The Best American Poetry

Denise Duhamel Poem on "Breaking Bad" Season Finale

Great catch Ken Tucker!  On September 3, this @KenTucker tweet breezed by: "I fear betrayal in friendship and love that blindsides me": not Walt Whitman, but another poet, Denise Duhamel" and now lots of people want to know which poem it's from. 

"82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed" is too long to reproduce in its entirety but you can find  the poem in Saints of Hysteria A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry Edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad (Soft Skull, 2007).

Here are the first few lines:

82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed  (by Denise Duhamel et. al.)

I fear dented cans,
the ones with their labels torn like a pantyhose run.
I fear dented cans even though I know
bulging cans are the ones that cause botulism.
I fear small caskets, and I fear small pox.
I can’t be vaccinated because I’m allergic to the serum.
Check my arms—I don’t have any of those vaccination dents
like everyone else. I fear going to a new hairdresser
or gynecologist. I fear people with authority who look nervous.
I fear any box big enough to hold me.
I fear the number 4 for no reason.
I fear this bad habit will catch up to me.
I fear being awake in the middle of the night
when everyone else is asleep, even that yappy dog Peppy,
and the baby in him. I fear the dogs that do not recognize
my smell or care. I fear the whirr and rattle of the tail.
I fear the front door slamming when the bedroom window is locked.
I fear strangers who do not know my strength . . .

And this is what Denise Duhamel had to say about how the poem was written:

Process Note:

Lines for “82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed” were written on October 24, 2001 by the members of Special Topics: Trends in Contemporary Poetry—Literary Collaboration and Collage, a graduate seminar I taught at Florida International University. Mitch Alderman, Terri Carrion, Andreé Conrad, Kendra Dwelley Guimaraes, Wayne Loshusan, Abigail Martin, Rita Martinez, Estee Mazor, Astrid Parrish, Stacy Richardson, Sandy Rodriguez, Jay Snodgrass, Richard Toumey, George Tucker, Jennifer Welch, William Whitehurst, and I wrote indi- vidual lines. Rita Martinez took the lines and rearranged them into the final ver- sion of the poem. Stacy Richardson, the only undergraduate in our class, passed away in 2002. This poem is dedicated to her.

Fans of poetry and Breaking Bad know that Walt Whitman had a starring role.  Did anyone besides Ken pick up on Denise's cameo?

-- sdh

Flash: Lauren Ambrose to Play Susan Wheeler on TV [by David Lehman]

Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame has agreed to play the part of Dr. Susan Wheeler in a two-night miniseries based on Robin Cook's 1977 novel, Coma. Wheeler (pictured at right) is the author of Assorted Poems (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2009) and such other collections as Smokes, Ledger, and Bag 'O' Diamonds. Her work has appeared in eight volumes of The Best American Poetry series. In the TV show, Susan is a medical student who works with Ellen Burstyn, now 79, at a hospital where healthy patients tumble alarmingly into unconsciousness for no apparent reason. Sounds like every hospital I know. Just as 90% of home accidents happen in your bathroom, so too the hospital is the place you are most likely to contract a disease or die. Mystery novelists factor this into their thinking. According to A & E (Arts & Entertainment), the miniseies -- which also features Richard Dreyfuss, Ellen Burstyn, James Woods, Geena Davis, and Steven Pasquale.-- is a "modern retelling" of Cook's novel -- you know, like "Hamlet" in "Mad Men" attire. According to Entertainment Weekly, which broke the story, Denzel Washington has been an inspiration for Lauren Ambrose. According to John Ashbery, "Susan Wheeler's narrative glamour finds occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, Hollywood Squares, Flemish paintings, green stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity." In the TV show, Wheeler attends a reading Ashbery gives at the New School on West 12th Street in New York City. Archie Goodwin is in the audience. Nero Wolfe is in the brownstone cultivating orchids and tearing up Webster's unspeakable Third. In this very room Susan Wheeler has channeled Quentin Metsys, the fifteenth century Flemish painter, whose master work "The Money Lender and His Wife" hangs in the Louvre and whose surname is "system" spelled backward. Inspired by Ashbery, Wheeler's poem won the contest. Richard Howard picked it. The real Susan Wheeler teaches at Princeton. The fake Susan Wheeler is like "Denzel on a mission," said Lauren Ambrose. The real Susan Wheeler's birthday is tomorrow, July 16, and we hope it will be a very happy one. This is not the first adaptation of the Robin Cook novel. Does Dr. Susan Wheeler figure in the Coma of 1978 (Michael Crichton's movie), and, if so, who played her? "The Coma of 1978" -- now there's a title a poet can do something with.-- DL

Embrace our messy imperfect genius: Ross Martin's TedxEast Talk

Television executive Ross Martin shares how his background in poetry uniquely and appropriately prepared him for the business world:

--sdh

Bert Cooper on "What's My Line?" [by DL]

 

The star of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying mystifies the panelists of "What's My Line?" including Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Martin Gabel, and Pamela Tiffin. John Daly is the moderator.  O Mnemosyne, mother of the nine muses. This is what TV was like on Sunday nights in the era of Mad Men. "Bobby" Morse in another interview says that he sometimes shows up for work on the Mad Men set singing "A Secretary is not a Toy" from How to Succeed way back when. -- DL

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

"Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged at dawn" -- DL & Connie Aitcheson on "Mad Men" last night

Spoiler alert: Read no further if you haven't seen the episode [the penultimate one in season five].
Context: Faced with a then-hefty debt of $7,500, Lane forged Don's name on a check and embezzled the sum from the firm. It would have been a shoirt term loan, he argues, but Don feels he has no choice but to force the Englishman's resignation. ("I can't trust you.") Lane is honoirable but weak. Losing his job would mean losing his visa as well as his source of income. How will he face his wife? She little suspects her husband has gotten himself into so serious a jam. What will he say to his son? The humiliation is total. It is a splendid irony that his wife has written a check to buy him a surprise present of a Jaguar, the account the firm has landed, at the very moment when their finances can least afford such an extravagance. But then she is as much in the dark about her husband's work as Kurtz's fiancee is of the deeds her hero has done in the Congo. The irony is beautifully compunded: the Jaguar fails to start when Lane chooses death by carbon monoxide as his "elegant exit" (Don's phrase), and he floods the engine. What does he do instead? Bad pun department: I won 't leave you hanging for long.
In the teaser for next week, Don is seen calling on someone at home. Stacey thinks (predicts) that he is visiting Lane's widow, paying her a condolence call, telling her what "really" happened -- possibly in the way that Marlow calls on Kurtz's fiancee and lies to her to keep her illusions intact. The less prescient of the two of us thinks he is showing up unexpectedly at either Joan's or Peggy's apartment.
Samuel Johnson it was who said that "nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge that one will be hanged in the morning." -- DL

<<<
           Tragedy struck the Mad world last night. Lane killed himself. Emotional defeat spread from his career to family to personal dreams, and he decided life wasn’t worth living.

            I can’t say I was surprised. After the confrontational exchange with Don, I felt he might be vulnerable to such an act. Among the suits, Don is the exception to the rule. Rather than disgrace Lane publically, he fires and castigates him privately while also offering his version of encouragement. When Lane says he doesn’t know what he’ll tell his wife or son, Don replies, “you’ll tell them that it didn’t work out, because it didn’t. You’ll tell them the next thing will be better, because it always is. Take the weekend. Think of an elegant exist.” But some exits in life are too harsh and lonely. When Lane returns to his office after that exchange, gulping down whiskey by the glass, I visualized him in a snow globe, completely detached from the world, utterly consumed with the pain of recent moments. There is a miniature Statue of Liberty behind him but at that instant she means nothing to him.

            Lane doesn’t find peace and solace when he goes home but more pain. The wives, Lane’s and Don’s, stick to type. They want to prepare and serve dinner or go to a restaurant --  wanting the best for their husbands, who are falling apart at the time. Even when Lane vomits after his wife shows him the Jaguar she bought for him, the poor woman believes it’s simply because he has drunk too much. She cannot possibly see that her well-intentioned gift is a dagger to his heart.

           It’s always a joy to see Sally. She’s precious, stubborn, mischievous, feisty, yet singularly clear in wanting honest relationships with others. Her communication with Glen, her phone pal, is guided by honesty. It’s hard not to adore a boy who’d rather go to the Museum of Natural History than stay at Sally’s home and get into any level of trouble. Yet when Sally discovers she has started her menstruation she runs away, ashamed and unprepared to explain what she’s going through.    

         While Lane is caught in an emotional tornado, Don is trying to resurrect his warrior side: the side of him that used to aggressively search for business opportunities and not wait for them to come to him; the side of him that, as he tells Roger, is “tired of living in this delusion that we’re going somewhere.” He wants to pursue his dreams of handling big accounts and working for major American companies (American rather than Mohawk airlines, Chevy rather than Jaguar). The conversation with Lane is decisive for him, too -- it reminds him to focus on what he really wants to do, but it leaves him clueless as to the danger Lane is in. His version of starting over in life isn’t the same as Lane’s. When he hears of Lane’s suicide he immediately knows that the best he can do for him then is to give him some dignity in death and cut him down from the noose..

-- Connie Aitcheson
>>>

"Mad Men": Last Night in Manhattan [by Connie Aitcheson]

           Wow. By the end of Mad Men last night, I wasn’t thinking of The Kinks' Girl, You Really Got Me (1964) but a line from Maurice Chevalier’s Thank Heaven for Little Girls – “for little girls get bigger every day.” Joan and Peggy have certainly grown up. 

           The exchange or sale for sex is certainly not new in the Mad world. Just last week Harry got slapped after an impromptu sexual encounter when he told the woman she just gave it away for free.  But for Joan to be so blatantly presented with the proposition for sex in order to land the Jaguar account was certainly shocking.

            The philosophical question of price came up several times last night. “What price would we pay?” “What do you want to get paid?” The show reasoned that better finances might allow Joan not to have to worry about repairing appliances or might even allow her to be free of her miserable mother, but I wonder whether any price is worth paying in order to land a partner position at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The terms of the deal weren’t Joan’s but Pete's, though Lane (for his own ends, partially) helped her improve the offer. Can Joan ever be free? Or has she just bought a noose around her neck?

            Peggy’s leaving was even more shocking to me. I always thought Peggy was the one character with integrity. She was there to remind the viewers of a person with flaws who is honestly trying to overcome them without hurting others in the process. But I guess after Don threw the money in her face, as might be expected towards a derelict or prostitute on the street, there was no recovery for her. When Michael Ginsberg’s character was introduced she was warned by another character not to bring him into the firm because he would be her supervisor one day, but she didn’t listen and brought him in because of his talents. Now she fully comprehends that talent would always be half the battle. As a female she would always be excluded from the big boys' table and spend her career enviously watching them from outside the glass office. Leaving was the only way to keep her integrity. Others (Freddy, for example) helped her to come up with the terms of departure. Will she too be able to stand on her own? Will she be able to trust the men who encouraged her to leave?

            Besides Joan and Peggy I felt sad for Don. His world seemsto be exploding around him. His girls, the women he has defended and loved, were making demands, selling themselves, or leaving. (He was the only partner to be outraged by the Jaguar magnate's demand for Joan's favors.) The rebellion of Megan, the departure of Peggy, woud be enough to shake the strongest man. But now his most central strength has been challenged. Would he and the other partners ever know if they won the Jaguar account because of his pitch (which was Ginsberg’s idea) or because Joan slept with Herb from the car company? It seems a tough situation to reconcile.

            The end of the show made me think of the Charlie Sheen quote, “I don’t pay prostitutes for sex. I pay them to go away afterwards.” Now the one who sold her soul stayed and the one who would never sell herself left.  It’ll be interesting to see how Joan’s presence in the partners' meetings affects the other partners. Will she be a thorn in their side on issues about the business or stand on her own among the mad men?    

-- Connie Aitcheson

Oh, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off!

Happy birthday, Robert Morse (alias Finch, alias Bert Cooper)

 

Shelley's "Ozymandias" on "Mad Men"

The surprising thing about the line from Shelley's sonnet quoted on tonight's episode ("Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") is not that Mr. Ginsberg knows the poem but that art director Stan, the unremitting  philistine, should also know it -- and know it well enough to point out, to Ginsberg and bystander Peggy, that the "rest of the poem" rebukes that hubristic utterance. The line joyously mouthed by the young copy-writer is from the monument Ozymandias, "king of kings," built to his vanity. But the great Oz was not an ominipotent ruler for long. Time has ravaged the statue: "Round the decay, / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away." -- DL