The Best American Poetry

The "Mad Men" Finale and the best commercials now on TV [by DL]

Some quotes:
"I have a hot tooth."
"Go to the Cloisters without me."
"Never cheap."
"I consider it a success: you didn't have to go a whole day wihout calling me an idiot."
"Why is this so hard? You only have to write 120 words and fifteen of them are Ajax."
"You just hate him because he voted for Goldwater."
"Will you take LSD with me?"
"You're really drunk. Sleep it off."
"This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament without being an artist."

Doors open, doors close, and an Old Fashioned with a beautiful stranger at a luxe Midtown bar is the way the evening ends.

The one universal truth linking all episodes of all seasons of "Mad Men" is that the client is always a shmuck.

"$50,000." That's the sum, the reccurent sum -- what a night with Joan is worth, or the life of Lane, or the collateral for a partnership in the firm, or the check Don gives to the angry widow. Fifty grand was a lot of money in those days. The most valuable stamp in the world was worth $50,000. Ernest Hemingway's story "Fifty Grand" was being read by aspiring writers in science-oriented high school programs in the post-Sputnik era of high angst. Sandy Koufax held out for one hundred thousand dollars. That was the really magic number in those days. That was the Joe DiMaggio number.

Peggy has come a long way, baby -- she's off to Virginia, slim  -- and Don's brother is going to "hang around. Get it?" Hang on for dear life, dear death, dear Adam. The suicide of one brother is the suicide of all. Dick Whitman gets to celebrate himself. His life's a toothache, and Canadian Club's the palliative. Meanwhile, lots of people get to sock Pete in the jaw.  Megan gets the part of Beauty in the "Beauty and the Beast" commercial for Butler Shoes. Who do you suppose is the beast in her life? And Roger hangs his hopes on the nudity of his life in bed with his French-speaking mistress, mother of his partner's wife.

Don, Peggy, and Ginsberg tell me that they dig two commercials on TV right now. The two, as paraphrased by me, who am too lazy to dig up the videos, are

(1) << A spot against cable tv, because the cable guy won't come, so you look out the window, and when you look out the window,  you see things you shouldn't see, and when that happens you have to disappear, and when you disappear you have to dye your eyebrows white, and when you do that you end up attending your own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly. Don't be Phil Schiffly. Switch to our dish or satellite or whatever the hell we're offering instead of cable. >>

Ginsberg said, "The visuals are funny, but the genius part of the commercial is the use of the name Phil Schiffly. (Oh, and btw, Phil Schiffly is the name of a guy who used to work in the ad agency's office before he screwed the pooch.)"

(2) << Car commercial. Attractive lady applies lie detector test to regular guy in shirt and tie. Nondescript q-and-a until she asks him, "Are you wildly and uncontrollably attracted to me?" He, emphatically: "No." Lie detector needle jumps all over the place. "Good," she says. "It's working." >>

At the bar waiting for his Od Fashioned, Don tells me he likes the car commercial because it takes the focus away from the car. "How much Bud would you sell if people tasted the stuff?" Then he excused himself to talk to the woman who approached asking him to light her fire. Come on baby light my fire. Doors open, doors close, and The Doors should sing. Hey, man, it's 1967. But James Bond is still in power, and "You Only Live Twice" is the song of the movie of the day. Don is on lifetime number two right now. The experience called "Vietnam" has not quite happened in the suburbs or on the New Haven line, the one-bedrooms in the East 60s, and the luxury flats in Midtown.  And the news is just months away. -- DL

The No Hemlock Rock [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darling Bleaders,

It's a rainy sunday, all the clay tree jewelry I made for the tree out my window is whipping around in the stormy air. Much of it is essentially of pancake dimensions so spins in the wind.

I wrote to you Friday, and I usually write you every two or three weeks lately, so I'll just explain by saying that if this stage of my life has taught me anything it is do it when it's hot, and when it's not, don't even try. Also, I signed off saying that I'd tell you something later, so that left a pregnant pause. (Can we start a reality show called I Didn't Know it was a Pregnant Pause! It could be about the awkwardly officious.)

But what were we talking about? Ah yes. I promised you my poem in answer to C DdA's.

It's become the leap off point for my grand campaign. Campaign title-wise, I've been noodling around with "pro-living." It is a campaign against suicide. I don't mean end of life care suicide, I mean screw-this despair suicide.

As I said here the other day, an old friend killed herself in 2007. I wrote the below poem sometime after that, speaking to myself as much as to others. Then this past Christmas another old friend (also friends with the first) took her own life. I needed to post something to the community we all shared, poetry in America, but I didn't want to just post the poem, because over the two and a half years I'd come to see that people could read a lot of varied things from the poem, which is good for a poem, but not good for an open letter or a manifesto, which is what I wrote instead. Since than, this past year, I've been researching this subject and thinking about what it all means. Oddly, I still believe everything in the poem, but with much more context. Anyway here's my poem.

The No Hemlock Rock

Don’t kill yourself.  Don’t kill yourself.

Don’t.  Eat a donut, be a blown nut.

That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,

stand on a street corner rhyming

seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with

racket.  Allow medical terms.

Rave and fail.  Be an absurd living ghost,

if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

 

Let your friends know that something has

passed, or be glad they’ve guessed.

But don't kill yourself.  If you stay, but are

bat crazy you will batter their hearts

in blooming scores of anguish; but kill

yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

 

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;

shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.

I will give badges to everyone who’s figured

this out about suicide, and hence

refused it.  I am grateful.  Stay. Thank

you for staying.  Please stay.  You

are my hero for staying.  I know

about it, and am grateful you stay.

 

Eat a donut.  Rhyme opus with lotus.

Rope is bogus, psychosis.  Stay.

Hocus Pocus.  Hocus Pocus.

Do not kill yourself.  I won’t either.

 

 

From this distance I'm just charmed to see how much I equate interesting rhymes with abandonless bliss.

I'm bringing all this up because December gets to be a difficult season for a lot of people and sometimes the blue comes out of the blue. So be prepared for it. Get through it to rue another day. The open letter/ manifesto is easy to find online. Well, I guess I'll link to it, I just fear seeming a barker on something too somber to bark for, but what can I say? I want you to stay. And I want you to have something ready to say if someone you love starts teetering near the neighborhood abyss. Say, We need you desperately. 

Love,

Jennifer

ps  The Boston Globe asked to publish a (slightly cleaned up) version, here, if you prefer.

pps While waiting to be seen by a professional, fill a notebook with color.

 

 

Don't Kill Yourself by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

SDH:  I was looking through my copy of Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 for the publication date of "One Art" so I could respond to Dean Rader's challenge when I found Bishop's translation of this moving poem: 

Don't Kill Yourself 

Carlos, keep calm, love
is what you're seeing now;
today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,
day after day tomorrow's Sunday
and nobody knows what will happen
Monday.

It's useless to resist
or to commit suicide.
Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself!
Keep all of yourself for the nuptials
coming nobody knows when,
that is, if they ever come.

Love, Carlos, tellurian,
spent the night with you,
and now your insides are raising
an ineffable racket,
prayers,
victrolas,
saints crossing themselves,
ads for better soap,
a racket of which nobody
knows the why or wherefor.

In the meantime, you go on your way
vertical, melancholy.
You're the palm tree, you're the cry
nobody heard in the theatre
and all the lights went out.
Love in the dark, no, love
in the daylight, is always sad,
sad, Carlos, my boy,
but tell it to nobody,
nobody knows nor shall know.

        by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)

The Trouble Clef - November [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Another November falling on me. How many are still ahead? God knows...Does it matter? 

Would I feel any better or any different about this one if I knew it were my last? Is ignorance - bliss?

Would I still practice piano daily, keep correspondence and answer the rare telephone calls? Would I book a vacation? Spend all days reading? Try to make sense of the pile of unfinished works? Would I, perhaps,  attempt to create something new, something important and lasting, placing a bet on its survival’s strength? Would I try to live healthy? Read self-help books?  Take herbal remedies? Change climate and diet, keep a daily regiment  of pills, sleep and exercise? Spend more time with family and with those who care, and avoid at all cost those who don’t?

Would I, perhaps,withdraw all money, raise credit cards’ limits and spend it all on some luxury cruise? And jump off the boat at the end of it, hiding in the night, in the ocean, as if returning to the depth of earth’s womb? Would I cheat death with suicide if I knew the day of departure?  As if arriving ahead of schedule to some fancy party? Would I be welcomed? Or would it upset the plans of its Host?

Would I, perhaps, simply go on living with the usual daily petty concerns,  as if nothing has changed, and this knowledge has no significance or power over my life?

After all, we are dying. We are all in the cage of Time: 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, an average 70+ years of life. This means we have total of 36,800,000 minutes (that’s all!) to live, to love, to loose, to remember, to create, to search for meanings, to shop, to say niceties, to worry about something soon to be forgotten. 36,800,000 minutes to make living, to make love, to make something of your life, to read, to re-read, to take action, to contemplate, to stipulate, to populate, to wage wars, to buy peace, to pay taxes, argue over politics... And also to dream, to dream, to forget dreams,  to loose dreams, to meet dreams, to play dreams, to dream again and again and again...

In the age of global warming life is melting away faster, since you are constantly running and can’t stand still, splitting yourself  into million pieces, broken, yet somehow still whole, with a constant noise  all around -  not hearing your own voice. By the end of this paragraph – you have 3 minutes less in the bank of your life. Each minute softly melts away, singing to you its quick farewell.

Living is the art of dying. If you’d know exactly your balance, how many minutes you have to die (living is the art of dying - each minute is melting away) - does it mean you would live them better? Does it mean you could spend them wiser?

It’s another November. Wet strands of grass under my dog’s delicate paws make squashing sounds. I turn the heater on for the first time in a long time and hear the old pipes waking from their slumber. I stop the pendulum of the grandfather's clock, as not to hear it pecks  in the dark of the house, but still I hear tick-tocks – my heart is still counting.  The sand is still running – gravity is always at work.

The last strands of Fall, my favorite season, with its late generosity – to give it all away without a safety-net. When you know you’re falling – choosing to fall from the sky.

 

 

The Virginia Quarterly Review: Update

From today's Washington Post:
<<<
Virginia Quarterly Review staffer died by his own hand, but he reached out first

By Daniel de Vise

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 9, 2010

The Charlottesville offices of the Virginia Quarterly Review are dark. The locks have been changed. Most of the staff have resigned or taken leave. There were two competing drafts of the fall issue, one assembled by the journal's editor, the other by members of his estranged staff. The winter issue has been canceled.

This Story

• Did tense office play a role in U-Va. suicide?
• College Inc.: Embattled U-Va. literary journal goes on hiatus

There are two divergent accounts, as well, of why the managing editor of the University of Virginia's esteemed literary journal walked to a lonely coal tower on a July morning and shot himself in the head.
>>>
Click here for more.

What Can Kill You [by Lera Auerbach]

WHAT CAN KILL YOU

No,
indifference
is not
the worst of it,
and it doesn’t equate
with loneliness.
After all
you choose
your feelings,
even though
it doesn’t seem
like a choice.
No, it’s not
your sloppy sense
of direction,
alienating attitudes
or unbearable shyness,
which is, in fact,
bearable,
it is something else
entirely,
like cancer or
a car crash and
it is somewhere else
where you lost it,
your crumbling sense
of perspective.

Reading David Foster Wallace Without a Net [by Eleanor Goodman]

Two years ago next month, the writer, philosopher, and literary genius David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his backyard. I didn’t know DFW, and initially I disliked his work. True, I took some pride in the fact that we attended the same alma mater and shared professors (many years apart). But I’d badmouthed DFW’s novels to friends as “mannered and faddish,” a criticism along the lines of James Wood’s coinage of the category “hysterical realism.” I resented his footnotes and piling up of details and jump-and-splice style of narration. I thought his tone was arrogant.

Then two months before DFW died, a friend loaned me Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Somewhere in the middle of the second story, “Death Is Not the End,” I abruptly got it, and I devoured the rest of the book with a feeling of voracious pleasure and nausea, as though I were compulsively eating an entire three-layer chocolate cake with jalapeno frosting. What I realized was that DFW wasn’t trying to make his readers feel stupid, or to intimidate them, or to bludgeon them with his own unreasonably encompassing intellect. He was simply trying to get his readers to feel something, to break through the anesthetized shell most of us walk around in all the time. He was trying to bring empathy back into our lives, an awareness of others as well as of ourselves. In this way, he was in a lineage not of literary figures, but of religious leaders—gurus and sages and mystics. He just also happened to be able to tell an incredible story on the page.

It wasn’t until this summer that I could finally pick up Consider the Lobster, one of his incredible collections of essays. For me, DFW’s work is inescapably recontextualized by his death: everywhere in his books are hints of the kind of flagellating self-hatred that must be behind suicide. Evidence of the cruel cost his writing exacted from him is there in the amusing confessions and casually self-deprecating meta-commentary. But perhaps, and I believe this simultaneously, his writing was the only thing that could keep him alive, until—in the midst of brain-chemical issues created by the psychotropic drugs he was taking and then not taking—it wasn’t enough.

There are questions we want to ask every time an artist commits this act of ultimate self-destruction. What makes some creative people find life unbearable, and do they find it more unbearable than investment bankers or store clerks or construction workers? Is there something about the kind of sensitivity and openness required to do creative work that makes people more vulnerable to the suffering in this world, including their own? Did writing save DFW or drive him crazy? How could someone so brilliant have been so cruel to himself and so uncertain of his own talent? And for god’s sake, why didn’t somebody save him from himself?

But we can’t save others from themselves: we can only love them when they’re here and continue to love them once they’re gone. What made DFW a genius as opposed to just a damn good writer was his basic humanity, his deep and unrelenting questioning of his own morality and moral failures—the same qualities that made him vulnerable to despair. Everything hurt him, as though his psyche were a wound exposed to the air. And maybe that makes it more selfish than anything else to wish, as I do, that he were still here. 

Tomorrow: DFW’s essay “Consider the Lobster” and the strange case of the marinating cat

Found Google Poems, Solitary Trees [by Megin Jimenez]

It's getting late! Not wanting to miss a day, I will share some assorted borrowed words...

You may have fooled around with the Google search function that completes what you're typing with the most common searches. (A fun experiment: compare what pops up when you start typing, "how do you" versus "how does one" in the search bar.) I'm fascinated by the lists that come up, and what they're saying about us, partly because they are not random (they're determined by what people are most looking for), nor are they determined by any single consciousness. On a language level they're just fun, too, sometimes puns and word play come up (although no one is actually doing the "playing"!).

Here is one I wrote down from "How does one". This was from sometime in April, so you'll get something slightly different if you type "how does one" now....

If this were a poem, what would you call it? 

How does one become a saint 
How does one become a vampire
How does one become a freemason
How does one get pinkeye
How does one determine aesthetic value 
How does one man army work
How does one become a celebrity
How does one become a citizen of the US
How does one get HPV
How does one become a Supreme Court Justice

"One man army" is my favorite turn there! I also love "vampire" below "saint", and "aesthetic value" right below "pinkeye". There's something about the Surrealists' pleasure in the beauty of unlikely juxtaposition ("the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella"). (Perhaps related, picking out images to put next to text has been reminding me of André Breton's Nadja, the odd, unnecessary, but also charming pictures sprinkled throughout the book...)

How does one become a saint?

The Trouble Clef – Findings | 24 April 2010 [by Lera Auerbach]

Here are some of this week's findings, confirming to the idea that life may indeed be worth living:

This is a wonderful TED talk on creativity, pressures, self-destructive tendencies that artists are prone to, and possible solutions:

Glenn Glould in all his glory at home:

One of the greatest living performers:

and a clip form Death on Venice, as interpreted by John Neumeier:

Saturday Musings [by DL]

Adam and Eve dropped in on us this morning.

*

According to David Fassler, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people aged 15-24. Only accidents and homicide claim more victims in this age group. "Research demonstrates that the majority of people who commit suicide are struggling with untreated depression of other significant psychiatric disorders." But what of those suffering from "treated depression"? What of those whose parents put them on drugs before they reached the age of consent? What of the human guinea pigs on whom psychiatrists experiment with different admixtures of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, not knowing which combination will work and which may prove lethal? I am not questioning the integrity or good faith of the doctors -- just suggesting that the blind faith we have in chemical science ("meds") is not really justified. They operate in the dark just as artists do.

A doctor with all his instruments
is not as good as common sense.

A starling on the branch of a tree
may know what's best for you and me.

We substitute sound for sense
when we confuse truth with science.

-- Blake Williams

**

I have been perusing James Schuyler's new book of uncollected poems, Other Flowers, the cover of which sports a wonderful "mirror" photo of the poet by Joe Brainard. Some gorgeous poems here, including one ("Having My Say-So") that Amy Gerstler has chosen for The Best American Poetry 2010.

Tom Clark's blog is always a pleasure to visit, especially when a masterly three-line poem by James Schuyler is paired with a beautiful photo of a red-eyed, orange-bellied, blue-winged starling: