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As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor
W. W. Norton & Company, Alice James Books
W. W. Norton & Company, Alice James Books
With National Poetry Month comes spring flowers and some of the year’s biggest poetry publications. And as April wraps up, we wanted to bring you two of our favorites — retrospective collections from two of the best poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.
Howe’s New and Selected Poems makes a concise case for Howe’s status as an essential poet. The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine gathers all of the beloved late poet’s work, a monument to a treasured career.
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe
Marie Howe is writing some of the most devastating and devastatingly true poems of her career — and some of the best being written by anyone. Her subject matter, from a bird’s eye, is simply the big questions and their non-answers: What are we here for? What does it mean to do good? What have we done to the environment? What are the consequences and what do we who are here now owe to those who will follow us? And yet her tone and straightforward delivery make her poems as approachable as friends. Howe is the rare poet whose poems one wants to hug closely for company, companionship, and empathy; and yet they are works of literature of the highest order, layered, full of booby traps and shoots and ladders that suddenly transport one between the words. It’s tough love that these poems offer, but it’s undeniably love.
This first retrospective gathers a book’s worth of new poems along with ample selections from of Howe’s four previous collections, each of which was a landmark when it was published. Her nearest antecedent might be Elizabeth Bishop, who also didn’t write very much, or didn’t publish very much, but everything she wrote was good if not capitol-G-Great. Howe is best know for What the Living Do (1997), which remains one of the great books on youth and grief, regret, and moving forward if not moving on. It regards a world in which “anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I lost.” Startling, almost koan-like statements like this erupt out of unassuming domestic scenes, making everyday life into high drama.
The typical speaker of a Howe poem is a woman who seems much like Marie Howe, even when she is speaking through the voice of the biblical Mary, as she does in Magdalene (2017): “I was driven toward desire by desire.” She is serious except when she’s funny, though she’s rarely laugh out loud funny — it’s more of a kind of internal laughter, either like blossoming light or paper rustling in one’s chest. She is consoling, except when she is taking herself and readers to task, bowing under the simple, Herculean responsibilities that come with living a life, being a parent. She’s tough, sometimes even stoic, except that in almost every poem there is a moment of surprise, a revelation, a piercing insight that injects a kind of pure ecstasy.
Some of the new poems are among the best Howe has written, making them among the best period. Set “In the middle of my life — just past the middle,” these poems grieve lost friends; reckon with the sudden adulthood of a daughter; lament the destruction of the environment; and take the moral measure of this very disturbing era. Each of these everyday dramas becomes an access point for the deepest kind of human reconciliation, where we must finally admit where language fails us. These poems also feature a recurring character, “our little dog Jack,” who, with all best intentions, becomes one of Howe’s most devastating metaphors. But all metaphors have their root in plain fact. As Howe writes in “Reincarnation,” one of her best poems, “Jack may be actually himself — a dog.”
Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine
This is one of those monumental events in American poetry: the life’s work of a major poet gathered in one big book, an opportunity to revel in all that Jean Valentine accomplished in her long and prolific career. As a young poet, Valentine (1934-2020) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1965, for her debut collection, Dream Barker. In 2004, she won the National Book Award for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003. In between, and after, she was always well regarded by the mainstream poetry establishment, winning most of the prizes available to an American poet.
But Valentine’s real influence was as a friendly ambassador to and from the avant-garde. It’s hard to pin Valentine’s poems down: I wouldn’t call them experimental, but they are anything but straightforward in their slippages of thought and wide leaps of association. Fairly early in her career, Valentine begin working in a style that had her teasing the reader with images, gently suggesting the way the poem should go, until, perhaps, a thunderclap at the end disturbs the calm. She always knows where to end. Pick almost any poem and the last couple of lines will shock you with their unlikely inevitability.
Valentine writes about everything — love, death, sex, the roiling political situations of the last half-century — with simultaneous candor and mystery: “I have been so far, so deep, so cold, so much,” she says prophetically in an early poem. She asserts that poetry can be made almost entirely through suggestion, that the poet must trust the secret links between one word and another, and trust that the reader will be willing to travel with the poet along those underground currents. In a short poem, a haiku from 1992, “To the Memory of David Kalstone,” dedicated to the literary critic who died in 1986, Valentine offers as succinct a statement of her poetics as one could want: “Here’s the letter I wrote,/ and the ghost letter, underneath—/ that’s my life’s work.” Valentine’s poems draw our attention to the words beneath the words, what’s said between them, in all the white space surrounding the poems.
Elsewhere Valentine opts for simple observations, stirred by a bit of mystery, as in the brief elegy “Rodney Dying (3)”:
“I vacuumed your bedroom
one gray sock
got sucked up it was gone
sock you wore on your warm foot,
walked places in, turned,
walked back
too off your heavy shoes and socks
and swam”
There are no sudden bolts of profundity here, nothing, really, that you could call insight, at least not overtly. Instead, Valentine asks an object, the sock, to carry the grief. This is a technique poets call the “objective correlative” — it’s an image that stands in for an emotion or knot of emotions. That unassuming object, or really just the word for it — sock — becomes a vessel, a kind of canopic jar to contain grief, but also to let it rattle around a bit. The poem ends with what might be an allegory for death, but is also a celebration of Rodney’s vitality. The language is as plain as can be, and yet I exit the poem with uncertainty, equally hopeful and despairing. Valentine is an expert at tensing these sorts of contradictions against one another. The emotional climate in Valentine’s poems is ambivalent in the best way, lit by contradictory energies.
And while this book is a monumental celebration of an extraordinary legacy, it is also sad to hold: Valentine was in an inexhaustible and generous force in American poetry until so recently. It feels impossible to accept the fact that she is dead while reading poems that are so profoundly alive.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books, including The Trembling Answers, which won the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress.
Britney Spears
Open to Treatment Plan After DUI Arrest, Source Says
Published
Britney Spears‘ team is hoping the judge mandates treatment for the pop star over jail time following her Wednesday DUI arrest … and Britney isn’t fighting them on that, TMZ has learned.
Sources familiar with the situation tell TMZ … Britney is willing to comply with a treatment and support plan.
We’re told her team is in the early stages of developing a plan and they’re exploring multiple options, including mental health services, detox, and dual-diagnosis programs.
It’s unclear whether she would do inpatient or outpatient treatment, and it’s also unclear whether she would enter treatment before her May 4 court date.
Broadcastify.com
We broke the story … Britney was pulled over by California Highway Patrol officers around 9:30 PM Wednesday in Westlake Village, CA, not far from her home. She was later taken to a hospital — not for any injuries, because we’re told she didn’t sustain any — but to draw her blood to determine her blood alcohol content.
According to CHP, she was arrested for “driving under the influence of a combination of drugs and alcohol.”
Sources familiar with the investigation told us an unknown substance was found in Britney’s car, which was sent to be tested.
Britney’s manager, Cade Hudson, previously told TMZ … “This was an unfortunate and inexcusable incident. Britney will take the right steps, comply with the law, and we hope this marks the start of long-overdue change in her life. She needs help and support during this difficult time. Her boys will be spending time with her, and her loved ones are putting a plan in place to set her up for success and well-being.”
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners.
Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures
Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror stars Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers who open a 1930s juke joint in Mississippi. Opening night does not go as planned when vampires appear outside. “In a straightforward metaphor for all the ways Black culture has been co-opted by whiteness, the raucous pleasures and sonic beauty of the juke joint attract the interest of a trio of demons … they wish to literally leech off of the talents and energy of Black folks,” writes critic Aisha Harris. The film made history with a record 16 Academy Award nominations.
We asked our NPR audience: What movie would you recommend to someone who loved Sinners? Here’s what you told us:
Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen
If you want another cool vampire movie with Western kind of vibes, check out Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark — super underseen and kind of hard to find, but really gritty and sexy and another very different take on what you might think is a genre that had been wrung dry. – Maggie Grossman, Chicago, Ill.
30 Days of Night (2007)
Directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
It follows a group of people in a small Alaskan town as they struggle to survive an invasion of vampires who have taken advantage of the month-long absence of the sun. Both this and Sinners revolve around a vampire takeover and the people’s fight to outlast the “night.” – Nathan Strzelewicz, DeWitt, Mich.
The Wailing (2016)
Directed by Na Hong-jin; starring Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee, Jun Kunimura
In this South Korean supernatural horror film, a mysterious illness causes people in a quiet rural village to become violent and murderous. A local police officer investigates while trying to save his daughter, who begins showing the same disturbing symptoms. The film blends folk horror, religion, and psychological dread, exploring themes of faith, evil, and moral weakness. Like Sinners, it centers on a supernatural force corrupting a close-knit community, builds slow-burning tension, and examines spiritual conflict and human frailty. – Amy Merke, Bronx, N.Y.
Fréwaka (2024)
Directed by Aislinn Clarke; starring Bríd Ní Neachtain, Clare Monnelly, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
In this Irish folk horror film, a home care worker, Shoo, is assigned to stay with an elderly woman who’s convinced she’s under siege by malevolent fairies. Like Sinners, Fréwaka blends folk traditions and social commentary with horror. The social failures Shoo copes with (untreated mental health issues, religious abuse) are just as frightening as the supernatural forces. – Kerrin Smith, Baltimore, Md.
And a bonus pick from our critic:
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Directed by George C. Wolfe; starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman
This is an adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a legendary blues singer (Viola Davis) muscling through a recording session with white producers who want to control her music. Chadwick Boseman’s blistering in his final role. – Bob Mondello, NPR movie critic
Carly Rubin and Ivy Buck contributed to this project. It was edited by Clare Lombardo.
The tiny town of West Goshen, Calif., was exactly the kind of place that community solar was designed for.
Near Visalia, most of its 500 residents live in mobile homes, where companies won’t install rooftop panels without a solid foundation. And until recently, they used propane for heating and cooking, with price fluctuations in the winter posing hardships for low-income families.
Community solar, in which residents get a discount on their bills for subscribing as a group to small solar arrays nearby, was designed to help low-income residents, apartment dwellers, renters and others who can’t put panels on their own roofs.
Over the last 11 years, New York, Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and other states have built thriving community solar programs. But California has built, at most, only 34 projects since 2015, and experts say that’s a generous accounting.
“We’ve had community solar for a dozen years, and it simply has not produced anything of scale and anything of note,” said Derek Chernow, director of Californians for Local, Affordable Solar and Storage, a developer trade group that’s pushing to get a more robust program off the ground. “Projects don’t pencil out.”
The West Goshen residents were among the lucky few, becoming part of a community solar project in 2024.
“It has kind of allowed us to kind of breathe a little bit,” said resident and community organizer Melinda Metheney. Her bill has dropped by about $300 in the summer months, thanks to the 20% community solar discount, stacked with other low-income discounts and clean energy incentives, she said.
West Goshen’s panels sit about 10 miles out of town, in a field surrounded by farms. Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week.
Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward (D-San Diego), who in 2022 authored a bill to create a more effective community solar program, said the state needs to double its annual solar installation rate to reach that goal and is not on track to do that using only large utility-scale solar farms and individual rooftop arrays.
“We need mid-scale community solar,” he said.
Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week. Above, solar panels at Extra Space Storage in Pico Rivera.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
He and a coalition of environmental groups, solar developers and the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group, worked to put his 2022 law into effect. They coalesced around requiring utilities to pay community solar developers and customers for the electricity they feed to the grid using the same formula they use for people who install rooftop solar.
But in May 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission decided to go with a late-in-the-game proposal backed by the state’s investor-owned utilities to pay community solar at a lower rate.
The agency, along with its public advocate’s office, argued that crediting solar developers at the higher rate would raise bills for customers who don’t have solar, who would still have to shoulder the cost of grid maintenance. It’s similar to the argument they’ve made to cut incentives for rooftop solar.
The new program relied on federal money, including the Biden administration’s Solar for All, to sweeten the deal for developers. But the utilities commission spent very little of the $250 million available under that grant before the Trump administration tried to claw it back last summer, and now it is held up in litigation.
At a legislative oversight hearing last week, Kerry Fleisher, the commission’s director of distributed energy resources, blamed the loss for the new program’s failure to launch.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of the Solar for All funding that was intended to supplement this program,” Fleisher said. “That’s part of the reason why this has taken longer than normal.” She said the commission still plans to release a program in the next several months.
Ward, the San Diego lawmaker who wrote the community solar bill, called the program “fatally flawed” in an interview.
He’s now considering a bill to bring the community solar program more in line with what he initially envisioned — higher incentives, requirements for battery storage, and compliance with state law that mandates new houses be built with solar.
A study last year funded by a solar trade group found that could save California’s electric system $6.5 billion over 20 years. But Ward’s effort to revive his program last year failed to pass the Assembly appropriations committee.
“All the other states in our country that have adopted similar community solar program models, they are working,” said Ward, adding that 22 states have programs comparable to the one solar advocates want in California. “The writing on the wall suggests that, exactly as we feared years ago, this was not the way to go.”
California Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Terrie Prosper called California “a leader in cost-effective, least-cost solar deployment overall compared to any other state,” in an emailed statement.
Under the commission’s definition, the state has brought on 34 projects, representing 235 megawatts of community solar. But studies from groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Wood Mackenzie use different definitions for community solar, and they show California far behind at least 10 other states.
Meanwhile, advocates and developers involved in successful community solar projects in California say they were difficult to get off the ground.
Homes in the Avocado Heights area of Los Angeles County are part of a community solar project.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
One that came online in May in the unincorporated communities of Bassett and Avocado Heights in the San Gabriel Valley provides solar electricity to about 400 low-income residents. They get 20% discounts on their electric bills for subscribing to panels installed on two Extra Space Storage building rooftops in Pico Rivera.
Organizers said it took nearly five years to find the right location and comply with utility requirements. They also got a grant in addition to funding provided by the state utilities commission’s solar program.
It “would not have happened if it hadn’t been for the grant,” said Genaro Bugarin, a director at the Energy Coalition nonprofit that proposed and coordinated the project.
Brandon Smithwood, vice president of policy at Dimension Energy, the developer for the project in West Goshen, said he still hopes to see a community solar program in California that compensates projects for the way they help out the grid.
“We’ve seen it can work, and we know what we have won’t work,” Smithwood said at the hearing.
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