The Best American Poetry

Larkin, Uncensored (On Love and Marriage)

 Love

Not Love you? Dear, I'd pay ten quid for you:
Five down, and five when I got rid of you.

Marriage

'My wife and I -- we're pals. Marriage is fun.'
Yes: two can live as stupidly as one.

Editor Archie Burnett dates these to December 1953 and January 1954, so no allusion is intended to the Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn standard "Love and Marriage," which it pre-dates.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Frank Kermode)

Philip Larkin in private was a frank curmudgeon, as these lines show:

If I could talk, I'd be a worthless prof
Every other year off
Just a jetset egghead, TLS toff
Not old toad: Frank Kermode.

The poem dates from 1978. Editor Archie Burnett recommends reading this poem alongside one beginning "A Lecturer in drip-dry shirt arrayed" with its sardonic view of jet-setting professors teaching creative writing in the States.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Robert Lowell)

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archue Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). A paperback version of this essential volume has an official publication date of April 2.

Richard Hell's punk poetry memoir 'I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp': No void here [by Ken Tucker]

Richard Hell wrote one of the best songs built around one of the least useful, or at least most misunderstood, phrases of 1970s punk rock in “Blank Generation,” for his band the Voidoids. To his great credit, as his new memoir I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An Autobiography (Ecco Books) proves, he and a few of his cohorts were among the least blank, most thoughtful and informed young musician-writers working during that period, not nihilists but poets with the romanticism wrung out of them by some combination of natural asperity, experience with music-biz venality, and a genuine passion to make some kind of art.

         And so while I Dreamed is indeed the memoir of a man who spiked his hair, consumed a lot of different chemicals, and lived in the shadow of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, and Johnny Rotten, Richard Hell stakes out his status as an always-intelligent man whose musical value has been underrated and whose excellent taste extends to a casual yet more than knowledgeable reference to “my main man New York poet Ted Berrigan.”

         Indeed, the most interesting aspect of this swiftly paced tale of a Kentucky-born first-gen punk-rocker is that he was a poetry fan and a poet before he was a bass player, a lyricist of concise note, a by-his-account profligate yet caring ladies-man. Hell – born Richard Meyers in 1949 – writes with some of his greatest passion about the second generation of New York School poets including Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Tom Veitch, as well as ornery outliers like Bill Knott, the latter for writing “fully thought-through funny word-packs of imagery and ideas of loneliness, desperate love, shock and fury.” He lavishes as much praise upon publications such as “C” magazine and “Ashbery’s and Koch’s and Schuyler’s and Mathews’ swoon of witty word-chess” Locus Solus as he does influential recordings by the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. If Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir Just Kids took a more literary shape than the straightforward prose and chronology Hell offers here, his is the book to read to get a less self-mythologizing view of what it was like to live in the blended musical-literary circles that overlapped and bedded down with each other in the late-70s/early-80s.

         It may be that, as someone who wedged into the vibrating narrow corridor of CBGB’s and sat at the same Gem Spa counter stools as Hell during this period, I am more susceptible than an average reader to his amiable rambles not just through CBGB lore but also his jobs at the Gotham Book Mart and the Strand Bookstore. But that also means I know his details are pretty much spot-on. Plus, I like the way Hell is not so highfalutin’ that he doesn’t enjoy sharing gossip about and quarrels with characters including his Television band-mate Tom Verlaine (boyhood buddies who became thoroughly sick of each other over the course of launching a career – that’ll happen when you’re a part-time drug-head and he’s a full-time control-freak); record-biz hustler-talents like Richard Gottehrer and Terry Ork; or Hell’s quick, vivid portrait of a pre-publishing-agent shark Andrew Wylie when he was still a punk-loving poetaster (a would-be Aram Saroyan, no less!); and the way Hell disliked Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye because Kaye disliked Hell’s guitarist Robert Quine (I know Lenny; I like Lenny; but the late Quine was undeniably great).

         Even better, Hell writes vividly about “what it felt like to be creating electrically amplified songs,” the way “it was like making emotion and thought physical, to be undergone apart from oneself.” Hell halts his story at 1984, when he “stopped making music and stopped using drugs.” Yet I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is not that dreadful thing – the “survivor’s memoir”; it’s a chronicle of an assiduously adventurous life lived with an acute awareness that the adventure is not something to be exaggerated or obliterated, but rather a blessing to be well-remembered.

--Ken Tucker 

Sundry Distractions [by Megin Jimenez]

 

While my first-person singular takes a breather, unaccustomed as it is to public blogging (like a frog), I'll use this opportunity to share some of my prized catches from the ocean of the Internet.

HOT LINKS

Interviews with creative people

* This interview with one of my favorite weirdo poets, Russell Edson, contains his own thrilling account of
his poetics. (His answers make a lot more sense than the questions, you probably don't have to read the questions if they become too impenetrable...)

* Poetry people will no doubt have come across this profile of another of my favorite weirdo poets, Anne Carson, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. (I was pleased to learn that she refers to her husband as "the randomizer" and made him t-shirt made with those words on the front, and a image of one of her painted volcanoes printed on the back...) 

However, poetry people may not have read this much meatier interview she did with the Paris Review back in 2004. Carson is unvarnished here, and unflinching and funny, and reveals a great deal more about her relationship to ancient Greek, her mother, being female, etc.

Funny

* In deference to the great feline overlord of the WWW, here is a GIF of a cat figuring out it was her human shaking the feather stick all along.

* A few years ago, I had a dream about a carp twisting and dying in my arms. In my search for a fairytale about a talking carp I thought the dream was referencing, I came across this New York Times story about a 20-lb carp in Rockland County that began shouting in Hebrew when it was about to be bludgeoned to death... I will let you discover the details of the story on your own... (I never did find the fairytale, which I must have dreamt, as well.)

Song

In my head these days, this lovely end-of-love song by a young Serge Gainsbourg. If you know some French, the lyrics are a poème.

And a poem, to finish

Here's an Edson-ish poem by Anne Carson, from "Short Talks," in Plainwater.

On the Total Collection

From childhood he dreamed of being able to 

keep with him all the objects in the world lined

up on his shelves and bookcases. He denied

lack, oblivion or even the likelihood of a missing

piece. Order streamed from Noah in blue tri-

angles and as the pure fury of his classifications

rose around him, engulfing his life, they came

to be called waves by others, who drowned, a

world of them.

Ritual of My Legs [by Megin Jimenez]

I was startled into a new thought when, in college, I presented one of my teachers with a translation of Neruda's poem, "Ritual of My Legs." He was surprised by a line where the poet is staring at his legs "as if they had been the legs of a divine woman, / deeply sunk in the abyss of my thorax", or rather, surprised by the thought of me translating those words. He wondered what those lines would make me feel as a young woman. 

"What the Water Gave Me," Frida Kahlo

I was startled because it created a sudden rift between me and Neruda. He had been mine before, mine as if I weren't bound to be defined as a woman. I had entered his poems without thinking of Neruda as a man and myself as a woman. I had been the poet staring at his legs, I had chosen this poem because I identified so much with lines like:

one talks favourably of clothes,
it is possible to speak of trousers, of suits,
and of women's underwear (of "ladies'" stockings and garters)
as if the articles and the suits went completely empty through the streets
and a dark and obscene clothes closet occupied the world.

(Except I translated the word "ladies" as "misses," because I've always hated that word, dreaded ever having to browse the racks in the "misses" section of a department store.)

It's rare to read in this way anymore, with complete surrender, becoming the voice in the book. This was the bliss of reading from ages 10 to 15. I read most indiscriminately, without giving a second thought to the author's gender, the time the book was written or the quality of the writing. I would check out a stack of 10 from the library, place them beside my bed and work my way down. I read Ken Follett spy novels, I read Wuthering Heights and many Sherlock Holmes books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I read my way through the "young adult" section (which ranged from Margery Sharp's tMiss Bianca  to Robert Cormier); W. Somerset Maugham became my favorite writer (eventually displaced). I didn't distinguish between "boy books" or "girl books," (though I'm not being disingenuous, I did know there was a difference between being a boy or a girl). It makes me wonder if boys allowed themselves to read in this way. Certainly it must be difficult for them to read "girl books" like The Secret Garden. 

There's a lot of speculation as to why women read so much more than men. (NPR: "When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain.") Of course, the speculation centers, as usual, on the composition of our brains and how women are "wired" better for empathy and patience, which are both required to enjoy novels. This strikes me as a lot of bunk, because it was not until very recently (historically speaking) that women were even allowed to make up the vast majority of the novel-reading public.

I would posit, entirely on an anecdotal basis, that it's this identification across genders that makes women more avid novel readers. This is not a problem with men, or men's brains, but a problem with the collective value that's placed on something marked "female." I've had J.D. Salinger and Faulkner both described to me as a having a special hold on men ("boys' books") which is annoying, because I never felt that distinction in my own reading of them, they were "mine," as well. But could a male reader feel the same way about some of the women writers I've had to ferret out? (Grace Paley, Marguerite Duras, Alice Munro, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir.)

Oh no, now I'm mired in the Gender Question Quagmire... I'll never get out! I will aim for a quick leap to the closest liana and close by saying that it's troubling that there's still this discrepancy between who's reading the books and who's getting the plaudits. That is, mostly women are reading the books, and many women are writing the books, while men are largely getting the sophisticated reviews and enjoying the most prestigious rewards. (Don't believe me? Check out the latest Count by VIDA.) 

***

Please enjoy the entire Neruda poem as a palate cleanser. (I got the text form the internetz, which did not credit the translator--for shame!--but I will track his or her name down. This is not my translation.):

"Just Like That" [by Matthew Thorburn]

God, I never felt lonelier
than when the shinkansen would pull in
and I heard that electronic chime—
the one to tell us passengers
here comes the next stop announcement
in Japanese. It almost sounded like
someone’s phone, because no one’s phone
sounds like a phone anymore,
or a ringtone version of a Milt Jackson line,
a vibraphone riff from somewhere
in the middle of one of Milt’s ten thousand runs
through “Django” or “Bags’ Groove”
or “Two Bass Hit.” I missed hearing him
twice back in Michigan, years ago
at the Serengeti Ballroom and the Bird
of Paradise, and now missed him all over again—
missed my CDs and headphones, the live
and studio versions, the alternate
takes and outtakes, but especially his solos
that strayed beyond what I’d given up
precious brain cells to store away
so I could replay at will. My dream job,
back when Milt was still alive, would have been
to be John Lewis in his tuxedo at the piano.
To play like that, of course. To play at all.
But also to be so close I could listen
to Milt every night, every night—
those ten thousand sweet transactions
between the mallets and the vibes.
This string of four or five notes, not quite
a melody, not close to a song, might’ve been
a little something Milt threw in for flavor
or to egg John on, something to go back to
throughout his solo, like an inside joke
or an old lover’s name you can never
really let go of, just the way I keep hearing it
now, lonelier each time, as we slide
into Shinjuku, Shiojiri, Nara, Shin-Osaka.

-- Matthew Thorburn

from This Time Tomorrow by Matthew Thorburn (Waywiser Press, 2013)

"Was It Ever Really There" [by Christina Marie Lancaster]

my weight on the
            sun is too
high for me to
remember:
my weight on the
            moon is
equal to you

when the sun
            is dying
we will call it
our Red Giant:

when the moon
            dies
who will notice

who will care.

-- Christina Marie Lancaster

Happy birthday, Richard Wilbur, 92 years young

First Snow in Alsace

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;
Across the ammunition pile
The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,
Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow
And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

-- Richard Wilbur (from The Beautiful Changes, 1947)

Dating Will Be Difficult When Everyone Is Dead [ by Chelsea Reilly]

Imagine your surprise when she tells you the rats got into the baby carriage again. There is a reason for everything, which I will explain much later. You have an important decision to make. It is not my business, but she has the sex appeal of an owl. I will make you so happy your face will be unrecognizable. I will make sure you never feel hunted again. We have things in common. For example, we are always waiting for lunch to happen. You have never startled anyone.  I know the difference between an emergency and a blinding pain in the chest. There are many people I regret marrying. I never planned on sleeping alone. 

-- Chelsea Reilly