All events are free!!
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We get lots of requests from publicists, usually to review a forthcoming book or write a feature about an author. This one came in today. (I'm not sure why, but withholding the name of the sender seems like the right thing to do.)
>>>>>>>>
Hi David,
I have a great interview for you.
Could I arrange for you to speak with Marcy Miller, author of the new book Rebooting in Beverly Hills, a wise and wild path for navigating the dating world AFTER Divorce (and in your FORTIES!) (www.rebootinginbeverlyhills.com).
Ms.
Miller, a highly successful Ivy League attorney from Beverly Hills,
who’s book has been described as “Sex and the City for the next
generation” would love to discuss with you:
Can I arrange for you to speak with Marcy Miller regarding her book, Rebooting in Beverly Hills?
Thank you for your consideration.
TJ
Publicist
LCO
>>>>>>>
-- sdh
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Poetry is
posing a
question to
the universe
and getting
no for
an answer
or getting
no answer
I'm not
sure which
-- David Lehman
"November 22" in The Evening Sun: A Journal in Poetry
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Every year on this day I think unfailingly of three things:
-- that today is Hoagy Carnichael's birthday, which I imagine him celebrating quietly with a glass of bourbon as he tickles the ivories (and out of Lauren Bacall's sexy throat comes the Johnny Mercer lyric for How Little We Know, which is playing in my mind even now),
-- that if time were elastic I would write a series of popular history novels under the collective title: What Really Happened. Charlie Orr would design the covers. Hell, he already has designed the covers for the first three books in the series. What Really Happened at Waterloo. What Really Happened in Yalta. And, What Really Happened on November 22, 1963. Charlie's hypothetical library is a fabulous construction.
-- that paranoid conspiracy theories, and narrative genres to which they have given rise, are based on our fundamental inability to understand events. What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, accounted for the penultimate section of a poem I wrote in my freshman year at Columbia, "The Presidential Years." Here is a fragment:
From The Presidential Years by David Lehman
. The day that Kennedy was killed
Was the day before the Stuyvesant-Clinton football game.
There was a rally in the auditorium
And our coach who was from Texas or Oklahoma said slowly, carefully,
“There isn’t a horse that can’t be bucked.”
Meanwhile half the school was marching along
Fifteenth Street to Union Square and then up to
Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue and some got up to
Fifty Ninth, and they were parading,
Yelling, “De Witt eats shit” until they were stopped by policemen.
I didn’t go. I stayed in school.
That day I almost got into a fight
With a fellow twice my size on the stairway
And he laughed at me. A friend of mine broke it up.
In English the head of the Physics Department walked
Into the room. He said, “I think you are old enough
To understand this. The President was shot today in Texas.”
I stand up. I do not understand. I say, “What”
And I think, the President was shocked today in Texas.
He leaves the room. I am sorry.
I leave early. The Clinton game is called off,
And the series has since been discontinued.
My French teacher is waiting for me. Smiling shuffling his legs
Touching his teeth with his tongue looking at me
He says, “There is a rumor that Kennedy was shot.
Do you know anything about that?”
March 1967 [published in The Paris Review, #43, Summer 1968]
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Anna K.
1.
Anna believed.
Couldn’t delay.
Every Friday
grew heroic
infidelity just
knowing love
might never
otherwise present
queenly resplendent
satisfaction trapped
under Vronsky’s
wild x-rated
young zap.
2.
Afraid. Betrayed.
Can’t divorce.
Envy follows
grim heroine,
inks judgment,
kills lust.
Mercy nowhere.
Opulent pink
quintessence radiates
suicide trip –
unique vacation –
worst Xmas,
yesterday’s zero.
by David Lehman (from When A Woman Loves a Man, Scribner 2005)
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I
don’t know where he hung his hat
but
am sure it was well placed—as we hung
on
his every word, gracefully placed,
as
he graced you, which was needed by me, and us
for
a reading that otherwise would be lonely
as
he explained at the bookstore, telling me he loved me,
although
he actually said you and probably meant “you.”
I
also don’t know what or where “time’s cellar” was,
but
felt sure I wanted to be a buyer
of this, or that, in fact, of whatever he was selling.
Nor do I know what woman loved him, but
I
think it was the one he asked
whether
to read to us this poem, or that.
With
grace he spoke to us, me and you, of what is needed
to
get on his bus, which drove like a three/one count with men on base
through
poignant moments, on occasion beautiful --
on
demand sublime -- and you sensed some poems
he
may have written while imagining himself
a
young boy in Ithaca, New York, in an orange cap and green shorts
cutting
out from a writers’ workshop—cutting away
from
the sawdust of lathes cutting out adverbs and
stones
polished over rocks he could make chuckle,
eating
ripe apples and not wiping his chin when he snuck outside
as
the sun crept
just
far enough
across
the lawn.
That
evening Mr. Lehman was loved by you, a woman, and us,
but
I don’t know where he hung his hat.
-- Robert B. Miller
Editor's note: Denise Duhamel, undoubtedly one "you" in this poem, introduced David Lehman at a poetry reading in the bookstore of Florida International University in October. In response to the reading, Robert B. Miller wrote this poem, which makes allusions to many of the poems Lehman read that evening -- including "Why I Love 'You'," "When a Woman Loves a Man," "Anywhere I Hang My Hat," "Story of My Life," "The Count," and "On the Beautiful and Sublime."
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Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash
again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
-- Walt Whitman
("Reconciliation" by Walt Whitman appears in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Ed. David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006)
-- sdh
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Why do sports pundits persist in recommending that rebuilding franchises trade their best
players? Thus Brian Costa in "Why Dickey Should Be Traded" (Wall Street Journal, Nov 9,
2012, p. A21) ). The theory is that the aging star will bring in hot-shot prospects that will dramatically help the team's prospects in the long range.
Unfortunately, it is logic of this sort that impelled the Mets to part
with Tom Seaver, the best player in their history, back in 1977. In
exchange for Seaver -- who had several great years left in him, and even
a threw a no-hitter in a Cincinnati uniform -- the Mets got a mediocre
pitcher, a good-field-no-hit second baseman, and two can't-miss
outfielders. Steve Henderson, the more ballyhooed of the two, had what would charitably be called a
disappointing career. The other outfielder is the answer to a trivia
question. All right, don't scarch your head. Dan Norman.
The Mets should sign Dickey not only because he had a great season but because he is a reason that fans come to the park and buy tickets. He is a Met, a crucial part of the team's identity. It interests me that he is also notably intelligent, a published author, but the germane fact is that he may well continue to pitch at this year's sensational level. While it is true that he is 38, the knuckle-ball as he throws it causes less arm weariness, and is less likely to lead to a severe shoulder, elbow, or wrist injury, than the standard pitcher's repetoire.
On the week when the Mets parted ways with Jason Bay, undoubtedly the biggest bust in a history of bad free-agent signings, two things occur to me:
-- Will columnist Jason Gay either leave the Journal or change his name to, for example, David Bright?
-- If we made a team of over-the-hill players that donned Mets' uniforms and stopped performing (.e.g. Jason Bay, Mo Vaughan, Roberto Alomar), added players acquired in one-sided deals (Jim Fregosi, Juan Samuel) or other dumb moves (George Foster), how would it fare against a team made up of players the Mets dispensed with (Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Lenny Dysktra, Kevin Mitchell, David Cone)?
The long season's over, and then came the chill. They played the World Series and nobody noticed. -- DL
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Luke Hankin's post last week about poems of devotion, reminded me of this poem by David Lehman, one of my favorites:
David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)
-- sdh
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About a year ago, the Chicago based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:
We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question -- what is it to be human?
David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago. "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. She sends along this preview video, which makes us wish we could put the production on the road:
Erica promises to send more photos of the performance, which we will share here. Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website. You will find Erica's interview with David here.
Congratulations Erica!
"Mythologies" will be included in David Lehman's forthcoming New and Selected Poems (Scribner).
-- sdh
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