The Best American Poetry

Joseph Ceravolo comes back!

Possibly the New York School's biggest secret --because the publicity-shy poet died young -- is Joseph Ceravolo. His poetry is wonderful, it is distinctive, in some ways it seems anomalous in the New York context; it has captured the enthusiasm of poets as various as, say, Charles North, Jordan Davis, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ron Silliman, Terence Winch, David Shapiro.and the late Paul Violi.

Today, on his always stimulating blog. Tom Clark posts an irresistible Ceravolo poem from Spring in the World of Poor Mutts, the 1968 volume that won the first Frank O'Hara Award. The judges were FOH's close allies, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. (Subsequent winners of the award were Michael Brownstein, Tony Towle, Kenward Elmslie, and John Koethe, a formidable quartet.) A "civil engineer and regular family guy" (in Clark's words), Ceravolo was born in Queens in 1934, went to City College, began writng poetry when serving in the US Army, and took a class with Kenneth Koch that proved decisive in his development as a poet. Many of us got our first exposure toi Ceravolo's poems in the Paris Review when Tom Clark edited its poetry pages. Before dying of cancer in 1988, Ceravolo wrote and published several other books with small presses, but what many readers, including ardent fans of Ceravolo's work, don't realize is that the man produced hundreds of pages of poetry in the last twelve years of his life. The poems -- some of which have dates in lieu of titles -- stand on their own and also figure as part of one long project: a chronicle of the poet's sensibility. Gathered together with his previous books, these "new" poems will wow the literary public when they are released, and that will be soon: Wesleyan University Press will be publishing Ceravolo's Collected Poems, edited by Rosemary Ceravolo (the poet's widow) and Parker Smathers. The announced publication date is December 2012.  You'll find more details in this space as we approach the date. -- DL

New Photo of Emily Dickinson---Is It Herself? (Terence Winch)

See the New York Times version of the story.

F. R. Leavis on Keats

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    Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
    Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
    Or on the wealth of globèd peonies...

 The 'globèd' gives the sensation of the hand voluptuously cupping a peony, and it might be argued that this effect can be explained in terms of the isolated word. But actually it will be found that 'globed' seems to be with so rich a palpability what it says, to enact in the pronouncing so gloating a self-enclosure, because of the general co-operation of the context. Most obviously, without the preceding 'glut', the meaning of which strongly reinforces the suggestive value of the alliterated beginning of 'globed', this latter word would lose a very great deal of its luxurious palpability. But the pervasive suggestion of luxury has a great part, too, in the effect of the word; for what is said explicitly in 'wealth' (and in 'rich' in the next line) is being conveyed by various means everywhere in the poem.

The palpability of 'globèd' -- the word doesn't merely describe, or refer to, the sensation, but gives a tactual image. It is as if one were actually cupping the peony with one's hand.
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When Henry James Asked for Directions by Edith Wharton

Henry James and Edith Wharton often went "motoring" together.  Wharton wrote about one such trip in  A Motor-Flight Through France (1908).  Here, she describes an experience with James while traveling in England: 

 From A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton

The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. […] While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,’ and as the old man came up: ‘My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ‘in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…’

‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’

‘Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’

‘Ye’re in it’, said the aged face at the window.

-- sdh

Who are these people and what are they talking about? Write a caption:

via Faber Books photo stream

Camus on Irony: When does the truth get censored? [by David Lehman]

The July 2012 Harper's has a lot going for it, but a most enjoyable surprise for this reader was a previously unpublished, because censored, essay that Albert Camus wrote in 1939 -- November 25, 1939 to be exact. France and Britain are technically at war with Germany, but so far there has been no direct engagement on the field. Germany has invaded and overwhelmed Poland and has neutralized the Soviet Union by concluding the infamous non-aggression pact in August 1939. The west waits anxiously. In this context a "free journalist" defends freedom of the press and protests the work of the censors. The piece was not signed, though it has been attributed to Camus. Le Monde published it in March 2012. It was written for the Algerian newspaper Le Soir republicain but it never appeared there. It is not entirely clear why the French authorities suppressed it, but they appear to have been instinctive ironists. Here is a central passage. As translated by John Cullen.
<<<
. . .as a rule, a mind with a taste for applying constraints and possessed of the means to impose them is a mind impervious to irony. We don't see Hitler -- to take only one example out of several -- employing Socratic irony. Conversely, when it comes to weapons that can be used against the too powerful, irony remains unparalleled. It completes refusal in the sense that it often allows its user not only to reject the false but also to say what is true. A free journalist in 1939 hasn't got many illusions about the intelligence of those who are oppressing him. In regard to humanity, he's a pessimist. Nine times out of ten, a truth proclaimed in dogmatic tones gets censored. When presented in an amusing way, the same truth gets censored five out of ten times.
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Therefore (Camus reasons), a "free journalist in 1939" must employ ironic means. "Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses."
The fact that the piece (published in Harper's under the title "Rules of Engagement" and characterized as a "manifesto") was censored does not invalidate its thesis, nor does it convict the author of being "dogmatic." -- DL

Kenneth Koch Comics Presented by Tanya Larkin

From The Art of the Possible, by Kenneth Koch

 

 

 

John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation by Bradley Omanson

Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth.  Until his 1928 book of war poems was reprinted by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli in 2008 (This Man's Army Univ of SC Press), Wyeth’s literary reputation was non-existent.  Not a single scholar of the period had written about him, or even heard of him, and his poems appeared in no anthology of First World War literature from the 1930s to the present.  Yet it might have been otherwise.  Wyeth had all the requisite credentials of the time for literary fame: an Ivy League education, service in the World War, followed by nearly two decades as an itinerant expatriate in London, Liège, Paris, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Provence, Italy and Greece, first as a poet, and then as a painter.  Moreover, he was known to Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Bloomsbury Group and Ezra Pound.  His cycle of modernist war sonnets, when it appeared a year before A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, was perceptively and appreciatively reviewed in a handful of journals, including Poetry.   But Oblivion followed, swift and absolute, for the next eighty-odd years.  Such are the inexplicable vagaries of literary fortune.

            Wyeth’s This Man’s Army is a diary of sorts, an impressionistic yet meticulously factual memoir of fifty-two entries, each identified by place-name, and covering the period May 15 to October 20, 1918, when Wyeth served on the headquarters staff of 33^rd Division, American Expeditionary Force.  Like any good diarist, Wyeth confines himself to the facts as they present themselves, never forsaking the particular to draw out some larger theme.  Any universals suggested by his subject matter are left implicit.

            In the following sonnet, for instance--- which describes the morning of August 16 in the aftermath of the Battle of Amiens, one of the critical turning points of the war--- there is no allusion to the historical significance of immediate events.  There are simply two soldiers, one an officer and the other enlisted, travelling by motorcycle and sidecar through a devastated French village occupied just days before by the Germans.  As they pass through the rubble without stopping, they share a jam sandwich and, in that symbolic act of breaking bread, the hellishness of war and the presence of the dead are experienced, not as an abstract realization or emotion, but as a precisely located sensation: a sickening taste in the back of the throat.

            Harbonnières to Bayonvillers: Picnic

            A house marked Ortskommandantur--- a great

            sign Kaiserplatz on a corner of the church,

            and German street names all around the square.

            Troop columns split to let our sidecar through.

            “Drive like hell and get back on the main road--- it’s getting late.”

            “Yessir.”

                                    The roadway seemed to reel and lurch

            through clay wastes rimmed and pitted everywhere.

            “You hungry?--- Have some of this, there’s enough for two.”

            We drove through Bayonvillers--- and as we ate

            men long since dead reached out and left a smirch

            and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam.

            “Want any more?”

                                                “Yes sir, if you got enough there.”

            “Those fellows smell pretty strong.”

                                                                        “I’ll say they do,

            but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.”

Wyeth’s literary record of the war is an accumulation of such small, precisely rendered sketches: low-key, incidental, unrehearsed, without a shred of rhetoric.  Compared to the major poems of  Owen and Sassoon, the sonnets of Wyeth may seem minor pieces, but they withstand close scrutiny, both in their craft and their accuracy of detail, and there is more to them than at first appears. Read more about John Allan Wyeth here.

Charles Bukowski: Woodcut by Loren Kantor

Charles Bukowski (c) Loren Kantor

"Woodcuts are by their very nature brusque, harsh & bold," writes woodcut artist Loren Kantor.  "What makes a woodcut portrait come to life are age lines, wrinkles and weathered faces." 

Kantor has been posting images of his woodcuts of actors, writers, artists, family, and friends over at Woodcuttingfool for about a year.  He sent me this likeness of Charles Bukowski last week and I love it, especially because of the way he's captured the weariness in Bukowski's eyes.  Thank you Loren for letting us share this image with our readers.  See more about Bukowski here.  Read Bukowski's The Laughing Heart (a personal favorite), here.

-- sdh

Homage to Joe Brainard [by Jacques Bernard]

Nancy Diptych

At the New School's Tishman Auditorium on Tuesday, May 8, writers who knew and loved Joe Brainard (1941-1994) read from the Library of America's new edition of the artist's collected literary works. Joe, a modest man, whose "modesty" (John Ashbery once wrote) "is the modesty of the gods," would have been astonished to find that his poems and prose have been published so handsomely under an imprint so prestigious as that of the Library of America. On hand was Ron Padgett, Brainard's closest friend, who edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, Padgett was among those who read their favorite Brainard pieces, as was Paul Auster, who contributed the volume's introduction. Other presenters included Frank Bidart, David Lehman, Edmund White, and Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien.

A beautiful Brainard anecdote told that evening has Joe on holiday with three friends touring Sicily. Whenever the group reached a new destination, an affectionate postcard from Joe awaited each of them. Edmund White said that on their first date the notoriously shy Brainard brought along a pad so the duo could pass notes back and forth in lieu of talking. 

Portions of I Remember were read aloud as were prose poems, diary entries, aphorisms, sui generis writings, and a play. Some Joe lines: "Writing, for me, is a way of 'talking' the way I wish I could talk." "Actually, I am practical. It's just that, sometimes, being impractical seems practical to me." Or, in a different register, "I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old."

In a letter to Padgett in 1965, Brainard wrote, “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes you are of course right.” Simplicity and honesty combine in Brainard's "I Remember." The recurrent use of these words at the start of each new entry in a list has become a poetic form and a standard poetry workshop prompt. From an interview with Anne Waldman on the subject of "I Remember": "I feel very much like God writing the bible.  I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written ..."

The Collected Writings does us the service of printing the whole of "I Remember" (including "I Remember More" and "More I Remember More") while simultaneously showing us how rich a trove Brainard left us beyond this signal masterpiece. And all this writing was done in the twenty-year period when Joe, on speed, created his paintings and drawings and collages -- hundreds and hundreds of them until the day he quit taking speed. For the last fourteen years of his life Joe Brainard produced no new work. What did he do? He stayed in his SoHo loft smoking Tareytons and reading great Victorian novels.

Joe was a sweet man. As an assistant professr at Hamilton College I arranged for a retrospective exhibiton of his work to be shown at the Root Art Center in the winter of 1978. The exhibiton coincided with a course I was giving on the New York School. The show featured such collages as "Yellow Madonna," "Butterfly Madonna," "Flower and Butterfly," "Smoke," "Morning Glory," "The End," "Let Me Entertain You," "Shower," and "Eight of Diamonds," as well as a pencil sketch of Jasper Johns," a self-portrait, paper cut-outs, oil-painted canvases, watercolors, gouaches, and numerous mixed media pieces. In all, seventy-eight of Joe's pieces were on display. We invited Joe to spend a January week at the college, during which he gave a reading and a gallery talk. I remember most vividly the afternoon that we had a very large art studio at our disposal and everyone in the class was encouraged to collaborate with a partner on a painting or drawing, a piece of writing, or some admixture of the two. Joe and I filled two dozen pages of a sketch book with our collaborative efforts that afternoon.

If you're wondering, Jacques Bernard is a nonexistent personage. In "I Remember" Joe recalls when he signed his paintings "by Joe." There were also times he thought of adopting a pseudonym -- Bo Jainard or Jacques Bernard. Such an impulse might last a week. But Joe was always Joe in his art, whether painting an Ernie Bushmiller icon (as in the "Nancy Diptych" above) or the whippet on the cover of The Best American Poetry 1998 -- or remembering that, as a boy, when he read "after five days return to" in the upper left corner of an envelope, he thought that after five days the recipient of any letter should return it to its sender.

-- DL