had to choose one poet and one poem, I would say to read Derek Walcott’s sequence The Schooner Flight. That is a sort of an ultimate poem. As I worked on Arsonville and then Friends with Dogs, which came out this spring, I found a lot of new inspiration in the poet Donald Revell. Like my mother, he’s from the Bronx. I look for poets who combine a strong sense of imagery rooted in the physical and social world with inventive and energetic language.

As a teacher at the University of New Hampshire, did you become a better poet?

I’ve been teaching poetry and creative writing classes, mainly on the undergraduate level and recently on the graduate level as well, and I think it did make me a better poet. I get to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading great poetry aloud, which certainly keeps poetry in my nervous system.

Teaching puts you in touch with other people, and the teaching of poetry is a particularly joyous experience to share.

–Kiran Singh