The Best American Poetry

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Donna Brook

This poem by Donna Brook first appeared in Hanging Loose 42 and also appears in her collection, What Being Responsible Means to Me.

THE SCHOOL OF PAIN

No one comes here to learn
what we teach.

They all want to be better off for it,
to know its applications, to grow
from the experience, to go through
just once.

What we offer
is the fact that it hurts
and is not the same as pleasure.
We’ve found

anything else, or less, or more
is not pain.

-- Donna Brook

I started out as an admirer of Donna Brook’s poetry and then I became an admirer of Donna Brook, so, in addition to being her editor, I became her husband.  Just to make that clear.

The School of Pain appeared in Fall 1982.  In the poetry world, Big-Time Suffering still had its ardent fans: Finish eating your depression stew, dear; it will make your poems grow up big and strong.  We still got lots of Dear Sylvia and Dear Anne poems from young women longing to be miserable.  The boys had to dress up as Berryman and Lowell.

Of course the idea that agony is ennobling goes far beyond the making of poems.  It’s still with us in relentless daily news reports – the guy who thinks he’s a better person because he’s had stomach cancer, the hollow-eyed saint, the uncomplaining amputee, the positive thinker being chewed on by tiger.  If it really worked that way, there would, indeed, be a real School of Pain, and it would have a waiting list.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Tony Towle

This poem by Tony Towle first appeared in Hanging Loose 82 (Fall, 2002) and also appears in his latest collection, Winter Journey.

THE DINNER PARTY

Ah, life is a reassuring dream that is vivid but comfortably mundane,
said the shmuck aloud to himself as he sat down next to the shlemiel
and indulged in an expansive gesture of certitude that sent the latter’s soup
into the lap of the adjacent shlimazel.  The shmendrick apologized,
to no one in particular, and the shmegeggy accepted; while the shlep
shuffled off to the kitchen to get another bowl, and at the front door the shnorrer
pushed past the shlumps to talk his way in.  It was the putz, of course,
that had arranged the seating, a decorous mélange of shmoes
crowded in next to the radiator, sweating and uncomfortable
but grateful to have been invited.  I have no idea where I’m supposed to sit,
so I leave and go sit in the park, where I hear an avian voice: “Hey,
you don’t recognize me?  I’m the pigeon that craps on your windowsill.
Why are you down here on a cold bench when you could be upstairs
eating a free meal?  What are you, some kind of shnook?”

Lenny Bruce said that everybody who lives in New York is Jewish and everybody who lives outside of New York is not Jewish.

In support of that thesis, I offer you Tony Towle, a sandy-haired shagetz who long-ago fled his native Queens and established himself as one of those residents of lower Manhattan to whom anywhere north of 14^th Street is the Adirondacks.   Tony has the true New Yorker’s command of the essential Yiddish vocabulary combined with a poet’s ear and sensitivity to nuance.  The fact that he lives with a nice Jewish girl probably doesn’t hurt either.

When Tony reads this poem aloud, he keeps it flat and reportorial, a bit the way a Swedish sociologist might present it, say.  I had the pleasure of reading it at the recent 70th birthday celebration for Tony at The Poetry Project.  I didn’t go into full shtetl mode, but I could feel the spirit of my late Uncle Louis trying to assert itself.

My favorite reading of the poem took place a couple of years ago.  CLMP had invited Hanging Loose to present some recently published poems in a reading at the main New York Public Library.  We sent Marie Carter, our associate editor and one-time editor of the University of Edinburgh’s literary magazine.  One of the poems Marie chose was The Dinner Party and her Scottish accent revealed whole new layers of universality in the poem.  The bonny lass did need a little coaching on the pronunciation of “shlamazel.”

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Harvey Shapiro

This poem by Harvey Shapiro appeared in Hanging Loose 81, in Spring, 2002.

DESK

After my death, my desk,
which is now so cluttered,
will be bare wood, simple and shining,
as I wanted it to be in my life,
as I wanted my life to be.

-- Harvey Shapiro

There’s a letter from William Carlos Williams, written from Yaddo just after World War II, that mentions meeting the young Harvey Shapiro there and says nice things about his work. That was 64 years ago. A few weeks ago, in Key West, we had a party to celebrate Harvey’s 86th birthday. He likes a good party.
The voice in Harvey’s many books has been consistent over the years; the diction has grown steadily tighter, simpler, always elegant. By contrast, there is the horde of poets at this stage of the game who have produced great, baggy, long poems, often tiresome, sometimes unbearable, as the Official-Summing-Up-Capstones-to-My-Illustrious Career. Perhaps that’s a requirement in some academic contracts.

Although he has taught at Yale and Columbia, Harvey has not had a career in the classroom. Instead, he served as an editor of The New York Times for 42 years, eight of them as editor-in-chief of the Book Review.  I like to think that those decades of journalism had an influence on Harvey’s poetry: Say what you’ve got to say and get out of the way. I know there are lots of other influences, but I fancy this one.  Hell, I started out as a reporter myself.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Michael Cirelli

This poem by Michael Cirelli first appeared in Hanging Loose 92 and later became the title poem in Michael’s first poetry collection, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2008.

LOBSTER WITH OL’ DIRTY BASTARD

The broken down fishing boats on the docks rock back and forth
as if there is music in the air. Norma Jean, Captain’s Girl, Jenny,
    all hips and
bounce – shimmy shimmy ya in their slips.  Across the street,
    Randazzo’s Clam Bar,
“the pride of Sheepshead Bay,” bustles. Inside, not fisherman nor
    pirate, but rapper
Ol’ Dirty Bastard has his own seat, where he reigns with sunglasses
    and a vinyl bib.
Dirty likes it raw, so raw he fathered 13 children, and when he
    rolls up to Randazzo’s,
in his black school bus with 24-inch rims, his clan of offspring
    pour out like bass.
Mama Randazzo sighs and smiles that forced diagonal smile,
    as she drags 6 tables together
There are platters of mussels and little necks with mouths
    wide open!
Dinner rolls bounce off the walls like handballs!  Sword fights
    break out with shrimp
skewers, the toddlers wear calamari rings on their fingers like
    diamonds, and lil’ Rusty
does the fake-sneeze-trick that leaves an oyster in his open
    palm.  Ol’ Dirty is ravishing
a huge boiled lobster, drawn butter dripping down his
    chin, as he cracks open the claws
with his golden fangs.

-- Michael Cirelli

             I knew there was a second reader appearing with me at Brooklyn College’s “Day of the Poet” a couple of years ago, but I had no idea who it was. Then I found his name in the program, one Michael Cirelli. Never heard of him. That’s all right.  He was identified as “a hip hop poet.” Hmmm, that didn’t sound so all right. I braced myself for some noise, attitude, and easy rhyming.

            Michael’s half of the program started out with brief readings by three young poets who, I later learned, came out of the programs he directs at Urban Word New York, which uses hip hop to teach poetry. The kids were experienced performers and the work, as it zoomed by, was better than I expected. I began to relax my old-fogy stance a bit.

            “Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard” was the first poem Michael read. Not at all what I expected! I thought it was terrific. I loved the evocation of the Brooklyn setting (with Mama Randazzo’s phony smile speaking volumes about the degree of welcome extended to large black groups in Sheepshead Bay) and the bigger-than-life figure of Ol’ Dirty. By the end of the reading, I had become a fan and I asked Michael for poems for HL. As I got to know him and his work, I learned that, yes, his knowledge of the rap scene is encyclopedic, but he also holds an MFA from The New School and is thoroughly comfortable in both worlds. I also learned, to my surprise, that Ol’ Dirty Bastard was a real guy, but that the scene in the poem is a total invention. Michael’s book manuscript took me further into a world where place, music and family all interact vibrantly. I think it’s safe to say that the book is the only one you’ll find that has blurbs from David Lehman and from Kanye West.

            -- Robert Hershon

On Charles North [by Michael Schiavo]

In the past year (at least) I've made several attempts to write a long piece about Charles North's excellent 2007 book Cadenza. Each time, I've faltered. I think my best course of action is to apply for a grant and, Gideons-like, use the money to place not just Cadenza but all his other books into hotel rooms across the country. The book would act both as reading material, the artwork that adorns the walls, and the rural radio station. I'd like to call his style something like "Transcendental Objectivist" but I don't want the responsibility.

The book's title poem is one of the great longer poems of the last decade. Akin to Ashbery's "The Skaters" in that it's a kind of entry into North's poetry. It's indeed a cadenza—"an elaborate flourish or showy solo passage, sometimes improvised, introduced near the end of an aria or a movement of a concerto." Except that it's the first poem in the book, so we already know we're in for something different. It's a discourse that opens up the fluid passage between the reader and the book, an argument for a certain approach to the creation and evaluation of art that still seems to be largely dismissed. Like Ashbery's poetry, it puts the classical and contemporary on the same plane. Medusa romps with Ted Williams, Athena and "How High the Moon" are not so dissimilar. I remember the exact passage where I began to feel the top of my head being taken off—and I mean this quite literally: I had a physical reaction to the revelation

Then I am at the bottom

of an extremely tall, vaguely cylindrical

(something about it reminds me of a free-form glass candy bowl)

swimming pool which has the water painted up the sides

and no clear point of exit or entry.

Far off, near what must be the top, is what looks like

a porthole where, if the pool were in fact filled,

a swimmer could theoretically exit—although

if this were as well the point at which

the water entered, exiting would be problematic to say the least.

The water is painted in a pleasing

—actually dry-looking—powder blue,

more the look and fell of sky than water,

neither realistic nor stylized (in the manner,

say, of a Hokusai) but somewhere between the two.

The English painter David Hockney, who has in fact

painted swimming pools, comes to mind.

"I'm Not a Doctor But" [by Robert Hershon]

Robert Hershon, co-editor of Hanging Loose magazine and Hanging Loose Press, will be editing our Sunday poetry pages for the next several months. Hanging Loose magazine was begun in 1966, the name deriving from the original money-saving format of loose pages in an envelope; ninety-five issues have been published to date. Hanging Loose Press has published 175 titles including the first poetry books by Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, Dennis Nurkse, Hettie Jones, Joanna Fuhrman, and Elizabeth Swados. The press also publishes  Ha Jin, Joan Larkin, Jayne Cortez, Paul Violi, Charles North, and Tony Towle  while continuing to present the work of new writers. Robert Hershon’s co-editors are Dick Lourie and Mark Pawlak, with Donna Brook and Marie Carter as associate editors.

Hershon's own most recent book, his twelfth, is Calls from the Outside World. Here's a poem of his -- from Hanging Loose #94 -- that will introduce you to Robert Hershon's distinctive voice and brand of ironic good humor. Welcome, Bob! -- DL

I’m Not a Doctor But
                for Larry Fagin

I’m not a doctor but
I play one on
the 79th Street crosstown bus
and I’m very busy
I’ve covered all the little girls
in their school uniforms
with band-aids on their elbows
knees and noses
and I performed an appendectomy
on some old guy while
we went through the park
(no anesthesia but lots
of birdsong)
I had to amputate the driver’s ears
but he’s learned to love the quiet
My practice has doubled
between Madison and Columbus
I’m just very, very busy

-- Robert Hershon