The Best American Poetry

The Stamp of Impulse: Ashbery and Koch in Worcester, MA, 2001

L to R: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, John Ashbery.  Photo by Stacey Harwood

On May 6, 2001, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and David Lehman appeared at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass to celebrate The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, the first exhibit to show the influence of Abstract Expressionism on printmaking. The exhibit was spectacular, with works on display by 100 pioneering Abstract Expressionist printmakers including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Nell Blaine, Louise Nevelson, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, and Joan Mitchell. Ashbery, Koch, and Lehman read their work and reminisced about a time in America when artists, writers and musicians were experimenting with creative forms.

Find out more about the exhibit here.

-- sdh

Thursday, January 24th, 7 pm: Frustration, Joy, and Lust at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. . .

This Thursday, Housing Works bookstore brings you Bill Hayward and scenes from his film asphalt, muscle and bone. Laura Isaacman, editor of The Coffin Factory, discusses art, literature, and film with Bill, whose photographs are the main art feature in issue four of The Coffin Factory.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street New York, NY 10012

Details here.

Find more about Bill Hayward on this blog here.

Visit Bill's website here.

-- sdh

Picasso: Black and White [by Sharon Preiss]

I suppose my viewing companion and I approached it all wrong. At the Guggenheim, I like to start on thetop floor and work my way down. But the exhibit was arranged chronologically and worked its way up, -- bottom floor early paintings, top floor the later ones, with the studies for Guernica (1937) around the thirdor fourth floor. But we started with the late paintings first, with his portraits of women out-of-joint, animal-headed, grotesque, and had to make sense of where he ended up – misogynistic, misanthropic, the cubist abstraction looking painful and hateful – without the softening of watching the master’s progression over time.

 To start on the ground floor and work up would have shown the calm line of the neoclassic portraits, the faces of his muses rendered with a mostly gentler hand. You could say there was even something like love between the painter and subject, between the painter and painting. But boy, did something happen, and it wasn’t just cubist experimentation or the horrors of war. To read the paintings, particularly the portraits, biographically, when the wives, mistresses, and muses became all a-jumble, the paintings of women began to change. Certainly this is not an entire overview of his oeuvre – he created close to 50,000 works of art over his 60-something-year career – but in this exhibit, the turning point of his depiction of women is dramatic. A portrait from the early 1930s of Olga Khohklova, Picasso’s first wife, is grossly misshapen and has a slit of a vagina dentata for a mouth. This is the spot where many of the portraits turn ugly.

Of course, not all the paintings in this show are quite so jarring. Much of it is evocative and brilliant. “The Maids of Honor” is typical of Picasso’s genius for deconstructing a figure and a scene and reconstructing it into something altogether new. The flow and folds of a woman’s gown become a chock-a-block of clashing geometries and fields of hue. And “The Charnel House,” a mangle of bodies and parts sprawled beneath a table, powerfully and aptly alludes to the scenes of horror that were breaking across Europe at the end of World War II.

Though the show is called “Black and White,” the palette is mostly gray, with subtle shadings that have the effect of almost obfuscating the content of the paintings and soothing the eye. Overall, it’s a magnificent exhibit, with many of the paintings coming from private collections, being shown in public for the first time. But start from the bottom and work your way up the Guggenheim climb. Perhaps by the time you reach the top you’ll be wowed enough and tired enough not to notice what I did.

                

Games Poets Play [by Heather Christle]

This evening I was reading this post on The Hairpin, all about "low-effort toddler games" like "Do You Like My Hat?" and "Hide Things in Your Clothes," and it reminded me of a passage from the children's book Pinky Pye, wherein a cat types up a list of suggested games:

 

The very clever cat then goes on to explain more complicated games, which you might enjoy reading (beginning on page 118).

And this led me to thinking of all the games I've played with poet friends, which now I will tell you how to play, in case you find yourself with guests or selves to entertain this weekend.

1. Game of First Lines

This is just like Balderdash, only instead of inventing definitions for obscure words, you invent first lines for titles. Pull a literary journal off the shelf, open to the first poem, read the title aloud, and then have your friends write down a convincing option for a first line, while you write down the actual one. Gather them all together, read them out loud, and have everyone guess which is real. Points to anyone who guesses right, or whose line manages to fool someone. Or don't keep track of points. Then pass the journal to the next person, so you get a chance to invent.

2. Game of Following the Rules of Vasko Popa's Game Poems

I just made this up, but I think it would end in tears. Here is how you play "Seducer"

One caresses the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And motions him coyly with her leg

Another kisses the keyhole
Keeps kissing it and how 
Until the keyhole returns the kiss

A third one stands to the side
Watches the other two
And shakes and shakes his head

Until his head drops off

3. Game of Not Listening

When you are stuck in an audience listening to someone who is dull or going on for too long, write down words and phrases she says, in order, but very selectively, so that by the time she finishes you have a much better speech she could have made had she only known how to edit herself. Extra points if you arrange her own words into an entirely different subject.

4. Game of Constant Similes

Pretend that every time someone says "like" as filler (of the "um" variety) he is embarking on making a simile it is your job to understand.

5. Game of Stacking Books

This game I borrowed from Matthea Harvey, who borrowed it from the artist Nina Katchadourian. Go to a place full of books. Find titles you'd like to arrange into a poem. Stack them in an order that pleases you. Depending on whether or not you think the place is trying to keep the books in a different order, you might consider leaving them there for someone to discover. Or take a picture.

6. Game of "Life of Game"

Listen to Loren Goodman.

7. Game of Thinking of Something

Think of something. Tell your friends you are thinking of something. See if they can guess what it is. If you are not with friends, try just thinking of something.

Those are all of the games I know. I'm lying. Those are half of them, but I am trying to raise my level of mysteriousness, which is part of a game I'm not telling you about.

--Heather Christle

 

Do Not Go Gentle... (by Sharon Preiss)

I first fell in love with Cy Twombly’s paintings when I saw Fifty Days at Iliam at the Philadelphia Museum of Art about 15 years ago. The ten large starkly white canvases flame with a narrative of the Trojan War, mixing abstracted image, brilliant swaths of color, and scribblings of text. “Like a Fire That Consumes All Before It” (pictured left) remains one of my favorite paintings, and I’ve had the privilege of spending a good deal of time with Twombly’s work on two trips to the DeMenil gallery in Houston that houses a permanent collection of his canvases and sculptures, as well several exhibits that have hung here in New York.

I was not, however, hot to see the exhibit of his paintings that Gagosian Gallery had this past November and December. Perhaps because the show was called Last Paintings, and it’s hard for me to bear the thought there will be no new work now, no more brilliant surprises from this singular artist, but moreover because the image used on the gallery website to announce the show seemed such a disappointment. The reds and greens seemed muted and dull – not at all the vibrancy I’ve come to love in Twombly’s work. And the painting itself seemed a sort of regression back to his early days of his signature repeated squiggle  -- a row of constantly looping eeeeeeeeee that reminds me of grammar school cursive writing practice. Not my favorite work from him. Yes, I see these works as part of the magic cryptography of sign and symbol that draws me to most of his other work, and yes, I see the abstraction of… well, something. But what generally blows me away about Twombly is that amazing use of color -- especially because it is so carefully and sparingly doled out -- and his abstracted allusions to recognizable objects – flowers, boats, the shore, the sea.

I did want to see the photographs, though, so off to the gallery to pay my last respects on one of the last weekends of the show. So many flowers! And so lovely to see how he how he used the photos – often blurred tight shots – as studies for the images in his previous paintings, whether they remained as flowers or explosions or just beautiful blobs of paint. The photos did not disappoint. I’m not sure what process or lens or filter he used to achieve the muted colors and soft edges displayed on the prints, but the muting promts the viewer to understand that these are not necessarily rows and rows of tulips we are looking at, but an inconsistent and lovely repetition of shape and coloring that Twombly clearly found more compelling than the idea of “flower” itself.

And so, after looking at these lovely forms with their soft coloring that lulls the viewer into blissful reverence, on to the paintings in the gallery above.

But wait, what’s this? These six large canvases with their repeating eeeeeeeeee are not dull green and red at all. The gallery announcement’s photo reproduction has done them no justice. These are Twombly’s last paintings and they are the strongest and brightest use of overall color on the canvas I have seen in his work. The green is almost neon. The red, a brilliant tomato. And the yellow, somewhere between school bus and canary and singing. And what’s this? Oh my – the eeeeees are no longer letters, god bless us, they’re tulips!

Thank you, Cy, thank you.

Sharon Preiss is the owner of Mobile Libris, a NYC-based book-selling service that specializes in selling books at author events. She earned an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and has taught literature, creative writing and composition classes at various institutions. Her poetry and prose have been published in PIF Magazine, Massachusetts Review, 5AM, The Tucson Weekly, CoverMag, and the Albany Times-Union.

Workshop Days [by Tomás Q. Morin]

Sometimes I get nostalgic and think about my classmates from my MFA years and how I adored so many of the poems I had the privilege of reading in those workshops and how much they taught me and spurred me to try new things. There was the one poem by Rebecca Vano that was an autumn scene I think, and there might have been a stick, or was it a squirrel; I can’t remember now that ten years have passed but what I do remember is thinking that nature was alive in her poem like it is in the best work of Snyder or Kinnell, that it wasn’t just landscape, a prop, rather the real deal. There was dirt in her poem, if not stated, then implied for sure, and wind and light and they lived and existed there as just themselves, not as hokey symbols.

I wanted that kind of presence in my poems. I can’t even claim to have had a floor with cheap carpet in my poems back then, much less the true ground. I wish more poems had real earth in them like Rebecca’s poem. Or more characters responding to other characters and not just our 21^st century speaker in the way her husband David Vano’s poems were dramatic and electric. It was David who first introduced me to Jack Gilbert’s work, Monolithos I think it was, and then to Frank Bidart. I still remember Orpheus being torn to bits in one of David’s poems and how in spite of his death there was still music, and I think maybe there was a river too, and maybe it had rocks over which the water flowed, rocks against which the head of Orpheus rested and sang. I wanted that kind of drama in my poems, the kind Frost and Yeats made their own.

I’ve missed reading the poems of the Vanos these last ten odd years and so it was with great delight when a couple of months ago David wrote me and said he had a new poem in the hopper and would I read it. Of course!, I shouted across the electronic ether and so before long I was in it again, a student happily lost in David’s poem, happily reveling in lines like this:

 

Now there are villagers who believe that the Giant Swift was no swift but God

and that since God had withdrawn His antiquarian gaze from this dark village,

we would be abandoned like dreams or the world’s poor.  But in that night…

 

These lines unfold across the page like a wing. How lucky I felt to again be able to watch his mind take flight. I can only hope he will send me more. Maybe Christmas or the New Year will even bring me a poem by Rebecca. Or Groundhog Day or St. Patrick’s will bring more poems by David and did I mention he’s a wonderful painter too! Perhaps it’ll be Easter that brings me the voices of other friends I haven’t read in far too long. Maybe I shouldn’t wait on fortune or destiny or happenstance. Maybe today we should all make our own luck and choose a friend we haven’t heard from in awhile and say, “I missed you and thought I’d write you a little something.” 

Trevor Winkfield at Tibor de Nagy: Nov 29, 2012 through January 12, 2013

Trevor Winkfield's "New Paintings" opens on November 29 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue (near the SE corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue), New York, NY 10019. The show extends until January 12, 2013. This remarkable painter (and sometime literary editor) has collabrated with, and designed covers for, such poets as John Ashbery and Ron Padgett.

Celestial Shrine, 2010, acrylic on linen, 29 7/8 x 38 1/2 inches.

Hazards [by Michael Schiavo]

 

"You are one thing, but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

 

"A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one." — Wallace Stevens

 

 

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." — Gertrude Stein

 

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

"La Glorieta, Buenos Aires" by Mong-Lan

"La Glorieta, Buenos Aires," by Mong-Lan, 2011, 28" x 39"

Mong-Lan left her native Vietnam in 1975, on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. A poet, writer, dancer, visual artist, singer, and educator, she is the author of five books and two chapbooks, including her book on the tango, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (the bilingual version: Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos). Find a complete list of titles here. Mong-Lan has won the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been frequently anthologized -- in, for example, The Best American Poetry. Visit:  www.monglan.com

Read Mong-Lan's recent post "On the Tango and Buenos Aires" here.