The Best American Poetry

Sharon Dolin: The Price of Beauty

photo by Michelle Acuff

This is where I am living: where they grow sunflowers and are in love with nuclear power. This plant, Golfech Nuclear Power Plant in La Garonne, is so close that I could see it in the distance from my bicycle as I sped to the local pool. This photo is by one of the artists here, Michelle Acuff, a sculptor with an amazing eye. She went right up to the power plant, something I am not prepared to do, that actually makes me tremble with fear. The proximity of the plant almost stopped me from coming here. In this photo, the centers of the sunflowers look like unblinking eyes staring back at the viewer. Is this the price we must pay for beauty? John, the resident director's husband, says they have a view of them from their window. A different sort of twin towers than the ones I used to see from my apartment in Brooklyn. Why are the French so in love with nuclear energy, which supplies roughly 75% of their energy needs? Where are the solar panels? Wind turbines that I saw all over Spain?

This is also the route for the pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela.

And in the town of Auvillar itself, I arrived just as a wedding was ending. . . The bride is in pastel blue (because she is remarrying). And all the wedding guests walked to see the view of the river before leaving in their cars.

I couldn't bear to take a photo of what lay to my hard left: what my fellow/sister artist took in the first photo, she who road right up to the power plant. So here I am, living for a few weeks in the heart of contradiction. Now I understand why, to my ears, the words in French for Love (l'amour) and Death (La Mort) sound almost the same. In fact, over lunch with some locals, I was corrected, having said la mort when I meant l'amour.

Sharon Dolin: La Tour de France

 

I just arrived in the southwest of France (in the Midi-Pyrenees) to begin an artist residency at Le Moulin a Nef in a tiny village called Auvillar. Quite a culture shock after pinxtos (tapas)-bar-hopping in San Sebastian, Spain till all hours of the night. On my first morning here, today, the Residency Director Cheryl Fortier and her husband John invited the artists (there are 4 of us) to come with them to watch the Tour de France cyclists go speeding by. Pourquois pas? So, of course, I went. There we were, with about 100 locals, on the side of the road, with sunflowers all around and an ancient abbey down the road, waiting. And the cavalcade of cars with passing floats throwing out hats, keychains (I got knocked in the head by a little cow keychain!), candies, madeleines....

 

And then we waited for another 45 minutes for the cyclists to whoosh by: frightening in their speed, like a herd of stampeding wildcats. It must have taken no more than 5 seconds for them to go by.

One of Cheryl and John's friends was explaining that there is the tradition of the Lanterne Rouge (Red Lantern): the person who completes the Tour but comes in dead last. And he is celebrated. It's like being the caboose of the Tour. And I thought, What a poetic idea. Maybe we poets are the Red Lanterns of the Tour de Coeur (The Tour of the Heart). We take our time, peruse the landscape, and come in last, but at least we finish the race.

 

Big blowsy blue hydrangeas setting off the orange trumpets of a campsis . . . Julia Fogg's terrain

It's a grey rainy day here in Ithaca and after the heat, I can't say that I'm too sorry.  Still, it was nice to open today's post from terrain, a blog I've been following for a couple of years.  I don't know much about blogger Julia Fogg other than that she's a UK landscape designer who travels widely and takes stunning photographs.  She concludes most of her posts with a poem.  Take a look:

continue reading here.

-- sdh

// Huffington Post Reading Series //

Hello hello:

I'm curating a reading series at the Huffington Post. Dana Ward's "The Crisis of Infinite Worlds" was posted this week, and you can check out past contributions from Paul Legault, Michelle Taransky, Ben Pease, and Ben Mirov. 

Follow me -- @alinagregorian -- to receive updates for future readings!

TTYL

xo, Alina Gregorian

Dana Ward's "The Crisis of Infinite Worlds":

 

Ben Mirov's "Ghost Machines":

 

Ben Pease's "Fugitives of Speech":

 

Michelle Taransky's gchat poetry:

 

Paul Legault's translation of Emily Dickinson: 

 

Quote of the Day: Octavio Paz

“The melting pot is a social idea that, when applied to culinary art, produces abominations.”

Chicken Parmesan Meatloaf Muffin via Chow

Discuss.

-- sdh

 

And the Gold Goes to . . .

If Olympic medals were awarded for anthology making, this year's gold would surely go to Mark Ford, whose London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press) has hit UK bookstores and will soon be available in the US. 

Here's what The Economist says:

NO OTHER city so inspires and infuriates poets like London. For Percy Bysshe Shelley, an early 19th-century romantic, “Hell is a city much like London.” A century before, Alexander Pope was similarly grim, writing from the safety of leafy Twickenham: “Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell!” William Wordsworth once marvelled of the view from Westminster Bridge, “Earth has not anything to show more fair.” But he was also baffled that in London “next-door neighbours” can be “yet still/Strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.”

Despite such complaints, London hooks the imagination, as can be seen in “London: A History in Verse”. Spanning seven centuries, this fascinating new collection features Wordsworth and Pope alongside lesser-known and even anonymous poets, all of them moved by the city’s labyrinthine streets and smells, sounds and textures.  The volume includes an outbreak of plague, the Great Fire, the deposition of Charles I, the crowning of Charles II, two world wars and the introduction of the London Underground, all of it conveyed through the prism of poetry. It makes for a thrilling read. Continue reading here.

Read Mark Ford's BAP blog posts here.

Find out more about and order London: A History in Verse here.

-- sdh

 

Good-bye, Celeste Holm, 1917-2012 (by Laura Orem)

The great character actress, Celeste Holm, died this past weekend at age 95. Miss Holm was a fixture in the acting world for more than six decades. The first Ado Annie in Oklahoma, she famously won the part when she demonstrated for Rodgers and Hammerstein her ability at hog-calling. In 1948, she received an Oscar for her performance as Anne Dettrey in the social drama about anti-Semitism, Gentleman's Agreement, and was nominated twice more, for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950). She more than held her own against Frank Sinatra in 1956's High Society. She performed extensively on Broadway and later, on television, including a recurring role in the 1980s nighttime melodrama, Falcon Crest. She was one of those wonderful actresses who can do almost anything.

But I remember her chiefly and most fondly for her role as the Fairy Godmother in the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. It was a yearly event awaited with great anticipation at my house, and even now, I can sing most of the score at the drop of the hat. Here's "Impossible," with Lesley Anne Warren as Cinderella. Good-bye, Miss Holm, and thanks for making this little girl happy.

 

Take an Island Vacation in NYC: Hop the Ferry to Staten Island for Matthea Harvey and Justin Bennett's "stillspotting nyc: staten island" Installation

Many times in years past we've sought respite from New York City's steamy summer heat by hopping the ferry to Staten Island.  The trip takes roughly 25 minutes, there's a breeze off the water, a stunning view of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, and, it's free!

Now there's added incentive to head to the ferry's Whitehall terminal: Telettrofono, a fascinating collaboration between award winning poet Matthea Harvey and sound artist Justin Bennett, is live on Staten Island.  Visitors to Telettrofono will be guided to points along the SI waterfront while listening to a 90-minute tale about the real — and not so real — life of inventor Antonio Meucci.  Here's how Matthea Harvey describes the project:

This year I worked on making a soundwalk with amazing sound artist Justin Bennett for the Guggenheim architecture program--it's going on for four weekends (starting this weekend) in Staten Island.. . The piece is called Telettrofono and it's about Antonio Meucci (who invented the telephone decades before Bell) and his mermaid wife, Esterre. Meucci was an amazing nineteenth century inventor who made a marine telephone for divers to speak with ship captains, flame-retardant paint (which he advised using on your underwear) and improved effervescent drinks, among other things. The Telettrofono tour will introduce you to his real and imagined inventions, a mermaid chorus, a preset verifiable fact mode, and the story of a mermaid who leaves the water because of her love of how things sound aboveground.

Matthea shared an excerpt from the audio program:

Preset Fairytale Mode:

Once upon a time in the time

of once upon a time, there was

an inventor who loved a mermaid

and would do anything to please her.

Because she loved sound, he invented

a megaphone, a telettrofono and a drink

that fizzed with the tiny effervescent

fireworks of fermented fruit. Because

she loved light, he invented smokeless

wicks and built a candle factory. Because

she was over-fond of candles, he invented

flame retardant paint. Because she loved

her cats, he came up with a way to carefully

quantify the amount of cream in their milk.

Because she missed her sisters’ voices

he made a marine telephone. Because

her bones were not made for this loud

human world, they began to crack and

ache and crumble. Because she needed quiet

he tried to hush the trains, the carriage,

even the gulls. Because she could no longer

climb up or down the stairs, he carried her.

--

Isn't it dreamy? 

Telettrofono is part of the Guggenheim Museum's two-year multidisciplinary plan to take the museum’s Architecture and Urban Studies programming out into the streets.  You can visit on Saturdays and Sundays, July 21–22, 28–29, and August 4–5, from 12 pm–7 pm.  For more information, go here.

-- sdh

Aram Saroyan on Bob Dylan and the Subterranenan Homesick Sixties

<<
Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn't believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process of composing a particular work, the poet. And when the work was done, so was the designation. In other words, the poet was a process one entered, not a title — not a noun but a verb. If one were to give Duncan's idea historical application, one might say that whoever became the poet might come to stand for the particular time in which the designation fell to him or her. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, for instance, who first read "Howl" at the Gallery Six in San Francisco in the mid-fifties, the period would date from that reading into the early sixties, when he published "Kaddish," a work of comparable power. Then, according to my personal chronology, a sort of hand-off took place, and the laurel wreath was passed to Bob Dylan, with Ginsberg's personal blessing.

There was Allen, in fact, among those photographed on the back of the first Dylan album I bought, in the spring of 1965, Bringing It All Back Home. Up to then, the poets I hung out with in New York — and we considered ourselves the standard bearers in all things — didn't give much weight to Dylan. He was a folkie, and a protest singer into the bargain, and our cadre was decisively apolitical. Joy had nothing to do with politics, and joy was what we were trying to create in our work. In fact, it wasn't a poet who alerted me to Bob Dylan's latest album but an actor friend, who brought it over to another friend's apartment, and when I said something casually disparaging about Dylan, he simply put the record on the turn-table and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" erupted over the room. End of story. There was no mistaking it. It was joy. It was the same joy that was just then beginning to be associated with those two new English rock groups, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It was resurgent rock-and-roll, but in Dylan it had found an altogether new, bent, American surrealist, Beat Generation lyricism.

Dylan had gone electric at the Newport Folk Festival and been booed by die-hard folkies to the point of tears, but this new album, including songs that he'd sung at Newport, was, from that first song, the one thing he hadn't done before and heretofore evidently couldn't do. It surged through you and made you glad to be alive:

Johnny's in the basement
Mixin up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinkin bout the government...
Look out, kid
It's somethin you did
God knows when
But you're doin it again...
>>>

For the rest of Saroyan's piece, click here. And lift a glass to Terence Patrick Winch for sharing. -- DL

Monday Cartoon by Nin Andrews

 

 
For more of Nin's cartoons go here.