The Best American Poetry

Don't be a spreader [by Mel and Max Brooks]

A message from me and my dad, @Melbrooks. #coronavirus #DontBeASpreader pic.twitter.com/Hqhc4fFXbe

— Max Brooks (@maxbrooksauthor) March 16, 2020

A collaborative plague poem [by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

Equinox

Pictures of the virus are pretty -- 
like sea creatures or pin-cushioned moons 
or holograms posing in semi-witty

situations beside balls and balloons
glowing with coronas, crowns, halos.
Under microscopes, SpongeBob cartoons  

look fractal-similar, my own lungs aglow
with pink rods and blue cones. I'm silly
then scared. Neighbors hoard Purell, ammo 

against infection. I try to chill, be 
a peaceful citizen, a good locked-up 
or locked-down member of society.

I'm "Baking Bad," filling measuring cups 
to make pot brownies for frantic friends
and a wedding cake for Sam & Sonny's nup-

tials, virtual and queer and legal and 
euphoric. We'll each dance in our Zoom box
to the host's boombox, no need to pretend

we're anywhere but in our PJs and socks,
our pink boas and perky blue face masks
(lest we're contagious). It's the Equinox,

night and day perfectly split. Sam basks 
in Sonny, Sonny in Sam, a perfect fit.
Then the day goes back to quarantined tasks--

hand washing (my fingers so dry!), chit-
chatting on my Clorox Wiped iPhone,
bombarding heaven for the sad and the sick.

Met Percent: Week Eighteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Met Absent(e) %

^{Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 3/14/2020. Inset: Dans un café, L'absinthe, Edgar Degas, Musée d'Orsay, 1875; Van Gogh Absente Poster; Photo of Toulous-Lautrec drinking Absenthe, 1910.}

I have visited ~55 times and viewed all galleries up to 599, 55% complete. As Absenthe is 55% alcohol and often depicted in paintings, it seems to be an auspicious metric for entering “European Paintings”.

But now I have an absent Met. Closed due to Corona Virus. Memories of viewings, Met online musings, and modified methods will follow. After all, Montaigne “sheltered in place” with 1,500 books in self-imposed reclusion for almost 10 years. 

“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.” -  Montaigne, inscription on his bookshelves, 1571.

The Shape of Labor

The Harvesters, detail, and analysis, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565, gallery 642.

Shape: “If Bruegel’s peasants give the landscape its function, their tool gives it its form. Here, an entire world is constructed around the shape of its most essential unit; the shape of the scythe borne by the figure in the lower left corner.” Labor: “Each scythe-arc reveals the stages of the economic system: harvested wheat to the road; a cart to the village; a distant town to the ships; to the centers of manufacture and trade. The painting connects the dots of a newly expanding economy, depicting the peasants as the heart of a system that profits only those at the far end.” Extracts from On Bruegel's The Harvesters, Henry McMahon, The Painter’s Table (blog), 2016.

In college I had a neighbor, previously a second-tier official British Royal portrait painter, who’d fallen on hard times. His family trust kept him out of England, quietly in Baltimore when not institutionalized. He gave me a signed copy of a Salvador Dali book in exchange for my K&L Feeds hat with “I eat eggs” on one side and “I drink milk” on the other.  His exit came with an alcohol binge: hands painted red, displaying the shapes of labor in the local bar; hammer in one hand, sickle in the other.

 

Halves: Hip Gables and Basement Windows

Left: Two Cottages, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1636, not on view. 
Right: The Anderson’s Half-Hip Home, Alec Bernstein, 2020.

Drawn to Rembrandt.  The cottages, farms, and feelings of Rembrandt’s half-hip gabled roofs bring thoughts of the Dutch-style Chicago bungalows I grew up with. Good for snow. 

The sketch is the view out my bedroom window. These homes had basement half-windows at ground level outside and at the ceiling inside. For 25 cents a week, I fed our neighbor’s dog Bunnie by crawling through their basement window. I was not old enough to trust with a key. These halves seemed perfectly scaled to childhood. 

It feels as long ago as Rembrandt.

woulda, coulda, shoulda

Top: Hypothetical reconstruction of the portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari (The Met, 14.40.626–27) with Hans Memling, "Virgin and Child," ca. 1470.
Bottom Left and right: copper maps, fig. 11 & 15 Met online. 
Bottom center: Tommaso and Maria, 1470, Hans Memling, gallery 642.

The Met hypothesis of the triptych is a “how it would've been”. A marriage portrait pair with a devotional centerpiece. Quite a difference from the portraits as they are exhibited. Nota Bene - the improvement in the perspective when angled on its assumed hinges. 

The copper map of Tommaso could “show the use of a copper blue to add highlights to the folds of the very deep black jerkin, seemingly to suggest the way a velvet garment slightly glows at the edges when struck by light (left). The decoration in Maria contains copper in addition to lead, suggesting that lead white and a copper blue were used to create pearls further shaded with a carbon-containing black paint.” Met Online.

Memling, in my opinion, should have a more prominent place in the canon. He was an A-list painter in his time, and should be now. Even the copper maps are painterly.

 

Squibs 404-408 [by Alan Ziegler]

404: 1993, hundreds of Woolworth's are closing and thousands of generic parakeets will be released on noon of the final day. Scrawny blue and green twelve-dollar birds will scatter in downtown Las Vegas, uptown New York City, and suburban Lynbrook. They will be freed from their group homes, where they sleep leaning on each other like passengers on a midnight train in India. These are not the cream of the exotic bird crop; they are bred for volume, their markup too low to help keep Woolworth's in flight. If you see one in your neighborhood, coax it home with seeds and love. Let it fly freely around the house, offer it food off your plate, teach it the words you’ve longed someone to say to you, and love it like you love the America that once was.

405: I overhear other people’s imaginary voices. Sometimes I do their biddings, which can be confusing when my imaginary voice gets garbled. What’s that you say? No way Jose! If that’s even my real name.

 

406: Long ago in America the Yankees got rained out and my little brother and I saw three Ape movies.

 

407: March 1967 Schenectady. After being up all night my roommate and I drive to Albany to watch the sun rise from a hilltop, but when we get there it has already become early. We have huge sleepy diner breakfasts, imagining what everyone will do all day. Back to Schenectady via winding back roads, my friend driving as I drift off. I awake to a bloody coat, shattered windshield, no pain. My friend moans, holding his stomach, no blood. He reaches out his hand, and I take it. Looking back at me from the rearview mirror is my shredded forehead, a small patch of my skull. A policeman wrestles the door open. Points a flashlight at me and says, “This one looks bad.” A few seconds (my time) later, I am being stitched up, floating serenely. A nurse hands me a phone and says, “Tell your mother you’re all right.” “Hi, mom, how are you?” I say, then remember my line and say “I’m all right.” The next day, with half of my face bandaged like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man,  I remember I have a date—such a crush—to see Eric Andersen in Albany. I call her, explain my situation low-key not to alarm her, and she says, “Does that mean you’re cancelling on me?” My mother comes up to accompany me on the train home to New York. My father and five-year-old brother Philip meet us at the top of an escalator in Grand Central Station. Philip looks scared and my father reassures him, “It’s Alan.” Philip smiles kindly and says, “My brother’s name is Alan, too.”

 

408: Visiting the Liptons on Shelter Island, I turn off the bathroom light at 3 a.m. and realize my mistake after a few paces engulfed in darkness on this moonless night. Somewhere are two bedrooms and a steep set of stairs, perilous even in daylight. Erin sleeps in one bedroom, and Judy and Ed in the other, but my mind’s eye cannot map the room. I crawl inch by inch, hoping that my surroundings will be revealed by headlights from a passing car before I careen down the stairs. Maybe I should fall asleep until first light, but what if I toss and turn and wake up—if I wake up—at the bottom of the stairs? Finally, I find a wall, then a door, slightly ajar. I slither in and listen with all my ears’ might to the sounds of sleep—two discrete rhythms. I back out, and the location of the other room is illuminated by memory. I confidently but cautiously wend my way to our room and climb in safe beside my sleeping wife, eager to tell her of my epic journey.

"Oxford (Summer 1968)" [by Peter Ferry]

Lehman and I hitchhiked from Oxford to Bournemouth one July Saturday that summer of 1968.  He was a gawky redheaded teenager from New York City, and I was a shaggy headed Midwesterner who had never even been to New York much less London; I was trying very hard not to be the fish out of water I clearly was.  David wanted to go to Bournemouth because it was where his mother had landed when she fled Austria in 1938; I did not know that at the time, and I didn’t know why I wanted to go to the sea until we got there.

The coastal resort of Bournemouth is only ninety miles from Oxford (I just Googled it), but it took us all day.  Much of the time we spent standing beside the road, we played games.  The “First-Line” game: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”  “Call me Ishmael,” “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.”  The “Guess-the-Poem” game:   I knew some Kipling verses and a few Robert Frost lines.  David recited whole great chunks of Chaucer and Paradise Lost.  Perhaps as a concession to me, we also played the “Old Baseball” game:  name the starting infield of the 1958 Cincinnati Reds:  George Crowe at first, Johnny Temple at second, Roy McMillan at short and Don Hoak at third. 

I don’t remember the rides we got except for one old man in a ’56 cream and sky-blue Hillman Sunbeam hardtop.  That I remember the car better than the person is because I was not far beyond that stage in life where cars were more important to me than people.  As a kid I had had a Dinky Toy of that very car in those same colors.

I remember a raucous waterfront pub in Bournemouth.  We were still charmed by our ability to sidle up to a bar and drink a legal glass of beer (neither of us was twenty-one yet), but it was probably just one because neither of us had much money.  Later that night, I remember going from one cheap B&B to another without any luck finding a room.  I remember finally asking for help at a police station hoping, I suppose, that the cops might let us sleep in a cell.  Instead the Sergeant on duty said, “If I were in your shoes, I’d sleep on the beach.”

“You can do that?”

The town even provided rather nice beach lounges on which we stretched out and shared a bottle of cheap Spanish wine.  When David fell asleep, I wandered out onto the town pier where two German guys were playing guitars and singing.  I looked out across the water, and then I realized why I had been drawn to Bournemouth.  I was homesick.  I wanted to be looking out at Lake Michigan in the middle of the night while people sang, but the English Channel and the German guys would do just fine.  Close enough.

Of course, David and I did lots of other things that summer.  We both sort of fell in love with cornfed girls, his from Kansas, mine from Jeffersonville, Indiana. We bought secondhand bowler hats, climbed all over Stonehenge (you still could do that then), ran around the track where Roger Bannister had broken the four minute mile, made Charles Baudelaire’s Milk and Honey Mixture (an inch of milk, a half an inch of honey and a heaping tablespoon of hashish: stir, drink) and became friends. All these years later we still are, even though our initial encounter was a bit rocky. 

The day I got to Oxford, David stuck his head out of his room next to mine and asked if I had a copy of The Paris Review. “I have a poem in there.  I’m a poet.”

“Right,” I said.  And I’m Under Secretary of State. But before the summer was over David had given a reading for the assembled faculty and students, and John Fuller, one of our dons and a bright young British poet, had published a broadsheet of David’s verse.  The son-of-a-bitch really was a poet. 

When I got home to Chicago, I quickly put Oxford out of my mind.  The tumultuous ’68 Democratic Convention was in full swing, and I dived right in.  I enlisted as a courtesy-car driver for Eugene McCarthy and got a front row seat to the whole show.  I watched cops chasing protesters under the el tracks on Wabash Avenue and protesters fleeing clouds of tear gas in Lincoln Park.  I delivered tipsy delegates to the Conrad Hilton under blinding klieg lights between banks of cops in riot gear and banks of kids in riot form on Michigan Avenue.  On TV I watched Abbie Hoffman drilling Yippies in self-defense techniques and Mayor Richard J. Daley shouting “Fuck You” at Senator Abraham Ribicoff on the convention floor.  Then I sat up all night typing angry letters about American injustice.  When the convention was over and the smoke finally cleared, I went to our family’s summer cottage in Michigan to decompress.  My favorite aunt, Ollie, patted the seat beside her and said, “Come.  Sit.  Tell me all about your amazing summer.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said.

“Then tell me the most important thing that happened to you this summer.”

“Okay,” I said, and then somewhat to my own surprise, “I met this writer….”  I told her all about Lehman and even read her some of his verse.

She listened attentively as always.  “What do you think all of that means?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think you would like to be a writer?”

“Well,” I said, “I think it might.”

 

Ed. note: The two young men had enrolled in the "Oxford Summer Seminar" organized by Prof. Ernest Hofer of the University of Massachusetts. It was a six-week program preceded by a week in London with tickets to "The Importance of Being Earnest" in the West End and a Richard Strauss opera at Covent Garden. I remember taking the train from Paddington and arriving in the most magical looking city on a magnificently blue day most rare in England.  Ed Goltz and I arrived, a day early, and stayed at a bed and breakfast.

Our group, which included undergrads from U Mass, Columbia, the University of Ohio, Oberlin, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, and Smith, among other places, was housed at St. Hilda's College, ordinarily an all-female college (photo at top). Christopher Ricks gave us lectures on the differences between America and Britain ("You have climate, we have weather"), on the one hand, and between prose and poetry on the other. We saw productions of "As You Like It" and "The Cocktail Party" and a son-et-lumiere show at Christ's College.

The other photos are of Bournemouth; a Hillman 1956 automobile (wrong colors, alas); Magdalene College, Oxford (which has its own deer park), where John Fuller taught; The Paris Review 43 (which included the poem Pete referenced, and the cover of his superb novel Travel Writing. While there may be no good excuse for how I introduced myself to Pete, it is true that I shamelessly identified myself as a poet. What can I say? I was very young. -- DL

Some cinematic suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies listed here, with brief excerpts from each:

-- Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear 
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xn5LrNJKiM8 ("The Shadow of Evil")

<<< Horror is what we feel witnessing the aftermath of a fatal car wreck. Terror is what we feel in anticipation of something terrible that has not yet happened.

What Cape Fear (1962) offers is a pure example of a third kind of sensation, one that attracts even as it repels: menace. Menace is Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, newly released from an eight-year prison sentence, a cigar in his mouth and a Panama hat on his head, into the heat of summer in a small, southern town. Cady embodies evil and Mitchum embodies Cady, a character who is as cunning as he is vicious.

Although he plays an unreformed sex offender who beats up women and has no business gaining control of the viewer’s attention, Cape Fear is Mitchum’s picture from the moment he appears on the scene, confronting the attorney who put him behind bars. “Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” Cady is back with a vengeance. >>

-- William Holden, in two POW films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai 
https://theamericanscholar.org/william-holden-model-prisoner/#.Xn5LANJKiM8 ("Model Prisoner")

<<< In each movie, Holden says something that communicates his capacity for irony and irreverence, as well as his distaste for the boyish conception of war as a “game.” In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Shears says to Warden: “You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being.” In Stalag 17, he offers this wonderful parting shot: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before.”

The slam-bang conclusion of The Bridge on the River Kwai is magnificent, and I shall say nothing more about it here except to reveal that the movie’s last word is “madness!” At the end of Stalag 17, Sefton takes wire-cutters to cut through the barbed wire, rescue a lieutenant the Germans want to kill, and guide the two of them to freedom. Duke: “The crud did it.” Harry Shapiro: “I’d like to know what made him do it.” Animal: “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. Ever think of that?” >>>

-- The Best Years of Our Lives with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews

 https://theamericanscholar.org/souvenirs-of-war/#.Xn5LL9JKiM8 ("Souvenirs of War")

<<< A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence. >>>

 

-- Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-matter-of-pride/#.Xn5LT9JKiM8  ("A Matter of Pride") 

 

<<< Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.” >>>

 

from "Julius Jaffe: The Analects" [by Mitch Sisskind]

OLD SONG
Julius Jaffe sang an old song:
'Boys, boys, too much noise!
Abie! Louie! Kum in hoyz!'

CONCUPISCENCE
Julius Jaffe said, "In Torah,
the Land of Egypt is a metaphor
for concupiscence." 

THE GODFATHER PART III
Morrie Brier asked Julius Jaffe for 
his opinion of The Godfather Part III.
Julius Jaffe said, "Feh! Feh!"

BERNIE BERLOWITZ
Julius Jaffe said, "By transgressing
a single word of Torah -- 'yarbeh' --
King Solomon caused the splitting
of the kingdom for his descendants.
How much more so, then, for Bernie
Berlowitz, who transgressed the
whole book of Shemot!"

FASTING AND FRESSING
On Yom Kippur, Julius Jaffe attended
services, and, as befits a Jew, he was
fasting. But following the services he
saw the Rabbi fressing on hard boiled
eggs. In shock, Julius Jaffe exclaimed:
"Rabbi, why are you fressing so?"
The Rabbi smiled. "I am modest in
my piety," he said. "When I fress,
I hide from others that I am fasting."

THE ANGEL OF DEATH
Julius Jaffe was carrying a large box of bricks on
his shoulders. The day was hot. Too weary to
go on, Julius Jaffe dropped the box and called
out to the Angel of Death. At that instant the
Angel appeared and said, "Can I be of service
to you?" Now trembling in fear, Julius Jaffe said,
"Yes. Could you help me put this box of bricks
back on my shoulders?"

Squibs 397-403 [by Alan Ziegler]

397: When I was a kid, sometimes I’d look down as I walked and imagine I was flying. Everything on the ground became magnified in its smallness—rivulets of rain water in the gutter became mighty rivers abutting cliffs, grass a golf course, dirt a desert. I thought about this today as I came across the fork in the road, and then saw a half smoked cigarette as a limousine, followed by a lumber yard, and fall foliage in the snow.
Wee wee wee I flew all the way home.

 

398: I have nothing prepared for the 6^th grade Science Fair. In desperation, I copy a diagram of the human brain onto a piece of oak-tag, and add some facts from the encyclopedia, including the similarity between the human brain and the sheep brain. I tell my mother I am going to make a brain out of paper maché, but my brain can’t get my hands to do it. The next day my mother brings home a sheep’s brain she got from the butcher. I display it next to the oak tag, and my table gets lots of attention.

 

399: From my 7^th grade school notebook: “In Science we went over chemical equations and actions for how electricity is produced in a dry cell. I don’t get it at all. I doubt if I’ll ever get it.” Two years later, researching an idea for a science class project, I read that a copper wheel and magnets can turn on a light bulb. I start to get excited about electricity. I buy the material and meticulously follow the instructions, but the bulb stays dark. I have no choice but to turn it in anyway, with a short composition about how it works, knowing it doesn’t. The teacher is fascinated and beckons me to the front of the classroom. I hope for a miracle, and feign shock when nothing happens. The teacher consoles me, says this is what science is all about, and gives me an A, which makes me feel even more ashamed. After teaching creative writing for many years, I come to realize I earned that A.

 

400: Youth in Repose. December 1965, a blind date at a fraternity party rushing me, you were doing a favor by doubling with your friend, who soon disappeared upstairs with my friend. Lights went low, music simmered, liquor flowed, no place for strangers. You stewed. No choice but to go out into the chill night. We talked and laughed and stood close together creating warmth. You worried about your friend. We found them back downstairs, entwined on the couch, youth in repose. The room was free upstairs, but you said no, no, I can’t do that. You wrote me a couple of weeks later, a “thank you for a fun night,” told me about your Christmas visit home, the trimming of the tree, how nice to be with your family. I never answered, not looking for “fun nights.” Twenty years later your unusual last name jumps out of an obit page: a man, would be about your father’s age. I skim down to find your name among the survivors. I am truly sorry.

 

401: College Friday, the doorbell rings in Alicia, surprising me from New York. I think of all the ways my weekend will now be wonderful, but the most-lasting joy will not be the sex, the sharing of new records, the movie downtown, or the huge Chinese meal. It will be the eyes, her eyes when I wake in the middle of the night, large and brown, arms-length away, wide open, eyes in love.

 

402: From our correspondent on the scene. The ventriloquists’ civil war has turned ugly. Outside a club, a man in a midnight blue tuxedo leans over the weeping, smoldering remains of a wooden figure sheathed with tattered pieces of the same blue cloth. Nearby, a man in a white suit lies, limp, a goofy grin spanning his throat, which cackles as the blood gurgles.  

 

403: My mother and I walk to the synagogue to see Grandpa Popowsky. I am four. She explains that it is against the rules for mommies to go near the grandpas at shul, so I will be the messenger. She hands me a piece of paper and nudges me into the large room. Men walk about aimlessly, heads bobbing, making strange sounds. The room is crowded but everyone seems alone. When I play make-believe—vroom vrooming with a toy car—occasionally I look around to make sure the world is where I left it, but my grandfather doesn’t pause, so I tug on his pants. “Avram”—he calls me by my Hebrew name—“is there trouble?” I want to play with the men, and my mother isn’t allowed to pull me away. But I am a good boy and give my grandfather the message. He pats me on the head and resumes his vrooming.

    If I had vroomed with my grandfather, might I have received a message that would speak to me for the rest of my life?

Nickole Brown's The Donkey Elegies

[A Review by Dante Di Stefano]

The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems
Nickole Brown
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020

Nickole Brown’s new chapbook, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems, continues the project she initiated in her chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018); this project, as the poet herself articulates it, proposes to build an antipastoral bestiary comprised of poems spoken in “a queer Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature: beautiful, damaged, dangerous and in desperate need of saving.”  As did To Those Who Were Our First Gods, The Donkey Elegies explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. Brown draws on her experiences working with donkeys in several animal sanctuaries and overlays those experiences with a complex array of personal, cultural, historical, and linguistic associations connected to this humble and hearty mammal. The Donkey Elegies does what any good essay does: it assays (it tests and examines, but it also attempts), it suggests (rather than expounds), it spirals outward while tethering the attention to one unparaphrasable idea; the essay, as form or genre, is, after all, the donkey of literature: sinewy, indefatigable, often overlooked. Like her central subject in this book, Brown’s poetry hauls steadily onward, tender and tough, lit with the knowledge that holiness dwells in the common, the low-life, the baseborn.

Throughout the collection, the lowly donkey becomes a metonym for the oppressed “who carried us from that squat existence of flint strike to entire cities,” and “who blistered and tore, who blew their knees and threw their vertebrae hauling the stone and laying the tracks, plowing one field and then the next.” Here, Brown not only alludes to slavery from the ancient world to the antebellum South, but also surveys the exploitation of laborers like her “illiterate, hammer-swinging grandfather,” and the coal miners and tenant farmers of her native Kentucky. Those laborers are the same as all the ones who are continually “made draft, made compulsory, forced into conscription, like all those boys in my mama’s class that won that twisted lottery and came home from Vietnam unable to tell the slam of a screen door from a land mine.” The unassuming and eminently tractable donkey rehearses, in its very plodding, the survival strategies of those whose extrinsic worth has been bound to their work, and whose ongoing struggle has been to resist the erasures that their worth-bearing work necessarily entailed. 

For Nickole Brown, however, the donkey’s symbolic resonances remain deeply personal, tied as she is to generations of laborers and survivors. These personal connections begin with the idioms of Brown’s Kentucky childhood. Brown notes these idiomatic roots in the fourteenth section: “the church ladies would say they hadn’t seen me in a donkey’s years even if I had missed only a few Sundays, and all us kids knew to avoid Uncle Leon because the man could talk the hind legs off a donkey and that telling grandfather what to do was about as good as putting a steering wheel on a mule.” These folksy benign figures of speech contrast with the misogynistic donkey jokes examined elsewhere in the chapbook. The toxic masculinity attached to the word “donkey” (as slang for “vagina,” and therefore, as troubling synecdoche for “female”) provides Brown with a space to consider misogyny in American culture, and how that misogyny has informed her own story, intersected as it is with class issues and regional inequities, “a birthright, that would’ve never let me see a day in school past tenth grade, and by the time I’d even think about going back for my diploma, I’d be trapped with too many babies and a shit husband to boot.” All the way through The Donkey Elegies, Brown evokes, with gut-punching clarity, the prevalence and preponderance of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender-based discrimination that contextualize American life. Like the donkey, and like many women in America, Brown notes that she survived by moving forward “regardless, in spite of everything.”

Reading about moving forward, not merely surviving, but assaying-into-song, feels especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second to last section of The Donkey Elegies, Brown writes:

    And here we are, on the brink again, testing the promise of rainbows with who-knows-how-many continents’ worth
    of glacial melt and less and less forest to save. There is no beauty

    in nature I see anymore
    that I recognize
    as simply beautiful
    without adding a prayer
    of please, don’t die.

Nickole Brown’s poetry does what all truly great poetry does: it reminds us that we are always on the brink and that there is so much to save as we skitter on the edge of an incremental apocalypse. The Donkey Elegies reaffirms a truth we know in every molecule of our animal-selves: to live like the donkey is to live in a Dickinsonian Forever composed of Nows. Buy this book, send a copy to a friend; it is a balm in uncertain times, a book of great, enduring, lyric power and imagination.

---

To read an insightful and formally inventive review of this chapbook, in which Julie Marie Wade compares The Donkey Elegies to Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, go to Lambda Literary here.

To read an Oxford American interview with Nickole Brown, go here.

To find out more about Nickole Brown’s poetry, visit her website here.

"Flatten the Curve": a plague poem [by Hilton Obenzinger]

How heroic are the grocery clerks
And the fast-food fry cooks
How brave are the ordinary workers
And the priests wandering through empty churches
How courageous are UPS drivers who risk their lives
How stoic are the cashiers and the bus drivers
And there’s no way to thank them all
All will be well once we unbend the horizon
I weep when I see a happy baby
Blissful and unaware that the Angel of Death
Is trying to erase the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
How tender are the smiles of life
How wonderful the professional calm of nurses
How sublime the persistence of doctors
How moving the faces of anxious waiting
How close we are in our distance
I want to use big words for such big feelings
But the words keep getting smaller and smaller
Flatten the curve and rise up

March 22, 2020

An English "Plague Poem" [by Martin Stannard]

NOW

My going is soft –
But it feels heavy in places –

A finch –
Perhaps a chaff –
Pops by to grace the day –

Separation is a way of life
For some people

I see a vessel approaching –
What is that flag it’s flying? –
Let me check my Everyman’s Book of Flags –
Oh, so that’s what it means –
I shall give this approaching vessel a wide berth –

Once things exceed a certain pressure
I have to conform to a formal code

This is such a time –
And so I behave myself –
I am needed to live quietly by myself –
There is a shelf I grace decoratively –

And there is sleep I need to do –

How did it fall apart so quickly?

A finch –
Perhaps a chaff –|
Pops by to grace the day –

I am locking the door: Watch me:

A Dispatch from “Journal of the Plague Year”: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.

The Corona Virus holds a press conference (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Virus: Good morning. I'll be glad to take a few questions.

Reporter #1: What are you actually trying to accomplish?

Virus: Well, there's a moment in The Possessed, the novel 
by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, when the main character --
I believe his name was Strombolini  -- says that since
he's already made a mess of his life, he'll try to make as 
big a mess of it as possible. In other words, he'll
transform destruction, or perhaps entropy is a 
better word, into creation by making it intentional. 
It's a bit like something Kenneth Koch used to say
about writing poetry: if something isn't working,
do it more.

Reporter #2: So you're an intellectual. Have you read
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor?:  

Virus: Certainly not. But I've infected the University
of Chicago. Did you know that Leo Strauss, the
phlebotomist who for twenty years was the Robert
Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor
of political science at the University of Chicago, in private
conversations used to worry about the schvartzes 
coming across Jackson Park? Well. he did.

Reporter #2: Don't you mean phenomenologist
rather than phlebotomist?

Virus: Thank you. But rather than either phlebotomist
or phenomenologist, I meant to say podiatrist. What 
used to be called a foot doctor.

Reporter #3: Could you please be serious for 
a moment?

Virus: I'll be serious if you'll be roebuck. It
was a wonderful store at one time. People
used to be able to order a whole house 
which would arrive disassembled in a 
railroad car, and then they'd put it 
together themselves. There were 
31,000 parts. That was going on
even at the time of the 1918 epidemic. 
There simply aren't people like that
today, as Nestor says in Homer's Iliad,
as translated by W.H.D. Rouse.

Reporter #4: Can you please stop your
infernal bookishness?

Virus: All right.

Reporter #4: What do you think of Donald Trump?

Virus: (sighs) I knew someone would ask that.
Listen, Trump is neither the hero nor the 
villain of this story. What's important is not
Trump himself, but the response to Trump 
in you and you and you and you. In this
sense, Trump is like the biblical Pharaoh.
Some people hurried to leave Egypt
when Pharaoh allowed it, and some 
people actually wanted to stay. Lindsey 
Graham would be somebody like that. 
Speaking of which, has it occurred to 
anyone that the name "Lindsey Graham"
naturally suggests "Lindsey Graham Cracker,"
because Lindsey Graham would have been
a segregationist in the old days, and 
"cracker" means a bigoted white person?
You see, the universe is always sending 
coded messages like that, but you people 
need to be aware of them and understand
them. Ahem. I myself am such a message. 

Reporter #4: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Well, I'm getting a bit weary. But 
before I go, I'd like to ask you a question.
Do you think I will be Time magazine's 
Person of the Year?

Reporter #5: No, because you're not a person.

Virus: (sighs) True -- and that's my tragedy.
I'm a bit like Satan in Paradise Lost, by 
John Milton.

Reporter #6: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Yes indeed. "Those who have ears,
let them hear."

Emerson on the poor and the "wicked dollar" (with a comment from Michael Schiavo)

A powerful and perhaps surprising moment in Emerson's great "Self-Reliance":
<<<
Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
>>>

Michael Schiavo comments:

Of course the phrasing is important, and something that many people overlook, in Emerson, and particularly in this passage. It's not "the poor" but "my poor." We all have obligations to specific people. There's also this passage from "Circles":

"One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty, another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty, and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's?"

--October 27, 2011

Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"? (and other pressing questions) [by David Lehman]

1) Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"?

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillips
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
e) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I wouldn't even have to act, just be myself."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out"?

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Mrs. Froy
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

Postponement of Rand & Shapiro Collaborations at Bravinlee Gallery

The March 19 reception at Bravinlee Gallery for the show of collaborations between the painter Archie Rand and the poet David Shapiro has been postponed. Which gives us this chance to exhibit one of their works from the "Kiss" series.  -- DL

Three Poets: Elizabeth A. I. Powell, James McCorkle, & Rick Bursky [by Nin Andrews]

Last week I started a series called A Virtual AWP, featuring poets that I would have loved to have met or heard read or lecture, whose books I'd have bought and had signed, had I attended. I felt then as I guess many feel now, that a dark wave was rising up above the planet. But I don't want to talk about that . . .

Instead I want to talk about poets like Elizabeth A. I. Powell whose book, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, was a New Yorker "Books We Love 2016" pick and whose new book, Atomizer, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University in the fall of 2020.  I have already been reading poems from her new collection including this lyrical essay from Plume, and this poem from The Los Angeles Review:

STALKING ME ONOMATOPOETICALLY                      

                                   “He closed my legs like a book,” Angela Carter

 

I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic
poem that kept pounding on the door of my mind at four a.m.,
rousing me with a slap on the face with its metaphysics
of sick lust and panic. The order was dated March 1, 2016.
A Thursday. Rainy. The sociopoem smelled of Paco Rabanne—
A Cologne for Men— and was devilishly handsome, so elegant,
so English-lyrically, well-anthologized, and attractive, seemed to have a form
that suggested well-bred content, an understanding of stanzaic
architecture, and deep image. Yet, this poem I loved had once tried
to stab Dorothy Parker at a dinner party. He had claimed
to have French kissed Helen Vender and Allen Ginsberg.
How could I rationalize or reconcile my love for the poem?
The poem tried to kill me, too, with the same red child’s scissors
once,  then another time it was tar and feather, because, the poem said,
“I love you so much.” On therapeutic advice I sought the restraining order
against the poem because it couldn’t contain itself, pushed me
down with a conceit stronger than my fragile couplets, how
it leaked anaphora like anti-freeze, bluish over the page
and into my life uninvited, thinking it knew me
better than I knew myself. The poem’s arguments were convincing,
but it was all fanciful diversion. A lie. All through the day
and all through the night: That poem. The poem telling me I looked fat
in my Lord & Taylor dress. So, I bit the poem’s ear,
again and again, until it bled a scary personification of ears. Stalking
me onomatopoetically down the sidewalk to where I kept my secret
sonnet turns inside. I just wanted to take a nap in Brooklyn,
sleep inside my source material, that pale of settlement,
the origin and end of everything in my family. So that the end
of my suffering might bring an insight, but the poem
turned my nap in Brooklyn into a series of disturbing
and surreal faces that made me awaken into the possibility that
I was the one who was so wrong, so ruined, damaged,
unable to sing. Yet, sometimes, honestly, I loved
what the poem said, when it convinced me of my tyranny.
I wanted to let go. I wanted its untouchable love. I waited for the poem.
The sociopoem’s persona looked like Sir Mick Jagger, wore leather
pants, had biceps, smelled literary and up all night,
like bay rum and old books. The poem had a spell over me,
its incantatory propulsion got into my blood and bile
with its rhythms that made my heart race. It mailed me
threatening letters, collages containing articles about what happens
to women my age, how they die, again and again
alone and withering, like a nasty old tree
from a St. Vincent Millay sonnet taught
in girl’s boarding schools. I wrestled the poem
until it swore to bless me, but it blessed me
in a language that made me feel uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a vowelic yawp. It was a brutal stuttering ich
that made me feel sick, unclean, subway ridden,
which gave the poem a great joy.

Another prize-winning poet I admire and would like to have met is James McCorkle, whose latest book, published by Etruscan Press, is part of Triptych. I think the following excerpt from his poem, "Fire Regime," gives just a hint of what he's up to in this wonderful collection.  

After the warnings, each a measure for the next
an emergency of slowness

is this any worse than before

I am haunted by the thought

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

As language evacuates
its own territories
who is swept along

in the rescue, in the naming
in the columns for those saved, those lost, sold or free.

                            # # #

 

 

 

Finally, I want to mention my friend, Rick Bursky, whose new book, Let's Become a Ghost, is just out from BOA Editions. A surrealist and a truly unique  poet, Bursky is a poet I trust to entertain, inspire, and to take me places I've never been before.

 

I NEVER KNEW MY FATHER COULD PLAY THE HARMONICA

 

I'm sitting with my mother and brother
eating chili at the small dining room table.
My father, dead twenty-six years, wears a black suit,
stands in front of the window playing the harmonica.
There's nothing original about the world,
but we get up each morning and go to work anyway.
A doctor tells us my mother's lungs have weakened.
My father is playing the blues, which I guess
he learned in prison. No one knows who's lonelier:
the ghost or the person who sees the ghost.
Not wanting to embarrass my father I don't look

at the frayed edges of his collar or the hems of his pants.

Last week I forgot to do laundry

and wore the same socks two days in a row.

My brother is first to leave the table,

says something about returning phone calls.

It's rare that we eat dinner together.

Years ago I would have said the light falling

on my father's shoulders made them look like mountains

in the distance with the moon rising behind them;

now I think cardboard theater props.

Sometimes my eyes feel like loaded guns

and I close them for the same reason guns have safeties.

I should be telling this in the past tense

but that would be the beginning of forgetting. 

 

 

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including forthcoming Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her first book of poems, The Republic of Self, was chosen by C.K. Williams as a New Issues First Book Prize winner. 

Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. 

She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. In 2020, she will be Distinguished Visiting Writer at Oregon State University.

 

Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, James McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014). He received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill and the NEA, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

 

Rick Bursky is the author of Let's Become a Ghost Story (BOA Editions, 2020), I’m No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance (BOA Editions, 2015); Death Obscura (Sarabande, 2010); the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize-winning The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), and the chapbook The Invention of Fiction (Hollyridge Press, 2005). He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Originally from New York City, Bursky lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. For more information, please visit rickbursky.com.

Plague Poem #2: ["The Plague" by David Lehman]

The Plague

Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
which I want to re-read this week
(now that the frogs, the lice,
and the locusts are upon us)
because his hypothesis is
that the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague
he has in mind is bubonic,
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
Fleas from infected rodents transmitted it.

In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things,
it's a false alarm, says one, and let's not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will -- the competitive desire to live
while others are dying -- is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.

3 / 15 / 20

"Street Scene": The Movies That Use Alfred Newman's Theme of the City

 

Listen to it (with Alfred Newman and orchestra, 1946):  here

https://youtu.be/DqjWf7qgoHg 

Or here

for Nic Raine & the City of Prague Philharmonic (rehearsal)

Maybe best of all, the horns and strings on the soundtrack of How to Marry a Millionaire

Directors: Henry Hathaway (2), Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan. Robert Siodmak, Jean Negulesco, Bruce Humberstone, George Marshall, and King Vidor 

Plague Poem #1 [by Hilton Obenzinger]

Our Social Distance

Stay away and be my love
We’re so close together when we’re so far apart
I take solitary walks with multitudes
I talk to myself but mostly I hear your voice
We follow each other at a distance
Songs ring down empty dark Italian streets
Windows of all the apartments fill with harmonies
Woody Guthrie is already singing the Rambling Virus Blues
Bach has written a new version of the Corona Variations
I can hear music winding through all the avenues
But there’s no guitar and no piano in sight
We’re all alone with each other
Keep your distance and make happy sex
Dance with each other in different continents
Everyone can be magnanimous and fart
And what our neighbors don’t know won’t hurt them
Let me be kind to you by way of Internet
Swimming through our brains
All alone we can open our doors
Yet keep far away from each other
As far as any of us can spit
So keep your distance and be close
Speak splendid poems and deeper wit
Stay away and be my love

Hilton Obenzinger
March 13, 2020

Squib 396 [by Alan Ziegler]

396: The supply room is empty, and no one knows when the next delivery is due. No one can remember the last shipment or who ordered it, only that we were well-stocked for a long time. We call every number in our Contacts and say, “Please bring more.” Some are sympathetic, some blasé, others downright rude. No one says when we can expect supplies. “At least we have each other,” I say to the room, but the others are gone. Just me amidst empty closets, empty chairs next to empty desks.I can barely see in the twilight and turn on a lamp. The bulb gives a final flicker and dies. There is simply no point in looking for another one. The sun, too, runs out. I am left with a night’s supply of darkness. I shall make it last.