The Best American Poetry

James Tate and the Ironies of Life [By Leah Umansky]

Today, at 32 years old, I entered my first police station. This is a good thing as I don’t have a criminal record and doubt that I ever will.  I had to file a police report on identity theft. I went home sick from work this morning only to find in the mailbox this afternoon that I’ve been denied for a credit card I never applied for at a store I wouldn’t be caught dead shopping in. (Sorry, you can take the girl out of Long Island, but you can’t take the Long Island out of the girl). 

The whole idea of identity theft is scary and most people don’t think twice about it. I know I didn’t.  I don’t use Wi-Fi, I don’t save credit card information on websites, and I don’t save passwords online. I doubt that I even have good credit, so if someone wants to really steal my identity, could you ask them to take all of my student loans, too?

(If this has happened to you, you know how horrible it feels. It feels like a betrayal or a violation. Unfortunately, it’s one of the negatives that has come our way in the electronic age. )

Sitting in the police station today felt strange. At first, I felt scared and vulnerable. The woman at the front window was on the phone and didn’t give me the time of day. Then, a policeman came out from behind and asked if he could help me. I sat down with him at a table and he started filling out my police report for identity theft.   As I sat there, I kept peering into the back room through the glass. I felt like a little kid. My eyes widened when I saw what looked like a real cell! It just didn’t feel real, but that could’ve also been the Dayquil talking.   Looking back now, it felt like a mash-up between a popular T.V show Taxi  and the famous Police Academy movies.

 

Taxi – a sitcom that aired from 1978-1982.

"As a writer, all bets were off." A eulogy for Eleanor Ross Taylor by Ross Taylor

This lovely tribute to Eleanor Ross Taylor (June 30, 1920 – December 30, 2011) by her son Ross.... comes to us from family friend Nin Andrews:

My mother was born at home in south-central North Carolina in 1920.  Her father was a farmer.  Her mother, Jennie, was mostly a farmer’s wife, but was also a seamstress, taking jobs sewing things for neighbors far and near.  She kept up on fashionable patterns.  As a teenager, my grandmother painted a very respectable picture of a mother and child, which was hanging in my mother’s room at her death.  She and Fred, my grandfather, often enjoyed discussing bible stories and texts in quiet, thoughtful tones.  For rural folk in the depression, this was the light of culture.  

My mother had two brothers and a sister, who did a number of remarkable things.  Both brothers, James and Fred, worked playing minor league baseball for a while.  Both brothers published well regarded novels.  Her sister Jean married poet Donald Justice and published a volume of stories.

In 1943 my mother married my father, Peter Taylor, who went on to write stories and plays and won the Pulitzer Prize for one of his novels.  He was from the city – or several, as his family moved a few times.  I should de-emphasize him in a piece about my mother, but he was very sociable and introduced mom to many people she came to love.

My mother was a teetotaler.  At the many parties she attended with my father, mom would stand happily conversing with her arms folded, not even disguising her abstinence with a glass of soda.  Some partiers admitted feeling intimidated by this. 

Many readers note, rightly, the unflinching determination to face truth in my mother’s poems.  I think the flip side is that she had courage in the face of real fear.  She was physically small, and, having recently watched her go through the diminutions of old age, her second childhood, I have become more aware of the country girl child in her.  She was inquiring (she saved stacks of clippings about astronomy, the brain, physics, paleontology) and she knew the world was a great and terrible place. 

She also loved watching cloud formations.  Most of her poems tell stories about people, but around the edges is an awareness of the creeks and mountains.  I feel her interest in gardening, birdwatching, even in people’s cats and dogs was a conventional expression of her love of the natural world. 

Perhaps a well known quote by Flaubert helps to explain her conventional life: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  As a mother, she was lovably predictable.  As writer, all bets were off.

Not Your Parents' Poems:

A 2012 Poetry Preview by CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER

We're reading a lot about poetry over at the NPR website.  Most recently, we enjoyed Craig Morgan Teicher's roundup of can't miss poetry books from 2012.  Read his full essay here. 

-- sdh

Reader, Do You Keep A Diary? [By Leah Umansky]

Not many people keep handwritten diaries anymore, but I do. I’ve kept diaries for as long as I can remember. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with them in the future, but for now, they sit sleepily in drawers in my apartment and a chest at home in my parents’ house. I think it’s sort of wishful thinking in a way that someday, someone will want to read my diaries and someone somewhere will be intrigued or impressed or who knows what.

My favorite diaries are Virginia Woolf’s. They are so interesting and intriguing and I often long to be a fly on the wall in her Bloomsbury. Through her diaries, I can be. I often find inspiration for my own poems in her letters. The title poem of my manuscript comes from one of her diary entries.  Now that I think about it, I own quite a few journals and collected letters of writers I admire such as, Sylvia Plath Emily and Charlotte Bronte and the great, Anais Nin.   Sometimes essays also have that tinge of intimacy that journals entail.  Some of my favorite essays are Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule¸ Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects, and basically any of Marguerite Duras' books.

I like the feeling of being brought back in time through someone else’s thoughts; it’s quite different than reading someone’s novel or biography. It’s intimate and tender. I remember one of my favorite classes as an undergrad was on the Brontës and one of my favorite books we read was Elisabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which was the first biography ever written on Brontë. What I love about Gaskell’s book is that Gaskell herself was a famous writer and so we not only get Brontë through the eyes of another woman, but Brontë through the eyes of another Victorian woman writer.  Through visiting Charlotte at the Parsonage in Haworth, Gaskell was privy to so much first hand information about not only Charlotte, but her siblings (living and deceased) :

"But now to return to our quiet hour of rest after dinner. I soon observed that her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation, if a chair was out of its place; everything was arranged with delicate regularity. We talked over the old times of her childhood; of her elder sister's (Maria's) death, - just like that of Helena Burns in Jane Eyre; of those strange, starved days at school; of the desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way, - writing or drawing; of her weakened eyesight, which prevented her doing anything for two years, from the age of seventeen to nineteen; of her being a governess; of her going to Brussels; whereupon I said I disliked Lucy Snowe, and we discussed M. Paul Emanuel; and I told her of ----'s admiration of Shirley, which pleased her; for the character of Shirley was meant for her sister Emily, about whom she is never tired of talking, nor I of listening. Emily must have been a remnant of the Titans, - great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth. One day, Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil-painting, done by her brother, of herself, - a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen, - and the two other sisters, girls of sixteen and fourteen, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes. . . . Emily had a great dog - half mastiff, half bull-dog - so savage, etc. . . . This dog went to her funeral, walking side by side with her father; and then, to the day of its death, it slept at her room door; snuffing under it, and whining every morning. We have generally had another walk before tea, which is at six; at half-past eight, prayers; and by nine, all the household are in bed, except ourselves. We sit up together till ten, or past; and after I go, I hear Miss Brontë comedown and walk up and down the room for an hour or so." (Gaskell, Chapter 29)

Celebrating A Good Story [by Leah Umansky]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” Hugo Cabret says, “every body has a purpose if they didn’t then why are we here?”  It’s a life long question, isn’t it?  What is our purpose?

I’ll never forget walking on to campus as a freshman at SUNY Binghamton and asking my adviser when I could declare my major because I knew I wanted to study English/Creative Writing. I knew early on that my purpose in life came from my passion for all things literary.

Like Monsieur Melies in “Hugo,” I was always intrigued by the imagination and the stories we tell from our imagination. For me, my fascination started with the Brontës. How did three sisters living in the isolated West Yorkshire Moors of England, who knew nothing about romantic love and relationships, write some of the most compelling and complicated novels of our times?

As a teacher, teaching Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night I’m constantly answering questions. Just the other day a student asked me, “How did Shakespeare know that a prank in the form of a love letter would be so popular?” I replied that it’s how you know something is good literature: it stands up to the test of time. One of my favorite parts of being a teacher is unveiling the heart of a story and seeing my students not only connect to it but recognize some aspect of the story in themselves.  

Going back to purpose, Monsieur Melies wanted to take people away iinto their wildest dreams. He was a magician, who saw the first moving picture at a traveling circus and knew he needed to be a part of it.  He created his own camera and then created his own movie sets, scripts, and visual effects. He believed in the imagination and wanted to create a magical experience for viewers.  

Leah Umansky, Guest Blogger January 15-21

This week we welcome Leah Umansky as our guest blogger.  Leah is a New Yorker by birth, a teacher by choice, and an anglophile at heart. Her first book, “Domestic Uncertainties,” is floating around various contest piles and hoping for someone to say, “yes!” She received her BA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Binghamton and her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and is a recipient of a 1-week fellowship at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. She is a contributing writer for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBLOG and a Poetry Reviewer for The Rumpus.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Barrow Street, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Verse 2, Cream City Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and Magma Poetry. Read more at her  blog i am my own heroine. Leah is the Founder and Host of COUPLET: a poetry and music series on the Lower East Side of NYC. Follow her on twitter (@lady_bronte )

Welcome, Leah.

The Secret Joy of Books

 

"A book ought to be an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us."-- Franz Kafka

-- etrelles

A Fine Romance - In Poughkeepsie, NY with David Lehman, Sunday, January 15, 2:30 PM

The Poughkeepsie, NY library has planned a stellar season of lectures, perfomances, and movie screenings to correspond with the touring exhibit David curated to complement his award winning A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.  We wish we could attend them all - maybe you can if you live in or are planning a trip to the Hudson Valley.  Check out the full lineup here. 

This Sunday, January 15, beginning at 2:30 PM, David will be on hand to talk about his romance with the American songbook, the songwriters who created it, and especially the songs that continue to delight everyone who hears them:

Poughkeepsie Public Library
The Auditorium
105 Market Street
Poughkeepsie, NY
www.poklib.org
845-485-3445 

Extra credit:  Identify the parties in the photo, above.

-- sdh

The Godfather channel: all Godfather, all the time

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While Sonny is driving alone in his car, he's listening to the October 3,1951 radio broadcast of Russ Hodges calling the decisive third game of the Dodgers-Giants playoff -- a half-inning before Bobby Thomson ended the Dodgers' season with the "Shot Heard 'Round the World, which many consider the national pastime's all-time greatest moment.

Both Frankie Avalon and Vic Damone auditioned for the role of Johnny Fontane. Francis Ford Coppola was most impressed with Damone and gave the role to him, but Al Martino was cast by the producers, and used his organized crime connections to ensure he kept the part. Ironically, Fontane sings "I Have But One Heart," which was Damone's first hit song. Share this

According to Mario Puzo, the character of Johnny Fontane was NOT based on Frank Sinatra. However, everyone assumed that it was, and Sinatra was furious; when he met Puzo at a restaurant he screamed vulgar terms and threats at Puzo. Sinatra was also vehemently opposed to the film. Due to this backlash, Fontane's role in the film was scaled down to a couple of scenes.  Share this

Of the main cast, four pairs of actors share a birthday: Al Pacino and Talia Shire (April 25), Diane Keaton and Robert Duvall (January 5), James Caan and Sterling Hayden (March 26), and Abe Vigoda and Al Lettieri (February 24). 

Whether it is, as many of us think, one of the two or three greatest of all movies, The Godfather is certainly a script that the certified US male of a certain class knows much of by heart. For more exquisite Godfather trivia (Jews play Sonny and Tessio, an Italian plays the Jewish Moe Greene) go here.
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Quote of the Day - Alain de Botton

Much modern architecture fails that general human challenge: how to look good when you're no longer so young.

Alain de Botton via twitter @alaindebotton

Nominees for this category of modern architecture?

-- sdh