The Best American Poetry

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: You Get What You Order

Bars are not democracies, but in both cases, you get what you order with regularity. Voters pick the guy who’s going to deregulate, reform education and cut taxes, and lo! that’s what he does. Voters pick the guy who’s going to reform health care, cut taxes and get us out of Iraq, and lo! Ditto! There are few surprises. Scott Walker’s bait and switch aside, elected officials are actually kind of predictable.

So what do voters mean when they complain about slippery politicians? It means they ordered up something they don’t want after all, and instead of admitting their own mistake, they find a crack in the glass, a fly in the soup, a crook behind the bar. Obama the candidate was pretty clear about seeking to reform healthcare should he be elected. Guess what? He did just that.

But voters want to send back the Obamacare cocktail, and now he’s ignoring his own biggest legislative achievement. He could say, “Hey, you got what you ordered.” But he won’t. As every bartender knows, you dump the perfectly good drink and make another, to the customer’s specifications, even though it’s the customer who’s at fault.

Having been maneuvered into this defensive posture more than once, here’s what one former bartender used to do: suppress customer turnout. In other words, I took preventative measures, steps to avoid filling the orders of customers likely to return them, by discouraging the customer from staying at my bar. I profiled. Here’s the kind of customer who’s going to send a drink back:

• Asks for, then spends a very long time parsing, a Drinks Menu
• Chooses based on the garnish, hence ordering that which comes with an umbrella, cucumber, or
  specialty ice cubes in the shape of florets
• Giggles
• Consults friends and neighbors before ordering, but does not consult the bartender
• Zeroes in on the flaming drinks

Someone who fit this profile would learn from me, much to my disappointment, that the key ingredient (crème de boullion, a sparkler) was out of stock. If I had to, I’d invent a key ingredient.

This method is highly inexact and therefore thoroughly unfair. No doubt many lovely customers got caught in my dragnet. Tough. Since I’d earn better tips from taking care of fewer, less problematic drinkers, prevention was too winning a strategy to ignore.

Which is why Republicans are very busy suppressing wide swatches of the electorate with “anti-fraud” laws, lest some few of them vote for Obama, and why I here suggest that Democrats try the same, anti-democratic, elitist, un-American, immoral strategy. Here’s how:

• Card the usual suspects: every white person over the age of 50. Make sure each has a valid passport or similar to prove U.S. citizenship.
• Inspect the ID photo—does it really look like its bearer? Or like a younger, more attractive cousin? Since passports are good for 10 years, a number of photos will be out of date. Challenge these.
• Check the address—is it within the polling place’s district? Some of the elderly move into assisted living but don’t change their addresses on their passports or driver’s licenses, since they can no longer travel or drive. Flag these tricksters as potentially fraudulent voters, no doubt pulling a fast one on America from their socialist, Obamacare-subsidized wheelchairs.
• Also target younger white men with cigars, white women who show up during business hours pushing expensive strollers, and anyone wearing a cross.
• Canvass the parking lot, then demand valid proof from white voters with fish or other Christian iconography on the bumpers or rear-view mirrors of their cars.
• Have all of the above cast provisional ballets, so they are in the same boat as the young, black and brown Americans who’ve been harassed by the other side.

There is an easier way. Voters could educate themselves. They want to slash aid for hungry people, schools, NPR and Planned Parenthood, while pouring tax dollars into wasteful defense spending at a rate higher than the next 10 countries’ combined military budgets? They can vote for Romney. They want tax breaks for the rich and squat for the middle-to-poor? They can vote Romney. If people calculated their interests like the rational creatures economists believe them to be, Democrats would win with 99% of the vote. But voters are no more rational than giggling arsonists perusing the drinks menu at Painkiller. Oops, gotta go. Just got a request for Zombie Punch.

You win if. . .

You win if you can name the bandleader with the clarinet and the singer
and what is it that you win? How about this:

 
Have you ever tried a Ramos Gin Fizz with Creme de Violette instead of orange blossom water?
(Originally posted April 29, 2011)

Nothing Beats the Martini [by DL]

 A "dark and stormy"
(ginger beer and rum)
does excellent things for some.
Try it
the next time you go off your diet.
You'll see.

But nothing beats a Martini.
No, nothing beats a Martini.

Informed imbibers agree
that a chilled Negroni
(gin, sweet vermouth, Campari)
is better than Long Island Iced Tea.
But does it beat a Martini?

Tell me what in
a Manhattan
is not to like?
Rye, sweet vermouth cut with Cynar
(an artichoke-based liqueur
you'll find at any good bar)
makes for a great cocktail
that will not fail
to please on land or sea
and improve any party.

Still, this is the singular truth:
Nothing beats gin and vermouth,
the latter French, the former English.
Served cold as the Arctic Ocean,
it inspires devotion.
It's as water to a fish,
It's delightful and delish,
It's precisely what I wish.

Nothing goes down as cleanly
as a well-mixed Martini.

No, nothing beats the Martini. 

-- DL

All Shook Up at the Poetry & Cocktail Slam [by Catherine Woodard]

The drinks at the 2^nd Poetry & Cocktail Slam at Back Forty were designed to have a bite, to sneak up on partakers – like the seven paired poems, like any good poem.

Drink in hand, Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club read each poem in front of the NYC bar or restaurant alchemist who invented the cocktail. Poet and performer, Holman read with his own magic: softly, slowly for “Somewhere I Never Traveled” by E. E. Cummings or booming for “Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  

The benefit for the Academy of American Poets was hosted by Peter Hoffman at his East Village restaurant with tasty treats from his kitchen. This year’s cocktail recipes and some of the poems will join the inaugural ones at www.poets.org/cocktails. 

Tom Macy from Clover Club in Carroll Gardens paired his berried and bubbly drink Clever Girl with the Emily Dickinson poem that begins "NATURE rarer uses yellow." Like many a Dickinson poem that lulls by surface sublime from the natural world, Macy floated a yellow pansy in the drink. All the better to heighten the punch.

“Just like me,” said Jessica Knevals ordering a Clever Girl, wearing yellow heels as bright as the flowers.

“I’d be lying if I said you were the first person to say that,” Macy replied.

Bar banter fueled by alcohol is likely more interesting to the bar patrons than the bartender. But pack in poetry lovers on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon and a drink based on Dorothy Parker Gin from the New York Distilling Company prompts replies to Holman in full Parker poems.

The longest Parker recitation was from Christopher Michel, also the only living poet on the menu at this year’s slam. His Poem in which I am an asshole as a poorly behaved poet guest inspired a rye drink with the longest lines of the afternoon, A drink which can make you an asshole, mixed by Tom Richter of the Beagle. “Because it will sneak up on you,” Richter said. Holman and Michel read the poem together while the Beagle owner covered his eyes.

”They truly are mixologists,” Holman praised those to mix, shake and pour the libations. "And they make more money than poets.”

Catherine Woodard has played coed, pickup basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals.  In 2011, Woodard was a featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University. 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, On Thunderclaps & Other Extremes

Equal parts gin, whiskey and brandy, shaken and strained. According one Prohibition-era recipe book, Here’s How!, once you serve it, you’d better run. The Thunderclap does sound pretty awful, and lethal too—a hit-and-run act of weather not unlike the real weather we’ve been having, most recently, a coordinated attack of tornadoes across Oklahoma, Kansas and a few other Midwestern states.

Who is responsible for this vile concoction? Here’s How! suggests that the bartender is, and that his best course of action is to leave the scene of the crime. But when it comes to the equal parts raw sewage, mining residue, and smog that polluters serve up, denial is the favorite course of action. It’s as if the bartender poured you a Thunderclap, stood before you while you downed it, and then said, “I gave you no such thing.”

Unlikely as it seems, the denial tactic has been very successful. Pew’s latest poll shows 62% of Americans don’t believe that pollution is heating up the planet, either because they’ve bought the “natural patterns” argument (“This Thunderclap is perfectly harmless! It’s the water vapor ya gotta watch out for.”), they haven’t seen enough evidence to form a belief (“Thunderclaps are just a theory”), or, scariest of all, they haven’t yet reached the question of responsibility because they deny the planet is getting warmer in the first place (“Thunderclap? There’s no Thunderclap here.”). Among Republicans—i.e., those charged with protecting the 1% from taxes and the polluters from governmental regulation—a very thick layer of denial obscures facts that in clean air would be glaring. Only 19% of them think pollution is driving up the temperature.

Ease of denial comes, in part, from the language concerned environmentalists use to talk about their passion, a set of terms drained of all passion. So forget global warming, greenhouse gasses, carbon
footprint, human activity, climate change, CO₂ emissions, and all the other post-doc terminology when it comes to a sober discussion of the state of our planet. Let’s ask one simple question of climate deniers (what does that term even mean? taking a stand against the existence of weather?):

“Gosh, that was some tornado/hurricane/tap water on fire. Do you think pollution has anything to do with it?”

You’ll get a resounding “yes.”Even from Republicans.

It’s similar to the “yes” you would have gotten in 2006, if you’d asked my neighbor, “Wow, your crappy 2-bedroom ranch is appraised at a half-million dollars! Don't you think that’s a little high?” Among my home-owning friends at the time, the ridiculous price tags attached to our modest dwellings was a common object of marvel. And yet when the bubble burst, howls of “We didn’t knoooowwwww!” arose—not from us, but from the banks, real estate hustlers and speculators who’d driven the prices so high.

Those are the same howls polluters will send up, when the weather gets too bad to ignore. But don’t worry: we won’t hear them under all that angry, gray, flammable water.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, gets educated

To see pigs feeding at the public trough, look no further than for-profit schools, which, like “private” prisons and Blackwell, aren’t the market solutions to failed Big Government that our conservative, pro-business friends tout them as. These entities aren’t market-based at all. They’re dependent on taxpayers. Call them socialist pigs instead of  capitalist ones, because what they’re doing is redistributing your wealth to their owners. And these owners are rich enough to bankroll big fights against any attempt to regulate the flow of federal dollars coming their way. That’s because they charge higher tuition than self-identified state schools like the one where I teach.

Meanwhile, the mission of educating students at for-profit colleges is an afterthought, as is made clear by their websites. I challenge you to go to Phoenix University’s and find out anything useful about the curriculum or faculty without having to chat with a sales representative.

Or read this, an easy A for effort in 9 easy steps.

1. All of the for-profit universities have special software tools and pop-ups designed to get you to enter your contact information. Phoenix nudges you toward this on its home page, with a 4-step “Ready to Change Your Life” tool. Phoenix is big on breaking processes into steps, of which there are rarely more than four. If you’d like to change your life, the 4 Steps are to enter your area of interest, educational background and contact info into Phoenix’s database so that an “Enrollment Advisor” can reach you. Tada! Your life has been changed into fodder for their targeted marketing!

Hi, I’m Shawn! Your advisor! I was also a contestant on “The Bachelor”!

2. You beat a hasty retreat from the “Change Your Life” tool, returning to Phoenix’s home page in search of academic information. Scrolling down, you spot a practically invisible link for “First Year Sequence,” which Phoenix provides on the off-off chance people browse university sites in order to discover what they might learn. You click, expecting a list of courses or a description of the pedagogical philosophy behind the core curriculum. You are disappointed. Whatever the “First Year Sequence” of study might be, the site tells you only that it’s “more than prerequisites and busy work.” Because what could be a bigger waste of time than laying the foundations for higher education?

2½. You’ll also find two videos on the “First Year Sequence” page. Phoenix's website uses a lot of videos, lest you get the impression that you’ll be asked to read in college. One video is called “What to expect” and the other, “Funding your education.” Hopeful, you click on the first. But “what to expect” is mostly about how college isn’t free, it costs money, and nothing about what you might learn. What you should expect, and Phoenix is very clear on this, is to pay tuition. How much tuition, and for what, it doesn’t say.

You turn to the next video, “Funding Your Education.” This one also neglects to specify tuition costs. Instead, it features two main strategies for getting Phoenix University money that isn’t  yours: federal loans and federal grants. That’s right, your first class is in how to feed Phoenix with government dollars. The video does not suggest that maybe you should pay Phoenix out of money you earn in the private sector, where it allegedly dwells. Before you even know what it charges, it’s steering you toward taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: ObamaCare as Imperial Fizz

The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.

I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance.
Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty.  Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?

Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.

Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”

Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?

But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Greenspan's Own Oops Punch

Entertaining as Rick Perry’s November 9, 2011 “Oops” moment was—you know, the one when in his frenzy  to take a hatchet to government, he forgot which heads he was chopping off—the more significant and now completely repressed “oops” moment for the American right occurred three years earlier, on October 23, 2008, when Alan Greenspan confessed his “state of shocked disbelief” that markets don’t regulate themselves.

Without rules, the free market is kind of like the punch you might have served at parties in your college dorm. Who knows what toxic assets were swimming around in there? Fermented Hi-C? Grain alcohol? Nail polish? Why not, when punch itself was invented by desperate sailors who had run out of beer and turned to the locals for a stimulus package. One of the oldest recipes calls for arrack, which tastes a bit like a credit default swap and is made from palm trees. Any punch worth its floating lemon wheels is meant to creep up on guests, unleashing a voracious appetite for risk. In dormitories, that means regrettable sex. Greenspan’s deregulatory punch unleashed a voracious appetite for paper profits, what he called “euphoria” and the rest of us call greed.

Beyond chopping off regulatory heads wherever they might be, Chairman Greenspan left another insidious legacy. He handed off a historically low 4.25% interest rate to his successor, Ben Bernanke, who then had very little room to cut it. Fiddling with the Federal Funds rate is one of the few tools the Fed has. Roughly put, the idea is to crank the rate up when the economy’s “euphoric.” Paul Volcker raised it to 20% in 1981, and was duly vilified. Nobody likes a spoiler, but ever since the Depression, the Federal Reserve’s job was supposed to be to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going. And part of why you take the punch bowl away is so that you can bring it back, by lowering rates in a crisis like the one we have now. That’s hard to do when rates are already low.

Greenspan not only failed to take away the punch bowl, he spiked it with 80-proof easy money, in the form of both low interest rates and deregulation. No wonder the speculators got drunk. His tenure fit right in with the larger recklessness of the Bush years, the blind appetite for risk, the unwillingness to weigh long-term consequences against immediate gain--in the case of the invasion of Iraq, the neglect to think even one week ahead into a post-Saddam future. The attitude was to take the easy profit in the short term and let the future fend for itself. Thus so-called fiscal conservatives and budget hawks gave away a budget surplus to the 1%, rather than saving it for a rainy day. Meanwhile, the rest of us journeymen got punch drunk, battered in the early rounds of what turned out to be an economic TKO to the middle and working class.

At his 2008 hour of reckoning, Greenspan predicted a “restrained” market “for an indefinite future”:

"The financial landscape that will greet the end of the crisis will be far different from the one that entered it little more than a year ago. Investors, chastened, will be exceptionally cautious. Structured investment vehicles, Alt-A mortgages, and a myriad of other exotic financial instruments are not now, and are unlikely to ever find willing investors."

Chastened, my ladle. Not only did investment banks and hedge funds quickly return to that “myriad of other exotic financial instruments,” Greenspan himself renounced caution a few years later, criticizing the meek regulations of the Dodd-Frank Act for their attempts to impose order on financial markets.

Have a cup of Greenspan's Oops. You’re going to need it when you get rabbit punched by those party animals again.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Santorum Phones In Your Faith

I see into your heart.

Not really. I wouldn’t presume, not while Rick Santorum’s on the case. He’s like Santa, knowing whether your theology is naughty or nice. Or phony. If your “worldview” is one that “elevates the Earth above man,” for example, it’s phony. Never mind that no one on earth actually has such a “worldview,” or can figure out what it is. Is it a pre-Copernican understanding of cosmology? Could Santorum draw a little diagram, please?

Most of us value Earth selfishly, as the planet upon which we selfishly live. Though we acknowledge the solar system in a superficial way, we really believe the sun revolves around us. To lay waste to Earth would threaten us, the center of it, and so we try not to. This human-centric “worldview” is not one that “elevates the Earth above man.” A few of us are selfless enough to view Earth as a gift from God, and therefore something to which, out of reverence, we should not lay waste. Is that what Santorum means? If so, it’s “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” as Psalm 24 so clearly states: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it." Or maybe
he’s thinking of Leviticus 25: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants." Either way, it’s clear that the Bible agrees with Rick Santorum about how unimportant Earth is, and how important is alien, rent-paying man. The Bible’s right in line with Santorum’s free-market, property-rights, capitalistic theology, and the anti-immigration stance he so Biblically takes. What else could “The land must not be sold permanently” and “you are but aliens” mean?

And even though the Constitution is a political document, not a theological one, if you are “trampling on a constitutional right” as Rick Santorum reads it, your theology is bad. To wit, don’t let individuals make their own decisions about contraception, because that would be to impose “ideology on a group of people expressing their theology, their moral code." Where to begin with this convoluted thinking? Santorum can impose his “ideology on a group of people,” but if “people” have other ideas, they are “phony”? And possibly, as one of his aides suggested of President Obama, Muslim? What if the pesky ideology being imposed is enshrined in the Constitution?

As lazy thought and self-defeating rhetoric, Santorum’s statements taste a lot like a Maiden’s Prayer. I say this for two reasons: first, this cocktail has serious varieties of religious experience. Secondly, its recipe is lower-case catholic—i.e., you can put whatever gets you elected in there and still call it a Maiden’s Prayer.

To the first point, like a “worldview that elevates the Earth above man,” we must ask, what is it?  What is the Maiden Praying? Turns out, the Maiden is Praying to get laid. Consider two of the alternate names by which this cocktail goes: Leg Spreader and Between the Sheets. According to research by Esquire’s Resident Cocktail historian, the wondrous David Wondrich, a Maiden’s Prayer “exists to assist a young gentleman in convincing a young lady that he has something to offer the gene pool. That's right, a date-peeler.” To be accurate, the Maiden isn’t Praying to get laid, her boyfriend is. But that just goes to show that the Bible is right: Adam did the naming, not Eve.

To the second point, like Santorum’s argument, a Maiden’s Prayer is what the deconstructionists in my undergrad English department would call an indeterminacy. Nothing in the recipe seems to be verifiable through testing and experiment; the whole is both remedy and poison. I did a quick survey of my recipe books and found, to my surprise, that even the base liquor of a Maiden’s Prayer varies from source to source. In some it is gin-based, in others rum- and/or brandy-based. There was only the fuzziest of consistency with what else goes in the drink, aside from lemon juice, which occurred in all of them. Some had orange juice, some Cointreau, others Triple Sec, and a few Curacao. The oldest version had champagne. One had cream. Wondrich moans that these days the recipe includes “pretty much anything the sexually insecure undergrad finds lying around.”

Which brings us right back to Rick Santorum. He alone knows what’s phony and what’s Biblical. He alone determines meet and proper theology, no matter how flimsy his argument. He is Adam—a sexually insecure, yet-to-graduate, presumptuous Adam, but Adam nonetheless. He knows the Maiden’s Prayer: spread your legs, ladies, while the men get busy outlawing contraception. Pick a photo, any photo (and yes, all of these photos claim to be of the same drink). The Maiden's Prayer is whatever RIck Santorum says it is. We’re in great hands with this potential leader of the free world. 

A Pile of Cantaloupe [by Michael Robbins]

I'm told Sunday's a "low numbers day," so I'll start posting in earnest tomorrow, but I thought I should come in here & noodle around a little. I'm a fairly lazy reader of contemporary poetry—if I'm not reviewing a new book of poems, my method is to pick the book up whenever I happen to remember its existence, read a poem or three, & put it back on the shelf. I'm usually reading four or five books at once, but unless that poem or three kill me, I'm content to let most contemporary poetry remain a dark continent I dream of colonizing one day. LOL metaphors!

The upshot of all this is that there are several piles of contemporary poetry books—I'm already tired of typing those words, instead of "contemporary poetry" I'm going to say "cantaloupe"—several piles of cantaloupe books lying around my apartment at any given time. Now I will go over to the nearest pile of cantaloupe & report back to you on its contents. Writing is so funny, how it works. OK, so that pile had Paul Muldoon's Maggot, D. A. Powell's Chronic, Mary Ruefle's Selected Poems, & A. R. Ammons's Sphere. I don't know what Sphere is doing in there, it came out in the seventies, & I've actually read it. The Muldoon came out in 2010 & the Powell was published in 2009, so you see what I'm dealing with here. Ruefle's book I've read most of, but that's because I was teaching it.