The Best American Poetry

Notes in a time of strike: the curatorial noos of “Futur, ancien, fugitif, une scène française” [by Tracy Danison]

Pierre Joseph: “Mur de mûres”, série “Photographie sans fin”, 2019: paper print. Photo: Aurélien Mole©Adagp 2019

Motivé, motivé / il faut se motiver / il faut rester motive / soyons motivé

                                                                                                       Le Chant des partisans – Zebda

If every demonstration by transport unions were a revolution I’d have bought myself, or, perhaps, been served, thousands of bowls of strawberries and cream by now. The duc d’Orléans’ machinations notwithstanding, common sense tells those with ears to hear that those who have never, ever, do Révolution.

No matter what the would be Révolutionaires shout, it’s more likely to be civil war than millennium.

O! Empty slogan! O! Hollow Révolution!

So, as I have indicated to Karine, who is lately shouting and revolutionating a lot, I do believe, as everywhere and in all times, most of what is supposed gold in all this is but cheap gilding, likely dangerously greenhouse-gas rich, too.

Forget the gilded promises, I tell the woman. Turn down the heat, snuggle up close, let’s take the bike, enjoy producing less CO2, playful-like.

In a time of strike, get a-pumping. Find some fun in it.

Révolution!

Evolve and inverse things ourselves, gather up the pearls rattling under the hooves of the swine, make that silk purse, fix up a lemonade… Etc., etc.

For instance, from our house, the Palais de Tokyo – the Musée de l’art moderne de la ville de Paris – is only 23 miles, there and back.

Lemonade!  

Tokyo’s time-stretched contemporary art exhibition Futur, ancien, fugitif, Une scène française is ongoing.

Futur, fugitif turns out to turn the usual on its head. Révolution! In a way.

Agreeable erotic willies flutter through the cramps as Karine and I stroll its acres.

Out of the passel of really fine work on show, the exhibition itself gets the big prize. I say this ‘though I think that every single esthetic worker in the Futur, ancien, fugitif show has bottom. So much so that I can even name particular favorites right off the top of my head as I sit here: Nina Childress, Jean-Luc Blanc, Anne Le Troter, Betrand Dezoteux…

… And I was deeply impressed with how Futur, fugitif’s artists have made their own the sense of the work of the “60s” made something fresh and unique from the soul of comic books, stuff and plastics… Futur, ancien, fugitif forces me to think, maybe for the first time in respect to contemporary art that there is a positive force of “tradition” that comes from experience rather than from special intention... This thought is only one of many possible thoughts Futur, ancien, fugitif gets you mulling over.

Anyhow, in the image of their soulful and sensitive choices, the curators of Futur, ancien, fugitif – a team including Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc Claire Moulène and Marilou Thiébault – put together a brilliant piece of conceptual, material and contextual contemporary art.

Caroline Mesquita: “Soft Evasion”, 2019: cardboard, paint. Photo: Aurélien Mole

After all, stitching together a satisfyingly representative patchwork of the work of living artists born over a signifying 25 years or so, from the whole of France, too, is nothing if not esthetic genius. And though hidden from public gaze by its artistic success, there is the sweat that genuine creators always speak of. Don’t doubt that underneath the glitter Futur fugitif is a tour de force of the toughest-minded type of professional coal heaving.

Karine, who is generally always glimpsing Révolution just flitting around the corner, is exasperated with her own life. In her opinion, humanity hasn’t really got beyond the wheel, fire and thrusting spear, so real human beings résiste. She was of course disappointed with Futur fugitif.

There was nothing new there barking up the shins of the current state of affairs, she thinks. But that isn’t the intention and doesn’t have to be; after all, why should everything be either a potential New Universal Model or a form of entertainment?

Nathalie Du Pasquier: (from front right to back left): “Cabine n°3, AS THE PLANE WAS REACHING CRUISING ALTITUDE 2”, 2019: installation, five paintings: oil on paper; “Cabine n°1: CASA MIA,” 1984-2019: installation, mixed media, painting, wool carpet, photocopies; “Cabine n°2: TROUVÉ DANS UNE GROTTE”, 2019: paint on wood. Photo: Aurélien Mole

Were Karine of my silk-purse-lemonade stroke, as she sometimes can be, she would have noticed that Futur, ancien, fugitif is, just as the curators say, transitive – showing each brick of the span of the years of esthetic development it covers.

It does that really well. As a mix of media, cultural geographies and intentions expressed through time, believe me, you’ll go far before seeing as well-chosen examples of what’s on offer at Futur, ancien, fugitif.

Participating artists: Nils Alix-Tabeling, Mali Arun, Fabienne Audéoud, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Grégoire Beil, Martin Belou, Jean-Luc Blanc, Maurice Blaussyld, Anne Bourse,Kévin Bray, Madison Bycroft, Julien Carreyn, Marc Camille Chaimowicz with We Do Not Work Alone and Wallpapers by Artists, Antoine Château, Nina Childress, Jean Claus, Jean-Alain Corre, Jonas Delaborde et Hendrik Hegray, Bertrand Dezoteux, Vidya Gastaldon, Corentin Grossmann, Agata Ingarden, Renaud Jerez, Pierre Joseph, Laura Lamiel, Anne Le Troter, Antoine Marquis, Caroline Mesquita, Anita Molinero, Aude Pariset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Marine Peixoto, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Antoine Renard, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Linda Sanchez, Alain Séchas, Anna Solal, Kengné Téguia, Sarah Tritz, Nicolas Tubéry, Turpentine, Adrien Vescovi, Nayel Zeaiter

A bilingual, full-color, hard-cover edition of the Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris’ Magazine Palais N°30, 14 October 2019, featuring “Futur, ancien, fugitive” is available worldwide: ISSN: 1951-672X; ISBN 978-2-84711-114-9. 

Futur, ancien, fugitif closes on 5 January 2020.

Homage to Walt: "I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You" [by David Lehman]

For Brian Clements's inspired project of annotating the two hundred years since Walt Whitman was born, two hundred poets and writers have contributed poems or reflections, which Brian -- in conjunction with North American Review -- has posted daily since Walt's birthday (May 31). I got to be #198 in a distinguished list that Martín Espada kicked off.

Convinced as I am that the last line of "Song of Myself" would make an excellent first line, I wrote a poem that begins and ends with "I stop somewhere waiting for you." Click here and you'll read it. And be sure to check out Brian's introduction to the project and the entries by such as Julia Alvarez, Ellen Bass, Maxine Chernoff, Richard Deming, the aforementioned Señor Espada, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Todd Gitlin, and Robert Hass, to limit myself to names beginning with the first eight letters of the alphabet. -- DL

https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/every-atom-no-198?fbclid=IwAR2PIRymF2sEEwFHHjr7zgYA9IGk56oyT_pQjPs8J1SyvQx8MoMe77VdrFs

"A Snail is What It Was" [by James Cummins]

Donovan thought Bob was jokin’
About the old San Remo—
How back then shit they were smokin’
Would put to shame D.’s “primo.”

All this was well before the laughs
At Max’s Kansas City:
Bob still carried a photograph
Of Joan Baez’s titty.

It seemed all Dylan cared about
Was conquering some snatch.
They smoked some more; then Bob was out;
He had a plane to catch.

We’re all failed stars, too, by this time;
Though some have way more loot.
D. figured Dylan for a mime,
While Bob thought D. a fruit.

Christ, let the purple rain rain down,
And let the winds go howling!
Don’t send me down to Hell to pound
Reruns of Father Dowling.

Johnny Angel, How We Love Him and "If Feeling Isn't In It" [prose by Stacey Lehman, poem by John Brehm]

For the past four weeks, we’ve been under the rule of Johnny, a twelve-year-old twenty-eight pound Schipperke. David and I have never had a dog together and I haven’t had a dog since childhood. My family always had German shepherds and though I remember each of them-–-Noah, Cito, Yoffey, Regan–-I can’t remember lifting a finger to care for them. For a brief period in the late 1970s I took in a puppy that I rescued when I caught him trying to cross the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I gave him to my mother, who was between dogs at the time.

Since Johnny has been with us in Ithaca, I’ve learned that dogs force you to reorder your life. You may be able to put them on a schedule, but face it, when they have to “go” you have to jump. Johnny wakes me at around 6:00 am. He’s on a strict diet. And even though he no longer has the energy of a puppy, he’s quite good at getting into trouble. He’s figured out how to open the garbage to get at any scraps. When he wants something, he lets us know thought we can’t always figure out what it is that he’s after. A walk? A treat? A massage?

We’ve grown quite fond of Johnny, especially David, who likes to take him for long walks and whom I’ve overheard saying sweetly, “I love you, Johnny,” and it is with mixed feelings that we look forward to returning him to my sister and brother-in-law on Monday. Will he miss us? Will he ask to visit? If he does, how will they, or we, know? 

One day about three weeks ago Johnny burst into a paroxysm of growling and barking. Someone was approaching our front door to deliver a package. I realized that he was both warning us of what he sensed was approaching danger and threatening what could be the source of that danger. I was deeply moved. He was protecting his home.

So much has been written about dogs and how they make us human. My favorite dog memoir is “My Dog Tulip,” by J. R. Ackerley. I also love this poem by John Brehm.

If Feeling Isn't In It 
        by John Brehm

You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . .  
                                                                                   Howard Moss

Dogs will also lick your face if you let them.

Their bodies will shiver with happiness.

A simple walk in the park is just about

the height of contentment for them, followed

by a bowl of food, a bowl of water,

a place to curl up and sleep. Someone

to scratch them where they can't reach

and smooth their foreheads and talk to them.

Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen

and other bringers of bad news and will

bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell

fear and also love with perfect accuracy.

There is no use pretending with them.

Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy

or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed

or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it.

They make no secret of themselves.

You can even tell what they're dreaming about

by the way their legs jerk and try to run

on the slippery ground of sleep.

Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance.

They don't try to impress you with how serious

or sensitive they are. They just feel everything

full blast. Everything is off the charts

with them. More than once I've seen a dog

waiting for its owner outside a café

practically implode with worry. “Oh, God,

what if she doesn't come back this time?

What will I do? Who will take care of me?

I loved her so much and now she's gone

and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people

who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.”

And when she does come, what a flurry

of commotion, what a chorus of yelping

and cooing and leaps straight up into the air!

It's almost unbearable, this sudden

fullness after such total loss, to see

the world made whole again by a hand

on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

 

        from Sea of Faith by John Brehm

Jocelyn Dax (1954-2019) by Stacey Lehman

My friend Jocelyn Dax died on Monday. Her funeral is today.

We met decades ago when a mutual friend suggested that she offer me her extra ticket to the New York City Ballet at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. We discovered we had a lot in common and quickly became close friends.

Jocelyn was funny, smart, sophisticated, and beautiful. She was tall, with long legs and unruly hair. She graduated from college at 19. She spoke perfect French! She loved music (Bob Dylan), poetry (Allen Ginsberg), mystery novels, and great food. I would say that the through line of our friendship was cooking, talking about food and cooking, and eating great food. Among my most dog-eared recipes are “Jocelyn’s Caponata,” “Jocelyn’s caviar pie,” “Jocelyn’s marinated pork loin and curried leeks,” “Jocelyn’s Shrimp with tomatoes and feta cheese.” You could drop in on Jocelyn and count on being fed a perfect egg or tuna-salad sandwich. If you planned a Passover Seder for twelve, Jocelyn would show up with chicken soup and 60 matzoh balls (“will that be enough?”). She baked my favorite kind of chocolate chip cookies. Her freezer was always filled with ice-cream, her pantry with snacks.

Jocelyn was sexy and lusty. I remember sitting in a movie theater when the male star of whatever French movie we were seeing took off his shirt. “Oh. my. god,” she said, just under her breath.

We did a lot of growing up together. Those were the years when, in the words of Alice Munro, "you realize that what you're living is your life." Marriages. Divorces. Love affairs. Career changes. And for her, a child.

Of course her proudest and most lasting achievement is her son Michael, an accomplished writer and environmentalist. Today he's a tall, handsome, confident man but I can't help but see him as a boy, sitting on the stairs of Jocelyn's lovely home to eavesdrop on the "grownups" in the dining room. 

The photo above was taken in Paris in the 1980s. I was on the last leg of my vacation; Jocelyn was starting hers. We met for an afternoon of walking around the city and catching up. I was awed by the way she managed every transaction with her beautiful French. Our first stop was a patisserie, where she selected two perfect pains au chocolate, which we ate on our way to dinner. “Don’t you just love eating and walking?” she said.

-- sdl

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

". . . an excellent blurb line is, "i put this book in my son's/daughter's suitcase when he/she went of to Harvard/Yale/Berkeley." it shows you have a family, which makes many people feel closer to you, and it also shows that you trust the book enough to put in in the hands of your kids -- in whom you have a huge financial investment.

another good line is, 'if you read only one book this year, make it this one.' Because that sort of gives them permission not to buy any more books this year. but if it's getting close to the end of the calendar year this line could look funny -- in that case make sure you say 'if you only read one book this fiscal year....' "

"The Birth of the Blues" on FS's Birthday

Note what he does with the word "weird" -- DL

 

Met Percent: Week Twelve [by Alec Bernstein]

“mow tall, mow often.” 

Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 11/22/19

I have visited 43 times and viewed all galleries up to 399 (~300 out of ~900) - one-third complete.

“The one-third rule means that when you mow, you want to cut off the top one-third of your grass blades . . . Mowing more than a third of the total height of your grass can stress the plant and make it more susceptible to common turf problems.” - https://lawnpride.com/one-third-rule/

The remaining two-thirds will find their own rules.

 

The Letter (an indivisible sound)

Top: Babylonian translation of “Met Percent” into the Cuneiform Alphabet
Bottom: Cuneiform tablet: Sumerian dedicatory inscription from Ekur, the temple of the god Enlil, Mesopotamia, ca.16th–15th c. B.C, not on view.

These writings are some of the earliest found. The “origin of writing” documents both the origins of the world and the first symbolic capture of emotions and thoughts “on paper”. Cuneiform is by far my favorite alphabet. 

The seven Sumerian debate poems (below) are world origin myths. When something was recognized as important, its origin became important, and it was given a myth. “The earth first appeared barren, without grain, sheep, or goats. People went naked” (Debate between Grain and Sheep).

Debate between bird and fish

Debate between sheep and grain 

Debate between the millstone and the gulgul-stone

Debate between the pickaxe and the plough

Debate between silver and mighty copper

Debate between Summer and Winter

Debate between tree and the reed

These myths are not universal and have significant variations throughout the regions and eras. No continuity, no Biblical standard, no problem.

“It becomes evident that he (Ring Lardner) was deeply concerned that the vast majority of mankind had no idea, earthly or otherwise, where it was going or for what reason”.  - Buford Donald Fisher, Ring Lardner as Dadaist, 1970.

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
- Ring Lardner

 

“An Archeologist of Morning”

Cuneiform tablet: a-she-er gi-ta, balag to Innin/Ishtar, ca. 2nd–1st c. B.C., Seleucid or Parthian, not on view.

“This tablet contains a lament by Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, over the destruction of her cities and shrines, and contrasts her present humiliation with her previous power.” - MetText

Left: A page from Melville’s “Marginalia”. His constant annotations were studied in depth by Charles Olson. Right: summary counts of the words marked by Melville in his Set of Shakespeare. Decoder rings come in many forms. 

Charles Olson described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Assyrian Beards

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.
Cover photograph of Melville on Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson, City Lights, 1966.

Detail, “The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.” - Gustave Courbet, Musée d'Orsay, 1854-55. “Myself painting, showing the Assyrian profile of my head.” - Courbet.

Speaking of Olson: “Not since Gustave Courbet grew an Assyrian beard has any Western artist attempted such a sweeping rejection of the roots of Western civilization and identified with the Ancient Near East ‘beyond Homer’ and ‘beyond’ the Bible. For him the Sumerians were crucial to the attempt.” - John R. Maier, Charles Olson and the Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholarship, Journal of the American Oriental Society.

“You're too much influenced by Greek and Latin already. Go beyond that, to the Sumerians, and before. Break the hold time has on you; get outside it . . since Western civilization has gone awry, we had better work with what we have from before the degradation.” - Olson quoted by Ralph Maud in his Charles Olson’s archaic postmodern. 

Trotsky, Custer, Zappa and Baraka

Rebellious generations often look forward but go back in time for hair styles. I know great beards when I see them.

 

Rock and Clay (Emergent Figures)

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.

If I free associate, as Montaigne did, I must include my forbearers of influence. I cannot see these ancient bas reliefs without a ghost of the magnificent emergent prisoners by Michelangelo . . . or the Rock Men and the Clay People from Flash Gordon who appeared and disappeared into earth. I connect them, by their nature, their symbiotic relationships with the mineral world. 

 

 

Calliope [by Mitch Sisskind]

When she used the word bullnose to describe
The blunt corner of a marble kitchen counter --
From that moment I was in love with Calliope,
As I inferred a knowledge of carpentry which,
Although I had been unaware of it, I do find
Attractive in a woman whose slender arms
Disguise wiry strength just as her vocabulary
Unexpectedly includes a word like bullnose.
Another turn-on for me is a sylph-like woman
In a form-fitting wedding dress so with pleasure
I anticipate browsing Modern Brides magazine
With Calliope – notwithstanding how when I
Looked up bullnose in the dictionary it was
Defined as a disease of pigs. But no matter!

"Gentleman's Agreement" (1947): The Trailer

Highbrows have long condescended to this Academy Award-winning movie. They are wrong. Gregory Peck is great; do you remember the foul-mouthed comedian  in "Mad Men" who tells Don Draper "I loved you in Gentleman's Agreement"? Best line in the movie, delivered by Celeste Holm to Peck regarding Dorothy McGuire: "She doesn't rate you, Phil." And Peck to his mother: "You're quite a gal, Mom." 

In this photo you see Holm, Peck, and John Garfield.

Quote of the Day: Prima Ballerina Tanaquil "Tanny" Let Clercq

“Souffles fall and so do dancers, and both survive: The main thing is to forget it.” 

                    from The Ballet Cook Book by Tanaquil “Tanny” Le Clercq

-- sdl

The Philosopher in the Brown Shirt [Adam Kirsch on Heidegger]

<<<

Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both.

-- Adam Kirsch

>>>

Excellent piece by Adam Kirsch (in Tablet) on Heidegger's "metaphysical" anti-Semitism and on attempts to reconcile what is valuable in Heidegger's writing with the undeniable fact that he was a Nazi in thought and deed.

The piece is entitled "Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi." It was posted on September 21, 2016.

 -- DL

"But Not For Me" (Happy birthday to you, Ira Gershwin)

 

One of Ira Gershwin's greatest lyrics:

"They're writing songs of love, / But not for me.  . ."

"With love to lead the way, / I've found more clouds of gray / than any Russian play / could guarantee.  . ."

"I was a fool to fall and get that way / hi ho alas and also lackaday."

"It all began so well, but what an end. / This is the time a fellow need a friend, / When every happy plot / Ends in a marriage know, / and there's no knot for me."

"Coda" [by Bill Wadsworth]

Coda 

You waited at the station entrance.
I was late.   My hair had turned gray
but there you were, all the snow gone,
all the leaves blown, the leopard sun
having leapt across a life never lived.

My gaze falls on your black eyelashes,
the black silk folds of your dress.
We mourn the same self as we walk
beneath the tracks of falling stars,
gone before we see them.

-- from the current issue of The Paris Review

"Every Atom": Brian Clements' Whitman Project -- 200 Days in Honor of 200 Years

A tip of the fedora to Brian Clements, who, in conjunction with North American Review, initiated "Every Atom" on Walt Whitman's birthday, May 31. On that day and for two hundred days after, poets and lovers of poetry cited, quoted, and commented on select passages from Whitman's oeuvre to honor the bard of democracy's two hundredth birthday.

Martín Espada kicked off the project with a post celebrating the passage beginning:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
Disorderly, fleshy and sensual…eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist... no stander above men and women

In Espada's words,

<< Whitman gives the “sign of democracy”—and declares himself the advocate for those excluded from democracy’s embrace. Speaking for “the rights of them the others are down upon” is the poet’s way to electrify and illuminate American democracy with his egalitarian vision, the ideal of democracy as it could be and should be.

<< In so doing, Whitman confronts a history of silence, charging himself with the responsibility to “remove the veil.” If the alternative is silence, then the “long dumb voices” of the despised and the “forbidden voices” of the indecent must speak through him.  The question, even now, is whether this country is ready for Whitman, open to his “way of being” when we need it most. >>

Kudos to Martín for choosing the 1855 edition of "Song of Myself," to my mind far superior to later editions. The lines he chose exemplify how Whitman, as he aged, tended to revise for the worse. "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos" is hands down better than "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son."

On November 20, Marie Howe responded to the challenge with a poem of her own, "The Singularity," incorporating line three of "Song of Myself." Ellen Bass (September 3) quoted lines (ending in "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from") that she read when she "was nineteen and on LSD"; Whitman gave her permission to transgress the sexual norms of the time. Richard Deming (Nov. 26) examines the impulse to "loafe" ("I loafe and invite my soul") and speculates on how sloth, one of the seven capital sins, gave rise to one of the greatest poems in the language. Ethelbert Miller (Sept. 7) considers "I am the teacher of athletes. . ." in connection with the "black bodies [of football players] touching the leaves of grass before each kickoff. On June 11, Richard Jackson brought up Whitman’s belief that he had the right to contradict himself because he “contains multitudes.” Does this assertion not amount to an anticipatory defense of personae, masks, and heteronyms? 

I chose the last line of "Song of Myself" -- "I stop somewhere waiting for you" -- arguing that it could serve as the first line of a poem. I did it in verse and have a hunch it will be the 200th in the series.

Thank you Brian Clements, for curating this extraordinary tribute to Whitman. Here is a link to the index for twenty summer days beginning with June 28.   -- DL

"Cape Fear" (1962) [by David Lehman]

Here is the first of my monthly movie columns for The American Scholar. For my opening salvo I chose Cape Fear (1962), in which Robert Mitchum captures the very essence of threat, lust, rage, and menace.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xeb13jNKiM8

Seven Haiku for a Mongolian Master [by David Lehman]

Seven Haiku for Mend-Ooyo

Lunch on the silver
edge of the wide bridal sky
in Mongolia.

Wife starlight blossom:
honeydew of honeymoon:
two melons ripe, sweet.

Man of the secret
code of the poet: ciphers
of Mongolia.

Paired pillows, the luck
of sweet violets, horses
on hills with white hats.

In Mongolia
seven Buddhas reign at night,
rain all afternoon.

Guest and host embrace
as the dark side of the moon
is loved by the night.

Evening's first star wears
her seven jewels and shines
in Mongolia.

Note: 

In Mongolia, Stacey and I spent time with Mend-Ooyo, an accomplished calligrapher as well as the nation's leading man of letters. After a leisurely and literary lunch he celebrated the occasion by giving us Mongolian names -- mine is Tsolmongerelt (meaning "light of the morning star") and Stacey's is Odontuya (meaning "starlight"). Mend-Ooyo's own name translates roughly as "Man of the Secret Code," and a woman we stopped to chat with is "Lucky Violet." When I wrote seven haiku for Mend-Ooyo, I incorporated some of these details and other examples of how in the Mongolian imagination images substitute for abstractions. Marriage, for example, means "linked pillows" in Mongolian. Stacey took the photo of me on camel after Mend-Oyoo drove us out to the desert. -- DL

Catullus #154 [trans Molly Arden]

Ode to His Love

Where are you my Lady I am waiting for you
I used to think that you would come but you
Proved to me that male and female are true
Distinctions "different but equal" do you rue
The three years you spent at law school
When I think of them I feel like such a fool

The man who bones his woman is a useful tool
Each time we fuck is greater than the golden rule
I wrote these lines in an effort to be cool
But it didn't work I felt like a ghost or a ghoul
You sat on me as if I were a stool
With you I'd swim in the deep end of the pool

O where are you my dove my sweet
Love is loveliest in the throes of heat

trans. Molly Arden

Epigraph of the Month: Scott Fitzgerald's for "The Great Gatsby"

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!’”

-Thomas Parke D’Invilliers (a fictional character in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise]

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered [by Clive James, 1939-2019]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.