The Best American Poetry

Part II on Bliss and the Mind's Eye [more for those who like this sort of thing, by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

Okay I thought I was done but I need to do a little more. Essay Part One.

 Allow me to put two more bits of notion into our meditation on the rule of bliss and its opposite, the swing-and-the-miss (and solitude, and its opposing number too) (which for me, right now, is you).

Note the first is the excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal commonly, wonderfully offered in tandem with Will’s poem. Read it like you have been staring hungry too long a tin of grav lox missing its key, and then entered the theater to deliver it as a monolog to the ghost of Stanislavski:

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up— But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road . . .  some rested their heads on stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here & there a little knot & a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity & unity & life of that one busy highway... —Rain came on, we were wet. 

April 15, 1802

I wandered lonely as a cloud, indeed.

 Note the second is that William wrote, and it has been oft repeated, that the two best lines of his poem were written by his wife, Mary, these being, “They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude.”

 Well the winner is whosoever’s work is long remembered and in this case the palm goes to all three. Also I don’t mind noting that while Will is a good man to go publically gloating about the wonders of his spouse’s mind, he was to himself a little too unkind, as the best line of the poem is the first one, the one that no who hears it, or perhaps speaks it aloud, ever quite forgets: I wandered lonely as a cloud.

The second best lines are indeed the ones Will called out as best, his wife’s apt description of something usually hidden and damn difficult to describe: that there is an inward eye, that things flash upon it, that solitude can be tasty and what is most tasty about it is the opportunity for day dreaming wherein spiced heights of passion and tangential sour lows of gross revenge play out a thousand times. That is the bliss of solitude when nothing, even so divine as love, is suffered gladly to intrude.

 The third best lines of the poem are “Ten thousand saw I at a glance,/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” I’m kidding of course with this beauty-pageant ranking, but the other lines that describe the wind tickling the lake into a million flickers of lightnesses and darks, then without dropping a stitch switches to tickling the flowers into a million flickers of yellow, lilting in brightness and weakness and power.

To continue, the forth best lines of the event are Dorothy’s: “some rested their heads on stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them.”

I could have stopped the quote at “laughed” which as the moment awakens into full-on magic, as in fairy tales when candles stand up and sing or when the color comes on in the Wizard of Oz, because here the flowers are Pinocchioed into humanity, when the daffodils, giggle themselves from that to they, but I was loath to lose Dot’s repetition about the wind and the lake and the blooms. What was so transfixing to them all, Will, Mary, and Dot, was the oneness of the water and the petals in their response to the wind. It created a scene of simplicity, and unity, and life, and that is the wind we all long to get caught up in.

Our own little heads are heads among ten thousand and when we too are too weary to dance, we rest noggins on rocks and are still parts of the program. The wind blows. Each tiny patch of water responds with a new reflection of the sky or matte introspection. On the shore, each leaf responds, each alone, each uncertain and certain, all in concert. Our hearts respond, each an only, each uncertain and certain, all in concert, and something lifts that often keeps us drastically darkened and lonely, somehow nature and art lift that murky curtain, and we join again the light fantastic.

Such togetherness abounds and is as thick and sweet as candied meat, but what about Crusoe, truly alone, perched on a little dead volcano, watching things of unquenchable beauty, like roving, giant, test-tubes of glass arising from hot pits in the magma, with boiling water spouting out of them like screaming kettles abandoned on their stove. Actually, let’s return to the text for a listen:

The beaches were all lava, variegated,
black red, and white, and gray;
the marbled colors made a fine display.
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass...I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.

I often gave way to self-pity.
“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don’t remember, but there could have been.”
What’s wrong about self-pity anyway?

Whenever I read this I’m like, "What the what?" I’m a nut for this kind of question and answer, the commitment to the notion that I know this world is of my making, clue one was that it is so perfectly tailored to unnerve me. She tells us it is our fault, this mess we’re in, but that it is okay to cry about it.

We are all back from somewhere, each a Doberman among Chihuahuas, but we are also on our way elsewhere to birdland, when we will look back on sharing dogness and a scene together, Will, Dot, and Mary, will seem something only the impossibly young could do, and what might never again be done.

Then we’ll know that we have passed the lake-afire-with-light part of life and are into a new one this time full of laughing fellows and full on sunny yellow where every glint of golden shimmer is perfectly opposed by one mustard and dimmer. As in the past it is the next ancient world I am trying to get through to, to which I am trying to get through. As I’ve told you before, I may play with a noun or a verb but prepositions must get all their tits in the right bra cups if I am going to proceed.

And I mean to. So, yes, there is Crusoe remembering Will and Mary and Dorothy’s memory, but not quite remembering their communal memory to the finish, leaving him diminished by three lines and the crucial, I repeat, crucial information that the bliss of blank is Solitude, where one has time enough to start seeing picture shows, unasked for but awaited, running unabated upon the inner screen of mind, “that inward eye.” Crusoe remembers the Wordsworths, and later remembers himself remembering, and is then remembered by Bishop, who is remembered by me, who is remembered by you, all of us wandering lonely as a cloud, building up to a bit of a storm. 

Which is where I’ll leave you. Get home safe now. DKY and ISRTEYA.*

Love,

Jennifer

*Don’t Kill Yourself. I Shall Return To Encourage You Again.

On Bliss and the Mind's Eye [an autumnal bramble by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darlink Bleaders,

I come to speak of daffodils not to bury bulbs of them. Here as we enter the entry to winter I thought I'd hinder the mundane with a bit of verse rapture about how hard it is to do without and how often we already have what we can't quite remember. Let's start again.

For many of us, when someone asks, “What would you bring with you to read if you were stuck on an island deserted of relief, for upwards of decades, lost as a tribeless chief?”, the answer is, “What do you mean ‘if’?

In Elizabeth Bishop’s sublime poem "Crusoe in England" every stone and stanza is a brilliant primer on the primal and the primary, what it is to be human from pram to prime to prim, and back to pram again.

Today I’m thinking of Crusoe’s confession that among the agonies of that wee island of his captivity, beyond rank loneliness and raw despair, beyond rage like a volcano-in-violence and sorrow like the cold, hardened magma the morning after, looking like the very shit of your life solidified, as unkempt as your bedroom, some parts glassy perfection and frozen, others chaos and regret, yes beyond all that, sat the anguish of a forgotten fact and nothing to consult to bring the neuronic nightmare of searching to a climaxed close, an answered ending, a fattened act in the sated sweet repose of Now I Know.

You should go read the whole poem but if you’re already too drunk or not yet drunk enough, read this chunk from the trunk:

There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. I'd drink
the awful fizzy, stinging stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.

Because I didn't know enough.
Why didn't I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I'd read were full of blanks;
the poems--well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
"They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss..."the bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.

The island smelled of goat and guano.

Now what I want to say to you, dearest darling bleaders is about what she, he,

An Able E, An A Belly, Hannibal Lee, A Napoli [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

How's the ol clacker clangin? I've been writing, for some time now, soundalikes to some of my favorite poems. They're all in my new manuscript (third book if I can figure out what to do with it) called Who Said. A few weeks ago I posted one that leapt from Blake's Tiger, called Spider.

Here I'd like to tempt you with a little ditty switch hitting for a guy who wrote on both a raven and a writing desk, to wit, a take in translation of An Ab Ole. Why won't you just write Annabel Lee? Mischievous fingers! Ahem, pardon my multiple personalities. Also for your orbal entertainment, looka these skulls. In a town like this instead of the Muss Nat Hist you can just take the kiddies to a bone shop. Used to be such a thing as a rag and bone shop, which was much messier than this (or thee). Tant pis. (I include here a rhyme both for those who know how to pronounce it and those who don't). So much the worse.

Anywho, here's the poem, I publish it here out of love for you. You. How the little word sings. The title reminds us of Plath but that aint who I'm plundering.

Lady Look-Alike Lazarized

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.

Did you like it? I hope so. The sky is so grey it is rubbing itself pink where it touches the trees. Kisses. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to attempt your diversion again and exhort you to take courage! We are going down the long slide, but we'll all go down together. Especially if we each stow each other's verbs in the arches of our shoes or in the gap at the center of our bras. goddago c u nextime.

Love,

Jennifer

Book Review Post - Deborah Landau's The Last Usable Hour [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I've been a sporatic spartan latterly, postwise, as I've elsewhere noted, I've got a lot of burners going at the moment and have been working hard to get something done for months and months now, interspersed with my usual state-hopping for secularism, and the raising of dem cute children of mine and now also, a puppy. I just try to keep the kitchen sort of clean and let the rest of it go to hades most of the time. Still, that doesn't leave time for hogging the blogosphere. But now I've handed something in, and am hoping will feel more free to return to our small electronic chats. 

Right now I'd like to offer you this book review which I wrote for no reason but the inclination to meet today's inclement weather with a storm of human artistry.

So what I want to tell you about is the terrificly smart, witty, and slightly terrifying new book of poetry by Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour. On the cover the silhouette of a chair swings in the open air on a rope looking as if it has hung itself, but also clearly a reference to the Platonic forms. It is a trick she pulls on us to great effect a few times in the book: she seems to say she is giving up but it turns out to be a metaphysical swerve. No, I’m not hanging myself, but I am also not in that chair. 

The chair was always empty. Plato imagined the ideal form could exist without its purpose, the human weight. Imagine perfection assless. Hilarious. Precarious.

I speculate that Landau’s poems frighten me so delightfully because she tells secrets, real ones, like being in a hanker for someone not synonymous with the husband, for romance, for instance. The book all happens at night, in a sleepless trance dropping in and out of depths of field. The poems apologize, for their insomnia and their intuitional intrusion like a sleepwalking blond beauty knocking on your door and apologizing for coming right in as she pushes past you and through your house to the yard and dissertates about the stars out there, some of which you have to admit you had not noticed before.

I have always been riveted by expressions of giving up and since I rarely give up I suppose I am most engrossed by people saying they are giving up, but then not actually giving up. Landau gives up beautifully a number of times, like an evening of dance made up entirely of interpretations of the end of Swan Lake. One hypnotic poem, or series part (each page stands alone but is not titled, though four titled sections comprise the whole), starts “In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.” and after flipping around Dante’s famous line of despair, it tells us of a mood that happens in a comfortable space, made hazy with gin and wine and night, coddled but a bit blank, candle lit, “are you sick” she asks herself without a question mark, “are you all done flirting,/ have you lost your appetites” and then the kind of open speech that makes me love a poet, the final line, “no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.” Don’t I know it.

I’m going to give you the next poem (or page-long stanza) in the collection in its entirety.

He keeps me waiting

and I start hysteria a little bit.

I start hysteria against everyone’s advice.

I go into the street to drink air.

I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.

Another mouth, some fresh-minted lips.

See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.

Sleep then wake then this then that day

and another night back on the bed

lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.

The sound of hustling advances and retreats

as if someone were shuffling money

or unbuttoning a blouse.

Can you put that taffeta away now, please?

Please put it away.

I love the funny inner language of “I start hysteria,” love how she pulls us out into the street with her and her tentative madness, love “on half a bottle of jewels.” After all, we are all taking something, but what? I like how Frank O’Hara’s “I do this than that” gets so literal here it rubs out the details.

But then my favorite part is the end, where she converts all this potential energy into something kinetic, the whole of life’s rhythms, breathing in and out, day and night, even the back and forth of sex, and of love (the “hustling advances and retreats”), and condenses them all down to sound, to a susurration, a rustling, “as if someone shuffling money/ or unbuttoning a blouse” which is one seriously sexy version of the candy-wrapper theater problem, to which image Landau gracefully switches and then says to life and its crinkle of repetition, “Please, put it away.” Pretty brilliant. It’s a terribly sad little stunner, but it is funny, too, and keeps our misery company.

Well, I haven’t said nearly what there is to say, but I’ll say one last thing which is to note the pleasure of a poet who can tell me that in the city, some days in the summer, “even the little girls reek.”

Here's a link to The Last Usable Hour on amazon. 

Read your poetry and don't kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again. You may also feel free to encourage me as my doing so does not always presuppose that I am myself sufficienty courageous to meet the day. Coffee helps, and rum too, but only so much.

Love, 

Jennifer

 ps Portrait of a Windy Day

 

 

 

ee [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Does everyone know this ee cummings poem?

It will rock yer glockenspiel, so read it. 

       XXX

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand; 
but--though an host of overjoyed 
noncoms(first knocking on the head 
him)do through icy waters roll 
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed 
anent this muddy toiletbowl, 
while kindred intellects evoke 
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag 
upon what God unto him gave) 
responds,without getting annoyed 
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers 
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) 
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion	 
voices and boots were much the worse, 
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease 
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified	 
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

 

Well there you have it. ee said a thing or two, dint he?

love,

Jennifer

One poor corr. plus two, two, hard two find, equals seven [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I've been 1 poor correspondant and I been 2, 2 hard 2 find, but that don't mean that you ain't been on my mind. Everyblogger flaggs in her faithful log flogging eventually or now and again, but in this case it was deeply work specific. There was something I needed to get done and in order to do it I had to stop chatting at the secret societies. You are one of my least and therefore most secret society, I've hidden you in plain sight. So this is what I wrote to you around this time in 2009 (slightly tweeked).

My dearest Bleaders,

Today is the kind of day the word susurration was born to serve.  The trees out my window are full of dry leaves and seed pods and the wind is blowing around the bower.  A visiting longhaired cat is glowering at big leaves bumping around with the breeze, and a lone last pepper dipping on its branch like a grounded fledgling flitting around. Riveting programing.

It is reasonable to be seasonably sensible to Keats, at least so much as to respond to the need for an inner struggle to take place in a physical space and that space to be a stubbled field after harvest.

But are we bird, or leaf, or cat?  Real or imaginary?  I'm the pepper, you're the cat.  Sadly, there is no bird. There is a mansion in Asia Minor in which each room is a poem. In the parlor, women come and go talking of Michelangelo, in the kitchen there are cold plums, in one bedroom a girl slumbers in the curve of a colossal marble ear, in another a beauty marries the bed. Out front there is a beak in a heart and a form on a door. Out back is the newly shorn staffs of wheat and corn.  And there we are, on a picnic blanket, not forlorn but arguing with our actual demons who are plump and angry and we are grotesque but they are getting tired, even of us.  Let's just try to hold on and see what happens after dark.

love,

Jennifer

 

Spin; or Investigation of a Curious Cherry Tree [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Took this picture, wrote this poem, thought of you, waiting for a storm [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Spider

 

Spider, spider, spinning tight

against the darkness of the night,

what inspired geometry

is wonder at your web from me?

 

On what different leads or lies

could my sympathies arise

if, instead of these aspire,

I had but gone out there entire?  

 

In the purpose of your art

twist the neurons of my heart.

For having lost a rhythm’s beat,

I dread my hand and drag my feet.

 

What the knowing? What the chain?

In what furnace burns my brain?

Where’s the Advil? What’s to grab?

I’ve got your heartthrob in my bag.

 

When I, as witness, turn from spears

to fat and lean, bread, pills and tears,

and spider winding, watched by me.

And nature’s this made all of we.

 

Spider, spider, knitting white

‘gainst the blackness of the night

what freaky strange geometry

could frame our sweet-ass symmetry?

 

A Red Hot Pepper of Love [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Yes, I'm still here. My block broke off Brooklyn and fell into the ocean so we have been sailing for months in the squall so that is why I've seemed so quiet.

Or some other unzipping. I unpack and redo the picking. 

This is just an octavian post card (little august). Giving myself again good counsel. Cultivate your garden ardently. Hard love any respite in the fruiting yard. White eggplant is the name of a seed, the plant dreams purple flowers and out bloop eggs. 

The pepper grow green then pipe up red. Here all the absurd fruits huddle up against the august sun.

Went to Vegas. Went to camp. Back in Brooklyn. Sent articles in, sent in some chapters.

love,

Jennifer

I have a new blog called "Poetic Atheism" [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders!

So I've been meaning for like a lifetime to start a blog called Poetic Atheism, a term I made up after I wrote Doubt: A History, in large part from thinking -- and in part from talking to Americans and other people about what religion and secularism and atheism mean to them. Humanist atheist religious groups taught me a lot (that religion is good sometimes when you take out the supernatural) and also I learned a lot from the 6000 years of cultural history of humanity (spotty but still good for the whole first two of those millennia): that art and love are the real and sufficient answer to the otherwise horrible fact of the abyss, death, and the non living world of the universe, vast mostly empty and cold and sometimes very hot but rarely warm, rarer still warm-blooded, and rare but I think not too to rare, sentient as me you and the whales.

There are only three posts up right now, the most recent being on Elevator Guy, Rebecca Watson, and Richard Dawkins. Gawker's report on Elevator Guy Event. Salon's report of it.

Hey if you feel like it please comment here or on my new Poetic Atheism site, or somewhere as it makes me feel more stitched in to the fabric of humanity, and if I don't get help with that, I drop a stitch and may under stress unravel my valiant previous efforts at order and tapestry. Or, as usual, just buy a book! So I can eat and buy ink!

Don'k kill yourselves and I shall return to encourage you again.

xox

Jennifer