The Best American Poetry

Peter Johnson on Writing in the Trump Era (by Nin Andrews)

I’ve always been skeptical of histrionics, and I tend not to catastrophize. But these are scary times, my friends. Liberal pundits toss around a lot of hyper-intellectualized reasons for Trump’s success and for the religious fervor of his followers. But it’s really pretty simple.  He’s a genius when it comes to the politics of rage, and I’ve been surprised at just how angry many white people are, especially white working-class guys.

But I was angry, too, and even a bit spooked, when I wrote these poems. “The Aim” begins with Trump Exhaustion, including a general sense of foreboding about what might happen next when even an itinerant angel refuses to appear. “Moments Recollected in Hostility” deals with the bizarre slogans and cliched rhetoric of TV and politics. More important, it takes a poke at my beloved working class and at GOP politicians who enable Trump.

I was raised near the steel plants in South Buffalo and worked in them, and I’ve always been amazed that working-class white guys often vote Republican. All the GOP has to do is to wave the flag and blame people of color for all their problems. Again, the politics of rage. Working-class white guys even say, “Trump’s one of us.” Trump is not one of us. When Trump says that he could shoot someone on 5^thAvenue, and we’d still vote for him, what he’s really saying is, “You’re so dumb that if I shot someone on 5^thAvenue, you’d still vote for me.”

He has disdain for us, and it’s tough for someone with my background to watch. There isn’t much consolation in either poem, though the narrator in the second poem is at least having fun with language. Is there any consolation or hope in the real world? We must of course believe so. Our only hope is that women will come to the rescue as they become more and more appalled at the general incivility and ever-present possibility of physical violence that Trump encourages.

Two Prose Poems from Old Man Howling at the Moon (Madhat Press).

 

The Aim

 

The aim is always heartless, like desire.
        This morning the President is tweeting, looking for trouble.
        You want to say, “Not again.” “This has to stop.” “Fuck off, I’m so very tired of you.”        
        But it’s 3 a. m. and there’s the possibility your son’s heart may stop at any moment.
        There’s also the dog, who’s snoring under your feet and will be dead by Thanksgiving.
        Whereupon Sorrow, like the heavy granite slab you’ll place over her grave.
        Nothing to do but pet her, promise to meet on the Rainbow Bridge, to bring your token and photos from your whole wondrous life.
        Anything to distract you from that shadow prowling by the woodshed. 
        An itinerant angel?
        An artist starving for attention pacing the dark recesses of his cruel cage?
        No, just a gaunt coyote squatting near a graveyard—stiffening at the sounds the  dead make.

 

Moments Recollected in Hostility

 

I once had a custom-made bumper sticker that read, “Good Luck with the New Cat.”
        It was meant to enlighten people as they flitted down the highway, panting like terrified kites caught in a vicious, indifferent breeze.
        My purpose, as always, was to plant a necessary metaphor in a bamboo field of possibilities in an attempt to force even one or two dimwits to hack away at it.
        How much better it would be if you could say, “The hole in the knee of the jeans was merely purchased,” and a few adventurous souls would wrestle with the grounds of likeness, instead of engaging in an episode of road rage ending with a troubled motorist reaching for his crossbow.
        How much better to convince someone that the meaning of life can be found in, “Swing hard and always remember to draw the curtains.”
        This is what we get instead: “Today the President’s advisers said the bombing sends a clear message ‘There’s a new sheriff in town.’”
        Who talks like that anymore except the kind of sadist who’d get a cheap laugh by holding a mirror up to the terrified mug of a puppy?
        And yet . . . behold my beloved working class, as they march in lockstep over a cliff while their leader drifts harmlessly to safety in his golden parachute.
        While his minions tighten their exquisite silk ties on their way to an amphitheater where they’ll argue like little boys over who can hold their pee the longest.
        Which brings me back to my bumper sticker and how happy I was on that beautiful April day, driving over hill and dale, repeating, “Good luck with the new cat, Good luck with the new cat,” as if the future of the world depended on deciphering its meaning.

 

Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry (Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

<<
There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime.
>>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

A Hurricane of Persecuted Stars: Clemente Soto Vélez [translated and introduced by Martín Espada]

One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, Clemente Soto Vélez (1905-1993) was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, the site of an 1868 revolt against Spain. The orphan son of landless peasants, Soto Vélez was a visionary poet, a surrealist, a socialist, an organizer and agitator for the independence of his island.

He was also a political prisoner. In 1936, the colonial government of General Blanton Winship incarcerated the leaders of the militant Nationalist Party and charged them with seditious conspiracy. Soto Vélez was the editor of the party newspaper. The statement on the masthead read: “Puerto Rican, the independence of Puerto Rico depends on the number of bullets in your belt.” This metaphor, in particular, was enough to earn him a six-year sentence, served in the federal penitentiaries at Atlanta and Lewisburg.

In the following poem, Soto Vélez confronts a political and emotional paradox: the fact that he lost his freedom for the love of freedom, cut off from his island for the sake of his island. The poet speaks of himself in the third person, and visualizes himself as a letter of the alphabet, sitting in isolation. This is poem #3 from Caballo de palo, or The Wooden Horse:

I met him
living like an h incarcerated in the honey of his bees,
but the bars of honey were bittersweet,
and because
he lost himself
in love with liberation,
and because he did not abandon
his love nor she her lover,
the earth for him is a hurricane of persecuted stars,
since liberation cannot
love anyone
except whoever loves
the earth, with its sun and sky.

--  Martín Espada

Tim Seibles on Writing in the Trump Era [by Nin Andrews]

NA: In this era of Trump and the Republican stranglehold on truth, I have been having a hard time writing, or even thinking about writing. I feel helpless when I read the news or talk to people who are so politically different from me. Yesterday, I was at the doctor’s office, listening to two elderly white men talk about how great Sean Hannity is, and how our country is, at last, in good hands.  I could feel my blood pressure sky-rocketing. Afterwards, I sat at my desk, and instead of typing, I stared out the window, thinking of Roethke's lines, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade . . .” 

I began to wonder, how are others coping? I thought I’d ask a few other poets, starting with Tim Seibles. 

NA: How are you coping in the Trump era? Are you writing? 

TS: During these times of Trump—times of idiocy, corruption and the resultant despair—I have found writing to be a place of energizing solace.  Though it is an illusion (at least in part), when I’m working on a poem, I feel like I’m talking back to the horror and cultivating some form of resistance to the infection that this administration represents.  Poetry, whether it be raging, broken-hearted, or ecstatic, is life affirming. It reminds those who are interested that others also suffer and yearn and see the trouble.  In some ways—both obvious and not—poetry itself means that being alert emotionally and intellectually is worthwhile.  In my darkest moments, I still believe that such engagement will help decide what kind of future will follow this insane period.

NA: Please share a couple of poems on the topic.

TS: 

KNOCK-KNOCK

It’s quiet—
like a fly
in a frog’s mouth. 

Say something
loud
but secret
like starlight
banging on a bug’s back,

something
so true
that
just the suggestion

un-hands the clocks—

why pretend
that I’m not
what I am:

a hard-on
held by the head nun,
that rogue fart in the flower shop,
freak branch
on the family tree,
that mad song
in a mum city—I am that
misfit music, that
two-headed Ken,

that Whoopsupsidethehead,
antsinyourpants
whatcanIsay:

I bum-rush the world,
find another world inside:
that last chance,
the lost choir,
that Ghost Dance
come again—

who says

we can’t

be free?

NOT NEARLY ENOUGH          #2
                        for Cesar Vallejo

Yesterday, maybe—tomorrow perhaps,
but today, no one is reading
my poems, no one at all!
It’s as if my whole life
has been covered like a parrot’s cage,
so everybody can get some sleep.

I didn’t mean to shout, to blaspheme,
to interrupt, curse, use slang, obsess?
over women’s thighs.  I did not
mean to cause trouble    did I?
Maybe I did.  Of course, I did—

but for the best possible reasons:

• There’s no pretty way to fight ugliness.
• There’s not nearly enough love going around,
• nowhere near an adequate array of sexual
• collaborations: in fact, a wild lack
• of empathy and daring, especially
• from God who has fallen wildly
• short of my expectations.

Where is the man who sees war on TV
and runs screaming naked down the street
with the head of his johnson flapping
back and forth, thigh to thigh
like a flag in a jock-less wind!?

And, with her marvelously chocolate booberoos
glossed with sunlight and saliva, where is
the woman who bursts into Our Lady of Hope
Cathedral singing Tell me somethin’ good!?

We see children, we were children—
with dolls that peed, with wooden trucks,
with wind-up frogs, and hide & seek—
who knew better than what our parents said.
Tell me: how did we let these fuckheads run the world
off the road?!  We cannot snuggle our brains
up our asses and wonder why morons
come to power with their sad toupees,
their burger-driven breath, their prune-sized
hearts    and wonder why our lives fit like
barbed wire brassieres!  Am I right or am I wrong??

This is mostly what I’ve been trying to get at
with poetry, but maybe I overdo, maybe
I pile on, maybe I’m impatient, maybe I’ve lost sight
of what people really want, which is to cuddle
the status quo like a syphilitic teddy bear! 
My mother used to say—before giving me
a good spanking—
You have gotten beside yourself, you
onion-headed little maniac.  In fact,
I am standing beside myself, right now:
staring at myself staring back at myself,
asking—with musty contempt—“Why
aren’t you reading my poems?!”

Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. His latest collection, One Turn Around the Sun was released in 2017. He just completed a two-year appointment as Poet laureate of Virginia.

Photo credit: Jennifer Fish

Happy Birthday Mr. B. "I didn't train her, she trained me!"

Born January 22, 1904.

Choreographer George Balanchine with Mourka. Photo © Martha Swope. 

What's Your Favorite Stock? [by Isaac Babylon]

From time to time we get a financial market report from one of our friends on the Street. I asked Ike Babylon whether he thinks the market is overpriced at the moment. I also wondered what his favorite stock is. Here's what he said. -- DL

<<<
Right now we have a market that's almost priced to perfection reflecting the confluence of positive trends: growth that's significant enough to ward off recession fears but not so strong as to invite rate hikes from the Fed, which remains accommodative; a Goldilocks economy, in other words. There is always global risk, the possibility of a black swan -- like, right now, the corona flu, which is a killer and can spread. And of course there's all the uncertainty in the world -- Brexit, Iran, tariffs, China,  North Korea, Putin, Syria, the specter of Socialism, etc. But we always have to climb a wall of worry. 

Right now I wouldn't put new money into Apple. It's the best stock in the market but it has more than doubled in price and it's a good idea to take a little money off the table. You will still own it if you are in an index fund or  growth mutual funds. 

Microsoft is my favorite stock. It is at 166 and change as I write, but it still has room to run. Our firm gives it a PT [price target] of 190 and that's conservative. Long term I like Disney under Bob Iger's leadership. Their streaming service is a winner; they have great franchises like Star Wars; and I like the way everything is integrated -- movies, theme parks, TV, products. ESPN has been a drag on them but that's largely priced into the stock.

JP Morgan is the of the banks, and if you study Warren Buffett's game plan, you'll see he believes in it as well as Bank of America. I always tell people they should buy some Berkshire Hathaway, class B shares, if they admire Buffett's track record. It's a very conservative investment that you can hold forever. They hold a huge amount of cash, which insulates them from market downturns, when he can swoop in and buy stuff on the cheap. They issue no dividend, which makes it totally tax efficient.

Fidelity Select Health Care, managed by Eddie Yoon, is a good way to play a portion of the market that is bound to grow given demographic trends.
>>>

Thank you, Ike. 

The House Guest [by Molly Arden]

House Guest

The sad seamstress

who stays with us this month

is small and thin and bitter.

No one can cheer her up.

Give her a dress, a drink,

roast chicken, or fried fish

it's all the same to her.

 ( from “The House Guest”  by Elizabeth Bishop, 1968)

            Molly’s never been a very accomplished guest.  For me it’s like being lost in a foreign country --disenfranchised, compartmentalized into Samsonite carry-ons, exhausted, dizzy from hunger with an upset tummy.  I am an insatiable know it all who’s every desire is, at all times, to be in tight command of my every presence.   To be a guest is to be lost on a straight driveway at the end of a pleasant cul-de-sac.  Lacking bearings toward home or the airport.  Chances are you came in on directions from a GPS and will leave reliant upon commands procured from this same device.  I’ve often stayed at a place for days without knowing more about where I am than a vague “south” or  “Western Pennsylvania”.  How odd to be directed to a shop or attraction by hosts who use hand signals and begin their instructions with “you’re the end of the driveway”.  You are at their mercy.  A disagreement during dinner might result in misdirection.  What if they refuse to give you directions at all?  Like a baby waiting for its mother at the end of a long day at the sitter’s, you’d sit and weep, calling for someone to pick you up and carry you home to your warm bed, please!

 Speaking of warm, who of us has not spent the night in a bitter guest room unable to locate the extra blanket that was earlier referred to as “in the chest” or “in the closet” and after stormy searching is found to be in neither?  “Who turns off their heat at night,” you’ll mutter, making a mental note to return the favor if these lovely friends ever grace you with a visit.  It’s possible you’ve wondered where the fuck they keep their toothpaste while trying desperately to brush garlic dressing from your tongue with a dry toothbrush.  Ever gotten turned around on an excursion to the bathroom (after a glass of wine or two) and found yourself -- a full-grown adult taxpayer, voter, and driver of a car -- lost in the vast confines of a relative’s house?  How many despicable meals will you eat? How many of you will settle your soft cheeks into cheap poly/cotton sheets, the staple of guest beds the world over?  Why is this same bed’s pillow always older than the host’s dining room table? 

The physical pain of a pleasant visit should make you rethink leaving the comforts of “home” ever again.  An evening with a friend’s well-meaning Chicken Picatta exposes you to the possibility of tenure in a strange bathroom, clutching a roiling gut while cinching your ass in a vain attempt to spare yourself the auditory embarrassment of ill health in the face of cheap construction.  Ever stave off olfactory reflection of the dinner you were served by sealing off the guest room closet with your fetid gas, rather than release it within the appreciation of your host?  Being a guest can mean coming to grips with the awful terror of not knowing where the simplest tools of the house are located; a toilet plunger, for instance (the horrific rising of the tide, the utter relief at its fall).  And we haven’t even touched on the spinal predicament of the hotel room bed. 

Yet we continue to pack the very essence of who we are – a consolidated version of our belongings and clothes -- rolled, tucked, wrapped, stuffed into small bags, cases, and compartments that we wheel, lug, clunk into these “homes away from home."  Our most essential items kept in our clutches, too important a part of our integral selves to be left at home with the rest of the tackle.  This stuff is our concentrate.  Our BRAND of lotion.  Our book.  The perfect jeans with that whiskered creasing we shopped hours for.  Our glasses and prescriptions.  Our  journal ( in case you say something clever).  The gray pebble the dog nosed on that walk last June before he died.  Our signature French perfume.  The thin shawl that looks good with everything, the one with the fringe.  All of this carried into the home at the time of arrival and never further away from you than a room or two.  It is important to maintain a consistency of self when traveling; these pieces we carry help us achieve this.

Maintaining too much of this sense of who you are can be a detriment, though.   For instance, I’ve been chastised in my small circle of friends for serving salad out of the bowl using just my bare hands.  You might gasp, you might assume a lack of proper upbringing, you might shrug.  It depends on your own values.  I come from a long line of bare handed salad slingers.  I didn’t even know what salad tongs were until I went to college.  Once, while teaching at a faraway writing program, I stayed with friends of friends.  These lovely people invited me to a home cooked meal with them on my last night.   I didn’t know it at the time, but I was dining with bread-board, bread-knife, salad tong kind of people.  It wasn’t until mid-way through fisting two handfuls of salad into the delicate wood bowl before me that I spotted the large, silver utensils laid out beside the salad.  Had I even paused to look before plunging my hands into the blend of baby greens?  I hadn’t even attempted to acclimate.  My hosts were desperately trying to make me feel welcome.  Both of them had served themselves out of the bowl with their hands, their brows glazed with sweat, their eyes flickering around the table – me – tongs – salad – tongs –me, but they would not make me feel the outsider.

I learned something about being a guest that night. Despite their stained futon, lack of coffee, and whiney toddler, I was enriched by my visit with them.  To remain pleasantly under the worn lens of my own experiences was comfortable, but would deprive me of a sophistication one would not normally associate with those things.  Good to have my eyes opened by way of visiting as a guest, if only just for a dinner, or a week.

Wonders never cease: François de Brauer’s “La Loi des prodiges”, a performed graphic novel [by Tracy Danison]

François de Brauer, La Loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) © Victor Tonelli 

I heard on the radio that a bartender in New York has proposed clarity & truth as 2020’s watchword. Sounds good to me. You first. Ready. Set. Go!

I am one of those people who smile all the time, even sleeping, even toting a machine gun. In spite of everything; the smile reflects my true feeling; I’m with Isadora Duncan, feeling is all that really counts.

But neither smile nor feeling reflects what I actually think about things in the round.

Once, when I cautiously let her in on one of my thinkings, my late Mother burst into tears, sobbing out, What cynicism! I was 18 then, bless me, already a soldier. My Mother was among the most fully-integrated hypocrites who ever walked Yahweh’s Stony yet Righteous path. Rightly, I believe, I took her outburst for sign and portent; a thinking is mostly better left unspoken.

Lately, my thinking has been affecting my feeling.

I’ve been darkly thinking, for instance, that life might very well be a play – a story, fairy tale, novel, opéra, musical comedy – in which I’ve failed to play my assigned role.

Don’t get me wrong. I love narrative. But narrative is just a tool of art, an interesting wart on the clitoris that is Life. Narrative just ends up; Life becomes.

That’s why the non-narrativeness of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard), an absorbing two-hour one-man show that I saw not long since at La Scala Paris has very nearly brought me around to renewed smilingkeit. La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard, a veritable feat of thespian endurance and mastery, is scenarized and performed by François de Brauer, rather new to the dramatic scene but certainly upcoming.

I am not sure how to translate La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard). I can’t decide whether the prodiges are natural wonders or human prodigies. In France, a certain fetishistic pedantism means that laws get reformed rather than changed or replaced, or even dreamt up or projected. A réforme commonly carries the name of an individual guilty of proposing it, presumably so that he or she may be punished for sticking his or her neck out later, when nobody’s looking.

So, the title’s all very dense, as they say, and so is the piece itself. But good dense: “with depth that entertains”. La Scala has the knack of good dense. As I write, I’m thinking of, last year, among others, Machine de cirque’s breathtaking acrobacy within an entirely different framework of dramatic success or Anne de Mey’s wonderful Cold Blood multimedia piece, also an absorbing meditation on theatrical technology and technique.

François de Brauer’s La loi des prodiges strikes me as a performed graphic novel. Taking on about 20 rôles – amazingly, one never once loses sight of who is who and who’s doing what – de Brauer creates complex situations such as protagonist Rémi Goutard’s birth, his Dad’s myth-scale rassle with the evil psychic twin who prevents his (Dad’s) suicide or young Rémi’s encounter with Duflou, a self-sealing blowhard and contemporary artist as well as an ambiguous friend of or to Dad.

The situations of La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) swirl around a welter of life emotions. Both situations and emotions belong, and/or not, to the said Rémi Goutard, who, as it turns out, is a future former député whose réforme seeks to stamp out artistic creativity as well as artistic endeavor. All through and into the end, La loi des prodiges makes perfect sense. However, anything you might say about it is your own story.

The sense of having seen it through – rather than, say, having seen through it to some sort of (fundamentally moral) narrative structure – is why I scribbled “performed graphic novel” on my hand as I was leaving.

As in my experience of graphic novels, in La loi des prodiges de Brauer’s word is subject to his image. The image in turn has its finger on the emotion rather than the idea. And that’s how it should be, sometimes.

Wonders never cease – François de Brauer is somebody to watch for.

La loi des prodiges (ou la Réforme Goutard) – Performance • 2019 • François de Brauer • 110 minutes • La Scala Paris • Ω Conception & performance: François de Brauer / Artistic collaboration: Louis Arene, Joséphine Serre / Costuming: Christelle André / Lighting: François Menou / Production: Les Petites Heures – La Scala Paris

Emily Dickinson's Atom Bomb Letters [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Darlingest Bleaders,

How I have missed you. And what obstacles I have had to defeat in order to at last rearrive here, panting, on the grass. Well, but, I’ve had mental adventures of which you will be the beneficiaries, so don’t mug. Or rather do, because I know it means you missed me.

I’ve been buzzy with otter projects, actual agents and actual editors wanting to see pages and rewrites too, but am now released by the holding pattern of stopping and waiting (and waiting), and so am at last writing to you.

Life has time for kids, time for sleeping, time for watching Firefly on Netflix, plus 30 Rock and American Idol, and time for work. Writing to you comes out of time for work, because there’s no other time for it to come out of. Granted I sometimes see Millionaire Matchmaker without having written to you, but rarely. Usually these are the only priorities that supersede you. So sorry you’ve been so long supersed.  I’m trying to save the world with rhetoric. It’s ex/hilarating /hausting.

Dudes, in one of my secret societies (I only have one, but I’m trying to confuse future forensics) (I confess this here because once, someone else in my secret society mentioned that they had other secret societies and it hurt my feelings, and I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of my cosocietans, should they happen to read this.) I said something and then some other guy said something obnoxious and so then I said something smartassy and the cosocietans really liked what I said. Want to know it? It was this: “Well what you said stung/k, but…” They liked that I goed stung/k. Isn’t following one thought to the next ex/hilarating /hausting? Anyway, the backslash locution at the end of the above paragraph made me think of that other one, stung/k. They are a shorthand usable by a culture that silent-reads its quips, so they needn’t be pronounceable.

Anyway. Emily Dickinson’s letters. I told you the class I’m teaching at Columbia this term is Poets and Their Letters, which I made up when they asked me what class I’d like to teach but I didn’t think they were going to pick it. All the other choices I gave them were things I’ve taught before. I’m concentrating the course on four poets whose verse I know very well, Keats, Dickinson, Bishop, and Stevens. In turn, in that order, we read their poems, then their letters. Next class we talk about Dickinson’s letters.

I gave them the green book (edited by Johnson), a nice big Selected Letters of ED. To prep, this week I read it straight through. Some journey. I feel like a restrung viola.

Talking about letters in this class has led me to realize that even for those who do not write their blog posts as letters, these days the closest thing to what once were letters, are blog posts. The email has too much brevity, too little gravitas, it compares to the scribble on a visiting card. But the blog, like the letter, is given more than an ounce of thought, and less than a gallon. It has more like a pint of poise and a quart of purpose. Just right for an afternoon’s diversion.

Emily, Emily. It is impertinent to be as I am, pert and in print, but I feel twinny with you. I think we had similar childhoods (talk about jenny from the hood, that’s the hood) in a way – isolated -- and similar strategies for walking it off.

She starts writing these atom bomb letters at 13. It felt strange to read page by page and watch her age. At first the message was the medium’s inadequacy: Her chief theme as a child was to berate the shortage of letters in return. As she got older, she lashed love onto the page with equal passion. Then something cracks leading into the 1860s and she goes nuts just totally saying what she feels like saying even if what she’s using ain’t words. As you all know, I too stood in the long lines at the DPV and took the test and showed my ID and now have a full poetic license, for forms, free verse, language, concrete, rap or pop, there’s nothing with a steering wheel that I don’t got a right to ride. You wanna hear how my girl talks?

Here’s her second letter to Higginson, year is 1862. She'd sent him a few poems and he'd sent back suggested changes:

<<<
MR. HIGGINSON,--Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.

You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their "Father."

But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.

I read Miss Prescott's Circumstance, but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.

Two editors of journals came to my father's house this winter, and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them "why" they said I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.

I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the Atlantic, and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.

Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,

E. DICKINSON.
>>>

Isn’t she perfect? Don’t you just want to cook her into a pie and eat her? Sorry is that weird? Can we read this part again: “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.” He had written an article of advice to the young poet that was published in the Atlantic, and that is what made her think to write to him.

Squibs 365-372 [by Alan Ziegler]

365: Late 1950s, Lassie barks for help through the darkness. The T.V. picture has gone kaput.  My father says “I’ll teach you to fix it” and removes the back to reveal a landscape of small tubes. He plucks out several and drops them into a paper bag. We drive to the drug store where, hidden in a back corner, is a scientific-looking object the size of a vending machine.

He instructs me how to plug the tubes in—one at a time, matching the slots with the numbers on the tube—and watch as the gauge points red or green. It reminds me of a game on the boardwalk.

He sets aside the only tube that turned the gauge red, and finds its match in the cabinet. Home, he re-plugs all the tubes except for the new one, which he lets me do. Lassie comes home!

 

366: The ancient writer, told he has hours to live, asks his doctor to bring him his books, and he starts paging through them. “Why didn’t you ask for your wife?” “I’ll have eternity with her in heaven. These are going straight to hell.”

 

367: Now, while the time since your death is still counted in weeks, I’ll be walking along and there, just beyond the ability of my eyes to distinguish faces, I’ll see someone who looks like you, and for a few milliseconds my brain will form your face. At first it was a little unnerving, but I’ve come to look forward to and treasure those milliseconds, and I will mourn them when they are gone.

 

368: The houseguest opens the refrigerator, smiles, and says, “Someone brought home baked goods from Entenmann’s.”

 

369: “Garçon, un bock! I write to please myself, just as I order my dinner…” [George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man]. I don’t need the menu, just bring me whatever looks good today.

 

370: My mother’s critique: “Received your article to-day and for a routine write-up, you sure made it into interesting reading.”

 

371: The evil that men do lives long after them, along with automatic renewals.

 

372: The only priest in the remote village announces he will be moving to a faraway parish in a week. A run on Confessions, future absolutions granted; pray now, sin later. Hail Marys peal from every corner, alley, barroom, bedroom. After the priest departs, it is holy sanctioned hell on earth. Except for a pious few, who eventually set off to find the Garden of Eden and scrounge for seeds.

"The bad guy isn't supposed to win": The Late Nick Tosches' Take on Sonny Liston [by David Lehman]

Legend has it that Sinatra was prepared to bet a bundle on Sonny Liston in the ballyhooed bout against Cassius Clay in Miami. "Save your money, Frank," he was told. The fix was in.

 

Last night I stayed up late to readThe Devil and Sonny Liston (2000), the late Nick Tosches' excellent biography of Sonny Liston, big bad Sonny of the dead eyes and the murderous fists, who said, "The bad guy isn't supposed to win. I change that."

No question that the Clay fight in Miami was fixed by the mob (as Tosches, pictured left, sees it). He astutely points out that that when a fight is fixed, only the fighter taking a dive knows about it.  The opponent can't be in the know. But, says Nick, even Clay, by this time Ali, must have known that the one-round fiasco in the reamatch in Maine was as bogus as the phantom punch. Liston was not a talented actor, and he fell awkwardly, like a building.

 

"Sonny, I had a lot of money on you. Why didn't you tell me?" "Because you have a big mouth."

 

Why did he throw the fights? Because the odds against him were long and he needed the dough. He had tax troubles. The IRS was on his ass. In the American mind as reflected in the work of sports columnists, he was the bad guy, the thug, the jailbird, the ex-con. A charge of rape, if reported, would have ended his career.

 

Meanwhile Clay entertained the white mainstream media. According to Tosches, the words "media" and "mediocrity" spring from the same root.

 

​So "they" told Sonny what to do and how to profit.

 

Most writers idoloze Ali. Not Tosches. He writes with a perfect contempt for the braggart who never met a microphone he didn't like. In Tosches' view, Liston had a much better sense of humor than Ali.​

 

RIP Nick Tosches, 1949-2019, author of a helluva book on Dean Martin. Goes without saying that the opinions in this piece are Nick's. not necessarily mine. -- DL

Pelosi Quotes Longfellow [by Mitch Sisskind]

Yesterday, introducing the impeachment managers,
Nancy Pelosi invoked Longfellow. It was the 
first time I've heard poetry spoken by a politician 
since Bill Clinton in the 1980's quoted Emerson's
baleful line about the future, "When our sons have
gone to where our fathers are...."

Speaking of baleful, here's a Longfellow poem 
perhaps appropriate for these dark times:

Haunted Houses (1858)

All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table, than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star,
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,–

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

 

"Columbia College 1967, #24" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Columbia College 1967, #24
Ellen Erlanger, Barnard Student

I’m taking a class called Women in the Modern Novel.
Everyone knows that the teacher, Professor Sims,
Is not well so it’s kind of an emotional experience
Twice a week and I try to make an effort in the class
Because it obviously means a lot to Professor Sims,
A really sweet person maybe about sixty years old.
Word gets around that she likes when girls bring
Cupcakes but that’s not my style so I just try 
To make an effort in class and show appreciation.

During a class on Pride and Prejudice Professor Sims
Posed one of her wistful subtly heartbreaking questions:
‘If this is supposed to be a class about the modern novel
‘And Pride and Prejudice was written over 150 years ago
‘What if anything occurs to you as modern about it?’
I spoke up and said, ‘This sentence in the book jumped
‘Off the page at me with its modernism in contrast to
‘Austen’s graceful stylistic locutions. The sentence is:
"Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all."

I was glad to see a spark of amusement if not of hope
In Professor Sims’ eyes as she asked me for my thoughts
About that sentence and I tried hard to fulfill her request.
Poor Professor Sims. Poe’s idea that the fittest subject
For poetry is the death of a beautiful woman suddenly
Came to mind because Professor Sims was very beautiful.
I heard myself saying, ‘In high school I had a boyfriend
‘Who was stupid but he was worth knowing because
‘He loved me in such a pure and unblocked stupid way.

‘He would get this look of slack-jawed stupefaction
‘While he was gazing at my body to the point that
‘I used to wonder what is he actually seeing there?
‘What could possibly bring on such bewilderment?
Eventually I realized that there was no cognitive
‘Interference between what he saw and what he felt
‘So he was like a toaster plugged into a power plant
‘And then when we made love there was also total
‘Disintermediation like a flopping fish out of water.

‘Where did you go to high school?’ This question
From one of the two Columbia guys who joined the
Class for the second semester broke the spell that
Followed my excessively intimate reminiscences.
The girls around the table shared amused glances
And Professor Sims smiled too. ‘A progressive school,’
I said going along with the joke. ‘College preparatory.’
The guy had a little red button pinned on his shirt:
An SDS radical. The other kid was an Orthodox Jew.

As things got back to normal Professor Sims found
The stupid men sentence in Pride and Prejudice and
Read the preceding one as well: ‘I am going tomorrow
'To find a man who has not a single agreeable quality,
‘With neither manner nor sense to recommend him.'
Professor Sims remarked, ‘This is an anarchistic motif
‘In Jane Austen’s work that crops up once in a while’
And the class seemed interested to discuss that. Later
As everyone was leaving the professor took me aside.

She said, ‘Is it intelligence or instinct or just youthful
Precociousness that allows you to express yourself
From unusual angles and with odd combinations of
Archaic orotundity and a well-calibrated diffidence.
See, I can do it too and I find it winning but most
People won’t understand you or will tune you out
As is done with Jane Austen’s secret anarchism.
What do you think?’ ‘Oh, it’s all just stupidity,’ I said
And I couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or cry.

"William Holden, Model Prisoner" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar 

<<<
William Holden, arguably the model for American men of his era, plays a prisoner of war in two major motion pictures. The Germans hold him and other American airmen captive in the close confines of Stalag 17 (1953), and in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sweats it out in a Japanese POW camp. In both movies, Holden’s character makes a daring, even miraculous, escape. His getaway happens at the very end of Stalag 17, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, it marks the beginning of our hero’s adventures.

Both films were celebrated. Playing Sefton in Stalag 17, the cynical POW with the smarts to profit by bartering with the camp guards and running gambling schemes to fleece his fellow prisoners, Holden won the Academy Award for best leading actor. The Bridge on the River Kwai won eight Oscars, including those for best picture and best director.

To some extent, the repetition illustrates the success principle: if at first you succeed, try, try again. Nevertheless, if you identify Holden with the masculine ideal of the postwar years, the coincidence is too keen to overlook.

Aside from Holden and the POW camps, the contrast between the two movies is striking. Stalag 17 is a black-and-white studio production directed by Billy Wilder, whose other masterpieces include Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. It’s set in late December 1944, and man, is it cold. References to Bastogne make it clear that the Battle of the Bulge is raging, and the Nazis are the enemy. The POW camp commandant (Otto Preminger) tells the prisoners they can forget about having a “White Christmas,” a song written, he says, “by one of your composers who stole his name from our capital” (Berlin). Later we hear “Jingle Bells” and “Adeste Fidelis” in the background.

To balance the surfeit of sentiment, we get the comic antics of two of the prisoners, Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and his friend the “Animal” (Robert Strauss). There is essentially one set: the barracks housing the American POWs. It’s easy to tell that a Broadway play preceded the movie.

At one point in Stalag 17, the men improvise a Christmas party by marching around the barracks singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” When a couple of guys in a makeshift band play the old Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer tune, “I Love You,” some of the boys pretend to be girls. As they dance, Harry Shapiro is the stand-in for the Animal’s adored Betty Grable. Once, when I dropped in on my Miami-based mother, then in her 80s, she was watching Stalag 17 on television and we watched that particular scene together. A sweet number, I thought, and wondered if Sinatra had recorded it. When I returned from Miami to New York, I listened to “I Love You” sung by Sinatra on a Capitol Records compilation. That was an amazing moment. I recommend you do the same if you want an object lesson in the difference between a pleasing rendition of a song and a masterly performance.

Clocking in at 161 minutes, 41 minutes longer than Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot in vivid color on location in Sri Lanka. Directed by David Lean, whose other movies, similarly epic in scope and length, include Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, the film follows U.S. Navy Commander Shears (Holden), one of the very few men who have not succumbed to disease or the sadism of the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). It’s beastly hot, which gives the producers multiple chances to show William Holden without his shirt on: sweating as he digs a grave in the POW camp or sipping martinis as a free man on the beach. Here, the Japanese are the enemy and Allied victory does not yet seem inevitable.

In both movies, Holden displays great survival instincts, resourcefulness, guile, and the weary self-interest that Bogart expressed in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He is very lucky, too, until his luck runs out. As Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he manages to escape from the isolated prison camp that needed no gates or surveillance because there was no place to escape to—the camp is bordered by a steep promontory from which few would survive a jump or a fall.
>>>

Click here for the rest of this essay.

 

Met Percent: Week Fourteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Beauty-Writing (Callos-Graphia)

“Handwriting is jewelry fashioned by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect.” - treatise on the penmanship of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, 9th century.

The diacritical marks indicate vowels (the alphabet has consonants only). The text is always cursive and has no upper or lower case (although shape variants are used in the beginning, middle or end of a word). Proportions are determined by a pen-stroke dot “grid” system within a circle.

How the Arabic letter “teh” is written: in its positions, and with its “isolated” proportion guides.

 

Chat with a Lampstand

Lampstand, Iran, 1578-79, gallery 462

Inscriptions are often verses of conversations. This lampstand “speaks” to its owner/viewer in a dialog of flame.

“I remember one night as my eyes wouldn’t sleep

I heard a moth speaking with a candle

Said the moth: Because I am a lover it is right that I should burn

[But] why should you weep and burn yourself up?”

Planning, Truth and Happiness

"Planning before work protects you from regret; prosperity and peace.”

“It seems worthless to me, even after all the terrible things we have had to go through, if we writers do not tell each other the truth.”

"To its owner happiness, security and life as long as a dove coos.”

The bowl with Arabic inscription (top left) has an abstract, almost contemporary, minimalist design, inscribed with a proverb on planning. It is stunning. Iran, 10th c., gallery 450.

The plate (top right) 2007, is from the Oskarmaria Brasserie inside Literaturhaus Munich, the cultural institute promoting education and literary events. After the salmon was enjoyed, a writer at our table discovered the phrase on writers and truth on the plate. At the end of the meal, a German colleague went to the kitchen and returned with the plate in a brown paper bag. She forced it from the hands of the staff. The Brasserie’s namesake, Oskar Maria Graf, was a German writer who, when the Nazis did not have his books on the Munich book-burning list, published an article entitled “Burn Me”. He got on the list.

The pen box (Qalamdan) (bottom) sends praise to the “owner”,  fashioned from brass and inlaid with silver and gold. Iran, 16th century, gallery 462. May there always be cooing . . .

 

Amulets and Talismans

This shirt was believed to be imbued with protective powers and may have been meant to be worn under armor in battle. Its surface is decorated with painted squares and medallions and the entire Qur'an written out and bordered by the ninety-nine names of God written in gold against an orange background. Talismanic Shirt and detail, Northern India or Deccan ,15th–early 16th c., not on view.

The power of the names of religious figures (Mohammed’s relatives), the Qur'anic verses, and the Shi'i prayers endow this standard with its amuletic properties. E.g. the “Protective Throne Verse”: “His Throne doth extend/ Over the heavens/ And the earth, and He feeleth/ No fatigue in guarding/ And preserving them . . .”.  Silver Standard, Iran, 18th century, not on view. 

When I was 10, my Great Uncle Harry - in the back of his wholesale underwear store in Galesburg, IL. - gave me amuletic advise on the battle of life: “To attain your natural leadership, bring your ‘lucky marbles’, and play to win.”

 

Invisible Rules

Left: Ornamental ceramic star, Iran, gallery 453. Center: a set of 15 furmah and 3 zillij. Right: M.C. Escher’s study of a Moorish tile pattern, 1936.

One of the technical design languages in Moorish art is the Zillij (or Zellige) set based system. It combines geometric tiles (furmah) with complex rules (no holes, no parts of a furmah permitted, etc.). There are at least 360 known furmah and an uncountable number of Zillij constellations. These Moorish geometries inspired Escher’s interest in tessellations. For me, they recall the set technique of 20th century serial music. Lots of rules all around.

Left: Met Moroccan Court, gallery 456,  inspired by two fourteenth-century madrasas of Fez. Right: Pattern generated by ruler and compass only. 

These patterns, as noted above, are generated by ruler and compass only. The four basic shapes, or “repeat units,” are: circles and interlaced circles; squares or four-sided polygons; the ubiquitous star pattern, derived from squares and triangles inscribed in a circle; and multisided polygons. I have had a recurring dream since high school geometry, in which I alone discover the way to trisect any arbitrary angle with only a ruler and compass. This was proven impossible in 1837. It is still impossible today.

I was against high ornament in my youth (“youth” defined as adolescence). The Baroque, Mannerist and Islamic patterns were ”over the top”. I was at home with Classic, Renaissance, and Modern. Over the years, I understood this as a need for balance and structure. I liked simpler rules. As the complexities of life became comprehensible - I could admit it - the complex, expansive, and decorative became newly appreciated. Tiepolo and Bernini were joys to grow into, and the door to over-stimulating art has stayed open. 

“I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.” - Montaigne

 

 

"On Leading Multiple Lives" [by David Lehman]

Dusty Sang, editor of Stay Thirsty, asked me to contribute a guest column to his on-line journal. It is in three parts bearing the title "On Leading Multiple Lives." Part one is below followed by a link to the Stay Thirsty page on which the column appears in full. -- DL

<<<
During the nearly four years when I battled bladder cancer, I didn’t think about it too much. I thought about getting through the day, taking my medicine, heeding the doctor’s instructions. I joined no support groups, read little about the disease or the procedures I was to undergo. I preferred to get on with my own work, to meet deadlines and fulfill commitments. Also, there were legal and financial necessities to handle in the event of my death.

Death: sometimes I pondered death, oblivion, and the big questions. But it wasn’t easy to do. I was distracted by pain, or by the medical directives, or by the various procedures I underwent. Much of the time I spent waiting, reading old magazines in the waiting room, or watching sports or an old movie on television when I was immobilized. I read little, though I am a big reader. But I wrote every day. I wrote to affirm my existence, my identity. As Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote:

         Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
         Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
         Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
         Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Myself I spoke when I wrote.

And at the same time writing was a way not so much to confront the situation but to escape from it. Reality is what it is, after all, but the mind is a house with many doors, corridors, hotel rooms, closets, a balcony or two, a front porch, a back yard, a widow’s walk, a cellar, an attic, a garage. Behind one door a sick man in a hospital bed is really a crooner in a white dinner jacket at the Copacabana. Behind another an amnesiac impersonates a psychiatrist.

By writing I could become a different person. By merely changing the pronoun I could slip into a different time period, change my personality and profession, end fact, try fiction.

You’re about to go on a trip. There’s hardly time to pack a suitcase, and only in the train do you realize you are lacking the necessary documents. It’s as if you’re in the hall of mirrors. There are one hundred of you – one hundred possible lives – and someone is shooting at you. You have to get away, and down the chute you go. But there’s still one murder unaccounted for. In the courtroom, the celebrated lawyer on crutches cross-examines himself. In the war room they are fighting the last war.

You can escape from one room to another, and you will, you have no choice.
>>>

Click here for the rest of this essay.

Squibs 355-364 [by Alan Ziegler]

355: Unemployment Office,  92^nd and Broadway, mid-1970s: Laid-off (not fired) workers wait weekly on long lines to affirm they are actively looking for work. No check-in, no check. So many dancers, musicians, and actors on those lines that if you yelled “And five six seven eight….” the opening of A Chorus Line would break out.

 

356: “Over and back,” was my favorite basketball violation. I’d have done it all game if they let me.

 

357: Beauty and Pizza, meet Parlor.

 

358: The following contains one falsity: On Saturday Night Live in 1992, Sinead O’Connor adapted Bob Marley’s “War” to include “child abuse” (repeated), nine years before the Pope formally acknowledged the problem. She tore a picture of the Pope (you won’t see it on the reruns). Two weeks later she was booed off the Madison Square Garden stage at a tribute to Bob Dylan, who came out and scolded the audience.

 

359: 
Second verse same as the first.

Second verse same as the first.

 

360: Sultry spring Saturday in Schenectady, 1970. Local hamburger joint advertises special appearance by Bippo the Clown—all day, bring the kiddies. “Damn everything but the circus!” I shout, and we head on over. An elderly couple is smoking in a booth, a bored teenager stands behind the counter wearing a white paper hat. “We’d like to see the clown.” “The clown went home.” “The clown went home?!” “Yeah, no one came to see him.” And thus the phrase the clown went home enters the lexicon, with a multitude of uses.

 

361: Sometimes my second move only becomes apparent after I make the first move, yet would not have been viable without the first move.

 

362: I still get angry at characters on screen who do something stupid even though I know the words were put on the page by someone like me.

 

363: I improvise on a Santana song in my head, barely aware I am fretting the notes on my forearm. “What song are you playing?” someone asks. “Samba Pa Ti.” "Nice intonation!"

 

364: Assignment: Research and write a 50-word biographical sketch for every extra in The Life of Emile Zola.

Dream Pairing: Amy Gerstler and Matthew Zapruder at Beyond Baroque January 17

Fri, January 17, 2020
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM PST

Location

Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90291

Nationally acclaimed poet and former New York Times Magazine Poetry Column editor Matthew Zapruder reads from his latest book, Father’s Day. He’s joined by legendary Los Angeles poet Amy Gerstler.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day, from Copper Canyon in Fall 2019, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the MFA and English Department at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poetry. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015, was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Irvine.

-- sdl

Bobby Darin, "Beyond the Sea"

Born Roberto Cassotto in East Harlem, Bobby Darin went to Bronx Science. Rheumatic fever as a boy shortened his life -- he died at age 37 following heart surgery. Here's his best live perfomance of one of his greatest hits, "Beyond the Sea," a swinging version of Charles Trenet's "La Mer." If memory serves "Beyond the Sea" was on the flip side of "Mack the Knife," which reached the top of the charts for Mr. Darin. Little known fact: he also wrote songs, such as "Splish Splash" (which took one hour to compose) and "Dream Lover." He was a fantastic performer on stage and did great impressions. When he tries he can sound exactly like Andy Williams doing "Moon River." And you can look it up.

 

"Dream a Little Dream of Me" with Doris Day

Doris Day may have been the most underrated of all the great 1940s girl singers.

Dorisb4day 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 -- DL