The Best American Poetry

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

 The Cosmopolitan is the most hypocritical of cocktails. All Juicy Couture, with magenta sequins on the hip pocket and a heart over the "i," it is in reality a stealthy, dark, sleek, long-range, off-the-radar missile designed to get you bombed. You're drinking a vodka martini, folks, even though it doesn't taste like one. Don't kid yourselves.

But you do kid yourselves. You wouldn’t order one of these horrors if you weren’t trying to kid yourselves. You’d order a martini, preferably made with gin, which shouts itself out, not vodka, that trickster, and certainly not pink vodka, sweetened with Cointreau and—arghhh!—dressed up in cranberry juice. “You” in this case is the consumer. “You” in this case is also a hypocrite, if we take hypocrisy to be saying one thing (“I am not gay”) but doing another (soliciting sex from other guys in the men’s room).  The Cosmo drinker’s hypocrisy is to say, “I am a nice girl. See my pretty drink?” but then, like her prototypes on Sex and the City, to get drunk and sleep with her unattractive divorce attorney.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

The problem with Latin is that it sounds all egg-heady. Cocktails, which could conceivably both have eggs in them and go to your head, nonetheless rarely have egg-heady names. Would you raise a Pulchritude to your parched lips? Nope, it’s an American Beauty. Sip a Vehicle? Sorry, try a Sidecar.   Our Old English, Celtic and Anglo Saxon words just sound better to put in your mouth. They’ve got chewier textures, a whiff of sensuality, the promise of tasting good. Browse a bartending guide and you’ll find Fizzes, Flips and Rickeys, Cobblers, Coolers and Kirs, Sours, Slings and Sledgehammers, Sharks, Derbies, Zombies and Knickerbockers. But Latinate names? I count only five that even come close.

The first two that spring to mind, Cosmopolitan and Metropolitan, are both from the Greek, -politan meaning citizenship, and the prefixes from words for world and city. The Cosmopolitan is the citizen of the world, the Metropolitan of the city. Greek, as we know, is not Latin, but these two words do sound a bit egg-heady, and so they share the problem of Latin, a disembodiment from the senses. Another candidate is the Ideal Cocktail, idea- again from the Greek word meaning to see, which implies that our ideals are more tangible than we think. Judge is Latinate, and there’s a Judge, Jr. cocktail—does that count? I don’t think so. The name is so clearly straining to convert the beverage into a person, and no matter how Latinate a person’s name, a person remains rooted in the body. Personification, an egg-heady word, trumps egg-headiness. Personification in fact does the opposite of how it sounds.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

“Drill, baby, drill” is to slogans as Bull’s Blood is to wine and “subprime” is to finance. A risky proposition. Duh. It says so right there in the name. Who would care—or dare—to drink the blood of a bull?  The same people who want to drill, baby, and who bet that “subprime” will suddenly translate to “above par” as soon as they pour their money down that drain of wishful thinking. 

What is going on with these people? Don’t they know that “subprime” means “not good,” as in, “bad”? Or consider the similarly risky mortgages called “liar’s loans,” as if “subprime” might be a shade too subtle. Hell bent though it is on screaming toxicity, that name seems to have had no deterrent value to investors. To the contrary, it attracts them like a promise: the worse for you it sounds, the merrier will be its consumption.

I'm not entirely sure what to call this particular quality of delusion. Hypocrisy springs to mind. After all, the “Drill, baby drill!” folks like to preach personal responsibility without necessarily taking it. If you can’t find a job, it’s your own problem. You need to take personal responsibility, not government handouts. If you’ve got black skin and the sinking feeling that it’s hampered your progress through both corporate America and airport security, why, that means you’re not taking personal responsibility. It has nothing to do with discrimination. You lost your weekend home in the Hamptons betting on a “subprime” mortgage? WAIT A MINUTE! THAT’S NOT FAIR! I WANT MY MONEY BACK!

Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, is a one-man illustration of what happens when you adhere to high principles only when they don’t apply to you. From Andrew Leonard’s article at Salon.com, the headline read, “Bobby Jindal's oil spill crisis of faith,” and, below that, “The principled stimulus foe changes his mind about the evils of accepting government assistance.” The article detailed Jindal’s “principles,” which, as you might guess, involve personal responsibility when it comes to unionized auto workers in Detroit and homeowners in Nevada struggling with underwater mortgages. Contrast those deeply held principles to Jindal’s howls for federal help with his own state’s water problem.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender

Here’s a bumper sticker concept for you: Free the Pour! Surely the Founding Fathers made room for free pours somewhere in their intentions, right? After all, we're talking about freedom, and freedom is exactly what good Americans all love, the Founding Fathers most of all, except when they weren’t so darned busy owning slaves. If I were Justice Scalia--such a dreamboat mind reader!--I’d know for sure.   He's the psychic who could tell that corporations were yearning for freedom to express themselves. Maybe those little poems that corporations are constantly scribbling in their journals will finally be published. And not a moment too soon.

 Alas, I am no mindreader, but merely The Constituent Bartender, at your service, and Scalia’s, if he’d like another cause for judicial activism. Free the pour, Your Honor!

Nothing Beats the Martini

 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.

Citizens 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?
It's a great cocktail
and will not fail
to please on land or sea.

Still, this is the singular truth:
Nothing beats gin and vermouth.
Nothing goes down as cleanly
as a well-mixed Martini.

No, nothing beats the Martini. 

-- DL

But who knows where or when?

These two gentlemen are
(1) drinking a cocktail concocted by Matthew Yeager
(2) toasting the Civitella Ranieri in Umbria
(3) plotting a trade that will clear salary room so the Knicks can pursue free agent LeBron James next summer
(4) congratulating themselves on buying shares of American Express last April when it was 15. (It is now nearly 40).
(5) considering the best way to get past the dark harbor and resume the continuous life.
The best (wisest, wittiest, most neatly correct) answer will win.
-- T. McGrady
 

Keats, Kern et al.

See Tom Clark on Keats and William Zinsser's book "Easy to Remember" on the melodic construction of Jerome Kerns's "All the Things Your Are" and much else.

  Here's to you, John Keats and Jerry Kern!

Wayne Curtis on Cocktails

Wayne Curtis has a neat piece on cocktails, "Spirits of the Dead," in the current (April 2009) issue of The Atlantic. The article includes a recipe for the "Aviation of fame and fable. For years bartenders made it with gin, lemon juice, and maraschino liqueur, omitting the impossible-to-find secret ingredient, Creme de Violette, which has become possible to find though still something of a secret.  -- DL

"Breasts like Martinis" [by Jill McDonough]

Breasts Like Martinis

The bartender at Caesar's tells jokes we've heard a hundred times.
A shoelace walks into a bar, for example. I whisper
Sarah Evers told me that joke in sixth grade and Josey says
My brother Steve, 1982. A whore, a midget, a Chinaman,
nothing we haven't heard. Then a customer asks
Why are breasts like martinis? and they both start laughing.
They know this one, everybody knows this one, except
us. They don't even bother with the punch line. The bartender just says
Yeah, but I always said there should be a third one, on the back,
for dancing, dancing with the woman-shaped air behind the bar, his hand
on the breast on her back. So we figure three is too many,
one's not enough. Okay; we can do better than that. I like my breasts
like I like my martinis, we say: Small and bruised or big and dry. Perfect.
Overflowing. Reeking of juniper, spilling all over the bar.
When I have a migraine and she reaches for me, I say
Josey, my breasts are like martinis. She nods, solemn:
People should keep their goddamn hands off yours. How
could we tell these jokes to the bartender? We can't. He'll never know.
I say it after scrubbing the kitchen cabinets, and she gets it:
dirty and wet. Walking in the wind, Josey says My breasts
are like martinis and I hail a cab, know she means shaking, ice cold.

– Jill McDonough

(Originally in Slate, Oct. 23, 2007)

"Toasts" [by Lee Upton]

Toasts

To the last credentials we have:
bottoms up.
Cheers to the skipper.

Be a sport.
During a nap
may you put in a brief appearance

in heaven and discover
they’re making a better heaven at last!
May this wine bless the sunlight

that kissed its life,
and for every toast you raise
may the one you love toast you twice

and not her husband.
And may the secrets
that chew like termites through every human heart

lose their appetites.
And may the long corridors of jokes
not even once silt up for you.

And when you are naked
may you excite speculation
rather than simple tolerance.

And may you never be ashamed
of your happiness.
And when nettles fly into your mouth

may they turn into wine,
and may you drink
until you’re conscious.

Lee Upton

--published in River Styx 76/77 (2008): 2-3