The Best American Poetry

Pink Sky Tonight and Emily Dickinson [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dearest Bleaders,

How are you? Like most bloggers or writers of anything but letters, I don't know who's reading me, but I sort of pretend I do, starting from anyone who has ever written a comment or told me they read these posts, and radiating out into the social known and unknown, in pulses of possibility. Which is to say that when I ask How you are, I am somehow actually asking, and I hope you are well.

I'm the usual, which is a brutal combination of very well and awful, of which I hear there is a lot going around. Frankly, I hope you are doing better, but I'm not too bad, possibly improving.

What if you struggle and it isn't easy and it hasn't been? It seems so strange to choose to hide the strain, but it isn't exactly a choice. Tonight in my Poets and Philosophy class we are going to talk about Emily Dickinson for two and a half hours and I am always delighted to do so. She makes me something, lifts my something. Happy and spirits.

I'm looking forward to talking about the one that starts "I measure every grief I meet," as I've been thinking about it a lot lately. First though, let's look at this odd little thing:

A wounded deer leaps highest,

I've heard the hunter tell;

'Tis but the ecstasy of death,

And then the brake is still.

 

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is mail of anguish,
In which its cautious arm
Lest anybody spy the blood
And, "you're hurt" exclaim

I say it's odd because I'm not crazy about the middle stanza and can't help but flinch when the poem's final rhythm hinges on the rhyming of "cautious arm" with "hurt exclaim." But I like "mirth is a mail of anguish" very much.

Here's her deeper poem on the hiding and knowing of pain and its consolations.

I measure every grief I meet
With analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long,
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether, could they choose between,
They would not rather die.

I wonder if when years have piled--
Some thousands--on the cause
Of early hurt, if such a lapse
Could give them any pause;

Or would they go on aching still
Through centuries above,
Enlightened to a larger pain
By contrast with the love.

The grieved are many, I am told;
The reason deeper lies,--
Death is but one and comes but once
And only nails the eyes.

There's grief of want, and grief of cold,--
A sort they call 'despair,'
There's banishment from native eyes,
In sight of native air.

And though I may not guess the kind
Correctly yet to me
A piercing comfort it affords
In passing Calvary,

To note the fashions of the cross
Of those that stand alone
Still fascinated to presume
That some are like my own.

One of the million things I cherish about this poem is the "piercing comfort it affords" to try to know and bear, for a moment, in contemplation, the burdens of others, and to thereby be less alone, suffering, and less absorbed by one's own suffering. "There's grief of want and grief of cold" and "a sort they call despair," and there's being separate from what your heart knows as home, right there in front of you but no longer yours -- "banishment from native eyes in sight of native air."

I love too that those "that stand alone" though they yet stand alone, are not singular, but are many, and therefor are not alone. The crackle of being alone in such good company is why this poem starts little brushfires on the red, Martian deserts of the heart.

To read more interviews between the voices in my head in the museum of my muse, see here.

To look at my books, see these.

To see a Radio Freethinker write-up of that LA conference on Secular Humanism I took part in a few weeks ago, see there.

I had a great time at the New School reading last night, thanks to everyone who showed up. It was really great to see so many friends. Thanks to David Lehman for the invitation and the great job moderating.

Well friends, bleaders, poets, and other travelers in the realms of gold, you know what I am going to say. Which is bear up! Courage. I speak especially to those standing alone in impossible inner situations, feeling the cool autumn air press down from outer space and trying not to name the chill too often, or too well. The advice is small and simple. Don't fall in the well. It is not your fault and you are doing fine. Rake a leaf a day and call it lucky.

Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love, 

Jennifer

ps. Here's me against tonight's pink sky, taken by John, just for you.

No Tomatoes [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

The condition of our afternoon seems to be overwhelmtion, despite the higher counsel to shun such exaggeration of emotion. The counsel, regrettably, is impossible to follow. People have all sorts of difficulties, and those of us who are a lot like me don't really understand all the other kinds of difficulties, no matter how often we see them and try. Those of us who are a lot like me are flush with nerves; we rattle around the cattle. We try to calm down by looking at life as a coaster on rollers, voluntarily chosen for the unsettling ride, yet we remain unsettled, completely, or at least around the sides.

There's always better living through chemistry, but that fun house has its own bad line and once your in it's hard to know which wacky mirror is the actual wacky you. Philosophy ought to be enough but let's face it, shall we, it is a lot, but not enough. The sun is shining. There is a blue sky widening out into space, narrowing down to the eye. Try to relax. Perhaps you have made a thousand errors of late but likely as not, no one is going to die. Anyway, not of your errors, and for the most part, not today. It is all okay.

 

Anyway, that's the theory. On another note, my kids and I have been enjoying Mimi's Dada Catifesto by Shelley Jackson. If you have kids, you should too. We've read it over and over -- it makes us laugh and encourages us to make sound poems and other cracked creations.

I also want to bring your attention to Amy Holman's new book Wrens Fly Through This Open Window.

Amazon used my blurb as the product description, so if you notice a me-sounding tone to that, at the link above, you'll know why. It's a really great book.

What else? Tonight I'll be leading my class (at the New School graduate program in creative writing) in a discussion of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry and the philosophy in it. She won the nobel prize a while back. Her poetry has a lot of sorrow in it yet always cheers me up considerably.

Something about her work reminds me of the joke: What's red and invisible? No tomatoes. 

So much over which we worry is red yet invisible. Because while a great deal of difficulty may be reasonably expected, it does not follow that any of what actually hits can be predicted. It is tomatoes, but there aren't any.

Then tomorrow, I'm off to take part in a big conference of heretics in LA. It is called Setting the Agenda: Secular Humanism's Next 30 Years. If you are going to be there, come say hello. Solo travel soothes many, but gives nerves to people like me; a vague scent of emergency assaults the senses. If you are new to these pages, you'll see here that I talk a bit about secularism in these BAP posts, also you might look at these books of mine, Doubt: A History and The End of the Soul. Also, regarding skepticism, see The Happiness Myth.

Well, friends, 1) remember to go outside and, 2) forgive yourself for not getting everything right. Life is not fated, but neither is it ours to boss around. It's not your fault. Don't kill yourself. Encourage others. Confess your misery and inquire after theirs. Do ask, do tell.

Love,

Jennifer

Even the Turtle Sometimes Sunbathes [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darling Bleaders,

This hardbacked landfish was taking in the rays at Prospect Park, proving that even those with a shell and a reason to hide don't always do it.

And who doesn't have a reason to hide? After all, a book is hidebound and will join you in your nook so you can go all solitary without having to hear your head's regular din of mad opinion.

This Sunday was packed with the public book and bookish and the arts of the hood. We Atlantic Anticked. Stumped for the kid's school. Went to an excellent talk by Douglas Rushkoff at the Dumbo Arts Festival. You should check out his new book Program or Be Programed. Look also at how the book is being made and sold. Books were such turtles when I first met them, always pretty much the same box and the same sell. Now they are a lot of animals and you can no longer know them by their tortoiseshell.

Tonight, in class, we are going to talk about Nietzsche, The Gay Science. I more often assign Human All Too Human, but was moved to this one this time by the rest of the reading list's sense of memory and history. Consider this:

Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places--into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

I don't exactly care about the "great human" bing thing. The claim works fine if you start it with the notion that Everything and Everyone exerts a retroactive force. By who they are to everyone else, and by their experience of the world, everyone changes the world (by influence and in interpretation). The particular way they are makes everything that has come before have a slightly new meaning: A million odd things in history were in a sense leading up to you. That is their new meaning, a meaning due to you. You come along and make a mint selling chewable gums and some other historical ruminant entrepreneur, freshening breath for a price, forgotten these two thousand years, but real, becomes perforce your forerunner. You got functions you don't know about, and even your funk has functions.

There are reasons this matters, to do with why you matter, and others, too, not least that such meditations take one's mind off one's money and one's money off one's mind. (I wanna be billionaire so frikken bad.)

I hope you are all doing well or at least not giving up entirely. Back to school can be a brute, even from a distance. Take deep breaths, forge ahead with resolution. If the days are overwhelming and your report all a muddle of fatigue, consider hoping for one very lovely moment in any day and if you get it, gilt a frame around it, get one of those museum wall lights and set your chair before it, find a cat to pet, click its pause like a remote control and idle away an evening time-slot, perhaps between Jeopardy and primetime. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Fortune and Other Tellers [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

How are you? Are the muses of autumn whispering in your ears? Or have they entered your blameless mind and turned to furies? The world is full of worry. Why not us? There's a New York Times article today where Woody Allen says he has never -- never -- seen one of his movies after it was done. Said if he was clicking through the channels and saw Annie Hall or Manhattan or any of them he speeds his clicker forward so as not to endure the pain of the film's imperfections.

So many people's heads are so peopled with critics that where seems to stand a man stands a multitude and not one of them enjoying himself. No wonder joy is so often tied to pain. Even Socrates on his death slab, prior to imbibing the dram of poison, rubbed his ankles where the guard had just removed his chains, and noted how often sweet pleasure is unbreachably in league with pain.

Will the pain you are in today some day, like the shackle removed, give fruit in pleasure, in relief? I don't know. I guess the truth is I'm still a little traumatized by 9/11, still wondering what's going to blow up next, and so where once I made promises now I can only offer a roasted plate of hope, plucked of its feathers, basted in its song. Delish, but making hope the thing without feathers, that does not perch on the soul, that does not sing a song with words or otherwise, and to our horror and our numb, sometimes stops at all.

Then again, you may spurn the wave, sailor, but what have you got if not your boat and whatever dream of seamless hulls makes that ship float.

Back in 2003 the MPR radio program Speaking of Faith devoted a show to my book Doubt: A History which is about religious doubt, all over the world, throughout history. They have replayed it over the years too, and over the years this show has brought my work to a lot of people, and often brought them to me -- in emails or other communications -- which is one reason I'm so glad to live in the future. I love hearing from people on these themes, and I do.

Anyway, the program, "Speaking of Faith," with the brilliant Krista Tippett, has decided to change its name to "Being." This week's very interesting show explains why. What moved them was the contributions of guests on the show (especially scientists) and audience members who have made it clear that they do not believe in God or are not religious, but who still find the show's questions to be their questions too -- questions about how to live with the mystery of life. I am moved to say that at about the 35 minute mark of this week's episode, Tippett introduces my book's episode and says it was pivotal in reframing the way she saw the conversation on faith, mystery, and reason.

It's funny to note, too, that the Woody Allen article to which I refer above is called On Faith, Fortune Tellers, and New York, because among the interesting things strewn around the piece, what seemed most headliney to someone was Allen saying that he has no belief in religion or fortune tellers, and that he thinks that if you can get yourself to believe either one, either one can do about as much to help.

So you see, it all comes around. Socrates thinks about his ankle, the rest of us nurse our separate wounds and wonder how so much happiness can well up in moments between so much anxiety and struggle. The man at the feast turns out to be frightened of the entre. Oh well. Perhaps he shall dare some antipasto. 

That's all for today. Tonight I'll lead a discussion on Paradise Lost with a bunch of lively grad students and we will pity Satan even as he over and over explodes his own existence and wonders at the carnage life keeps raining on his reign.

Please be careful, bloved bleaders. Youth is difficult, aging a trial, and all our envy misplaced on other weary wanderers who when they meet their blessings in the street barely hale them, but rather click by at tricky, frightened speeds. Take up no arms against yourself, lay down your arms! Both the lion and the lamb are popping several pills to get through the day and several more to fall asleep again. You, by comparison and contrastion, are doing fine. I know you are suffering, or have been, but don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you yet again. 

Love,

Jennifer

ps The picture above is art from the Crossing the Line Festival in Brooklyn this past weekend at the Invisible Dog. Here's another.

Paradise in Hot Contention, Possibly Lost [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearling Bleaders,

Went out to Governor's Island, Brooklyn's new backyard, last Saturday which happened to be flapper day. Sweet band, great dancing. The day rather fluttered than flapped.

Now it is September and all must snap back. Tonight teaching begins again and I'm kind of delighted. Three hours once a week on poets and philosophy. I'm heading my head into Milton. Where a day makes sense, isn't agonizingly nonsensical, there must be some world view, some philosophy of it all, some skeleton so that all your muscles aren't in a heap on the floor in a wiggly bag of skin, flexing like a puddle of snakes but not quite able to move. The patriarch God of Paradise Lost makes it so all fights that happen in his house are important. The rest of the semester all the poets and philosophers will be out of that house-- all hell, if you'll allow, will have broke loose. 

In life it is exceedingly difficult to break loose. It has something to do with the pacing of real life, it is hard to notice what is going on until years later you look back and say, Oh, we were getting to know each other. or Oh, I was starting to learn to think for myself. While while your going through it it is a nearly senseless salad of agony and bliss. Often the bliss is little, like bacon bits.

Go to school my lovelies. If we don't go to school how will we notice how warm September has become? Likewise, out of the father's house we have to choose for ourselves what to lose. The only habits that need to be broken are the ones you do not even know about, which makes it difficult to proceed. Philosophies must be cracked against one another, just as we do. It's middle memory again that matters:  books get the pacing down so the rabbit mind of apes like us can visualize some middle-sized plot. Life is a crisis without it and we haven't naturally got it. No wonder you tell yourself such terrible things. If you don't know you are a character in Paradise Lost, you think you are just another upstart losing a fight with your dad. If you do know you are a character in Paradise Lost, it is pretty clear that the action is actually all about you, and how you feel, and how you manage the day.

Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you yet again. 

Jennifer

 

Middle Memory, A Day at the Beach [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders, 

Sometimes I go out sometimes I stay in. Out, I sometimes take a lot of pics. This one reminds me that last summer I was taking lots of shots of bunches of people. 

There, behind a little machine. Home and there again.

As I've said here before, I like photographs because I want to get a longer look. This pic here is from a day at Coney Island. I grew up on Long Island, where summer at least had Jones Beach which was and is the greatest of beaches to me because of its weird intimacies. You spend the whole day with whatever people decide to put their towels down near you. On a good summer day, the place was crowded with everyone who you usually see in cars and busses and on lines at multiplexes but here they are nearly naked and weirdly happy. Right in front of everyone, they go about living, like each group had been indoors and hadn't noticed that the walls had gone. 

Of course you miss a lot. Which is where the pics come in handy. Also, you forget so much. Without the pics I wouldn't have remembered the day had even existed. The pictures I took this day remind me of how I was thinking when I took thirty or so pictures at the beach one day. With this picture here, I was thinking of the man at center feeding the seagulls with his kids. Feeding the seagulls is not good beach behavior as the gulls are rapacious when encouraged and will filch food from populated blankets and harass befrenchfried youngsters to distress. So seeing the picture I remember I was at first a little picklefaced at him, but then I decided he was interesting. Later he finds something very strange in the surf. Later the young man running at the left of the photo will be delightedly burying his friend in the sand. Alright I'll show you that one.

How much do you love the Nathan's cup and the punim on the boy in the sand? 

The days go by and you do not always know what they were for or in what manner they forwarded your fortunes. Life sounds short when you drive past Greenwood or think about, say, the six hundred years between Ovid and Bede, but goddam some of the afternoons go on forever and some of these difficult eras change a lot slower than seasons. 

The idea is to try to let yourself feel what is happening to you, which, as the philosophers have told us, may as well be all in your head, and as the poets have told us, isn't. It is actually real and happening to you and you are the cello the universe is playing and you sound okay. Play. What if you were the greatest cello in the world but had two memory settings -- super short and super long. You wouldn't be able to tell, from the notes you could remember moaning, what piece you were playing, but you would know in some larger way that you are a cello and you are playing pieces and what kind of thing you tend to be drawn to. To which you tend to be drawn. That is, I think, the situation.

The economy, my economy and your economy, liberates those who once had jobs to go cry on the beach, but those of us who make our own hay must hasten always back to it. It is difficult.

Come visit me over at Dear Fonzie where I hope to show a few more pictures from the day at the beach, most especially, the weird thing Mr. Seagull-Feeder found.

Okay, was good to chat. And remember poet, don't kill yourself.  I'm sorry it is so difficult to determine whether you are at the beginning, middle, or end and you really can't tell by looking at any given day. You have to try to feel it in whatever other memory bank there is, a middle memory that isn't short and isn't long but that knows what frikkin song you are singing and how it is going.  Try! Progress is slow but probably somewhat possible.  

Love,

Jennifer

Pictures for a Sunny Afternoon [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 Dearest Bleaders,

 Life, friends, is a blindered run. As this image of the Black Forest Maze in The Land of Make Believe make perfectly clear, you can not always see over the walls. Nevertheless, we must not simply press on. Gotta suss some kind of pattern. Follow clues. A walnut may not think, though it looks like a brain, and a flame tastes not of sugar though its gentle light be sweet -- and yet, hindsight shows the world riddled with clues! They didn't just jump there like seashells on the himalayas. Next picture.  

These flightless birds are the last of a great race whose habitat as you can see is sliding into the drink.  

 

A lot of things may remain obscure. Part of that is just a matter of waiting, without, I must emphasize, without forgetting what it is you are waiting for. For which you are waiting. 

Hope you are using the summer for some luxuriating. And remember kids, don't read the reviews. Of course people don't always like you at first! You are weird.

Love,

Jennifer

We Went To the Falls [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Bloved Bleaders, 

We just got back from Camp Inquiry -- a weeklong summer camp up near Buffalo where skeptical kids can play in the woods and talk about the meaning of life and learn about science and art. Just like the Skeptic world I told you about at TAM8, there was a lot of magic and stuff about magic. The Amazing Randi was again quite amazing. He showed us a movie of him hanging upside down in a straightjacket from a crane over Niagra Falls. Escaped!  Also secrets about how he debunked Uri Geller on The Tonight Show. And every night we sang around the campfire ending with "Imagine." Sweet like smores. Of which there were plenty. 

Before a daytrip off Camp Inquiry, I'd never seen Niagra Falls. When over on the unseeing side of things as here, it seemed like the world dropped off. If you forget that it's water, it looks like the ground dropped in, and recently, given that the spray provides a constant sense of immediate aftermath.

So yeah, so, it has been a rainbowy season. Which makes this rainbow thing going around especially funny. Has everyone heard this already? Yes maybe, but not everyone here.

Double rainbow guy.

Additionally silly version.

One more, in song.

Okay I admit I can't stop laughing from this song.

Poetry, my friends, from all directions, the summer and the setting of the empire having once again successfully lowered expectations to an almost blissful buzz, Wasn't I yearning? Perhaps not.  Anyway, stick around, there's plot. Just not today.

 DKY

Love,

Jennifer

I love TAM Skeptics [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Sky over Vegas the day we left. 

Dear Bleaders,

 How’s it rolling? We just got back from Las Vegas where we went to The Amaz!ng Meeting 8. It was amazing. I met a lot of great people, for instance the music man behind the TV show "Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t," Gary Stockdale, and had lots of interesting conversations. The comedian Paul Provenza was there too, fun chatting with him over lunch about his new book. I was invited by D. J. Grothe who hosts the wonderful podcast For Good Reason. Here's the link there, to an episode Provenza was on. Here's an episode with me.

Heard great music at TAM! Got completely delighted by the mindreading act of Michael Weber. There was lots of good magic. Skeptics love magic and vice versa. The poet is magical in her skepticism and verses vices.

 Also played some slots and some roulette and enjoyed everything but the insane ambient smoke in all the lobbies, especially on weekend nights. I am a woman who enjoys a cocktail and in that sense too enjoyed Vegas -- it is a delightfully drinkin’ town. John played some blackjack too. Fun. 

It was terrific to get to know more about James Randi's work too. Fights the good fight. Check out Randi's website to see more.

 Now I’m off to do a Center For Inquiry fundraiser in DC, going with the whole family. Will see some old friends too. Looking forward to it all very much. If you show up, come say hi.

  I’m in the mood to give you a poem so here’s a little something from my first book of poems. It is a reminder that the path to new knowledge is fraught with uncomfortable uncertainty and must be accepted as a most disturbing adventure, sometimes grotesque, sometimes thrilling. 

Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass

You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.
You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change. 
When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame.
The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range.
You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.

It, inertia, is a pity. It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you 
yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage:
“When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not. Stay tame.”

Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range.
Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page?
You will not. Be rewarded for remaining long the same?

You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame.
You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage
(when trainers wander off). Tigers, please do not stay tame.

As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change
from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard.
But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same, 
when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

Jennifer Michael Hecht The Next Ancient World 

  Sky over NY as we got back into town. 

TAM 8 [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 

Dear Bleaders,

Traveling a lot this month. Right now I'm off to The Amazing Meeting! in Las Vegas. I'll give a talk and be on a panel and I'll be going to a lot of the other talks and stuff. I shall defend poetry against the arrogance of science! It will be funny. 

If you are there, come say hi. 

Stay cool! It's hot out there. Plus, don't kill yourself.

Love,

Jennifer