The Best American Poetry

The Sweet Scientist [by David Lehman]

There were greater heavyweights -- Dempsey, Louis, Ali -- but only one champ retired undefeated, having won all fifty of his bouts, most by knockout. Rocky Marciano of Brockton, Mass., may have been a clumsy boxer, but he had the force of Zeus in his right hand and he could knock you out with an unexpected left hook as well. The saga of his championship years is at the center of A. J. Liebling's The Sweet Science, which even foes of pugilism recognize as one of the greatest of all sports books. A compilation of articles written for The New Yorker, Liebling's book combines close and savvy observation of what goes on in the ring (and in training camp, at the weigh in, and in the cab that takes you to the Garden or the old Polo Grounds) with a wondrous prose style.

Liebling's simile-machine produces such long-playing hits as these, to quote just a few: "Marciano looked like the understander in the nine-man pyramid of a troupe of Arab acrobats." Former featherweight champ Abe Attell "looks at you with cold eyes around his huge beak that is like a toucan's with a twisted semptum."  After absorbing the punch you see depicted here, Jersey Joe Walcott "flowed down like flour out of a chute." Randy Turpin, a Sugar Ray Robinson opponent, punched "always at some curious angle. One punch for the body looked like a man releasing a bowling ball; another, a right for the head, was like a granny boxing a boy's ears." Here's looking at you, Rocky, just before your last fight, when you took out the old Mongoose, Archie Moore, in the ninth round, on September 20, 1955 in Yankee Stadium: "Wrapped in a heavy blue bathrobe and with a blue monk's cowl pulled over his head, he climbed the steps to the ring with the cumbrous agility of a medieval executioner ascending the scaffold." The similes are as precisely accurate as they are wildly imaginative -- wit at the service of truth.

The Sweet Science and four other books by the versatile writer (about food and Paris, the press, night-club owners and other Broadway personages, and a Louisiana politician) are available in one beautifully designed, admirably edited volume from the Library of America. The Sweet Science and Other Writings includes, in an appendix, the best essay on boxing ever to use poetry as a unifying and organizing conceit. And who is the poet who provoked Liebling to this figurative flight of fancy? Well, a hint: What killed boxing as Liebling knew it and loved it in its glory years? Television, he would answer, but there was one individual who, by the force and witty complexity of his personality, rescued the sport and extended its life by two decades, the way Sinatra extended the life of songs first performed by Ruth Etting. You know who. -- DL

Mitch Sisskind writes The Iliad! [with comments by David Lehman]

Iliad

Old age, Tolstoy wrote, is the biggest surprise
In a man's life. So true! Childhood hours
In the ancient car I now recall, the hot months,
Sox game on the radio, soporific Bob Elson
Mumbling in the microphone, "Um, strike one,"
And at bat Sherman Lollar, sloth-like catcher,
Elson droning, "Ball four. It's a base on balls,"
Henri Bergson called this perceived duration,
The sense of time as elastic phenomenon
Stretched or compressed by stoic's fortitude
Or child's impatience: "Are we there yet?"
And this is where the surprise comes in.
Yes, my good man, you have arrived there.
Yes, you are there all right, ya big dummy. 

In fact, you've already been there for a whie
Except "there" is not "where" or even "what"
You would have imagined. "There" is "here,"
Wherever you happen to be at the time.
As the snail everywhere bears its shell,
You and the destination are one now,
Not where you're going but what you are.

But we will grieve not, as Wordsworth wrote.
Or perhaps we will grieve. Shall we? No matter,
It doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.
That's just how the cookie crumbles,
That was the funeral of Hector. 

-- Mitch Sisskind

Veteran sportscaster Mitch Sisskind, prize-winning author of "Monsters of the Midway," who has covered the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers in a career spanning four decades, has now branched out in verse and written his "Iliad." My source is Pierre Menard, who under a pseudonym acted as the first United States citizen with a French first name ever to be a president's press secretary. To call Menard an informed source is to obfuscate the understatement. For those not in the know, a brief synopsis is in order.

Back in the day, Menard flexed his chutzpah chops by dropping his last name in favor of that of the notoriously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye. His project: to write, with word-for-word fidelity to the original, "The Catcher in the Rye" with the difference that the book became an allegory of the life of Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their heyday, who befriended pitcher Don Newcombe in his losing battle with rye, bourbon, scotch, and Canadian whiskey. Yet Newk, who squandered his great gifts and faced a depression like you wouldn't believe after Yogi Berra went deep on him twice and the Yanks clobbered the Bums 9-0 in the seventh game of the 1956 World Series, is one of the few from that legendary team still alive and well.

It was in 1959 that the soi-disant Pierre Salinger adopted the pseudonym of Mitch Sisskind.

On a dare from Deejay Shap and Larry Weed, Sisskind agreed to hole himself up in a Hilton hotel -- the one in Pisa known to the natives as the "tiltin' Hilton" -- for twenty-four hours with no books or reading material handy except the Gideon Bible and the San Francisco Chronicle. At two hour intervals a kindly hotel staffer would knock on the door saying "My name is Alan, and if it isn't Alan, it's Donald" and offering snacks: "Coffee's a dime." But Sisskind vowed to disregard any such temptation and to limit his responses to the names of wrestling holds.

By the end of twenty-four hours Sisskind had written his Iliad after escaping from handcuffs and leg-chains. He then took a bath, watched porn on demand, had a Coke, read three war novels by Herman Wouk, James Jones, and Norman Mailer, and became a gemologist. We post the written results above and invite readers to compare the lines with the Homeric original (chapter 22: pages 397-411 in Rieu's prose translation; or see Lattimore, lines 265-261). "There is no question in my mind that Achilleus was the greatest athlete of all time," Sisskind told Janet Benderman in their Partizansky Review interview of 2008. "Achilleus was god's man, less mortal than divine."

About his accomplishment Sisskind said, "I did not write The Iliad. I wrote my Iliad, and I called it 'Iliad,'  for each of us must have his own Iliad, alas, do we not?"

"Iliad" is posted together with other compelling works -- by Angela Ball, Terence Winch, Sharon Mesmer, Jim Cummins, Ron Padgett, Led Upton, Bill Zavatsky, and worthy others including Denise Duhamel, guest editor of the 2013 edition of Best American Poetry -- in the one-shot, hot-shot, big-hit lit mag that Martin Stannard put together for the world to see on August 1, 2013. -- DL

Red Smith Hits It Out of the Park, with Roger Angell's comments [by David Lehman]

Red Smith would never have predicted that the illustrious Library of America would collect the columns he typed on short deadlines for the New York Herald Tribune, publish them lovingly, and dub him "America's greatest sportswriter." The involvement of the Library of America -- which has published two volumes by A. J. Liebling, including The Sweet Science, his masterly book on boxing -- reflects the growing recognition of sportswriting as a craft and Smith's elevated standing in the scribe's fraternity. 

Smith sat in the press box and, in his phrase, "opened a vein" when it came time to stare at the typewriter. Barely minutes had gone by since Bobby Thomson won the 1951 pennant for the Giants ("Reality has strangled invention"), or Rocky Marciano knocked out Archie Moore (Rocky threw "a left that made him curtsy like a convent girl"), or Secretariat pulled away from the field at Belmont on my birthday in 1973 ("It seems a little greedy to win by thirty-one lengths," the horse's owner said), or the Yankees beat the Dodgers for their fifth World Championship in a row twenty years earlier. The title of the last piece mentioned, a quote pulled from the piece (and not, alas, the original headline), is a beauty: "Like Rooting for U. S Steel."  And I wondered whether the Godfather auteurs remembered this line about the New York Yankees and their fans when they had Hyman Roth -- celebrating his birthday in Cuba -- say "Michael, we're bigger than U. S. Steel."

It has been a long time since U. S. Steel was the measure of power, size, and importance, and American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (edited by Daniel Okrent) comes from that time as remote from us and filled with nostalgic glamour as the early seasons of Mad Men. You could, if you were a lazier columnist than Smith, call it the golden age of American sport; certainly it might have seemed that way to a New Yorker spoiled by having three major league teams within subway distance. Joe DiMaggio patrolled center field for the Yankees, and when he stepped down, Mickey Mantle came along to take his place. Willie Mays played center for the Giants, who, with Leo Durocher at the helm ("a controversial guy, and that may be the the understatement of the decade"), were the unlikely victors of a four-game World Series sweep of Cleveland in 1954. Sugar Ray Robinson, the best fighter "pound for pound" in any weight class, performed regularly at the Garden. Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, made West Point a college football powerhouse. Between 1949 and 1960, Casey Stengel managed the Yankees to ten pennants in twelve years. In 1947, Branch Rickey ("the greatest of all double-talk monologists") put a Dodger uniform on Jackie Robinson and revolutionized baseball.

Smith made an art of deadline sportswriting. He was especially handy with a simile. When Sugar Ray was past his prime, in one of the Carmen Basilio bouts, Smith conjectures: "Maybe, like an aging shortstop, he can no longer go to his right." Or consider these sentences from his piece about the 1947 World Series game in which the Dodgers' Cookie Lavagetto ruined the Yankees' Floyd Bevens's no-hit bid with a bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning two-out double. "In the third [inning] Johnny Lindell caught Jackie Robinson's foul fly like Doc Blanchard hitting the Notre Dame line and came to his feet unbruised. In the fourth Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski's monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth." In the same game, Tommy Henrich of the Yankees took a hit away from Hermanski: "Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball."

To write for a newspaper requires a strict brevity of means. It takes artistry to write in short paragraphs, as in this one about Brooklyn southpaw Carl Erskine, hero of game five of the 1952 World Series: "Erskine is an agreeable young man with good habits and an equally good overhand cure. He does not drink, does not smoke, and does not choke in the clutch. On out-of-town business trips, while his playmates sit in the hotel lobby waiting for somebody to discard a newspaper, he visits art museums." There is wit in Smith's parallel structures. but what I like most is this glimpse into road-trip life, circa 1952.

Smith has his sour moments. He is down on Jersey Joe Walcott (for being old) and Ted Williams (for spitting his displeasure with the fans), He is right to voice a city's frustration and anguish when the Dodgers and Giants left for the West Coast at the end of the 1957 season. Their departure from New York "is an unrelieved calamity, a grievous loss to the city and to baseball, a shattering blow to the prestige of the National League, an indictment of the men operating the clubs and the men governing the city." Two years later, a certain amount of revisionism has taken hold. Baseball's West Coast expansion "was a development long overdue and greatly to be desired, but effected in an atmosphere of deceitful contriving which left the game wearing the dollar sign like a brand."

American Pastimes has been edited, and is introduced, with exemplary intelligence by Daniel Okrent. Chapter headings are wonderful. What had been "Nice Guys Finish" -- the piece about the exodus of the Dodgers and Giants to the Pacific Coast -- now sports the title "East Goes West and League Goes South." There is one error, no doubt the product of an oversight, that should be fixed in the next printing: In an October 1966 piece recollecting Fridays in previous decades at Madison Square Garden, Smith would never have referred to "Rocky Marciano's three wars with Tony Zale." It was a completely different Rocky, Graziano, a middleweight, who did battle with Zale. I make a point of it because Rocky Graziano was the first prize-fighter to take my fancy: I was eight years old and saw Somebody Up There Likes Me with my parents and sisters at a drive-in movie. Paul Newman played Graziano.

The sportswriter's occupational risk is hyperbole, and Smith is not exempt. Of Whirlaway, winner of the racing's Triple Crown the 1941, Smith writes, the colt "was Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones -- not just a champion but" -- you finish the sentence. The remarkable thing is how few lapses there are in such a long career.

Like Liebling, Red Smith writes with particular verve about Marciano. The undefeated heavyweight champion was "victorious, invincible, indestructible." But it is DiMaggio who best fits Smith's idea of the heroic athlete, the demigod who does everything with majesty and grace -- and is therefore the proper model for a prose stylist, doing his job with consistency and great skill and without ostentation or temperament. In a game against the Red Sox in 1950, Bobby Doerr hit what looked to be a sure double when "Joe raced in on a long angle to his left, thrust out his glove, palm up like a landlord taking a payoff under the table." When Joe retired in October 1951: "the simple, flat fact [is] that the greatest ballplayer of our day and one of the greatest of any day quit baseball yesterday." The last sentence in the last column Smith ever wrote was something he told himself whenever he felt disappointed with the current crop of ballplayers: "Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio."

-- David Lehman

This post appeared originally on our blog on June 21, 2013.

*

Roger Angell writes that Red Smith "was a hero of mine, long ago, because he always made it clear that it was OK for sports fans be smart and educated enough to own an extended vocabulary. and also to appreciate and, above all, enjoy sports. To be like him, that is.  He was serious about this but never took himself seriously.  He was also (by the way) a heavy drinker and often filed copy with seriously shaking hands.

"My only beef about your review is that you omitted Red's weird ending in that column about that Bevans-Lavagetto near no-hitter: a line saying  that the unhappiest man in North America when the tilt ended was a sportswriter there with a broken "v" on his typewriter, which made it it impossible for him to write either of those names.  This was Red himself---he told me later that the "v" snapped off along about the fifth inning and flew like an escaping sparrow out of his Smith-Corona and out of sight over the lip of the pressbox.

 

"Thanks for bringing this all back.  I've got the Okrent collection and now I'll actually read it."

 

*

For Mitch Sisskind's response, click here. 

-- DL

Remembering John Ashbery: "The Improvement" [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

(Ed note: In the aftermath of John Ashbery's death, I've been scrolling through our archive of John-related posts. We've had hundreds! I discovered this one from 2011 and  it has inspired me to attempt  "The Improvement" as tonight's cocktail.) 

L to R: Chef Pacifico, Peter Hoffman, and Bob Holman

The idea was genius, cooked up by Tree Swenson of the Academy of American Poets and poetry-loving restaurateur Peter Hoffman (Back Forty, Savoy): Take eight of the city's most creative mixologists and challenge them to invent a drink inspired by a favorite poem. To the drinks add poem-inspired hors d'oeuvres prepared by chef Shanna Pacifico and dramatic readings of the featured poems by the Bowery Poetry Club's charismatic Bob Holman.  Serve it all up in the acclaimed restaurant Back Forty in the East Village, with chef/owner Hoffman as host, and you've got my kind of National Poetry Month celebration. . 

I was there on Tuesday night with camera and notebook but I must confess that after chasing mixologist Anna Dunn's "Tender Buttons" (LIV Vodka, Zaya rum, Berkshire gin, Chinaco tequila and tarragon and lemon syrups) with Pacifico's "Green Eggs and Ham" (deviled eggs with crispy pork) my notes are barely legible.

But I did capture Back Forty's own Russ Tinsley making "The Improvement," inspired by John Ashbery's poem of the same title. The poem has stayed with Tinsley since college and came to mind when he took up the cocktail challenge. He aimed for a spring-like and refreshing drink -- hence the gin -- in which all of the ingredients would be recognizable, like the "inside out," of the poem.With his combination of ginger infused gin, mint, lemon, lime, honey, and splash of ginger beer, I can affirm that he succeeded beautifully. When asked if he would like John Ashbery to sample his creation, Tinsley replied, "that's the dream." John? Are you game? 

I'm hoping that if enough people request "The Improvement" it will become a permanent part of the menu. 

-- sdh 

Why typing John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" is a good thing [by Dara Wier]

These, I suppose, two Candadians, have been watching me for many years.  They're in a painting James Tate and I found on a trans-Canadian road trip.  We don't know who they are, or why they're sitting in a field in their business outfits or what the painting might commemorate or what the hat's are about; nor do we know who painted the picture. But these two men have served many purposes over the years.

At first they constituted an exciting discovery, up on a barn's interior wall that served as a repository for an antique dealer's stash.  When we learned we could have these men, and their mysterious, unknown, unknowable company, we were very happy.  So, we took them with us back home to Amherst, Massachusetts.  Over the years they've watched me work, write, read, think, talk and live.  I've often thought I should please them.  I've often been amused by their situation.  I've sometimes made up somethings about who they are.  I've sometimes let them stare at me.  I grew to love these two strangers in a strange situation, a strange feeling that feels very familiar.  

 

This particular Cry Room is in Missoula, Montana.  For some reason, I'd never seen a Cry Room before or known that they are fairly commonly found in churches across the country.  My friend and I had been talking about how various people handle or have sudden bouts of crying, and we were about to head into a wedding where one expects a little bit of a certain kind of crying to go on, when I saw the door marked CRY ROOM.  I pointed toward it in such a way as to say without saying it, look, there's where crying gets done, it has its own room.

Recently I typed into a document John Ashbery's early poem, "The Instruction Manual."  This gave me no need of any kind of CRY ROOM of any kind.  This rewarded me with considerable layers of pleasures.  I was typing it so that it could be shown via computer to an honor's poetry seminar I'm meeting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  I typed from The Library of America's gorgeously produced, well-edited (by Mark Ford) 2008 volume Ashbery/Collected Poems 1956-1987.

Word by word the poem is such an amazing tribute to poetry, to imagination's desire, imagination's ability to save us or save something of us, or for us or in us. The poem treats invention's and sight's methodical rendering as a creative force equal in significance to that of the Big Bang's. The poem enacts how invention advances by careful degrees and attention, how taking time to build something (make up something) gives us such a time of potential beauty. Formally we get to experience an imagination within an imagination, a view of Guadalajara within the poem, Guadalajara's people in their town, in Guadalajara's square, in and around its bandstand, the neighborhoods around the square, a patio within a house, and love appears in most all of its phases and stages, ah, the poem does it all perfectly......and color, how the poem says: you're seeing by means of words what isn't exactly here, believe this with me now, here it is, such a generous gesture, here is this and this leads to that and that leads to there and over here we have, ah the precisely imagined and managed colors and then finally how the poem glides away from itself so perfectly...I love this poem (of course I love many other  Ashbery poems as well)......and so cool that Shahrazad (the one in the book) is in Scheherazade (the music mentioned in the poem) and is one of our ultimately successful model tellers of all time (......these are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad....) (The Modern Library Classic of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS has commentary or blurbs from:  Robert Louis Stevenson, John Addington Symonds, Agernon Charles Swinburne, and Lady Isabel Bishop, it's translated by Sir Richard F. Burton.  What a crew!

I was talking with a friend yesterday about collaborations, not how we do them, but how what we know about them causes us to feel as we receive them.  And how when one is told that something is a collaboration, suddenly, everything about how one receives it is different from how we receive something from a single author or artist.  Maybe almost everything about collaboration has to do with how we receive it almost as much as how it gets made.  Fictional collaborative efforts seem exceptionally aware of this.

I love the little Russian dolls hiding inside one another for their persistence, the Morton Salt Girl on her box for her flair (I haven't seen her for a while), anything almost that is something within something within something.  I like a frame on a picture.  I like a picture in a picture. I like a geode. I like time lapse photography. I like stop action action.  I used to not like poems about poems, these made me very nervous for a while, and then one day, in an antique store in Deerfield, Massachusetts, I came upon something that dropped that particular veil from my eyes.........walking in the door, my eyes directly were directed to a piece of calligraphy.........I walked closer........I looked more.........(never had calligraphy been anything I'd have thought too much about, all due respect to calligraphers, of course)......I saw there....something I'd never seen before........layers and layers of something written, graphed, laid on a page, words that were drawing me in by their design (like a vortex this is) (like a real reverie) and when I got close enough to see what finally (or perhaps firstly) (who knows which way this was made, at least in its illusion, one can't (and shouldn't) be able to tell which came first) I was caught up short, under a spell, ready to see what I could finally read: executed with a pen.  Way down deep in the almost perspectively vanished end of its existence.

It's a good thing when one is stripped of a prejudice of any kind.

That piece of calligraphy freed me from a prejudice I'd been longing to drop.  I wish I could show it to you here.

(ed note: this post first appeared on 9/28/2009)