The Best American Poetry

From Daniel Nester in Albany.

Hello there. This is Daniel Nester writing to you from Albany, NY, in my office at The College of Saint Rose, a medium-sized college right in the Pine Hills neighborhood of the city. Just a few things about me, dear reader, before I start with my guest blogging hijinks.

I live with my wife, Maisie, and my our daughter, Miriam "Mitzi" Lee, in the Center Square neighborhood of the city. We are three blocks away from one of the best used books stores I’ve ever been to, Dove & Hudson. We came here around three years ago from that nest of lovable yuppiedom, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. I have one book of poems, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVox, 2006), and before that two prose books on my obsession with the greatest rock and roll band of all time, Queen--God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (Soft Skull Press, 2003 and 2004). I used to edit La Petite Zine, then Unpleasant Event Schedule, then the Sestinas section of the McSweeney's website.

So why am I here guest blogging, dear reader? To plug my own books shamelessly and talk about myself too much? Well, most bloggers do that, I suppose.  Maybe it's to "overshare," that buzzword Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker, invokes to describe her personal posts in yesterday's Sunday New York Times magazine? I'm not sure there.  Let's hope not.  Gould seems to conflate her accounts of her own blogging and editing Gawker, the media- and star-making-machinery-obsessed website. It's an interesting term, however: poetry debate often about whether or not to overshare in their work, whether it is better to strike an "impersonal" pose (Eliot) or engage in "candor" (Ginsberg) . Maybe that's why poets and their blogs seem to have a symbiotic relationship: it's either an escape valve for sharing/oversharing personal information for the poets of impersonality, or another outlet for candor for the Too Much Information poet-types.

I think it's fair to say I am a TMI poet. 

Anyhoo, on with the show.

That photo of me above is taken from most recent installment of Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, also known as KPF.  What is Karaoke + Poetry = Fun?  It's a very occasional reading/singing performance in which poets read a poem or two then sing a song. Yes, it's that simple, and it's that fun. I invented KPF in 2000 when it seems readings needed to be jazzed up a bit. Some others have tried the format.  Alcohol is usually involved with KPF. Scratch that: It is always involved. More photos from KPF to come.

New and Old in China

We were in Dalian for our first two days here, cosseted in the Five Star Furama hotel.  All of the advertising cliches apply:  thick terry towels and bathrobes, fluffy eiderdown pillows, luxurious appointments and these.

These commodes have begun to gain acceptance in U.S. markets.  Will Smith hawked his on Oprah a few months ago, saying that he didn't miss toilet paper because the "Washlet" gets it right.  When I visited a bath showroom in April, a few customers scrutinized one the way my colleagues and I looked at the first computer to appear in our offices in the early-80s.  Can these be the wave of the future?

How strange, then, in China, to go from luxury hotel to home-style restaurant, where the Jakes is across the hallway from the dining room, doesn't have a door, and is just a simple hole in the floor.  We've been camping and know the drill when it comes to going in the wild.  Yet these primitive facilities still call for an attitude shift.  As Eleanor Goodman, a translator of Chinese poetry explained, "you just pull your clothes out of the way and go." 

--sdh

Genghis Khan

Mongolia!

On Memorial Day let us remember the fallen, and honor them (by Mitch Sisskind)

When you need inspiration there's no need to look any further than Orson Welles' classic commericals for Paul Masson wine. Many of them can be seen on Youtube. This is a nice one. I just wish it went on longer!

Below is a great scene from the film "Ed Wood," in which the title character (played by Johnny Depp) meets Orson Welles. Again, very inspiring!

Film Still Series #67

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman.

From Dalian (China) with Love

At Dalian University of Foreign Languages on Monday, I read my "Oxford Cento of American Poetry," and invited the students to pick a favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. A line from Whitman inspired Wang Xingying (王兴颖)，whose English name is Eileen. The earthquake was very much on her mind when she wrote these lines.

-- DL

Yours and Mine

What is yours is mine,my father,
though you are not here any longer.
When the sky grew darker,
your love came into my heart deeper,
and then my eyes turned brighter,
and my wings stronger.

Facing disaster, I won't be weaker.
You and I are together,
no matter what I will suffer.
God made us daughter and father,
disaster has taught me to stand straighter.

What is mine is yours, dear father,
forever and forever.

*

Wang Xinying also wrote three one-line poems.

Hand
Hand handing hand hangs hope high

Love
Love lets life last forever

Where is God
When God turns his back to us, everyone's face is God's.

IncreduLit #2

A friend of mine, inquiring as to the source of the line "So I sign off, wishing I could sing on," received the following reply from the IncreduLit scholarly service:

"So I sign off, wishing I could sing on" is the first line of the notorious "Black Bart" soliloquy from the second of Robert Service's "sestina operas," Klondyke Fannie, as adapted by Helen Trueblood for her famous "Frontier Opera" series, which opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall in, we believe, May of 1934.  An interesting note on that production: Trueblood herself trained as a Rockette for six weeks before the show opened, and was in the opening night kick line for the phantasmagorical, pyrotechnical final act in which Black Bart is kicked to death by the entire Rockette troupe, with each dancer costumed as Annie Oakley.  Intrigue surrounded the production from that first night on.  When Daily Mirror columnist, Walter Winchell, who'd had a brief affair with Trueblood and was furious at having been jilted, raced up the aisle to phone in a vicious pan of the production, he was tripped and sent sprawling by a mysterious "Lady in Black," sustaining a broken ankle and a particularly nasty cut to his upper lip.  The "Lady" was never apprehended; insiders at the time claimed "she" was local radio host, Barry Gray, in a black dress and wig.  Winchell had carried on a long feud with Gray, excoriating him in his columns, calling him "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk."  In any case, Winchell's bad review never appeared, and Klondyke Fannie was a smash hit for a few months, until the man playing Black Bart--Paul Soldati, an actor with reputed Mob ties--was literally kicked to death during a Sunday matinee performance.  The subsequent murder investigation closed the show down; it was never revived.  Trueblood, however, didn't give up, and the following spring opened her second opera, Juneau What I Mean, to mixed reviews; it closed after a moderate run.  Subsequent entries in the "Frontier" series--What's Your Point, Barrow? and Don't Know Her Name, But Alaska--had similar success before the outbreak of World War II.  During the war Trueblood served as a WAC officer until her death in 1943, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she worked as a consultant for the drama troupe stationed at the USO training camp there.  Trueblood never recovered consciousness after a mike boom accidentally knocked her off the stage during a dress rehearsal for Juneau What I Mean.  The troupe was scheduled to fly out of Fayetteville two days later to perform the opera at a series of American bases in the South Pacific, beginning with Guam.  One notable personality connected with this production was Bob Hope, who played the lead character, "Dirk, the Handler."  After Trueblood's death, the tour was canceled, and the entire drama troupe was transferred to Chicago to train in sketch comedy.

In Praise of the Middlebrow

Years and years ago, I read an essay by Richard Eberhart, "Will and Psyche in Poetry," and it became something of a touchstone for me in reading poems.  As a thumbnail code, it was a sort of default guide.  But as it turns out, the definitions of "Will" and "Psyche" I've followed all these years have been my own, not Eberhart's.  Now I've read the essay again, and realize either my twenty-something brain read only what it wanted to then, or that my fifty-something brain (along with my thirty- and forty-something brains) conveniently forgot the part of the essay I wasn't interested in.  Eberhart was much more judicious toward Will than I have been in my life, and ultimately saw both Will and Psyche (possibly) residing in the other.

Oh, fine.  Go yin-yang and golden mean on me; I'm still not interested in fairness after all these years.  My young self wanted to know what Keats meant about "negative capability," what Graves meant about the presence of the Goddess, what Eliot meant about coming back to where we started out from, and knowing that place for the first time.  My personality is withdrawn, reclusive; I'm better at hearing than seeing.  I'm more interested in the unseen than the seen, not because I'm subtle, but because I'm cowardly, and have felt from early years on there's more danger there.  Will seems too obvious to me, with its chest-thumping, its demands to be lauded.  Here's Eberhart: "The Psyche state in poetry pertains to, exemplifies, or takes off from peace, quiet, calm, security, harmony, proportion, concord, tranquillity, freedom as from something (war, for instance), serenity, stillness, and silence ... Will is wish, desire, inclination, pleasure, appetite, passion, purpose, determination, choice, intention, entreaty, command, decree, power, arbitrary disposal, self-control as in a man of strong will, zeal, volition." 

Others have made a similar dichotomy, though phrased differently and with different emphases.  My own has always been an attempt to understand the difference between the poetry that wills itself into being, via the brain, logic, the determination on the part of its maker to be a poet, and the Psyche poem, more prized, of "inspiration"--of the "lights," the soul, the heart, the Muse, the god.  The latter seems the truer poem, the poem that directly accesses the ground of being.  The poem of will ultimately deceives: not only is it susceptible to cleverness, but the force of the cleverness itself can turn out to be the real, if unconscious, subject of the poem; the poem's agon can be played out several levels above the ground of being, fooling the poet, and possibly the reader.  The poet of will is the poet of the middlebrow: the will is the organ working furiously behind that furrowed middle brow.

The middlebrow isn't the standard of the age, of course; but it's the commonplace everyday knowledge of the age, and serves its purpose, as I now finally realize.  At its highest, the middlebrow orders things, makes lists, codifies, and marshals rhetorical strategies, clevernesses, even deep learning, into homilies.  When we think of homiletic types of literature, we immediately become condescending: Sunday school sermons and the like.  It's age-old experience mushed up into spoon-sized servings.  And that's probably a reasonable reading of the immediate past, with the added value that it lets us off the hook in the present.  But in fact the middlebrow in any age is precisely the shrewd packaging of homily in contemporary terms that is just a step or two in advance of us.  That's probably why we turn on it so fiercely when we catch up with it and pass it.

More Questions [by Nin Andrews]

More Questions

Tell me, Love, who is your critic?

And when?  Do you know?

Do you believe what he says? Or she?

Me?

Yes, until his back is turned,

I do.  I do.

I don't mean to.  It's just what happens.

But I never read a poem from top to bottom.

Is that a comment about sex or poetry?

Or the shadow?

Do you agree with the number three?

Do you count your days? Lucky stars? Loves?

Who taught you to add?

Do you know?

Me, I'm in love with Ann and Tim and Nicanor too.

Nicanor is dead.

Did you ever ask your love, are you an elegy?

Do you know what you are doing? Asking? Of whom?

You who were always such a quick study.

A flash in the pan. The sky, too.

Does that mean you were never happy after the fact?

Did you cry the night we had sex?

What % of sadness do you carry in your soul?

That's mine, you know.  Right there.

In the skin beneath the skin.

Is that where love and poetry begin?

Do you have a handkerchief? A tissue?

Something to tell me now?

Is this how what begins

Begins?

-- NA

Two Sonnets (by Mitch Sisskind)

"We are changing our name to Schmeltzer..."

I sat the girls down,

Told them, “Girls, we are

Changing our name to Schmeltzer.”

“Why, dad?”

Gave me the puppy dog look.

“Because I said so, dammit!”

Misunderstanding, consternation,

Flashed across their physiognomies.

“Lori and Kristin Schmeltzer?”

That was back in the Reagan years,

And that’s how it’s been ever since.

They are fully growed now.

We are the Schmeltzer family and

In Titusville Schmeltzer Means Respect.

Pa During the T-Mobile Commercial

Before there was leave a message

At the sound of the beep

There was Jesus.

Before there was please

Enter the last four digits of your number

There was Beelzebub,

Before there was your zip code

Your four digit identification number

Your password your user name

There was Holofernes and there was Nobodaddy!

Ah, the whole world is going to Hell!

We’ve lost sight of what really matters

And a lot of it is because of electronics!

Kids are obsessed with their Sidekicks!