The Best American Poetry

BAP Launch Reading Tonight: 7PM The New School 66 W 12th Street

Master of ceremonies for tonight's BAP launch reading. twitter.com/BestAmPo/statu…

— Best American Poetry (@BestAmPo) September 20, 2012

Don Paterson at the Y (by David Yezzi)

Here's a little intro I wrote for Don Paterson, who read at the 92nd Street Y last night with Paul Muldoon. It's not much of anything, and certainly not even a shadow of Paterson's gorgeous reading, but it has a few biographical facts that might interest folks who don't know Paterson's work. Unfortunately, I had to leave out quotes from poems I thought he might read. Here's one from his latest book, Rain, called "Correctives" that breaks my heart (the second-born of his identical twin boys, now 10, has a hand tremor, as the result of a difficult birth):

The shudder in my son’s left hand

he cures with one touch from his right,

two fingertips laid feather-light

to still his pen. He understands

 

the whole man must be his own brother,

for no man is himself alone;

though some of us have never known

the other hand’s kindness to the other.

Don Paterson, 92^nd Street Y, October 14, 2010

When Bernard Schwartz from the Poetry Center contacted me about this evening with Don Paterson and Paul Muldoon, it wasn’t immediately clear to me if he was putting together a poetry reading or a rock concert. I mean, on the one hand, we have Paul Muldoon—rhythm guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder (with the Milton scholar Nigel Smith) of the “Stones-via-Cream-via-Hendrix” influenced rock band Rackett, performing at the Knitting Factory and other venues—and on the other hand Don Patterson, jazz guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder with Tim Garland of the Euro-jazz-Celtic-folk ensemble Lammas, whose numerous albums include tracks such as The Water in the Rock, a setting of a poem by Antonio Machado for voice and 12-string guitar. What kind of evening are we talking about?, I asked Bernard. Strictly poetry, he assured me.

And yet I can’t help feeling that, despite the absence of Marshall stacks and gleaming Zildjian symbols, what we have in prospect tonight is, in a very important sense, an evening of music. Given the innumerable nuanced sounds that good poetry makes—its rhythms, its chimes and hiccups, its hectorings, its sentence sounds and melodies, its organ tones and wave-laps of syntax: in other words, its music—it is not surprising that the poet and the musician should often be the same person.

Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Don Paterson left school at 16 and moved to London to join a band. Poetry, for him, came later, even as music remained a constant companion and a companion project. Music may be found throughout Paterson’s poems—sometimes as the subject itself. Take his poem “The Box,” from his collection Landing Light, a poem written in the shape of a guitar—the box of the title refers to the hollow body of an acoustic guitar, as in guit-box. Like his poems, this instrument is so well-made, so attuned to and expressive of the sounds of feeling that, as he says, “it takes no more than a dropped shoe or a cleared throat on the hall landing to set its little blue moan off again.”

Or there is the tribute in his most recent collection, Rain, to the minimalist electronic group TBA, from the Republic of Georgia, and its leader Natalie “Tusja” Beridze. The charged music of the poem halloos Paterson’s admiration for a fellow musician, with a glimpse, too—in its incantatory techno-speak—of Paterson’s parallel life at the moog and the mixing board:

                        Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing

                        the range with those bat-scaring frequencies ring-modulated

            sine-bursts and the more distressing pshycoacoustic properties

            of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing

                        you are nonetheless beautiful as the mighty Boards

            themselves in your shameless organicising of the code.

Organicising the code—that is what the best poets (and musicians) do, isn’t it? They take the raw matter, the data and the program of language, and make it their own. Paterson uses rhyme—in the poem I’ve just quoted from and elsewhere—and meter with a freshness and mastery that gives us the cadence of our contemporary speech as if for the first time.

Rain—how presciently titled, given the down-pour outside—is dedicated to the memory of the poet Michael Donaghy, a fellow musician on the page and off. Michael read at the Unterberg Poetry Center not long before he died, of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 50, six years ago now. Though Michael lived his adult years in London, he was a boy in New York. While he was working as a doorman, a Y patron in his building, Joan Jacobsen, saw him reading a book of poetry and gave him a Poetry Center membership, which he remembered fondly on that night. In Paterson’s sequence “Phantom,” Michael speaks to his friend: “Don’t let pass,” the phantom says,

talk of my saintliness, or those attempts

to praise my average musicianship

beyond its own ambitions: music for dancers.

All I wanted was to keep the drum

so tight it was lost under their feet,

the downbeat I’d invisibly increased,

my silent augmentation of the One—

the cup I’d filled brimful . . . then even above the rim!

But these outward connections to music and musicians are also pointers to the deeper, more mysterious and affecting music in Paterson’s poems—through which the poems express our deepest connections to one another. There is the heartbreaking lyric of a son’s trembling hand, of a swing-set that feels the absence of the child, of the lie that will not be silenced, and of the crushing lack left by a friend who has died. Tonight, let’s have some of the old songs—while they’re still new!—performed by one of our very finest singers, Don Paterson.

and now for something you really weren't expecting! (Katy Evans-Bush)

It turns out that Tiny Tim was a "musician and archivist," a sort of professor of music hall, and used to do vaudeville street performing in New York City. Check out Baroque in Hackney for the companion piece to this; and look out in a day or less for some good old English music hall.

Trust me, there is a rationale.

William Logan on Frank O'Hara

Re: "Death is often a good career move in poetry" (the first sentence of William Logan's review of Frank O'Hara's Selected)

as if FOH committed suicide
when all he did was watch the tide

drunk as in a Song Dynasty tune
trying to embrace the moon

-- DL

A Tune of “Affection and Sorrow” by Yan Jidao

The following Tune of “affection and sorrow” was written by the Song dynasty poet Yan Jidao:   

阮郎归

晏几道

旧香残粉似当初，人情恨不如。一春犹有数行书，秋来书更疏。

衾凤冷，枕鸳孤，愁肠待酒舒。梦魂纵有也成虚，哪堪和梦无。

Tune: Ruan Lang Gui, affection and sorrow

By Yan Jidao

My fragrance the same

as we first met

Not so your love

fading since the day you left

You write

few lines in spring

fewer words in fall. 

Phoenix blanket cold

Pair pillows gone
And I alone with my sorrow and whiskey
keep hoping to find you in a vision
or a dream
though I dream less
these sleepless nights.

-- translated by Qihui Gong and David Lehman

Yan Jidao's dates are c. 1038-1110 (very approximate).
Professor Hsu Ping of San Jose University helped with these translations.

"Ruan Lang Gui" literally means "return of the lover" (or in Eileen's inspired rendering "back of the lover"). But she she wriotes, "the content of the tune doesn't necessarily correspond to the exact meaning of the title," and we have opted for "Affection and Sorrow" rather than "The Return of the Lover" in translating "Ruan Lang Gui" into English.

-- DL

"Everlasting Longing" (by Li Yu)

长相思 李煜

一重山，两重山， 山远天高烟水寒，相思枫叶丹。 

鞠花开，鞠花残， 塞雁高飞人未还，一帘风月闲。

Tune: everlasting longing
by Li Yu
translated from the Chinese by Qihui Gong with David Lehman

Distant mountains lie, row after row,
Between the high sky and the far away hills.
The cold river water flows.
The chill mist is still.
My longing for you has turned the maple leaves red.

The chrysanthemums of autumn soon wither.
The high flying geese return.
Yet you do not return from the border.
Clear moonlight and gentle breeze
do their best to console me;
in vain: my loneliness goes on and on.

*

Qihui Gong, a senior at Tsinghua University, who has chosen Eileen as her Western name, served as my interpreter on a recent Friday morning in Beijing. She writes:

"I love Chinese traditional poems, especially the 'Tune' in Song dynasty. And I've tried to put several into English last winter holiday." Li Yu, whose "everlasting longing" is among her favorites, was an emperor during the Song dynasty.

DL