The Best American Poetry

Billy Collins Pinch Hits for Garrison Keillor, and See What Happens

Billy Collins, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, will be filling in as guest host of The Writer's Almanac from June through August. Garrison Keillor, the regular host, is devoting the summer to his weekly variety program, A Prairie Home Companion. (In addition to a run of outdoor performances, Garrison is taking the show on a thirty-day bus tour and a two-week cruise.) The Writer's Almanac is the daily radio show that features a commentary on the day in history, a profile of a poet or writer born on the day, and a poem specially chosen by the host. Today is Ron Padgett's birthday, and Billy chose Ron's poem "The Swiss Family Robinson." Click here for June 17 and here for yesterday, Bloomsday. The Writer's Almanac has got to be about the best five minutes that FM radio has to offer. -- DL

The Origin of Father's Day (A Day Late, But That's Part of It)

Billy Collins explains the origin of Father's Day:
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Today is Father's Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother's Day sermon. She thought of her father, who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too. So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father's birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father's Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father's Day, not until 1972. Mother's Day is still the busiest day of the year forists, restaurants and long-distance phone companies. Father's Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made.
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from A Writer's Almanac, June 16, 2013

Showtime at the Matrix [by Tomás Q. Morín]

The day before I was to have my teeth cleaned, I was telling my wife over the phone how the dentist’s office had said I would be free at 10:00 from their chamber of hooks and mouth vacuums and that ugly, cycloptic light with the orange bulb they crane over you. Because it sounded like I was saying 8:10 instead of “at 10:00,” what began as an ordinary comment quickly turned into a back and forth worthy of my beloved Abbott and Costello.

I don’t recall mumbling my way through high school or college, though I was soft spoken, as friends have reminded me. What happened to my voice, I don’t know. There are times when my speech has been so garbled, I’ve had to apologize and excuse myself from the phone so I could lick my lips, clear my throat, or open and close my mouth to loosen the muscles of my face as if I were doing some kind of demented mouth yoga, anything to try and improve my annunciation so that I didn’t sound like Boomhauer from King of the Hill, a character whom I love and, not surprising, have no trouble understanding. 

 

The paradox of my mumbling is that when I read a poem out loud, I’ve been told my words go from being heavy and thick to a soft, crisp baritone. When this happens, I think I must be engaging more of my body in the act of speaking. My posture is better. I probably inhale more air and project. I open my lips wider and wrap them more firmly around each vowel. Performing a poem is almost akin to entering the Matrix, a place where I’m a better version of myself, minus the tacky trench coat.

Whenever strangers compliment me after a reading, I have always assumed they were being kind because to my ear there’s little difference between my speaking and reading voices. One kind gentleman went so far as to joke that if the poetry thing didn’t work out, there was always radio where I could become the voice of America.

“The voice of America” has a nice ring to it, though I don’t think she would want me to speak for her because there’s no telling what I might say about how she treats her tired and poor huddled from sea to shining sea. Worse yet, I might become a voice of “reason” for the left like Beck or Limbaugh are for the right. If that happened I would no doubt have nightmares in which my fellow soft baritones like Nat King Cole and Keanu Reeves would reproach me for misusing my instrument.

It’s better not to anger Neo or the King. Better to keep my feet on the ground and out of my mouth and instead write poems about dentists or cartoons or yoga in the hope that centuries from now my voice might be one of a thousand in a dusty library whispering from the page about the truth, which never hurt anyone or led people astray, unlike the Truth that continues to bring nations of innocents to their knees. 

"Young Blue Eyes: Frankie in the Forties" [by David Lehman]

Back in January 2008, when Dight Garner was editing the "Living with Music" blog for the New York Times, I got to write a column on my top twenty Sinatra  tracks from the 1940s, an enviable assignment and one that I had a swell time with. Here my first five entries -- with a link to the site. -- DL
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David Lehman’s January 2008 “Young Blue Eyes” Playlist:

Sometimes overshadowed by the Capitol Years (1953-1961) or the years after when “our hoodlum singer” (as Johnny Carson put it) became the iconic leader of the Rat Pack, the 1940s are the closest thing to a forgotten decade in Frank Sinatra’s career. This is a lovely way to spend an evening:

1) All or Nothing at All (music by Arthur Altman, words by Jack Lawrence). Though initially recorded on the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, this most famous of the songs Sinatra sang with the Harry James Orchestra is eligible here on a technicality. The 1939 recording didn’t become a hit until it was re-released as a single four years later, during a prolonged (and ruinous) musicians’ strike, when Columbia Records was desperate for material. Sinatra in 1944: “It’s a funny thing about that song. The recording we made of it five years ago is now in one of the top spots among the best sellers. But it’s the same old recording. It’s also the song I used to audition for Tommy Dorsey who signed me on the strength of it. And now it’s my first big record.” The final bar of the vocal is miraculous.

2) I’ll Never Smile Again (Ruth Lowe). As recorded on May 23, 1940, by the Dorsey orchestra with Sinatra and the Pied Pipers vocal group. Jo Stafford, then the golden female voice of the Pied Pipers, likes to say that within a few bars of first hearing Sinatra sing, she knew. You’ll hear why the first of his nicknames was “The Voice.”

3) Oh! Look At Me Now (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). January 6, 1941. Another gem from the three years Sinatra spent as Tommy Dorsey’s boy singer. In the allegory of Sinatra’s career, this song – which he recorded as a solo on “A Swingin’ Affair” in 1957 – figures heavily: “I’m so proud I’m bustin’ my vest.” Sung here as a duet with Connie Haines backed by the Pied Pipers.

4) Be Careful, It’s My Heart (Irving Berlin). June 9, 1942. Like Artie Shaw, Sinatra recognized the value of recording not only current hits but a repertory of songs written by the masters, and thus he did as much as anyone to (1) extend the life of the music and (2) launch the concept of the “standard.” In this excellent Dorsey arrangement of an underrated Berlin ballad, Tommy’s trombone beautifully states the melody all the way through and then comes Sinatra’s vocal.

5) (There’ll be a) Hot Time in the Town of Berlin (Joe Bushkin music and John De Vries lyrics). I’ve heard two versions of this tune that Bushkin (Lee Wylie’s pianist) wrote to boost morale among the troops abroad. The CBS radio broadcast of Oct. 17, 1943, which became a V-disc, is interesting for its variant lyrics (“Michigan” rhymes with “gimme some skin”), but I prefer the more relaxed delivery of March 4, 1944 (arranged by Axel Stordahl; available on the “Frank Sinatra in Hollywood” boxed set; disc 1, number 19). This is one of “the songs that fought the war,” in John Bush Jones’s phrase. Our lads were going “to take a  hike / through Hitler’s Reich / and change his Heil to whatcha-know-Joe.”
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Quote of the day: On the Transit of Venus

"Venus will look like a dark pea drifting across a bowl of carrot soup."

Robert Siegel, Senior Host NPR's All Things Considered, June 5, 2012

Hold Steady [by Michael Robbins]

When I was a wee bairn in the seventies, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. My earliest act of literary exegesis was attempted when I was eight or so, as I listened again and again to a secondhand eight-track cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Paul Muldoon writes of Leonard Cohen, “his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called ‘poems’ I’ve read.” The list of artists of whom I could say this seems long until I remember why “most” of the “poems” I read are “so-called.” Popular music—rock and roll at first, soon followed by pop, country, jazz, disco, R&B, the blues, soul, hip-hop, metal—has been for me less a passion or obsession than what Kenneth Burke said poetry was: equipment for living. I remember listening to “Tumbling Dice” as a teenager and wondering whether even the Stones themselves understood what perfection they had achieved. I didn’t get people who simply put music on in the background as they talked or read or ate. You had to, yes, immerse yourself in it, like a religious mystery. In college, before I quit drinking, I rarely got laid, in part (only in part) because the end of the night would inevitably find me pressed against a stereo or jukebox, trying to filter out the sounds of a party or bar so I could concentrate on the Ramones. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Rock and roll is, among other things, our profoundest celebration of the ridiculous.

"Very briefly, Alan's character became an elderly Belgian woman." Dave Barry

I don't think I've ever heard people having so much fun in an interview,including the host, in this case NPR's Robert Siegel, host of "All Things Considered."  He's speaking with Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel about Lunatics the comic novel that they've just published.