The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry 2020: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"Anxieties" [by Donna Masini]

It's like ants 
and more ants. 

West, east 
their little axes 

hack and tease. 
Your sins. Your back taxes. 

This is your Etna,
your senate 

of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi

to hell. You see 
your past tense-- 

and next? A nest 
of jittery ties. 

You're ill at ease, 
at sea, 

almost in- 
sane.  You've eaten 

your saints. 
You pray to your sins. 

Even sex 
is no exit. 

Ah, you exist. 

"After finishing a novel, I was in that drifting place, scribbling, taking notes, slowly collecting drafts toward a new book I'm calling 4:30 Movie. Terrance Hayes suggested I try to write an 'anagram/word scramble' poem--a form he'd 'invented.' As with any form or prompt, sometimes it leads somewhere, sometimes not, but there's always a surprise, and my first attempt ended up in another poem: 'If you think in anagrams, / parades and drapes, diapers, rape, despair and aspire / all come out of paradise.' Depending upon mood or poem I give myself different formal conditions, but every line must end (and in some poems begin as well) with one of the words that comes out of the scramble. Sometimes I use this to 'warm up'--to play. Sometimes I try it when I'm anxious--hence the title of this one."

--Donna Masini

The poem, from Donna's book 4:30 Movie, was selected by Sherman Alexie for The Best American Poetry 2015, the poem originally appeared From Poem-A-Day, www.poets. org

Dispatch From A Distance - Whose Woods [by Cara Benson]

“Land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life.” Patrick Wolfe

“Whose woods these are I think I know” begins the canonized Robert Frost poem about stopping on a horse one evening “to watch [the landowner’s] woods fill up with snow.” Though the first stanza is concerned with this probable owner and whether he would catch the speaker of the poem stopping on his land, Frost’s primary aim in the poem, it seems, is to render a stolen moment of contemplation on the darkest day of the year, before traveling the long road home and ultimately the long road of his life to death, the forever sleep.

As someone who walks in woods often, nearly daily since COVID and moving up on a hill, this opening comes to me not infrequently. It’s one of the many lines I chirp out as I go, a refrain as I make music with my feet as well. Others include: bah bah bah bah bah bah bah You say it’s your birthday! Or, from The Sound of Music of my youth: Oh Mother Superior I could never get lost in these hills! And, also, because I take me with me: Paranoia paranoia everybody’s coming to get me. Just say you never met me. I’m not sick, but I’m not…. Well, you get the picture. Songs, catch phrases, bits of conversation – usually unbidden – burble up from the well of my experience, which is some small part of a collective experience, a version, if skewed and biased, of communal mixed tapes.

The Frost line, I’ve noticed, usually comes out as Whose woods are these – an interrogative, the maybe more expected version than how it was constructed for the poem. Of course Frost is being a poet in arranging his line for rhythm and surprise. In conversation we might say, “I think I know whose woods these are.” Instead, he opens with what sets us up for an expectation of the question. “Whose woods” feels as if it will be asking, rather than asserting. Though he then undermines the assertion (he thinks he knows, not he’s certain he knows), there is a claim embedded in the line. He is sure that there is a singular owner, even if he’s not entirely sure he knows which.

The woods where I now live are the original homelands of the Mohican (Muhheconneok) people. Their villages and great council fire were down closer to the river, the land in the hills for seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering, and it is certain they were here for millennia prior to Henry Hudson sailing up “the river that flows both ways” in 1609. Their territory extended on both sides of the river and from as far north as Lake Champlain all the way south to close to the mouth of the river at Manhattan island. One account has it that their numbers had been 25,000, with 4,000 warriors, at their peak.

We know that this changed – dramatically and violently – with the coming of the Dutch, and then the English. This isn’t news. It also isn’t new to say that settler-colonial myths surrounding “giving thanks” between colonists and Indigenous people, as an obvious example, are distorted, propagandistic narratives. Still, the story of an amicably shared feast with scant acknowledgment of the atrocities that settlers enacted gets repeated every November. As do the tidal waters with their source high in the mountains of where the Mohicans lived still get called the Hudson rather than the Muhheacannituck.

Which names and narratives we reiterate have tremendous material, emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. Erasure equals death. In a most literal sense, the story told in the 1493 Papal Bull that decreed “that barbarous nations be overthrown” wrote the justification for violently dispossessing non-Christians of their land solely by erasing the humanity of anyone who did not succumb to Rome. This is often called the Doctrine of Discovery, and in 1823 a United States Supreme Court decision incorporated this argument into federal law as the basis for further usurpation of Turtle Island. A more seemingly benign example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, wherein he wrongly conflated the Mohicans and the Mohegans (neither of whom are extinct), gets retold to this day. 

What story, then, shall I tell of these woods? Rather, what story is it my place, nee duty, to tell? I am aware as I walk through the forested hills where I now live that I tread on history I don’t feel good about, to put it plainly.* I am also aware that this story is not solely in the past. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, the present-day descendants of those whose homeland I also call home, is a sovereign, self-supporting federally recognized tribe of about 1500 enrolled members. They live some one thousand miles west in Wisconsin on a reservation in Menominee tribal land due to various coerced removals, what they have called the “many trails” of their history. This distance has not diminished their connection to the area. The Muhheconneok, the people of the waters that are never still, after all, are a people named for place.

“The connection has never been broken,” says Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Bonney Hartley. “We’ve always returned, we’ve always had land claims, we’ve always had historical interest in our cultural sites. It’s always been home.” Her office, in fact, is located not in Wisconsin, but in New York in Muhheconneok ancestral homelands. Through the National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, their Tribal Historic Preservation program reviews hundreds of projects every year within its recognized areas of interest. In other words, in these woods.

What follows territorial acknowledgments? What comes once this story is brought to the fore? How to make this right? One specific avenue for reparation is, to use a complicated term, giving land back (is it giving if it was never rightfully owned?). The recent Supreme Court ruling in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, which decrees a large portion of that state as never having been disbanded as Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, is an historic win for Indigenous rights in the US. Could this signal the possibility of other favorable outcomes for Native American tribes and people? As for the Mohicans, they did petition the State of New York in 1986 for 23,000 acres, enough land that they would have been able to return home to live. The territory named wasn’t along the river valley but in western NY, the tribe’s last location before being forced out by developers in the 1800s. The suit was finally settled in 2010 with an award of less than 2 acres for potential establishment of a casino and an additional 330 acres added to their Wisconsin territory. The casino was never developed due to encroaching competition, ultimately from NY State itself. This certainly was not the win the Muscogee (Creek) Nation experienced, but that was 2010. Would the case have turned out differently today?

I am no legal scholar. I don’t know if there is a case to be brought for land along the Muhheacannituck. I imagine the tribe’s best legal claim was the one they sought in western NY rather than their original homelands. There are deeds that document agreements for most of the land along the river, though both sides of the signers on paper had vastly differing understandings of what those leases meant. But maybe this isn’t something that has to be negotiated through the law. Chelsea Vowel, writing as âpihtawikosisân, says that returned land could come from privately held territory. “I mean damn…maybe your huge ass union needs to fork over some of the land its executives have squirreled away on their massive salaries as a gesture of good guesting. That could be a real thing that could happen.” (She’s writing in response to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, hence mention of unions, but the point remains if we’re talking about corporate CEOs, for example.)

I don’t know if that is a thing that would happen. It’s easy to mention words like hell and frozen over when it comes to expecting “good guesting” from corporate America. Corporate anywhere, really. It’s also easy to deflect personal responsibility, hence the moves I just made in pointing out the government and then corporations as the culprits. Maybe the real thing that could happen includes the 1.33 acres that are deeded in my name. Maybe not, but reckoning with this history – this present – is as crucial as (and interrelated with) remediating the climate crisis, and it isn’t only about territory (though obviously that’s a big deal). The theft of land is a symptom, if you will. The disease is White hegemony, and I believe it can be healed with patience, dedication, and a willingness to be uncomfortable (here I am talking to my fellow Whites). Even for those of us who’ve been engaged in this kind of introspection and/or public action for a while, there is still deep individual and collective work to be done. I hope that the watershed moment we are in regarding race leads to truly liberatory transformations that take hold. I think repeating that story, the one that says righting wrongs and honoring the agency of others is liberating for all involved, could be of use. For anyone, and I include myself in this, who is grappling with his/her/their path in this process, I’ll offer the reminder that no one has to have all the answers. It’s good to be asking questions. Possibility can absolutely emerge from uncertainty. Of that I am sure.

Notes:

*I realize that centers a White woman’s feelings (mine). I do this to show that it isn’t healthy (“feel good”) to be an oppressor. 

The Tribal Seal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians is included with gracious permission by Tribal Council. It is the creation of Tribal Member Edwin Martin.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance and Enter Geese. 

Francois Villon, Rascal Poet [by David Lehman]

The original bad-boy poet roamed the countryside of fifteenth-century France. Francois Villon narrowly escaped the gallows; a vagabond and a thief, he cast his major poems in the form of satiric versions of a last will and testament.

In "Le Petit Testament" (also known as "Le Lais") -- a title that appealed greatly to the Australian inventors of the great twentieth-century hoax poet Ern Malley -- Villon bequeaths his possessions, whether tangible, spiritual, or imaginary -- to the people and institutions that deserve them. The mood is one of irony, sometimes bitter, sometimes of the type known as gallows humor, but there is warmth of feeling and also compassion.

To the Holy Trinity, Villon leaves his soul; to the earth, his body; to a Parisian named Denis, some stolen wine; to a madman, his glasses; to a lover, all the women he wants. At least two of Villon's shorter poems -- "Ballad of Hanged Men" and "I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me" -- were composed in 1462 while the poet was under sentence of death.

Here is a brief excerpt of "The Legacy" ("Le Lais") rendered by John Payne in 1878:

                                Item, this trust I do declare
                                                For three poor children named below:
                                Three little orphans lone and bare,
                                                That hungry and unshodden go
                                                And naked to all winds that blow;
                                That they may be provided for
                                                And sheltered from the rain and snow,
                                At least until this winter's o'er.

This stanza, sweet and sad, yields a completely different set of emotions when you consider that the three "orphans. . .named below" were three of the richest men then living in Paris.

At Bennington College one winter, Anne Winters and I suggested that a group of young poets write a poem ending with Villon's grand line, "And I die of thirst at the rim of the fountain."

Here's my stab at a famous Villon verse:

“In my own country I live in a foreign place
With strength of mind and purpose, yet powerless,
A winner at any game I try, yet awash in loss.
At dawn I say goodbye to the night,
And in bed, I fear I'll fall from a great height."

Among translators the late Louis Simpson had a go at Villon's testamentary masterpieces in 2000. Earlier, Galway Kinnell edited a Signet book of bilingual selections. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "A Lodging for the Night" perpetuated some of the legends surrounding Villon, which have formed the basis of more than one Hollywood swashbuckler.

Simon Loekle has an excellent blog post on Villon, which begins with these paragraphs.

<<<
   Francois Villon disappeared from written record circa 1463 (aged 30), when he was banished from the city of Paris, after a dramatic reprieve from the gallows.

Though Gutenberg's contraption was thumping clanking and squeaking in Germany, the first printing press did not set up operations in Paris until 1470; the earliest edition of Villon was published in 1489. That Villon's reputation survived for nearly 30 years after his disappearance, that it proved strong enough to support a half dozen published collections of his work over the XVI century is his true legacy. It was the literate and literary readership that preserved his words and brought them to the print shop, but he had a reputation among his contemporaries not only for his criminal activities: he was known for his poems. The First Respondents were listeners, in taverns and jail cells and fine chateaux.

The Legacy was written (I think quickly) in 1456 just before the poet fled Paris, and it is in part a farewell to his native city. The specific places and people underscore its satiric motive; if the topical humour falls flat after 500 years, the energetic bite of the verse still makes its mark. Over the next four years on the road, "The Legacy," it may reasonably be supposed, served as a kind of ticket or calling card, as it displays his skill in a long poem (a traditional ambition of poets). The satiric parody of the Last Will (popular since the days of the plague) spared Villon the demands of narrative (which, somehow, Villon does not seem temperamentally suited for). The format is obviously flexible, and if Villon presented it along the way, it is easy to imagine his touching up the text with local references. 

That "The Legacy" is a work of hard-boiled irony is palpable, though how the irony works through the poem is more difficult to grasp. Over the centuries, virtually all of the "heirs" have been identified, but we have lost the immediacy of the reference, and must bear in mind that Villon is engaged in presenting "the thing that is not." It is also clear that The Testament is unquestionably the masterpiece: the interludes of ballades and rondeaux enrich the poem, providing human details and warmth, and better exposing Villon's humours. The two poems cover much the same territory (behind or to the East of Notre Dame); some of the "heirs" in the first are "re-gifted" in the later. I cannot but think that the later work was a conscious revision of the first.
>>> 

From the archive; originally posted October 5, 2013.  See also "Francois Villon Begins His Journey," a poem I wrote in 2017 following the impulse that gave rise to this piece on the "Rascal Poet."  The Hollywood swashbuckler pictures is Ronald Colman playing Villon. -- DL https://www.thecommononline.org/francois-villon-begins-his-journey/

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Yesenia Montilla

Eartha Kitt As Muse

by Yesenia Montilla

The eyes are two saucers filled with every

forlorn woman’s last meal: roasted

chicken & a good Bordeaux                    & how

the heart is found in the neck’s thick artery, ready

                                    for a man’s good touch.

Eartha, I know nothing about fame or fortune

            but I know a little about being so lonely

that even the flower’s elaborate bloom can not keep me company.

You’re so damn pretty, that I could write a poem about you

                        & you  

                        & (insert lover’s name)    We both have had plenty

to spare           & darling, I love how

we look in the mirror & kiss the air

            & how when our hand waves in greeting

the sky and all its particles dance & a sweet sigh

escapes from our parted lips                   

                        & isn’t that  sound a kind of tenderness?

How laughter bolts from our mouths like a wild

heart drumming

this is how we muzzle the world —

 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. She lives in Harlem, NY.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Emily's Escape [by Nin Andrews]

(c) Nin Andrews 2014

Karen Sagstetter: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo [detail] by Diane MacEachern

 

No Crying in Baseball

No crying when I struck out swinging.
No crying when a runt smashed a grand slam
off my pitch. Or when I wrecked my legs
black and blue sliding into third. 
No crying when I was picked off
at third for the third time
or when my wondrous fly ball
whacked the rear fence
and bounced back like a prodigal to a centerfield glove.
Not even when my mind wandered to the beach 
and I bobbled the ball and the manager screamed
get out of my life!

I’ll tell you what brought me tears. 
I was in space, orbiting the generous blue earth 
and pressing my face against 
the plain window glass of my ship.
I witnessed ball fields in neighborhoods on every continent,
green diamonds shining through glorious clouds 
and dogs the world over
chasing grounders in the afternoons.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Karen Sagstetter is author of Commotion, a book of poetry, as well as poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals, two chapbooks of poetry, two nonfiction books, and The Thing with Willie, a collection of linked stories set largely in Galveston. She  studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and  worked as senior editor for many years at the Smithsonian’s museum of Asian art and at the National Gallery of Art. She grew up in Texas and now lives in Maryland. 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Emily Alexander Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

REVERENCE AND IRREVERENCE AT THE SAME TIME

“Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too” by Emily Alexander

http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2019/august/alexander-meredith.html 

One of the greatest things a poem can do is pull a surprise laugh out of the reader when solemnity is all that’s expected. Mark Halliday, Stephen Dunn, and Dick Allen are masters of this. The reader moves along in beautiful sadness, and then, suddenly, laughter. In Emily Alexander’s “Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too,” a richly detailed meditation on the Emergency Room, the serious tone stops to elbow readers in the side. “a bomb rib-lodged in a man’s chest / then two train commuters / skewered onto a hand rail so I shove / a spoonful of peanut butter in my mouth / to shut me up,” Alexander writes, and already the bleak moments feel lighter. Or: “I woke up to pee then I found / my keys drove home I barely made / a dent in night it dented me right / back.” This poem bares a moment, revealing both its tragic and comic sides: reverence and irreverence, existential absurdity … life.

"When I Heard the Learn'd Urologist" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Where were you when televisions
Multiplied in American homes
And pastel-colored cars had fins
On which at least once a boy
Chasing a ball stabbed himself
And the fins, like kings, died out?

I lived when Eisenhower’s golfing
And mumbled press conferences
Affronted the intelligentsia whose
Worship of Stevenson blossomed
Into the miracle of Jack Kennedy’s
Televised White House cello recitals.

In the doghouse was an expression
Extremely common in those days.
You might hear a man who forgot
The anniversary of his marriage
Forty years ago refer to himself
As in the doghouse, for example.

People said, On the warpath.
They said, You’re cooking with gas.
They said, Fish out of water --
Jump on the bandwagon – A fly in
The ointment – The jury is still out --
He’s always blowing his own horn --

Or how about this? Eke lullaby,
My loving boy, thy lusts relent --
Four hundred and fifty years ago
A man wrote that poem to his penis.
Can you imagine it happening today?
I can. I’m a board certified urologist.

-- from the archive; first posted September 2014

"Smoking in Heaven" [by Robert Hass]

Watching young poets in the early evening
Smoking on the terrace outside the poetry reading,
I wondered if there would be a smoking terrace
In heaven. I have a friend, dead now,
A Catholic who was unimpressed by the prospect of paradise
Until he discovered a group of medieval theologians
Who had proposed that there was a special kind of time
In eternity. They gave it a Latin name.
Like my friend, they couldn’t conceive of a God
Who would force them to live forever
Without sunrise and sunset. His wife, a skeptic,
Called it decaffeinated time, at which he shrugged wryly.
This idea of life after death made him very happy,
Which was, as far as he was concerned, the point.
He’s been dead now for almost a decade,
So I suppose he knows one way or another
Whether there is nothing after death and no one there
To know it or not. The smoking terrace would, of course, be out of doors,
So it wouldn’t be as depressing as those smoking rooms in airports
Where people with grey skin submit to their addiction
With religious humility. You could light up and walk to the edge of the clouds
And watch the fragrant smoke you were expelling
Drift into the decaffeinated sunset. It made me wonder
If there were coffee in heaven. Or sex. I knew a woman
Who said that the main reason for sex,
As far as she was concerned,
Was the cigarette afterward. And if there were sex
In heaven, why would there be anything else? Probably
So that you could also watch Canada geese settle on a lake
Just as the moon was twilighting the surface of the water
In luminous little scallops. The young poets
Should read Allen Ginsberg who said that poets should set an example
By not submitting to what he called “the nicotine haze
Of capitalism.” Probably in the heaven without tobacco
The couples are walking by the sea, having already made love,
And the moon, almost unnaturally large,  is just coming up,
And the color of the moon on the water is just like what
Their bodies are feeling, contented but still tingling,
And in the moonlight they can see a pack of feral goats
With their beards and inhuman eyes grazing on the hillside, also contentedly,
As if time and eternity were the wrong ideas altogether,
And the women would have come in with their Greek masks on
To walk the shoreline and dance what fate is.

From Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020), an extraordinary new book by the poet, author of The Apple Trees at Olema and Twentieth Century Pleasures, editor of Poet's Choice, and guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. Kudos, Bob. -- DL

Happy Birthday Jacques d'Amboise [by Alastair Macaulay]

Jacques d'Amboise, during an interview with former New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, 2016. Find the interview on YouTube here.

July 28, 2020 - The happiest of birthdays to wonderful Jacques d’Amboise, eighty-six today, a constant source of charm, enthusiasm, and communicative glee. When I took the “New York Times” job in 2007, Jacques - director of the National Dance Institute - was one of the many leading figures in dance I tried not to mix with.

I didn’t stand a chance. At the first NDI performance I attended in 2007, I snuck in furtively, and sat where I thought nobody would find me. Jacques, however, knew I was there somewhere, and despite having painful knees came charging down a flight of stairs saying “Where’s Mr England? I have to tell him about Freddie Ashton!”

And we were off, with me losing my heart immediately to this man whom Ashton had singled out at age seventeen (yes, 17!) to partner Diana Adams in the leading roles of his new ballet, “Picnic at Tintagel” (1952) before I was born and before Balanchine or anybody else had created a role for him. Over the next twelve years, I met Jacques for the occasional lunch: he would tell me about how badly Balanchine behaved to Ashton, how he, Jacques, always visited Ashton in London in subsequent years, about having been slated to dance the original cast of Robbins’s “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953) (“Jerry took so long to make a ballet, and I was a young man in a hurry - I went to Mr Balanchine to let me change the rehearsal schedule”), about the revelation of how Balanchine spoke of the role of Apollo as with no role he created for Jacques, and much more. I’m especially proud that I brought him to speak at the filmed 2018 New York Public Library seminar on “Apollo”, where, with marvellous generosity over two afternoons, he interacted with Edward Villella and Ib Andersen (two of Balanchine’s later Apollos), Suki Schorer, Kay Mazzo, Kyra Nichols, and other Balanchine alumni.

“A wild boy made civilised by art” is how Balanchine told Jacques he saw the title role of “Apollo”; Jacques - who always felt that was his own autobiography - has never ceased to be grateful to the choreographer who changed his life and introduced him to the civilising power of art.

 

Jacques d'Amboise as El Capitán in George Balanchine's "Stars & Strips"

I was privileged that, in 2016 and subsequent years, Jacques asked me to interview him for the Balanchine Foundation about four or more of his roles - Apollo, El Capitán in “Stars and Stripes”, the “Tschaikovsky pas de deux”, and “Who Cares?” A great treat for me. The photograph above is from our “Who Cares?” Interview, which I happily watched for the first time today. The “Apollo” one is yet better. All on YouTube!

 

Alastair Macaulay interviews d'Amboise about his role in Balanchine's "Apollo"

 

(Ed note: Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. He was the chief dance critic of The New York Times from 2007 until 2018. He was previously the chief theater critic of The Financial Times in London (1994-2007) and the chief dance critic for The Times Literary Supplement (1996-2006), founding editor (1983-88) of the British quarterly Dance Theater Journal, and a guest dance critic for The New Yorker (1988 and 1992). This post is reprinted, with the author's permission, from a post on Instagram. Alastair Macauley's feed is rich with dance commentary and history, and great photos. Follow him in Instagram here. sdl)

Poem Beginning with a Line after Yehuda Amichai [by Didi Jackson]

Past the window in the room where we make love
waves follow one another like lines of laundry
as the cliffs unfold, spilling like bolts of cloth into the bay,
and it is the anise, they say, the snails
are after, defining the roads of Serifos
like small-change coins, curled and climbing fierce
as soldiers up each stalk in numbers so thick
they could be plucked like white berries ripe
with June, and they too would taste of licorice
succulent in a time of honey and nettles.

from Moon Jar by Didi Jackson. Red Hen Press, 2020.

Archie Ammons and friends at the launch reading of BAP 1994

from left to right, A. R. Ammons, James McManus, James Cummins, A. E. Stallings, Angela Shaw. The reading was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, William Wadsworth executive director. The Academy sponsored the BAP launch reading from 1992 through 1995. For digging up the photo, we're indebted to Jim McManus.

Happy Birthday, John Ashbery (with a collage and a poem from the maestro, 1927-2017)

Wet Casements

    When Edward Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. 
It was not raining much.
                       KAKFA, Wedding Preparations in the Country
	
	The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
	In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
	Their own eyes.  A digest of their correct impressions of
	Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
	Ghostly transparent face.  You in falbalas
	Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
	The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
	Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
	Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
	Never pierced through into timeless energy of a present
	Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
	Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
	That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
	Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
	Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
	For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
	And out of it.  I want that information very much today,

	Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
	I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
	Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
	Of dancing on a bridge.  I shall at last see my complete face
	Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

	I shall keep to myself.
	I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.

The poem is from Houseboat Days (1977). 

"In Progress" [by Tony Towle]

We adjust the background
so that I am still in a forest,
but the traditional kind,
not one made of cement and glass,
but composed primarily of wood
and auxiliary vegetal matter,
aerated with avian sonorities,
and partially veiled by “air products”:
innocuous mist or fog,
for there is such a generous
spacing between predators
that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,
wherever they might be watching from,
think that living in our world
would be a safe and wonderful thing.

I pause in the mist or fog, because
it is a good place for retrieving erstwhile data
to supplement the present with;
that is, what’s left of the present
after the morning news
finishes most of it off —

and here is something: When Phil Niekro
retired from the Atlanta Braves
there was no longer anyone
playing in major league baseball
older than I was. He achieved
this distinction in 1987         
and will never relinquish it.

What has happened since then?

Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.
Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,
really, but I’ll get to them later,
since I’ve often admonished myself
for living in the past, although
that was when I lived in the past. 

The Phil Niekro discovery
came through one of the newspapers
I perused during the eons of down time
consequent to proofreading at Forbes,
where in two years my only noteworthy
“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg
was not a principality — as written, a synonym
for minuscule polities — but a grand duchy.
In the following week, while
resting comfortably on my laurels,
I missed a typo so egregious that my luster
was tarnished beyond reclamation.

So back to the present, or what’s
left of the present after the evening news
has finished chewing on it —
and there was no word
about the Somali pirates
who attempted to seize my poems
and hold them hostage.

What were your poems doing
in the Strait of Hormuz?

You mean the Gulf of Aden.
You may well ask.
I wish I were at liberty to say.

                        *

So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,
while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store
except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,
who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up —
2 o’clock was that approaching hour — and then he abruptly left
a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,
walked in from a long-past-due assignment,
and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said
that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch
to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,
and saw that it was quarter to three — I had just lost 45 minutes!
but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.
Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,
but they set off reflection enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.

from The Brooklyn Rail (April 2020)

Sonnet 7/26/2020 (by Mitch Sisskind)

When you really need a wimpy
You get one. It was our mantra
Those many nights awaiting
Delivery of the Racing Form
To the newsstand on Diversey 
Even as we called a longshot
Like Greystone Park a whale 
Or how a consistent winner like
Doctor Morrie Weiss was called
A woolly mammoth with payoffs
That could feed an entire village
Albeit at even money or less.
But a wimpy? You will get one
When you need one. Period.

                      *

Very pleased that my Collected Poems
is now available on Amazon >> 

"Thinking" at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria (Summer 2006)

Two poems at Civitella Ranieri, July 2006

Thinking

                        You see a man / trying to think. -- Adrienne Rich

Here an orange and black-spotted butterfly
tests the lavender. There a bee sips
the yellow and deep red interior
of a red zinnia in full bloom.
The man needs to be alone.

The butterfly shies away.

You see a man trying to think,
but first he must clear his head
and throat.

The man coughs.
The butterfly leaps from a lush pink to
a bright orange zinnia. The man is thinking.
Give him room. Figs grow plump and green
on the trees while he does his thinking.
The pomegranates in the bushes
are pregnant with seeds.
The orange butterfly has white spots
on a black border.
It is not the same butterfly as before.

Thunder in Umbria

How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.

Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Summer 2006.

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

A memory of freedom forgotten

by Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
 

It comes seeking the legitimacy of history but
even that feels like a violence—that is: history
is narrative. The need to break the plot
of itself. The field, something like a field
is a plot. A plot is a demarcation. I was running
some place like a field & there she was, her hand
at her waist. We were before language, language
was & was not history, she did not hold the memory
of beating before or after, body at ease, arms not
akimbo but almost in a holding. We were all there,
golden, maybe insects in the grass. You were running
into open space, even the sky was different than
what I remembered. Language already happened but
we were before language. Our smells did not matter
except they told each other who was there. (Scarcity—
who invented  that name.) Enclosure before history
of enclosure.

                                                            For Phoebe Glick and Sara Jane Stoner 
                                                            after language from Ruth Wilson Gilmore

 

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar was born and raised by a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone's Eyes (Belladonna*, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University and a CantoMundo fellow. She lives in Jersey City, on the periphery of the Hackensack Meadowlands. 

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Bernard Welt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Arthur Gary

 

Sabbatical

for Doug Lang

 

We hear tales of a wonderful country called Wales

Only Wales is wholly imaginary, like Middle Earth

Or the Starfleet Academy

There is no holiday called Christmas

Children do not exist

 

Humans have as yet failed to discover

A reliable means of reproducing their kind

Except in elaborate fictions—a kind of imitation of life

Lana Turner has not collapsed, at least not yet

 

There was no ancient mariner

And he never stopped anybody

All the world is not a stage

Some people actually are islands

The world is not too much with us

 

All happy families are not alike

I know whether I am the hero of my own story

I think I am extremely likely to see

A poem lovely as a tree

I do not celebrate myself or sing myself

There is not much of me

And I don’t taste all that good

 

This not the saddest story I have ever heard

I am not a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together

Although I admit it must look that way sometimes

I did not place that jar in Tennessee

I didn’t eat the plums

 

In the beginning God did not create anything

This is not Illyria, lady

The answer is not blowing in the wind

You are not my funny valentine

Fish do not gotta swim, birds do not gotta fly

 

‘Twas not brillig

Lafayette, we are not here

I do not want you green

 

I do not wander lonely as a cloud

If clouds really are all that lonely

I took the road everybody else takes

And it hasn’t made any difference at all

A thing of beauty is not a joy forever

I don’t have to go down to the sea again

The sea is not calm tonight

I don’t remember

 ________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bernard Welt is the author of Serenade (Z Press), and poetry in journals including The Antioch Review, Sun & Moon, Little Caesar, and Z, as well as of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art (Art issues Press). His poem, “I stopped writing poetry . . .” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 (Robert Hass, ed., New York: Scribner, 2001).

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Keegan Lester Draws an Ace [by Ace Boggess]

HIGH ENERGY AND MOVEMENT

“a river chipped with stars,

night continues on without me.” by Keegan Lester

http://www.poolpoetry.com/poet-keegan-lester.html

What first drew me to David Lehman’s daily poems twenty years ago, and more recently the books of Matthew Lippman, is the pure kinetic energy of them. These poems travel great distances in just a page or two. They are like taking a trip from New York to Florida but winding up in California, while depicting all the stops along the way. Keegan Lester’s poem “a river chipped with stars, / night continues on without me.” does this (as do so many of his poems). This poem spins, spirals, sidesteps, dances. It dovetails a bit, yet leaves the reader in a new and unfamiliar place by the end.

Crediting Saul Bass [by Stefanie Green]

The credit sequences that open a movie constitute an under-appreciated art form, as you will conclude if you watch an hour of Saul Bass’s film title sequences on youtube.com [https://youtu.be/qqM3McG4-LE ]. Distinctive and recognizable, Bass’s style relies on all manner of graphic images: cut paper, printed ephemera, close-ups of objects, signs and symbols. Some of the most notable directors of the 1950s up through the ‘90s chose Saul Bass to do the credits for their films, and his creative output tells you why.

Bass, who was born in 1920, was of the same generation as Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin: a trio of tremendously talented Jewish boys from New York City. At Brooklyn College, Bass studied with Gyorgy Kepes, the influential Hungarian emigré designer and film maker, and was influenced by the Bauhaus and its American version, the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Running through his work, as through that of Glaser and Lubalin, is the idea of combining word and image, and presenting it boldly, either with color or strong direction, or jagged type, or any other number of graphic techniques.  

Of the three designers, Bass's work has the most immediacy. It is as if he ripped the lettering right out of paper. (In fact, the title sequence for Bunny Lake is Missing shows a hand ripping paper.)  In contrast, Glaser and Lubalin seem to me to have a more literary and historical style, although both were immensely innovative in their use of color, imagery, and typography. Bass’s work, both his animation and graphic design, feels much more raw.

Bass was a master of logo design as well as animation. The sales pitch film for his ATT logo redesign in the mid 60s  [https://youtu.be/xKu2de0yCJI ] is a beautiful example of the post-war ideal of mass communication. I noticed, also, that his ATT bell logo is used in the titles of Ocean’s 11 (Sinatra version). The bell shows up as one of the slot machine figures.

In what follows, links are embedded in the movies' titles.

The Man with the Golden Arm

            Bass loved using the human body in abstract form. In this case, he was lucky that the film’s title included “Golden Arm.” The arm and hand in the poster are jagged, and with the rectangles that surround the actors’ photos, that edginess expresses the drug-induced state and its withdrawal. The mock handwriting typeface also has that jagged quality.

Vertigo

            A closeup of a woman’s lips, then her eyes. The music has a clock-like beat, and suggests hypnosis. The image then dissolves into a turning eye, and then a spiral getting larger and smaller. The optics prepare the viewer for the feeling of vertigo to which James Stewart is susceptible.

Anatomy of a Murder

            The movie’s score was written and performed by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The film itself is a courtroom drama, but the music signs that you’re in for something unexpected. The case involves not only a murder but also a rape, and the couple involved, as played by Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara, are not quite believable. The score, along with Jimmy Stewart’s jazz piano hobby, set you up for a cool noir story. In the title sequence -- and in the poster -- Bass returns to the graphic of body parts made from ripped paper. As strong as the graphic is, it misses the mark for me, because the story doesn’t analyze the murder so much as the emotions that lead to it. Still, it’s one of his most memorable images. I remember it from the time the movie first opened.

North by Northwest

            The opening credits, with Bernard Hermann’s pulsing, atonal score, is all angles and lines going in vertical and diagonal directions. Again, the typeface is a bold sans serif---not Helvetica, the European typeface, but something resembling Franklin Gothic Condensed, which US newspapers used before Helvetica became the symbol of modern design. “Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion.” (www.artofthetitle.com/title/north-by-northwest/) The credits beautifully convey the movie’s urbane finish and comic undertow as we move from animation to street scenes, crowds walking, people descending subway stairs, and the city bus slamming its door in Alfred Hitchcock’s face, arguably Hitch’s greatest cameo.

Psycho

            As in Vertigo, Bernard Hermann’s score and Bass’s animation work together beautifully. This time the lines are vertical and horizontal, moving in and out of the frame with the same pulsing movement in the ear and the eye. There are several different versions of the print poster but they all use the same lettering for the title: the word “psycho” --- all caps and split through the middle.

Spartacus

            The sequence opens with hands bound, dissolving into ancient artifacts, more hands from statues, busts of Roman generals and leaders, then close-up images of Roman inscriptions. All these images fill the screen and move in and out of each other. The images are simple but multiple and immediately recognizable as ancient. It’s like a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exodus

A burning flame suggests the memory of the Holocaust and the struggle for Israel’s independence. Ernest Gold’s soundtrack is sweeping and heroic. The poster incorporates a hand raised, holding a rifle. The addition of that graphic creates movement and a powerful emotional response in the viewer.

Ocean's 11

Digital numbers, one to eleven, fill the screen like a Times Square flashing headline. Then playing cards, slot machines, dice. Wow.

West Side Story

Here the end credits are amazing: graffiti on city walls. The soft background music from Leonard Bernstein’s score contrasts sharply with the rawness of the scrawled lettering.

Cape Fear, Casino, The Age of Innocence

These three Martin Scorcese films have beautifully-crafted title sequences. Cape Fear opens with a screen full of dark, gently rippling water from which a pair of dark menacing eyes appears. The Casino titles are a shocking surprise, and the background music of the Saint Matthew Passion by Bach, plus the floating body in flames, really set you up for an epic story. Finally, The Age of Innocence sequence is a lush time-lapse of sensuous flowers opening in slow motion. It’s a perfect use of imagery. You can tell Scorcese must have worked closely on the design of the titles. It’s a perfect collaboration.

-- Stefanie Green was the art director of Cornell Alumni Magazine and Weill Cornell Medicine from 1987 to 2015.