The Best American Poetry

"Odd Man Out" -- noir ou non? [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

This is the seventh in a series of exchanges between noir enthusiasts David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis

Let’s go to the land of tea at four, a pint of bitter, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and Brexit. Would you consider Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) a noir?

Suzanne Lummis:

No, it’s better than noir, bigger than noir, more terrible than noir, an ancient thing—it’s Tragedy, and Tragedy of a high order. Also, it’s excruciating. I can’t bear the prolonged ordeal of the central character, James Mason’s “Johnny.”  I managed to watch it all the way through years back, but in re-watching it—so as to address this question—I fast-forwarded through half an hour. It was killing me, the slow death of this wounded man, hallucinating from loss of blood as he staggers through a city in Northern Ireland.  And we emphasize with him; unlike a film noir protagonist, he didn’t rob money for himself but to support a political cause. The story’s set during the “Troubles,” and he’s a leader of a group similar to the IRA. But, far more important, though he made a terrible mistake, a tragic mistake, he’s lately reevaluated his life while in prison and now abhors violence. Now, even more than fear of his own death he’s afraid that in a struggle over a firearm he might’ve killed a man. He asks everyone he encounters who’s seen the news of the robbery, Did I kill that man?   Because of this and his suffering, physical and emotional, we feel for him. Moreover, it’s James freaking Mason, for Krist’s sake. That beautiful man, that beautiful face. What a performance.

One element that’s absolutely noir--the cinematography. Five minutes in I was on the Internet—who lit this?!  And that was even before the story hits the streets, those night-time shots of shadow blackened figures fleeing through long alleys, and the faces of children and the aged peering out windows… Crazy beautiful.  Robert Krasker, Australian guy, also cinematographer for one of director Carol Reed’s other great ones, The Third Man. Who can forget the first appearance of Harry Lime? - 40% acting, 60% lighting.  

To paraphrase that irascible critic Kenneth Tynan, anyone who finds the stock CGI effects of, say, Avatar, with blue people looping around in the air inside cartoon-colored environments fantastically cool, but thinks the fierce lyricism of Odd Man Out is boring because it’s black and white. . .  Cannot be my friend. 

 David Lehman

Odd Man Out is one of the great British films of the late 1940s, the era of Brief Interlude, Dead of Night, The Third Man, and The Fallen Idol. I didn’t appreciate the greatness of Odd Man Out until the second or third time I saw it, and now I try to see it every chance I can. Is it a noir? It can certainly be discussed in this context, as we are doing. If noir involves failure, a caper or heist or mission gone wrong, with dead bodies piled up on the stage at the end, preferably in black and white, it qualifies – but then, so does Olivier’s Hamlet, and we have another category for it. Jean Negulesco’s wonderful film The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) -- with a sneering Zachary Scott cast perfectly as the villain and Peter Lorre as the detective story writer who joins Sydney Greenstreet on his trail – has many noir elements, but we wouldn’t hesitate to characterize it as an espionage thriller.

This returns us to the problem of how to define noir, which Caroline Seebohm brought up when we talked about Hitchcock. In the Wall Street Journal today (August 13, 2019), the critic Terry Teachout ventures this definition: a noir is a movie “in which a flawed by basically innocent protagonist is presented with a moral choice, makes the wrong call, and is plunged into a violent after-hours world of passion and crime.” I admire Teachout’s stab at the problem, though, to take Teachout’s two examples, I wonder how “innocent” Fred MacMurray and Robert Mitchum are in Double Indemnity and Out of the Past. It seems to me also that no definition of noir will work unless it takes into account the distinctive lighting, the shadows, the chiaroscuro, and other atmospherics characteristic of noir classics.

Odd Man Out, because of its political and religious themes, differs from the noir films that readily come to mind when the subject arises, but I am happy for the chance to talk about it here. The evocation of Belfast in a dream-tangle of shadows is haunting. At the moral center of the movie is the doomed love affair of the revolutionary leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), an escaped convict, and the steadfast Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan). Father Tom, Lukey, Shell, the bartender, the little girl who lost he bar -- the secondary characters around them -- are like figures in a nightmarish allegory, and the movie has the feel of a dream. As one film professor puts it, the film is "festooned with gargoyles" (Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University). Naturally the robbery Johnny and his cohorts plan is meant to be his last, and it is his last though not in the way he planned. Naturally the robbery Johnny and his cohorts plan is meant to be his last, and it is his last though not in the way he planned. Naturally something goes terribly wrong. Johnny kills a man and is wounded in the process. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to fall out of the getaway car and get abandoned by his none-too-bright buddies.

I particularly like the scene in the deserted bunker when Johnny wakes up to find that the strange dream he had is true – he lies wounded and alone, susceptible to hallucination, hunted by the authorities. It is a very episodic movie, with Johnny’s progress like that of a pilgrim on his way to purgatory. There is the time Johnny is in the back of a hansom cab, which the police do not inspect believing that the passenger there is an ordinary drunkard. There is a wonderfully weird scene featuring the crazed painter Lukey (Robert Newton), who sees in Johnny’s suffering face the perfect model for an masterpiece of portraiture. Movies that make intelligent use of poetry or scripture hold a charm for me, and in a hallucinatory moment Johnny quotes lines from I Corinthians (13-11 and 13-2): “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. . . and  though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” The dialogue before the bloody finale is moving. “Is it far?” Kathleen “It's a long way, Johnny, but I'm coming with you.”

Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #7 in the series.

It Had To Be You & All the Things You Are w/ Helen Forrest, Dick Haymes, Artie Shaw

Possibly the best swing version of "It Had To Be You": Helen Forrest and Dick Haymes, vocals; the Artie Shaw band.

and then comes Helen's peerless rendition of "All the Things You Are":

 

Met Percent: Week Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Hero

I was given the middle initial “C” in memory of my grandmother Celia, who had not yet died. The “C” was a placeholder for a middle name I would select. At 15, I chose Clisthenes, the Athenian tyrant and founder of the first democracy. 

History contains so much quiet violence.

After 9/11, my “C” and my Clisthenes were removed by the Social Security Administration. Apparently my parents had not included  the “C” on the birth certificate, and I never filed a legal name change (who knew). 

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”- Montaigne

 

Difficult Vocabulary

Catullus, Tibullus, Horace and Ginsberg [Carpe Diem, 1968-1972]. 

It was a difficult time. As teenage poets, Simon Schuchat and I published Buffalo Stamps, a poetry magazine, costs partially paid with my Bar Mitzvah money. We would take the Greyhound Bus to NY and search for poets. We found them, and kindly many gave us poems: Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Anselm Hollo, Lewis MacAdams, Bruce Andrews. Simon continued on (and continues today!).

Simon somehow got Allen Ginsberg’s phone number and got him to read at our high school. The condition was an airport pick-up and drop-off at his hotel. Simon agreed, not mentioning we weren't old enough to drive. A prize moment, the master reading in the gym, including what our faculty deemed “difficult” vocabulary. “Mouth my tongue touched once or twice all ash [ . . . ] youthful cock tip, curly pubis” - “On Neal’s Ashes” (1971).

Catullus, Carmen 16: My Harvard Loeb Classic edition includes the “difficult” lines  (“Fuck you, up your ass and in your mouth”) in Latin but excludes them in the English on the opposing page. Other editions presented this complete poem as a “fragment”. Ancient censorship! I was proud that our high school allowed vocabulary that Harvard Press did not.

Mesmerized then and now: the comfort of re-reading Kaddish and “Ave atque vale” (“Hail and farewell”) when my father passed away. Two musical tongues: one with and one without definite and indefinite articles. 

 

Honey, Milk, Wine and a Prayer

No matter how humanistic it got, much of the ancient arts served as entry tickets to the underworld.

“The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ . . . provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation”. - Montaigne

 

Lonely?

I was drawn in: Greek sculptures: their anatomy, their balance, their contrapposto. But also static: perfect musculature but never tense. Repressed, idealized, or both? The abstraction was key. Ivins remarks there are few groups of interacting subjects. A singular wrestler. “The figures are frighteningly lonely.” *

I spent many years engrossed in the Classics. My shift from Beat poetry was triggered by the sounds of Virgil’s Bucolics in Latin. I stepped away from the contemporary: the counterculture, DC politics, and student riots, after my unplanned presence at the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968 (not to mention being arrested for high treason; I was 14). I entered abstraction and stayed there for a very long time.

Art and Geometry, William Ivins, Harvard University Press, 1946. (Curator of the Met’s Department of Prints, 1916 - 1946).

 

Gary Cohen Calls Endy Chavez's Catch (2013)

<<< Edmonds at first and one out, and Pérez deals. Fastball hit in the air to left field, that's deep, back goes Chávez, back near the wall, leaping, and... HE MADE THE CATCH! He took a home run away from Rolen! Trying to get back to first is Edmonds... he's doubled off! And the inning is over! Endy Chávez saves the day! He reached up high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors bullpen, and pulled back a two-run homer! He went to the apex of his leap, and caught it in the webbing of his glove, with his elbow up above the fence. A miraculous play by Endy Chávez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first, and Oliver Perez escapes the 6th inning. The play of the year, the play maybe of the franchise history, for Endy Chávez, the inning is over. >>>

For Summer: Florida Poets: Neil de la Flor [by Emma Trelles]

these are messages i'm sending to you, neil de la flor

The Vagabond

by Neil de la Flor

We bond over electronic music and make out. On the dance floor, his arms are dumbbells destined for the seabed. We pray for the abyss to relinquish the red lights of the world. Adora welcomes the world batting her eyelashes like a flamenco dancer bats her abanico. She is ridiculous in her beehive wig.

A boy and a girl wear leather dog collars as Lola spins the Cure, Depeche Mode, The Clash, New Order. We order two shots of tequila and photographic memories. Each shot is a declaration of love or something close to a crossbow. The arrow of time is a cosmic phenomenon divined in blue agave. The cosmos quarrels behind us in a black veil.

He reveals his history of histories beneath yellow street lights—a pair of binary stars fight for more space. Vampires move over. Rats get out. He bends dangerously in awe of his own angels.

We (don’t) share secrets.

The shadow on the left puts his left hand in the right pocket of the shadow on the right. We (or they) are nouns and verbs created in a foreign language. Each lie a point of light in the sky.

Neil de la Flor is a writer, educator, photographer, and executive director of Reading Queer, a Knight Foundation funded organization dedicated to promoting queer literary culture in South Florida. He is the author of Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and An Elephant’s Memory of Blizzards (Marsh Hawk Press). He also co-authored four collaborative books of poetry, including Sinead O’Connor and her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions, 2011), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and winner of the Sentence Book Award; Facial Geometry (NeoPepper Press, 2006), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass; and Two Thieves and a Liar (Jackleg Press, 2012), also co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass. He graduated with an MFA from the University of Miami, where he was a Michener Fellow, and can be reached at neildelaflor.com

Why should there be two happy as we? [from "Show Boat": music Kern, lyrics Hammerstein]

Charlie Parker and the Mrs. loved this song. . .

I'm in the seventh heaven / there's more than seven / my heart discovers. . .

Bukowski on His Birthday (August 16) [by David Lehman]

Many artists and writers gather their strength by opposing the established order, but sooner or later the successful ones are assimilated into the culture (Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco). Usually it happens belatedly but with hyperbolic claims as if to compensate for years of indifference or inattention. There are even times when the lag between rejection and celebration vanishes to nothing, as Gertrude Stein wrote in her brilliant lecture "Composition as Explanation." When the culture swallows the fashionable anti-establishment poetry of the moment, the result may be a mild case of indigestion. A good example is anti-war poetry of the 1960s, which was immediately accepted and glorified and is of absolutely no interest today.

The poet who has resisted assimilation longest and most strenuously is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is the real thing, like Mexican Coke, a simile he would not have embraced, being a man who sets store by bourbon, whores with good legs, and the twenty-dollar window at the track. His poetry resists the mainstream as, say, even the radical Ginsberg of the 1950s doesn't.  Bukowski is as enamored of himself as anyone else but he takes himself less seriously as a literatus. He keeps his brain in the post office where he labors as one of the proles. This humility is one reason he appeals to readers, and he has genuine and ardent readers. Bukowski has long led the league in one important category: more of his books are stolen than those of any other author, an enviable distinction.

Read "The Continual Condition," the most recent of Bukowski's posthumous collections, and you will see how he manages to make the reader feel that what he is saying really happened and in just the way described. He uses his artistry to conceal his artistry. He depicts himself, in such poems as "Rejected" and "The Theory," as emphatically ugly -- and at the same time he insists upon his virility. In the former, an editor rejects a story on the grounds that "to infer that an ugly man your age / had sex with four women in one day / is simply infantile day-dreaming." So what does Buk do? He spends the rest of the poem fleshing out this very situation.

About poetry Marianne Moore wrote, "I, too, dislike it." Bukowski would revise that to read "I, too, shit on it." He had an outstanding bullshit detector, and his poems in scorn of the Beats and other celebrated authors ("Ginsberg was / brought in / petted and / dismissed. / Burroughs was / still o.k. / but hardly / interesting / anymore. / Mailer, well hell, / that's big publishing, and / Olson, you know, well, / those breath pauses were / out of date / but meeting him / was nice") are funny and, well, nice.

Bukowski's power lies in the fact that he acknowledges he is no better than anyone else and yet he remains the hero of his own life. His poems seem raw but are tightly controlled and secretly much more in the know than you might think. (Li Po and Catullus make sneak appearances in "as Buddha smiles"). I intend to write more about this fascinating , politically incorrect but irresistible personage but for now will leave you with these lines, the opening lines of a poem, which will arrest your attention and won't let it go: "the god-damned ants have come marching here / and are climbing into my wine, / I drink them down." –

DL

First posted on the BAP blog on September 23, 2011

 

Happy Anniversary, Stacey

"Dusk" [by Amy Gerstler]

Dear, I can’t subsist on this diet
(really more of a fast — celery
seed and a soft word every other
month) any longer. Is that blood
on your pillowcase or another girl’s
lipstick? I want you to know
I’ve had such unalloyed joy
over the past several decades,
smelling your hair and petting
your sweat-beaded feet while
you were asleep. It was far sweeter
than I ever thought possible.
But my ancestors are welling up
in me now and keep nudging me
towards the door. Bells are rung,
harps are played: recessional music.
We both know the theater will close
in a few minutes. If you had been
more attentive or a better pretender
I could have run on fumes for a few
more years, sipping snow melt,
remaining quite high on it. Let
the record show I recited prayers
for your perpetual ascension
and good health as I laid this note
in its frozen envelope on your desk
and left, taking both dogs, the teal
parakeet and the black cat with me.
They got custody of our love.

– Amy Gerstler

from American Poetry Review (July-August, 2008)

M. F. K. Fisher on the Martini

 

<<

The first Martini I ever drank was strictly medicinal, for threatened seasickness, and in spite of a loyal enjoyment of them which may be increasing in direct ratio to my dwindling selectivity of palate, I must admit that I still find them a sure prop to my flagging spirits, my tired or queasy body, even my over-timid social self. I think I know how many to drink, and when, and where, as well as why; and if I have acted properly and heeded all my physical and mental reactions to them, I have been the winner in many an otherwise lost bout with everything from boredom to plain funk. A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.

 

-- M. F. K. Fisher, "To the Gibson and Beyond" (The Atlantic, January 1949)

>>

 

Remember: the only difference between a Martini and a Gibson is that the former gets an olive or lemon twist, the latter a cocktail onion or two. To make a "dirty" Martini serve with an olive and add a little of the olive juice from the jar. Vodka Martinis are OK, but for the full effect I recommend mixing gin (Hendrick's or Plymouth or Tanqueray or Beefeater) with a tablespoon of dry vermouth (preferably French: e.g. Noilly Prat); shake with ice, and serve straight up in frozen Martini glasses. Keep the gin (or vodka) in the freezer.

 

-- DL

Homage to Hitchcock [by David Lehman]

The multiple-choice form seems to suit a moviemaker as complex as Hitchcock:

(1) Which of the following did not play the male lead in a Hitchcock movie?

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca 
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

 Answer: c), Orson Welles, who directed and who dominates the screen in A Touch of Evil. Note the difference between Welles and the other four on the list. Each of the others is a non-method or pre-method actor; three are from Britain. Unlike Welles in his portrayal of evil as ugliness, at least three of the Hitchcock heroes named may be said to have an everyman quality in spite of the fact that three are very handsome, while the fourth has boyish good looks, and the same three may be said to be suave. Hitchcock can project versions of himself as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Rod Taylor, the young Gregory Peck, even Olivier as a toff. But it doesn't work with Monty Clift in I, Confess.and it wouldn't work with Welles or Brando.

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

Answer: b) Hamlet and madness. Hamlet says he is mad only "north by northwest," reinforcing the doubt that he is truly mad rather than calculatingly capable of an "antic disposition." The plot of Hitchcock's movie is mad, fantastic in the old-fashioned sense. Yet there is method in the apparent madness -- and there is as much comedy in this thriller as that category can hold. The title also encapsulates the movie's locations and its motion. This is a movie of movement: in taxicab, motor cars, train, plane, bus. Cary Grant's journey begins in New York City -- Madison Avenue, the Plaza Hotel, and the United Nations. Then the film takes a trip to the Midwest with its unending fields of corn and finally culminates on the top of Mouth Rushmore, which is north by northwest from New York City. Finally, there is a sense of playacting in the movie and the sort of temporary insanity that accompanies excursions into the absurd. From the moment Cary Grant, advertising executive, is kidnapped at the Plaza Hotel, each scene is more implausible than the scene preceding it. A prodigious amount of liquor is consumed by our hero, who reveals himself to be quite a resourceful, witty, charming, romantic, fast-on-his-feet character as the movie goes along -- whereas, at the start, he is merely adept at stealing a cab, playing the field, and reporting to mother.

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

Answer: c) a London church in The Man Who Knew too Much, but metaphorically it is also a) an anticipation of the Albert Hall, scene of the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Like Albert Hall, Ambrose Chapel is a name that can also be taken to refer to a person, the way James Stewart and Doris Day approach it at first. While b) is incorrect, it is relevant. Only  e) is just plain wrong.

  (4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on Marlene Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
c) See (d)
d) Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine, Lorraine Day, Priscilla Lane, and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than his or her talent.

Answer: d) the actresses named. It must however be admitted that b) and f) are decided possibilities. As for both a) and e), each is random speculation. The birds' savage attack on Tippi Hedren is probably the worst ordeal any Hitchcock blonde endures, though the company is stiff. Kim Novak dies twice in Vertigo. Ingrid Bergman is poisoned to the brink of death in Notorious. And of course there's Janet Leigh's lifelong fear of showers, which originated with the one she takes as Marion Crane in Bates's Motel after she has decided to to return the money, concealed in a newspaper, to the bank from which she absconded with it

(5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance, and what does that tell you?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood 
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Answer: Some would argue for symbolism. The shattered eyeglasses at the amusement park signify the death of the girl in Strangers on a Train. The key leads to the wine-cellar and its secrets in Notorious. You might say that the glass of milk in Suspicion, like the coffee cup and saucer in Notorious, accentuates the innocence that is menaced. The homely domestic objects contain lethal doses of poison; the threat of murder can be disguised in the least threatening of objects.

(6) Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

a) Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
b) Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
 c) Ingrid Bergman offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
 d) With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
 e) Doris Day belts out Che Sera, Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

Answer: (b). Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. Raymond Burr had nothing to do with it. In movies he played a minor character, usually a heavy, until he emerged as television's "Perry Mason." God bless his agent. Hitchcock would not have been interested in Lou Gehrig or any element of his story, which lacks a violent death, grounds for suspicion, murderous motives. There are foul balls but no foul play. On the other hand, each of the others is perfect: a) Rear Window, c) Notorious, d) Strangers on a Train, and e) The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is underrated, perhaps a natural consequence of having been made in a period of masterpieces on the order of Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest.

(7) In Vertigo

a) Who is real, Judy or Madeline?
b) Who is real, Johnny or Scotty?
c) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak helps explain the nature of their relationship, which is passionate but not exactly sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined to repeat.
d) What does Bernard Herrmann's music contribute?
e) Why does the detective reject fashion designer Barbara Bel Geddes?
f) Why are they both named Charlie, Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and can you make the case that this, even more than Saboteur, is Hitchcock's most patriotically American movie?

Answer: You're on your own here. Go to town..

8) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

a) attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
b) attract attention and get ejected because the cops were preferable to the kidnappers awaiting his exit
c) fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
d) warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
e) arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Answer: b) is correct. a) and e) are amusing fictions. d) is Borgesian. c) refers to the plot of a different movie, Notorious.

(9)  Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock prank?

a) to cuff his hero and heroine during rehearsals, clear the room, and lock the door
b) to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
c) to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
d) to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
e) to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

Answer: (c) Refers to Billy Wilder's movie Stalag 17. The rest are pure Hitchcock.

(10) To appreciate Hitchcock's movies,

a) you need to see them
b) You need to see them more than once.
c) you need to take into account that he was raised Catholic
d) you have to consider that he was born British but was American by choice
e) you have to acknowledge that the McGuffin is to plot as psyche is to drama and the dream
f) you must remind yourself that you, the viewer, are both the male and the female leads in the film

Answer: a) for sure, but a strong case can be made for each of the others.

Note: The multiple choice form, with which we are all familiar, is little used for the purposes of exposition. This is part of a little experiment. -- DL

a) Sean Connery in Marnie
b) Cary Grant in Notorious
c) Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil
d) Laurence Olivier in Rebecca 
e) Robert Cummings in Saboteur

 Answer: c), Orson Welles, who directed and who dominates the screen in A Touch of Evil. Note the difference between Welles and the other four on the list. Each of the others is a non-method or pre-method actor; three are from Britain. Unlike Welles in his portrayal of evil as ugliness, at least three of the Hitchcock heroes named may be said to have an everyman quality in spite of the fact that three are very handsome, while the fourth has boyish good looks, and the same three may be said to be suave. Hitchcock can project versions of himself as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Rod Taylor, the young Gregory Peck, even Olivier as a toff. But it doesn't work with Monty Clift in I, Confess.and it wouldn't work with Welles or Brando.

(2) The title North by Northwest is a reference to

a) The Tempest and magic
b) Hamlet and madness
c) A popular route flown by Pan American Airlines in 1959
with change of planes at O'Hare and Mt Rushmore the final destination
d) Emily Dickinson's poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes"
e) Cary Grant's use of a road map as a disguise in the dining car 

Answer: b) Hamlet and madness. Hamlet says he is mad only "north by northwest," reinforcing the doubt that he is truly mad rather than calculatingly capable of an "antic disposition." The plot of Hitchcock's movie is mad, fantastic in the old-fashioned sense. Yet there is method in the apparent madness -- and there is as much comedy in this thriller as that category can hold. The title also encapsulates the movie's locations and its motion. This is a movie of movement: in taxicab, motor cars, train, plane, bus. Cary Grant's journey begins in New York City -- Madison Avenue, the Plaza Hotel, and the United Nations. Then the film takes a trip to the Midwest with its unending fields of corn and finally culminates on the top of Mouth Rushmore, which is north by northwest from New York City. Finally, there is a sense of playacting in the movie and the sort of temporary insanity that accompanies excursions into the absurd. From the moment Cary Grant, advertising executive, is kidnapped at the Plaza Hotel, each scene is more implausible than the scene preceding it. A prodigious amount of liquor is consumed by our hero, who reveals himself to be quite a resourceful, witty, charming, romantic, fast-on-his-feet character as the movie goes along -- whereas, at the start, he is merely adept at stealing a cab, playing the field, and reporting to mother.

(3) Identify Ambrose Chapel.

a) Albert Hall's younger brother
b) The kidnapper in The Man Who Knew Too Much
c) A London church
d) The MacGuffin
e) Montgomery Clift's parish in I Confess

Answer: c) a London church in The Man Who Knew too Much, but metaphorically it is also a) an anticipation of the Albert Hall, scene of the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Like Albert Hall, Ambrose Chapel is a name that can also be taken to refer to a person, the way James Stewart and Doris Day approach it at first. While b) is incorrect, it is relevant. Only  e) is just plain wrong.

  (4) Hitchcock favored blond actresses because of

a) A childhood crush on Marlene Dietrich
b) Unresolved Oedipal issues
c) See (d)
d) Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Joan Fontaine, Lorraine Day, Priscilla Lane, and Tippi Hedren
e) The idea, which occurred to him with the force of an epiphany, that blond-versus-brunette mirrored the American power structure
f) The belief that in movies an actor's looks are more important than his or her talent.

Answer: d) the actresses named. It must however be admitted that b) and f) are decided possibilities. As for both a) and e), each is random speculation. The birds' savage attack on Tippi Hedren is probably the worst ordeal any Hitchcock blonde endures, though the company is stiff. Kim Novak dies twice in Vertigo. Ingrid Bergman is poisoned to the brink of death in Notorious. And of course there's Janet Leigh's lifelong fear of showers, which originated with the one she takes as Marion Crane in Bates's Motel after she has decided to to return the money, concealed in a newspaper, to the bank from which she absconded with it

(5) Which of these did Hitchcock invest with uncanny significance, and what does that tell you?

a) A glass of milk
b) A shattered pair of eyeglasses
c) A giant Sequoia Redwood 
d) The key to the wine cellar
e) A burning mansion

Answer: Some would argue for symbolism. The shattered eyeglasses at the amusement park signify the death of the girl in Strangers on a Train. The key leads to the wine-cellar and its secrets in Notorious. You might say that the glass of milk in Suspicion, like the coffee cup and saucer in Notorious, accentuates the innocence that is menaced. The homely domestic objects contain lethal doses of poison; the threat of murder can be disguised in the least threatening of objects.

(6) Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

a) Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
b) Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
 c) Ingrid Bergman offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
 d) With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
 e) Doris Day belts out Che Sera, Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

Answer: (b). Gary Cooper played Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. Raymond Burr had nothing to do with it. In movies he played a minor character, usually a heavy, until he emerged as television's "Perry Mason." God bless his agent. Hitchcock would not have been interested in Lou Gehrig or any element of his story, which lacks a violent death, grounds for suspicion, murderous motives. There are foul balls but no foul play. On the other hand, each of the others is perfect: a) Rear Window, c) Notorious, d) Strangers on a Train, and e) The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is underrated, perhaps a natural consequence of having been made in a period of masterpieces on the order of Vertigo, Rear Window, and North by Northwest.

(7) In Vertigo

a) Who is real, Judy or Madeline?
b) Who is real, Johnny or Scotty?
c) True or false: The age difference between James Stewart and Kim Novak helps explain the nature of their relationship, which is passionate but not exactly sexual -- it is more like an event in the man's psyche, which he is destined to repeat.
d) What does Bernard Herrmann's music contribute?
e) Why does the detective reject fashion designer Barbara Bel Geddes?
f) Why are they both named Charlie, Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, and can you make the case that this, even more than Saboteur, is Hitchcock's most patriotically American movie?

Answer: You're on your own here. Go to town..

8) In the auction scene in North by Northwest, Cary Grant violates the hushed-room decorum by making wacky and contradictory bids in order to

a) attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
b) attract attention and get ejected because the cops were preferable to the kidnappers awaiting his exit
c) fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
d) warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
e) arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Answer: b) is correct. a) and e) are amusing fictions. d) is Borgesian. c) refers to the plot of a different movie, Notorious.

(9)  Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock prank?

a) to cuff his hero and heroine during rehearsals, clear the room, and lock the door
b) to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
c) to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
d) to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
e) to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

Answer: (c) Refers to Billy Wilder's movie Stalag 17. The rest are pure Hitchcock.

(10) To appreciate Hitchcock's movies,

a) you need to see them
b) You need to see them more than once.
c) you need to take into account that he was raised Catholic
d) you have to consider that he was born British but was American by choice
e) you have to acknowledge that the McGuffin is to plot as psyche is to drama and the dream
f) you must remind yourself that you, the viewer, are both the male and the female leads in the film

Answer: a) for sure, but a strong case can be made for each of the others.

Note: The multiple choice form, with which we are all familiar, is little used for the purposes of exposition. This is part of a little experiment. -- DL

For Summer: Florida Poets: Caridad Moro-Gronlier [by Emma Trelles]

the dream of flight, 2019, collage with japanese paper & watercolor on canvas, maria berrio

Entry 

by Caridad Moro-Gronlier

 

Tortillera, n.

Pronounciation: Spanish /tor-ti-lle-ra/, Spain, Latin, Central and South America, U.S.
Forms:Torti, Torta, Tort, Tortilla
Etymology: < Latin tortus (twisted), <Spanish torta, <Germanque<English queer. Compare French tortille
Origin:<From term torticera (tortious), derived from Latin tortus, with the meaning of crooked, twisted, etc. torticera, a highbrow word, by a process of popular etymology pronounced wrongly as tortillera by their phonetic similarity as in "she is tortillera" instead of "she is torticera" by an error in pronunciation.
Synonyms:amaricada, arepera, bollera, bollo, buchona, cachapera, cambuja, camionera, come coños, desviada, ententida, fricatriz, hombruna, invertida, juega tenis, kiki, lechuga, lela, lencha, lesbiana, machorra, marimacha(o), obvia, sáfica, sopaipilla, tijeras, tribada, trola, troquera, virago, webiá, zapatona

1.
a. Homosexual woman; lesbian.
I outed myself as a tortillera at Noche Buena dinner last Christmas and I was roasted along with the lechón.

b.Transatlantic traveler term known to connect homosexuality with the beginning of homophobia; refutes all sexual and onomatopoeic explanations (i.e. the supposed equivalency between the clapping sound made from kneading corn pancakes to the sound made during lesbian sex) as seen through the consideration of homosexual behavior as something twisted, deviant, first referenced in 1830 in the Spanish-French dictionary by M. Nuñez de Taboada, published in Madrid, in which the French word tribade is translated as tortillera and defined as "a woman who abuses another”.
My mother did not allow me to play softball in high school because the coach was a tortillera and she didn’t want me to end up a tortillera, too.

c. Derogatory slang that denotes deviant, twisted behavior, the lowest form of female debasement, term known to induce emotional distress such as shame and self-loathing, as well as physical symptoms including, but not limited to anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dermatitis, depression, enuresis, flushing, gastritis, heart palpitations, hyperhidrosis, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, kyphosis, lethargy, malaise, mania, nausea, nightmares, OCD, panic attack, paranoia, rash, rosacea, scarring, sleepwalking, stuttering, tachycardia, tongue biting, teeth gnashing, thinning hair, ulcers, vomiting, xerostomia.
Better my daughter be dead than a disgusting tortillera. 

2. Female producer and seller of maize pancakes.
According to Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, upon the arrival of Spaniards exiled to Mexico due to the Civil War, some were greeted by a sign that read "El sindicato de Tortilleras les da la bienvenida!", which caused someone to quip, “This is a very cosmopolitan country if even tortilleras have a union!”

 

 

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the award-winning author of Visionware, published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in  Pintura:Palabra, An Anthology of Ekphrastic Writing; Rhino Reading Queer: Poetry In a Time of Chaos; Bridges To/From Cuba; The Antioch Review; The Tishman Review;The Cossack Review; Moon City Review; The Damfino Review;The Collapsar; The Notre Dame Review; The South Florida Poetry Journal; The Comstock Review; This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching; The Lavender Review; and others. She is an English professor at Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, Florida, with her wife and son. "Entry" first appeared in Rhino Poetry.

Squibs 313—319 [by Alan Ziegler]

313: “Are you back?” Yes, from every place I have ever been.

 

314:

Citi Field offers Nathan‘s hot dogs with free sauerkraut out in the open for anyone to take in any quantity, just like in the 60s at the second Nathan’s, in Oceanside on Long Island, run by Murray Handwerker (son of the original Nathan), who set up a stage in the back where you could see the likes of the Dillards for free as you ate your hot dog with unlimited sauerkraut. Yankee Stadium also offers Nathan’s hot dogs, but not sauerkraut.


315: Here’s your petard back. Now go hoist yourself.

 

316: My elementary school music teacher, Dr. Frisch, selects all but five fifth graders to be in the chorus. I am one of those left behind. Instead, I join the school newspaper, and play drums in the band (run by another teacher), marching in town parades. (I can still play “Cadence Number Two” with my fingers.) One day in music class Dr. Frisch overhears me say something snide about the chorus. “You think because you’re in the band you’re a musician. You’re not a musician—you’re a drummer. Drummers aren’t musicians. You’re a faker!” A couple of decades later, I return to my high school as Poet in Residence, warmly welcomed by former teachers. In the faculty room, I spot an old man in the corner dozing in an easy chair, his few tufts of hair like spent tumbleweed. Dr. Frisch. I slowly approach him, and he snorts awake, as another teacher says, “Alan Ziegler has returned to us. He’s famous!” I indulge in a few seconds picturing the young Vito Corleone being reacquainted with Don Ciccio. “Dr. Frisch, your chorus made me a writer!” I say. He smiles and nods his head. “Yes, yes, Alan…”

317 (from the untold history of baseball—Pitchers and Catchers): Herbert Steadmire, after noticing a large number of early-season arm strains, was the first team owner to see the wisdom of having pitchers come early to Spring Training. The following season, his team outpitched early opponents, but the pitchers suffered an inordinate number of leg strains. “We’d better also bring catchers next year,” he told his manager.


318: Lyrics on the cutting room floor:

            You set me up just to knock me down
            You could win a prize at the carnival.
            You invite me home then you skip town
            Never enough is always that’s all.

 

319: At Allard in Paris, after the lunch crowd has thinned out, Erin and I have two things in common with the old man under the painting: fine food on our plates and precious time on our hands.


We are luxuriating in our canard de Challans aux (beaucoup) olives when we notice the old man seems to have fallen asleep.



The serveurs leave him be. This is Paris. As we devour our profiteroles, the old man calls out, twice. A serveur approaches and the old man continues his chant, clearer: “Camembert! Camembert! Camembert!” The serveur  bows and returns with a fine looking piece of cheese surrounded by grapes imbued with the seeds of life.

The Case of Lizabeth Scott [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

The latest installment of the dialogue between Lehman and Lummis on film noir centers on this question:
What is your opinion of Lizabeth Scott as a noir heroine?

Suzanne Lummis:

I have a feeling I’ll enjoy hearing you talk about her. I like her fine, but I think the noir actresses who fare best within our contemporary understanding of acting, how spontaneous and authentic it should be, are Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Grahame. Oh, and Claire Trevor. Back then, actresses especially were either permitted or required to be phony—and sometimes it sets my teeth on edge.  In The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers, where Scott's not a femme fatale but a friendless woman down on her luck, in one scene she did this thing that would be unthinkable for an actor on the screen today—out of the blue, she put her head in her arms on the table and made crying sounds.  Have you ever seen anyone do that in life, cry noisily face down on a table?  And in Dead Reckoning you can see the glycerin under her eyes.  It didn’t matter to audiences then, but our expectations have changed. I shouldn’t blame Lizabeth Scott; it was symptomatic of a larger problem re. how actresses (far more than actors) were trained. Also, I haven’t seen all her movies—I hear she did one with Dan Duryea that’s her best performance.  

David Lehman:

I became aware of a bias against Lizabeth Scott some time ago; she was disparaged as the poor man’s Lauren Bacall. Dead Reckoning is pretty terrible, but that’s not specific to her. On the other hand, her work in Too Late for Tears – the movie with Dan Duryea to which you refer – is marvelous. Eddie Muller showed it on TCM recently and she was, in her own blonde way, as superb a noir heroine as you could want, dispatching both Arthur Kennedy and Mr. Duryea and outfoxing a lot of other folks until she meets a bad end in Mexico. She is as ruthless, as narcissistic, as beautiful and blonde, and as exploitative of her gender as one could ask for in a noir heroine. 

Click here to read last week's installment and here for the whole series, of which this is #6 in the series.

Every Poem is a Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Didi Jackson's "Moon Jar" [by Elizabeth Powell]

One of the questions poetry asks us is how do we live in a fractured world? Suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades have been on an alarming rise. According to the American Psychological Association there has been a 30 % rise between 2010 and 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in our country. Mental health is still less understood and accepted and treated as is physical illness. The brain is a complex organ.

Poetry is art and art knows truths that science doesn't have terms for yet. Medical studies on the effectiveness of treating emotional disorders is mixed, but expressive writing in psychological therapies has long been used. Confessional poetry was birthed from the womb of psychiatry. Today, the medical humanities and the study of literature as a means to heal and understand is gaining traction, deepening understanding, and building bridges. 

Robert Frost once said that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world. And so it is with Didi Jackson's forthcoming book of poems from Red Hen Press, Moon Jar. To heal from the terror and pain of surviving the suicide of a loved one is a tall order. Moon Jar seeks to find wholeness in the fissure through art and the natural world.

I spoke with Jackson about the title poem recently. Moon Jar is an ekphrastic poem that uses ancient Korean ceramics as a way to build a metaphor and allegory. The moon jar’s beauty lies in its imperfection. The surface of the moon jar is like the surface of skin, full of various markings and freckles, but perhaps the better for it. The moon jar defines beauty to include imperfection. Here, ekphrasis understands that nothing is perfect. It reminds me of quilters of yesteryear who used to make sure to have one imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect. 

The idea of modesty in the act of creation informs the tone of this achingly beautiful lyric. The finely hewn couplets and elegant syntax draws us down the page using assonance and shorter lines. The poem has a quiet power in its own testimony. The speaker is lit up by the moon’s nudge toward epiphany, which allows the speaker to merge with all color, all light, a kind of redemption that fills the fissure. A momentary stay.

Moon Jar 

My wedding ring is missing
one small diamond, and 

I like it that way: a reminder
of the imperfect in 

all of us, like that keyhole
size of grief that remains crystalline. 

In Korea, ceramicists for centuries
have made moon jars: testimony

to the virtue of modesty: asymmetrical
warping on the wheel, slumping 

in the pine-heated kiln,
impurities when fired — black

dots and pocks on its surface
like freckles on skin.

I have been kept awake
so many nights by the moon:

its pull on the pines and night birds
and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time.

Never a perfect sphere,
the milky moon jar joins two 

clay hemispheres into one. 
When the light of the moon

finds me, I am the color
of everything in the winter night. 

                (originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review)

EP: Suicide continues to be a major killer in the United States. Your forthcoming book “Moon Jar” speaks to the suicide of your second husband. How did you navigate the difficult terrain of healing and writing? Artistically, were their beacons of light that lead the way?

DJ: So many who take their lives believe there is some part of themselves that is flawed. Maybe someday we will come to value each other exactly as we are. I took consolation and inspiration in the works of a number of poets and artists who served as guides in my writing of Moon Jar. I found myself looking for poets who write about their grief, whether it be from the loss of suicide or not. Ruth Stone, Matt Rasmussen, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Edward Hirsch, Anna Akhmatova, Beth Bachman all served as inspirations as writers who have seen the darkest of days and moved through that darkness with their poems. Just after my husband’s suicide, I was especially buoyed by Kevin Young’s anthology on grief, The Art of Losing. Just to know that I wasn’t alone in facing what seemed to be an impossible recovery was incredibly beneficial. Visual artists helped too, modern and abstract artists especially Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. In his essay, “Why Modern Art Matters Now,” Kirk Varnedoe argues that modern art “is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded” and therefore opens itself to a range of human experiences. The work of writing the poems in Moon Jar became a way for me to process what had happened and a way for me to begin to recover by investigating  my own range of emotions. 

EP: In the title poem, Moon Jar, the speaker is reckoning with the imperfect life and how to live it. The moon jar itself is an object that represents a larger trope. I know you are also a teacher of art history, but what made you want to write about the Korean ceramic moon jar and how it relates to the overall narrative of the collection?

DJ: I taught art history for almost ten years. Recently, I was teaching a course on the intersection of language and visual art. Before I could introduce my students to any type of art, I wanted to offer several good reasons why we should look at art in the first place. The moon jar, as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong mention in their book Art as Therapy, is a great example of morality taught through visual art. They ascertain that art can serve many functions. Moon jars are made by joining two hemispheres of clay. That metaphor alone is so beautiful. My poem mentions a wedding ring, a western symbol of unity. But, what I love most about the moon jar is that it is beloved for the imperfections that come from combining the two halves, firing in the kiln often adds blemishes and spots. In a time when we are obsessed with perfection, this idea is refreshing. 

 

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. 

"My Orgasms: A Survey" [by Nin Andrews]

My Orgasms
a survey of surveys on the Sex Lives of Men and Women

I accept no responsibility for statistics, which are a form of magic beyond my comprehension.
-- Robertson Davies

The average couple is said to have sex 2.2 times per week.  (Though the definition of .2 sex varies depending on one's gender.)

85% of couples said they would like to have sex at least twice a week.  (Only 27% of couples claim to have sex twice a week and like it.)

80% of British men suffer temporary mental setbacks the night after they have sex.  (It has yet to be  determined if this is a cultural or universal phenomenon.)

75% of American women prefer chocolate to sex.  (This, most scientists believe, is a world-wide phenomenon, depending on the availability of chocolate.)

54% of Christian women say fidelity is what they most love in a man, but  only 6% say the faithful also need to be good in bed. (Yet another good reason to be an atheist.)

40% of sexually active adults distinguish fucking from sex.  (Sex without fucking?  Is this another Christian sect? )

38% of men pray for divine aid with their sexual performance.  (Examples soon to be released in The New Book of Common Prayer.)
 
35% of married women consider sex as important as any other household chore.  (And who knew doing the dishes could be so much fun?  For details on exotic dishes, check out Dish-sex.com)

25% of men say their sexual advances are turned down at least 50% of the time.  (Women are always better at advancing in such matters, alas.)

10% of men admit to lying about their sex lives, and pollsters suspect the number to be higher.  Even when filling out anonymous, men admit they want to keep up with the Joneses. (Such lies!  Do tell!)

1 out of 15 women admits she fakes her orgasms. (But she still refers to them as "my orgasms.")

-- NA  [from the archive; originally posted April 29, 2008]

Let’s Face the Music and Dance [by Ian Crouch]

from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010

<<<
Last Wednesday night, I was fortunate enough to be at the Allen Room in Frederick P. Rose Hall for "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," Hal Willner’s inspired rejiggering of the “Great American Songbook.” With the lights of New York forming an ideal backdrop through the venue’s glass back wall, Rufus Wainwright crooned Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (1936). Sting emerged from the audience and lustily sang the Gershwin brothers’ “Love is Here to Stay” (1938), in what was likely the only time the standard had been performed by a man wearing cargo pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. And, following numbers by Shannon McNally, Marc Anthony Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, Jenni Muldaur, and Christine Ohlman, Lou Reed stomped his way through the great 1943 Harold Arlen / Johnny Mercer hit “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

The show was held in conjunction with David Lehman’s exceptional new book “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” which inspired a freestyle narration by Ken Nordine, whose pre-recorded voice was piped into the room last night from on high, sounding like the received word from a better, more devious God.

Lehman’s central theme is that while the success of great popular composers and songwriters—Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II—owes much to their Jewish cultural heritage, the songs they wrote often served as a way to escape “their Jewish origins and join the American adventure.” (Philip Roth writes about this exact idea in several novels, perhaps most movingly in “American Pastoral,” and most histrionically in “The Plot Against America.”) Lehman’s foremost example of what he calls this paradox (Richard Rodgers actually attended Camp Paradox as a child), is Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) [pictured left] who in writing such songs as “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” was preaching a new religion, that of America itself.

Yet Lehman is both proud and protective of his own connection to these great songwriters, going as far as to cast himself as a fictional nephew to Uncle Jerry (Kern) and Uncle Harry (Arlen)[pictured right]. And he offers a clever turn on a famous line from “West Side Story” (Bernstein / Sondheim), noting that, “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way.” His most intriguing argument is that even the songs by non-Jews of the era, “are in some fundamental way inflected with Judaism.” Lehman’s thrust is a cleaned-up riff on the classic Lenny Bruce Jewish/goyish bit: “If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish … Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews.” The connection between Jews, blacks, and goys is not inconsequential: it forms one of the central components of music from the standards era, perhaps best exemplified by Frank Sinatra singing “Ol’ Man River,” [pictured right  on the radio in the 1940s] or as Lehman puts it, “the lean Italian dressed in white singing a song by Jews about the plight of blacks.” (It’s worth noting, also, that Lenny Bruce made an appearance last night, in the person of Steve Cuiffo, doing a version of the above bit. A crazy show!)

While navigating these elaborate and often fraught ideas, Lehman consistently applies a light touch, perfect for a book about songs with lyrics such as: “The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you,/ The east, west, north, and south of you.” That one’s from “All of You,” by Cole Porter [pictured left], a Midwestern WASP who went to Yale, yet who wrote lyrics that fit squarely into what Lehman understands as a tradition that “followed a Jewish imperative in their abundant humor, wit, and cleverness and in their ability to mix sadness and elation and to produce thereby the mysterious tingle of romance.” Porter was all about romance, and his songs “Let’s Do It,” “Let’s Misbehave,” and “You’re the Top,” can make even the most hardened stoic grin like a fool. If you’re not convinced, check out Bobby Short’s debonair version of “You’re the Top,” which includes such improbable rhymes as: “You’re a rose,/ You’re Inferno’s Dante,/ You’re the nose / On the great Durante.”

For all the fun of the pop song, however, there is an underlying sadness throughout the book. “An ode to the great songwriters is bound to turn elegiac,” Lehman writes. He includes a chronology at the end of the book that starts at 1,000 b.c., with King David (“a musician”) ruling over the Kingdom of Israel, and ends with Bob Dylan performing an electric set at the Newport Film Festival in 1965. (Interestingly, last night’s bassist was Tony Garnier, a longtime member of Dylan’s current touring band.) Lehman likes Dylan, and even links him to Harold Arlen and the other Jewish songwriters of an earlier era. But Dylan heralded, in many ways, the death of the popular standard. He—along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—made the guitar king, and eliminated the composer/lyricist dynamic by doing it all himself. Additionally, folk and rock music communicated the anger and confusion of the time, rather than scoring points with cheeky internal rhymes and charming pathos. “The new music devalued cleverness and irony, not to mention the clarinet and the trombone,” Lehman writes.

The standards celebrated the American “good life,” something that in the nineteen-sixties suddenly seemed bourgeois, old-fashioned, or narrow. An example: As the boys in the Barry Levinson movie “Diner,” (set in 1959) argued about who was better—Sinatra or Johnny Mathis—Mickey Rourke, the beautiful young Mickey Rourke, ended the discussion, and the era, by naming “Presley,” as in Elvis, as his choice instead. That movie’s great opening scene at the dance hall now looks like a museum piece. The gentle notion of “romance” had turned to camp. Dancing was finished, and for those who have lamented the last fifty years of pop music, so was sophistication and style.

Which brings us back to last Wednesday, to Lou Reed and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).” That killer interpretation, along with Marc Anthony Thompson’s gorgeous rendition of “Spanish Harlem,” suggested that at least for that moment—with the city lights shining in the distance, and the traffic inching cross-town—the old popular standard could live alongside rock, and that hits are hits no matter when they were written or how they are performed.

from The New Yorker, January 28, 2010. Pictured top left: George and Ira Gershwin. Bottom left: Rufus Wainwright and David Lehman after the concert.  See also the write-up that appeared in Tablet.

The Ladies Lazarus: Feminist Poetry Renaissance in Kansas City [by Elizabeth Powell]

Just down the steep hill from where I teach at Northern Vermont University in quaint Johnson, Vermont  is a precious artistic resource, Vermont Studio Center. Known for its artist residencies since it began in 1984, the rural Vermont enclave hosts a series of talks and readings by visiting artists and writers for the surrounding community.  What a score! It is part of the rich fabric of the arts that Vermont inspires and makes possible. 

Through Vermont Studio Center programming, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to new work and making new friends and acquaintances. Indeed, it was through VSC that I met up with the dynamic duo, sometimes known on their reading tours as The Ladies Lazarus, also known as poets Erin Adair-Hodges (author of Let’s All Die Happy, University of Pittsburgh Press)  and Jenny Molberg (author of Marvels of the Invisible from Tupelo Press and forthcoming Refusal: Poems from LSU Press). They inspire me. I love their smart, stunningly brilliant poems. 

They also are editors at the prestigious Pleiades Press, which is woman-run. Little did I know that there is a poetic renaissance brewing, a feminist literary scene with chops, in the Kansas City area. Kansas City, Here I Come! The area boasts other formidable women poets that I am a fangirl of, such as Hadara Bar Nadav, Traci Brimhall, and Bridget Lowe. Next February I will be featuring their work in a special issue of Green Mountains Review. 

Here’s a sampling of their fine work. First, Erin Adair-Hodges’, Unmappable, a poem that tries to locate the source of feminine dislocation. The poem interrogates the vast expanse of Kansas, how it can make the speaker disappear not only in size or scope but also through the political and social oppression of women in Kansas. Like Emily Dickinson’s “done with the compass, done with the chart,” Adair-Hodges’ speaker will find her own way, following the power of lightning, which also  has power over the landscape of Kansas. “Anyone can be buried” in this place, but the narrator rides the Plathian arrow away from the deadly cooing of wheat and into the bullseye of her own unmappable power. 

Unmappable

Kansas coos me into its wheat.
Done with direction, I follow the lightning,
God’s arrows insisting even the desolate
can be a destination. 

In the black and white of a winter dawn
a train zippers the wetland 
to a sky clouded with intention.
It looks more like a photograph

than a photograph resembles the moment
it captures, its frame diverting, its filter
slanting truths. Say I make of this a photo—
what would the evidence show? 

That I was in a body here for awhile
and I wanted this to mean something?
Is this the alibi or the crime? 
And who is the jury to receive this—no one

knows I’m here. I loaded the car in Technicolor
and drove east—had done milked the west 
of fresh starts—but the time changed
so I don’t know when I am.

Kansas says it does not matter. Time
rolls over its husks and soil like fog, changing
nothing. So much land—
anyone could be buried out here. 

(originally in The Sewanee Review)

Next, in Molberg’s poem, “Note”, there is the speaker’s desire to disappear from the oppressive patriarchy. In this cutting, yet almost quiet poem the reader understands that the aggressor’s threat of suicide becomes a part of the oppression of the speaker, a victim of domestic violence. Here the speaker’s life, like her favorite poem, is ripped out for a suicide note by a man who wants her to disappear so he can live, putting the other woman in her place. Here we have the very enactment of gaslighting, one of the methods by which oppression happens. 

Note

He said he would hang himself
so as not to make a mess.

But he was still there the next day.
And the next. And the next.

He wrote the note for the cops
on a page he tore from my favorite book

of poems. That’s all I saw of it—
in absence—the ripped-out page

like a jagged fin down the spine.
What is my body but a rainstorm?

What are my bones
but flightless shards of light?

I did not feel secure, 
though I married the only man

I believed was safe. Two children.
Three dogs. The dying cat.

Papers signed and unsigned.
The woman who pasted her face

over mine in our pictures
and mailed them as proof of their affair

before she tried to kill herself.
This, too, he does not tell me.

In the dream, he cuts 
the air around my body

with a giant pair of scissors, 
origamis me

until I am small as a ring-box. 
In I go, with the rest 

of my clothes, to the cardboard crate
where dress-sleeves stick out

like the arms of paper dolls. I nestle there. 
I fold and fold. I try to disappear.

                                    (originally in Ploughshares)

What follows here is an interview with Jenny Molberg and Erin Adair-Hodges about, among other things, The Ladies Lazarus Tour. Molberg and Adai-Hodges collaborated on the answers.

For Summer: Florida Poets: Brian Turner [by Emma Trelles]

Aedes Aegypti

by Brian Turner

With the audio on mute, the television
flickers over the bodies of lovers
tangled in dream, carbon dioxide
pluming from their mouths
the way factory smoke billows
from the industrial park outside of town.

Mosquitoes circle in a holding pattern above.
As the female’s wings beat 400 times
per second, the male’s at 600 hertz,
their wingtips trace the smallest figure-8s
into the invisible, a gesture toward the infinite.

Such brief lives they have. One month,
maybe, their coupling a conversation
at 1200 hertz, the high pitch of their union
an A above concert C—

                                       Beethoven’s last note,
perhaps, the note he chose not to take
by feather from the well of ink
the way a mosquito might dip a stylet
in blood.

               He let the note play itself out.
To recognize the cry of the bat
with its hunger returning. Blue notes
smoldered out from the throats of lovers.
That no matter how certain
the crushing weight of the indomitable,
even the smallest of flyers
raise their wings in music.

Brian Turner is a writer and musician; author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, two poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise), and a debut album with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team. He edited The Kiss anthology and curated the series on Guernica. He’s received a Guggenheim, a USA Fellowship, an NEA, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He’s published in The New York Times (online), National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, and more. He directs the MFA at Sierra Nevada College.

 

Language Has Consequences: Carolyn Forche and the Poetry of Witness [by Elizabeth Powell]

 “In the dark times. Will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” These words by Berthold Brecht have been on my mind a lot lately even from my privileged point of view in rural Vermont, where peace is mostly as abundant as the long sweep of hay and cornfields. Still my television set blares the discord and hate, a technological vomiting that gets harder to subdue. 

The Brecht poem appears in one of my favorite poetry anthologies, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poets of Witness, edited by the esteemed poet Carolyn Forche, who has recently published a highly anticipated, lyrical memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance about her time in El Salvador in the 1970s bearing witness to the horrors of war and human rights abuses. 

 With the brutality and crimes against humanity happening along our southern border, in addition to bloodshed from white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso and Dayton, it is hard not to think we have firmly crossed the threshold into our own dark times. Language has consequences. It has been said, our lives are human documents. What is written in those documents is us. Philosopher/theologian Martin Buber once said,“Whoever speaks one of the basic words enters into the word and stands in it.” 

 Poetry is one way to enter into the words of witness. This autumn I will be using Forche’s 1993 anthology as part of my poetry workshop at Northern Vermont University, where we will learn all we can about the poetry of witness. I can’t stress this enough in my blogs this week: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,” William Carlos Williams once said in his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”. We are collectively staring into an abyss right now. It’s important to remember history. What is past is prologue. People are dying right here, right now.

I began reading Carolyn Forche’s seminal book of poems “A Country Between Us” when I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s. In hindsight, I see how her writing and witness about El Salvador helped bring to light, along with other organizations for which she worked like Amnesty International, the brutality and horror of what was happening, bringing a palpable awareness of human rights onto campus. One of the most important poems to me from that collection has been “The Colonel”, a poem that recounts a harrowing experience when her friend and mentor Leonel Gomez Vides, an El Salvadoran revolutionary, brings her to a dinner party at the home of a Colonel, who confronts them in a terrifying manner on the eve of all out war: 

    “…He spilled many ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves….As for the rights of anyone, tell
    your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears on the floor with his arm and held the last of     
    his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap     
    of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. 

    (May 1978)” 

I remember reading it as a young person, my eyes rushing back and forth over the page, the image, the meaning, the language, the form. I could sense those ears on the floor of the poem listening for help. Up until then I was unsure if poetry could make a difference, if I should just go with my original plan to go to law school to become a civil rights lawyer, stop my formal poetry study and training. But that poem lead me down a road to read other poets of witness like Celan and Akhmatova. I began to understand that poems were a different kind of law. I learned a poem was an argument. Reading “The Colonel” made me immediately understand Shelley’s dictum ”Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Go read or re-read this poem, now. Share it with young people that you know. Reread or read The Country Between Us and then read What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. That’s your assignment. Then talk about the issues of brutality, torture and death, and human rights abuses with your friends and neighbors. Be an unacknowledged legislator. We co-create this world with our actions. In the words of my grandfather, notice whoever you meet, you never know how they will change your life (or vice versa).

Here is a case in point, an event from which we benefit. When Leonel Gomez Vides, a man of mystery, the El Salvadoran national who showed up on Forche’s door step with his two young daughters in the 1970s, implored her to come to El Salvador to witness and report back to the people of the United States what was happening. Back then, she was a young poet, teaching in California, having recently worked on translating the work of Salvadoran writer and poet Claribel Alegria, from the Spanish. This was how Gomez became aware of Forche. He was related to Alegria. He also understood that a poet’s eye could bring critical information back to the United States and urge people and politicians to take notice of the brutal violence and help. So begins the memoir, which is filled with vital information of the revolution and civil war in El Salvador and how Forche became a human rights activist. It is the story of a young woman’s education in poetry and in life.

 Recently, I had the thrilling opportunity to see Forche speak and read for the first time at Bookstock, The Green Mountains Festival of Words, a literary festival held every July in Woodstock, Vermont. It was thrilling, inspirational, necessary.

Here's my interview with Carolyn Forche about her new memoir, What You Heard is True: of A Memoir of Witness and Resistance: