Meghan O'Rourke
Richard Howard
Lee Upton
Laura Cronk and David Lehman
John Ashbery and Adam Zagajewski
All photos by Star Black. Copyrtight (c) Star Black. Adam Zagajewski was reading at NYU that evening, but he and his party joined the BAP / New School crowd at Cafe Loup, where this picture was taken, after the BAP 2008 launch reading at the New School.
<<When the Feat of the Loose-Coat Skirmish happeneth to be done underhand and privily, between two well-disposed, athwart the Steps of a Pair of Stairs, lurkingly, and in covert, behind a Suit of Hangings, or close hid and trussed upon an unbound Faggot, it is more pleasing to the Cyprian Goddess, (and to me also, I speak this without prejudice to any better or more sound Opinion) than to perform the Culbusting Art, after the Cynick manner, in the view of the clear Sunshine— >> -- trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart
<<
The little business [la chosette] performed on the sly, between two closed doors, across the stairs, behind the tapestry, on a pile of loose kindling, is more pleasing to the Cyprian goddess (and that’s where I stand, without prejudice to higher authority), than performed in view of the sun, Cynic style—
trans. Donald Frame
>>
<<“You’ll be a cuckold, my fine fellow, I assure you, you’ll have beautiful horns. Heh, heh, heh, our own Master de Cornibus, God preserve you! . . .” “The other way around” said Panurge, “my dream presages that in my marriage I’ll have all goods in plenty together with the horn of abundance. You’ll say they’ll be satyr’s horns. Amen [to that]! . . . Thus I’d eternally have my gimlet at the ready and indefatigable, as the satyrs have. . . . In consequence, a cuckold never, for the lack of that is the cause sine qua non, the sole cause of making husbands cuckolds.”
trans. Donald Frame
>>
<< “Thou wilt be a cuckold, an honest one, I warrant thee; O the brave horns that will be born by thee! Ha, ha, ha. Our good Master de Cornibus, God save thee and shield thee . . .” “You are (quoth Panurge) very far mistaken in your Interpretation; for the matter is quite contrary to your sence thereof; my Dream presageth, that I shall by Marriage be stored with plenty of all manner of Goods, the hornifying of me shewing, that I will possess a Cornucopia, that Amalthean Horn, which is called, The Horn of Abundance . . . You possibly will say, that they are rather like to be Satyrs Horns; Amen, Amen . . . Thus I shall have my Touch-her-home still ready; my Staff of Love sempiternally in a good case, will, Satyr-like, be never toyled out . . . Hence doth it follow by a consequence as clear as the Sun-beams, that I will never be in the danger of being made a Cuckold, for the defect hereof is, Causa sine qua non; yea, the sole cause (as many think) of making Husbands Cuckolds.”>> -- trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart
See "Pantagruelism for our Time" by D. S. Carne Ross
Nin Andrews, a regular contributor to this blog, whose poems have appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry, has brilliantly extended the conceit she introduced in her Book of Orgasms, first published in 1994, reprinted since then, and characterized often as an international cult classic. In the new book there are poems that reflects Andrews's passionate engagement with the work of such poets as Walt Whitman, Henri Michaux, Robert Hass, Lydia Davis, Denise Duhamel, Frank O'Hara, Amy Gerstler, James Tate, Mark Strand, Robert Bly, Rilke, Vallejo, and the sculptor Bernini ("Ecstasy of Saint Teresa"). There is also a splendid reflection on John Ashbery's "Instruction Manual." Andrews dares to ask questions, such as "What is the postmodernist orgasm?" Interviewing many in her indefatigable quest to resolve the issue, Andrews gives us the standard Wikipedia definition ("An orgasm of questionable identity or origin") as well as the far more convincing definition provided by the new American feminist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who says it is "a part of the all that women can't have."
The press release from Etruscan Press in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., begins with these paragraphs:
<<< Nin Andrews’s poetry collection, The Last Orgasm, a collection of wry and fantastical, spiritual, feminist meditations on sexuality, love, desire, and the end of desire, was released by Etruscan Press today.
The Last Orgasm continues the journey of Nin Andrew’s first collection, The Book of Orgasms, which became a cult classic that has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and has readers around the globe. In both books the orgasm is an ethereal presence, puzzled by humanity in general and the author in particular.
Jan Beatty, (Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) says, “Of course, I would praise The Last Orgasm. And the first, second, middle, next, next to last. For the sake of everything true and holy (although Andrews would say there is nothing holy) please read this outrageous book! In these smart, raucous poems of one orgasm after another, Andrews climaxes at the pinnacle of social commentary—the G-spot of social change: the change being, give us more orgasms/the orgasm is dead. Indicting the writer, the book, the poetry mafia, and, of course, the orgasm, Andrews writes: ‘When I was sixteen, I woke one night and saw Our Lady of the Orgasm singing.’ Read this book if you want to sing again.”
>>>
Today I wanted to give a shout out to The Unsung Masters Series, which brings forgotten poets to a whole new audience. The most recent volume is about Bert Meyers (1928-1979), a poet new to me. Edited by Dana Levin and Adele Williams, the book reprints poems from Meyers’ out-of-print volumes alongside commentary by critics, former students, colleagues, and his son. I’ve underlined so many passages in my copy, but thought I’d make my case for his genius by simply showing you some of his images about the moon:
We live in pain,
The moon’s an aspirin.
(from “Madman Songs”)
The moon, a giant freezer, hummed.
(from “The Old Engraver”)
…the moon’s been reached.
A few astonished flies
wrinkle the dust on its face.
(from “These Days”)
The moon’s a little goat
over there on the hill…
(from “Daybreak”)
…the moon has a dirty face
the stars are broken glass
in a dark and empty street
(from “Without a Chance”)
…at night the earth’s a woman,
the full moon’s her mirror.
(from “Images”)
You can find more information about the book and about Bert Meyers here:
https://www.bertmeyers.com/about
On George Gershwin’s birthday
I keep expecting them to play
Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris,
the Cuban Overture, the Concerto in F,
Porgy and Bess as played by Miles Davis,
but no, all day it’s been Dvorak, Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and other worthies
not born today, Elgar for heaven’s sake;
at least they could give us some Debussy,
as didn’t "they" (such a useful pronoun)
criticize him for imitating Debussy,
or Ravel, who declined to give George lessons
saying, “Why become a second-rate Ravel
when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?”
-- DL
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A Dictator Walks into a Bar
In the hotel lobby, leaning against a marble column
from when the Romans ruled, I sip my vodka as gunfire
night and day ricochets in celebration
punctuating someone's wedding or a moment in
someone's mood in which blowing
off a clip into the air fights off boredom:
in this cellphone video that's more slashes of light,
jiggle and jag than a stable point of view,
I watch them drag him from muck out
of a culvert, his kufi knocked askew,
heavy body thrown across a Toyota battle wagon
where an electrical engineer turned militia man,
who reminds me of my father, mild, unshowy, studiously
polite, doesn't smile, frown, as he
watches himself slapping, in the footage that he's
showing me, the Brother Leader, great Murshid,
the Guide—doesn't comment, doesn't shy away
from my oh so fine-tuned sensitivities
quivering on the brink, maybe a little drunk, my cloak of objectivity
already tattering into rags—his lumps, welts
not quite bleeding—unable to look away,
am I hoping to see blood? It isn't every day that a dictator writhes under
your heel—the one powerful enough to say
Those who do not love me do not deserve to live—
as if he himself were the soul in the body politic and we
were just an afterthought, accessory
to his glory, the merest janitors to his trash, or maybe
just the trash itself, all of us human trash
waiting to be burned. But now, it's our turn,
and we've got him where we want him—
his livid puffy face, its blankness unto death
like slopped over paint running down the can—
his nose by now smashed in so his mouth
hangs open to the blahness of desert hardpan cliffs shadowing
tank tracks back into the Nafusa Mountains
where just an hour ago we were driving and he was worrying
about load-shedding and high-voltage grids,
the tragedy of no infrastructure—while I was daydreaming
of vodka and peeling happy hour shrimp
glinting like armor plate—finally, I've seen enough; but as I
turn to give him back his phone he's moved down
the bar and seems, head bowed, to be
peering into his drink with that intimate anticipation
that could signal a joke or a prayer speeding
to its punchline, only it's the new kind
of humor, the new kind of prayer,
in which the jokes aren't funny and prayers don't deliver,
and whether you're praying or laughing, it's all on you.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY. [Author photo by Annette Hornischer.]
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Wall painting, Tripoli, Libya
“And I Will Dwell Amongst Them, Amongst Each One:” The Individual Life as a Sanctuary in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
A personal tribute to Chana Bloch, key translator of Amichai’s poems
Author’s note: The following essay was inspired by my recent participation in an AWP panel honoring Chana Bloch. Panelists were invited to consider Chana Bloch’s influence on their own poetry.
--By Yehoshua November
As an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, I studied under the poet Ruth Stone. During my first workshop turn, she announced to the class that my poem sounded like a translation, albeit not a bad one. Confused and embarrassed, I returned to my college apartment. On my desk, I spied a copy of the first poetry collection I had ever purchased, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the second section of the book composed of Chana Bloch’s translations of Israel’s leading poet. This was 1999. Amichai would pass away one year later, a few short months after the publication of Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation of his final volume, Open Closed Open. I had just entered a relationship with—and began writing poems devoted to—a dark-haired young woman with a space between her front teeth, the woman I would marry less than two years later.
This is to say, from the outset, even when I was unaware of it, my poetry and personal life have been significantly shaped by Chana Bloch’s translation work. Perhaps, as a side note, I should admit that, despite my Jewish day-school upbringing, I had managed to spend enough time on baseball cards, reruns of MacGyver, and other unspecified pursuits to manage not mastering modern Hebrew. Certainly not well enough, at the time, to read Amichai’s poetry in its original language. Thus, for me, like so many, Bloch served as the access point to one of the greatest poets of the last century.
Several years ago, I attended a poetry reading by the recently deceased Polish poet Adam Zagajewksi. When asked what was lost in reading his poems as translations, he said, “Nothing. I feel, even as they are rendered in English, these are my poems.” As a devoted non-Polish speaking fan of Zagajewski, this answer felt like a fantasy fulfilled. According to Bloch and her co-translator Chana Kronfeld, the same may not hold true in the case of Amichai translations. As Bloch and Kronfed point out in an essay on translating Amichai’s final poetry collection[1], much of Amichai’s puns and word associations go unrepresented when rendered in other languages. They add that modern Hebrew is a kind of “echo chamber” of its Biblical precursor so that everyday contemporary speech resounds with meanings rooted in antiquity. They point, for example, to the Hebrew word shem, which translates as name. The plural form of the word, Shemos (names), serves as the Hebrew title of the second book of the Torah (referred to in English as the book of Exodus). Shem also brings to mind Hashem, an informal title for the Divine, a way to refer to God without mentioning one of the sacred, un-erasable names.
Given the absence of the rich diction that flavors Amichai’s original Hebrew, Bloch and Kronfeld wonder at Amichai’s popularity amongst his non-Hebrew speaking readers. [2]They conclude that he “crosses the language barrier” because “[h]is images make poetry out of the non-poetic things of ordinary life” and because he “makes a virtue of accessibility.” In introducing one of my poems included in The New York Times Magazine—the one time I enjoyed this distinction--Matthew Zapruder noted that my poetry is characterized by “radical clarity.” As a Chassidic Jew, being called radical in the largely secular poetry world did not come as a surprise to me; however, I never imagined the accessibility of my poetics would be the reason. Is my poetry really radically clear? And if so, how did I arrive at this atypical aesthetic? Is Amichai’s work—exceedingly accessible poetry further simplified when translation strips it of association and word play—also radically clear? Perhaps Ruth Stone’s observation about my student poetry as a kind of translation has remained largely applicable. If it’s true my poetry is more accessible than that of many of my contemporaries, perhaps, at least in part, this is due to many years of reading Bloch’s translations of Amichai. It’s strange and pleasurable to think this may be the case. Interestingly, in a tribute to his mother, Jonathan Bloch writes[3], “When I was a child, [my mother] wrote the word ‘clarity’ in black marker on an index card and taped it to the wall above her typewriter, where she would see it when she looked up from writing. I remember seeing that index card with the word clarity, in fading marker, hanging there for many years. I think that clarity was her lifeline, to the end.”
Looking back, it’s not hard to trace a number of my poems’ rhetorical underpinnings to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Employing the language of negation in “When I Banged My Head on the Door, Amichai writes[4], and Bloch translates, “…and I didn’t scream ‘Mama’ and I didn’t scream ‘God.’/ And I didn’t prophesy a world at the end of Days/ where there will be no more heads and doors.” Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s more than likely this same language of negation, and particularly negation of spiritual idealism, that sparked or pushed along my poem “I Made a Decision,” which reads:
Once, before either of us was twenty,
in the cafeteria, I watched your mouth
enclose itself around a plum.
Because I was young and you were beautiful,
I did not say, This is just a physical body nourishing itself.
And I did not say, Perhaps this is the other half of my soul.
I made a decision with a young man’s body,
and my soul continues to thank me.
Aside from questions of craft, a recent tribute to Bloch I participated in asked its panelists to consider Bloch’s exploration of her Jewish faith and her desire to examine what she called “the inner life.” Here, too, I think it’s instructive to return to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Amichai departed from a life of tradition as an adult. One finds no shortage of poems doubting the Divine in his body of work. In this spirit, Bloch and Kronfeld note[5], “Amichai’s reception outside Israel has tended to oversimplify the meaning of his work, blunt his irony, and even—so help us!—present him as a poet of fuzzy feel good religiosity.”
Yet, I think a traditional Jew, especially a Chasidic Jew such as myself, can find Amichai relevant and compelling, even without overlooking or distorting his iconoclast streak. This is because Amichai’s work echoes a central Jewish theology relevant to notions of the inner world and Jewish faith. Or at least his work offers a secular iteration of that theology. [6]As Chassidic and Midrashic teachings point out, the Divine instruction to build the Tabernacle, and by extension the Holy Temple, reads[7], “Make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell in them.” In the verse, the Divine voice does not note, “I will dwell in it,” as grammar would dictate. Rather, it states, “I will dwell in them,” in each one, implying that true construction of a Sanctuary entails each individual sanctifying the ordinary moments of his or her life, locating holiness in the mundane. For this reason, and in contrast to ascetic religions, traditional Jewish practices engage the body and the world. According to the Jewish mystics, each time a Divine command is performed with a physical object—and Judaism abounds with such commands—divine light, Or Ein Sof, is drawn down to, and absorbed by, the item in use. Surprisingly, in this theology, one’s body and its daily undertakings constitute a kind of Divine Temple, especially when acts are carried out with Divine purpose. And, in a sense, the Temple the individual creates proves more central to daily life than the larger structure of the communal Holy Temple.
The ambition to sanctify the quotidian is present in much of contemporary poetry, but few poets seem to see the body and the individual life as a kind of sanctuary to the extent that Amichai does. Or in Amichai’s secular iteration, the interior world of memory seems just as important as larger real-world history and geography. In this sense, the personal and historical, the interior and outer worlds, compete, coalesce, and get conflated, recalling the Jewish theology of the literal communal temple structure and the idiosyncratic temple of each individual life. Given Bloch’s focus on the inner world and Jewish faith, it’s not surprising she was drawn to and served as a leading translator of Amichai’s poetry. Let me close with a Bloch translation of an Amichai poem which appears to best represent the individual-life-as-temple ethos. Significantly, in the poem, Amichai refers to David’s Citadel, a Herodian tower in Jerusalem whose name calls to mind the Holy Temple, which, in the Song of Songs, another work Bloch co-translated, is also referred to as David’s Citadel. Here, quite literally, Amichai, like the Midrashic-Chassidic teachings, prioritizes the individual human temple of daily life over the larger historical structures:
A prose poem from "Tourists,"[8] by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch
2
Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down
my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their
guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with
the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman
period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said
to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch
over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the
left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables
for his family."
Photos: Amichai above; Chana Bloch below
Continue reading "On Yehuda Amichai, as translated by Chana Bloch [by Joshua November]" »
Theodore Ell’s first collection of poems Beginning in Sight won the 2022 Anne Elder Award, judged by Gig Ryan, Ella Jeffery and Marjan Mossammaparast. As the book’s title suggests, Ell’s poems are conceived through a gathering of visual details, their accumulation developing atmospheres and meanings that are often vague and indefinite. Part of the appeal of Ell’s poetry is the contrast between the precision of these details and the shadowy effects they create. In “Tenebrae” the arrival of nighttime into a city apartment is presented with rigorous particularity: “Sky / in the gaps of a broken comb - the medley / of towers, antennae.” The way the night seems to enter the apartment, to break the distinction between the inside and outside worlds, generates a vulnerability, ominous, that transforms solitude into isolation, reminiscent of some of Pierre Reverdy’s poems. Tenebrae is of course a Catholic service held during Holy Week in the days leading up to Easter, and a tension exists in the poem between “the cold communion” of maintaining this solitude by watching the night pass by from the windowsill and the desire to enter into the world: “Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves – / not dress circles”.
Tenebrae
Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky
in the gaps of a broken comb – the medley
of towers, antennae. The city: a queue
for dinner at a swish place, or a catwalk.
Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves –
not dress circles or crystal filled in series,
only forgetting the rule of doubt for hours,
leaving morning till morning, whole vacancies.
This sill, monogrammed by wine rims. A living.
Rest from studying the pavement in silent lines,
from the cold communion, aid. Frail-voiced
nuns chant responses from behind gilt fences
through the workless days. They reach some in the street,
who look in, down a ribcage of coloured light,
high rafters, canopy – a keyhole vision
of dusk between towers, that toothed horizon,
a light that breaks our outline, hides our numbers.
Sam Sax begins their hilarious, touching, and human/humane book Pig with an Orwell quote from Animal Farm—"“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” It is impossible for me to say which Sax poems I enjoyed more—“Miss Piggy,” “a pig pulls out of paradise,” or “james dean with pig.” Inventive and political, tender and sensual, Sax’s poems use the concept of “pig” to talk about police violence, capitalism/”this little piggy went to market,” pet pigs, religious dietary restrictions, the swine flu, the pandemic’s outbreak in pork plants, ecology, pig hearts used in surgery, and the celebration and degradation of the human body. When Sax learns that their grandfather castrated pigs as a young person, they imagine “castrato pigs singing/opera oddly/wagner probably…” and later, in a companion poem “Author’s Note,” they write “I’ve never bred pigs. never fed pigs…only read pigs. only/ begged to be pig-bred. only been/ called pig/a hundred times…” In “Experiments,” they imagine revisiting a classroom of fetal pigs. In “Squeal Like A Pig,” they recontextualize Deliverance through a tender queerness: “boy hurting/boy hurt/never imagined/I could leave/become the trees….” Sax has seemingly and magnificently exhausted the subject, though they write in their opening poem “the first book written/about pigs was published/ in 3468 BC, the last will be this, until it isn’t….”
Congratulations, Sam!
Sprezzatura
Eugenio Montale asked me if there was an American word
for sprezzatura, particularly with respect to poetry.
In respetto di poesia, he said. And I said yes, in American
We call it ‘moose’ and mentioned several poets,
Frank O‘Hara among them, who were quite famous,
As fame goes in our sort of work, for their moose.
He wondered if there were an American expression
To convey the general concept of ‘Eugenio Montale.’
And I said, Yes, we call it ‘George Seferis.’ I also observed
—I was showing off, but how often do you get to talk
to Eugenio Montale--that, in my view, the prose of Seferis,
Especially his diaries from the last years of the war
And the slow waking to the depth of that devastation after,
Were even greater than his poems, though his poems
At their best gave off pure light, like the glare
From the white walls on the cliffs above the harbor in Skios
Which could make the eyes ache. He canted his head
Politely and asked if among Americans the worship
Of the Virgin Mary was a custom. And I said that it was
And that in the cities of the Middle West and probably
The towns, it was especially intense among the mothers
Of children with grave illnesses who heaped flowers
In enormous quantities before her altar and he nodded.
And they light candles? he asked. And I said, Yes, candles.
from Summer Smoke, the brilliant new collection by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020). Hass was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of The Best American Poetry. Photo credit: Miriam Berkley.
From the archive; first posted September 25, 2020
They committed the folly
Of failing to follow the lolly.
They didn’t learn about the booze,
They didn’t learn about the flooze,
The smack, the jack, and the lolly.
And, in short, they missed the trolley.
They overlooked some obvious flaws.
Why? Was it arrogance
Or the need to spare the expense
Or just a lack of common sense?
Who can say? Whatever the cause,
They failed to observe the clause.
They didn’t do their due diligence.
They didn’t do it,
And now they rue it,
And how they will rue not doing it,
How they will rue the day
They didn’t do their due diligence.
David Lehman’s recent books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (2019) and Poems in the Manner of … (2017).
______________________________________________________
Tiburón
once, as a child, my parents & a credit card bought a pool table
& i found myself in the backyard with clumsy hands & growing breasts—
i claimed corner pocket until i could master sinking an eight ball
& by fifteen the neighborhood kids knew of the mexican girl
named Tiburón— the shark who’d bite at the sound of a pool stick
chalked into strategy in exchange for walmart gift cards.
& i recall a time when a boy who thought himself a man
challenged me to a game of strip pool.
i thanked the sky for the cold desert night, for cloaking my body
with layers. i emptied the table of its striped billiards &
the boy who thought himself a man stripped down to a full moon,
cupped his manhood & i walked away
with his shit-talk in my pocket. years later, in college, my roommate
asked me to accompany her to the local pub.
the bar sticky in old beer & jukebox, we took our seat on broken stools,
rickety when our legs crossed themselves for good balance.
the room full of tall men hovered over the pool table, their hands
choking the necks of IPA’s. i stacked a tower of quarters on the table.
stared down a white man covered in mermaid tattoos
trapped in the ocean of his arm.
i’ll play for 5 bucks & a few smokes. i break the table & his jaw
snaps back at the reckless dance. four beers later i sweep
a twenty dollar bill & american spirits. i walked into the alley,
smoked my winnings & exchanged my dollar bills for a california burrito.
my mouth smothered in salsa verde. i laughed, laughed at the history
of men who dare doubt the feral animal that blazes in this blood.
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Karla Cordero is a Chicana poet, educator, and a 2021 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. Her poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth, is a San Diego Book Award winner and finalist for the International Latino Book Awards. Karla’s work has appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, The Oprah Magazine, PANK, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext Anthology, among other publications. She is the Executive Director for the non-profit art organization Glassless Minds and Professor at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College. Follow her @karlaflaka13 on Instagram or visit her website.
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Charles Edouard Boutibonne, Ladies Playing Billiards, 1869
This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":
"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial
Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.
Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.
Visit Wordsmith.org for more on poetic forms. And https://pachofaunfinished.wordpress.com/tag/david-lehman/
From the archive; first posted March 14, 2015.
514: Song lyricist was my dream career: Fill a dozen or so pages with drafts, send them off to my dependent collaborator (with a sweet voice, ear for melody, and recording contract), and live on royalties as I consume experiences for my next set of lyrics. The dream came true—except for the contract and royalties.
515: I was madly in love with the 60s singer-songwriters, playing their albums on repeat (pre-digitally on a turntable) and seeing them at The Gaslight, Fat Black Pussycat, Bitter End, Gerdes Folk City, Club 47, Central Park summer concerts, Palisades Amusement Park, Newport Folk Festival: Phil Ochs, Laura Nyro, Eric Andersen, Buffy St. Marie, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Fred Neil, Paul Siebel, Patrick Sky, Richard and Mimi Farina, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Steve Noonan, Janis Ian, and of course Bob Dylan. (Though I was never enamored of "Blowing in the Wind," which Peter Yarrow introduced on a live Peter, Paul & Mary recording with a Rabbinical "This song asks nine questions.” What motivated him to count the questions? Years later I asked him and he tousled my hair and said, “Oh you!”)
516: I took to the guitar at an early age. Here I am pretending to be a lap-guitar-cowboy (prepared for an unruly-crowd).
I toured local backyards as one of the first Elvis impersonators, right down to the cowlick.
517: When I was 15, I spent some of my Bar Mitzvah money on a $50 Harmony Sovereign guitar at the recently-opened branch of Sam Ash in Hempstead. Here's Paul Ash after closing the deal.
On the way home, my mother said, “Is this going to collect dust in the closet?” I took the bait and signed up for lessons from Al Wansor, who had an eponymous store in Lynbrook. At the first lesson, Al “taught” me to play “Love Me Tender”—single notes, no chords. I wanted to strum like Bob Gibson and fingerpick like Mississippi John Hurt. I didn't return so I never got to know that Al Wansor had toured with bands and did session work on albums. I did enjoy playing the notes to “Love Me Tender,” and eventually realized the repetition was starting to train my ear to recognize note differentials, training that was never completed because I gave up on Al Wansor.
518: I played the Harmony Sovereign at dozens of gigs, wrote songs on it, and filled cassettes labelled "noodling" and "messing." Everyone who picked it up admired its action and tone. Several years later, Jimmy Page would compose Led Zeppelin songs on a Harmony Sovereign (here on display at the Met Museum), and even played it on the recording of “Stairway to Heaven".
Also, Pete Townshend had one.
But first I had one.
519: I would pretend I wrote songs I admired, and sing them in imagined settings. I also fantasized going to go to my left on a fast break for the Knicks, which was never going to happen, but having my lyrics sung at the Gaslight was remotely possible (and did happen).
Fred Neil’s “Just a Little Bit of Rain,” comprises only 13 discrete lines, including:
And if you look back
Try to forget all the bad times
Lonely blue and sad times
And just a little bit of rain
And just a little bit of rain
I heard myself adding:
And if you look back
Try to forget the last words
Those hastily caste words
And just a little bit of rain
And just a little bit of rain
I felt like I had just gone to my left on a fast break.
520: Robert Middleman was my folkie friend throughout high school (and beyond). Somehow, we summoned the gumption to play hoot night at Gerdes Folk City (the original location, positively on Fourth Street), where on Monday nights anyone could do a song or two. The emcee sized us up and put us on first. As the sparse audience scattered politeness for Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind," the emcee said, "Well, that's a hootenanny for you," which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." We were followed by a kid about our age who knew what he was doing. He was Gram Parsons, later of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers (who would OD at 26). Another performer was a cowboy-type with the refrain, "I proceeded to take 3 or 4 steps backwards and give her a dropkick right in the crotch." Everyone (including me) laughed at the line, which showed up a few years later on Jerry Jeff Walker's Driftin' Way of Life album. By then, I didn't laugh.
521: In the spring of my first year at Union College, my roommate from Carmel Valley said, "One of your folksinger friends was killed near my house." He said it with a combination of hometown pride and college banter. It took me a couple of days to find out it was one of my heroes, Richard Fariña, who had left a party for his wife (and collaborator) Mimi's 21st birthday to take a ride on the back of a motorcycle.
I mourned by singing "Children of Darkness" to Mimi:
Now is the time for your loving, dear
And the time for your company
Now when the light of reason fails
And fires burn on the sea....
For I am a wild and a lonely child
And the son of an angry land;
And now with the high wars raging
I would offer you my hand
I wasn't wild, I wasn't particularly lonely, and I wasn't a child, but I certainly felt the need to imagine Mimi's company.
522: Though not as momentous an occasion as Ezra Pound showing up at William Carlos Williams' room at Penn, I first met Carl Rosenstock when he appeared at my dorm room to check out the Harmony Sovereign he'd been hearing about, marking the beginning of a long songwriting/performing friendship. Usually one of us would write a first draft and the other might offer suggestions. Eventually we added Cliff Safane (a true musician who played piano, sax, and bass clarinet) and called ourselves "The 42nd Street Shuttle," which came to be known around campus as simply "The Shuttle." We were regulars at the North End, a makeshift campus cafe, where performers included Phil Robinson (later to build the Field of Dreams), and afterwards we might have beers at the Rathskeller with Jeffrey DeMunn (currently with 119 acting credits on IMDB), who blew us away with his Krapp's Last Tape at the campus theater in the Nott Memorial.
We also played frequently on Rob Friedman's Folk Fest radio show on WRPI (which went on for decades). And we somehow got on the stage at Caffe Lena in Saratoga, with Cliff playing bass clarinet (probably a first for a folk club). At the end of the set, Lena declared, "Well, that's the new music!" which we took to mean, "We got that one out of the way." Set list:
523: Some lies are so unnecessary (and ultimately disprovable) that they could hardly be worth the ephemeral pleasure they might bring. This lie still confounds me: A production company was making a documentary on Union College. The producer called and said he'd heard that "The Shuttle" was the folk group on campus, and could we record one of our songs for the soundtrack? (Maybe someone would see it and offer us a contract.) Weeks after we did the recording, a classmate mentioned he had seen a preview. "Are we in it?" we asked. "Yeah," he said. "The Shuttle, right in the opening."
We weren't in it.
524: I couldn't sing. I could finger-pick passably (thanks to someone showing me the secret of double thumbing), and my Harmony Sovereign sweetened my strumming. But I couldn't run a sequence of single notes, a minimal skill set for a lead guitarist. Carl liked—needed—having me around, so I was in the Shuttle lineup, home or away, and the lead lines were keyboarded or blown by Cliff.
One of my lyrics came out, wholly formed, in my notebook, triggered by my memories of playing the snare drum in the elementary school walking band.
Carl added a lovely melody, and since there were so few lyrics, Cliff had plenty of time to stretch out. One performance, I felt the music in a way I hadn't before, and improvised a very brief solo. The show was recorded, and when my solo came up on the tape, Cliff looked at me, smiled, and said, "You had a musical idea."
The next day, a friend ran up to me on campus, held my shoulders, said, "'Proud of your brand new shoes'—beautiful!" and ran off.
525: I met a student named Paul Harris when I was being rushed by both Jewish fraternities. Paul asked me if Eric Andersen was any good. "He's great, why?" His friend Harvey Brooks, a bass player, had asked Paul to join him accompanying Andersen at a concert. They hit it off so well musically that Eric Andersen did something perhaps unprecedented: He rerecorded his current album, 'Bout Changes 'N' Things, this time with Paul and Harvey.
Paul went on to an illustrious career with hundreds of credits as accompanist and arranger: The Doors, Nick Drake, B.B. King, Ian and Sylvia, John Sebastian, and so so many more, including a stint as part of Stephen Stills' group "Manassas."
One day Paul excitedly gave me a reel-to-reel of Richie Havens' forthcoming first album, Mixed Bag. We went to the campus library, and I listened to the whole album through headphones in one of the cushioned chairs on the mezzanine, tingling with the excitement of a career being launched. "What did you think?" Paul asked, and I told him I loved it except for "Sandy," which sounded more cocktail lounge than folk club. Paul seemed crushed. "I thought that was some of my best playing," he said, and I listened again and realized that Paul was transcending musical borders, and I should try to keep up.
Paul's most stunning early achievement was arranging and conducting Tom Rush's Circle Game album, utilizing compositional approaches he'd picked up from Edgar Curtis, a Union professor. When I ran into Paul backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, we got into a conversation about the merits of the two Jewish fraternities at Union. Tom Rush sidled up and said, "So, what are we talking about?" I tried to change the subject but Paul continued with Phi Ep vs. Phi Sigma.
After graduating, Paul toured with, among others, Judy Collins. By then we had lost touch, so when I saw that Collins was performing in Troy, I tried to reach Paul at the hotel. Someone else came to the phone and said, "My name is Michael Sahl, I'm filling in for Paul." He promised to give Paul my best. Decades later I was introduced to Michael Sahl at the graduation of his son Ben, my student and friend. I said, "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Wa talked on the phone."
525: Carl and I took a bus to New York to audition for Vanguard Records. Not only didn't we get a deal, but someone stole my borrowed guitar from the waiting room. (Fortunately, it wasn't the Harmony Sovereign.) And we auditioned for an A&R man at April Blackwood. His name was Tony, and he told us that our songs needed hooks. He was sympathetic to our artistic impulses and said he had been on the performing side of the business. Then, the pre-Dawn Tony Orlando belted out "Bless you / bless every breath that you take."
526: The summer of 1969 I was living with my girlfriend in Riverside, California, working as a newspaper reporter (infiltrating the White Citizens Council, writing about street corner preachers and a women's liberation group) while occasionally sending lyrics to Carl, who was passing the basket in Greenwich Village coffee shops.
My girlfriend moved back East on a pre-determined date to start at a new college. As much as I thought I was prepared for the split, after she left for the airport I felt like the world around me had gone empty. I grabbed my notebook and wrote exactly what happened.
The empty suitcase slowly fills
You take the candle off the windowsill
The dresser's empty now
You look around
Make sure there's nothing you left behind
You take the ticket that I bought
For the bus ride to the airport
Baggage on the sidewalk
We just sit and talk
And the driver starts his engine going
You're going
The driver moves to close the door
He says we can't wait anymore
Caught by surprise
No time for goodbyes
I walk away after you turn the corner
You're going
We knew at the start that it would end
And we knew just exactly when
You'd go back east I'd stay west
It's just what places
It's just what places
It's just what places
Have to offer
To offer
Months later, back in New York, I caught one of Carl's sets. I sat in the corner, alone, paying close attention to the wizard guitarist sitting on my old stool. A young woman with bright red hair yelled, “Do the one about the candle!” (I later found out she was the daughter of a famous folk musician.)
“You know the poet I’ve been talking about, who wrote the lyrics to that song? He’s here tonight.” Carl pointed towards me, and all eyes turned my way. “But he’s so innocuous looking," said the young woman with bright red hair.
I couldn't have felt more flattered.
527: I was writing poetry and editing a literary magazine, but I got down to the Village occasionally. Carl was part of a flock of folksingers, who would play a set or two, then head for drinks at the Kettle Of Fish (above the Gaslight). When the Kettle was full, it was over to Googie’s on Sullivan Street. When the bars closed, the migration might head a few blocks down to Chinatown. Among the crew, the one I thought most likely to make it was Patrick Chamberlain, a singer-songwriter-raconteur born in East Texas and raised in rural Pennsylvania. He greeted me at one of his concerts with “The gentleman from the press has arrived.”
Back row from left to right: Carl Rosenstock, Pat Chamberlain, and an innocuous lyricist (drawing by singer-songwriter-poet Rich Levine).
And then, tragedy. As I heard it, Pat was on the phone with an ex-girlfriend, threatening to blow his brains out if she didn’t come over. She didn’t come over. I played the cassette I recorded of his recent concert. Pat introduced a song with, “They say you need three things to make it in this business: experience, exposure and an ex old lady so you have some kind of experience to write songs.” Lyrics included “it gets in my veins I can hear her refrains / I hope that she is just fine.”
The memorial service was at Calvary Church. I overhead Paul Siebel say to Steve Goodman, “If it’s all the same to Pat, let’s not do this to each other.” Goodman replied, “It really kicked that shit out of me.” Siebel looked around and said, “He sure threw a good party.”
528: I had some money, so when Erik Frandsen (who once sang “Meet the Mets” at the Gaslight) told me about a Gibson J-45 at Matt Umanov’s shop, I went for a look.
As I was testing out the guitar, intimidated by all the pros in the room, I started strumming major 7th chords. Someone pointed to a sign that read, "No major 7th chords without a note from your mother,” and I switched to double-thumb fingerpicking and plunked down $350. I still have the guitar.
529: For a few years I wrote songs with former Shuttle-mate Cliff Safane, more pop than folk. They were performed by an up-and-coming singer (who didn't come up).
530: Back in the late 60s, a magazine identified Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, and Steve Noonan as the Orange County Three. Noonan's career didn't take off like the others, but his first album never strayed from my rotation.
531: Fast forward to 2014.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
