The Best American Poetry

Happy Birthday Marianne Moore (by Anthony Madrid)

MARIANNE MOORE (11/15)

One hundred twenty-five today || Madrid is keeping score || A very happy birthday to || the incomparable Marianne Moore

An amber-tinted philatelist || inhabits the ocean floor || A very happy birthday to || the incomparable Marianne Moore

Reactor core with its rods || I don’t even know what they’re for || A very happy birthday to || the incomparable Marianne Moore

♣

The incomparable Marianne Moore!! || Top billing, top dollar, top drawer

Silk, taffeta, velvet, velour || for the conqueror Marianne Moore

And there’s plenty more action in store || for the carnivore Marianne Moore

And nary a Larry
who doesn’t adore
the dodge and the parry
of Marianne Moore!

The incomparable Marianne Moore!

♣

She “digesteth harde yron.”

A Poem for Veterans Day

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing HR7786 June 1, 1954, changing Armistice Day to Veterans Day.

 

Reconciliation    

Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash
          again, and ever again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

                                        -- Walt Whitman

 

("Reconciliation" by Walt Whitman appears in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Ed. David Lehman, Oxford University Press, 2006)

-- sdh

Dostoevski predicted the end of World War I (and nobody heard him)

Dostoevski's natal chart reveals him to be a Scorpio with Sagittarius rising. This is scary enough, but his moon is in Gemini, so watch out! Born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Dostoesvki suffered from epilelptic fits (see The Idiot) but did well in his examinations though he loathed mathematics. On Shakespeare's birthday in 1849, Dostoevski was arrested for belonging to a group of crazy liberal loudmouth intellectuals. He was sent to Siberia. sentenced to be executed, and faced a firing squad in the freezing rain. But it turned out to be a mock execution and Dostoevski went back to his cell the shape and size of a coffin convinced that it is better and wiser to be a saintly fool in Siberia than to pimp for his sister in St. Petersburg. Released in 1854, he wrote "Crime and Punishment" in a hurry because he needed the money to cover his gambling debts. He was a compulsive gambler.

From analyzing Dostoevski's astrological profile, you can safely arrive at several conclusions. His favorite songs would have been "I Fall in Love Too Easily" (Sinatra version 1940s) and "He's a Rebel" (rock song from early 1960s). The prophetic nature of his writings, including "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Notes from Underground," doom him to be a Cassandra without honor in his native land. Yet his fame eclipses that of all other Russian authors with one exception. A palm reader held his hand and looked into his searing eyes. You will achieve immortality, she said. But you will die in your sixtieth year. He obliged her on February 9, 1881.

Dostoevski's birth pattern -- a full house, with only one empty chamber -- is replicated exactly on the second day of August 1914. Had this fact been understood correctly, World War I might have been averted! The celestial mechanics of Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto intimate that Dostoevski would die on the same day as the end of the war, and indeed, the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which would have been the novelist's ninety-seventh birthday. But it t would have come more four years earlier if in the prison of his days the free man had learned to praise. The fault lay not in our stars but in ourselves. The German minister smoked a Turkish cigarette in a jade holder. "Nothing ever happens in Brussels," he shrugged.

On that day, in graveyards in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, in Latvia and Estonia, school children in tatters stood shouting, "Hooray for the Karamazovs!"

For Dusty's natal chart, go here

-- DL

On the Tango and Buenos Aires [by Mong-Lan]

 

Borges' Tango Drawing from University of Notre Dame | Rare Books & Special Collections

Stepping out onto Corrientes, you see the surge of lights, the waves of people, the blaring neon.  Buenos Aires: wind-swept, bipolar, insomniac, histrionic.  Not surprisingly, there are more theatrical shows here than in any other city in South America.

I now find myself here for more than three years, immersed in its culture and people, el castellano (the particular Argentine Spanish), and the tango.  Dancing the tango, singing the tango, painting the tango.

There is poetry in the forbidden, the languid nights, the time spent and misspent dancing the tango to the weeping of the bandoneón and the low sighs of the double bass.

Dancers sway in each other’s arms, on city streets, on choreographed stages, in meat-market milongas, in private homes, in the heady sweetness of a complex mathematics that looks at once simple and elaborate and only sometimes involves the heart.

A poetry of the body, a heightening of the senses that exalts the communication of the body between one person and another, a poetry of the senses overwhelming the five senses of the body — the tango.  The tango was born in the Rio de la Plata region that encompasses Argentina and Uruguay. Some of the great musicians and singers of the tango came from Uruguay.  Much the way Chile made its wines famous all over the world, Argentina made the tango its brand.

The tango is sultry and sensual, not sexual — that is for después.  After 17 years of being involved with the tango and relationships of the flesh and the heart, I have come to realize that every relationship is a tango, every movement between that leads from here to there, if it affects us, if it afflicts us, if it calls to our heart and recalls ancient memories. 

The tango is more than just a movement, or a series of movements — it is that connection between yourself and your partner, between two hearts, two memories, two bodies moving as one.

I have found that more important than the dance itself is the relationship, a relationship.  Give and take.  Not just give, and not just take.  The follower gives of herself, the leader gives. If the energy is just right, there is a balance, and both are refreshed, renewed.  An exchange at once spiritual and sensual, a figure eight that is emblematic of eternity.

Buenos Aires is a city of intense passion, city of song and dance, pot-beaters and rioters of an unstable economy.  Things are taken light-heartedly and explained by “es lo que hay” — that’s what there is.  A city where if you can take the ups and downs and believe whole-heartedly in luck and the lottery, you can remake yourself in body and spirit.  But into what?

Writes Jorge Luis Borges in “El Tango:”  Esa ráfaga, el tango, esa diablura, / los atareados años desafía; / hecho de polvo y tiempo, el hombre dura / menos que la liviana melodía, / que sólo es tiempo.”  (This gust, the tango, this mischief, / the busy years challenges; / made of dust and time, man endures / less than the light melody / that is only time.)

A city caught and trapped in dust and time, while the mischievous tango endures.

The streets Corrientes and Cordoba surround my apartment.  The people are still primal, raw — connected more to the skies, to each other, to the universe than to any technological gadget.  One sees the desperation in the eyes of a child of four, reflected from the eyes of her parents.  

Where the two main roads intersect, 9 de Julio and Corrientes, there rises a great obelisk, an emblem of the city itself. It is a streak of ego and daring into the sky, as if to say:  This is who we are, this is what we aspire to, this is what we were.  If we may but look inside ourselves, to what stirrings this ambition may lead us to . . .

This is the city where Borges masterminded and directed the great library, wielded his pen and the labyrinth of his mind in soaring blindness and darkness.

Where mind must function over matter, making matter immaterial.  Where a song is heartbreak, heartbreak is forever, and forever is longer than a thought.

For every motion, there is an equal and opposite emotion.  For every desire, a non-desire and a lurking fulfillment.  Everything — this too is about to extinguish . . .  this feeling, this emotion, and desire. 

This is the moment I am most alive.  The moment I cross the street to meet you, eyes moist.  All the threads of a life . . .  

Tango que fuiste feliz,
como yo también lo he sido,
según me cuenta el recuerdo;
el recuerdo fue el olvido.

— Jorge Luis Borges: “Alguien le dice al tango,” with Piazolla

(Tango that you were happy,
as also I have been,
following memory’s recounting;
the memory that was oblivion.

— Jorge Luis Borges: "Someone says to the tango," with Piazolla.)

(Translations by Mong-Lan)

Mong-Lan left her native Vietnam in 1975, on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. A poet, writer, dancer, visual artist, singer, and educator, she is the author of five books and two chapbooks, including her book on the tango, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (the bilingual version: Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos). Find a complete list of titles here. Mong-Lan has won the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been frequently anthologized -- in, for example, The Best American Poetry. Visit:  www.monglan.com 

Mong-Lan with David Lehman, Oct 16, 2012

 

Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012 [by David Lehman]

Jacques Barzun, intellectual historian, legendary Columbia professor, mentor, essayist, man of letters, has passed away at the age of 104. Perhaps in an effort to point to his great versatility, the NY Times obit calls him a "cultural gadfly," which seems to me tonally wrong. No gadfly, he did not sting and fly away, in the manner of a satirist; his knowledge was as deep as his range was wide, and he brought the resources of an encyclopedic mind to the least of his endeavors.

No one else could have written -- and published at the age of 93 -- a magisterial cultural history of Europe, with a driving thesis embedded in the very title of the book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present." As a professor he crossed disciplinary boundaries with enviable ease -- if he taught you Romanticisim you were exposed to history, music, philosophy, art, and literature; you put in time with Berlioz, Rousseau, Delacroix, Shelley, Coleridge, Goethe, Carlyle, Stendhal, and the world historical individual personified in the emperor of France -- and you understood the ways the 19th century deviated from the classical and swerved into the modern.

For many years Barzun and Lionel Trilling team-taught Columbia's senior "great books" seminar, which met one night a week and was arguably the crowning glory of a Columbia education. Trilling and Barzun were different in temperament and taste. As writers and scholars they used totally different strategies, rhetorical and methodological, to attack a subject. Yet they were able to air their intellectual disagreements with civility founded on fondness as well as respect. They complemented each other beautifully in dialogue and had a shared penchant for off-the-cuff wordplay. One evening Malthus's dire predictions of runaway population growth were under discussion. Trilling ventured, "honi soit qui Malthus pense." To which Barzun replied without missing a beat, "honi soit qui mal thus puns." Students lucky enough to have taken the Colloqium on Important Books, as it was called, still spoke about it, with ardor and awe, thirty or forty years later.

When, working as Trilling's research assistant, I decided to make the prose poem the center of my doctoral thesis, Trilling suggested I meet with Barzun and he arranged the interview. Not only was Barzun encouraging; he pointed me in so many fruitful directions -- from Macpherson's "Ossian" to Leigh Hunt to the prosopopoeia as a rhetorical device -- that I walked away in that state of intellectual agitation that bodes well for a critical undertaking even as it vastly complicates it.

I turned again to Professor Barzun when, a decade later, I set out to write a book on murder mysteries. At Cambrdge University, I had written my master's essay on detective novels. Now, in 1985, I wrote a Newsweek cover story on the subject and landed a book contract. Long a fan of Jacques' great "Catalogue of Crime," done collaboratively with Wendell Taylor, and containing thousands of annotated entries on detective novels and stories, I wrote to him, and met with him for a luxuriant hour of conversation in his midtown office. The single-space, two-page letter he sent me touched on Voltaire's "Zadig," the relation of detection to science, the development of the Surete in France, the reason for the genre's highbrow appeal, among other things. Barzun said that criminal anguish was something that could be done well by Dostoyevsky but was usually fatal in lesser hands. The first-person murder mysery, he smiled, "must be a foresight saga." It was quite a session. "The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection" owes much to Professor Barzun.

Though Barzun in "Meditations on the Literature of Spying" (1965) reveals that he has little affection for Cold War developments in the espionage genre, he makes a number of observations that I  find suggestive, impressive, and useful. For example, he connects the success of the genre at the time of his writing -- the time of James Bond on one hand and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold on the other -- to "the multiform attack on privacy" that causes vast amounts of anxiety in the populace. Barzun goes further:

<<
Psychoanalysis has taught even the common man that he is in some ways an impostor; he has spied on himself and discovered reasons for distrust and disgust: in all honesty he cannot turn in a good report. Nor do his surroundings help to restore his confidence. The world is more and more an artifact, everywhere facsimiles supplant the real thing -- the raucous radio voice, the weird TV screen. Just to find his bearing he must fashion a computer simulation of his case. So mimicry, pretending, hiding, which are part of the child's first nature and used to be sloughed off as true individuality developed, now stay with us as second nature, and indeed as the only escape from the bad self and the bad world.
>>

This is brilliantly put and one has to rub one's eyes a little recalling that the essay, so predictive of intellectual conversation to come, appeared back in the Spring 1965 issue of The American Scholar. While Barzun broadcasts his irritation with the espionage genre, at least he pays it the compliment of calling it, in his title, "the literature of spying," which is no mean thing in his book. -- DL

On Self-Pity: D. H. Lawrence and Kenneth Koch duke it out

D. H. Lawrence
Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Kenneth Koch
I Like Rats

I never saw a rat
Sorry for itself.
I never saw two rats
Consoling one aniother for being rats.

Rats live good full rat-lives with other rats.
Rat mind and rat heart plunge them into rat sex with
       other impassioned rats.
People say they are poison and ugly and cause disease.
I say people cause disease.
I never caught a cold or syphillis or gonorrhea or
       manic depression from a rat. 

Charles Bukowski's "Laughing Heart"

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

Auden on Prayer Book Revision: No More Mr. Nice Guy? by J. Chester Johnson

When the article, “On Working with W. H. Auden on The Psalms,” appeared here, I received a number of questions and requests for more information.  So, I’m taking this opportunity to respond – at least, in part.

I’ve noticed it came as a complete surprise to many persons that W. H. Auden was so fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the Episcopal Church’s revision of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, begun in earnest in the late 1960s. While a portion of his views on the subject was included in the article, associated material by and about Auden on the revision project is also contained in the final pages of Later Auden, the most recent biography by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer.  To receive a little more flavor of the intensity of Auden’s perspective toward the subject, add the following excerpt from one of his letters:

“What has happened over the last few years has made me realize that those who rioted when Cranmer introduced a vernacular liturgy were right.  When this reform nonsense started, what we should have done is the exact opposite of the Roman Catholics: we should have said ‘Henceforth, we will have the Book of Common Prayer in Latin.’ (There happens to be an excellent translation.)”

These views were further clarified and emphasized in the considerable communication that exists on various aspects of the revision process between Auden and Canon Charles Guilbert, who was, at the time, the Custodian of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER of the Episcopal Church.  The basis for Auden’s fundamental aversion to the revision can be summed up, I believe, in this thoughtful and quite eloquent excerpt from a letter, dated March 19^th, 1968, to Guilbert:

“We had the Providential good-fortune, a blessing denied to the Roman Catholics, that our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say, when the English Language was already in all essentials the language we use now – nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer – at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language.”

Although Auden’s ideas were decidedly contrary to much of the revision project, they were not as vehement regarding the psalm retranslation for which he served on the drafting committee before returning to Europe to live. In this respect, since the two of us held the position of poets on the committee, I’ve been asked from time to time if I could identify specific Auden contributions to the retranslated psalms, now contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. As a consequence of my joining the committee sometime after Auden had become a member, combined with his heavy schedule – mainly, Auden’s frequent trips to Europe and his eventual move from New York City – we never attended the same meetings of the drafting committee.Therefore, I cannot be an original source for Auden’s textual offerings to the finally adopted psalm retranslations. Nonetheless, I was, of course, very interested in the specific recommendations Auden would have made to the committee, and I inquired during my participation on the committee about those contributions. It should be obvious and noted that a true rendering of the translated meaning of the considered text, as a matter of principle, preceded, for obvious reasons, any contribution by either poet.  Before the poets’ assistance was invoked, the scholars on the drafting committee traced, to determine if mistranslations surfaced at points along the trail, received text from the original Hebrew through the Greek (Septuagint), through Old Latin, and through St. Jerome’s Latin revision to Miles Coverdale’s 16^thcentury translation, which also relied, in part, on Luther’s German Bible and which constituted, with little adjustment, the psalms contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER for virtually the book’s entire life. One final step for the committee also involved a review of the 1928 version of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, which had accomplished a few modest adjustments to Coverdale.

According to comments of the chairman of the drafting committee, with whom I worked closely on the retranslation for more than five years to completion of the project, Auden provided three memorable contributions to the adopted retranslation:  In psalm 27, he replaced “secret place” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “secrecy”; for psalm 42, he replaced “water pipes” in Coverdale and “water floods” in the 1928 version with “cataracts”; and for psalm 95, he replaced “prepared” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “molded.”  I also believe Auden made an additional and fourth contribution: He presented forceful pleas for the committee to retain a variety of inherited language; for example, I know he argued for the preservation of this line from psalm 122: “Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself,” and that is what one finds today in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.  I’d not be surprised at all if a few more traditional lines were also saved through his erudition and zeal.

Notwithstanding the deep reservations he held about the general revision, Auden still felt compelled to offer help, reflecting, among other things, his ties to both the institution and the qualities of the traditional liturgy. At one point in the correspondence, Auden writes to Guilbert, “I should be honored and delighted to serve in any capacity on the Standing Liturgical Commission.”  I also believe the offer to assist illustrated a genuine generosity and good will, which unfortunately do not comport with the judgment, among many people, that Auden regularly exhibited a honed curmudgeon attitude.  My interchange with W. H. Auden can not confirm this latter view; a person of strong ideas he was – with polymathic knowledge and precise proportion at his fingertips to enhance and justify those views, but he was mostly accessible and transparent and not rude, arrogant, or routinely short – not from my experience.

 I distinctly remember my first encounter with him. In my early 20s, I decided to try out New York City as a place to live – during the late 1960s. Early on in the settling process, I found myself thumbing through the mammoth Manhattan phone book, and either accidentally or by intense curiosity, I unearthed the name, W. H. Auden. Now, surely, the poet would not be so open as to list himself in the phone book for everyone to know the number – I assumed it was just a duplicate name in the gargantuan city.  Yet, to confirm my conclusion, I decided to call – the hubris of the young at play.  Someone picked up the phone, and I began to inquire: “Is this W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  “Is this the poet, W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  It couldn’t be, could it? So, I started to stumble and stutter into some comment about how much I admired and enjoyed his verse.  He immediately made me feel at ease, and we talked for awhile – I didn’t feel rushed to jump off the phone.  Little did I know that, in four years, I’d be communicating with him over the retranslation of the psalms for THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

There is also a story involving Edward Mendelson that corresponds with my own, both of which could possibly help shed some of Auden’s adhering reputation among some people for brief tolerance and quick severity.  Mendelson, an assistant professor at Yale at the time, had been given the job of serving as Auden’s chaperon and guide on a visit the poet made to the campus to talk with students and to record his poems.  During the stay, Auden mentioned to Mendelson that he wanted to put together a new collection of his essays, to be titled FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS; however, Auden didn’t remember what he had written, to which Mendelson replied that he had copied all of Auden’s essays, which were then in Mendelson’s apartment.  Auden, obviously pleased, spent a few hours with the copies but then said he would need to return at a later date in order to read all of the essays. Following the trip to Yale, after Auden had announced his departure for England, he wrote to Mendelson asking that he, Mendelson, make the selections for him, and sent a check for $150 to cover the costs of copying.  In turn, Mendelson put together a preliminary list of contents, which Auden reviewed and amended; Mendelson, a few days later, sent a sheaf of copies to Auden.  Sometime after these exchanges, Auden asked Mendelson to be his literary executor. And still later, Mendelson remitted a check to Auden for $40, the sum remaining after the costs of copying and mailing were paid.  When Auden received the check, it apparently became a celebratory moment for him and Chester Kallman, with much waving of the check, for, as then exclaimed, they had, at last, found an honest man.      

Mendelson chose to end his biography, LATER AUDEN, with attention to the poet’s fervid concentration on liturgy and the conduct of worship. Considering the remarkable focus and energy Auden placed on these issues during the last years of his life, there could be no more fitting way to close the final chapter on the poet’s life. 

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers"?

Who wrote "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers" (and if you haven't read it, here's a link)?

a) Andrew Marvell
b) John Ashbery
c) Marvelous Marv Throneberry
d) Andrew Jackson
3) Percy Bysshe Shelley
e) The Merry Widow
f) Barbara Stanwyck

Follow the links for the right answer. Bonus: Someone on this list who did not write the poem in question wrote a poem with a very similar title! The first person to name the poet and give the correct title of the poem will be absolutely right. -- DL

"Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" [by William Butler Yeats]

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

-- William Butler Yeats