The Best American Poetry

J. D. McClatchy as Editor: "Uncensored Note to Auden" [by Jane Mayhall]

 

 

 

In a year of losses we lost a mainstay of the poetry scene yesterday when J. D. McClatchy (pictured at left, with James Merrill) succumbed after a long bout with cancer. Of his poems he wrote this In 2009: 

<<<
Poems accumulate--or mine tend to. Tremulous globules . . . an image, a phrase, a feeling . . . begin to condense on the pane of a larger idea. Proximity encourages their combination into something larger, moister, more glistening. Even so, there are times when some bead or other doesn't join, is left at the edge. Most are then merely shaken off. Sometimes, one is transferred to the notebook, a note too sharp or flat to go with the rest. I noticed a few of these, and strung them together as "Lingering Doubts," the title pointing to their common occasion. I might have let each stand on its own, but the age of the epigram seems to have passed with J. V. Cunningham. Hence this small suite of doubts, their tone of voice shifting from the ironic to the embittered to the plaintive. >>>

The occasion was poem Sandy wrote that David Wagoner selected for The Best American Poetry 2009. The richness of metaphor, the elegance of composition, were the virtues of McCatchy's prose, which was itself continuous with his finely wrought, formally ambitious  poems. McClatchy did so much so well -- he wrote libretti and taught at several major universities -- that I would point to one area for which he has not yet been fully recognized. He was a tireless editor -- of books and collections of poetry, of anthologies and, for a quarter of a century, of The Yale Review. I love literary magazines and know how much work goes into editing an issue, let alone four of them in a year.I was thinking of some of the pieces Sandy published and remembered a day in 2008 that was brightened by my reading of The Yale Review. -- DL

<<<
During the summer I like picking up an old literary magazine lying around from some previous season to see what I might have missed the first go round. To the hammock today I went with the October 1999 issue of The Yale Review (vol. 87, no. 4) smartly edited by J. D. McClatchy. There's a nice little piece on Auden by a Cambridge Fellow, Ian Sansom, and a very fine poem on the same subject by Jane Mayhall, which I am going to type below. In Mayhall's poem I admire the way the writing -- the line-lengths even -- approach prose but turn back at the last minute into the terrain of verse. The landscape imagery is sustained and given a biographical edge ("the wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face") and the diction moves from high poetic ("madrigal sunlight") to academic vernacular ("radically moral score-keeping") in a single bound. I think Auden would have liked "the dreamy / semen of a distinguished flotsam." It's a line he might have written, but he would have revised it out of a subsequent reprinting of the poem.

-- DL

Auden in 1970
(photo credit: Tyrone Dukes / New York Times)

Uncensored Note to Auden

To bask in your intelligence, when the wither
and time-gaps are stalking around me,
when the literal husks and brains never tried are
going to steer me off the road, I service
myself to the faint yellowed pages of this book, its
tiny lighted torch figure,

the running insignia on the spine of
a 1958 Modern Library Edition, and I come to whatever dense
trilogies; compassion, spirited wit, wide-reaching
intellect, emotional power. These obviously
unstable and ridiculous concepts given
over to donkeys, ("some great

gross braying") predicaments out of date -- in these
I would take long breaths of pure joy. The madrigal sunlight,
roboust willows of your radiant, asymmetrical
and radically moral score-keeping. The dreamy
semen of a distingushed flotsam. I need
that satirical pastiche,

against the false simplicity
your imitators have become.
The wrinkled Grand Canyon of your face gives me that
wreath, infinitude; the tropics and winter of
the real world, you have reproachfully
left us.

-- Jane Mayhall

>>>
From our archives. Originally posted August 4, 2008.

Alone with John Ashbery (by Angela Patrinos)

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.  Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

                                                                                          At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

 

 

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.      

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.  But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.   

 

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

 

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said. 

 

He moved on to his translations of [Pierre] Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

 

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even.  There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in.  No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years.  As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.  This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”  He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.  It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.  The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.” 

Does he attend openings and visit galleries? He does.

John Ashbery confides that he is looking forward to the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

 

from the archives; originally posted April 16, 2008. Reposted today, April 7, which was designated "John Ashbery day" in perpetuity in a ceremony in the New York City Council in April 2006 during the John Ashbery festival we staged at the New School that week.  Participants included  Strar Black, Billy Collins,Jane Freilicher, Jorie Graham, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hammond, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Meghan O'Rourke, Ron Padgett, Jenni Quilter, Archie Rand, Eugene Richie,David Shapiro, James Tate, John Emil Vincent, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier.

New Trilling Essay Talk of the Town [by David Lehman]

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considerd coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

continue reading here.

"Girl Writing a Letter" [by William Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

[from The Best American Poetry 1995]

Auden on Lenin: Propaganda poems make nothing happen (twice)

Happy birthday, Wystan, born today 112 years ago (February 21, 1907).

Here's an article that appeared in the Guardian in 2009. Note that the newspaper uses a photograph of Auden the elder statesman, face cracked; Auden would never have written poems in praise of Lenin after 1939.

<<<
Unpublished Auden poems surface in film archive
Translations of Soviet propaganda songs discovered in the British Film Institute archives
Alison Flood
Saturday May 23 2009
guardian.co.uk

Three unpublished poems by W. H. Auden have surfaced in the archives of the British Film Institute more than 70 years after they were written.

They were discovered by David Collard while he was working through the papers of Ivor Montagu, the co-founder of the Film Society, as part of the research for a study of Auden's career in the cinema. The verses are a poetic translation of anonymous Russian peasant songs extolling the virtues of Lenin and his political heir Stalin, which Auden was asked to produce for the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film, Three Songs of Lenin, in October 1935.

When arranging subtitles for Three Songs of Lenin, Montagu had decided the songs -- around which the film is structured -- needed a more poetic English rendering, and approached Auden. The poet worked from a literal translation to produce three songs, published for the first time this week in the Times Literary Supplement.
>>>

Read the rest of the Guardian story here. 

From the archives. Originally posted May 26, 2009. 

Myth(ologies) in the Making in Chicago [by Stacey Harwood]

Frome the Archives (November 8, 2012):

About a year ago, the Chicago based theater artist Erica Barnes approached David Lehman for permission to adapt his poem "Mythologies" for the stage as a dance performance piece. According to Erica, she was in the midst of a somewhat fallow period when on a whim she visited the Poetry Foundation website, clicked on the "Poem of the Day" and "fell in love." David's sequence of thirty sonnets "Mythologies," first published in the Paris Review issue 106 (1988) and awarded the Bernard F. Connors prize, was the Foundation's featured poem. Erica has this to say about David's poem:

We need new myths. Our old heroes are too unattainable, too perfect, too… heroic. David Lehman’s poem ‘Mythologies’ tells the story of a man struggling to construct new myths in the wake of the disintegration of his expectations. Blending the language of poetry with the ritual of theatre, ‘Mythologies’ searches for the answer to the age-old question --  what is it to be human?

David granted permission and over the next several months Erica dispatched periodic updates of her work- in-progress. She secured funding, hired a full cast and crew, found performance space, and held rehearsals. On November 1, "Mythologies" opened at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater in Chicago.  "It was a success," writes Erica, and her excitement is palpable. She sends along this preview video, which makes us wish we could put the production on the road:

Erica promises to send more photos of the performance, which we will share here.  Meanwhile, you can find out more about "Mythologies" in Chicago by visiting the dedicated website.  You will find Erica's interview with David here.

Congratulations Erica!

"Mythologies" will be included in David Lehman's forthcoming New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013).

-- sdh

Friday Night Cocktails with Jack Benny, John Ashbery and Friends [by David Lehman]

Friday at six, martinis straight up with olives. Plymouth or Hendricks. Tanqueray for JA; Bombay for Jim Tate ("lower proof so I can drink more of them"). A couple of eye drop's worth of dry vermouth, preferably Noilly Prat. Mucho hielo. Shake vigorously in a pickle jar. Yes, I know that shaking as opposed to stirring risks "bruising" the gin, and also that you slightly dilute the end product, and frankly my dear I don't give a damn. I like drinking the thing in a y-shaped glass with a floating island of chipped ice on top.

And then we talk.

Ashbery walks in, sees me, sidles up, whispers in my ear, "I hear that John Ashbery is at this party."

Marshall McLuhan comes over and says that Obama is the "coolest" US president since JFK. The "hot" presidents were LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton. Carter was neutral. Reagan was "warm." W was mildly cool but only in relation to Al Gore in earth-tone garb.

Woody Allen looks down at the floor as he plays Cole Porter on his clarinet. He is really a very modest fellow.

Kim Novak doesn't have to act. All she has to do is stand there. Ditto Robert Taylor.

The waiter brings over a tray full of Algonquin cocktails. Since I have no pineapple juice, freshly pressed or otherwise, I have to substitute grapefruit juice, and the rye runs out so I use Canadian Club in honor of Don Draper, as follows: one and a half jiggers whiskey, one jigger Noilly Prat dry vermouth, one jigger of grapefruit juice, times two, shaken. "Delicious," Stacey says. 

Judy Garland sings: "Our love affair will be such fun, / We'll be the envy of everyone. / Those famous lovers we'll make them forget / From Adam and Eve to Scarlett and Rhett." Lyrics by Arthur Freed, music by Roger Edens.

Jack Benny says "I'm thinking" after a long pause following the menacing question, "your money or your life?" 

John Ashbery says that "Jack Benny was my role model."

Jack Benny reminds us that he was born on Valentine's Day. I give him a copy of Self-Portrait in a Coinvex Mirror. He says, "I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either."

In the works are three doctoral dissertations on JA in relation to Mr. Benny's radio show. "Anyone who would understand Ashbery's poetry had better listen to the radio shows of the early 1940s," says Professor McGuffin with the authority of Jacques Barzun on the subject of baseball.

I just thought of a skit featuring Danny Kaye and Bob Hope -- an abbreviated version of Kafka's The Trial, with Kaye in the lead role. Kaye says he has goine from being Davi Kaminsky in Brooklyn to Josef K. in Prague via the dancing feet, sweet voice, and comic brilliance of the greatest of all Borscht Belt geniuses. Kaye say he is looking for justice and Hope says he is looking for a war to visit. One of them will have to wait for a long time. Thanks for the memory, Bob. You don't deserve to be dismissed, ignored or recalled with a patronizing sneer, but that's the Zeitgeist for you.  

Ashbery says he and Frank O'Hara saw On the Town, the movie, one holiday night and they loved it so much they went on to walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and strill across it. I love it, too, though I can't understand why they left out some of the greatest Bernstein songs ("Some Other Time," "Lucky To Be Me," "Lonely Town") and it's a shame they changed "a helluva town" to "a wonderful town," the town being New York City.

Joni James sings "As Time Goes By." Here's to you, Herman Hupfeld, alias Dodie (to his friends), who wrote both the words and the music. "Moonlight and love songs never out of date, hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate / Woman needs man and must have his mate." 

Vivien Leigh says "tomorrow is another day."

And we're all here to toast you, J. A. . -- DL

[From the Archives, originally posted September 28, 2012, revised July 28, 2017]

 

Lehman on Auden [by Angela Patrinos]

Auden in New York. Why does he seem so inviting? Angela Patrinos reports.

<<<
Even with all the rain, last night’s event at the New School was standing room-only.  Yet again.

David Lehman presented a lecture on W. H. Auden, giving us in one hour’s time the vital details and contradictions of the poet’s life and work, and addressing such questions as “Can a flawed poem be a great poem?”

By the age of twenty-two, Wystan Hugh Auden was the most prominent poet in England, with a sound more modern than any of the day.  For example:  “It’s no use raising a shout./No, Honey, you can cut that right out.”  And yet, in January of 1939, he left England and moved to New York City. His reason for coming to NYC—not definitively clear:  “He’d become accustomed to peregrinating,” David said.  Perhaps NYC was the next place on his list.  But perhaps, too, Auden desired to be a less-known entity.  Or perhaps it was because he fell in love with a young man from Brooklyn named Chester Kallman.

He seems to have been happy in New York —it certainly was his choice to be here—and yet he wrote “Refugee Blues” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and he spoke of loneliness.  Perhaps this was a loneliness that followed him here.  David read a poem that Auden wrote just before his arrival in NY, a poem inspired by a painting he’d seen in a museum in Brussels. “Pay attention to the adjectives and adverbs,” David said.

In order of appearance, they are “human, dully, reverently, passionately, miraculous, dreadful, untidy, doggy, innocent, leisurely, forsaken, important, white, expensive, delicate, amazing, calmly.’

The poem is titled “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the painting is Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  Without a title placard for this uncanny painting, it’s unlikely that a viewer would know to search for, and find, the very subject of the painting.  No clues can be gotten from the gaze of the personages in the foreground, who leisurely turn away from what’s taking place in the horizon—the disaster, the forsaken cry, the unimportant failure of the fallen Icarus.

The poem begins:

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
                        walking dully along”

(David points out that to reverse the inversion in the first two lines to “The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering” would be to lose the eloquence.)

The poem is an example of Auden’s later style—which held more gravitas than his earlier work.  It was a style of poetry that was wordy, discursive (too wordy, too discursive, said his critics).  You can contrast the style of “Musee des Beaux Arts” with that of the conversational, idiomatic style of William Carlos Williams’s poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” written twenty years later and inspired by the same painting.  In Williams’s poem, there is only one word that editorializes: “unsignificantly.”

That no one chose to notice the fall of Icarus, that his death made nothing happen, brings us to the famous line that appears in Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats (d. January 1939).”: “For poetry makes nothing happen.”

Yeats died right before Auden came to America, and Auden’s eulogy marks his first American poem. “You were silly like us,” Auden writes at the start of the poem’s second section.  Yeats, silly?  David explains: “Very esoteric pastimes did Yeats have.”

(Note that to reverse the inversion would be to lose David’s eloquence: “Yeats had very esoteric pastimes.”)

Auden’s eulogy, David points out, is poised between two contradictions: “And each in the cell of himself is almost/convinced of his freedom” and “In the prison of his days/Teach the free man how to praise.” (I wondered if there might be, within these contradictions, a nod to the paradox in Yeat’s poem, “The Balloon of the Mind”:  “Hands, do what your bid: /Bring the balloon of the mind/ that bellies and drags in the wind/into its narrow shed.”  Here Yeats implies that the mind needs restrictions, not total freedom.)

David then read “September 1, 1939.”  This was the poem that began circulating the internet immediately following September 11, 2001, and was excerpted on the subway walls for the Poetry in Motion series so that those who’d had no previous exposure to the poem, were now reading it during their anxious commutes.  It seems that we instinctively countered all that was unprecedented with the precedence of poetry.

Some of Auden’s most famous poems were ones that he would later revise and, finally, renounce, “September 1, 1939” being one of these.  The couplet at the end of stanza two, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return,” has been criticized for implying a justification for Germany's behavior in the wake of the Versailles Treaty.

Auden wanted to cut the second to last stanza. He called it “intellectually dishonest,” but before finally renouncing the entire stanza, he revised the last line, a line that he felt was false, and a line that David says is rhetorically the strongest in the entire poem.
The line: “We must love one another or die.”
Auden’s revision: “We must love one another and die.”  (Emphasis is mine).
This version, David says, weakens the polemical effect.  Imagine if Patrick Henry had said not: “Give me liberty or give me death” but “Give me liberty and give me death.”  Brodsky’s take on the line was: “We must love one another or kill.”
When David has his Oulipo on, he likes to tag on a ‘t’: “We must love one another or diet."

David made the decision to include all of the original stanzas of “September 1, 1939” in The Oxford Book of American Poetry because, he says, the inclusion dramatizes an issue that should not be neglected: Does the greatness of art excuse its meaning—ever?

P.S. (Auden-unrelated) I often hear people talk about what a brain and a wit and a gentleman and a true scholar David is, but I don’t hear enough about the way he dresses.  Last night he lectured in a shirt, tie, and jacket ensemble that, with its deep tones of blue accented with amber, had an alchemy that was so very easy on the eyes and made his face glow.  Wear it again, David.

>>>

From the Archives (originally posted April 7, 2009)

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

On this, two days prior to the 88th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the day the NY Stock Exchange collapsed, we bring you this ever timely if not timeless column 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 maket 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,Thailand, Somalia, Libya, 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, 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

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)