The Best American Poetry

Camus on Irony: When does the truth get censored? [by David Lehman]

The July 2012 Harper's has a lot going for it, but a most enjoyable surprise for this reader was a previously unpublished, because censored, essay that Albert Camus wrote in 1939 -- November 25, 1939 to be exact. France and Britain are technically at war with Germany, but so far there has been no direct engagement on the field. Germany has invaded and overwhelmed Poland and has neutralized the Soviet Union by concluding the infamous non-aggression pact in August 1939. The west waits anxiously. In this context a "free journalist" defends freedom of the press and protests the work of the censors. The piece was not signed, though it has been attributed to Camus. Le Monde published it in March 2012. It was written for the Algerian newspaper Le Soir republicain but it never appeared there. It is not entirely clear why the French authorities suppressed it, but they appear to have been instinctive ironists. Here is a central passage. As translated by John Cullen.
<<<
. . .as a rule, a mind with a taste for applying constraints and possessed of the means to impose them is a mind impervious to irony. We don't see Hitler -- to take only one example out of several -- employing Socratic irony. Conversely, when it comes to weapons that can be used against the too powerful, irony remains unparalleled. It completes refusal in the sense that it often allows its user not only to reject the false but also to say what is true. A free journalist in 1939 hasn't got many illusions about the intelligence of those who are oppressing him. In regard to humanity, he's a pessimist. Nine times out of ten, a truth proclaimed in dogmatic tones gets censored. When presented in an amusing way, the same truth gets censored five out of ten times.
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Therefore (Camus reasons), a "free journalist in 1939" must employ ironic means. "Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses."
The fact that the piece (published in Harper's under the title "Rules of Engagement" and characterized as a "manifesto") was censored does not invalidate its thesis, nor does it convict the author of being "dogmatic." -- DL

Name the book our hard working editor is reading when he's not marking up a manuscript

"No R" -- a short story by David Lehman [with a coda by Borges]

<<< Kaminsky knows how to survive in the magazine business: start a magazine that almost nobody can understand, and become the darling of the academy
>>>

from "No R," a story by David Lehman, in The American Scholar. Click here to read this three-part story that wowed the crowd at KGB Bar in February 2013 when Lehman read it aloud.

And remember what Jorge Luis Borges said: "I respect translators, and my stories have sometimes been greatly bettered by them. One of them told me so himself. Besides, I am so fond of English that I like anything better in English than in Spanish." While the relevance of this quote to "No R" is not obvious, people of good faith can figure it out. Borges also declared unequivocally that Robert Louis Stevenson "is the most wonderful writer of all English writers, after Shakespeare."

Homage to Stanley Bing [by DL]

The pseudonymous Stanley Bing is the businessman ("executive vice-president of corporate communications") and wit who writes the consistently entertaining and smart "While You Were Out" column on the last page of Fortune magazine.

"We're Forever Blowing Bubbles" in the June 11 issue is an excellent example of Bing's style. (After writing that sentence I think I will put on a Crosby song before continuing. OK. "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" Bub-bub-bub-boo.) The column is arresting and quotable and I wanted to quote the whole of the second paragraph, not only because of the individual points made, but because of the vast distance between the short paragraph traverses .

But rather than give you the whole paragraph, let me turn it into a prompt: I will quote the first and last sentences of the graf and ask you, dear readers, to fill in the middle. The middle consists of five sentences, four of them short. How does Bing get from

<< Men all used to wear fedoras. >>
to
<< But I can't believe that in the future everybody is going to continue to want to share things. >>

There then follows a very fine passage about what's wrong with "sharing."

OK, for the multiple-choice part of the endeavor, who ridiculed the verb "to share" by writing, "'Let me share this knife with your throat,' suggested Mack."
1) Matthew Arnold
2) Arnold Stang
3) William Matthews
4) William Meredith
5) Meredith Wilson

-- DL

"Men Marry What They Need" [by John Ciardi] & a Brainteaser

John Ciardi, a poet and editor whose verse translation of Dante many of us read in college, and who is sometimes patronized as "middle-brow," wrote an amazing poem, which you should read: "Men Marry What They Need":

Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.

In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,

I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more

inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn

and have my laugh at death. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother

by hidden names, but that thin buzz whines through:
where reasons are no reason, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.

-- John Ciardi

I wonder what a woman would say in reply. -- DL

QUESTIONNAIRE [by Anthony Madrid]

1. Name some poets everybody in your milieu likes, except for you.

2. The opposite. Poets you like, but none of your friends do. Poets you are always having to defend.

COMMENTARY ON 1 AND 2. These two questions are supposed to get at opinions and tastes for which the person receives no applause. Things like that occupy a special category, for sure, but it’s not like the contents of that category reveal the person’s Authentic Taste.

Authentic Taste is whatever you like or dislike irrespective of all applause, including your own. A fundamentally unknowable category. And here it is further obscured by the fact that a certain kind of citizen gets off on holding perverse opinions. This is how they “know they’re in the right.”

More on this hereafter.

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3. Never mind other people for a second. Off by yourself, name some poets whom you really should like—’cuz they’re just exactly your kind of thing—but you just don’t.

4. The opposite. Poets with whom you have virtually nothing in common, but whom you truly love.

COMMENTARY ON 3 AND 4. Baby poets never have answers for these questions. They are all invested in defining their tastes in a way that coheres, makes a statement, is portable, can be summarized. Consequently, whenever they see something is written in a style that they supposedly approve, they treat the thing like family. That poem or poet always has a place to stay. At the same time, baby poets exclude all kinds of stuff on principle, and so even when they like it, they don’t like it. They explain away their liking in the same way I used to explain away my liking the Monkees. I don’t really like them; I just like listening to them and singing along.

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4 (b). Poets you’re embarrassed to like, exactly because your liking them reveals what a shallow, tasteless, sentimental, unintelligent person you really are.

4 (c). Poets who proved to you that {your stupidasshole ideas about what makes for good writing} were wrong.

COMMENTARY. Again, I’m just trying to get past the baby poet in all of us. I have asked people question 4 (b) and had ’em come back with a rigmarole of great names. “Shelley, Keats…” It’s quite frustrating. You wanna say: “Look, answer the question in such a way that you’re not implicitly bragging.” But with a lot of these customers that’s like saying, “OK, grow a new head. Good. Now lemme ask you all these questions over again.”

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5. You know how T.S. Eliot allegedly put the Metaphysicals back on the map? Suppose you were an arbiter of taste like that. Whom would you like to put back on the map.

COMMENTARY. This is actually a really loving and affectionate question—provided you’re not dickishly asking it of someone who, you know damn well, doesn’t know anything about old poetry. But when the person does know things, you often get a response that is a joy to listen to.

Some of the most valuable ten-minute conversations of my life have taken the form of somebody telling me about an old poet whose reputation deserves reviving. Edmund Waller. James Thomson.

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6. Poets you regard as your personal property. I.e. it literally annoys you, or at least makes you uneasy, when others like this poet, because you cannot believe they like him/her for the right reasons.

(I call this the Emily Dickinson question. Anyhow, for me, Dickinson is exactly this poet. When I first saw Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson on a shelf in 1997 or whatever it was, I thought: “Totally get that. Totally.”)

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7. If a photo were suddenly gonna be all over the internet, a photo of some famous person or celebrity reading your book, who would you want it to be. Name a few people.

(Corina Copp knows what I’m talking about with this!)

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8. Poems you’ve wept over more than once.

9. Poems you have thundered against.

COMMENTARY ON 8 AND 9. Question 8, of course, will have rather more authority than 9 with persons like myself, who go by the Kama Sutra theory of pleasure. The less voluntary the response, the sexier. (Goose bumps, too, have a lot of authority on this model.)

Meanwhile, the thunder question might be the most intimate one on this list, insofar as it’s basically a given that if you were thundering against some poem you were denouncing a lot more than the poem without realizing it. Or maybe you’re too savvy for that. Maybe you always draw excellent distinctions between the poem and the poem’s influence and the kind of person who would be excited by it, and so on and so forth. Perhaps in discussing the poem itself you always maintain a steady tone of amused superiority.

In which case: Get lost. Can’t you see we’re trying to get something done around here?

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10. If, twenty-five years from now, we were to find you on a bench in the New York City subway, drooling on yourself and rocking back and forth and reciting something from memory, what would it be?

COMMENTARY. I think Edward Lear must have regarded the above question as the Supreme Index of Poetic Goodness. Likewise, the author of Peacock Pie. I asked Nadya, the other morning, what her answer would be. She thought about it a while and said, smiling, “Adze-head.” Here’s the piece she meant, a much-repeated item in this household:

 

            Across the sea will come Adze-head,

            crazed in the head,

            his cloak with hole for the head,

            his stick bent in the head.

 

            He will chant impiety

            from a table in front of his house;

            all his people will answer:

            “Be it thus. Be it thus.”*

 

(*Copy-text: The School Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, page 4. The poem is listed as “Anonymous, Irish, sixth century.” Translation by James Carney.)

 

Hell (O, Young Lovers) [by DL]

As one who maintains that the multiple-choice exam retains its potency for the poet who favors unusual or ad hoc forms, I have created the Freud Quiz, a series that continues and now numbers some thirty entries. But as a sort of aphoristic aphrodisiac, this versatile form begs to be applied to other subjects. Let's start with hell. Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.

Hell is

(1) "Other people" (Sartre)
(2) The title of the first section of Dante's Divine Comedy
(3) Cowering in a trench in Flanders beside the dead bodies of two fallen comrades
(4) Having to listen to the music Sasha Frere Jones praises in The New Yorker
(5) "Myself" (Milton)
(6) A book of poetry consisting entirely of unedited traffic reports
(7) A substantive formed from the Anglo-Saxon helan or behelian, cognate to "hole" (cavern) and "hollow."
(8) The edifice at the end of the road paved with good intentions
(9) An empty place populated by devils (Shakespeare)
(10) "What You Make It" (Breathe Carolina, 2011)

So what does Van Gogh's "Kartoffelessers" ("Potato Eaters"), the image above, have to do with it? Well. . .

Who wrote it, who sang it, and when?

Irving Berlin did not write "(There'll Be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin." Who did? And who recorded it? When?

There'll be a hot time
In the town of Berlin
When the Yanks go marchin' in
I wanna be there boy,
And spread some joy
When they take old Berlin

There'll be a hot time
In the town of Berlin
When the Brooklyn boys begin
To take the joint apart
And tear it down
When they take old Berlin

They're gonna start a row
And show them how
We paint the town back, in Kokomo
They're gonna take a hike
Through Hitler's Reich
And change his 'Heil' to 'What ya know, Joe'

There'll be a hot time
In the town of Berlin
When the Yanks go marchin' in
You could never keep 'em happy down on the farm
After they take Berlin

I'm gonna grab a Frau
And show her how
We paint the town back, in Michigan
I'm gonna take a hike
Through Hitler's Reich
And change that 'Heil' to 'Gimme some skin'
There'll be a hot time
In the town of Berlin
When the Yanks go marchin' in
You know that you could never keep 'em happy down on the farm
After they take Berlin.

Matt Hart's Heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

Matt Hart is one of the readers at the season finale of the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry series next week. Here's an excerpt from his review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out.

Where did the cops come from?

The word cops has this derivation:

(1) It is an acronym for the Committee on Public Safety in France during the French Revolution.
(2) It refers to the copper badges worn by the first New York City policemen.
(3) It is based on a noun conversion of the popular slang word cop meaning "steal" (as in "cop a feel").
(4) The singular form is one half of an anagram of police, the other half being lie.

The winning answer will either or not, being all too human, allow for repetition, and may account for the twilight of idols that once were gods, in vino veritas, as in the "Filthy Lucre" chapter of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death.

But you must also explain the relevance to this exercise of the illustration at the left. -- DL