The Best American Poetry

"Tenderly" [by Angela Sundstrom]

Fuck me now in pale-fire
parking garages, against
U-haul trucks and trellised
fences that tread-mark skin,
against Victorian lampposts
that lull with their flicker,
on grated sidewalks, sideways,
upside down in Ferris wheels in
reverse in the backseat of the
Buick accelerating exponentially
between our thighs, pistoning
upwards in thunderous storm,
against Brownstone stoops
at dusk, in the sun stippled
yard of neighbors at noon,
in Luna Park at midnight,
whitefish sparking the beach,
on the boardwalk slick
like seal skin, in the tides
like Leviathans until dawn.

(From the archive: originally posted January 2012.)

Auden on Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by fourteen for 2018 dollars. The devil count remains the same. -- DL

The JFK Murder Mystery (with gumshoe Tony Trigilio) [by David Lehman]

If, like me, you can suspend your usual horror at conspiracy theories in favor of the higher paranoia, and you have a weakness for poetry noir and are convinced that JFK was not assassinated by a lone marksman in the book depository building, have I got the book for you: it is Historic Diary by Tony Trigilio (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX). Trigilio uses a variety of styles and forms -- e.g., a pantoum for The Manchurian Candidate, diary entries in porose or prosey verse for the assassination witnesses who met violent deaths.

Here are a couple of sentences or lines lifted almost at random from this compelling new book:

"He shot the President on his lunch hour."

"The PTA overrun with communists."

"Tough to believe, in those 90 seconds
After the shots came off, a man could stash
A rifle, run down four flights of stairs, buy
Himself a Coke, stare down a cop."

"Dressed and sitting
upright in bed, November 8, 1965,
Kilgallen found dead of a drug
overdose, her case notes vanished -- "

"'The Queen of Diamonds'? What did she mean, 'The Queen of Diamonds'?"

-- DL

[from the archive; originally posted March 9, 2011. The image is that of the book cover Charlie Orr created for an unwritten book by me.]

"Hick and Willie Get a Catalog from the 'Atheist Collective' Gallery" [by Jim Cummins]

Hick:

"Got the mail.  Here's a list of 'Easter Fun Facts,' straight from Jesus.
Did you know He suffered from 'Dysfunction, Resurrectile,'
until His Father threw a thunderbolt projectile?
It broke the stone to pieces--"


Willie:

"--'and scared all the feces
out of Magdalen, Peter, and John the Reptile'?
No, I didn't know that.  Let me open their 'Dreck File'--
maybe there's a paparazzi shot where Mary 'V's us."


Hick:

"You're disgusting.  Did you know if you have a Resurrection
lasting longer than 'Eternity'
by Calvin Klein, you should consult an attorney?
Or that John Calvin was saved in a run-off election?"


Willie:

"Well, he had a lot of followers.  He was a Twitterer,
after all.  Is that from the 'Atheist Collective'?  Do they want money?
Okay, I'll lighten up and try to be funny--
although the guy who wrote 'Snowbound' was Whittier."

[from the archives; originally posted May 2013]

"Good Bad Titles" [by David Lehman]

On May 30, 2008, in this space, Dan Nester posted about an afternoon he and Jonah Winter spent sending up the titles that adorn poetry books. The titles that occurred to them "all seemed so aggressively portentous, imbued with such fawning obsequiousness," Nester wrote. "To exorcise ourselves of the real-life titles we were mentioning, titles that shall not be mentioned here, we played a word association game wherein either Jonah or myself would think of the second word of a two-word poetry book title, which would “after after” whatever the other participant named as the first." The "after after" in that sentence is hard to parse, perhaps deliberately, but the list of titles that follows clarifies the idea and gives us a window into the lads' minds that day: "Technical Vulva," "Variegated Cock," "Airport Beaver," "Stiff Flowering," "Tremulous Beaver."

The best of the list formed a category of their own: "good bad titles." Such was the thought of Corey Zeller, who approached a bunch of other poets to see whether they would produce self-parodying titles on order. Zeller's objective: "to write a book of serious prose poems" borrowing the deliberately bad titles. That She Could Remember Something Other Than _________, a Nester / Winter nominee, is the working title for Zeller's collection. 

Among those who have responded to the summons thus far are  Dean Young ("Tears of My Shadow"), Major Jackson ("The Shoeshine Chronicles"), Nin Andrews ("Beta Male Ballads"), Kim Addonizio "What Color is Your Vagina," "What Do Assholes Want?" "My Despair"), Arielle Greenberg ("Four Thousand Short Notes on Heidegger") as well as Joe Wenderoth, Dana Levin, Tim Seibles, Matthew Zapruder, and Joyelle McSweeney. A few conclusions can be drawn. Heidegger, who figures in several titles, handily beats out Descartes as the bad philosopher of choice. Sex, body parts, and bodily function retain their ancient popularity, with Dean Young's "My Mother's Thong" rivaling Dorothy Lasky's "Sitting by Your Mom's Bush in Broad Sunlight" but topped in tastelessness by the simplicity of Peter Markus's "On the Rag."

Here are some of the titles Jim Cummins has punfully proposed:

NOSTROMOSEXUAL
THE INTERPRETATION OF JEANS
PRIMO LEVI'S
THE LIVES OF A CELLO
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S PERSONS

Jim also suggests some plausible pseudonyms, chosen from the imaginary "tablet of contents" that he has been tinkering with for years. W S Merlot pours well. With Kenneth Joch you wonders how to pronounce the surname: Jock? Joke? Josh?

 Not one to shirk a challenge, I came up with titles for books, not necessarily poetry books, that might appear in a publisher's catalog:

Useful Canadian Revenue-Sharing Plans
The Woodrow Wilson Story
Do It Yourself Dentistry vol. 1)
When the Manure Hits the Ventilator
Dead Money: Prizer, Cisco, and Other Value Traps
How to Get Rich While Saving the Planet
Shakespeare’s Happiest Couple: The MacBeths

The last on this list was prompted by the proposition that the Macbeths may be Shakespeare's happiest husband and wife -- in the tragedies at least. 

Speaking of Shakespeare, I thought of another such title during a phone conversation with John Ashbery. We were discussing a decision he had made and I called it shrewd. He couldn't hear what I said and asked me to repeat the adjective. Shrewd, I said, "as in 'The Taming of the Shrewd'."

Oh, the photo illustrating this post is -- Hmmm. Why don't I invite commentary from the blogosphere? 

DL [from the archives; posted August 7, 2011

"Rocky Colavito" [by Jamie Katz]

When Rocky Colavito was hitting forty-two home runs a year,
a dark-eyed, rifle-armed right fielder for the Cleveland Indians,
my monthly sports magazine said he made the bobby-soxers       swoon.
I wasn’t sure what that meant. I was nine or ten.

And when Rocky Colavito was traded to the Detroit Tigers,
even up, for the American League batting champion,
a crew-cut mean-eyed shortstop with a cheekful of chaw,
the magazine said the Cleveland bobby soxers were in     mourning.

Rocky hailed from the tough Crotona Park section of the Bronx,   they said.
One night he leaped the fence at Yankee Stadium, bat in hand,
because he saw his dad fighting with some bum in the stands.

The Rock always looked like he needed a shave. Charming but dangerous.
He was the clean-up batter. The slugger. Struck out a lot, too.
And when it was over, after he finished up back home in the Bronx,
we never heard another word about him.

And where are those bobby-sox grannies
who swooned for Rocky Colavito and mourned for him, too?

[from the archive; originally posted October 12, 2016, reposted today on the occasion of Mr. Katz's birthday. Photo above: Colavito in Cleveland, c. 2016]

When Rocky Colavito was hitting forty-two home runs a year,
a dark-eyed, rifle-armed right fielder for the Cleveland Indians,
my monthly sports magazine said he made the bobby-soxers       swoon.
I wasn’t sure what that meant. I was nine or ten.

And when Rocky Colavito was traded to the Detroit Tigers,
even up, for the American League batting champion,
a crew-cut mean-eyed shortstop with a cheekful of chaw,
the magazine said the Cleveland bobby soxers were in     mourning.

Rocky hailed from the tough Crotona Park section of the Bronx,   they said.
One night he leaped the fence at Yankee Stadium, bat in hand,
because he saw his dad fighting with some bum in the stands.

The Rock always looked like he needed a shave. Charming but dangerous.
He was the clean-up batter. The slugger. Struck out a lot, too.
And when it was over, after he finished up back home in the Bronx,
we never heard another word about him.

And where are those bobby-sox grannies
who swooned for Rocky Colavito and mourned for him, too?

[from the archive; originally posted October 12, 2016, reposted today on the occasion of Mr. Katz's birthday. Photo above: Colavito in Cleveland, c. 2016]

Meditations on John Ashbery, 1929-2017 [by Vincent Katz]

Juan Martín del Potro is playing Rafael Nadal in the Semifinal at the U.S. Open, and suddenly I am thinking how John Ashbery could, had he been watching, turn all this — the court, the colors, the fans, the ball persons, the players and their ultimate struggle — into poetry, and that thought inspires me to want to write poetry.

John’s poetry was, and is, always so inspiring. From Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Vermont Notebook — each book was a reinvention of what poetry can be, and what John could be as a person. He felt unlimited, and that was truly exciting, as exciting as his unpredictable word choices and combinations of language-types. It’s funny, in a way that makes total sense chronologically, that what these reinventions most remind of are the exciting swerves of some of my favorite rock and roll musicians — David Bowie primarily, but also the Beatles of the late 1960s, Lou Reed as well. John seemed to tap into the sense of the artist as, ultimately, a performer. He had a vast knowledge of music, of many varied aspects of culture, and he seemed to desire and be able to perform different versions of himself, different selves.

After Vermont Notebook, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John became the iconic international figure he has remained.

As he put it, in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat:

                                            …But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Thank you, John, for making it so clear that poetry can be so exciting.

-- from the archive; originally posted September 12, 2017]

Juan Martín del Potro is playing Rafael Nadal in the Semifinal at the U.S. Open, and suddenly I am thinking how John Ashbery could, had he been watching, turn all this — the court, the colors, the fans, the ball persons, the players and their ultimate struggle — into poetry, and that thought inspires me to want to write poetry.

John’s poetry was, and is, always so inspiring. From Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Vermont Notebook — each book was a reinvention of what poetry can be, and what John could be as a person. He felt unlimited, and that was truly exciting, as exciting as his unpredictable word choices and combinations of language-types. It’s funny, in a way that makes total sense chronologically, that what these reinventions most remind of are the exciting swerves of some of my favorite rock and roll musicians — David Bowie primarily, but also the Beatles of the late 1960s, Lou Reed as well. John seemed to tap into the sense of the artist as, ultimately, a performer. He had a vast knowledge of music, of many varied aspects of culture, and he seemed to desire and be able to perform different versions of himself, different selves.

After Vermont Notebook, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John became the iconic international figure he has remained.

As he put it, in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat:

                                            …But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Thank you, John, for making it so clear that poetry can be so exciting.

-- from the archive; originally posted September 12, 2017]

"My sex life" [by Angela Sundstrom]

I like my dog
more than you.

-- Angela Sundstrom

from the archives: first posted February 20, 2012

#TBT: At the Institute Cervantes with John Ashbery, David Kermani, David Lehman and Mónica de la Torre, 2004

at the Institute Cervantes in New York City, 2004:

Tom Clark, Reverdy, and Pere-Lachaise in the fog [by David Lehman]

The redoubtable Tom Clark continues to post for Vanitas, where last night appeared a poem with a hard-to-resist title, "One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy's Ghost)," and this ravishing photograph (by Lothar Streidle, 2004) of Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris,

One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy’s Ghost)

Through the night
It snows on the
Sierras as it does
On the grave of
Apollinaire in the
Cemetery of Père
Lachaise
And on
The radio I get
Truck music from
San Jose:
“Want to make it to
Amarillo by
Morning…”
“...Just
Because you ask me to.”

The green oak
Burns weakly
In the grate
And as I write
In the window
Of the loft
The light
Turns blue.

– Tom Clark

The late Donald Hall said that "Tom Clark was the best student I ever had.” It was Donald Hall, who taught Clark at the University of Michigan. Hall, The Paris Review's longtime poetry editor, passed the torch to Clark, who chose the poems for the magazine in the late 1960s. It was a brilliant run. -- DL

Poems and Notes by John Tranter on Hitchcock (and Noir) on Hitch's Birthday

<<<
Hamlet does not utter the words North by Northwest (a compass direction that does not exist.). He does say "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

“Shadow of a Doubt” was Hitchcock’s favorite of his movies: in it the young teenage girl is named Charlie, after her handsome uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, who (yes) is also named "Charlie”. 

 

See these poems in my book Starlight: “Boy in Mirror”, about Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its companion piece, the double acrostic poem “Girl in Water”, can be found in the “At the Movies” section of Urban Myths

 

The film (“Vertigo”) is based upon the novel D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead) which was written specifically for Alfred Hitchcock by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. A version is now available as Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo [Entre Deux Morts] (Between Two Deaths), London: Bloomsbury, 1997. — J.T

 

Here is the Santa Rosa house used by Hitchcock for the movie Shadow of a Doubt: 

 

 

 

From Urban Myths by John Tranter

 

Shadow of a Doubt

Handsome Uncle Charlie, burdened by crime. 
He laughs and scatters gifts, but he looks 
unwell – no, he’s fine – the man playing cards 
looks sick – he has a full hand of spades, 
but then, he gets to tell the story about 
how the ace of spades leads the pack. 
Suspicion follows you like a snake in the grass, 
so the story is torn up. But destroying the evidence 
points to the evidence. Sleeping dogs lie. 
Now, should a girl tell on the bad man? 
It would kill Mother. But Uncle Charlie 
has been killing plenty of those, it seems, 
the fat, lazy, greedy widows eating cake 
and wasting money – they deserve to die. 
Now those two men are here to see you, 
again – something about a survey, 
counting all the happy American families 
and listening closely to their apple-pie opinions 
as they look down from a high window through 
shade-dappled branches at a pair of neighbours 
pausing for a gossip in the sun. On the busy street 
the old traffic cop can’t help the girl, he’s 
avuncular and normal, and he has a job to do. 
Now everything falls to pieces 
and a killer pleads for his life. Traffic 
everywhere, an engine running and leaking gas, 
then back on the train again, the train 
that takes you out into the horrible world. 

The man with all the cards is here, somewhere, 
behind the viewfinder, watching everything, 
a resident alien with a point of view. 

Uncle Charlie has to die, we all knew that, 
it just took a while to fall into place 
in front of a speeding black locomotive 
somewhere out of town, and far away. 



North by Northwest

A hero breasts Manhattan traffic, always
ready to stop off at a tourist destination. 
A blunder with a telegram and Mother – 
a demon never seen, only hinted at 
in her distant, comfortable castle – 
will lose her little boy, who quickly 
plunges into an irritating adventure 
in the picaresque mode – leaping 
to conclusions as the scenery reels past, 
into bed and out again, dodging and weaving 
across a landscape more deadly and bucolic 
with each passing trick of the light. 
Of course it’s post-postmodern to have the hero 
an advertising man rather than a policeman-detective 
tough-guy action type, and the crop-dusting plane scene 
is funny and priceless. Perhaps the Master was trying to 
lighten up after Vertigo. There’s no fun there, just 
descending levels of madness and sadness. 
The blonde, unlike his sainted Mother, 
is very good and also devious and wicked, 
and so roller coaster morals are the norm 
and in fact this unravelling storm of incidents 
and grief is the painful future due to us 
when we stumble blinking into the light, 
for this sequence of parables was built 
by its huge crew of many talents to be seen 
and heard in the crowded dark, the wicked 
are found out and trampled on, another 
train, another bed, good night. 


Dark Passage 

Poor Vincent Parry: he rolls out of a garbage can 
and stumbles through a valley of coincidences, 
falling into the lap of a blonde. 

Poor Vincent: we are locked inside his head, 
seeing everything, feeling nothing but vertigo 
as the screen swoops and wobbles with his weaving 
and ducking to avoid his fate. He can’t 
have a drink, we would get splashed, 
he dare not look in a mirror, because 
we would be there gawking, dismayed… 

Poor Vincent: he gets disfigured by a man with a towel 
and a razor, and wakes up tied to the bed. 
Madge calls, and whispers, and goes away, 
and calls back again, spying, sneaking a drink, and 
every fragment of conversation ends with Madge 
who, if she can’t have what she wants, 
kills it. Vincent gets punched around 
and a pal gets it, beaten to death with a trumpet. 
Madge, fatal Madge, fallen Madge, 
defenestrated Madge on the sidewalk. 

Ah, Vincent: he used to look handsome 
with a pencil-thin moustache, then he woke up 
looking like some movie star. He wants to 
call out in his bad dream: Untie me! 
Set me free! But he will not be free 
until he takes the bus to distant Peru 
alongside a boring couple of jerks 
who have just stumbled over each other 
in a bus station of all places. 

Vincent dreams that he sits in a white jacket 
sipping a drink by the moonlit beach in Peru, 
feeling anxious until the music changes 
and a blonde appears: Well, tie me down, 
and start me dancing. 



Girl in Water 
                                                                           (Vertigo)

Waiting to meet a pretty girl – any pretty girl – 
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc, 
telephone passion – no, a soda fountain, a pizza. 

Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I 
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella, 
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in –  

yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand. 
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so 
learn to love and fail in love in the back row at the Bijou, 
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills… your spyglass a nib, 

keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until 
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase. 
After that ending, another climb, another cliff 
beyond which something awful awaits: love  

or falling in love or into love or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent 
that leaves you breathless, leaves you  
very unsteady like a cork in the water, 

effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything. 
That conscious pilot spoke: scripsi quod scripsi: 
I have written what? I have written for 

girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl 
or woman in waves of water. I, 
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn 
in plots and complex narratives to draw 

many clues out, threads of meaning. A 
new insight into the convoluted plot 
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine, 
villains struggle to prevail and bluster 

against ordinary background noise and hubbub: 
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo  
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy 
will win and lose everything. I 

owe more than money. The key will turn: 
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm 
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later 

refuse help from well-meaning friends or  
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who 
understand too well their weaknesses, their 
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic 

those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire, 
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!

 

-- John Tranter

>>>

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was in His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, on August 13 of the nineteenth century, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as it did in 1993 and 1999, you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, a waitress who writes poetry and is calling from Oregon to ask you for a job. She sounds drunk and promises to make it worth your while. But when you explain nicely that it is very late and not the right time, etc, she says fuck you and hangs up. Then you grab a broom, turn out the lights, and chase the bats out the door. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers ad oceanic vastness, which comes through in such movies as "Lifeboat" (in which Tallulah Bankhead and company survive on a raft in the North Atlantic in World War II), "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Psycho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn shower curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps." When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower, or from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or from the top of the Statue of Liberty, or in an out-of-control merry-go-around at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given his stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train") or at least complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt," James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder," the birds in "The Birds"); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Priscilla Lane, Larraine Day, and Teresa Wright. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably blonde) fantasy lady.

A tip of the old fedora to Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind-- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

A Tarot Reading for David Lehman [by Benebell Wen]

On January 30, the eve of a New Moon, housed in Aquarius, I read tarot for Best American Poetry’s very own David Lehman. The King of Swords was selected for his signifier card. In tarot, a signifier card anchors the deck around a singular energetic frequency, and the selection of the signifier identifies that frequency as the subject that the tarot is to be read for.

From the King of Swords, we can extrapolate some of David’s personality traits. In his essence, he is Air, the cardinal element governing the suit of Swords. He is an intellectual. Compare: Men of Water have spirituality, the emotive, and the creative. They ask the question, “Who?” Men of Earth are resourceful and pragmatic. They ask, “What?” Men of Fire have their bodies, their passion, and innovation. They want to know, “How?”  Now men of Air, like David, are analytical, rational, and learned. They are the ones who ask, “Why?” From French playing card tradition, the King of Swords is said to correspond with the righteous and fair warrior-king, King David of Judeo-Christian mythos.

Hmm. Same name, too.

To start, I borrow from Golden Dawn traditions and cut the deck into four piles, right to left. The four piles correspond with the four Hebrew letters that spell out the Telegrammaton, or the name of God, and represent the key to accessing the collective unconscious, the infinite and the supreme unity, which is understood by the framework of its four corners—the spiritual-theoretical elements Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.

Diagrams from Wen’s forthcoming book Holistic Tarot (North Atlantic Books, 2014).

David’s signifier, the King of Swords, appeared in the Y pile, which indicates matters of work, career, or health and wellness. Y is about our labors and our own two hands. It is governed by Fire energy, such as ambition, passion, leadership, and vitality.

Fire is also the area related to creativity and innovation. Perhaps David has been mulling over another project that he would like to materialize. If so, the cards here affirm that he should go forward at full vigor. It could also be a caution to watch his health. The H-Love pile would tell us to focus on our family and relationships. The V-Community pile is about our contributions to society. The final H-Economy pile is about our net worth, our property and assets, our financial health. At present, it is David himself that he must focus on. Y-Work is about the self. David has given much to the world around him already and now is the time in his life to care after his own body with the devotion he gave to others before.

Now we proceed to the heart of the reading. To limit the length of this posting, I will draw 4 cards only.

 

The Knight of Wands in David’s past indicates a fiery, impetuous character who has thrived on stirring conflict and challenging others (including himself). The Knight of Wands is a visionary, though has trouble finishing what he starts. There is also immaturity in the Knight of Wands, mostly because when he has thought up an idea, he charges forward to implement that idea, well before he has thought through the consequences. Fortunately for David, that impetuous nature has worked to his advantage in the past and by luck, he has been successful. Therefore, perhaps, it is a lesson he never quite learned, and so that same fiery charge continues to this day. That confidence from past successes is the subconscious influence on his present.

The High Priestess explores what is below the surface of his consciousness and indicates a deeply intuitive and perceptive individual. The High Priestess is an intellectual, a mystic, is educated, but also possesses knowledge that cannot be taught. She is a personal metaphor for David’s greater spiritual role as a keeper of knowledge and wisdom, a keeper of the arts. The card, further confirmed by the strength of presence of a Major Arcanum here, speaks to the greater role he serves to his society. It seems also that his work is not finished yet. There is more for him to do and more greatness to come from him. However, the High Priestess is also a guardian of secrets, and so David is advised to keep his ideas secret for now. Do not tell others yet. Wait, David. Wait until that idea has matured some before sharing with others.

The Emperor is manifested in David’s external sphere. It is the card of authority and paternity. It is symbolic of an iron will. To others, David’s world appears to be one under great order, under control. Note that the landscape behind The Emperor in the card shows a stern, severe nature. Yet the Emperor is also about dominance and superiority in work and career realms. Whatever he pursues, he will conquer and succeed. However, what is it that he has conquered? In The Emperor card, the kingdom behind him is parched. The dryness of the imagery represents thirst, a thirst for a different kind of sovereignty than the one he has attained.

I liken the golden orb that The Emperor holds to the story of King Midas, the king who could turn everything he touched into gold, but ultimately died of hunger because when his lips touched food, it would turn to gold and gold cannot nourish. That myth might resonate with David. There is still thirst in him, in spite of all he has accomplished, because to date, he feels he still has not attained what would truly nourish him.

The final card gives us a sense of where David is going. The Three of Pentacles is one of those cards that frequently appears in spreads for artists and writers. Here, it appears in reverse, which hints at a deeply rooted fear of mediocrity. There is a motivation generated by that fear of mediocrity and it is that motivation that seems to be driving David’s current movements forward. The Three of Pentacles in reverse might also be seen as an indication that David’s current approach isn’t the optimal one. There is a better way to accomplish what it is he is striving for at the moment, and he may need to reevaluate his current movements.

The Three of Pentacles in reverse may also hint at difficulties with friends and those in his current social circle. There is a sense of displacement here that may be the theme of his struggle. On the current trajectory he’s intent to be on, the outcome will be that of someone who is outside looking in. There is some connection here between the Three of Pentacles in reverse and The Emperor. The one at the top is the one alone. Being an outlier is lonely business. That is his inner conflict. He fears mediocrity and strives for greatness. Yet greatness does not nourish him. Going forward, there is his struggle: The Emperor versus the Three of Pentacles reversed. His answer, of course, is given right there in the spread, in his unconscious: it is The High Priestess.

[this insightful and prescient reading was originally posted February 6, 2014]

Not keeping it clean (by Molly Arden)

When votre ami Molly Arden says "Alors! J'adore le français!" or if I, on a brille pomme jour I say "English, I abhore!" -- it is not that I am unpatriotic.  I am un Américain fier -- enorme, you might say. 

However, when je regarde THIS video of Valérie Rouzeau balancing an assiette de bonbons -- golden sugary fondre of language and then poem and sound and all of it and done so deliciously -- I feel like weeping.  Let's all commit to use two or three languages to express ourselves.  A tout le moins.

 Follow the English text as she reads it in French and see if you don't fall in l'amour avec her mouchoir.  Someone get Molly a hanky.

[Originally posted May 21, 2011.]

Is a market top on tap? "Noodles" weighs in [by David Lehman]

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College,now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more." Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal.that only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. . R1). 

Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all that . "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas,he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with the song "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out .Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL

originally posted September 8, 2017

Mozart, Symphony #5 in B Flat major

 He wrote it at the age of nine.

He didn't lose his touch in "later" years.

 

Poet Spotlight: Dora Malech [by Kristina Marie Darling]

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech.  Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech

 

Essay     as yes,

begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).

Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.

Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.

It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.

Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?

Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—

 

_____________

 

I do

            After Meg Ronan

 

Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.

 

_____________

After Plath: Metaphors I

            [I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]

Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.

 

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors II

            [An elephant, a ponderous house,]

Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.

 

______________

 

After Plath: Metaphors IV

            [O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]

Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.

_____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors V

            [This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]

A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors VII

            [I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]

Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.

Batter Up! Poems Inspired by Baseball, Thanks to Jim Cummins [by Stacey Lehman]

Johnny Podres, 1955 World Series Game 3

We have our friend Jim Cummins to thank for this podcast of baseball-inspired poems that comes to us from University of Cincinnati Elliston Project. Jim is the innovator who curated the Elliston Poetry Collection for over three decades, beginning in the mid-1970s. He was inspired to record visiting poets and writers and compile the archive during an especially beautiful reading on a spring afternoon by Lucien Stryk. Alas the Elliston Project as it was shaped and steered by Jim Cummins no longer exists. But thanks to his vision, we have a rich and deep archive (800 hours!) filled with the voices of some of our most celebrated poets. Click on the links to hear these great poems: 

All tracks   Podcast [complete]
Track 01   Introduction
Track 02   Jim Hall reading Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" (1985)
Track 03   Jim Cummins reading Grantland Rice's "Casey's Revenge" (1985)
Track 04   John Drury, "Stadium" (2003)
Track 05   John Drury, "Ghazal of Baseball" (2003)
Track 06   Wyatt Prunty, "Baseball" (1999)
Track 07   Wyatt Prunty, "A Baseball Team of Unknown Navy Pilots, Pacific Theater, 1944" (1999)
Track 08   Robert Pinsky, "Night Game" (1991)
Track 09   Ada Limón, "The Good Wave" (2017)
Track 10   Alan Feldman, "Monday Evening Softball" (1979)
Track 11   David Lehman, "Ninth Inning" (1995)
Track 12   Arthur Smith, "Extra Innings" (1986)

Read Jim Cummin's posts about the Elliston Project here, here, and here, 

-- sdl

[First posted on the BAP blog April 14, 2017.]

Philip Roth says the Bull Still Has Room to Run [by David Lehman]

In honor of the late Philip Roth we bring you this feature that we ran back in March 2014.

<<<

If the market seemed overvalued last year, wary analysts are eyeing the exit signs now that the individual investor is back into equities. Have we reached a market top? Philip Roth, who accurately predicted the end of the last bull market in 2007, is still long on stocks, according to today's Wall Street Journal. (See page C4, "Bull Market is Weary, but Few Signs Point to Exhaustion" by E. S. Browning).

Roth, now eighty and retired from novel writing, has pursued an alternative career in stockpicking, hints of which surface in the Zuckerman novels and in "American Pastoral." Interviewed about current market conditions he sounded cautious. "There's nothing that I see now that says imminent demise," he says, acknowledging the danger signals: new market highs, overpriced stocks, and a tremendous amount of headline risk. "The Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Venezuela, Boko Haram (Nigeria) -- and you can't blame it on Israel and the US."

Except for these trouble spots, and the vengeance of nature whose most potent weapon is the weather, Phil sees smooth sailing ahead for the bull. "Most tops are made with high interest rates, rising inflation, and rising stock prices," Roth says. "Two out of three are missing right now, and two out of three ain't bad."

So how much room does have the bull have left to run? "It depends on how you define bull," Roth says. "Not only the metric you use but the ontological status of bull. Let us not overlook the fact that bull is short for bullshit, and if you served in World War II and weren't singing 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me),' you know that everything is bullshit.

"Hell, some writers made a career of it," the retired novelist added. "But let's not go there." Roth refused to comment on the following other subjects I brought up in our conversation: Woody Allen, the Oscars, the new biography of Philip Roth by someone with Roth in her name who is no relation, the Olympics, Bob Dyland, and the disrespect shown him by envious writers and irate feminists.

Roth grew animated when the subject turned to "Investors Intelligence," a widely followed survey of newsletter writers, which indicates that 60% of market newsletters were bullish in January. This unusually high figure sent a bearish signal, and January saw a sell-off. "But people were buying on the dip in February," Roth said. "And the cycle continues. Now comes March like a hungry lion, proud if alone. The ides are not a soothsayer's fantasy for nothing. Then April, and the poets with the hats walk under the trees on college campuses. The old mantra is 'sell in May and go away,' but June is "busting out all over.'  July, August, Summertime, and the slow slog of the marshes. And then, like the unfurling of a matador's cape, September. Oy. September. November. And these few precious days I'll give to you."

-- David Lehman
>>>

Originally posted March 3, 2014

When Philip Roth Retired: "I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad. . ."

Back in November 2012, we ran this column  about Philip Roth's decision to cease his writing career:

Our greatest living novelist is hanging up his spikes. He has been mulling it over for two years, he told Charles McGrath of the New York Times. “I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.” Here's a link to what Roth calls his last interview, and here's a little more about how he came to his decision.

<<<<
“I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s over, maybe it’s over,’ ” he said. “I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn’t read in 50 years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad — two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, ‘First Love’ and ‘The Torrents of Spring.’ ” He also reread Faulkner and Hemingway.

“And then I decided to reread my own books,” Mr. Roth went on, “and I began from the last book forward, casting a cold eye. And I thought, ‘You did all right.’ But when I got to ‘Portnoy’ ” — “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969 — “I had lost interest, and I didn’t read the first four books.”

“So I read all that great stuff,” he added, “and then I read my own and I knew I wasn’t going to get another good idea, or if I did, I’d have to slave over it.”
>>>