The Best American Poetry

March 29, 2021

On James Schuyler's "Arches" [by Edward Hirsch]

James Schuyler is often celebrated as a poet who celebrated the everyday and ordinary, what he called “the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.” He took a walk or peered through his window, and the poem became the daily record of what he saw. He had a keen eye and reveled in particularity. But Schuyler was afflicted by periodic bouts of mental illness and he was often looking at life from the outside, as through a looking glass. The reason that daily life takes on such a luminous glow in a great deal of his work is because he was effectively cut off from it much of the time. He cherished the familiar because it was never quite familiar enough, never something that he could take for granted. He reminds me of the eighteenth-century English poet, Christopher Smart, in the way his work spotlights and exaggerates familiar things. Both fastened themselves to daily life as a meaningful way to hold onto the world.
            It’s not necessary to pathologize Schuyler’s enthusiasms or the way that he took pleasure in describing ordinary things. But this way of looking at some of his work from this angle does help account for its psychological pressure, its odd intensities. The language is plain but seems psychologically lit from within. He looked hard at things, but he wasn’t an Objectivist poet, like Louis Zukofsky or George Oppen. There is an inner nervousness driving his work.
            Schuyler’s mental health was fragile, and he was institutionalized several times in the 1970s. In 1975 he wrote “The Payne Whitney Poems” while he was interned at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City. He published the entire eleven-poem cycle in the New York Review of Books in 1978. The diary-like series subsequently appeared in The Morning of the Poem (1980). Here, as the poet David Herd suggests, “Schuyler presents in miniature many aspects of his work: the importance of observation, a fascination with the vicissitudes of weather, a fondness for the collage-like list (as in ‘Sleep’), and, throughout the cycle, a sense that in writing one might better make oneself at home in one’s world.”
            “The Payne Whitney Poems” are nervous, low-key, focused on the daily, sometimes funny. The opening lines of the poem “Trip” set the tone and establish the subject: “Wigging in, wigging out: / when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom” (“Trip”). Here’s the poem “Arches”:

Arches

                                              of buildings, this building,
                                              frame a stream of windows
                                              framed in white brick. This
                                              building is fireproof; or else
                                              it isn’t: the furnishings first
                                              to go: no, the patients. Patients
                                              on Sundays walk in a small garden.
                                              Today some go out on a group

                                              pass. To stroll the streets and shop.
                                              So what else is new? The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

            The title runs into the first line and the poem sets off on its own hesitant string of thoughts. As so often happens in Schuyler’s poems, the speaker is looking out the window and recording what he sees, as if the window serves him as a protection against what Gaston Bachelard calls "exterior dizziness." He is engaged but slightly removed from it all. The lines are cut short, the rhythm jittery. There isn’t much to hold onto. What’s striking is how immediately Schuyler’s speaker begins adapting (“Arches // of buildings, this building”) and correcting (“This / building is fireproof, or else / it isn’t”) what he observes. The buildings narrow to a single building. The poem itself is visually “framed.” The speaker is looking through the enclosure of his own window and through the arches that “frame a stream of windows / framed in white brick.”
            Everything is provisional, every statement leads to a revision. This building is fireproof or, whoops, it isn’t. There’s dry grim humor in the recognition that in a fire the patients will go before the furnishings. The uncapitalized word patients is immediately capitalized. This poem has the simple language of someone who has come through a great catastrophe, who needs to remember how to use language again. It is very shaky and tentative.
            There is a tiny drama here. The speaker is looking at the windows of the other buildings, at the patients walking in the garden on Sunday. He isn’t one of them. They’re free, or somewhat free, to stroll about; he is not. He takes a moment to ask himself “So what else is new?” It is almost as if he is trying to think of something interesting to tell a visitor. He seems slightly desperate to come up with something fresh in a place where life has come to a standstill, where nothing new seems to happen. That’s why he turns to the weather:

                                                                                 The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

Schuyler manages to capture the texture of a small moment in time, how the day darkened and dusk sets in, simultaneously slowly and swiftly. No other poet would have jammed those two words together as “slowly/swiftly”. A person is sitting or standing by the window as the day closes shop. As soon as he describes the sky going from blue to gray he immediately corrects this observation, noting a “gray in which some smoke stands.” The three alliterative s sounds—“some smoke stands”—enact the way that the day comes to a lingering and yet sudden close. Something can still be seen, something preserved. Something is left standing. But it is mist and vapor.
The poet Michael Hofmann hears an undertone of nervous amusement in this poem, despite everything. He writes: “However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, however low, is merriment. The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, in the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire. It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary.” This is well said about a poem that is somehow hesitant and yet sure of itself. It seems quietly aware of its own construction, of being made in front of us. The speaker of this poem is ill, but the poet who crafted it was healthily—slowly/swiftly—making a new kind of poem.

From 100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch (published on March 30, 2021, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Above left: James Schuyler.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 29, 2021 at 09:01 PM in Book Recommendations, Feature | Permalink | Comments (1)

March 28, 2021

David McAleavey: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

This time tomorrow

this time tomorrow where do you think you will be in a car, a room

on a road, a floor of a building with perhaps many floors, rooms, doors

or lying on grass playing with your retriever looking for autumn

falling dogwood leaves bees complaining for flowers or by a window

awaiting cloudburst light hardening, darkening or fixing coffee

I’ve just won a prize the E-Super-G Award E stands for Ego

Super for Super G for Gratification it’s almost enough

some of you may now finally and at long last feel belief in me

of course the money will send my kids to college which makes them happy

raccoon coats and such rah rah siss boom bah Go Team which is romantic

I mean they think so which increases my stature as a lucky dog

I’m the first winner it’s not like Nobel-stuffy it’s so very nice

I do have duties I’ve only started to hear I have to do stuff

remove shrubbery take out tree stumps and plant new remove old driveway

remove old sidewalk have to rent a jackhammer replace old lamppost

make forms pour concrete trim slate and lay it in place got to wear those gloves

but not tomorrow you can put this hard stuff off you know how you can

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

David McAleavey has published seven books, most recently Huge Haiku (Chax Press, 2005), Rock Taught (Broadkill River Press, 2016), and Talk Music (Flying Islands Press, 2018), as well as one chapbook, David McAleavey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2001), and has edited two collections of writing from and about Washington area writers. He taught literature and creative writing at George Washington University from 1974 to 2020. He has lived in Arlington, Virginia, since 1976.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Posted by Terence Winch on March 28, 2021 at 10:15 AM in Pick of the Week, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (5)

Squib 455: Tales of the Sixties; The People’s Brigade [by Alan Ziegler]

(Excerpted from The Incomplete, an unpublished novel based on real events.)

Students received academic credit for living communally at The House in the woods of northern Vermont at the end of the Sixties. Schoolwork included marathon discussions ranging from the minutiae of daily life (dishwashing responsibilities, cleaning up after the House dogs) to the great questions of the day (evolution or revolution, Stones or Beatles for dinner music). A former House member named Susan asked to be on the agenda. Susan had joined the People’s Brigade, a revolutionary collective based in Boston, and wanted to know if her comrades could stay for a couple of days on their way to an action in Buffalo.

“This is going to be another Stones vs. Beatles,” I whispered to my girlfriend Debra, whom I was visiting, and sure enough the Artsy folks were opposed (“Militants take over and they don’t listen”) while the Politicos were in favor (“We’re living this cushy life while the war rages and blacks are oppressed”). The Politicos outlasted the Artsys, who considered it a victory that the discussion took less time than deciding against mandatory dishwashing shifts.

Susan told us that she’d fallen in love with a guy in the Brigade named Rick, but the group decided that monogamy was counterrevolutionary. The solution was for each of them to fuck three other people in the Brigade.

“You slept with three strangers because a group told you to?” Debra blurted out.

“Hey, they’re not strangers. We’re a collective. We do lots of stuff together.”

Debra’s roommate Cynthia lit a joint, and Susan reached over and took a drag, held it in for ten seconds with her head tilted back, then eased the smoke through her slightly opened lips. She lifted one leg to rest her head on her knee. I imagined myself as one of the revolutionary monogamy-busters. Susan and Cynthia left to camp out in the Small Room downstairs so they could talk all night. Debra said, “At last we’ll have some time alone. Until the invasion.”

On Friday morning the People’s Brigade pulled up in a van and a Volkswagen: ten of them, all with short hair — including the women — wearing denim and backpacks. One of the students said, “Hey, you guys look like a little army.”

“Damn-fucking-right,” replied one of the guests.

Susan greeted her comrades with hugs, but I couldn’t tell from her body language which one was Rick. They moved into the Big Room, and within minutes posted a sign on the door: “If this door is closed, please do not disturb under any circumstances. If it’s open, join us! Thank you for your cooperation.” An Artsy muttered, “Already they’re taking over.”

The guiding force of the Brigade was Kevin. After lunch he called a Brigade meeting in the Big Room, with the door open. “We’re here for war games, and it’s going to get uncomfortable,” Kevin proclaimed as he paced in front of the group. “But it’s gonna serve you well in Buffalo when this isn’t a game. Do you know that it’s against the law there to call a cop a ‘pig’? Imagine what happens when you try to make bacon out of one.” Several House members slinked out.

“Now I want to know: How many of you in the Brigade are prepared to die if it comes to that? Let me hear you one at a time: ‘I-am-prepared-to-die!’”

One by one, they boomed, “I am prepared to die.”

I didn’t want to go to Vietnam partly because I didn’t want to die.

“Good. We’ve progressed a lot, not like those lame, whiny declarations we heard a few months ago. Now the next step. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but we’ve got to start dealing with it.” He took a deep breath, making eye contact with each of his colleagues as he exhaled. “I...am...prepared...to......kill, if necessary. Let me hear everyone say it: ‘I-am-prepared-to-kill.’”

Nervous looks and indistinct mutters.

“I can see we have a lot of work to do. You trivialize revolution if you don’t confront this. Let’s say it one at a time, even if you don’t mean it. Say it enough times and you will mean it.”

Many of the declarations were barely audible. One woman started strong but tailed off. “I can’t say it, I can’t. My parents are pacifists, my brother got beaten in Mississippi, it’s against everything I was brought up on.”

She trailed off into sobs, which were obliterated by Kevin screaming, “Your pacifist parents didn’t put the world straight.” His voice softened, “All right, we’ve made some progress, that was a good start, another step on the long march. Now let’s talk tactics.” He asked all visitors to leave.

Late that night, after Debra fell asleep, I went into the kitchen for a snack. There for the taking twenty-four hours a day were canisters of potato chips, prodigious jars of peanut butter, chunks of cheese, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and dozens of eggs. I considered a major omelet but opted for a platter of peanut-buttered potato chips. Someone had left the peanut butter out, so it spread smoothly onto the chips.

I’d crunched through half a dozen when I heard a commotion from out back, starting with a faraway muffle and taking shape as it got closer. Two people arguing. A male and a female. None of my business.

A slapping sound and the female shouted, “You son of a bitch, I thought we were finished. What’d you do that for?” Another slap. Susan—it was Susan’s voice. Some schmuck was hitting her. Was it her ex-monogamous lover Rick in a fit of bourgeois rage? I sprang up and opened the back door. I could see two shadowy figures about thirty yards away, squaring off. A fist landed flush on a face, and I sprinted toward them. It was Susan landing the punches. I stopped short and they turned to me, startled.

The guy with her was Kevin, who stepped toward me and said, “Listen, brother, thanks for caring, but it’s all right.”

“He’s right, thanks, it’s fine,” Susan added. Her tremulous voice carried just enough weight to convince me to leave them alone. As I reached the door I turned back to see them arm-in-arm.

Back in the kitchen I picked at the remaining chips, and a few minutes later Susan came in alone. “Oh, I’m glad you’re still here. I was just getting some ice.” Her left cheek and eye were bruised and swollen, and her lip was puffy. I had never seen a woman look like that except after assault scenes in movies. But Susan was smiling. “I feel so great, wow, I could never understand why boys fight, but it really is a high.”

“That must have been some ideological disagreement,” I fished.

“Oh no! You see we’ve been doing this war game stuff and we’ve got this problem. The boys know all about fighting, but we girls think we can’t fight. Today we were taking turns hitting each other, and I had trouble hitting back so Kevin said he’d work with me. He hit me a few times but I still couldn’t hit him back, not really. I was afraid of being hurt but Kevin explained you’ll get hurt either way and you can turn your pain into anger. That’s what oppressed people have to do, turn pain into anger and hit someone even if you’re not mad at that particular person. I made that motherfucker wince.”

Pain for the cause. It reminded me of my first high school basketball game. At a crucial point, I took a vicious charge. I could barely hear the coach say, “That shows some heart.” I was one proud young man.

On Saturday morning, Susan got a call that Rick was in jail. He’d been busted for shoplifting thermal underwear from a sporting goods store, and for resisting arrest. Susan scrambled to raise the $150 bail from students, explaining that Rick was a political prisoner because he needed the supplies for the Buffalo action. But when Kevin found out, he exploded. “Rick is chickenshit!”

“How can you say that?” Susan replied, shocked. “He’s in jail, a hero of the revolution.”

“Bullshit. We can’t afford to get him busted in Buffalo if he’s out on bail here. He’s too chickenshit to go to Buffalo and too chickenshit to tell me he’s too chickenshit to go to Buffalo. So he got himself arrested. Even he’s not stupid enough to shoplift before an action.”

“You take that back,” Susan shouted, as if responding to a playground insult.

“I’m beginning to think that you’re chickenshit, too,” Kevin sneered.

Susan’s eyes inflated as she hauled off and punched Kevin in the jaw. Kevin was about to hit back but instead he relaxed his fist and kneaded his jaw. He smiled. “Who needs chickenshits like Rick, when we’ve got you.” Susan’s features scrambled for position into a recognizable expression, with flashes of grimace, smile, and rage. “Susan, not everyone is cut out for this stuff. Rick is a good guy, and he’ll be effective back on the picket line, supporting people like us.”

They decided to let Rick stay in jail. Perhaps they’d pick him up on the way home.

Early Sunday morning, we were awakened by someone knocking on doors yelling, “The Brigade is leaving with our food! Emergency meeting, hurry!” A dozen sleepy-eyed students were in the Life Room with Kevin, while the other Brigadiers waited outside. “How can you call yourselves the People’s Brigade?” an Artsy yelled.

“It’s the people’s food. We just liberated our share,” Kevin replied calmly.

“What about us, we’re not the people?” the Artsy challenged.

“This place is paid for by your parents, who legally steal. We’re reclaiming what is ours. Don’t worry, your parents will buy you more food.”

“Right on,” said one of the Politicos. “I’m just disappointed that you didn’t respect us enough to ask.”

“Good criticism, brother,” Kevin said.

The students, afraid of being branded counterrevolutionary, reached a consensus to ask the Brigade to return half the food, and to censure them for not asking first. Kevin agreed. As some of the food was being returned, an Artsy said, “Don’t take a needle or a thread from the people.”

Kevin looked at him quizzically. “That’s Mao, you asshole,” the Artsy explained.

Posted by Alan Ziegler on March 28, 2021 at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 26, 2021

Squibs 453-454: For Robert Hershon [by Alan Ziegler]

453: I was required to observe Bob Hershon teaching junior high school students for a Teachers & Writers program I was running. It felt strange, since Bob was one of my heroes as a poet and editor. We hatched a scheme. Before class started, I sat at a desk in the back of the room. Bob walked in and started his spiel, doing a double and triple take in my direction. He started and stopped a couple more times. “Alan, what are you doing here?”

“I’m observing you. It’s in your contract.”

“But you’re supposed to be here next week.”

“Come on, Bob, you don’t want to do this in front of the students, Just carry on.”

“No, let’s do this.”

“Bob, you know perfectly well that the only time you are fully prepared for class is when you know I’m coming. I want to see how you really teach.”

“You’re right, Alan, let’s not do this in front of the kids.”

Bob stormed out and I followed. In the hallway we threw books against lockers, argued, and finished with two resounding claps. We mussed up our hair, untucked our shirts, and returned to the classroom, where I took my seat and Bob resumed as if nothing happened. The assignment: “Report objectively what you just saw.”

One student concluded with, “Then he went into the hallway with a man who also claimed to be a poet and there was lots of noise.”

454: I have celebrated this poem with dozens of my classes:

Poster
by Robert Hershon

            in 1961 my apartment at north beach
            had split-rattan blinds and kandinsky
            posters scotch-taped to the walls
            and a table made from a door
            and a brick-and-boards bookcase
            and a mattress on the floor and almost everything was painted
            flat black except for the little yellow
            desk I bought from good will
            and I wrote my first poems sitting there
            watching cars wiggle down lombard street
            with dick partee lying on the couch
            behind me reading the chronicle
            and rehearsing on his invisible alto
            hey man, am i bothering you
            no dick, that’s okay, it’s 1983 now
            play some more

“Poster” is a hundred-word textbook on how details can convey location and character, and how punctuation-free enjambment can induce the reader to “wiggle down” the page like rafting on a gentle rapid then cascade 22-years in 10 words with two commas to break the fall. What grabs me most about this poem is how it captures time. For many years I would say something like this to my students:

“In 1983 in Brooklyn, a well-known poet named Bob Hershon wrote himself back to 1961, when he was starting out as a poet 3,000 miles away (where Dick Partee continues to play a real alto in North Beach jazz clubs). Through poetry, we just joined Bob simultaneously in his 1961 and 1983 pasts. Bob, it’s 2002 now, write some more."

Bob wrote many more. In the Fall of 2007, I told Bob how much I loved the poem and asked for any information so I could show off to my class. He responded:

"I'm delighted to know that you use that poem. Your timing is uncanny: It was fifty years ago today that I moved to San Francisco. Some background? I had a little cold water flat on Telegraph Hill (still cheap in those days, $75 a month, but before your students get too envious, tell them I had also been making $75 a week as a newspaper reporter) and I had just recently started writing what sort of looked like poems to me. Dick Partee was a sax and flute player who had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was staying with me. He'd lie around on the couch, a few feet from where I was trying to write, reading the Chronicle and humming sax parts. He stayed quite a while, but he moved on after I got involved with the woman he'd just broken up with. Ah, what was her name? Dick is still in SF and we're still in touch. Sadly, dental problems forced him to give up his horn some years ago. How's that? And how are you? Weller than well, I hope.”

Dick Partee died on May 10, 2009. We lost Bob Hershon on March 20. I’m admiring a Kandinsky poster scotch-taped to a wall, listening to what I imagine--because I could find no recordings--Dick Partee sounded like in his prime, and joining in a massive public hug for Bob Hershon.

Posted by Alan Ziegler on March 26, 2021 at 01:19 PM in Alan Ziegler | Permalink | Comments (4)

NLP (by Mitch Sisskind)

When she started up on him he said

'Yo no soy un stupido.' He also said

'I'm not going to play monkey for y'all.'

It worked. She calmed right down.

This is how Neurolinguistic Programming

Teaches that there's only one right way

To do something so if you want to open

The window you don't unlock the door

Or make the bed or any such nonsense;

Same way when your old lady starts up

On you, you say 'Yo no soy un stupido,

'I'm not going to play monkey for y'all.'

Or if you want to shag a bird you say,

'Hey, you're looking good tonight.'

Posted by Mitch Sisskind on March 26, 2021 at 09:35 AM in Mitch Sisskind - Correspondent at Large | Permalink | Comments (2)

From My Diary – February 2020 [by Lera Auerbach]

Suite del Ocells © Lera Auerbach

(1)

At first, the days were numbered.
They were numbered before the surgery and then after.

Going under is a bit like dying, but you know you will wake
and that you are not entirely alone in this.
You welcome the temporary oblivion that anesthesiology provides.

What if we knew for certain that reincarnation is real?
Would it change our fear of dying?

The days after surgery are marked by progress,
life stripped to its essentials.

The body learns how to function again, how to adapt,
and you are just grateful for any sleep you can get.

You long for things to return to normal, or at least their appearance,
even though you suspect that the new normal and the old may never be reconciled.

The news from Europe and Asia is full of numbers and statistics:
the new virus ravaging through China has made its way to Europe.

I don't turn on the TV in my hospital room.
Instead, I open the All Good Things book on my Kindle.

I enlarge each painting or drawing and drown in each image, appreciating its beauty.
The book is a personal anthology created by Stephen Ellcock –
one of the very few people I follow on social media.

(Every day Stephen posts images that speak volumes;
images that reassure me that not everything is dismal and there is beauty
hidden in the open, just waiting for someone to give it form.)

(2)

Today is the 24th of February 2020.

As I write this, I feel the longing for the present moment – this moment in time.

Last week, I was in the hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
It was snowing, and February felt as cold as the Februaries of my childhood in Chelyabinsk.

I remember waking up in intensive care after the surgery.
The pain was overwhelming.
If I have to endure this pain all my life, I would rather die, I thought.

There were two men in intensive care in hospital beds like me
and some shadowy nurses. I couldn't see them clearly:
everything doubled in my eyes and made me feel nauseous.

One of the men was moaning.
The other was interrogated by doctors or nurses
who kept on asking him if he had ever had a heart attack.
They just kept on repeating the same questions,
but the man didn't seem to understand them.

Or did I dream this up?

When I woke up, nobody was next to me.
For a moment, I thought I had already died and this combination
of pain, nausea, loneliness, and moaning was hell or purgatory,
or whatever is waiting for us in the forever beyond.

I drifted in and out.

Then there was a nurse next to me.
She kept on repeating the same question over and over again,
"Can you rate the level of your pain on the scale from one to ten?"

At first, I could not understand what she was saying.
How can you measure pain? The enormity of it.
And how would such a scale look?

How would one take all this shapeless pain and put it on a scale?
Wouldn't the pain spill and fill the entire room, overflowing?
I was drowning in pain, and I was asked to measure it?
How do you rate your drowning experience?
Unbearable?
Almost unbearable?
Almost bearable?
When everything doubles in your eyes – does it mean that your pain doubles too?

I found it difficult to speak or to find my tongue.
The nurse put something soothing on my lips.

"How do you rate your pain on the scale between one and ten?" she asked again.
She didn't seem to be annoyed by my silence.

"It is ten," I managed to whisper.
Then I thought again. I was able to withstand it somehow.
It means it could have been worse.

"Maybe nine," I corrected myself.

"I'll give you more painkillers," said the nurse,
and a sickening wave of nausea took me into its current.

"All is doubled," I managed to say;
and heard before being carried into oblivion:

"She has a very low pulse…"

"Still high pain…"

"Too long…"

(Too long...)

(3)

Before the surgery, they strip me naked.
Completely naked. Underwear and all.

I put on a robe that has an opening in the back.
The robe doesn't close well.
I feel like a baby just born into the world, completely defenceless.

There are many people.
They come and introduce themselves:
surgical team, anesthesiologists, nurses.

Each person asks my name and date of birth,
what surgery I am having, and on which side.
They know it, but it's the protocol –
I'm told it's for my own safety.

After continually repeating my name and date of birth
for each new face entering the room, I start to feel strangely removed from myself
as if I'm saying the name of someone else, not my own.

Indeed, this particular combination of letters and syllables feels almost random.
I'm me, but not my name.
But if I'm not my name, then who am I?

I think about it while I lay naked,
waiting for the nurses to roll me into the surgery room.
They roll my bed through corridors so fast I get dizzy and cold.

In the operating room, I notice that I'm the only one not wearing a mask.
I remember: they will put some kind of a breathing apparatus
into my nose and throat after I fall asleep.

They will also put a catheter, make four openings in my ribs
for the instruments and the camera.
And I will not feel or remember any of it.

One of the surgical assistants lifts my robe and, with a marker,
writes something on my belly on the right side,
just around the place they will cut.

Later, I discover next to the angry-looking scars,
two large black letters, TM.
Why TM?
For some reason, I remember this abbreviation from some time ago
when I was learning transcendental meditation.
But transcendental meditation has nothing to do with it,
although perhaps it is also some sort of anesthesiology.

TM stands for Trevor McKenzie, the name of the surgeon.
The letters, written in a sharpie, remain next to the scars for weeks after the surgery.
I feel tattooed or branded, but it doesn't upset me, I find it rather amusing.

Everything is so strange – it must be happening to someone else.
Not me, but to the person whose name and date of birth
I recite mechanically to everyone who enters my hospital room.

The initials of the surgeon's name on my belly feel more like a sculptor’s signature.
Let your initials signify your responsibility, welcoming my future without the tumor.

(I shall be your greatest masterpiece, my surgeon.)

(4)

The time in intensive care with shadowy nurses and moans feels endless –
dark void, unbearable, unending.

The next time I wake up, I'm in the hospital room,
I can see the snow falling through the dark windows,
it's late evening.

Where did this day go?
We came to the hospital early in the morning.

Rafael is in the room.
My lips are so swollen I can't talk.
My lips are blocking my voice.

"All shall be well," repeats Rafael.

I feel empty and light-headed,
so I let my mind fill with this thought.

All shall be… shall… Why shell?
Does it mean all is not well now but will be well in the future?
Does it mean that this thought is a shell?
And if it is a shell, what is the real thought within its protective embrace?

But I'm too tired to open the shell.

(I drift into sleep again.)

(5)

Today is exactly two weeks since my surgery.
Two weeks felt like two months. Or two years.
But not entirely in a bad way.

My previous life feels distant, not quite real.
Yet my life now is even less real in its normalcy, in its un-remarkableness.

The bloody mess is all around, yet nowhere to be seen.
IKEA's designs are maddening.

There are 80 cases of coronavirus in New York now.

(People have stopped consuming Corona beers out of superstition.)

(6)

The scars on my belly do not have stitches or threads, only glue.
The glue is still there after two weeks.
In one of the four scars, it's starting to peel off.

"In a year or so none will be visible," Rafael assures me,
probably concerned over me being concerned over my scarred appearance.

I'm not concerned. The scars make the surgery real.
Without them, it all seems to be a dream within a dream.

Maybe some part of me is forever stuck in the purgatory of Intensive Care,
trying to measure the unmeasurable and weigh the unthinkable,
while someone in monotone keeps on asking about a failed heart?

Can someone attack your heart?
Can your heart attack someone?
Can your heart be broken?

(Even the smallest feather could tip the point.)

(7)

I was ill, I had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
and I had to cancel my upcoming concerts.

Finally, I returned home to pick up my life but found that in the meantime,
the world, too, had fallen ill.

Unlike me, the world is steadily getting worse and not on the mend at all.
People went mad with fear of catching a deadly virus,
and panic is spreading across the borders.

Rafael bought 25 dry army breakfasts that are supposed to last for 25 years.
Then he bought 25 dry army dinners and a massive bottle of water.

"We should probably buy more cat food," he said.

(After all, Aya, our cat, may not want dry army breakfasts for years to come.)

(8)

I wish to make the world around me understandable,
but everything around me, every object, contains something
that refuses to be defined.

I write in order to understand, not vice versa.
But understanding, if any, is fleeting and cunning –
a red fox-demon, a clock with cut-off hands of time.

(I stand empty-handed.)

Posted by Lera Auerbach on March 26, 2021 at 08:47 AM in Art, Lera Auerbach, The Trouble Clef, Poems, The Plague | Permalink | Comments (1)

Tags: Illness, Mayo Clinic, poetry, times, virus

March 25, 2021

An Interview with Mary Jo Salter [by Aspen Matis]

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight poetry collections including A Kiss in Space, Open Shutters, Nothing by Design, and A Phone Call to the Future. Her most recent book of poems, The Surveyors, invites readers to evaluate and ponder the way things have turned out—for the poems’ speakers, and for us all—in this new century. In a tone of ironic wonderment in the face of life’s surprises, the collection reveals both puzzlement and acceptance.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Salter via email about the radical nature of unexaggerated truth, the 17th century poets who inspire her, and the foresight and brilliance of the rare reliable critic. We also discussed her newest book-in-progress, Zoom Rooms.

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

Tell the truth. I don’t mean “tell the facts,” of course; poetry isn’t reportage. What I love about my favorite poets, what makes them “radical,” is that they neither bury their emotions (though they might profit from reticence or obliquity as a style) nor, even worse, exaggerate them. They dare to speak truly about human experience—or some personal subset of experience—by means of the genuineness of their emotional register. I’m impatient with writers who profess to be overcome by joy or outrage or despair in the face of relatively minor daily events. On the other hand, I love the way some of our greatest poets elevate daily detail itself, the in-the-moment weight of being alive, to the point of bringing us to laughter (Larkin) or goosebumps (Dickinson) or tears. Elizabeth Bishop, an emotionally reticent poet, is a master of this weighted dailiness—think of what she makes, in “Sestina,” of an almanac and a teakettle and some buttons that look like tears.

You’ve served as an assistant editor for the Atlantic Monthly, as the poetry editor of The New Republic, and you were a co-editor of the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. What was the most gratifying aspect of these editorial positions for you? What did you enjoy most about these jobs? Was there a common thread, a vein of gold each shared?

As a young slush-pile reader at The Atlantic, I wasn’t allowed to make decisions on my own; those were up to the poetry editor, the late Peter Davison. The happiest moment in my two years of opening envelopes at The Atlantic was in discovering some luminous poems by the self-described “late bloomer” Amy Clampitt, who had just started publishing a little. Peter did publish her, then and afterward. My writing her a fan letter (I was 24, she was 59) led to one of my richest literary friendships, which lasted for Amy’s final 15 years. I’ve edited two editions of her work and still serve as one of her literary executors, and I feel she is still present in some way every day of my life.

Being sole poetry editor at The New Republic was more challenging. But it was good aesthetic training to make independent choices for those three years. I gave up that job because of the demands of co-editing the Norton Anthology. And that experience—from 1992, when I started reading for the fourth edition, to the publication of the sixth edition in 2018—is too vast to encompass here. I’ll just say that it was an honor to be along for the ride with my co-editors Margaret Ferguson and Jon Stallworthy, and upon Jon’s death, Tim Kendall. They were modest souls, despite their erudition, and our literary taste was shared to such a degree that we could good-naturedly take each other’s suggestions. It was a given that we mere humans couldn’t possibly arrive at a definitive canon. Being humbled by that fact was actually freeing.

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

What a wonderful question! It just so happens that I spend a lot of my mental life in the 17th century. No poet has brought me more pleasure than Shakespeare (though my main attachment is to the plays), and then the 17th also includes Donne, Milton, and Herbert. I wrote my master’s thesis at Cambridge about Herbert, and an epigraph by him appears as an opening to my first book. I wrote a play once about Milton meeting Galileo (an encounter which actually happened), and I’ve slipped a scene from Paradise Lost into the title poem of my most recent book, The Surveyors. This is what happens to my literary crushes, I guess: they become characters in my work.

The affinity I feel with the 17th century extends to Dutch paintings of the period (I can think of at least four poems I’ve written about them). Maybe my answer here relates to your first question. I feel that the best artistic work of the 17th century tells the truth—from the hyper-realist still lifes to the low-rent tavern scenes to the warmly humanist portraits. That truth extends to the amusingly vulgar love poems of Donne, or to that side of Shakespeare that invents Falstaff or the “rude mechanicals.” It’s an era that is formally ingenious, a brainy feature that delights me. And yet the era aspires to purity of feeling, which finds no better exemplar than in Herbert. His feeling of inadequacy before the splendors of God’s creation is sincere, but the self-demanding craft by which he becomes a “creator” is, to me, almost super-humanly perfect.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not?

Certainly there are reliable critics. You may rely upon their values, even if you disagree ultimately with a particular judgment. Great poetry critics aren’t always practitioners, but most of my favorites are. No poem Wordsworth ever wrote was better than his prose preface to the Lyrical Ballads: he uncannily anticipated our sensationalist age, and the small, quiet, but necessary role poetry could play in counteracting it. Closer to our own time, nobody’s criticism seems better than Auden’s—not merely the witty, epigrammatic essays in The Dyer’s Hand (which Joseph Brodsky rightly said should be every poet’s Bible) but the insights he embeds in poems. Auden’s elegies for Yeats and for MacNeice are disquisitions on why art matters, but not more than existence; and his long prose poem at the end of The Sea and the Mirror, in which Caliban sounds more like Henry James, does the same.

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

I have a sonnet sequence about our current techno-human pandemic age that is the title poem of my forthcoming collection of poems, Zoom Rooms. I have no aptitude for science, but the history of science fascinates me, and projections about its future even more. What I’m trying to do is to write poems that might last a while, by means of addressing universal human concerns; and yet I feel compelled to engage with the speedily changing, cyborgian flavor of contemporary life. Our descendants may find it more interesting to read poems that were written by machine-learning machines than by old-fashioned humans. I was about to say “we’ll see”—but we won’t. We’ll just have to keep on writing.

Posted by Aspen Matis on March 25, 2021 at 09:00 AM in Aspen Matis, Book Recommendations, Feature, Interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 24, 2021

Remembering Robert Hershon [ed. Terence Winch]

Bob header 2 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Like many others, I am deeply saddened over the death of my dear friend Bob Hershon on March 20, 2021. Bob was smart, funny, and generous. He was also a wonderful poet. Bob was the co-founder of Hanging Loose magazine and press, and helped bring the work of hundreds of writers (including me) to light. He was beloved by many, and earned that love through his great generosity of spirit. Here is a poem by Bob's from last August. It may very well be one of his last poems, but like all his work it is characterized by his warmth, humor, wisdom, and literary genius. Thanks to all of his friends and fellow writers whose tributes to Bob appear below. I'm sure there will be more contributions and comments in the future.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A wonderful, characteristic photograph of Bob Hershon, at a memorial reading I organized for Harvey Shapiro at Stony Brook Southampton in 2013. Now Bob is gone. He was a man filled with humor, warmth and life. He had been ill for some time, but it’s still hard to grasp. —Kathryn Levy

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

My dear friend and Hanging Loose co-editor Bob Hershon’s passing has left a gaping hole in my heart. As John Yau recently wrote, he was a major American poet. The quickest of wits, he was an unapologetic city poet in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff and Harvey Shapiro. His knowledge of Brooklyn history, of baseball, popular music, movies and art was encyclopedic. If you ever shared the podium at a poetry reading with Him you made sure he went last lest you be upstaged before you ever got started. —Mark Pawlak

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Did You Know that Robert Hershon is a Major Poet? by John Yau

Click here to listen to

Bob reading at the DIA Art Foundation, November 10th, 2015

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Superbly Situated

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things

i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed

and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed

how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you

part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat

we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

Robert Hershon, “Superbly Situated” from How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Joanna Fuhrman

I wrote this to introduce Bob when he received his LiveMag lifetime achievement award.

My intro for the award: Robert Hershon's 15th collection, End of the Business Day, was published this year. His work has appeared in The Nation, APR, The Brooklyn Rail, the current issue of LIVE MAG and a million other journals! He has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. His awards include two NEA fellowships and three from New York Foundation of the Arts

I think we all know that Bob Hershon deserves a Goddamn pile of lifetime achievement awards, a sky-scraper full of awards, a mountain of awards.

He needs one for his wry poetry that captures the joy and pain of everyday life, loss, aging, friendship and marriage.

Another for his absurdist poetry that skewers literary fools and know-it-all know-nothings who fill up shopping mall bookstore readings and AWP soirees.

Another for more than fifty years of co-editing one of the best literary journals in the country (and wrangling the OTHER editors into some sort of order)

For publishing the work of high school students from all over the country and the world including some of my early poems.

As other presses embrace, the Ponzi scheme mode of publishing, Hanging Loose is unique in still not charging poets to submit poems, AND actually PAYING writers for their work

He-- of course --deserves another award for putting SO MANY beautiful books in the world (including work by so many of my favorite poets): Paul Violi, Jayne Cortez, his wife the lovely Donna Brook, Charles North, and Quote unquote “younger poets” like Tom Devany and Maggie Nelson

Another for being such a good friend to so many people for so many years. For writing poems to his friends so precise that we all feel like we are their friends too.

I’ve known Bob now for more than 30 years, and in this time his poetry has only gotten better: more honest, funnier and more absurd.

He’s the only poet I know to have a poem on the OP-Ed page of the NY Times AND the menu of a restaurant. I am hoping this publishing trend continues. I would like a Bob Hershon poem flashing underneath the tracks of the F train and in the information books at the hospital.

His work is what we need to make any kind of sense of this backwards world.

I’m looking forward to his 16th, 17th and 18th book.

AND his 50th, 51st and 80th lifetime achievement awards.

RIP Adam Zagajewski: "Black birds pace the fields. . ."

Jill Krementz's 1986 photo of Strand Broddky Zagajewski Walcott

Adam Zagajewski, who died Sunday, the first day of spring, age 75, was a wonderful poet and sweet gentleman.

This is from "Self-Portrait":

Black birds pace the fields,

waiting patiently like Spanish widows.

I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older.

I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,

and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses

dissolve like cumuli on sunny day

The photo above was taken by Jill Krementz in January 1986. Left to right: Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky, Adam Zagajewski, Derek Walcott

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 24, 2021 at 10:06 AM in Obituaries, Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grains of Paradise - for Adam Zagajewski [poem by Angela Ball]

Grains of Paradise

-for Adam Zagajewski

The time of impossible friendships,

cruel steps, the time of refrigerated semi-trucks
and their willing assistance,

the time of I-pad goodbyes,

of casual stock, pastured, backs
to the wind,

of taking counsel from vibrating
grass,

the time of light stored in windshields,
in chrome trim,

of recipes written on matchbooks,
on prison stationary, in braille, calling for

grains of paradise. Unseen, they are
anywhere, not waiting,

just beyond recognition.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 24, 2021 at 09:22 AM in Feature, Guest Bloggers, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0)

Overcoming Writer’s Block with Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown (by Nin Andrews)

Many years ago, my shy teenage son came home from high school and said he had almost spoken in class that day. “But the words got stuck right here," he said gesturing at the base of his throat. “Maybe tomorrow, they will actually come out of my mouth.”

I thought of him a lot over the last year when I developed a serious writer’s block. I had ideas, the desire to write, even the urgency, but the words would not come. I kept thinking, Maybe tomorrow I will be able to write again. But there was a little space in my office where ideas fluttered around like uncaged birds and never landed. Even when I did put something down on paper, there was a distance between what I meant and what I said. I thought of William Stafford’s advice to lower your standards in order to keep writing. But how low?

And how does one deal with the feeling that the muse is simply absent? Day after day I would wake up hopeful, only to find she was still on vacation. Maybe she moved to another town, or a beach resort—she knows how much I hate those brightly lit vacation spots with tourists and palm trees and so much sun, my skin fries, and my soul, too. But it’s not just she who left me. My dreams were missing, too. Even my daydreams. It was as if my mind were a blank page, or maybe a whole book of blank pages. I blamed my writer’s block on the news, the weather the pandemic, a family crisis, loneliness, old age, even my pajamas.

Yes, my pajamas. Because my entire wardrobe for the last year could pass for pajamas. There’s no reason to worry about appearances during a pandemic, of course. But every poem I wrote (if I could call it a poem) seemed to be wearing pajamas too, or joggers with elastic waist bands—nothing I'd want to present to the world.

I have tried so many things to overcome my writer’s block. First I listened to hours of poetry podcasts by the amazing poets, Pádraig Ó Tuama and Tracy K Smith. Although I love the podcasts, they didn’t make me want to go to my study and compose my own work. They did make me wonder if I’d ever be able to write a poem as beautiful as the ones they featured.

Next, I watched poetry reading after poetry reading on ZOOM. I paid attention to some of them. I love the convenience of listening to a performance in the comfort of my home. But I am not the best audience when I am too relaxed. My mind wanders. I begin to wonder, “Is this poetry reading ever going to end?” Or, “What is that thing on the wall behind the poet’s head?” Or, “I wonder what that paint color is — Farrow & Ball Blue Ground? Benjamin Moore Aegean Teal?” But there were notable exceptions—poets I wish I could listen to forever including Major Jackson, Tim Seibles, Shara McCallum, Leona Sevick, Denise Duhamel.

Next, I signed up for a class with Natalie Goldberg, whom I have always loved. But the classes were pre-recorded, and after I listened to a few of them, I lost interest. I do like the prompts she gives. It occurred to me after watching her that I’d love shorter classes. Maybe five to fifteen minute videos. Something to appeal to my limited attention span. I would really like to have poets offer prompts and/or short teachings online. So I started a project with LitYoungstown for which I am collecting videos of poets reading a poem and offering a prompt—the series is called Lit by the Imagination, and will be posted in April on Lit Youngstown’s Facebook page. Who knows? Maybe I’ll start writing again soon.

Finally, I read Write It, Jessica Jacobs’ and Nickole Brown’s book of uniquely inspired prompts, and was so
impressed, I started taking free classes (free but you do need to pre-register for them) with the authors. What brilliant teachers and poets they are! They call them “generative classes” because they hope to help us generate our own work. They teach and read between offering prompts, and the two are fascinating to listen to—their insights, the poems they select, the way they think about poetry and writing. In addition, they chat easily with their audience and create a sense of community, something I have missed during the pandemic. I feel as if a little touch of heaven is offered in each class. I’ve become a bit of a groupie. I am already looking forward to Sunday, March 28th, their next session.

Here’s a prompt from their book, and two video prompts:

“The poet Jack Gilbert wrote, We die and are put into the earth forever, / We should insist while there is still time. If you only had one week to live, is there something you would insist on doing? Is there something that keeps you from doing that thing now?"

And so, with National Poetry Month just around the corner, I insist on returning to writing. With a little help from my poet friends, I think and hope this will happen.

Posted by Nin Andrews on March 24, 2021 at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

March 22, 2021

The Meaning of Life [by Jean-Paul Satire]

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 22, 2021 at 06:06 PM in Art, Feature | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Mourning the Loss of Bob Hershon" [by Thomas Devaney]

Mourning the loss of Bob Hershon.

His life-long work at Hanging Loose Press is beyond measure.

Bob’s poems, with their "downhome speech," lead with the heart.

The one where he puts his hand back to reach-out for his son's hand as they're crossing the street always hits me. The son much older now, Bob writes:

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge.

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand.

The streets of the city are before us: Bob's gait remains distinctive. His stride is deliberate with a range of tempos. His sense of being is transmitted in the stride of his line breaks and lines.

on skinny old
Lexington Avenue
I speed up
to pass this man

so I can
slow down

I take
great pleasure in the exact size
of my steps

The poems are living maps: all the worlds in all of the names, all the places, which continue to live in Bob's honest and vivid words.

Somewhere, I believe, Sherman Alexie credits Bob and Donna Brook with saving his life. They published Sherman's first book with Hanging Loose Press. Later, even though his big publishers wanted him to publish all of his books with them, Sherman stuck with Hanging Loose for his poetry collections. His tribute to Bob helps to tell the larger story: "Bob's Coney Island" –

Let's begin with this: America.
I want it all back
now, acre by acre, tonight. I want
some Indian to finally learn
to dance the Ghost Dance right
so that all of the salmon and buffalo return
and the white men are sent back home
to wake up in their favorite European cities.

I am not cruel.

Still, I hesitate
when Bob walks us around his Coney Island:
the Cyclone still running
the skeleton of the Thunderbolt
the Freak Show just a wall of photographs
the Parachute Drop
which has not been used in 30 years
but still looks like we could
tie a few ropes to the top (Why the hell not?) and drop
quickly down, spinning, unravelling
watching Bob's Coney Island rise
from the ashes of the sad, old carnival
that has taken its place now, this carnival
that is so sad because, like Diane says

all carnivals are sad.

We drop to the ground, our knees buckle slightly
at impact. We turn to look at each other
with the kind of love and wonder
that only fear and the release of fear can create.
We climb to the top and parachute down
again and again, because there is an ocean
a few feet away, because Manhattan is just a moment
down the horizon, because there was a 13-year-old boy
who believed that Coney Island belonged to him
though we know that all we see
doesn't really belong to anyone

but I'll let Bob have a conditional lease
because I know finally
somebody will take care of this place
even if just in memory.

___

Thomas Devaney wrote and co-director the film Bicentennial City and is the author of Getting to Philadelphia, Hanging Loose Press and You Are the Battery, Black Square Editions. His work is featured in Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Haverford College.

—

photo credit: Star Black

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 22, 2021 at 07:00 AM in Feature, Obituaries | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 21, 2021

A Fond Farewell to Bob Hershon [by Terence Winch]

Like many others, I am deeply saddened today over the death of my dear friend Bob Hershon. Bob was smart, funny, and generous. He was also a wonderful poet. Bob was the co-founder of Hanging Loose magazine and press, and helped bring the work of hundreds of writers (including me) to light. He was beloved by many, and earned that love through his great generosity of spirit. Here is a poem by Bob's from last August. It may very well be one of his last poems, but like all his work it is characterized by his warmth, humor, wisdom, and literary genius ---- Terence Winch.

Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

and Cookie Lavagetto, Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect

baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,

and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson

than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was

ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue

and I watched the games by myself with a bag of candy corn

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally

decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and

stare at the games, by myself again, without candy corn

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

Original note: Robert Hershon has written 15 books of poems, most recently End of the Business Day and Freeze Frame. He's won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hershon has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. >>

Ed. note: "Chatter" was the "pick of the week" for August 30, 2020, and it elicited enthusiastic and charming comments from Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally, and Jack Andreson, among others. I woke today to the sad news that Bob died in his sleep last night. Our hearts go out to Donna and Lizzie. --DL

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 21, 2021 at 06:55 PM in Feature, Obituaries, Pick of the Week | Permalink | Comments (3)

June Jordan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________________________________________

The Reception

Doretha wore the short blue lace last night

and William watched her drinking so she fight

with him in flying collar slim-jim orange

tie and alligator belt below the navel pants uptight

“I flirt. You hear me? Yes I flirt.

Been on my pretty knees all week

to clean the rich white downtown dirt

the greedy garbage money reek.

I flirt. Damned right. You look at me.”

But William watched her carefully

his mustache shaky she could see

him jealous, “which is how he always be

at parties.” Clementine and Wilhelmina

looked at trouble in the light blue lace

and held to George while Roosevelt Senior

circled by the yella high and bitterly light blue face

he liked because she worked

the crowded room like clay like molding men

from dust to muscle jerked

and arms and shoulders moving when

she moved. The Lord Almighty Seagrams bless

Doretha in her short blue dress

and Roosevelt waiting for his chance:

a true gut-funky blues to make her really dance.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and was the author of ten books of poetry, seven collections of essays, two plays, a libretto, a novel, a memoir, five children’s books, and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. As a professor at UC Berkeley, Jordan established Poetry for the People, a program to train student teachers to teach the power of poetry from a multicultural worldview. She was a regular columnist for The Progressive, and her articles appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Essence, and The Nation. After her death from breast cancer in 2002, a school in the San Francisco School District was renamed in her honor. [From the forthcoming volume, The Essential June Jordan (May 2021, Copper Canyon Press]. See also this link.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

June Jordan on being a poet (and to hear her wonderful laugh)---

Posted by Terence Winch on March 21, 2021 at 10:09 AM in Pick of the Week, Poems, Terence Winch | Permalink | Comments (7)

March 20, 2021

"So I said like why so he said like maybe" [by Molly Arden]

So I said like why so he said like maybe my place?

So he said I'm on the job around the cock
So I said that's hard
So he said what
So I said around the clock
So he said yes
that's what i meant
like it was like he looked straight
at you when he spoke
of guns versus flowers
or Walt Disney versus Picasso
as the century's greatest artist
everyone will chill
so I said typo
so he said type-A
so then we unambiguously
did the thing that has no name,
the secret everyone knows
so no one ever spills it.

Lovely to be the queen of the wards!

-- Molly Arden

Ed note: From the archive; first posted August 13, 2008. Molly asks me to mention the symposium she is organizing on the question raised in the poem: namely, whether Walt Disney or Pablo Picasso may be said to have been the greatest artist of the 20th century. DL

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 20, 2021 at 01:20 PM in From the Archive, Molly Arden | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the archive: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 20, 2021 at 10:23 AM in Adventures of Lehman, Current Affairs, From the Archive, The Plague | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 19, 2021

The Real Reason Linda Reagan [Amy Carlson] Left "Blue Bloods" After 7 Seasons [by Walter Carey]

Ed. note: One of our most popular posts was written for the BAP blog by Walter Carey on October 13, 2017 preceded by this note: << Walter Carey writes: "David Huntley, my source for this story, is the pseudonym of an executive at CBS who asked that he or she not be named. -- WC." For an update ("Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?) click here. And here for the latest on Erin's love life >>>

For seven seasons, Linda Reagan as portrayed by the actress Amy Carlson was a stalwart figure in the hit series Blue Bloods. She plays the wife of hot-headed Danny Reagan, mother to their two boys, daughter in law of police commish Frank Reagan, sister in-law of Erin, brother-in-law of Jamie, aunt of the Columbia undergrad who used to go to Catholic school, granddaughter-in-law of grandpa, and a normal human being, who works as a nurse, lives in Staten Island, demands to be respected by her husband, and concludes phone conversations with him with this exchange:

"Love you."
"Love you more."
"Love you most."

Several theories have been making the rounds regarding Linda's sudden departure from the program. In episode one of season eight it is explained that she died in a helicopter crash transporting a patient. To those who believe that this is what happened to Amy Carlson, my source is happy to report that she is very much alive. There is also no truth to the rumor that she got sick -- "totally" -- with husband Danny always going off the rails and blowing his stack. That was actually something that endeared him to her, Linda admitted tearfully after one of their quarrels., according to Megin Draper, a close friend.

It was really very simple, the actress confided, nursing a glass of Jameson's on the rocks as she negotiated her farewell package. It was "time to move on."

The network executive who bears a resemblance to Ned Beatty gave her a skeptical look.

"It really is time to move on," repeated the Knox College alumna, who graduated cum laude, made her TV debut as Josie Watts on Another World in 1993, and currently resides in Chinatown with her kids and her partner. But she winked and touched her nose like Robert de Niro in Good Fellas so her interlocutor knew there had to be more to it. The pro bono work she has done on Frenchkiss Records has never interfered with her work on Blue Bloods, and while her significant other plays bass guitar for the Seth Meyers show on another network, that has never raised any red flags let alone hackles in legal.

"Does the real reason have to do with Frank Reagan's political ambitions?" she was asked. "Warmer," she said. "But if you print it, Danny will kill you." Therefore my source has adopted a pseudonym and will employ the subjunctive to describe what the smart money is saying, which is this:

Frank Reagan, as played by Tom Selleck, has the distinction of wearing nearly the same tie on every episode of Blue Bloods. Each is a rep (or regimental) tie featuring a red field with diagonal stripes usually containing white, blue, or a combination of the two. I happen to own two such ties myself, purchased at Brooks Brothers, and from a study commissioned by the triumvirate of Rogers Peet, Hart Schaffner and Carlo Marx it has been ascertained that for a municipal leader, this is the tie of choice, inspiring trust and confidence in the populace.

The consistent use of ties of this order has long led Reaganites to suspect that Frank has political ambitions. The speculation, fueled by dissatisfaction with the de Blasio regime in New York coupled with the gag-me-with-a-spoon shenanigans in DC, has resulted in a "draft Frank" movement. Linda Reagan is said to have taken a position on the net-yet-official campaign. One of her pet ideas: a series of TV commercials featuring endorsements of Reagan by various Franks -- such as Frank Sinatra, Frank O'Hara, Frank Hogan, Frank Costello, Frankie Machine, Frank Malzone, Fenway Franks. Frank Bullitt in his 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, Francis Ford Coppola, Pope Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Francine York, and Connie Francis.

But this is all speculation, and the rocky relationship between the police chief and the mayor is nothing new. Still, the fact that Frank Reagan polls higher than the mayor in all five boroughs, with an almost unheard of 90% favorable rating in Staten Island, may affect Frank's decision, and if Linda Reagan has anything to say about it, it's a go. -- WC

from the archive; first posted October 13, 2017

Posted by Virginia Valenzuela on March 19, 2021 at 04:30 PM in Feature, From the Archive, Television, Walter Carey | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Broken Mirror of Facebook [by Lera Auerbach]

Something peculiar occurred on the night of October 13th, 2020: my personal Facebook page disappeared. It was abruptly deleted by Facebook with the warning that this action was permanent and irreversible.

I have used Facebook since 2008. During these years, I have never received any warnings or suspensions. I am not involved and do not comment on political matters. Mostly, I use Facebook to share my art, poetry, and music. So, I was at a loss as to why my page was removed. The explanation I was given is that, according to FB, I was impersonating a public figure. In other words, I was accused of impersonating myself. Before killing my page, Facebook asked for proof of my identity. I uploaded a copy of my driver's license, and a few seconds later, I was informed that my account was permanently closed, and I was irrevocably banned from Facebook.

I maintained two pages: a personal page with 5000 friends and a professional Artist-page with around 25,000 followers. While my personal page disappeared, my fan page remained frozen in time, with the last post on October 12th, as my connection to the fan page was removed together with my personal account, which administered it. I had no way of accessing or posting on my fan page even though it was still published.

I felt a strange emptiness as if some part of me died with my page. I never considered myself addicted to Facebook, although addicts rarely admit their addiction. Yet, I probably spent far more time on FB than I should have, never realizing the extent that FB had become embedded in my life.

I am a private and introverted person by nature. On my FB page, in the short description about myself, I wrote, “Hermit in search of a hermitage.” As a concert pianist and conductor, I enjoy performing in large halls, leading hundreds of people in an orchestra, and facing 3000-plus people in the audience. I love the magic of being on the stage, but behind the spotlights, I am a hermit, at least as much as my profession allows it. I'm shy. I don't speak much – unless it is a public speech. I don't go to parties, and I'm terrible at small talk. Strange as it may seem, when I'm not on tour, I can spend weeks without ever talking on the phone. Over the last few years, I use email less and less. Facebook became my primary connection to the world; its messenger replacing email and phone.

Yet, Facebook also became an overbearing presence continually feeding information, acting as Orwell's Big Brother – predicting my likes and dislikes with frightening insightfulness, bringing to my attention offers that would feed not my needs but my desires and, yes, seeping away my time and concentration. Often FB’s feed would appear with precise knowledge of my most recent conversations, thus giving an uncomfortable sense of being spied on and analyzed by something or someone on the other side of the screen.

Although FB was stealing my time, it was also a source of wonders and even miracles. It resurrected my dear childhood friend with whom I lost contact for over 20 years. It provided fragile but tangible strings of connections. I built new friendships that spilled into real life. My friends provided a sense of support and gave feedback for my research. Over the years, I built an international network of like-minded people, musicians, writers, artists, choreographers, actors, translators, orchestra directors, art collectors, and poets who inspired and stimulated my work. In addition to music, I'm also a writer and a visual artist. My friends on Facebook often served as first readers or first audience for my works-in-progress.

Facebook is not the real world, but it is one of its mirrors. It reflects different things to different people: it can become an irritable and alienating discourse or a sharing of inspiration. After my life-threatening illness and surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the first months of 2020, immediately followed by the global pandemic, I have been in personal quarantine and complete isolation since February 2020. Four out of five people in our family are immuno-deficient and at higher risk for COVID-19. During this time, Facebook more than ever provided the sense or perhaps only the illusion that I'm not alone.

After my page disappeared, I spent the first couple of days in disbelief. I expected that at any moment, my Facebook page would reappear since it was so obviously a mistake. There was no customer support, no telephone, no email to make a complaint. I asked one of my friends to post what happened to me on her page, hoping that someone from Facebook would see it and do something about it.

“You must have done something wrong,” one of my friends said, “Facebook couldn't just kill your page like that without any warning.” Another friend, a curator, told me that once her account was suspended because she posted a sculpture by Michelangelo, which Facebook considered nudity.

“But my account was not suspended; there was no warning. It was just removed from existence,” I insisted, “besides, I have not posted anything that AI could consider indecent or offensive.”

“Perhaps, it was your poetry,” another friend suggested. I write poetry in the Russian language, and, unfortunately, there is no feature on FB to turn off automatic translation. Automatic translations of poetry are dreadful, and many of my bilingual writer-friends complain about it. My friend suggested that perhaps in its automatic translation, something in my poem could have triggered the AI Centurion of Facebook's morality. But I could not imagine anything in my poems that, regardless of how flawed the translation may have been, could have given Big Brother a warrant for my guillotine.

Over the next few days, I was astounded to realize that every person I shared my story with assumed that I must have inadvertently done something wrong. This reaction was so prevalent that I also started to think that I must have indeed somehow made some mistake and that the verdict Facebook gave me of "impersonating a public figure" was just a cover-up for some deeper-rooted cause. Yet, I could not think of any posts that could have been the reason. I also noticed that whenever I approached someone about my Facebook problems, they seemed reluctant to get involved as if I was infected with a plague, and the plague could spread into their lives.

In its less severe virtual form, the situation reminded me of what my parents and grandparents faced in the Soviet Union. As a child growing up in Russia, I knew all too well that our phone-line was tapped, that every word we said needed to be self-censored before uttering. At that time, when someone was visited by a KGB agent, all friends assumed that he or she must have done or said something wrong. The person would then start suspecting that perhaps he or she indeed said or did something wrong; perhaps, too much was said during a birthday party, or maybe so-and-so could have misinterpreted words, or that a private conversation was overheard. In 1937, the KGB came to arrest my grandfather Isaac and his brother. My grandfather's brother refused to follow them, claiming there was clearly a mistake. The KGB agent said if he refused to go, they would shoot him. He insisted that he was innocent, and it was a mistake, so they shot him dead. Then they turned to my grandfather, asking if he would follow them. He did. My grandfather was accused of being a Japanese spy and sent to Gulag for many years. His only crime was being Jewish. I was not sent to Gulag, but I was removed from my home page of Facebook, banned from re-entering it, without any avenue of appeal for justice. I was accused of impersonating a public figure. By the same logic, I may have been accused of being a Japanese spy as well.

Another friend suggested that perhaps someone did this to hurt me purposely. A couple of years ago, my website was hacked, its contents erased, a skull with crossbones appeared with the slogan "Death to Jews." I don't involve myself in political matters. But I don't hide my Jewish roots. As an artist and a public figure, there are always those that dislike who I am or what I do. I'm not sure what's worse: for this micro-universe, which you have carefully built over 12 years, to be destroyed by a random computer mistake or to be specifically targeted by someone who hates you.

Psychologically, it felt strange being suddenly and permanently removed from the Facebook world I had become so dependent on without fully realizing my dependency. Every time I opened my computer, the Facebook URL would appear, and sometimes, without thinking, I would press the return button only to enter a blank page with the notice that this account no longer exists; or I would touch the Facebook logo on my iPhone only to be reminded of my expulsion. My husband also has a Facebook account, although he doesn’t use it much. We have mutual friends. At times, I found myself tempted to sign into his account just to visit my friends' pages to see what was new in their lives, but I always stopped myself. I did not want a peephole into the lost paradise.

Over the past years, I did consider quitting Facebook more than once, but there is a significant difference between being expelled or leaving of your own free will. The only other time I was away from Facebook for any length of time was during my Svalbard expedition with National Geographic. I was researching my ARCTICA symphony, for which I was commissioned by National Geographic, The National Symphony Orchestra, and the Oslo Philharmonic. There was no internet connection so far North, and I enjoyed a wonderful sense of liberation and isolation – while looking forward to sharing this incredible adventure with my friends. Upon return to Longyearbyen, the most northern airport in the world, I was finally able to connect to the internet, and through Facebook messenger reached my friends in Greenland. On their instant invitation, instead of flying to Miami the next day, I flew to Nuuk to continue my Arctic research. The facility of connection through Facebook made this miraculous change of plans possible.

I read Rilke's line "Excess of being wells up in my heart" in one of my friends' posts. "Excess of Being" became the title of my published book of aphorisms. Another FB friend, David Lehman, a poet and the editor of the Best American Poetry anthology, posted a question about a phrase from Nijinsky's diary, which he needed for his upcoming book. I had recently read Nijinsky's journals, and I answered his question. Later, we became friends and had a joint poetry reading at the well-known KGB poetry bar in New York. On his invitation, I became a regular contributor to the Best American Poetry blog. On Facebook, I met Marilyn Nelson, a wonderful poet who became my close friend and collaborator. In 2021 our joint book of poems for children "A is for Oboe" will be published by Penguin-Random House.

Facebook became not only a source of distraction and procrastination but also a wondrous matchmaker. And now I missed it. I felt a sense of loss as if suddenly I had lost all my friends. During the pandemic, with its isolation and travel bans, losing access to my Facebook network of friends increased the sense of alienation.
Where were my friends? My 5000 friends and 25000 followers?
Did any of them notice my disappearance?
Besides a few people whom I contacted in the hope of reaching Facebook powers to review my situation – nobody seemed to notice my disappearance.

When the execution of my page happened, I was in the middle of a Daily Reflections project: posting every day a newly made recording of my poetry and a new work of art. The project was meant to continue daily for one year – leaving something creative born from each day. Did any of my friends notice that these daily reflections suddenly stopped? (I did not stop the project; I continued posting daily but on YouTube.)

The first person to notice I was missing in action was my father. My parents are staying with me during the pandemic – a rare occurrence since I usually travel worldwide to give concerts. Although we are rather close, they seem to be more informed of what I am doing through my Facebook posts than from life.
– What's wrong with your Facebook? – My father asked.
– It was removed.
My father was in disbelief.
– You need to speak with Mark Zuckerberg!
– How? I'm not on Facebook. Besides, he probably receives thousands of messages.

More days passed. I didn't hear from anyone. Nobody noticed I was gone. Ten days later, a friend called asking why I'm no longer among his Facebook friends. He claimed that I was the only reason he was on Facebook in the first place. A choreographer contacted me. He was wondering if somehow, I was upset with him and blocked him on FB. We were in the middle of discussing and planning our next collaboration when suddenly, all my messages and my account vanished from his view.

Through a mutual friend, I was introduced to someone who works at Facebook. If this person would vouch for me, perhaps Facebook would review my case? But he said he could not vouch for me, and the Facebook system would know that he did not know me personally – we had not corresponded before, and he wasn't among my friends. Vouching for me could cost him his job even though he knows and trusts our mutual friend and believes that I was not impersonating myself, but actually, I am myself and have been myself for the last twelve years on Facebook.

As days passed, the sense of disbelief and anger turned into grievance and loss. I kept on telling myself none of it is real. My real friends are still there. Facebook is nothing but an illusion and, ultimately, a huge waste of time. Still, I felt sadness as if someone, perhaps part of me – my virtual self – had died. And there was no funeral, no closure. My death went unnoticed, as if I had never existed.

On the 21st of October, it was my birthday. Last year I enjoyed over 500 birthday messages. This year besides my family, my birthday remembered three friends, one journalist, and my publisher from Hamburg, who always sends me very thoughtful and eloquent wishes. A day later, one more friend emailed me a birthday card. That's it. I was not surprised. It was what I expected. 500 greetings are an illusion. Six are reality. Yet, I also knew it was unfair to think so. I'm not any better. I have friends but rarely remember when their birthdays are; I relied on Facebook to remind me.

Facebook is a mirror but a mirror that changes its functions. Sometimes it prettifies your world by sending you illusory flowers and kittens. Sometimes it shows you the ugliest side of people whom you thought you knew well – their comments on current events make you wonder how the same person could combine seemingly disparate personalities. The broken mirror of FB works only one way as in an interrogation chamber: Facebook seems to know more about you than you know yourself, yet you have no idea who is watching you and how to contact this invisible someone – or something – to ask for justice.

In the same week my FB page vanished, I discovered that my credit card was hacked, and a large sum of money was withdrawn. Also, the internet connection in our house stopped working. All of these events were unrelated, but altogether I felt more and more isolated and vulnerable. There was life before Facebook and before the internet, I told myself. And not so long ago. We are so dependent on computers now, but in my childhood and student years at the Juilliard School in New York and Hannover, Germany, I didn't own a computer. I managed without it and managed well.

Slowly the internet problems were solved, the fraud perpetrated on my credit card was reported and resolved, but Facebook remained absent. I noticed that I rarely used the internet those days. Instead, I dove into writing. Since all my concerts were canceled in 2020, I concentrated this year on literature. Usually, I would write most of the day with some Facebook interruptions. I write by hand, then type into a Word document and then edit. I enjoy writing by hand, although a computer is a necessity and a very handy tool for editing. Since my Facebook collapsed, I have been writing almost non-stop, filling one notebook after another, changing the ink in my fountain Waterman pen daily. I have finished the second book of my novel, "Note by Note"– memories of my early childhood and started the third. Being fully immersed in my childhood – a world without computers and Facebook – I could fully appreciate how rich and sensitive that time was. As a child, discovering the world through music and art, I felt more present, alive, and aware than now, being split between virtual and real worlds, torn between what appears and what is.

Perhaps, I was indeed impersonating myself on Facebook. If so, who is more real? My avatar-face shown to the world, to my friends, fans, and foes, or the real me – a hermit in isolation, seeking connection, yet also fearing it.

On the evening of October 26th, inexplicably, my Facebook account resurrected. There was no message, no explanation, no apology, no warning – nothing at all. The page just reappeared with its last posts dated October 12th, as if the previous two weeks disappeared from my life. I don't know how it happened and who intervened. I asked several people who might know someone on Facebook to help, but I probably will never know who saved my account from extinction. Whoever you are and everyone who tried to help – my deepest gratitude.

It felt peculiar to visit my page and find it as I left it – as if seeing an old house you no longer live in. In one of his interviews, Solomon Volkov said that he had two immigrations in his life: one from the Soviet Union to the United States, and the other from the USA to Facebook. I don't share his sentiment. Yet, during these days, I realized that most of my professional contacts happened through Facebook. I realized that Facebook is a source of inspiration and support. I also realized that I became too dependent on it, forgetting that I am only a guest there, even on my own page; forgetting that there is the other side of the screen which is not seen in this one-way mirror; forgetting that this mirror is no longer just a tool of connection, but a spider which feeds on your time, who reflects you not the real world but the world you believe in, the world according to your likes, feeding you information that confirms your beliefs to keep you hooked, to keep you hungry for more likes so it can continue to feed on your time.

I looked at my page, but I didn't feel like posting anything. I didn't feel like saying hello to my 5000 friends and 25,000 followers, real or imaginary, who were just fine without me.
I visited a couple of friends whose pages I see more often, but I didn't feel like clicking likes. I felt balancing on the edge of the Matrix, not sure if I wanted indeed to return there, now that once again I had a key into this forbidden garden of social delights. By now, I felt free from my FB addiction, from needing its daily dose of fake relevancy, its noise of the gigantic fugue of voices demanding my attention, crying to be appraised. Was I happier without it, now guarding the entrance voluntarily? I was grateful to be given back the choice and to be able to glance into this mirror, but I also appreciated my privacy and freedom even though freedom doesn’t always equate with joy.

The great choreographer John Neumeier, with whom I closely collaborated in creating three full-length ballets with my music, doesn't have an email. Well, actually, he has an email address, but he rarely uses it, if ever. He doesn't have Facebook or other social media pages. Not having them is a luxury, and sometimes I feel jealous of it. What confidence and inner freedom, what a secure network of friends and colleagues one must have to remain free of virtual attachments. John is over 80 years old, and he is as active and creative as ever – a living legend in his field.

Can I afford the hermitdom I seek?

Posted by Lera Auerbach on March 19, 2021 at 04:01 PM in Lera Auerbach, The Trouble Clef | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Starmakers [by Nin Andrews]

Lately I’ve been thinking about how my father used to say, There’s no such thing as the self-made man. Think about it.

It was one of my father’s ongoing arguments with the world, with American optimism, and with the whole idea that anyone can succeed if he or she works hard enough. (My father grew up during the Depression. And, as he put it, his own father lost his shirt. As a young girl I always pictured my grandfather shirtless.) My mother would simply roll her eyes once Dad got started. And I would think of one of my favorite books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, which I re-titled, Harold and the Purple Wand.

Harold is self-made, I would say. Harold can draw the world and make it into anything he wants because he has a purple wand. (Was I the only one that noticed it wasn’t a crayon Harold held?)

Alone in my room, I daydreamed about what I would do with a purple wand. I drew endless pictures in purple. Sometimes I imagined making myself into a girl with wings. (Who doesn’t want to fly?) Other times a star.

My father, an artist and architect, took great interest in my artwork. But he wasn’t a fan of the Harold stories, or of my purple sketches. I would try to shield my paper to keep him away. Once, he pointed out that even Harold didn’t make himself into a star. He could only draw stars. Or make others into stars. (He was, back then, a bit too philosophical for my child-mind.)

In spite of his criticism, I spent days drawing purple girls, imagining myself as a kind of Haroldina, who wore glasses just as I did, but who lived in a world I could only dream of.

As an architect, my father took on many apprentices in his day. He spent hours both going over their blueprints and introducing them to builders and potential clients. He told me once that he never felt fully credited or thanked for his help. After his funeral, one of the architects he trained told me what a pain-in-the-ass my dad was. Without asking, my father would correct his blueprints, and he never thought anything anyone else drew was quite right. But his influence, this man added, is still present in all that he designs. And if he had not had him as a teacher, he would not have become the architect he is today.

I think of my father when I think of all the people who have helped me and other poets and writers, all of those who are the bearers of purple wands in the literary world, who have made others into stars, who have changed the career paths of other poets and writers, often without bringing much attention to themselves. I am thinking of reviewers, editors, anthologists, book sellers, interviewers, translators, social media divas, those who run reading series, and all those that buy books, or who take the time to love and share poetry.

Given stardom, many writers simply bask in the light. They don’t think of all those who helped them shine. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t grateful. I think most of us just don’t quite know how to say thanks. Or how to say thank you enough. Because there is no enough.

So I thought I’d do a series of blog posts next week on just a few of the star-makers in the poetry world: a few of the reviewers, anthologists, editors, YOUTUBE reviewers, book sellers, and translators who have made others’ literary lives possible—and even wonderful at times.

Nin Andrews' is the author of several books including Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Southern Comfort. Her next collection, Miss August, will be published in May, 2017. You can find her and even sign up for her email (seriously?) by going to ninandrews.com.

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2017.

Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 19, 2021 at 02:00 PM in From the Archive, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0)