The Best American Poetry

My Body, Take and Eat. Or: Sermon on Her Mound [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 2: 17

(A disclaimer: The following opinions, words, indulgences are mine and mine alone.—jae.)

Let today’s appropriately Lenten Old Testament lectionary reading—that mess about the serpent and the fruit of that goddamed (quite literally) tree—serve as my prologue. Or, if not that, then in the words of Waylon Payne as “The Killer” himself, Jerry Lee Lewis in 2005’s Walk the Line:

God gave us a great big apple, see, and He said. "Don't touch it." He didn't say touch it once in a while. He didn't say take a nibble when you're hungry. He said, "Don't touch it. Don't think about touching it. Don't sing about touching it. Don't think about singing about touching it.”

Me, I’ve touched and nibbled that apple. I’ve stolen it from orchards aplenty (oh, Augustine!), baked it into pies, stewed from it ciders of bouquets both voluptuous and vinegar, set it atop heads and shot arrows straight through (and what exactly did William Tell, hmmm?). I have dared to eat the peach, I’ve rubbed the banana, fondled the melon, pear-treed the partridge, and bitten the berry until the juices veritably gushed.

But this is not a confession. I’m repentant only in theory.

This, Brothers and Sisters, is a sermon.

I’m looking at a picture of Jesus as I compose this. Unfairly blue-eyed and ridiculously rosy-cheeked, his right hand is raised in a gesture of benediction, and his beard is, a bit hilariously, curled in ringlets. It’s certainly not my favorite picture of the Lord, but it’s not his face that concerns me here. It’s what lies in this print’s geographic middle: Jesus’ ripe, red-as-a-valentine heart. A cross blossoms from its upper cleft. A tangle of thorny vines (which, unfortunately evokes Pamela Anderson’s tattooed upper arm à la “Barb Wire”) strangles it to near infarction. And: It’s on fire.

Behold the Sacred Heart of God.

I’m occasionally asked how I reconcile both the erotic and the religious impulse in my work. My answer is—with greater confidence and ease than I do in my day-to-day life, sadly. Even so, there are lusts and longings that I’ve celebrated in various poems (some of which I’ve also and alas celebrated in various beds) that are not just sternly frowned upon by Scripture, but outright verboten. In fact—and this troubles me greatly—these are deeds for which, in some eras hence and in some contemporary regimes, the price of their doing is death. It is with gutting ambivalence that I always come back to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. Yes, Jesus stepped in on her behalf and told the stone-throwing hypocrites to take a hike. But he was also vodka-clear in his command to the woman: Go and sin no more.

Well… crap.

Martin Luther was of the opinion that as people of faith, when we sin, we ought sin boldly, trusting in Christ alone for our salvation. (Reason number 8 why I’m a Lutheran.)

But sin, unlike sex, isn’t precisely an act. It’s a condition. A terminal disease.

“The day thou eatest therof, thou shalt surely die.”

So whatever The Erotic is (argue amongst yourselves), it damn sure ain’t safe.

But then again, neither is a God whose thorn-pocked, fiery heart is splintered by a cross. A God who so loved the world that he let himself be ripped to fleshy shreds on Skull Hill some two millennia ago. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clean, it wasn’t safe.

Christ, however, is more than his crucifixion. He’s the very embodiment of God’s grace, forgiveness, joy, humility, and absolute concern for the well-being of every soul in every body that has or ever will have lived upon this twirling solar satellite we call Earth.

But: Christ is also his crucifixion.

Likewise, The Erotic is more than just cock and pussy. It’s a state of sensual fuck-it-all-ness. It’s knowing full well that the apple you’re eating bloody will kill you, but swallowing it anyway, fearing neither death nor bedevilment in the gulp-down. It’s the awareness that even though you’re eating it, it’s not this apple precisely that you’re hungry for. It’s the hunger that precedes the apple. The thirst that can only be quenched by more thirsting.

But—and make no mistake—The Erotic is also and indeed cock and pussy (configure as you will).

It’s no secret that poets are notoriously horny—or, if you will, notorious in the telling of horny tales. Moreso than the average Jack or (ahem) Jill? Oh, I think not. Sinning on paper is the safest of all. You can’t catch anything, there's no need for birth control, and if you don’t want to overtly cop to a particular kink, you can write it off as ‘poetic license’ with a mere wink and lick of the lips.

And I like to think that God has a heart for poets. King David—that sinning psalmster—was utterly, unapologetically beloved by the Lord. But David suffered greatly at the hands of his own urges. As have I. As have we all.

So already-broken hearts have the tendency to get busted up even more. And hands a body craved so desperately upon it, when gone, leave the ghost-scars of longing. And nevermind with what fervor you whetted its blade upon your skin: Desire's knife, left unused, rusts in its sheath. Night flees from daylight, and lovers’ arms turn cold.

No. There is nothing safe in this world, or, perhaps, the next.

But looking up at the Sacred Heart of Christ, and thinking of every love I’ve blundered, every lust I’ve suffered, every apple I’ve ever been the I of, I’m resigned to an altogether un-contrite gladness.

In a Day of Pentecost sermon preached last year at Martin Luther Church, Zürich, the pastor (whose name is lost to my memory) proclaimed: Gott kommt mit Feuer—God comes with fire.

Well. So do I, Brothers and Sisters. So do I.

--Jil Alexander Essbaum

(This was not written as a response to Lisa's post which in turn was not written as a response to Denise’s—I wrote it before I read Lisa’s—but Glory Be!, lookie the collective unconscious at work! I find this to be a fine, fine serendipity. -jae)

Ed. note: from the archive. Posted February 16, 2008.

Introducing Emily Dickinson, part II: A Loaded Gun [by David Lehman]

Emily Got Her Gun

Like many other readers, I have long been fascinated by Emily Dickinson's poem #764, which has instigated much commentary and many conflicting opinions:

My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a Day 
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --

And now We roam in Soverign Woods --
And now We hunt the Doe --
And every time I speak for Him --
The Mountains straight reply --

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through --

And when at Night -- Our good Day done --
I guard My Master’s Head --
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow -- to have shared --

To foe of His -- I’m deadly foe --
None stir the second time --
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --
Or an emphatic Thumb --

Though I than He -- may longer live
He longer must -- than I --
For I have but the power to kill,
Without -- the power to die --

Why does the poet present herself as an instrument of volcanic (“Vesuvian”) power? Why does she adopt a masculine, even a phallic persona? How are we to understand the paradoxes of the final stanza, the first one a beautiful example of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus, the second an elegant antithesis? To enter this terrain is to stray into heavily contested space.

Some feminists infer a suppressed, pent-up energy ready to explode. Was the poet, about whom we know so little, full of murderous fury? Adrienne Rich believed that the poem is “about possession by the daemon.” In A Loaded Gun, his 2010 novel centering on Dickinson, Jerome Charyn describes “a woman maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” Camille Paglia will have none of it. “My Life had stood” is “one of Romanticism’s great transsexual self-transformations.” It is also, Paglia writes, a “Romantic vampire poem,” with the gun representing “Dickinson as denatured vampire, a masculine maker of sadistic poetic speech.” Paglia’s views, in her irrepressible prose, are a pleasure because they quicken thought, but her musings will not necessarily facilitate a close reading of the poem.

The identification of the poet with a rifle is the mystery that confronts any reader. In “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Dickinson presents herself as “a boy.” Here Dickinson announces from the start that her life is “a Loaded Gun” and that it is as a gun that she is speaking. The unambiguous first line of the poem, even if isolated from the rest of the poem, may arouse endless speculation. It is the poem’s final mystery, never to be solved, though I rather like the theory that the gun stands for Emily’s power as a poet.

Some maintain that the poem is Dickinson’s depiction of marriage in which inevitably the husband must kill the wife. One reductive reading identifies the speaker as a woman in a patriarchal society who can escape victimhood only by joining forces with the ruthless male hunter, the gun’s owner. To Helen McNeil, a scholar influenced by Paul de Man, the solution to the final stanza is that “Dickinson knows she is immortal” – knows that her poems will live on. “The poet as pure poem-machine never dies,” McNeil writes, as if the immortality Dickinson imagined were between the covers of a book, a purely linguistic accomplishment.[1] Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that the poem’s speaker is Death, and I suppose that, by the logic of a metonymy, with the gun a stand-in for Death, you can make the case.[2] But while it may help us to understand the riddling paradoxes of the poem’s great final stanza, the danger of this reading is that it disregards the opening words of the poem: “My Life had stood.” No, the speaker is not death but a gun with “a Life”; not an end but a means; “pure instrumentality,” as Helen McNeil would have it. In a turn of phrase that vaults me back to the 1980s and the heyday of deconstructive criticism, McNeil adds her view that the poem has “an element of sublime parody” because “to be a gun is to be only a gun.”

          Leave aside interpretation imposed on the poem from without, whether based on biographical speculation, theoretical position, or ideological conviction, all of which are on display in Dickinson criticism. The critics, ingenious though some are, do not give enough thought to the religious impulse in Dickinson’s poetry – and to the extent that her art illustrates the maxim that sacred things surround themselves with mystery.

Let’s look at the uncanny last stanza, the “closing riddle-signature” (Wolff). The chiasmus, or reversal of terms, in the first two lines is breathtaking: “Though I than He - may longer live / He longer must - than I -”  Then comes the magnificence of the final paradox. “For I have but the power to kill, / Without - the power to die – ” The rifle has the power to kill – we can see that. The rifle may endure longer than its mortal owner if it is well-made and has been used and cleaned with care. But what is the power to die that the master has?

As a Romantic in the mode of Keats, Dickinson is capable of transmuting death into “an ecstasy of woe.” She believes in an afterlife that makes sense of life and death. The metaphor of hunter and gun is at the service of this belief. When, in “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty,” the assertion depends on the same associative logic that animates Dickinson’s poems. If roses were not subject to the laws of birth, growth, decay, and death, would they be as beautiful? Were all to survive any and all fatal shocks, could our actions have any moral significance? In the moral realm, therefore, to die is a “power” informing all human acts and justifying virtuous lives.

In the final stanza of Dickinson’s poem, the distinction between “may” (indicating possibility) and “must” (implying both inevitability and a moral imperative) is all important. As an inanimate object, the rifle may outlive its owner, just as a pencil may outlive an author. But as a bare, forked animal with a soul, the owner must live longer if we understand time under the aspect of eternity – if there is such a thing as eternity, and our actions live on after us and have a moral value. And to die is a “power,” not just a necessity but also a privilege, because it is death that gives consequence to human agency. Emily may not have approved of Walt Whitman’s long lines and “barbaric yawp” – she never read him but says she heard that he was “disgraceful”  --  but she would certainly have agreed with him that “to die is different from what anyone suppos’d, and luckier.” Death is the pre-condition for the immortality of the soul, the affirmation of which may be the most radical thing about Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Ed. Note: For part one of this essay, click here. For the author's reading of "Ozymandias," click here.

[1] Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson (Virago, 1986), pp. 174-178.

[2] Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Dickinson’s Use of the Romantic Grotesque” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Prentice-Hall, 1996), p. 128

An Interview with Elaine Equi [by Aspen Matis]

Elaine Equi's witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Among her other titles are Sentences and Rain, Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program at The New School. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Equi via email about her newest book of poetry, the poetic nature of eccentricity and mundanity, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, and the bewitching powers of 17th century poet Robert Herrick.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Funny you should ask. I was just thinking that my inner life seems to have disappeared. I’m not quite sure why that happened, but I do know that I think of poetry as a tool for getting back in touch with it. By inner life, I mean some larger sense of self — what people used to call “soul” or “psyche.” I know meditation is helpful in that regard, and I do a little of that. But for me, the fastest and most reliable road inward is poetry.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I think poetry can do all of those things. I like the way poetry can articulate moments we all experience that might otherwise go unnoticed. Haiku is a great form for making you more focused — mindful and appreciative of what’s going on around you. But I also love poetry that opens up imaginative and aesthetic space. I like fantasy and speculative realities — time travel, clones, dream worlds.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

I am honestly not a very radical person. I’m just not the type. I consider myself more of an eccentric. I have a poem, “Ode to Weird,” that says “All poets are weird/ even when their poems/ try to appear normal.” I was being playful but also truthful. Recently, I’ve discovered there’s a whole critical movement devoted to defining and exploring the notion of weirdness. The late Mark Fisher has an excellent book, The Weird and the Eerie, on this subject.

Stylistically, do you consider yourself a minimalist? 

I think I go on a little too much to be a true minimalist, but my writing is definitely informed by my love of short poems. Some of my favorite poets are Sappho, Basho, Issa, Williams, Niedecker, Creeley, Aram Saroyan, Joe Brainard, and Rae Armantrout. I like aphorisms, epigrams, fragments, haiku, lists, jokes, and concrete poems. In short, I never came across a short poetry form I didn’t like.

The Intangibles, your newest book of poems was praised widely. Of it, Albert Mobilio wrote, “Always count on Elaine Equi’s nimble gymnastics to flip the ordinary around and create something rich and strange… These poems do not wear their brooding hearts on their sleeves but rather flirt and banter, drawing us close before revealing their ruminative complexities.” Bob Holman praised the collection, writing, “If Emily Dickinson were alive today, her name would be Elaine Equi. Each of these poem gems is a secret; to know them, simply read them.” What was the impetus and engine of this latest collection? 

I’m very much a poet of the mundane, so there are poems about pills, perfume, food, yoga, and reading murder mysteries. But I also wanted to reflect on how technology and social media were increasingly playing a much bigger role in our lives (this was in 2019). I wanted to observe that shift, and at times, complain about it. However, I must say that since the pandemic, my attitude is changing. I’m grateful to be able to order what I need, teach my workshops online, and stay in touch with family and friends. I even sort of like Zoom poetry readings.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated with how technology is changing the way we communicate. I’m also interested in writing about the body, something that’s inherently grounded in the physical. And since I’m getting older — in poems about aging.

What else? Dance, visual art — anything to do with color.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I admire the wit of many poets from those eras, but Robert Herrick is my absolute favorite. He wrote great short poems and some long ones too. His work is succinct, often hilarious, and pretty racy for a vicar (a position he once held). There is also a magical side to his writing. Many of the poems are spells or charms for the purpose of courting his Muses/ mistresses, banishing evil sprites, and insuring the success of his book. Obviously, they worked.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

Photography has always been a big inspiration. I love taking pictures, looking at pictures, and thinking about pictures. I’ve already done several projects that combine words and images and I hope to do more in the future. Writing poems in the form of captions to go with my photos is very satisfying. It feels like two different sides of me are collaborating.

Most popular funeral songs [by David Lehman]

In the age of sabermetrics, they ("they, they who are known as they," as Kenward Elmslie has it), have tallied up the songs (and versions of same) most popular to play in funerals. Click here for a full run-down, or take away these teasers.

-- Sinatra leads the pack with "My Way." 

-- Both Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen are represented in the top ten, though the most popular version of Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" is said to be by Eve Cassidy rather than the star of "The Wizard of Oz" -- and people would apparently rather hear Gerry and the Pacemakers sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" than, say, John Raitt.

-- Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes in at number ten.

-- -- Vera Lynn's "We'll Say Goodbye" makes the list, which reminds me that the song puts in an appearance at the end of "The Singing Detective" -- which makes exceedingly smart use of songs popular in the year of the action, 1945: "Peg o My Heart," "Accentuate the Positive," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" . . .but I see I'm digressing into a different list. 

According to Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, authors of the cleebrated biography of Willem de Kooning, say that the painter would have liked to have Sinatra's "Saturday Night is the Loneliest night in the Week" to be playing at his funeral.

As for me, I'd have an orchestra play Arnold Newman's "Street Scene" as the funeral goers arrive. In a ceremony I would play a recording of Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" as sung by the song's lyricists (Betty Comden, Adolph Green) with Nancy Walker as a third voice. I think that recording is from 1960. As the ceremony ends, I'd like "Goodbye" played by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra. An instrumental. But at a party in someone's apartment later, people will play Sinatra's vocal from the 1958 album, "Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely."

Meanwhile, I think of the wit of Larry Rivers, the painter who started out as a jazz musician and loved playing his saxophone to the end of his days. Larry arranged to have his own recording of "Everything Happens to Me" to cap his funeral. For Sinatra's memorial the choice was inevitable: his signature song on radio and TV, "Put Your Dreams Away."  

from the archive; posted March 17, 2013.

On Anne Porter, Poet, 1911-2011 [by Lucette Lagnado, 1956-2019]

A 95-Year-Old Poet Finds Her Muse and Literary Praise

'You Can't Drive Anymore,
But You Can Still Write';
Homage to Her Late Son

By Lucette Lagnado (1956-2019)

The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 11, 2006 12:01 am ET

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- At 95, Anne Porter has senior moments, like finding a ticket that says "Keep This Ticket" in her purse and having no idea what it was for or how it got there.

It is one more frustration of getting old, along with relying on a walker to compensate for an uncertain gait and wearing oversize glasses to reinforce fading eyes. Mrs. Porter also finds inspiration in these setbacks, and that has helped to launch an unlikely, late-blooming literary career.

That mysterious ticket, for instance, inspired this poem:

I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country

Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border

And ask
To see my ticket.

Mrs. Porter was 83 years old when her first volume of poetry, "An Altogether Different Language," was published in 1994. The book was named a finalist in the National Book Awards. A judge of the awards, David Lehman, a poet and professor at The New School in New York, subsequently decided to include Mrs. Porter in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, placing one of her longer poems alongside the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.

"Anne Porter is a marvelously talented poet who has not yet received the recognition that is her due," says Mr. Lehman, who praises her work for its "literary simplicity and directness."

Asked why she keeps writing poems through her 80s and 90s, Mrs. Porter responds that art may be the only pursuit that old age can't wreck:

"You can't sing anymore, you can't dance anymore, you can't drive anymore -- but you can still write," she says.

Poetry is a field filled with productive old people. Stanley Kunitz, the American poet laureate who died in May at the age of 100, was writing poems and being published till the end of his life. The late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize when he was nearly 70. John Ashbery, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is prolific at nearly 80. The new U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall, is 78 and still working.

Mr. Hall muses that some elderly poets may find the medium well-suited to the rigors of old age: "Poems are made for other persons to read but made out of silence and solitude, and perhaps there is more silence and solitude in the world of the old," he says.

Mrs. Porter has developed a knack for chronicling the rigors of old age with biting verse, as in "Old in the City":

You stay away from doctors,
They'd send you to the hospital,
Where pieces are cut out of you,
And after that you die.

She has done readings at Canio's Books, a literary hangout here in Sag Harbor, at churches, schools, libraries and at downtown New York bar called KGB, where many in the audience were in their 20s. "I was perfectly comfortable," she says.

Mrs. Porter was married to the artist Fairfield Porter, considered one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century. After he died in 1975, she found life on her own difficult, especially as her health declined. She lived with her youngest daughter for years. When her daughter married and moved out, Mrs. Porter suffered several crises. "I fell downstairs twice," she says. Alone and increasingly vulnerable, she decided to sell her home and move into an assisted-living community run by Quakers.

She was all set to go when her daughter and son-in-law offered her another option: come live with them in a nearby town, not far from the home she owned for decades with her late husband. They built Mrs. Porter a separate wing with vaulted ceilings, giving it the look and feel of a cathedral. In one sun-drenched room, they set up a desk and workspace and hung paintings and drawings by her late husband. In the space opposite the desk, they placed her favorite painting of all, of her late son, Johnny, who died in 1980.

One of Mrs. Porter's most acclaimed poems, written when she was in her early 70s, is a lengthy homage to her late son, who suffered from what she believes to be either schizophrenia or autism:

Though your shoelaces were hardly ever tied
And you seldom wore matching socks
You tried to behave with dignity in the village
"So as not to embarrass my little sisters."

...

And for years your times at home were so short and so far apart
That hearing them once called "visits" you turned white,
So deep was your speechless fear
That you might be only a guest at home, and have no home.

Mrs. Porter says she usually thinks about a poem and outlines it in her mind, and only then begins to sit down and write. She prefers scribbling verses on stray pieces of paper -- backs of envelopes, old invitations, whatever she finds at hand. Only when she has a final version does she sit down and begin to type it up.

Shunning computers, she works on an ancient manual typewriter belonging to her late husband. It is hard for her to walk, so she stuffs a pouch attached to her walker with notes and drafts and rolls it around from room to room.

After her 1994 book, she published "Living Things" this year. It contains the poems from her earlier collection and 39 new ones. This year, her publisher, Zoland Books, now an imprint of Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, asked for more poems that would go in a new anthology.

Being able to live with her family has helped her with her poetry, she suspects. "I feel sheltered. While I am in bed, I can hear them laughing and I know they are good," Mrs. Porter says.

She adds: "Institutional life is a little chilling to a person's imagination."

Born in 1911 to a family of Boston Brahmins, Mrs. Porter remembers writing poetry as a child of 7. She attended Bryn Mawr and Harvard, but dropped out of both. After her marriage, she raised five children and quietly continued writing.

The marriage was stormy, she and others recall. Mrs. Porter led her life in the shadow of her husband. "There was a lot of hospitality -- cooking, plus raising five kids and she had her hands full," says Elizabeth Porter Balzer, her daughter. Whatever poems Mrs. Porter wrote, she wrote on the side.

She only threw herself into her own work as an artist after her husband died. "I remember realizing that I was alone, and I'd have to be more organized," she says. "I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write."

In the mid-1990s, David Shapiro, a poet and art critic decided to help Mrs. Porter find a publisher for her work. "I thought that she was hiding in an Emily Dickinson way," he recalls. Mrs. Porter received a $1,000 advance from Zoland.

Anne Porter at a reading held in September at the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary Church in Southampton, N.Y.

On a recent weekend Mrs. Porter read from her newest book at Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary, a Roman Catholic church in Southampton, N.Y., that she used to attend. The audience included parishioners who used to pray with her, many of them elderly, along with a sprinkling of artists.

She and her daughter took turns reciting "For My Son Johnny," as some in the room grew misty-eyed.

Afterward, lines formed and she greeted old friends who came up to embrace her and get her autograph. Finally, exhausted, she headed home with her daughter.

"People don't use their creativity as they get older," she said. "They think this is supposed to be the end of this."

Ed. note: Portrait of  Anne Porter by Fairfield Porter.

Amy Gerstler: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

Lost in the Forest

 

I'd given up hope. Hadn't eaten in three

days. Resigned to being wolf meat...

when, unbelievably, I found myself  in

a clearing. Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me:

their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks. I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke. I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

 

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk. I'm so hungry

my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?

"Drink up, sweetheart," she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

"Atta girl." Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell. "You'll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom," she says as

she leads me upstairs--her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Index of Women, a book of her poems, will be published in April by Penguin Random House. She is currently collaborating with Steve Gunderson on a musical play. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

"Estelle" [by Molly Arden]

Mom was somewhere north
of the kitchen watching the new girl, Estelle,
sashaying in her crisp apron with a dust-mop.
The bed posts trembled when her poof
passed over them as if they were living men.

Molly read a romance that first winter night
after Estelle put away the dishes fed the dogs 
and hung the wet laundry on the lines outside.
While she read the wind dried the garments 
in the cold February wind, on the verge of flying.

Both girls watched from their windows
as shivering sky creatures wore and inflated 
the pants and shorts of the daytime household.
Molly shivered thinking of her maid, Estelle,
who lived among the camisoles and slippers.

She lived among the camisoles and slippers
of the household like a fox in a nest of feathers.
Molly saw Estelle after her Saturday bath
when everyone else slept and kissed her own
breasts thinking of Estelle’s rounder ones.

Between the Lines [by James Cummins]

                     after A Moveable Feast

We only have Papa’s account of this,
That Scott Fitzgerald asked him to weigh in
With ‘absolute honesty’ on the question
That filled Fitzgerald’s heart with fear and dread:
Was he big enough?  Was he man enough
To please a woman?  “Zelda?” his friend asked.
Scott nodded.  “Yes, Zelda.  Who else?”

It’s clear Hemingway wants to reassure
Fitzgerald with a comforting response.
He fumes at women.  “They’re all alike. 
They want to destroy a man—it’s true!
Crazy Zelda’s trying to kill you.”
Scott looks up from his cherry tart:
“You don’t know anything about Zelda!”
Hemingway backs off that one like hot
Potato soup dropped in his lap by one
Of old Michaud’s careless waiters. 
He dips a spoon in his own cherry tart;
Outside he hears the racket of a car.

“Have you tried a pillow?” he asks quietly.
“You’ve got to get some purchase on that slope.
A pillow can facilitate your mount.”
Scott stares at his wine glass.  “I never know
Whether I’m in or not,” he says.
“When I ask, she gets disgusted.  Cries.”

At this Ernest almost upsets his wine.
He can’t abide a woman’s tears—he can’t!
They’ve tried their tricks on him and found
He’s what a man should be: a stone. 
They’ve tried the “too small” line before;
And sure, he’d spent some sleepless night
Reviewing his performance in the sack;
But if a woman can’t be satisfied,
He wasn’t going to take that on himself.

“What if she’s right?  What if I’m just too small?
Scott’s question broke through his friend’s reverie,
Who then slammed his hand down on the table:
“Let’s check it out!  Let’s go to le water.”
Scott suddenly looked blank.  “Well, I don’t know,”
He said.  “I mean, they do that in Pigalle—”
“For Christ’s sake, Scottie, I don’t want your balls!
You asked for my ‘absolute honesty.’
Let’s get some sort of assessment in hand.
So to speak.”  “So to speak,” Scottie sighed.

“Michaud!”  Now Hemingway was all business.
“Michaud, come help us out?  And bring Pierre.”
Scott looked alarmed.  “Ernie, old man—old sport—”
But Hemingway brushed all dissent aside.
“Don’t ‘old sport’ me!  Save it for your prose.
Come on, we’ll have a good old show-and-tell—
You show, the rest of us will tell.”  But Scott
Held firm, and only he and Hemingway
Repaired to le water, the dank men’s room,
Where Scott undid his belt and dropped his trou.

Now Hemingway’s a bit unclear about
What happens next: we’re given to believe
He checks Scott out, and then they reappear,
Attabler, with their cherry tarts and wine.
But old Michaud fills in the blanks for us.
One of his waiters, Francois, had the runs
That day, and so was seated in a stall
Reading Le Monde when Scott pulled down his pants
Francois’ account is somewhat vague because
He had to stare through a narrow crack;
But evidently Hemingway squatted,
Then got down on all fours so he could find
The ‘angle of the dangle’ as he called it.|
And Francois swears he heard him say,
“Pull it a couple times, see if it moves.”
But Francois’ English wasn’t, say, the King’s.

Now they’re sitting above their lunch again,
And Ernest is expansive.  This might mean
What Scott showed his friend in le water
Wouldn’t keep Hemingway awake at night.
“It’s not the size that counts; it’s the motion—”
His pal was one big friendly smile.
“Let’s hit the Louvre and size the statues up.
You’ll see—their scale is pretty much the truth.” 
A frightening image flared in Scottie’s mind:
Ernie measuring statues with a tape.

The Louvre was just a short walk from Michaud’s.
Scott stammered out, “I really should get back”—
Ernie seemed more obsessed with … that ... than he.
“Zelda can't make you any more a man
Than some whore you could pick up in Pigalle.
A pal can boost your confidence, that’s all.”
But Scott was adamant outside the bar.
They let the tarts settle and had a smoke;
Ernie studied his friend as they stood there.
Was that the problem then?  Scott was a poof?
He’d never judge a friend.  Then he thought
Maybe he’d pushed him too far for one day.
“I guess you’re right,” he said, “it’s getting late.
The Louvre’s a project for another day.”

Except they did go to the Louvre that day;|
And Hemingway explained to Fitzgerald,
“The proper measurement of man is man.”
Scott still had his theories about finance,
How these abstractions can suck out your soul;
And Ernest still thought life a game
Between whose lines a man’s soul finds its measure.
They stopped at Dingo’s on the way back home
To drink apéritifs and watch the sun
Slip through the pink clouds of the Paris dusk.
Ernie held up his glass to catch the light,
And then intoned, without cracking a smile:
“A rosé is a rosé is a rosé.”

Introducing Emily Dickinson, part 1 [by David Lehman]

Emily Dickinson is one of the chief glories of American poetry because, in her poems, she weds originality of vision with an idiosyncratic style raised to a rhetorical ideal. Her characteristic utterance is the brief lyric, often in quatrains, evincing the power of compression, the resolve to “tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” a staccato rhythm, elliptical leaps, and a unique system of punctuation, with the humble dash working to juxtapose, or separate, parts of thought. The twentieth-century editors who regularized her punctuation, removing dashes, and lower-casing her capital letters, did her a great disservice. Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught.

Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, nearly all of which were unread by anyone in her lifetime. She kept the poems tied up in a drawer. She averaged one a day in her most fruitful period, which coincided with the Civil War. Though she very seldom addressed the conflict, it didn’t go entirely unnoticed. “It feels a shame to be Alive -- / When Men so brave—are dead,” she wrote in 1863. But this is an exception. The external world did not much impinge on her. “Escape is such a thankful word,” she wrote, as if a concentration on ultimate things, the truths of the soul, required her to ignore temporal actualities.[1] Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. The one time she sent out her work, The Atlantic rejected it. She resisted the urge to repeat the effort not only because “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” but also because editors were bound to bungle things, and did. When, without her consent, a poem of hers was printed in The Springfield Republican, it vexed her that the editor inserted a conventional comma that she had deliberately omitted.[2]

The “belle of Amherst,” also known as the “mystic of New England,” gradually absented herself from society after a year attending the seminary that would become Mount Holyoke College. Her reclusive solitude is the fact at the base of legend and myth. Choosing to remain housebound, refusing visitors, she dressed in virginal white. In an introduction to a selection of her poems, John Malcolm Brinnin pictured a nun costumed as a perpetual bride in her father’s Amherst house: “When Emily Dickinson became the nun in the cloisters of her father’s house, enacting in her poems the bittersweet resignation of thwarted love and accepting marriage to nothing but the universe, she had unconsciously made a place for herself among the tragic heroines of drama and fiction.”[3] With a poet as secretive and private as Dickinson, the conjecture can quickly go from cloister to prison or dungeon. Summarizing Rebecca Patterson’s speculative biography The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), the poet Anthony Hecht makes shrewd use of an often misused adverb: in Dickinson’s life, Patterson “diligently discovers parental inadequacy, repressed homosexuality, and frustrated love.”[4]

Ever the provocateur, Camille Paglia contends that Dickinson’s poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated sadomasochist. Dickinson is nothing less than “Amherst's Madame de Sade.” In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia likens the poet to “the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”[5] Was Dickinson an inmate in a prison, a nunnery, or a Victorian house with an attic for an eccentric and slightly deranged maiden aunt? Maybe none of these things. What she was, by any standard, was an eccentric, a visionary, and a great American poet

Dickinson wrote poems that pose soluble riddles. The “it” in “I like to see it lap the Miles” is a train. She has poems that offer aphorisms (“Much madness is divinest Sense”) or metaphors that widen into allegories (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”). There are also capricious poems (“Bee! I’m expecting you!”) and tantalizing fragments.  “A Letter is a joy of Earth — / It is denied the Gods — ” is the whole of #1639.  Best of all are the poems that are finally inscrutable but infinitely suggestive, including otherworldly dramas of life beyond the grave: “I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died”; “I died for beauty”; “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”; “It was not Death, for I stood up”; “Death is the supple suitor.” She writes so often and so knowingly about death that the reader may wonder whether she has discovered the country “from whose bourn / No traveler returns” and has written her poems from the other side.

The poems have numbers, not titles, and the ones to which I keep returning have hearts of irreducible mystery. She can follow an opening line in a way that no one would have anticipated (see #640) or end a poem with the last word you’d expect (#510). Before an audience or a class, recite the first line of the former (“I cannot live with You”), ask people to nominate second lines, then astonish them with what Dickinson does, which I shan’t reveal here for fear of spoiling the fun.

 Anthony Hecht sees the riddling impulse as central to our understanding of her poetry, and I agree, but while there are riddling poems that are easy enough to solve, she specialized in enigmas and puzzles that tease the mind but keep their meaning hidden. This is less a strategy or a reflection of her disposition than it is an esthetic decision that follows from her respect for complexity and her distrust of easy answers. “The Riddle that we guess / We speedily despise,” Dickinson wrote.  Mystery is the link between art and religion, according to Stephane Mallarmé, and these sentences of his apply to Dickinson’s writing: “Every sacred thing that wishes to remain sacred envelops itself in mystery. Religions take refuge in arcana that are revealed only to the predestinate: art has its arcana, too."

Ed. note: For part two of this essay, please click here.

[1] “Escape -- it is the Basket / In which the Heart is caught / When down some awful Battlement / The rest of Life is dropt -- ”

[2] The poem: “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (#986), a riddle poem, the solution to which is a snake. The newspaper inserted the comma that Dickinson specified she did not want between lines three and four (“You may have met Him – did you not / His notice sudden is -- ”).

[3] “From the introduction to Emily Dickinson in the Laurel Poetry Series (1960).

[4] Anthony Hecht, Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (Atheneum, 1986), p. 85 Hecht’s essay is entitled “The Riddles of Emily Dickinson,” aiming his attention on her poems rather than her person.

[5] See the fascinating final chapter of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990).

The Importance of Martin Guerre, part two [by Joe Lehman]

Ed. note: Part one of this discussion of "Martin Guerre" was posted here on February 12.

I have been poring through the lyrics of the various songs from Martin Guerre the musical. The moment that has most directly affected me emotionally, is where Arnaud takes the stand in court and proclaims:

I'm a Protestant, yes
Of this I am proud
But to bring down your lives
This is not what I vowed
I vowed to love the Lord. 

I won't stand and see destroyed
the precious times we've all enjoyed…

I could easily substitute “Zionist” for “Protestant” to describe my own identity and how it has become seen as heretical to many of my friends and acquaintances on the Left. “I’m a Zionist, yes. Of this I am proud…” has a welcome ring to it. Imagine, then, a young Jewish adult obliged to proclaim his conviction in the belief of individual rights and freedoms, while simultaneously defending the existence and prosperity of the State of Israel, only to be turned away and called a racist pig, by the same progressive-minded individuals who lay claim to ownership of the belief of individual rights and freedoms.

The character of Guillaume is the consummate prejudiced demagogue of the show. He certainly has the most forceful lines:

Stand up and be counted, rise above the crowd
Say this in their memory, I will make you proud
Look around, can't you see what the world has become?
It is time we were cleansed of this Protestant scum!
By the blood of the martyrs, we will take up the sword
We will root out this cancer in the name of the Lord!
Everywhere is chaos, everywhere is doubt
Everywhere are heretics, the time has come to burn them out!

There are an infinite number of madmen throughout history, and if I follow Godwin’s Law, I could easily make an analogy to Hitler and Nazi Germany but it is just too easy a thing to do. (Ed. note: According to Godwin’s Law, if an argument goes on long enough, someone will surely compare someone else to Hitler.) Guillaume, as he is portrayed, can easily represent both a follower and a leader of a bigoted movement. He extends an appeal to lower-middle class resentments and desires:

I was born a poor man, just like each of you
Born to sweat and suffer as the poor must do
Working like a cart-horse, slaving in your field
Till my back is breaking I will never yield.

Furthermore, he exhibits a false paternalistic benevolence by reminding the fellow Catholic villagers of his roots in the community:

Baptiste, I knew your father
Albert, I knew yours too
Men who stood for decency just the same as you.

Finally, he assumes an air of traditional piety by resorting to religious exclamations:

Here I stand before you, bloody and unbowed
By the sword of Jesus
I will make you proud!

The conclusion of the show, where we have the final showdown among Guillaume, Martin, and Arnaud and Bertrande, is most illuminating. Enraged that he has no chance at winning over Bertrande’s affection, now that she is legally bound to Martin though still in love with Arnaud, Guillaume concocts the convoluted idea that it was both Martin’s and Arnaud’s plan from the start:

Right from the start, keep out Guillaume!
Keep him away, far from Bertrande, keep them apart!

All I did Bertrande, I did for you!
So true, so pure...I knew you deserved much more

(he lets Martin go and grabs Bertrande)

A Martin Guerre better than them
A Martin Guerre much more like me.

It would seem that “Martin Guerre” has become representative of both elevation and salvation -- for Arnaud, who is pure of heart, and for Guillaume, who is bitter and aggrieved. Guillaume is about to kill Martin with his knife, but Arnaud, who recognizes he has no place left in the equation except as the martyr, shields Martin and is stabbed to death in his place. He dies in Bertrande’s arms. In the melee, Guillaume too is killed, when another side character springs in and bludgeons him. Everything has come full circle.

It is Bertrande who voices the lesson to be learned from the entire experience:

When will we all learn?
We lived our lives in fear...
We say we love the same God yet there's blood on every hand!
Let him die for peace
Can't you understand?
If all we ever love is hate...
Will we ever hear?

Intolerance has indeed led the people of Artigat down the pathway to hell, from which the only recovery is reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant factions.

Here, in 2021 America, there has been a lot of talk in the news from the Biden administration about finding unity between the various competing factions that fall under the aegis of Republican and Democratic parties. But it is still early, and the future remains terribly uncertain. I only know that I, as an individual, can strive to be, and continue to be, a better person. Perhaps I take after Bertrande:

 I will carry on
till the fear has gone
till the day I find
There's someone who will hear!

There’s someone who will hear.

Ed. note: For part one of this discussion, click here.

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

Checking up on my baseball card collection [by Greg Pattenaude]

The Super Bowl is over and it's almost time for baseball. Spring training is starting; pitchers and catchers reported today. You wouldn’t know that looking out my window seeing at least a foot of snow covering the ground.  And half of the country is freezing. But I digress since I am involved in a baseball-related activity:  going through my baseball card collection. Like many my age, I started collecting in my youth during the mid-1960s, starting at age 7. The cards had been stored safely in my childhood home and for the last 30 years dutifully kept in shoe boxes within plastic bins in my basement.  And they probably would have been left alone but for another event in my house.

In a nearby area of the basement, I noticed an amount of water had accumulated on the floor. I had no idea where it came from, but quickly realized in horror that a small plastic tube that drained furnace condensation had come loose right above our record album collection. Drip, drip, drip. And the leak, apparently, had been going on for a while. Yes, record albums were ruined, even though they were kept in hard shell cartons. It turns out that there were tiny little holes on the tops and bottoms of these cartons; the perfect conduit for a drip from above. The vinyl is fine – mostly - but the jackets didn’t make it.  About 100 album jackets met this fate. I was not about let that get to my baseball card collection. 

I am happy to report that the cards are in good shape and unharmed. Some were shuffled around, but I managed to get them sorted back together by year. My main collection is from 1965 through 1969.  By 1970, I apparently wasn’t into as much. I’m not sure why, but I guess is my interests moved elsewhere, to walkie talkies, radio and electronic nerdy stuff.

The great players of the mid and late 1960s are in the collection: Aaron, Banks, Clemente, Mantle and a very young Reggie Jackson. But mostly, there are many not so famous ones. Topps, the card manufacturer, always guessed who the rookie stars for each team would be for the upcoming season. There were two faces on the front of the card. Most times they missed but other times they hit the jackpot, with at least one becoming a star, maybe even a Hall of Famer, and if you were really lucky, two would become big names. Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan were paired for the 1968 Rookie Stars card and is in my collection.

When I started collecting, I remember being offered a bunch of cards from older kids on my street. But these cards were from the 1950s – who would want them? Yes, it was very bad decision on my part.  Another bad decision was to use my Dymo Labelmaker to cover the team name if a player was traded and perhaps using a magic marker to black out the logo on his hat. Clearly, I had no idea about the long term investment of a ten cent expenditure. If I ever get a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, I will travel back to tell myself not to do that.

You might think my collection was for the bubblegum, but no; it was never about the bubblegum.  That was prohibited in my house.  Trident was the only one my mother would allow.  My gum was given to friends and helped promote silver filings.

I briefly returned to collecting in the last 1980s, thanks to work colleagues who were still into it.  But by then, other manufacturers, like Score and Fleer, had entered the baseball card business, and the long term value of collecting newer cards plummeted.  When you could buy an entire set, 792 cards, at the check out line at K-Mart, the magic was over.  I still have those, too.   If I had to guess, I have well over 3,000 cards.  

My collection is secure.  I ordered a supply of playing card boxes to keep the cards in perfect shape.  In fact, I didn't order enough the first time and had to order more.  The boxes will sit inside a plastic bin which will be in another plastic bin.  I might even look into filling out the collection for each year to keep myself busy and assuming I can afford it.  Plus, there is a place where you can send cards to be “graded”; a higher grade means a higher value.  That Koosman-Ryan card is probably worth something.  Thank goodness it was never used for bicycle spokes.

Like most things nostalgic, it was fun looking back, even if the reason was damaged records.

An Interview with Grace Schulman [by Aspen Matis]

Grace Schulman received the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement awarded by the Poetry Society of America. One of the country’s most distinguished living poets, she was inducted as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Schulman via email about her newest book The Marble Bed, poetry’s power to cut through rhetoric, and the transformation of personal excitement into art.

At age fourteen, you sent a poem you’d written to the poet Marianne Moore, thus opening the door to a long-lasting friendship. What was the greatest gift that relationship gave you?

In an exchange she wrote, “The flawless typing shows the work to its greatest advantage.” Elegant, humorous, what she couldn’t do to dress an honest response. The gift was her personal stature. I’ve envied her wisdom, humility, and courage in the face of adversity. She portrays the hero as having a “sense of human dignity / and a reverence for mystery.” I’ve tried to live up to those impossible standards. Failing to do so, I remember her saying that it’s all in the trying.

What is poetry’s role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Salvation. Because otherwise I’d be destroyed by the very thing I must express.

What do you see as poetry’s role in society?

Poetry is essential, all the more so now in a time of suffering. A good poem cuts through current rhetoric. It is written in the language of urgency. It bridges nations and genders that exist like unapproachable islands, enabling us to see things whole. It addresses the unspeakable with song. It allows us to listen to ourselves and to others. It annihilates death. Read a poem by Akhmatova, or even one by Li Bo, and hear the writer speak across time.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do?

Radical? Go to the library. It is the most radical institution we have. Read, read, read.

You served as the poetry editor of the Nation for over three decades and for twelve years you directed the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center. What’s something unexpected you learned at these exciting positions?

In my long tenure at The Nation, from 1971 to 2006, I came to treasure literary freedom, which is as crucial now as it was when Henry James mistakenly panned Whitman’s “Drum Taps” in an 1865 issue of the magazine. In my time there, I enjoyed reading all submissions myself, from the unknown farmer in Illinois to the latest offering from James Wright or May Swenson. I encouraged works in translation, and the publisher, James Storrow, gave pages of space to poems from Russia, Italy, Hungary. My work at the Poetry Center was built on my work at The Nation: some poets appeared in The Nation, read at the Y, and visited Baruch College, where I taught, and still do. I discovered that The Nation, which I steered, was the contest that offered readings and publication.

In many of your poems, mundane earthly moments become doorways through which to glimpse universal spiritual questions and truths. How do you achieve such agile leaps from the humdrum to the transcendent? 

I learned from Flaubert that if you look hard enough at any mundane thing, the result will be sympathetic. From the seventeenth-century poets, Donne, Vaughan, and Herbert, I discovered that close observation of the object will draw out human feelings and invite larger matters. From Marianne Moore I realized that even if universal truths are unattainable, the poet creates art in the search for them.

Your beautiful memoir Strange Paradise tells the story of your 50-year marriage to Dr. Jerome L. Schulman before his death in 2016. Did writing help your grieving process? 

My long marriage to Dr. Jerome Schulman has meant everything to me. A physician and scientist, he was passionate about the arts. Because his work centered on basic scientific principles and utilized a language above my comprehension, I didn’t know until now the extent of his contribution. He was a modest man, and so I’ll say this for him: his models are being used worldwide, and his laboratory’s findings in viral interferon and in messenger RNA are fundamental to vaccines in use today.

Science and poetry have much in common. Seeing is one. Einstein said he “saw” thought. DNA is built on a visual perception, the double helix. In poetry, there’s the image. Precision is another aim they share. The dead-rightness of accuracy. “Hurrah for positive science,” Whitman declared, and his cheer echoes in lines or particulars. The fusion of opposites is another trait, common to physicists and to poets like Blake and Keats. My own beloved scientist happened to read my work with discernment. Unfortunately, I could not fathom his language of t-cells and bi-functional antibodies and the like — until now, when I stretch my brain to understand his good work.

The Marble Bed transports readers into a subliminal landscape pulsing with love, loss, pain, wonder, and grief. The speaker offers what Poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips calls “an ode to life.” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes that “Each poem journeys far, wandering the territory of love’s psyche.” For me, reading The Marble Bed was a transcendent experience, and an access into my own impulses and longing, mortality and imagination. What would you like to share about your process? 

Thank you. Rowan and Yusef are great poets and I’m grateful for their praise. And for yours. As for process, what matters most to me is the transformation of personal excitement into art — that is, to make my journey through Genoa everybody’s journey. To let everyone know precisely what it’s like to smell Russian sage or roll in a wave’s foam at the shore’s edge. Transformation is the work of language. Finding the best words.

Are there any reliable critics? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Yes, reliable in a broad sense. A multiplicity of critics, each with sensitive opinions that may differ on occasion. That seems fitting, since we have a multiplicity of poets, a twelve-foot shelf, giving us a gamut of knowledge and feeling. Crowded though it may be, the field is less limiting than in the past. Poetry in English embraces a wider range of cultures and demographics, and a richer language for them. As for usefulness, any informed feedback is fodder for the poet. Also, of course, insightful criticism can sell books.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate you?

Waking in the morning to junipers at the bay and unlit streetlamps in the city. Seeing old things new and new things with joyful curiosity. Music, especially the mournful chords of Coltrane, the shaggy runs of Thelonious, the quicksilver notes of Art Tatum, the muted trumpet of Miles, and, latterly, the hard tones of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

What are you working on now?

Since my eighth book of poems came out last fall, I’ve been working on a “New and Selected Poems,” tentatively titled Again the Sun! For the New, the crises of our times have generated energy. And for the rest, I’m making difficult choices from past books. I’ve been partial to the poems that show change, I think toward freer forms, more natural speech. But — as Sondheim advises, “Let others make that decision, they usually do.”

Time For A Snack! Body Movement with Melissa Canter [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

It's time to push away from your desk, or get out of bed, or get off the couch, and take four (just four!) minutes to clear your head and get the oxygen flowing. This could be the start of something new:

I've known Melissa for my whole life. She's my cousin! Always hard-working and ambitious, Melissa spent two decades working (and succeeding) among the toughest sharks on Wall Street before turning to yoga and the Chinese moving meditation called qigong. She is now certified as a Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT) with Yoga Alliance and is internationally certified by the Chinese Health Qigong
 Association of Beijing, China.
 With over 10,000 hours of teaching, she has trained both students and teachers in the art of life-coaching as well as in numerous styles of yoga, meditation and qigong

Find out more about Melissa here.

-- sdl

Poetic License [by Jim Cummins]

I booked a four-way once.  I was sitting in a bar when War & Peace sidled up and sat down on the stool next to me.  "Gotta light?" she asked in a heavy Moscow accent.  "I don't burn books," I replied; she laughed a long, low, melodious Russian laugh.  "Actually," she said, "I only smoke afterwards," and winked, as she gently dragged a long blood-red fingernail across my cheek.  "Have you met my friend, Naked Lunch?"  I'd been so transfixed by the Russian beauty--there was so much of her!--that I hadn't seen the thin, waif-ish tart slipping up behind me.  She looked like a walking STD--tattoos, piercings, nose & navel rings, wearing a black leather jacket that couldn't conceal the fact she had nothing on underneath.  She must've seen the involuntary look of revulsion that passed over my face before I could readjust my bar mask.  She looked hurt.  "I know," she whispered, "but I bring a lot of coke to the table."  I hadn't thought of that; this could be my lucky night!  We continued to drink until W&P suggested we go over to her apartment and "sort things out."  I agreed, but Naked Lunch said, "First we need a little spice."  We pretended we didn't know what she meant but she knew we did.  So we looked around the room.  I saw Beloved sitting at a table with The Bluest Eye, but NL pointed out that Beloved was too old and TBE a little too young.  War & Peace agreed.  She said, "I met The Intuitionist at a signing once," motioning with her chin toward a table in the corner where TI sat, drinking alone.  "Whoa," I said.  "That's too spicy for me!" and we all laughed.  "How about a poet?" Naked Lunch asked.  "Don't turn around but Thomas & Beulah is sitting a few tables over."  T&B was writing assiduously in a notebook, next to a half-empy (or half-full, depending on how you looked at it!) glass of wine.  "I'm in," I grinned, and W&P and NL flipped a coin to see which one would make the approach.  As it turned out, T&B was more than eager to join us--and in fact, showed us all what "poetic license" really

meant, "all night long," as the song goes.  Damn, I love curling up with a good book!

The Haiku Masters of Japan drop in for a visit [by David Lehman]

Thanks to Bob Hass, I'm
reading the haiku masters
of Japan -- Basho,

Buson and Issa --
in one essential book: The
Essential Haiku,

published by Ecco,
with smart intro and useful
notes by Mr. Hass.

Examples follow.
(Translators do not observe
strict syllabic count).

Here is Basho as
rendered by B. Watson in
fifteen syllables:

"It's not like anything
they compare it to --
the summer moon."

And now for Buson,
trans. by Yuki Sawa and
Edith M. Shiffert:

"I go,
you stay;
two autumns."

Issa, the last of
the three, wrote the following
(trans. Robert Huey):

"Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants."

This post, which went up
ten years ago, concluded
with my rules-be-damned

three-word translation
of Basho’s famous beloved
haiku of the frog:

Pond.
Frog.
Splash.

The Many Faces of "Oy!" [by Mitch Sisskind]

"Oy" is one of the greatest words in any language and I've noticed that people of all backgrounds quickly pick it up and start using it. Let's take a look at some situations in which saying "Oy" is very appropriate (click on thumbnail for full-sized image): 

• 
• 
• 
• 

 

Cornelius Eady: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Yoon Kim

_____________________________________________________________

Handymen

 

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.

You can’t fix it.

The toilet babbles like a speed freak.

You can’t fix it.

The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.

You can’t fix it.

The screens yawn the bees through.

Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.

Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.

The frost heaves against the doorjambs,

The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.

No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,

No one schooled you in spare parts.

That’s what the guy says but doesn’t say

As he tosses his lingo at your apartment dweller ears,

A bit bemused, a touch impatient,

After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,

After the hard wind has lifted something away,

After the mystery has plugged the pipes,

That rattle coughs up something sinister

An easy fix, but not for you.

It’s different when you own it,

When it’s yours, he says as the meter runs,

Then smiles like an adult.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

CORNELIUS EADY’s poetry collections include: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation. [For more poems by and information on Cornelius Eady, click here.]

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

"One Thousand Words about Harry Mathews" [by Mary Maxwell]

     
    In some sense he brought it on himself.  Given his predilection for complex games of identity, why would anyone take Harry Mathews seriously as a poet? Yes, he was there at the beginning, with Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler and Locus Solus (funded by a modest inheritance received by Mathews).  And he was there in the early days of The Paris Review, so that his fictional My Life in CIA carries a certain plausibility, the underwriting of mid-century modernism by the U.S. government a real-life thriller not fully resolved.  In that particular case, the sheer marvelousness of Mathews’s imagination (details ringing exactly right, both vague and specific) is such that there are those who still truly believe he was a spy.  He certainly lied as one trained in espionage.

          As a novelist, he was inspired and egged on by the great Georges Perec. He was close pals with Perec, Mathews’s sublime The Orchard being a most perfect remembrance of the Frenchman who remembered.  For many years Mathews was the only American member of Oulipo, although in relation to the poetry that affiliation has become a red herring of sorts, with formal ingenuity being the focus of the introduction to his posthumously published Collected Poems (Sand Paper Press). The emphasis is deceptive. Oulipo meetings and practices served as preliminary ten-digit exercises rather than true literary performances, a distinction the musically trained Mathews readily acknowledged. Modes of composition are not the same thing as “Verdi’s vindictive fugato” or “an astronomical consort fructifying a preordained basso continuo.” (Close examination of such phrases show how Mathews’s seemingly flighty wordplay is unexpectedly grounded.)

          Brought out in mid-February 2020 (with an especially winsome cover by Trevor Winkfield), “inventive” and “unorthodox” printed on the front book flap attempt to offset the seemingly intimidating verse oeuvre within. The collection (apparently with Mathews’s approval) starts off with a late poem, a self-invented form of the sestina, “Cool Fans the Glade,” written in 2013.  The poem’s end-words grow by one letter with each enjambment (at/fat/fast/feast/afters/rafters), beginning, “But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?”  A second late poem, “Quiet Moon,” follows.  A third, the unfinished “The Politician’s Antic Spoil,” is accompanied by reproductions of Mathews’s handwritten notes of the work’s procedures. As an appendix put together by editor and publisher Arlo Haskell explains, this planned double sestina would first proceed by diminishment, with letters subtracted rather than added with each end-word’s iteration.

          At the start of a volume spanning seventy years, all this feels a little like explaining the mechanisms of a magician’s equipment just before his tricks are about to be performed.  Such emphasis on scaffolding at the outset tends to distract from other kinds of prestidigitation.  For while a certain kind of reader will approach his poems as cryptic escape rooms, there are other routes in and out of the poems. To parse the vastness of Mathews’s “discernment” and “appetite” (as Daniel Levin Baker exactly identifies but does not elaborate upon in his introduction) requires a subtle advocacy.  Understanding the elaborate processes leading to the poem does not necessarily make the reader more appreciative of the result.  Mathews’s confections can be as intense as fruit confit, perfect fruits dipped in syrup over the course of days and weeks and set out on racks in order to become edible jewels for holiday consumption. Not everyone likes them.

          And so the Collected Poems (now out for the course of a year occupied by other matters) have been subject to a certain neglect, if not suspicion. They couldn’t possibly taste as good as they looked.  If Mathews was really as marvelous as his friend John Ashbery and others said, why was he so often (with a few notable exceptions) excluded from the New York School grouping? As in Ashbery, there are strong whiffs of French syntax in the lines, distinctive as the scent of Gitanes. (As it happens, included in the Collected are some truly delightful poems written in French.)  Taking Parisian boulevards as a starting point, perhaps the best way to present his poetic work is as a sort of extended flirtation taking place at an outdoor cafe, formal stricture functioning as mere frame, the way extenuating circumstances of vehicular traffic and passersby impinge upon conversation.  His lines often throb with the intensity of being abroad (The New Tourism being a matter of sensibility as much as actual travel), experiences lit by unfamiliar skies and therefore glowing with an enchanted alienness., “if life is a puzzle, then travel is another.”

          And yet, in all fairness to the Collected’ s procedure-focused editors, Mathews liked to share his recipes (often quite literally, as in “Butter and Eggs”). Parting the curtain was part of the tease. While there’s a consistently sybaritic, erotic buzz that runs through his tightly bound lines, analogous to the after-effect of excellent cuisine and good bottles, to dismiss him as a mere bon vivant would be an error; his poems encompass a range of constrained pains and pleasures. As in “Waiting for Dusk,”

          This is a moment between here and there, between the face
          of worldly things and their unstable reflections which in the basically sunny weather
          suggest reveries tending to sleep, and then sadness.

Along the lines of Catullus, Mathews engaged in that most serious play of all — the production of sophisticated love poems, praising how the eyes of his beloved “rekindled my perception of a jaded world,” or how her “hair muddles / The real and the false in such ambitious copulation.”  In Out of Bounds he confesses

                                      … most of all
When you conclude and speak the blessed words that once more conjugate your love for me
Do I find my body wincing at this possibility.

That Harry Mathews was born on Valentine’s Day confirms the nature of his genius. As he records in his prose Autobiography, for him the writing life was above all an exploration of “how formal pretexts lead into intimate experiences.”  

Harry Mathews, "Cool gales shall fan the glades," a sestina [by Harry Mathews, Feb 14, 18930 - January 25, 2017]

Cool gales shall fan the glades

But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?|
Who wants to write a poem without the letter e,
Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal
(OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn
Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u
In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,

Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by
Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat
Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up
Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e.,
Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north
Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden
    ship without a drop to bail,

Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad-
making!) — or fresh basil
Gently crushed by its own slight weight, reviving memories of delights once stumbled on as a boy,
Delights often wreathed with necessary pain, like the stout unforgiving thorns
That tear shirt and skin as we stretch for ripe blackberries, to be gulped down fast,
Sweeter than butter and marmalade, quenching our thirst better than sucked ice,
Making us almost drunk as we shriek with false contempt at each benighted ump

Who decides against our teams. What happened to those blissful fruits, honeydew, purple plum,
White raspberry, for stealing which from Mrs. Grossman’s stand I invented ingenious alibis
That she never believed (insulting, or what?)? Where are childhood’s innocent sweetnesses, like
    homemade rice
Pudding and mince pie? Or the delicious resistances of various foods — bony
Lobsters, chops with their succulent tiny interstices, corn sticking to the cob, or the grilled feast
Of brook trout I caught without too much fuss after kicking a 
resentful hornets’

Nest? And when carnality replaced appetite, I was communally pronounced the horniest
Ten-year-old around; and I hadn’t even seen you. But when I did, you became the plume
In the horse’s hat of my lust. I was thirteen when we first danced together. There weren’t many afters
But I cherish my plume. There weren’t any afters, nothing, just a gentle abseil I
Could not climb back up. I still wave my plume, or my horse does, as he canters nobly
Into next year, my eighty-fifth. I hasten to add that “this coyness, lady, were no crime”

If I didn’t, in spite of all, feel so grateful to you. All manner of mercis
Fill my throat, along with immortal memories, of which I must acknowledge the thorniest
To be your disappearance, whether you tanked in river water or were scorched by Zeus’s proximity
    (or some such baloney);
But your firm breasts, taut nipples, and bent thighs? No thorns. All you wanted was a loosened peplum,
So I still bear your plume, and your name will not die: not to be written here or read, but my voice
    shall sibilate
It so shrilly that unseeded babies hear me, and every hidden woodworm wake from its dream to fall
    forever from the rafters.

from Poetry (June 2014)