The Best American Poetry

Lilac Season [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Édouard Manet (1832-1883), White Lilac, oil on canvas circa 1882

Every spring my mother would drive to the abandoned mansion on Carlton Road. The long path leading to the front door was shaded by a canopy of overgrown lilac bushes. She would cut as many as we could hold, reaching ever higher for the biggest and most fragrant flowers. When we arrived home, she arranged them in a cut-glass vase, a wedding gift, and placed the vase on our piano so that it was reflected in the mirror above the staircase.

--sdl

Born Today, Miles Davis Was Born To Play (On Green Dolphin Street)

"A Visit" [by David Shapiro]

It was a small family party
Aunt Olive who tried to save Dallas
pleased after death to have a park
named after her after death
Terrified I got up off my usual position
and didn't know whether to look or think
Afraid of an encapsulated psychosis
They were quiet: Elaine and Bill de Kooning took a look
and Kenneth so happy, surprised to have a Heaven after all
I decided to accept l0,000 years of imprisonment
if that would lighten my father's obvious punishment 'itself
lightened by his good works for workers

Meyer Schapiro looked on steadily
as if he were watching Kings of the Road
in the scene of excretion
Nothing human or divine was strange to him
And I had been crying when the 33 recording
of my grandfather voice played El Mole Rachamim
And I couldn't translate
whom he was calling supplicant
I asked for something faster or fall
Then John Hejduk arrived looking for his wife and son
happy as if he were building worlds again
And Fairfield in painting gear
who had predicted this before
that despite particulars something was the same

and my Uncle Bill born with an open heart
The dead were visiting
in the corridor
I was like a charlatan on TV
finding a smile (long) on the door
or like the philosopher who will always
wake and travel for a table risen
The dead were gathering, I saw them all
my calm father and my mother like two candles
And his grandfather Aaron atheist and good chess player
who taught me to castle early and lift my violin
My father's mother whom I hardly met
walked without me with my murdered aunts
in a nest of keys and locks
They weren't singing

As others concluded I let them go heard and listened to very little
The dead have been buried off the ground
I only saw them smile
the consolation of the need you'll say and where was Paganini,
practicing so loudly in the orchestra of heaven
where was my young dead friend Phyllis and her flute
And where I just had to look more
Before turning away in terror
A family party parting
Amateur chamber music
The delights of the dead

--David Shapiro (2004-8)

from The Hat; from the archive, originally posted August 9, 2008

Theodore Roethke (on His Birthday) [by David Lehman]

No anthology is as nearly complete as the editor wishes. In the case of The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), permission for the use of several poems was denied. Theodore Roethke's 1958 poem "The Sensualists," for example, had an honored place in the book. And his reputation could use a boost. But it was not to be. I would love to post that poem here, but that doesn't seem right. So I'll just refer you, dear reader, to Roethke's Collected and I'll write you a brief head note. Here goes:

Theodore Roethke (1908 –– 1963). Born in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 25, Roethke spent many boyhood hours in the greenhouses that his father and uncle operated and owned. The poet was a big man –– six feet two and over two hundred pounds –– and for a time he coached tennis at the colleges where he taught. He was of the generation of American poets who delt they had to contend with the shadow of William Butler Yeats. In "How to Write Like Somebody Else" (1959), Roethke referred to Yeats as a father figure and wrote that writing meant "daring to compete with papa."

At the University of Washington, where he held a faculty appointment from 1947 until his death, Roethke exerted a powerful influence on student poets, among them Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and David Wagoner. "Poetry is an act of mischief," Roethke wrote. He accumulated aphorisms and observations in the manner of Wallace Stevens. In "The Poet's Business," for example, he notes that "A poet is judged, in part, by the influences he resists." I'm not certain I agree that "a `movement' is a dead fashion" -- this seems just clever -- but the idea that "almost all language is dead metaphor" succinctly states the poet's challenge. As one who spent time at Bennington College, as Roethke did, I prize this notebook entry from the 1940s: "Going to Bennington [is] a little like going into the Marines."

Roethke wrote two poems entitled "The Waking." Both are included in "The Oxford Book of American Poetry." Here is the villanelle he wrote under that title:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

 

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

 

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

 

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

 

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

-- DL

The Publisher's Publisher: Mark Saunders 1967-2019 [poem and tribute by Dean J. Smith]

The Beam
for M.H.S

Dome of white gold
between indigo
clouds

sabered shafts
on blue ridge
mark new directions

stanchions above
the diamond--
his field illumined

precision lasers
roam over texts
in his study

flares of love
for his wife
and children

light of pure joy
In his smile.
Never a mask.

        -- by Dean John Smith

On the morning after the University of Virginia basketball team won the national championship, I was on the phone with Mark Saunders, the director of UVA Press about a book that would celebrate the incomprehensible journey the Cavaliers had just completed.

We had previously agreed to table all discussions until the game was over.

“Let’s talk tomorrow so we don’t jinx anything,”  Mark said.

After the victory, Mark celebrated by leading the school’s Auld Lang Syne inspired mantra, “The Good Ole Song.”  It’s preserved here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXjTmSXL6Ik

He and I shared texts over the last two seasons wherever we happened to be watching. He might be in John Paul Jones arena when I was at a hockey tournament in Buffalo.  Weeks of silence went by and then possession by possession critiques of the team would cascade down the screen.

Mark passed away suddenly last weekend, at the age of 52. His death is a devastating loss for the scholarly publishing community.

Continue reading . . . 

 Dean J. Smith is the Director at Cornell University Press.

#TBT Found in Translation -- China, 2008 [by David Lehman]

Eleven years have gone by since Stacey and I traveled in China and Mongolia. Here's a blog post from then:

<<

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (Evidently, the Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluded, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God."  Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.
>>>

(May 20, 2008)

[from the archive; re-posted November 20, 2014]

Artie Shaw and band play "Frenesi"

Artie Shaw, born on this day,
was born to play
the clarinet, and when he
left for Mexico, he came back
with this great track:

 

For Alexander Pope and E. M. Forster: Fools rush in. . .

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." -- Alexander Pope
"Where Angels Fear to Tread." -- E. M. Forster
". . .and so I come to you, my love, my heart above my head." -- Johnny Mercer

 

Next Line, Please: A Letter is a Joy of the Earth [by Virginia Valenzuela]

There are a number of poems that were considered by their authors be unfinished, even fragmented, including Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and some of Emily Dickinson’s mysterious two-liners. For this week we considered Dickinson's poem #1639, using it as our first two lines in a poem of our own creation:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—

Of course it is almost impossible to beat Dickinson at her own game, but what can we say? A poet's gotta try.

It may be Angela Ball who comes closest to imitating Dickinson’s characteristic aesthetic, two stanzas, eight lines, slanted rhymes, and lots of em dashes:

A letter is a joy of earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Its script sails slotted—
Dimly in its berth—

Its sovereign words purse—
Tightly—all the while—
Till appointed hands unfurl—
And deliverance—arrive—

Emily Winakur’s staccato rhythms and cascading thoughts mirror humankind's struggle to make sense of it all: life, death, the world, the gods:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
it is denied the Gods—
Singing stories—Death or Mirth—
announcing—like a Fraud—

that Thing you did. Was it so Great—
if no one knew but for
those Gods hushed and hovering—late—
round heaven’s hearth—Voyeurs

of deeds and sins. To have to Pause—
unknowing—to hold paper
up to Sun—and wonder at the Flaws
and Flights that will appear—

as soon as paper splits and tears
by taper’s candlelight.
Anticipation mixed with fear—
“Madame,” it says, “I write—”

Charise Hoge’s “Mollusk and Mail” completes Emily’s fragment "as Marianne Moore might have done," David says, "with the celebration of a lowly creature," one that is extremely close to my heart, the snail:

A Letter is a joy of Earth––
It is denied the Gods––
Though Godspeed may prevail
––when it is deemed a snail.

Admire then the Snail––
A coiled envelope that seals
the softness of a living thing
––discerned in words––arriving.

Beth Dufford “cheated and used two of Emily’s mysterious couplets to bookend my meager whimperings in between,” and to great effect:

A Letter is a joy of Earth—
It is denied the Gods—
Like warmth before a shadow’s Birth
Eludes the sheltering frog—

Let me use this Day, let it not slip—
Let me imprison it in a locket—
Let me not thirst with this Hock at my lip
Nor beg, with domains in my pocket.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, with more mysterious lines and couplets and scholarly commentary from the master of poetry, David Lehman. And tune in next week for a new prompt!

Hip-hop in the performance puzzle: get a feel for it with Valentine Nagata-Ramos & François Lamargot [by Tracy Danison]

Photo©CédricSintes

Old wine in new bottles: “My Milk is Better than Yours”, the old story of mother love in hip-hop style by Valentine Nagata-Ramos

Hip-hop does a lot more than popularize, re-energize, enable and reference today's dance. The genre’s popularity and ability to generate esthetic energy is a translation of the primary and universal values of the liberal age: liberty, equality and solidarity.

Is there still break-dancing in front of (the shell of) Notre Dame? If not, you can always find it in front of the Grande Halle de la Villette. Sometimes there are kids there who are so good it makes you cry to realize just how good a body in movement can be…

Remember those “find stuff” puzzles for kids where they have to look for a person or thing hidden in a picture? The idea is to broaden and hone the visual imagination, I guess. I’m going to spend my summer (and Fall) doing broadening and honing my dance theory imagination, looking for hip hop in contemporary, modern and classic dance and dance performance and … in performance tout court.

It might not be so easy to discern the hip-hop element in the Opéra Comique’s take on Manon – though, come to think of it, Puff Daddy and 50 Cent could easily have written the story of social anomie, megalomania, brutality and shallow avarice.

However, as a first step, it will be child’s play, I think, to see hip-hop’s – esthetic, cultural and social – universality in the program of Festival XX sur 20 (“Twenty on 20- 100%- Festival). Child’s play, too, to see in Valentine Nagata-Ramos’ lively and lovely My Milk is Better than Yours just how good hip-hop is at the essential human itch to tell stories.

FESTIVAL XX SUR 20 • 2019 • François Lamargot & cie XXème Tribu • Day-long • Maison de la culture et de la jeunesse (MJC) Hauts de Belleville, Friday and Saturday, 28 & 29 June, 2019

"Twenty/20" is dancer and choreographer François Lamargot’s tribute to the Hauts de Belleville neighborhood and to the Maison de jeunesse et de la culture (MJC).

Hauts de Belleville, which is a part of the bigger Belleville neighborhood, is in the 20^th arrondissement and, mostly, still a place where ordinary folk can afford to live, at least if they’ve already got a roof over their heads.

The Hauts de Belleville MJC in particular and MJCs in general are a type of secular YMCA, present throughout France, town and country together, an outgrowth of the movement for popular and youth education, which began at the beginning of the 20^th century. Children in my own 11^th arrondissement neighborhood use their local MJC for activities ranging from ballet to fencing to karate to singing to fun-tilted science and arts education. Hauts de Belleville is where François Lamargot grew up and its MJC is where he learned to dance hip-hop. Also where he and his friends founded their performance troupe cie XXème Tribu.

Lamargot, who’s now worked with people like Anthony Egéa, a very early hip-hop adopter (1984), the very heterodox dance performer Blanca Li and urban dance popularizer and current director of the hip-hop oriented MAC Créteil, Mourad Merzouki, has developed his own form of contact dance based on hip-hop principles. He now advises, teaches and performs across the world – doing dance workshops in francophone places such a New Caledonia or Haiti.

MY MILK IS BETTER THAN YOURS • 2018 • Valentine Nagata-Ramos & cie Uzumaki • 60 minutes • Théâtre du Fil de l’eau, Pantin, 7 June 2019, 20h

My Milk is Better than Yours©CédricSintes

While Festival XX sur 20 shows off hip-hop’s social universality and cultural relevance, next door in the near suburb of Pantin, choreographer and performer Valentine Nagata-Ramos  – product of a father from Japan and a mother from Spain who elected domicile in France  – shows how apt an instrument hip-hop is for telling our old and new stories. Here’s hoping she one day gets a crack at Manon Lescaut!

Keep in mind that, in my opinion, anyhow, the mind-blowing variety of “styles” of this dance genre actually represent aspects of the myriad human concerns more than any esthetic ideology.

These styles go from expressionistic psychotherapy – for example, Nach’s – Anne-Marie Van’s – take on the “Krump” style of hip-hop – to esthetic development as social movement (Nagata-Ramos has herself talked to me of Voguing: developing dance gesture out of modeling poses) to getting ahead (say, any old Hollywood dance entertainment shtick for entertainment’s sake), to doing necessary updating of our fairy-tale repertory. 

Nagata-Ramos’ My Milk is Better than Yours is a fine example of fairy tale informed by psychotherapy, a sophisticated little jewel of a contemporary-old story of mother love and motive, told with pure b-boy brio. It’s all danced to a t, by the way, by Fanny Bouddavong, Santiago Codon-Gras and Yanis Khelifa.

My Milk is Better than Yours premiered last year at La Villette as a new creation by the region-wide Kalypso festival set afoot by Mourad Merzouki.

So, whether you get to walk up to the Festival XX sur 20 or walk across the périph’ to see My Milk is Better than Yours, and whether you’re lucky enough to visit Paris or whether you’re in Tokyo or Shanghai or Lagos or Moscow, as you watch those boys and girls in baggies and baseball caps springing and gyrating in front of the local tourist attraction, ask yourself where it all came from and where it tends toward. Also, give ‘em some spare change.

On Fats Waller's Birthday: I'm gonna sit right down and write [by David Lehman]

May 21
Black Jack I beat the dealer
and no use complaining
even though one or another souvenir
of my bout with cancer may act up
throwing a left hook that I didn't evade
and the embarrassment of a knockdown
will be mine 

I will get up at the count of eight and

On May 21 
Fats Waller's birthday
I'll be living in a great big way and I will play
"Honeysuckle Rose" and "Your Feet's Too Big"
yes, "your pedal extremities are colossal"

As I write this
It is November 10 of the previous year 
but I can do it I can sit right down
and write myself a letter
and make believe
it came from you

 

In China, in 2008: after the quake, before the Olympiad [by David Lehman]

Eleven years have gone by since Stacey and I traveled in China and Mongolia. Here's a blog post from then:

<<

In Jinan, as previously in Dalian, despite the economic disparity between the two places, the audiences for my lectures exhibited the same degree of enthusiasm despite their limited knowledge of English. In Dalian, the group consisted of adults, well-dressed, formal, taciturn, for whom I had prepared a lecture. After reading one paragraph and staring at faces blank with incomprehension, I ditched my text and resorted to an old favorite in such a situation: poems consisting of two lines or fewer, and the haiku stanza.  It worked. The blackboard helped, and luckily I knew a bunch of these short poems by heart.

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (The Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluded, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God."  Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.
>>>

(May 20, 2008)
[from the archive; re-posted November 20, 2014]

"An Argentine Gaucho Named Bruno. . ." [by David Lehman]

<<<
Even to attempt a definition of key terms such as erotic and pornographic is a hazardous task. But about a few things there is general agreement. This is from My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late Victorian pornography written by an anonymous gentleman with a big-time itch and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures. “Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking,” he writes. “It is not a graceful operation – in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.” The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of “coupling” to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an “operation” no finer than urination or defecation, and “more ridiculous.”

Call it fucking or call it making love: the “process of coupling” is the central fact, the rock thrown into the previously placid pond, around which widen the circles of erotic implication. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove problematic, and the array of possibilities suggests that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. We know, in any case, that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, “most people try to do as much of it as they can,” and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.

In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The familiar image of the “beast with two backs” is ridiculous but accurate and therefore a valuable corrective to high-minded or romantic representations of the theme. The subject of sex gives rise to elegant aphorism (“Sex is the lyricism of the masses”: Charles Baudelaire), extravagantly mixed metaphor (“Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt”: Luis Bunuel), and exceedingly clever limericks (“An Argentine gaucho named Bruno / Declared there is one thing I do know: / A woman is fine, / A boy is divine, / But a llama is numero uno”). Sex in The Waste Land is a nightmare from which the typist may never recover, consisting of passionless caresses, “unreproved, if undesired,” from “the young man carbuncular” – surely the least desirable epithet ever conferred on a man. But then T. S. Eliot’s poem is an example of what Lee Upton calls “dysterotica,” which bears the same relation to the erotic as the world-view of 1984 or Brave New World has to Utopia. 

-- David Lehman
>>>

from the introduction to The Best American Erotic Poems (2008)

The Paris Review Redux: Graduation Season

 

<<<

From The Paris Review Redux:

This week at The Paris Review, we’re turning our attention to graduation season.

Read our Art of Poetry interview with Eileen Myles, as well as Venita Blackburn’s short story “Fam” and David Lehman’s poem “Commencement.” 

Click here for more.

https://mailchi.mp/theparisreview.org/redux-132229?e=d13cb7bb3f

>>>

Elizabeth Bishop on John Ashbery's "Three Poems"

"At first I felt extremely baffled -- only a sense of `motion' and the extremely good writing led me on -- but now after many re-readings I think I am getting to understand them better -- especially `The Recital' -- and some of `The System.' Actually, when I do enjoy passages or pages most, they remind me very oddly of Kierkegaard (whose name I don't remember how to spell right, I think). Although no theologian, probably no Christian, I've always been able to read him with the greatest pleasure -- and your THREE POEMS have now begun to give me the same sort of pleasure. I hope you don't mind my saying this -- that I shd. be saying something like they remind me of Yeats! Whatever -- you have really arrived at a personal, purely logical, and deep -- as well as beautiful way of saying things. I'm not a critic and have difficulties expressing myself about poems -- but I'm sure this book is very important -- as they say all the time, of course-- but really, as well."

-- Elizabeth Bishop
(typed letter dated March 5th, 1973, from Sixty Brattle Street, Cambridge 02138)

from the archive; originally posted June 21, 2008

The weather forecast from "No Time Like Now" (University of Pittsburgh Press) [by Andrei Codrescu]

I don't blow my own horn because I was born in the modest half of the 20th century in a country so overtly serious about writing, especially poetry, poets could be rendered invisible while their work was performed in stadiums by actors. In the U.S. where Hype is, like Inflation, a God, I realized what the score was as soon as I read Mark Twain on the subject. The Statue of Liberty only holds a torch instead of Gabriel's trumpet because the French built it. And Gabriel's trumpet was, of course, not made so that Gabriel could blow his own horn. Or mix his instruments. He had the Lord's PR agency for that. All things being teachable, I was also touched by the evident nostalgia of these verses by the brilliant, now no longer with us, Jim Gustafson: "They used to pump it for me/but now it's strictly self-service." Except for New Jersey and Oregon. Having just spent two hundred and fifty dollars to buy my own books from one of my esteemed publishers, I was heartened by a message from David Lehman to reproduce here one of my poems with a few lines about it. David Lehman is not just my friend, but a friend of poets and poetry. It was indeed he who suggested that I send my new book to Ed Ochester at the Pitt Poetry Series. This distinguished poet and publisher issued David Lehman's new poetry book, "Playlist" at the same time as my own "No Time like Now," so there are now two great books around. Here is my poem:

NO WEATHER HAIKU

Smart has a ceiling, stupidity has a floor.
Falling is faster climbing slow.
If you want out go for the door.
Whatever you do go in the door.
If you go out go out the door.
Some of it is history that bag of germs
and some of it is window-sills still wet with tears.
I love the doors of New York in the frigid haikus
of december. I have keys to them all.

This was evidently written in December and it's now mid-May in New York and freezing. Climate change is not caused by poems, but they can sure forecast. You will notice that this poem is attempting to overstress the ubiquitous idiocy of our meteo-political climate by shouting at the inmates (people) to do the obvious: go in and out the door and be brave. History, that bag of germs intentionally left coma-less if not comatose in the poem, is not about to succumb to its misery. Not in New York. I have the keys here, but if you need to go in and out don't ask me for permission. I hope you enjoy this crank I never forgot after moving back to New York half a century after I swore to never.

Writing New York: Cornell University Press Author Panel (Tuesday, May 21, 6 PM)

At The Cornell Club-New York [Tues, May 21]
6 East 44th Street

Cornell University Press Authors:
David Lehman, Robert W. Snyder, and William J. vanden Heuvel

Moderated by:
Dean John Smith, Director of Cornell University Press

Join The Cornell Club- New York for a moderated panel discussion on their work and commonality between the authors- the New York experience as a central character. The discussion will be followed by a book signing. A rare opportunity to see the inside of that most secretive club, usually closed to the public, and to "meet the press."

David Lehman
In One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, David Lehman brings the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. 

Robert W. Snyder 
A tribute to Washington Heights, Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. 

Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel
In his new memoir, Hope and History: A Memoir of Tumultuous Times, the Ambassador recounts inspiring stories from his eight decades as a soldier, lawyer, political activist, and diplomat. 

 6:00 pm reception; 6:30pm panel discussion, gratis. Registration is required.

Email K.Alman@cornellclubnyc.com or click here to register.

"Platonic Love" [by Curt Anderson]

We dine at Adorno and return to my Beauvoir.
She compliments me on my Bachelard pad.
I pop in a Santayana CD and Saussure back to the couch.
On my way, I pull out two fine Kristeva wine glasses.
I pour some Merleau-Ponty and return the Aristotle to Descartes.
After pausing an Unamuno, I wrap my arm around her Hegel.
Her hair smells of wild Lukacs and Labriola.
Our small talk expands to include Dewey, Moore and Kant.
I confess to her what’s in my Eckhart. We Locke.
By this point, we’re totally Blavatsky.
We stretch out on the Schopenhauer.
She slips out of her Lyotard and I fumble with my Levi-Strauss.
She unhooks her Buber and I pull off my Spinoza.
I run my finger along her Heraclitus as she fondles my Bacon.
She stops to ask me if I brought any Kierkegaard. I nod.
We Foucault.
She lights a cigarette and compares Foucault to Lacan.
I roll over and Derrida.

[first published in Poetry, February 2000]

PARIS PERFORMANCE AGENDA MAY 2019 [by Tracy Danison]

Paris Performance Calendar is a work-in-progress “dance syllabus”, complemented by essays, articles and interviews from The Best American Poetry and other publications. 

PERFORMANCES & CREATORS TO LOOK FOR ON THE ROAD TO SUMMER 2019 [by Tracy Danison] 

The run-up to Summer features many dance and dance performance and theater performance pieces that will figure in live programs into 2020.

L’ILLUSTRE THEATRE DES FRERES SABBATINI - theater of objects • 2015 • Yannick Toussaint - Cie Histoire d'Eux • 30 minutes • Théâtre du Fil de l’eau – 20, rue Délizy, Pantin, 18 May, 15h, 16h, 17h, 18h, 19h and 21h; 19 May 14h, 15h, 16h, 17h, 18h and 19h • 10e biennale internationale des arts de la marionette  Α The greatest plays of the ages on an traditional Italian stage just two-and-a-half-feet wide by collective Cie Histoire d'Eux,  led by Yannick Toussaint since 2005. Marionette specialists, Histoire has used many different approaches, including shadow play (Nasreddine et autres histoires - 2012), black light (Sale temps en eaux troubles… - 2013), and video and magic (Dans la bouche - 2018). Ω Director: Yannick Toussaint / Performers: Yann Berriet, Yannick Toussaint, Laurent Diwo, Agnès Briatte / Scenography: Yannick Toussaint, Charline Dereims with aid from Valentin Monin et Léo Taulelle / Graphic design: Laurent Diwo / Music: Ludovic Derrière and Jean-Nicolas Mathieu

Yannick Toussaint - Cie Histoire d'Eux performance calendar

TOUT SEMBLAIT IMMOBILE  – Theater performance • 2013 • Nathalie Béasse • 70 minutes • Théâtre de la Bastille, 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 May, 18h30 • OCCUPATION#3 Α Continuing an exploration of the roots of her endeavor, Nathalie Béasse decocts a story of experts confounded and inexplicable transitions towards… narrative and, once again, the fear, gladness and magics of childhood. Nathalie Béasse’s creations include an extensive in situ series entitled mes petites météorities. All the works presented during occupations are based on previous creations except aux éclats, a work-in-progress. Ω Concept, script and set design: Nathalie Béasse in collaboration with, Étienne Fague, Érik Gerken and Camille Trophème / Lighting: Natalie Gallard / Music: Camille Trophème / Set: Étienne Baillou / Painting: Julien Parsy

ROSES – Theater performance • 2014 • Nathalie Béasse • 70 minutes • Théâtre de la Bastille, 21 and 22 May, 20h ; 23 - 25 May, 21h • OCCUPATION#3 Α roses is free adapation of Richard III, providing the instrument of translation from sensation and fairy tale towards examination of the human condition with an experiment in literary-figure role-playing. Nathalie Béasse’s creations include an extensive in situ series entitled mes petites météorities. All the works presented during occupations are based on previous creations except aux éclats, a work-in-progress.  Ω Concept, script and set design: Nathalie Béasse in collaboration with Étienne Fague, Érik Gerken, Béatrice Godicheau, Clément Goupille and Anne Reymann / Lighting: Natalie Gallard / Music: Nicolas Chavet and Julien Parsy

SOFTCORE – A HARDCORE ENCOUNTER • 2018 • Lisa Vereertbrugghen • 45 minutes • La Dynamo de Banlieues Bleues, · 22 & 23 May 2019, 20h  • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α Lisa Vereertbrugghen explores how the “softcore” (body) mixes it up with “hardcore”, the heart-seizing techno-style music that vibrâtes through a dancer at 200 beat per minute. With live music remixed with her own voice, she reonstitutes an expérience of a body that is porous, supple, ready to adapt in a poetic and analytic tableau vivant. Ω Concept, choreography and performance: Lisa Vereertbrugghen / Sound: Michael Langeder / Lighting: Vera Martins / Artistic advisors: Madison Bycroft, Sabine Cmelniski, Nestor Garcia Diaz

Lisa Vereertbrugghen performance calendar

CO-PULATION – Theater of objects   • 2019 • Fu Le - Cie Tetrapode • 60 minutes • ECAM - Théâtre du Kremlin-Bicêtre, 24 May, 20h30  • 10e biennale internationale des arts de la marionette Α Choreography working around the quest for differentiation - emotion, sensation, gesture - to escape solitude. Fu Le and the cie Tetrapode migrated from Taiwan to Paris and are known for their carefully elaborated scenography ; Fu Le is a performance artists as well as sculptor, author and photographer. His other dance performances include A distant land (2017) and Raining ropes (2015) Ω Choreography: Fu Le / Performers: Cie Tetrapode / Production: Cie Tetrapode ECAM Théâtre du Kremlin-Bicêtre

Fu Le performance calendar

STEREO • 2019 • Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – Cie Le principe d’incertitude • 50 minutes • MC93 – Bobigny, 25 May2019, 19h 30; 26 May, 18h • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α Stereo – performed by Liz Santoro – explores the interaction of movement and the signs that produce and surround it. As she dances her solo piece, a video feed allows the dance performer Cynthia Koppe to write and present her thoughts and feelings in real time from New York; a voice synthesizer enables Santoro to hear and respond to Koppe through movement. The complex of language-body-movement and mind through the filter of scientific notions is a fundamental theme of Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s excellent work, which turns out to be among the most emotionally poignant dance performances available today. Ω Concept: Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard with Cynthia Koppe / Performer live: Liz Santoro / Performer distant: Cynthia Koppe Music: Greg Beller / Costumes: Reid Bartelme

Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard – Cie Le principe d’incertitude performance calendar

NEAR • 2018 • Ballet Cullberg & Eleanor Bauer • 60 minutes • MC93 – Bobigny, 25 May 21h & 26 May, 16h30 • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint Denis Α The performers of the Ballet Cullberg invite a choreographer to work provisionally with them and, after a trial period, decide whether to go on to finish the project. Near, a piece on gesture, the individual and the group, and the relation between a broad variety of subjects and matters and persons the result of this process. Ω Concept : Eleanor Bauer, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad & Yung Lean / Choreography: Eleanor Bauer / Performers: Ballet Cullberg : Adam Schütt, Anand Bolder, Camille Prieux, Daniel Sjökvist, Eleanor Campbell, Gesine Moog, Giacomo Citton, Katie Jacobson, Mohamed Y. Shika, Suelem de Oliveira da Silva, Sylvie Gehin Karlsson, Unn Faleide / Music: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad & Yung Lean with Frederik Valentin / Scene: Josefin Hinders with Linnea Birkelund  / Costumes: Pontus Pettersson/ Lights: Jonatan Winbo / Rehearsals : Lisa Drake

Eleanor Bauer performance calendar

WALK#3 • 2019 • Joanne Leighton • +/- 240 minutes • Starting points: Regard du cygne, Micadanses (near Saint Paul in the Marais), l’Atelier de Paris (at the Cartoucherie) and Canal St Martin – Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (Porte Dorée), 1 June, 17h • June Events • Walking, Anne Thérèse de Keersmaeker believes, is the purest form of dance. Walking is the first of our gestures that turns ordinary moments into intentional and unique movement. De Keersmaeker’s objective for last September’s Slow Walk was to “meditate” the urban environment and re-appropriate it. Joanne Leighton’s Walk#3 invites participants to consider “Step by step, what world are we making?”. The walk from the Regard du cygne dance-performance space, a bit over five kilometers, which I recommend, brings you through working class, gentrified and immigrant neighborhoods that represent pretty well Paris (and France) hors tourisme today. The walk is followed at 19h with the in situ performance 9000 pas (“9000 steps”) at the Musée nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. Ω Choreography & direction: Joanne Leighton / Choeographer-performers: Lauren Bolze, Marion Carriau, Alexandre Da Silva, Marie Fonte, Marie-Pierre Jaux & Arthur Perole / Music : Drumming, Steve Reich / Sound: Peter Crosbie / Lighting: Sylvie Mélis / Costumes : Alexandra Bertaut / Set(s): Tovo & Jamil / Production: WLDN

Joanne Leighton performance calendar

RITUEL POUR UNE GÉOGRAPHIE DU SENSIBLE – Dance performance and installation, complemented with GÉOGRAPHIE CORPORELLE, an apprenticeship in touch • 2018  • Julie Nioche• 60 minutes/installation • Maison des Métallos, 2 June, 15h – 18h ; 3 June, 14h – 17h ; 7 June, 14h – 17h ; 8 June, 18h – 21h30 ; Géographie corporelle, 7 & 22 June, all day :  •  Α Julie Nioche’s dance performance installation invites spectators to become co-creators in a ritual in order to make their bodies their own country with a ritual that enables easy passage over their boundaries of imagination, psychology and perception. Accompanied by dance performers, up to forty participants use installations called “At home”, “On the way” and “From the center” that help them consider how they embody their bodies and relations with others. Miléna Gilabert created Géographie and is accompanied for the apprenticeship sessions and aided by Blandine Minot Stora, Cécile Brousse and Cécile Ravenel ; sessions last 20 minutes. The ritualization concept of Rituel has its roots in the experience of Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan, who founded Taldans, a theater research laboratory in Istabul in 2003. During the violent repression of the 2013 pro-democracy demonstrations in Turkey artist-activists such as Sizanli and Kaplan created meeting and assembly spaces that enabled continued human exchange and toleration in the midst of the violence. Julie Nioche is a dancer, choreographer and osteopath. She founded and heads up the association A.I.M.E., which looks to spread knowledge about the body to the general public and which has developed Rituel. Nioche’s other recent works include Nos amours (2016), Qu’est-ce qui vous amène? (2017), La taille de nos âmes (2018) and Rituel pour une géographie du sensible (2018).  Ω Concept and performers: Julie Nioche, Filiz Sizanli et Mustafa Kaplan / Music: Alexandre Meyer / Set : Laure Delamotte-Legrand with the aid of Vincent Gadras  / Installation management : Max Potiron

Julie Nioche perfomance agenda

The Day Doris Day Said Good Night [by David Lehman]

The great Doris Day, who died the other day, was celebrated for her work in romantic comedies of the 1960s. She was box office gold with James Garner, Cary Grant, and Rock Hudson. But her real achievement was as a singer. In musical movies she gave outstanding performances as Ruth Etting (in Love Me or Leave Me in 1955) and as Mrs Gus Kahn (in I'll See You in My Dreams in 1953). One of the finest of all Big Band vocalists, whose version of "Sentimental Journey" is a madeleine that can transport you to 1945, she sang with the Les Brown Orchestra when swing was king.

Maybe her biggest single hit was the Academy Award-winning song of 1956 in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much inwhich she played opposite James Stewart. In honor of Doris Day, "Che Sera, Sera" was sung at sing-alongs in smart clubs all over the nation yesterday.

Doris gets her own day in my Playlist:

1 / 4 / 18

Doris Day is a great screen name because
of Oscar Levant’s witticism  (he knew Doris Day
“before she was a virgin”) but mostly because
of the voice of Doris at break of day or when
driving on Rte 17 and listening to  her sing
“Sentimental Journey” with Les Brown (“and
his band of renown”) and “Dream a Little Dream
of Me” or “Someone Like You,” “A Hundred Years
from Today,” or “Love Me or Leave Me,”
the face cherubic, the flip side of Sinatra’s
brooding in Young at Heart, blonde
and relentlessly upbeat, but there is sex in that voice