The Best American Poetry

Frank O'Hara Writes a Letter to Larry Rivers

The letter is dated June 27, 1953:

<<<
Someone who didn't like me could say, "Sure, all you have to do is show him Larry Rivers or the sea, and out comes a poem;" but really, I don't see why one shouldn't enjoy something in life if one can stand not enjoying so much else.  it's too bad you don't imagine I understand you as well as I imagine you understand me, but we can't have everything at the same time, thank god, or it would be too confusing.  I loved staying with you and adore your mind..."
*

"Good god, it just occurred to me how much I am influenced even here by our own works. maybe we should just slap this into the middle of "How to Proceed [in the Arts]." I think if I publish a book it should be called "How to Proceed in Everything I Can Think Of" by Frank O'Hara.  In our own discursive way we are getting to be the moralists of our time, since we are always trying to tell people how to act. >>>

In the picture above, O'Hara is seated, Rivers is standing. Below Rivers speaks at O'Hara's funeral. That's John Ashbery in sunglasses.

"Literal Lives" [by David Lehman]

Lamb wrote a dissertation on roast pig.
Hogg and Suckling did not. Wordsworth
Was not what you would call an economical writer.
Wilde tamed London. Pater was his literary father.

Pound earned a small but steady income from his writing.
Ping-pong was Tennyson's favorite indoor sport.
No one else had done what Donne did in verse:
Erotic lyrics in a religious idiom, and vice-versa.

Racine's roots went deep into France's classical soil.
The Iliad was Homer's first grand slam.
The Spanish Tragedy exemplifies Kyd's mature style.
Swift wrote slowly. Pope pontificated.

Frost wondered whether the world would end in ice.
Moore was less wordy than Longfellow, whose short poems
Are his best. Peacock strutted. Bishop
Preferred Rio to Rome and the Vatican.

Ford couldn't drive a car. Neither, of course, could
Austen. As a child Woolf adored the story of
Little red riding hood. West died in California.
Mann loved women. Hardy endured.

-- David Lehman

From The Big Question by David Lehman (University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Originally in The New Republic

Trochaic Theory Predicts Obama Victory (2012 Update) [by David Lehman]

It is time to update the trochaic analysis of presidential politics inaugrated in this space back in August 2008 when the system predicted Barack Obama's electoral victory.

The double trochee is the conventional standard for presidential names: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Warren Harding. The effect is heightened when the name is alliterative: Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson -- Herbert Hoover to the contrary notwithstanding. Nota bene (AKA BTW): A trochee flips the metrical pattern of an iamb: it consists of an accented beat followed by an unaccented one. Think of it this way: "Oklahoma" is a double trochee. (Thank you, John Hollander.) Sing it. "Okla -homa, Okla-homa. We know we belong to the land, / and the land we belong to is grand" -- Oscar Hammerstein's revision of Robert Frost's vision of the land in "The Gift Outright," whose composition is contemporaneous with that of "Oklahoma!"

When the Republicans met last week, all anyone could talk about was the appearance of Clint Eastwood and the empty chair motif. There was a lot of noise, but what no analyst has yet pointed out is the strange fact that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have the identical metrics in their names. Is this auspicious? Hardly. It suggests an incomplete verse -- an iamb in search of a strong beat -- just as "Joe Biden" does. Now if the latter would go under the moiniker "Joseph Biden" -- a double trochee -- he might have a fighting chance. But as it is he'll probably take it on the chin at the veep debate. (October update: the pundits opine that Joe Blowhard bested the choir boy with the widow's peak.) Not to mention that a study of the Biden family finances suggests a lot of debt and an incoherent financial strategy, although I would not sob too hard for the Bidens as his Senate pension added to his wife's will save them from the poorhouse, and in any case people don't vote for the vice-president, LBJ in Texas in 1960 notwithstanding, which is the second use of that strange word in this piece. From the metrical point of view, "Bill Clinton" is the exception that proves the rule, and 2012 is beginning to look a lot like 1996.

Barack Obama's name parses out as an iamb (Barack = unstressed foot after stressed) followed by an amphibrach (Obama = long syllable sandwiched between two short ones). This is a vey difficult combination to defeat especially in an incumbent when he is personally very popular and considered a nice guy. A month ago I was saying you could gauge how scared the Dems might be; hey'd simply dump Biden and run Hilary for his job. That seems an increasingly unlikely scenario if only because the president does not want to be upstaged by his veep, whom he doesn't really like, or likes to the extent of saying about her that she's "likable enough."

The New York Times is rooting for him like mad, which doesn't exactly help in the red states but gives you an idea of how passionately the blue states feel. The electorate may vote in a Repulican congress, but an Obama defeat? Forget about it. Personal popularity and exemplary comportment count for a lot at a time when a politico with national aspirations can impregnate an aide, deny his paternity, and pin it on another aide, while his wife, dying of cancer, campaigns for him. I still can't get over that.

You have to wonder what the future holds for Hillary Clinton. If, instead, you are wondering why the image of Franklin Roosevelt heads this piece, it is not only because last night we saw David Grubin's brilliant 1994 documentary FDR but because "Franklin Roosevelt" (trochee first, dactyl second) is metrically an exact inversion of "Hillary Clinton," thus creating a formidable chiasmus, and history loves a chiasmus, and you can look it up. And remember: when FDR won re-election in 1936, it was a landslide, and we had not yet endured the worst of the Depression.

-- DL

(Ed note: Find David Lehman's two-part (2008) interview on the subject of "trochaic theory"  here  (Part I) and here (Part II). Read more here and here.)

From the Archive: Poetry, Difficulty, and a Very Annoying Word by Mark Doty

(Ed note:  This post first appeared here on March 10, 2008.  Mark Doty is the guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2012.  You can catch him at the BAP launch reading on September 20. Find out more about Mark Doty here.)

I've just gotten home from school (I'm a guest teacher at Cornell University in Ithaca this semester)which means I've walked a bike-path through the woods, still ice-coated from this weekend's storm. It's amazing. When the wind blows the trees crackle, with a sound that's a bit like hissing oil in a skillet and a bit like the sound that that the highest lick of seawater makes as the tide comes in and sinks into dry sand. I like this walk and it's a good time to sort through the conversation and events of the workshop I've just taught.

Today we were looking at poems by Terrance Hayes from WIND IN A BOX. My workshop's centered on the poetic sequence, so we're interested in poems composed in groups, or longer poems in sections. I think my students were slightly frazzled by the daylight savings timeshift today, and I was feeling sort of spun-around myself, because right before class I'd been reading an essay by Charles Harper Webb in the current issue of THE WRITERS CHRONICLE. Webb's essay concerns difficulty in poetry, which he thinks there's too much of; I paraphrase here, but he seems to feel that many poets write for an elite group of other poets who appreciate coded gestures and opaque language that may be incomprehensible to the general reader. The thing that startled me about the article was that Webb says that such poetry has turned away from "natural human taste."

Whoa. It's clear that it's in the nature of human beings to make things, but as to calling what we make "natural"  or "artificial" -- well, that's a scary business. Webb feels that poems that are readily understood by the general reader (he cites Billy Collins and Sharon Olds as examples) are natural, and that more demanding work isn't; astonishingly, Webb identifies the general reader as someone who'd probably like A Prairie Home Companion.

I could talk about what I disagree with in this position for several weeks worth of blogging, but suffice to say that the presumption inherent in calling any kind of art "natural" is unnerving, because of course it implies that whatever the critic doesn't care for will go tumbling into the abyss of the other category. "Natural" has a long history of ugly usage. There are plenty of states remaining where I could be arrested, if the authorities so desired, for my private practice of "unnatural acts," and one doesn't have to look far back in time to find the ways in which what was presumed to be "natural" for women or for people of color was in fact simply an expression of the prejudices of the moment. "Natural," as they say, pushes my buttons.

I can only be grateful that poets refuse to take such a position seriously. The two greatest of American poets were, of course, practioners of disparate poetics practically incomprehensible in their own time; how long did it take Whitman and Dickinson to find their audience? Should they have attempted to speak to the "general reader"? (Whitman, of course, did so, as time went on, and not always with very happy results. His great poems are the demanding, uncompromising ones.)

What looks difficult to us is often merely different, and isn't it a pleasure to encounter what we don't know how to read yet? There ought to be room in the huge house of American poetry for all sorts of practice, from the plainspoken to the highly wrought, from the direct to the encoded, from the open to the secretive. And besides, if what we strive for is to be "natural" -- well, which to prefer, the artifice of the spider or of the bee, the termite or the paper wasp, all makers of intricate systems?  I am not convinced that nature is all that plainspoken.

Okay, enough rant. I was thinking about my class, and about how my dear and earnest Cornell students, who dwell in a culture that places great value upon intellectual achievement, on working hard
to find correct answers, seemed to struggle with finding their way in Terrance's poems. What I understood, after we talked about two pieces, was that they weren't quite hearing his tone; they hadn't found access to the voice that informs the work, the over-riding or indwelling current of feeling.
For them, the poems were emotionally difficult - which presents another, more interesting dimension
to Webb's argument. There are many sorts of difficulty, after all, and what "difficult" is depends on who's doing the reading.

From the Archive: The Creative Process: Painting, Writing, and the Case for Ruthlessness (by Tess Callahan)

Even before I began writing, I loved to draw and paint. Although I enjoyed it, I never considered it as a profession. Maybe I was afraid of the impracticality, or like my character, Oliver, (in my novel April & Oliver), I was simply afraid. Accessing one’s own creative power can be terrifying. Disowning it, on the other hand, opens the door to catastrophe, as poor Oliver finds out.

To keep me sane, and in an effort to understand the world, I’ve lived and traveled in a variety of continents. It hasn’t helped on either score, by the way. I now have more questions and less sanity. Nevertheless, traveling has added a thick, rich texture to my life. Throughout these journeys, my journal and sketchbook have been my navigation tools. For me, the two are complimentary, and over the years, visual art has taught me to be a better writer.  

Painter Roy Kinzer (shown left) who formerly taught at the Montclair Art Museum, unwittingly taught me as much about writing as any writing teacher. He pushed his students to see large, abstract forms, positive and negative space, and nuances of color – such as flecks of green in a skin tone or reds in a swatch of grass. By forcing myself to yield my preconceived ideas to the reality of what was actually in front of me, I slowly began to give that same courtesy to my characters. My stock assessments of them fell away as they revealed their true and surprising selves. Also, Kinzer’s insistence that we work on all parts of the canvas at once, rather than get bogged down in minutia too soon, trained me to stay fluid with the overall arc of my storyline.

From the Archive: Franz Kafka, 3 July 1883- 3 June 1924

Franz Kafka was born today. In the black-and-white Prague of his boyhood the sun shone yellow on the gray pavement. Debates were held in the cathedral. The rituals of life were very great. Every man had the right to a trial. Behind the mound above the hill on the northern edge of the medieval town stood a castle. Rumors of its existence encircled the turrets of the building like swarms of hornets. Kafka listened.

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883. When he began to compose the stories on which his enduring posthumous fame is based, he decided to write in the German language. He knew that he was born on the day before the day the United States was born. It was this, he joked to Jaspers on one of their walks, that he had in mind when he wrote Amerika.

Franz had a father. His father had a store. It was three o'clock. The father's example made the son loathe himself. The castle existed in his mind like a bird on a branch, singing in the darkness. 

Hermann and Julie Kafka did what they could. He was their first born. He arrived a year after they were married. Two other sons died as infants. What was the effect on young Kafka? "Difficult to assess," the professor said. Three younger sisters survived. The brood was brought up by governesses.

Kafka was named after Franz-Joseph, emperor of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire that spanned the ancient capitals of Prague and Vienna and Budapest. The drama of Kafka's life was the crumbling of that empire.  He took a job in 1907 with the Assicurizioni Generali Insurance Company. The hours were long, the work mind-numbing, the offices filthy, the girls unhappy, the boys guilt-ridden, the hypocrisy contemptible. Then, in 1908, he found the ideal job for his extraordinary imagination. He went to work for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. An executive in the human resources department of a major university advised me that Kafka's practical expertise in workers' compensation issues of his own era would have equipped him to deal with our own. "Better than having two master's degrees," she said.

Kafka did not want to become famous. "Posthumous fame is not the best kind," he said. "It is the only kind."

That this prototypical Cancer with Gemini moon has Leo as a rising sign has not escaped the notice of astrological analysis. Dr. Setz of Arnheim pointed out that there is far more air (42.8%) than fire (12.8%) in Kafka's chart. "It will surprise no one that the mutable outweighs the cardinal and the fixed among the modes in Kafka's nature, but I can't be the only one present who failed to expect a domination of 55 yang to 45 yin. In a presidential election, that would be a landslide." There was much murmuring as of flies on summer eves. 

In his diary Kafka wrote that coitus is "the punishment for being happy together." -- DL

(Ed note:  this post first appeared on July 3, 2010)

From the Archive: For I Will Consider the LOL Cat by Stephanie Brown

I admit to spending an afternoon perusing skateboarding and Roomba-riding cats and have also had a go or two with I Can Haz Cheezburger. My son likes Longcat, just about the tallest thing on the planet. I also love the dark humor in Grandma's Dead: Breaking Bad News with Baby Animals and Why is Daddy in a Dress? Asking Awkward Questions with Baby Animals by McCall and Schwarz. I'm not alone of course: someone's uploading the videos and the dog and cat profiles to Catbook and Dogbook. Zany and silly pets may be outnumbered by cute ones, as we seek the "Aw" factor. Why?  Addicted to Cute by Jim Windolf in the December 2009 Vanity Fair sums up the phenomenon of "cute overload" in everything from cute animal videos to cupcakes to Snuggies, noting, "maybe the move toward cuteness has come about partly because the idea of 'edge' has gotten old." I'll buy that. I also think the silly idiocy of the cats on Cheezburger is a brief respite from spreadsheets and other things one does while seated in front of a computer screen. I love the Cheezburger cat because its facial expression of desire reminds me of one of my own meal-obsessed cats, and I imagine he'd react just this way to his own cheeseburger. It's dumb, sure, and has grown into a profitable phenomenon.  People love their pets a hell of a lot, to the delight of some and the consternation of others--is it a an example of western decadence as one Islamic cleric believes? Do we love and seek to protect pets more than we do our children?  

All creatures great and small--what's not to love about devoted animal companions?  In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Phillip K. Dick depicts a future where real animals are valuable and coveted because of their rarity, as one might want gold bullion today; it seems prescient and too believable in an post-eco-disaster future: as wildlife becomes rare, the real thing becomes truly a priceless treasure. One of the nicest parts of Whitman's Song of Myself is stanza 32, which begins, "I think I could turn and live with the animals" and praises their innate spirit in contrast to man-made religious hypocrisy, along with their calm fortitude; lilies of the field, as it were: "Not one is dissatisfied, / not one is demented with the mania of owning things."  "St. Francis and the Sow" by Galway Kinnell and William Stafford's "Choosing a Dog" emphasize the love

Nin Andrews: How to Write the MFA Poem

Tom Clark, on his estimable blog today, posts Nin Andrews's must-read "Learning to Write the MFA Poem." (Click here.) We printed the poem in its entirety on February 22, 2010, as you'll see if you use this link, but I can't resist offering this excerpt:

there is a certain kind of poem I was taught to write
when I was earning what my husband calls my mail-order degree
from a low-res program in the Northeast.  And I guess
I would call this kind of poem an MFA poem,
though the truth is, I never learned to write one very well
(though this is one of them, or is trying to be),
but I do see them everywhere now, these MFA poems,
which I despise, not because the poems are bad
but because I was taught how to write them
by this asshole professor (he was such a creep)
who was abusive to women, mostly,
fucked with their heads if not their bodies,
you know the type.  Back then
the women took whatever he dished out
because he was famous I guess.
I hated that, and how he would write poems
about being an asshole, which he was and is,
and about everything and anything else
because, he would explain, everything is happening at once,
so everything is happening in his poems, and happening so fast,
that the past, present, and future are all there in the poems
though nothing is ever really happening
because the poems are usually in some static place

The next stanza takes the poem to that particular place and does amazing things with the set-up. It's a tour de force -- the truth, the poetry, and the parody are one. Mega kludos, Nin.

I remember writing a poem called "The Guggenheim Poem," aping the kind of poems people used to write on their fellowship year funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The poems uusally took place in Italy -- in Venice, often, but sometimes Florence or Rome, with side trips to Siena, and maybe Arezzo, and certainly Rapollo, and once in a while Naples. The poet had gone to a museum in a flimsy skirt in the fierce heat and the eyes of the men were upon her as she walked on the hot brick or cobblestone streets and she wore sunglasses and imagined she was Audrey Hepburn but all pretense and fantasy fell away when she came face to face with the Titian of Venus and Adonis or the David of Donatello in Florence or Piero's madonna and child in Urbino or a Giorgione self-portrait in Venice, which she saw as a vision of her father or her husband, she's not sure which, though she has spent many hours analyzing the possibilities, but this she knows this: it was a sudden flash, an epiphany even, like seeing a broken statue and realizing you had to change your life. -- DL

From the Archive: When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems (by Laurence Goldstein)

(Ed note: Anthony Madrid posts thus far are pretty terrific, yes?  I kow you agree so to show your appreciation you should buy his book. 

His post about translation got me free associating until I arrived at this post by Laurence Goldstein from a few years ago.  Not exactly on point but timely nonetheless. sdh)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Ph èdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

Forty Swimsuits [by Molly Arden]

Tonight’s entry begins in the small closet in the upstairs hall.  There, a bag of shameful confirmation is knotted evidence of a ritual I’ve practiced since my teens.  It’s difficult to discuss without the risk of sounding horribly shallow, it might be only a poet who would recognize the significance of the ceremony involved in selecting an annual summer wrapper.  This ritualized spring rebirth of the self is made by way of spandex, nude lining, underwire, a few pieces of hardware.