The Best American Poetry

Good for you, Jude [by Catharine Stimpson]

  I had vowed to stay away from Hamlet, especially productions that starred celebrity actors but stuck to tried-and-true stagings.  I was tired of knowing what was going to happen--be it poetry or sword-fights---before it did.

    Loyal to my oath, I did not buy tickets to the Broadway transplant of  London's Donmar Warehouse Hamlet , which stars Jude Law (above). 

    Then my friend P. called, a clever woman who can  be emphatic in five languages.  "I have just seen the best Hamlet ever," she declared.  "I was transfixed. You must go."  I murmured and demurred.

    Then  she called again after the Ben Brantley review in The New York Times that panned and praised in unequal measure. "What a vile review," she said. "That man said this was a Hamlet for people who didn't know Hamlet.  He made me feel stupid for loving the play.  You must go and give me your opinion."

    P. and I have been friends since we were in college together.  Loyal to my pal, I found myself at a matinee on Sunday, November 1, with P. and her husband C. To placate me, P. had smuggled an Activa raspberry yoghurt into the theater so that pangs of hunger would not cramp my opinions.  "Be honest," she ordered, "Be ruthlessly honest."

    P., this blog is for you. Hamlet gave me what the staging of all canonical plays should give its audience---the suspension of the belief that the play on the stage has been done before. Tears even  trickled down my cheeks when, amidst the carnage of the last scene, Horatio held Hamlet in his arms, a brotherly pieta, and sighed,  "Good night, sweet prince."  He paused before he spoke.  Oh, hell, I thought, he can't bear the idea of having to trot out these lines once more.  He must sense that the audience, although mostly silent and attentive, included that big, fat guy who bellowed during the performance, "This is Old English, and I can't understand it."  But then, experiencing the actual performance of the lines, I realized the actor was taking time to organize his words out of the chaos of grief.

    Honestly, this is not the most compelling Hamlet I have ever seen.  The women are wan.  One must feel enough sexual heat between Claudius and Gertrude to understand why, after her noble husband died, she would so quickly and happily turn to his brother Claudius.  At long last, she can release her repressed passions.  Only a little heat arises from this very, very good production---and deliberately so.  This Danish court is a place of hard necessities and cold  calculations.  The set looms over the actors like a stone prison cell.  To desire freedom and love and honor is to risk disaster and death---as Ophelia and Hamlet learn. And to be brilliantly intelligent and playful, and Hamlet is,  is to risk going mad. In the great debate as to whether Hamlet is mad or feigns madness, Jude Law's  force field of a Hamlet chooses the latter. He cavorts with energy, forethought, and cunning.  Despite his contemplation of suicide, he wants to survive. His only mistake is to kill the wily but obtuse Polonius, believing him to be Claudius.

    Why did I weep?  Because this court, which includes the ghost of the King, does break Hamlet and Ophelia. Because the toxic horrors of small, intriguing courts and of codes of revenge did not vanish with the early modern England of Shakespeare. Globally, they remain active. And because Shakespeare's poetry, worming and dancing and darting into our hearts, forces us to weep. Damn and exalt poetry's
power to do so.

    After the play, P., C., and I walked along West 44th Street.  Crowds of adolescents were waiting to get autographs, particularly that of Jude Law. In the audience had been several younger children as well. Good for you, Jude, I thought. You have used  celebrity to bring them to poetry----as handsome celebrity Hamlets before you have done.  And if you used obvious gestures to underline and bring out the meanings of your "Old English" script, as Brantley accused you of doing, you were doing your job. You were insisting that "Old English" and its puns and sorrows could be once again new.

Herd on the Street [by Catherine R. Stimpson]

 "Herd on the street! Herd on the street!"  This should be a warning cry.  Pick up your kids and flee! A mob of men or beasts is at hand.

        No more, not now, not in New York as the month turned.  On October 31, the herds, perhaps 50,000 strong, flocked to Greenwich Village for Halloween revelry and parades. On November 1, perhaps 2,000,000 people gathered in five boroughs to watch 42,000 participants in  the ING-New York Marathon. Except for the losers among the elite runners, these mobsters seemed cheerful.

        I once thought that marathons were Apollonian. Wearing shorts and sneakers, their bodies stripped down to muscle, the runners were paragons of form, training, and self-discipline.  Do not break stride! In contrast, Halloween was Dionysian. Wearing costumes, their bodies concealed, the celebrants were paragons of freedom from form, training, and self-discipline.  No "nots" allowed.

        No more, not now.  Halloween and marathons share the status of being public feel-good events, more so for the spectators of the marathon than for the runners straining to achieve their individual goals. Both Halloween and marathons  stir up jollity and a sense of communal well-being, unless one is a runner veering towards the side of the road to vomit. On Sunday morning, an NBC announcer ,waiting for the endurance test to begin on Staten Island,  marvelled at being at a "modern day Woodstock."  The marathon's theme song was Frank Sinatra's canonical rendering of "New York, New York." On Saturday night,  on  6th Avenue in the Village, a person in a mask whined, "Can you see through your mask? I can't see through my mask." This tedious spoilsport was violating the spirit of the night.

        Because they are public feel-good events,  the Halloween festivities and the Marathon are robust , wholesome popular entertainment.  Both, of course, have deep historical roots: Halloween in the cycle of the Celtic year, which Christianity then adapted; the marathon in Greek history, when a messenger ran 26 miles and 385 yards (such is the spurious precision of historical fables) to tell Athenian citizens that Greek forces had whipped the Persians at a place called Marathon.

        Not surprisingly, these spectacles efface history.  The Villager revellers have taken the Hell out of Halloween.  One woman emerged from a grocery store wearing a witch's hat, but she was pushing a stroller in which the baby was wearing a tiara and a pink princess dress with flounces.  A man strolled through the crowds with his dog on a leash; the little canine was strapped into angel wings. The organizers of the Marathon fail to remind us that the Greek messenger who first ran these demanding miles dropped dead when his job was done. On the contrary, on the day before this year's Marathon, a story in the New York Times mentioned a study that had concluded reassuringly that only .8 of every 100,000 marathoners died because of their exertions.

        Enabling both spectacles, and insuring their safety, are the New York police.  On Saturday, at 3:45 p.m., they stood in formation at the intersection of 6th Avenue and Waverly Place.  Their wooden barriers and steel fences, for crowd control, were already in place.  The men and women seemed genial and relaxed.  A French tourist, in elegant suede boots, posed in front of them, her male companion focusing his cell phone camera, both perhaps dreaming of Dolce and Gabbano ads. On Sunday, police on gleaming black motorcycles, along with the media,  accompanied the elite runners--their knight consorts.

        Both feel-good herd spectacles are glocal events, at once global and local.  Marathons are run in several countries and at the Olympics. Halloween may be infiltrating previously foreign spaces. A Mexican anthropologist,with me in the Village said that she now sees United States Halloween masks at Day of the Dead celebrations in the Mexican villages she has studied for decades. Scripted as triumphs of human resilience, in the case of the Marathon, and of human cavorting, in the case of Halloween, they are harmless boosts of civic spirit.  It is far better to have sneakers than blood on the street; far better to pretend to be a nasty devil than to be one.

Catharine R. Stimpson, Guest Blogger November 1-7

This week we welcome back Catharine R. Stimpson as our guest blogger.  Catharine is the dean of NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science and is a University Professor. Prior to her arrival at NYU in 1998, Stimpson was director of the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program. She has served as University Professor at Rutgers, where she was also dean of the graduate school and vice provost for graduate education from 1986 to 1992. She is a former chair of the New York State Humanities Council and the National Council for Research on Women, and president of the Modern Language Association. She was the first director of the Women's Center of Barnard College and of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers. Stimpson's many publications include Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces and the Library of America's Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932. Read more about Catharine Stimpson here.

Welcome back, Kate.

In other news:  OCHO: The Travel Issue (edited by Emma Trelles) is up and running. GOSS183 uploads all of its publications to its main web page, so please click here for a free copy.

If you'd like a print copy, you can buy one here.  And I do believe this OCHO will be available on Amazon within the next week or so.

-- sdh

Sunday Morning [by Catherine R. Stimpson]

A reliable test of character and circumstance is how you spend Sunday morning. What do you do? Are you able to choose what you do? Or does necessity---for example, the need to earn money---drive you?

        I am lucky. Unless I have a family emergency or my job has gone crazy, I am a free woman. Do I dance? Do I sing? Do I burn incense at the altar of false gods? No, I read the wedding and ceremony announcements in the Style Section of The New York Times. They are  fun, and a profound social and cultural history.

        Obviously, they show the newly respectable demographies of love. The couples represent a range of nations, races, ethnicities, and sexualities. Individually, men and women, be they in a two-sex or same-sex union, personify the social mobility of the United States.  The parents of Ivy League law school graduates may have been truck drivers, or nurses' aides, or mechanics in a city transit system. Behind the smiles of the head shots  must be story after story of ambition, energy, intelligence, determination, and the anxiety that mobility generates. The jobs these lovers hold---no matter what their class of origin---reflect the contemporary economy. Women are doctors, lawyers, company chiefs. Both men and women earn their money from the new technologies----developing software, designing web sites, selling Internet services.

        For those of us who habitually study narrative, each of these announcement extends the marriage plot that is a staple of song and story. Two people meet, but one of them is involved in another romance, and so they part, only to meet years later accidentally or to have one person send an e-mail out to the other as a whim. And then this Cupid's shot in the dark hits, and the couple, reunited, are now announcing their marriage in the paper of record. Or, a young man and a woman, though educated in the United States, are raised in traditional families that believe in arranged marriages. One of them refuses to be go along with tradition, but then freely meets a soul mate from the same culture. Neither can believe their good fortune.

        The most sophisticated renderings of the marriage plot balance romance and realism. So amidst the hope and happiness that these versions of the marriage plot radiate are dry statements of the number of previous marriages each partner has had, couplings that death or, more often divorce, have severed.

        Read these announcements. I really do.

        This is my last guest blog.  People cling to the cliche that journalism is the first draft of history.  Perhaps a blog is the first draft of an essay, but it is also an experiment in a conversation, here with strangers who have had the courtesy to listen to you. My thanks for the chance to be here.

In Praise of Cranberries [Catharine R. Stimpson]

    Praise cranberries as one tough fruit. Boil them up for a sauce. Their skins pop. The nub of the berry endures. Transform them into a smooth cylinder of jelly. The single berry vanishes. The acidic and astringent taste persist. Put them in the refrigerator after a feast with the other leftovers. Long after uneaten turkey decays, the cranberry is defiantly if sharply edible.

    The great poet of the cranberry is Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). The verse "Cranberries" in Tender Buttons (1914) is as tough as its subject. Stein energetically explores the possibilities of transformations: cutting grass, silencing the noon, and murdering flies, taking the pesky insects from life to death. But, as I read the poem, the cranberry, even if it cooked, keeps on being a cranberry. The last lines, "Just as it is suffering, just as it is succeeded, just as it is moist so is there no countering."  

    A tough fruit, a tough poet....but each gives sweet pleasures if we pay tribute to their toughness.

    To cranberries and to Stein: take this as a tribute.

I am about to amaze myself [Catharine R. Stimpson]

This is not the post I meant to type.

And I am about to amaze myself by typing it.

I am about to do two things I have never done.

First, I am going to speak as a woman of faith, as an Episcopalian yet.

Next, I am about to abandon, if only so briefly, a way of being that I prefer---that of deliberation, reason, negotiation, the quest for common ground.

On the subway, a few minutes ago, I read the NYTIMES  (December 4) article about conservative Episcopalians founding their own "rival denomination" because the main church is too supportive of homosexuality and, more specifically, of the ordination of a gay bishop.

And I say, good riddance. 

Get thee gone.

Take the paltriness of your agape (charitable love) and one of its evil twins, homophobia.

The battle/argument/prayers over the Church and homosexuality will go on.  I will regain my deliberativeness, reason, spirit of negotiation, and quest for common ground.

But for now, good-bye.

Transnational Mourning [Catharine R. Stimpson]

    Murderers can decide when they will grieve---if they grieve for their victims. Military commanders can decide when they will grieve---if they grieve for the warriors whom they send into harm's way. Death and destruction envelop the rest of us when they choose to do so. We exert our will and agency only through  prayer, preventive techniques, and the songs, poems, and memorials with which we mourn.

    December 1 was the first day of the last month of 2008, a blessed and a cursed year. It was World Aids Awareness Day. But I also saw, on a concrete plaze on West 4th Street in New York City, the writing of a new chapter, "Transnational Mourning," in the ancient book of grief. University students organized a brief, border-crossing vigil in honor of the dead and wounded in Mumbai, India.

    The people there were transnational in their countries of origin, passports, languages, and arts of mourning. The killed and hurt in Mumbai were also transnationals. Representatives of three faiths spoke at the ceremony: a Hindu chaplain, a Muslim chaplain, a Jewish chaplain, and the rabbi of the Chabad serving the university.

    This transnational gathering might have had nothing for which to give thanks as people thought of and felt the destruction that took place in Mumbai during the American Thanksgiving holidays. Their daring was to reject nihilism. They quietly remembered the dead and then, out of their disparate  identities, created a sense of unity that must precede, and follow, human compacts. A projector threw images of burning candles spelling out One/Soul/Life on a screen. I heard a student murmur, "I don't remember a lot of Jews and Indians being together before."

    The organizers distributed candles for us to light and hold. Candles are the wax, self-consuming pillars that traditionally illuminate lamentations. Yet, the vigil drew on the technologies that enable and mediate transnationalism. The Mumbai Massacre had been on many screens, including those of TV. Many of the students had spoken to family or friends on their ubiquitous cell phones.

    Despite this transnationalism, the vigilant were aware of national identities, their own and that of others. Transnationalism elides but does not abolish nations. A student told me that she had talked to her family on her cell phone. A relative works in the travel business and did long shifts in an airline office in the Mumbai suburbs. The main office, near the Taj Hotel, was closed. "People were flooding in, even without their passports," she said, "All they wanted to do was to get home." She added that she had become even more aware of being an Indian citizen. She vowed to go home as soon as she finished her education and work to reform her country.

    On the sidewalk a block away a young man was handing out flyers for a panel discussion that was "OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!" Its subject was to be another form of transnationalism: the world economic order. Its title? "The Deepening Economic Disaster: Causes and Opportunities for Change."

    On the plaza: a poignant scene of  transnational mourning. On the sidewalk: a promise to expose the dangers of transnational capitalism. A deep pun was at work. On the plaza, people were establishing transnational bonds, the ties among them. On the sidewalk, the advocate of a lecture series was talking up an event that would shred the concept of transnational bonds, financial instruments to be bought and sold. Such are the layers, juxtapositions, and collisions of our globality.

Catherine R. Stimpson
NYC

Down Under Rising [Catharine R. Stimpson]

    How dare Baz Luhrmann dare me as much as he does in Australia, the epic film that swept into the United States over Thanksgiving? Dare me to feel as much as I did? Dare me to abandon irony for that pre-ironic innocence that compels belief? And dare me to believe in wonder again, in a magic that has nothing to do with David Copperfield and everything to do with spirits and the genius of a land and the heart's territories?

    There I sat in the Regal Union Square Stadium Theater on Broadway and 13th Street. I wept as love triumphed and hated the hard-of-feeling who snickered when the movie ended with an announcement that Australia had formally apologized for its racist past. For love and social justice were feeding on each other.

    Australia is about both, but Luhrmann lavishly spreads the food of love before us. Two gorgeous people are romantically in love: Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), and the eponymous Drover (Hugh Jackman). She is the gorgeous aristocrat whom Australia transforms from a woman of hauteur to one of steel will and sensuality. He is the gorgeous man of the Aussie land who learns to love again, even  if she is a Lady landowner and a Brit. Romantic love roils with family love: grandfathers for grandsons, mothers for children, brothers for brothers, and a half-caste child, the irresistible Nullah (Brandon Walters), for his dual families and their traditions. 

    Luhrmann demands that his audience love art and seduces us into doing so. He gives us awesome physical beauty, violent action (those stampedes), suspense, and for the cinematically knowing, metamorphic chains of visual images and generic references. Australia borrows from the romantic comedies in which lovers who hate each other suddenly realize that their snarls are the flip side of sexual passion. It samples the Western and its landscapes and horses as totemic animals.

    Above all, Australia is a national epic. This is not the Australia of convicts disembarking on a fatal shore. This is the Northern Territories from 1939 to 1941, its deserts and mountains, its rains that pour down like a miracle, its competitive agricultural industries, its rough multicutural city of Darwin that the Japanese bomb, and its great Aboriginial arts and crafts of survival. Luhrmann's nation is viciously racist. Half-caste children, the members of the Stolen Generations, are snatched from their full-blood mothers and stashed in missionary schools, where they are trained to become servants for their white rulers.

    Luhrmann dares us to imagine that a national epic can dramatize the eventual bringing together of colonizers and the colonized first settlers. His film score brilliantly weaves together the English tradition (a swelling Elgar's Enigma Variations that summoned my tears), the Australian "Waltzing Matilda," a Sir Elton John arrangement of "The Drover's Song," and Aboriginal mourning songs, spells, and incantations.  The bad white guys, here a murderous cattle baron who has fathered the half-caste Nullah whom he would kill, will die. Lady Sarah must give up Nullah to his Aboriginal heritage, but he promises to sing his life to her, and she promises to hear him. As a national epic about race, Australia reverses D.W. Griffith's cruelly racist Birth of a Nation (1915)---a cinematic act parallel in  its way to Obama's undoing of the bloody segregationist politics of the United States.

    Like all romantics, Luhrmann also dares us to go to the edge of the probable and then leap over into the abyss of dreams. The overarching musical theme of Australia is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Lady Sarah first sings it, hesitantly and then forcefully, as she comforts a Nullah grieving for his blood mother. Then an entranced Nullah hears it in a sweaty movie theater in Darwin. He next plays it on the harmonica of a dead white man, to be joined by an angelic chorus of mission school boys, rescued  by boat from the Japanese by the Drover's aboriginal brother-in-law and a hotel keeper and Nullah's aboriginal uncle. He wll die sacrificially in this effort. Hearing these wisps of song over the waters, Lady Sarah races to the dock to be re-united amidst the carnage of battle with Nullah and the Drover.

    Lurhmann's promise is that if we make the leap into the abyss of dreams, if we dare to wonder, we will land on a Yellow Brick Road or on a road whose composition we have yet to discover.  Yes, the Wizard of Oz is a fraud, but Nullah's Aboriginal grandfather, warrior and guide to the land and a dancer among the spirits, practices an authentic magic.

    In the Regal Ladies Room , my partner of several decades, an Australian who lived there until she was in her mid-thirties, pointed to the changing table for babies. Its name? Koala Kare. A national symbol of Australia, this cuddly koala grins out from a piece of metal. Kitsch and commercialism meet amidst the mirrors, sinks, and stalls. Luhrmann, I like to believe, would laugh. For the great arc of the rainbow---be it in Aboriginal myth, the Old Testament,or a Judy Garland performance---radiates over us all in this rash and beautiful storm of a movie.

    Corny? Of course, as corny as Kansas in August.

Catharine R. Stimpson
New York City

News This Week (November 30-December 6, 2008)

This week we welcome Catharine R. ("Kate") Stimpson as our guest blogger.  Stimpson is University Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University.  She writes about literature, women and gender, and education, and is chair of the board of Creative Capital, the innovative artists' organization. Welcome, Kate. _______________________________________________________________________