The Best American Poetry

John Hennessy, Guest Author June 14-19

This week we welcome John Hennessy as our guest author. John is the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books )and Coney Island Pilgrim (Ashland Poetry Press) He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021, and the forthcoming anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as poetry editor for The Common. Find out more about John here. 

Welcome, John. 

-- sdl

Wang Ping: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wang Ping on the rooftop of Rudy Burckhardt's apartment building in NYC. Photo by Rudy Burckhardt.

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Our Prayers on Father’s Day

Dear God, we are not child actors. We are children. Real children.

Dear God, where is my papa and mama? We just walked 3,000 miles, fighting coyotes along the way. We thought we’d be safe once we crossed the Rio Grande.

Dear God, you said everyone is born equal, every life is a gift, and the kingdom of heaven resides in the mustard seed.

Dear God, we are small and young. Some of us just learned to walk, some still wear diapers, and some are still nursing. Are we not your tiny mustard seeds, dear God?

You say a kid must not be boiled or eaten in mother’s milk. Why are you ripping us from our mother’s breasts, from our father’s hands?

Dear God, we have lost everything: our country, our home, our friends and tomorrow. We have nothing left but our papa and mama. Please give them back.

Dear God, here’s my mama’s number. Here’s my papa’s number. Here’s my aunt’s number. I have it memorized. Please call so we can get out of this dog kennel.

Dear God, you cried for donkeys moaning under loads and falling on the roadside. Are you crying for us, as we fall off la bestia, crushed under tren de la muerte?

Dear God, you wept when you heard starving baby ravens crying from the nest. Are you weeping for us, Lord, as you hear our wailing for papa and mama from the cage?

Dear God, we followed your law to flee from danger: a burning forest, a roaring tsunami, a raging war, violent gangs.

But dear God, it’s been months since I was yanked from mama’s breasts, since I’m left in the cage, crawling in circles . . . as I turn the tender age of 11 months old.

Dear God, we didn’t want to leave home, walk 3,000 miles, or fall off la bestia.

Dear God, we are not criminals or child actors. We just want our mama and papa. Our parents are not criminals or actors. They just want to raise us. There’s no script. Our only word is to live, like all God’s children.

Do not turn off the light on us, dear God. Do not throw away the key to our cage. Give back our papa and mama, dear Lord. Do not forsake us, alone, terrified, drowning in our tears. Hear our cries on Father’s Day. Hear the cries of our fathers and mothers, dying from the death sentence of separation.

Dear God, please let us be children again, like arrows in the hands of a warrior. For we’re your mustard seeds, your heritage, keys to thy kingdom of heaven, dearest God.

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Wang Ping was born in China and came to the U.S. in 1985. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, The Last Communist Virgin, Flashcards: Poems by Yu Jian, Ten Thousand Waves, and Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (AWP 2017 award for non-fiction). She won the Eugene-Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is the recipient of an NEA felllowship, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for non-fiction, and many other awards. She received her Distinct Immigrant Award in 2014, and Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015. She is the Minnesota Poet Laureate 2021-23, appointed by International Beat Poetry Foundation. She’s also a photographer, installation artist, and flamenco dancer. Her multi-media exhibitions include “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges” and “Kinship of Rivers,” shown at schools, colleges, galleries, museums, lock and dams, and confluences along the Mississippi River. She is professor emerita of English at Macalester College and founder and director of Kinship of Rivers project.

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                                    Rudy Burckhardt 6 fotos,1992

 

Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) on Plath & Hughes [by David Lehman]

THE SILENT WOMAN: SYLVIA PLATH & TED HUGHES
By Janet Malcolm
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 208 pages. $23.
Reviewed for the Boston Globe by David Lehman (March 1994)

          Janet Malcolm is among the most intellectually provocative of authors. A genuine iconoclast, she strews bold judgments in the reader's path with confidence bordering on impudence. Able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight, she may damn all journalists in a single universal clause or may, to equal rhetorical effect, define a person's character on the basis of her reaction to a failed recipe. Controversy trails her like the clouds of glory following the blessed babe in Wordsworth's Immortality Ode.

          In her last two books the whole thrust of Malcolm's effort has been directed at the writing profession -- which, given her scrutiny, would seem to be very nearly as impossible a line of work as psychoanalysis, the subject of a pair of previous works by Malcolm. The Silent Woman, her new book, created a major buzz when it dominated a late-August issue of The New Yorker last year. In a strict sense, it is a literary essay on the rival merits of half a dozen biographies of the poet Sylvia Plath, all of them problematic, none of them satisfactory.

          But The Silent Woman is much more than that. It is a double narrative in two time zones. One narrative centers on Plath's bleak last days and the unbearable emotional pressure that made possible her great outpouring of poetry but also led to her suicide at the age of thirty in February 1963. The second narrative concerns the fighting that ensued (and shows no signs of letting up) over the meaning of Plath's life and death. The implacable animosity between Plath's hagiographers and Plath's husband, the often vilified Ted Hughes, who was conducting an adulterous affair at the time of her suicide, leads Malcolm to propose an "allegory of the problem of biography in general" (p. 28) -- an allegory as trenchant and incisive as her earlier allegory of the problem of journalism, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990).

          The first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer has become justly famous: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." At a time when journalists have graduated to the status of media figures and are glamorized as never before, Malcolm depicts the very species as contemptible. The journalist is a "confidence man" who preys on "credulous widows," she writes in The Journalist and the Murderer. And as a parable designed to illustrate this truth, she tells the riveting story of a lawsuit brought by a convicted murderer (Jeffrey MacDonald) against the author of a best-selling book about the murder and the murder trial (Joe McGinniss). MacDonald claimed he had been conned by McGinniss into cooperating with him on Fatal Vision, only to be betrayed by McGinniss in Fatal Vision.

          For Malcolm, MacDonald's legal narrative was more compelling than the traditional defenses summoned in McGinniss's behalf. She had no trouble making the convicted killer's position seem more sympathetic and more reasonable than that of the swashbuckling, intrepid reporter. For her, moreover, this quite exceptional case represented the standard or norm for the relations in general between people who write for a living and the people they write about. Her strong views on journalism did not endear her to some in the journalistic community, and they displayed their glee when Malcolm's theory seemed to be borne out inadvertently in the legal melodramas of her own life. When rogue psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson took Malcolm to court for having misquoted him in a series of devastating articles exploring his ouster as curator of the Freud archives, he was charging her with the same bad faith that she found so odious in Joe McGinniss. It became possible to regard The Journalist and the Murderer as obliquely confessional, and the same is true of The Silent Woman.

          Malcolm leaves us in no doubt that The Silent Woman is a continuation by other means of the arguments put forth in The Journalist and the Murderer. Again she indicts an entire genre of literary production, and again she seems to be implicating herself -- with whatever degree of ironic self-awareness -- in the indictment. Biography's essential nature is "transgressive," she writes, and the biographer resembles a crook: not a con artist this time but a "professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away" (p. 9). Changing metaphors, she depicts biography and journalism as related pathologies, "virulent" strains of "the bacillus of bad faith," to which she is herself "susceptible" (p. 28).

          Sylvia Plath's life and death have become a cherished feminist myth, and the imperatives of biographers seeking to perpetuate it are usually given priority over the keepers of the estate, jealous of their privacy and eager to put their own spin on destiny. Malcolm, the contrarian, sides with Ted Hughes and his protective older sister Olwyn, whose resistance to the biographical incursion may well be imagined; in the Plath legend, Hughes has always figured as the villain who hastened her demise. Malcolm prefers to see Hughes as Vronsky to Plath's Anna (p. 123). The fact that Assia Wevill, the woman for whom Hughes left Plath, committed suicide in 1969, gassing herself as Plath had done, "in a bizarre gesture of imitation" (p. 102), has the perhaps surprising effect of enlarging Malcolm's sympathy for the reclusive Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate.

          In an allegory, everyone stands for something, and Hughes is the embattled artist: "His effort to disentangle his life from the Plath legend while tending its flame is a kind of grotesque allegory of the effort of every artist to salvage a piece of normal life for himself from the disaster of his calling" (p. 156). Olwyn Hughes is the "Cerberus" of the Plath estate. The cluttered-up house of a fatuous old man, whose claim to fame is that he dwelled in the flat below the one in which Plath took her life, becomes a "monstrous allegory of truth": "This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life" (p. 204).

          There is more intellectual excitement in one of Malcolm's riffs than in many a thick academic tome. Consider her contention that "the nineteenth century came to an end in America only in the 1960s" (p. 15). Or this take on journalism: "The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions" (p. 41).

          Sometimes Malcolm goes too far, even for me -- and I'm a big fan. There is, for example, the kitchen episode with Anne Stevenson, whose biography of Plath, Bitter Fame, was widely thought to have failed because she had made too many concessions to Olwyn Hughes. When Malcolm visited her in England, Stevenson prepared a lasagna dinner, forgetting at the last minute to insert an inessential ingredient ("the white sauce"). Here is how Malcolm magnifies the omission: "When we ate it, half an hour later, it tasted good, but Anne was critical of it and repeatedly apologized for it. As with the publication of Bitter Fame, she had no choice but to serve it, but she felt it to be an imperfect, compromised thing. I understood her anguish and felt for her" (p. 105). Turning Stevenson's hospitality into a homely metaphor for a failed literary enterprise seems both unfair and unkind, the sort of journalistic stunt that Malcolm deplores when she spots it in the work of others.

          Malcolm raises ethical questions that almost all nonfiction writers must confront, and the fact that her own practices have been questioned scarcely invalidates her thesis or her individual insights. Summing up her own ambivalence, she likens herself to "a lawyer defending a case he knows to be weak and yet obscurely feels is just" (p. 177), but she is also the quavering defendant and the severe magistrate. When she condemns biography as a form of "voyeurism and busybodyism" that can be sadistic and cruel, what she is really doing is initiating a powerful argument with herself, for she knows that she shall not 'scape whipping. If The Silent Woman may be likened to a poem, it is not only because the writing is so fine but because of the truth in William Butler Yeats's observation that we make rhetoric out of our quarrels with others -- and poetry out of our quarrels with ourselves.

A CERTAIN CLARITY, AND TWO POEMS BY LAWRENCE JOSEPH [by John Hennessy]

 

Happy Juneteenth!  As noted earlier this week, I hope to take this opportunity to raise awareness of a few books that were launched in the early days of the pandemic. Lawrence Joseph's A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems came out in March, 2020, just as much of the country was shutting down, to excellent reviews in The New York Times, LRB, and elsewhere. Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann stunningly observes:

“Almost uniquely among contemporary American poets, Joseph doesn’t retail privities, doesn’t chase the minuscule scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods. Readers of his work may be tempted to conclude: this poet doesn’t have a personal life. That’s because what the poems give us are the past fifty years – Joseph’s adult lifetime – in terms of event, public policy and the evolution of civilisation: the Detroit Race Riots, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Twin Towers, globalisation and the internet, archaic and experimental weapons, from stones to ‘steerable/bombs, unprecedented precision, flexibility,/cost,/one, two/trillion’, from axes to ‘those low-flying A-10 Warthogs/ ... each of them, firing/one hundred bullets a second’. Then on to turbo-capitalism, the 2008 slump, Occupy Wall Street, toxins in the water in Flint, Michigan and beyond, Hurricane Irene and the flooding up and down the East Coast, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza and Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq (twice). I remember saying to myself long ago that if you are looking for a poetry that lucidly and systematically offers a sense of this world as a place where things go continually wrong, there is no one but Lawrence Joseph. It’s as though, instead of famously not doing so, Jane Austen had written only about the Napoleonic Wars, or Kafka about World War One.”

It's my pleasure to present here two of Joseph's poems. ("In One Day's Annals" was first published in The Common.)

IN ONE DAY’S ANNALS (by Lawrence Joseph)

Inscrutable the Muse Who Selects My Fate;
Breaking News Graphic, Word of the Attack

Spreads; History of the Great Exegesis;
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew;

Truly Stupendous Levels of Hatred;
and others, too many to mention, each

with their own characters, dialogues, scenes.
In his eternity, up to his waist in a pool

of green liquid poisons, the president who
raises his eyebrows, blows out his cheeks,

purses his lips, feigns surprise, smirks.
In one day’s annals, seen through Sweet

Revenge’s windows, Carmine Street’s
gold dusk light, purplish bronze shielding

Teardrop Park turning a misty gray, slipping
on the ice, falling, headfirst, onto Rector Street,

Number Two subway train’s lights go out—
he continues to play—lights on again—

he finishes, lifts his guitar and kisses it—
on one of fifteen years of Wednesdays,

millions of gallons of untreated sewage
discharged from the North River Wastewater

Treatment Plant’s pipes into the Hudson
and Harlem rivers. What’s clear,

delicate, beautiful, what’s ugly, horrifying;
but why we go to the end of the night

is for no other reason than another
moral to the story, the primal paradise

the body remembers, elemental stasis
of infinities of light and of time, hypostatic.

Lawrence Joseph was born and raised in Detroit, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently So Where Are We (2017) and A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (2020), both from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I also want to mention—and recommend— his book Lawyerland, alternately dubbed novel, non-fiction, and non-fiction novel. He recently retired from St. John’s University School of Law, where he was Tinnelly Professor of Law, and lives in New York City.

Joseph is sui generis in American poetry—an apparent insider (frequently anthologized in Best American Poetry and other collections, Jonathan Galassi is his book editor) who until recently spent his days teaching labor law, far from the MFA circuit. Throughout his work, Joseph turns his uncompromising moral vision on the brutality inherent to the structures of power and calls for their dismantling. While his language and forms are utterly contemporary—this is a new poetry of resistance—his work is doubtlessly informed by Melville and Whitman, Stevens and Stein. A poet of “great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness,” as John Ashbery has written, Joseph expertly combines images, ideas, and the language of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, with expressions of great beauty and physical and emotional intimacy.

On Utopia Parkway, by Lawrence Joseph

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay,

from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside

 

to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets

I take to work. The front yard of roses — 

 

did I write their names down correctly? — 

Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale.

 

Q31 bus, among the words I hear are

Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated,

 

Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not

physically well, a poor man, arrested

 

on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose,

on the street, held, choked, left unconscious,

 

still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation

administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death,

 

according to the autopsy report, a homicide — 

rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins,

 

by employees of the Agency’s contractor,

isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence

 

explains, but, merely, legally justified means

of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway

 

was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house.

He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine

 

on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater

he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state

 

set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines

the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace,

 

the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression

of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual.

 

In what place, the Federal Reserve’s

monetary spigots and banks’ access

 

to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce

the market’s decline — in what places, violations

 

of which forms of which eternal laws?

Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place?

 

On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike,

in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy

 

blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed

and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.

Invisibility Leaves Traces [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

    My grandmother Alichka, whose birthday I always remember as it coincides with International Women's Day in March, had a Singer sewing machine. It occupied all the wall space between the door and her bed. It had a pedal to step on for the machine to work. Just like my father's Lada car had pedals: a pedal for gas, a pedal for the brake, and even a pedal to make the car roar like a bear. 

    Alichka could mend things without the sewing machine. She had a special plastic mushroom for simple fixes. Let's say you had a hole in your trousers. Alichka would then find the thread of the color of your pants (she had a magical chest of various threads, needles, and buttons; her collection of buttons deserves a poem dedicated to them alone.) Alichka would take her plastic mushroom and place it inside your trousers right under the hole (you must not wear your trousers at that time, of course!) and stitch them in a way you would never guess that the hole was there. Unless it was in a prominently visible place, but even then, it would be noticeable only if someone paid close attention to your trousers. Which rarely happens. 

    Sometimes, there would be no hole yet, only a tear or just the traces of a future tear. Then it was not necessary to undress; you could keep your trousers on while Alichka mended the tear without her Singer machine and without her plastic mushroom – just with her hands. In such cases, out of superstition, she would cut a piece of the thread and give it to you to hold in your mouth during the entire mending procedure. It would ensure that the needle did not accidentally stitch your brain. Not sure exactly how the whole thing worked, but it must have worked just fine. Alichka often mended my clothes, and every single time I held a thread in my mouth while she worked, and I don't believe my brain was accidentally sewn. Or, if it happened, we didn't notice it. 

    When Alichka was stitching, her hands would leave traces in the air. Quick horizontal traces. Just as a conductor paints music with a baton. Conducting lesson 101: imagine you're a painter, and the baton is your brush. Invisibility leaves traces. 

FATIMAH ASGHAR, KRISTINA FAUST, AMA CODJOE, FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ: DISQUIET POETRY PRIZE WINNERS [by John Hennessy]

For the last four years at The Common we’ve been happy to partner with the DISQUIET International Literary Program, a two-week long conference bringing together writers from North America, Portugal, and throughout the Lusophone world. Our tenth-anniversary edition, Issue #20, featured a special portfolio of “Writing from the Lusosphere”—that is, “Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora, with works in English and in translation exploring Lisbon, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Mozambique.”

This partnership has also led to our publishing poems by the winners (and some of the runners-up) of their annual DISQUIET Poetry Prize. It’s my pleasure to present the first four of those winning poems here.

 

KUL, by Fatimah Asghar

Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kul.

A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. What day am I promised?

Tomorrow means I might have her forever.
Yesterday means I say goodbye, again.
Kul means they are the same.

I know you can bend time.
I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no

other reason than I deserve her.
If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
bring back the grave. Pluck the flower

of my mother’s body from the soil.
Kul means I’m in the crib eyelashes
wet the first time they open. Kul means

my sister is crawling away from her
on the bed as my father comes home
from work. Kul means she’s dancing

at my wedding not-yet-come
kul means she’s oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kul

means I wake to her strange voice in the kitchen
kul means she’s holding my baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, educator and performer.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others.  Her work has been featured on news outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship recipient and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color and the writer of If They Come For Us (One World, August 2018), a collection of poems that explores the legacy of Partition and orphan-hood. Along with Safia Elhillo, she is the editor of Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket 2019), an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender nonconforming and/or trans.

 

OFFSTAGE, CHRIST, by Kristina Faust

At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.

The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.

That he’d never learn to cook was only one of the regrets that came to him in quiet rooms. He felt an ache at the back of his tongue knowing he would lose the taste of aniseed, say, the way others so easily forgot visions of the world without end and lapsed into dirt sense when merely stirred by a voice, a flame, or the shimmer of oil.

Kristina Faust is a native New Jerseyan living in Grand Rapids, MI. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize for poetry.

BURYING SEEDS, by Ama Codjoe

for Betty Shabazz

Who, when they killed her husband, was carrying
twin girls—not in her arms, but in an armless
sea, with bits of blood as food. She covered

her daughters in the waters of her body.
She covered her daughters in the rooms
her body built, pressed against the wooden

floor of the Audubon Ballroom. She must have
cried, as my mother did, when she stuttered, Twins?
into the paper gown of the hospital room.

The body longs for its double. Even twins
stretch long their arms toward other strangers.
The first time I visited a mosque, I was surprised

to be separated from my father and brothers.
I sat, with the women and girls, alone.
From across the aisle, I stared at the men

longingly. As a child, I asked my preschool teacher
why I couldn’t play outside, shirtless like
the boys. It was a hot day. Before she could answer,

I relented, wearing my favorite undershirt—the one
with Archie, Betty, and Veronica—chasing
my sun-kissed brothers across the playground.

Lately, when I glimpse my nakedness in the half
mirror above the bathroom sink, I’m looking
at the photograph of Pauline Lumumba baring

her breasts as a sign of mourning. The widow’s
breasts and mine hang like four weeping eyes,
without titillation, fertility, or innocence.

I wanted to write a poem for Betty Shabazz
because her high cheekbones and luminous
eyes are like a BaKongo mask breathed

into with life. After her husband’s lifeless
body was wrapped in white linen and covered
by the words: what we place in the ground  

is no more now a man—but a seed—she took
one last look at him who had smiled at her
and touched, countless times, her unveiled face.

My mother did not wear a veil on her wedding day.
Eighteen years after their divorce, my father
fidgets with the gold band she slid along his finger.

As she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger,
shimmying the ring over my father’s knuckle,
which words did her mind circle over: worse or better 

death or death? That night, did my mother bunch
the hotel bedsheet in one hand like a nosegay?
Did she allow it—another white dress—to drag,

crumpled, behind her? The vows we promise
one another are veils through which we envision
the future; we enact our dreams using a vision

clouded by tulle and lace. Grief-stricken, Betty Shabazz
said of her husband’s assassination, Well, it finally
happened. Weeks prior, she had taken to wearing

her husband’s hat for comfort and continued to do so
after he died. I want a desire that could be mistaken
for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twist

my mouth into a cry. Once, I shared a bed with a man
who, as a boy, heard his parents’ lovemaking. I was
confused, he admitted, it sounded like they were in pain.

Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz
reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall,
which is also the shape of my mother’s dress falling

from her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud
turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—
a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here,

wrapped in the caul of the present, fixed on this plot
of grass, with so many seeds buried underground,
and winter—forged into a circle—threatening never to end.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude, forthcoming in 2022 by Milkweed Press. Among other honors, she has received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City and works in social justice and the arts.

 

PROVINCETOWN, by Francisco Márquez

Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,

not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that

it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure
its momentous light, eternal

that is inside the ordinary, and couldn’t. If I look
backwards, the mysteries forming themselves

in darkness, I remember
the heaviness of heat.

A soporific wave lifting from concrete.
There was more a strangeness

in the dark square of water lifting
from a mallard having submerged,

like the sun into water, than there was
to that wooden place. But to think of it

in exile, in its solitude of water,
to see it turn significant

against what could destroy it,
it was then I saw myself becoming it.

Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at NYU, and his work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Narrative, and Bennington Review, among other publications. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and The Poetry Project, as well as Letras Latinas and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is assistant web editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His poem presented here will be reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2021.

Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School” [by David Lehman]

Mark Tansey is a definitively postmodernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in the best editorial-page cartoons. His pictures are literary; they tell stories, spin out allegories, or make intellectually complicated witticisms. At the major Tansey exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1994, the most striking and I think best example of the painter's work on display allegorizes a World Historical Event in the annals of modern art. The picture, an oil painting dating from 1984, is called Triumph of the New York School. It records the moment New York supplanted Paris as the art capital of the world and home of the international avant-garde.^[i]

One of Tansey's ironies is that his picture is wholly committed to the representation of a scene and as such stands in diametrical opposition to Abstract Expressionism, the movement that vaulted New York into its position of international dominance. In sepia tones suggestive of an old photograph, with a war-ravaged landscape as backdrop, Tansey's huge canvas -- more than six feet tall and ten feet wide -- depicts one set of military men surrendering to another. The defeated group of soldiers on the left of the painting is dressed in French uniforms from World War I. The victorious men facing them wear the battle fatigues of American soldiers in World War II. At the center of the picture is a table on which the surrender is at this moment being signed by Andre Breton, the leader of the French surrealists and the presumptive spokesman of his era, wearing a combat helmet and great coat.

Breton, who was known as "the Pope of surrealism," is observed approvingly by the commander of the victorious Americans, Clement Greenberg, champion of "American-type painting" (his name for it), whose pronouncements on painterly matters were supposedly heeded, in the galleries and lofts of New York, as though they were the orders of a five-star general. Breton's forces include Pablo Picasso (in a flamboyant fur coat), Henri Matisse, Ferdinand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the champion of "the New Spirit," who brilliantly promoted the School of Paris, launched Cubism and gave Surrealism its name.^[ii] Greenberg's adjutants are such mainstays of the New York School as the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Arshile Gorky, the sculptor David Smith, and the critic Harold Rosenberg, who vied with Greenberg for the distinction of being the group's chief hierophant. Not only the uniforms but the placement and posture of the figures suggest a clash of periods. The French have a cavalry; the Americans, a news photographer kneeling to take his shot of the magic moment. The French are formal, the Americans at ease. Greenberg, genially slouching, keeps his hands in his pockets. So does Pollock, his prize discovery, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

In composition and scale, Triumph of the New York School evokes the grandeur of a classical surrender scene -- Velazquez's Surrender of Breda (1634-35) -- to make a point. The picture illustrates the allegorical thesis stated succinctly in its title; in effect Tansey visualizes a dead metaphor to revive it. The conceit of the artist as soldier derives from etymology -- from the military origin of the term avant-garde. If the "vanguard" of an army is its assault troops, vanguard artists are the elite officers planning raids and forays into the uncharted regions of the imagination. But Tansey's Triumph of the New York School is based on something more than impressionable conceit: the conviction that what it depicts did in fact happen, and in just this metaphorical way.

It is generally accepted that the old School of Paris, which dominated the first part of this century, was eclipsed by the New York School in the late 1940s. The success of Abstract Expressionism is seen, moreover, to have coincided with a triumph for the city of New York as a milieu, a market, an ambiance, or a headquarters for art and the arts. It could be said that the artistic movement concurrent with Hiroshima and the death camps had superseded the ones associated with the earlier "war to end all wars." The "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein's term) was history; "action painting" (Harold Rosenberg's catchy, existential-sounding term) was now. All this Tansey's picture proclaims, and more: that the avant-garde artist is a militant figure, accustomed to adversarial behavior, for whom conquest and capitulation are the only available choices, because changes in style and fashion in art occur violently, amid competition, and in the face of stalwart resistance.

Tansey's picture is faithful to a script; the advent of the New York School has long been rendered in the terms of a military campaign or athletic contest. The picture's title echoes that of Irving Sandler's standard history of Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting (1970). The champions of the new American painting had a penchant for framing the artists' struggle in the context of a competition for global supremacy: New York versus Paris, America versus Europe. Adjectives of choice included triumphant and heroic. This lexicon of triumph now makes people anxious. Recent critics have objected on the grounds that such language smacks of either chauvinism or boosterism. It may also lead to a more profound misunderstanding -- the notion that on some theoretical plane the agents of the abstract revolution were agents of American nationalism. In fact, the avant-garde adventure was not narrowly nationalistic but was as international in outlook and character as in the diverse birth places of the artists themselves, many of whom had come to America from Europe -- from Russia (Rothko), Holland (de Kooning), Armenia (Gorky), Germany (Hans Hofmann), and elsewhere. "Most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to American art or in that sense to any national art," Robert Mothwerwell said, "but that there was such a thing as modern art: that it was essentially international in character, that it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to participate in it, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in its own way here as it had elsewhere, because beyond national differences there are human similarities that are more consequential."^[iii]

If the metaphor of triumph remains compelling, that is largely because it is historically accurate: New York did displace Paris as the center of modern art, Abstract Expressionism did become the first indigenous American art movement to win international dominance. But for the artists themselves, the most important triumph came at home, not abroad. In 1965 Frank O'Hara -- "our Apollinaire," as Philip Guston dubbed him -- recalled the "violent resistance" facing the American artist in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was, O'Hara warned, all too easy to forget "that period's artistic and political isolationism (how controversial then were Gertrude Stein and Wendell Wilkie!), the mania for Impressionist masters, the conviction, when there was any interest at all, that avant-garde was not only a French word but an Ecole de Paris monopoly. But the greatest resistance of all came from other American painters -- the regionalists, the Social Realists, and the traditionalists."^[iv] The artistic triumph of New York was, in short, a victory over public rejection, scorn, and blind allegiance to tradition. The spirit of the new, vacating Paris, had arrived like a guest who had been invited for cocktails in June and stayed for the rest of the summer.

Some events in the history of art really do seem to occur with the speed and decisiveness with which, for example, the sinking of the Japanese carriers at Midway determined the naval war in the Pacific. The shift of the world's center of artistic gravity from Paris to New York would appear to be one such event. It was as momentous as it was unexpected, an incidental byproduct of the global tremors of the wartorn 1940s. It happened suddenly -- over the course of a few years commonly thought of as the "heroic" period of the New York School.

-- David Lehman (1994)

[i]. "Connections: Mark Tansey," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston May 11 - August 7, 1994.

[ii]. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 296.

[iii]. "Robert Motherwell," in Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975), p. 66.

[iv]. Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles, p. 66.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Six [by Alec Bernstein]

“Faux tographe...”

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (detail), Leonardo da Vinci, Musée du Louvre, 1510. 
The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right, Leonardo da Vinci, 1510. 
Trilby Clark from Movie Stars Exhibit Cards series, 1920. 
NFT Art, Rick Carter, OMGDrops, 2021. 

The Met Museum galleries of Drawings and Prints are very near the Photography galleries. Three “Special Exhibition Galleries” (691, 692, and 693) display all three media. Categorization seems blurry, fluid or tentative.

We forget that painting on canvas was a radical change from painting on wood (see Leonardo’s chapter “how to paint on canvas”). As radical was the exhibition of drawings in museums and galleries. Photography was also inherently problematic. 

The Trilby Clark Card (of the once-renowned 1920s actor) is of course both a “photograph” and a “print” but is cataloged in the department of Drawings and Prints with Leonardo’s Head of the Virgin. Looking back on examples from the Met’s Prints online, I notice a surprising number are printed photographs. The Met Photography Department opened in 1928, but the mass-produced printed photographs remain in Drawings and Prints (founded 1916). What prompted the Met to keep printed photos in Prints? Is mass production an artistic marvel more marvelous than a single photo? Are printed photographs not photographic prints?

Oscar-winning art director Rick Carter’s NFT (Non Fungible Token, far right above) is a good example of what awaits the Met’s future Acquisitions Department. Initially the NFT was intended to protect the rights of image originators. It has gone full spec-capitalism and is presently entangled in our crypto-currency market dynamics. The data needs no physical printing of any kind.

But categorization is a minor skirmish in the larger “art / photography” battles.

Jean Renoir often quoted Edgar Degas’ comment to the photographer Nadar: “Faux peintre! faux artiste! faux. . . tographe!” (False painter! false artist! false-tographer!) (1873-74). 

In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1922), Marcel Duchamp wrote, "You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”

In predictable over-simplifications, mainstream media regularly “exposes” pairs of “boundaries”: Weege—fine art and murder; Richard Avedon—art and fashion; Robert Mapplethorpe—art and pornography; Richard Prince—art and appropriation; Cindy Sherman—art and “post-everything”. 

George Bernard Shaw was an early experimental photographer, commenting on the field with his usual astuteness, “I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot”.

Self-Portrait (detail), GB Shaw, c1907, Society of Authors, the National Trust and the London School of Economics.

 

Weltschmerz und Zeitgeist

Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., Diane Arbus, 1962. Top, print. Bottom: proof sheet.

Everyone I have ever known has seen me in this pose. I use it to this day. It seems also always to suggest a caption, a Komposita (a German compound term) . . . from Zietgeist to Weltschmerz to the recently coined German Coronaangst terms, like Maskentrottel (mask idiot) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated).

For a while, I had a copy of the proof sheet hanging in the dining room. I called it Boygrenadeparken. Then driving to the office, an Ausländer working for a German corporation, I would mull over multisyllabic terms to prepare for the day. E.g., how to maintain das Fingerspitzengefühl (the fingertip feeling — tactfulness, intuitive flair or instinct) while having das Fernweh (distance pain — a longing for a place that isn’t where you are right now).

Somehow I find the idea of the Komposita apt for Arbus: Bittersweet? Glee-gloom? Mashed-up-solitude? And the happy-kinder on the proof? Just too long a shoot. . .

 

Happy Birthdays, Mr. Hockney

Top left: David Hockney working with his Polaroid, photograph by David Hockney Foundation, n.d.
Top right: Pearlblossom Hwy., 11 – 18th April 1986, #2, David Hockney, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1986. 
Bottom: Hockney at the BMW Design Studio, Newbury Park, CA, photographs by BMW, 1995.

I saw Hockney lecture on his Polaroids in the 1970s. He spoke eloquently on the time his montage method gave him to stay with a work, compared to the speed of a single photograph. It reminded me of Ansel Adams: “If photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output.” (1943).

In 1995, Hockney was commissioned* to do an “art car” for BMW and assigned a BMW 850 CSi. The car, unfortunately, did not fit in his studio elevator, so he drove up to evaluate our design facilities. I was the designer assigned to support him, and I waited at the reception desk to give him a tour. He carried his dachshunds, one under each arm, and saw among the business cards one for “Frisbee, Corporate Dog.” He asked if it was true that we had a corporate dog.”Yes, he is in the accounting department.” “O.K. I don’t need to see anything else. This place will be fine.” He brought his long brush collection and spent two and a half days painting in and outside the studio.

One morning while viewing the car, we chatted over a cigarette break. He had heard on the radio that OJ Simpson received 7,000 birthday cards in jail. This was how I discovered that I share a birthday with both David Hockney and OJ Simpson. 

I remember his long brush work . . . And his words, “A line has time in it.”

*BMW gave Hockney his own 850 CSi, complete with a special custom seat raised up for his little dogs to see out of the window.

 

Marilyn @ The Met & The Money

Top left: Marilyn Monroe on the Set of "The Misfits": Leaning Out of Second Floor Window of Frame House, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top right: Detail, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top center: Marilyn Monroe and John Huston on the Set of "The Misfits": At the Craps Table, Eve Arnold, 1960.  
Bottom left: Andy Warhol’s cropping of: Niagara, Eugene Korman, 20th Century Fox, The University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology, 1953. 
Bottom center: From Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1967. 
Bottom center insert: Untitled (self-portrait, as Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean), Cindy Sherman, 1982.  
Bottom right: Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York City (Sad Marilyn), Richard Avedon, 1957.

The only Eve Arnold listed at the Met online is not shown. It is described as one of Arnold’s series of gambling table shots (above) on the set of “The Misfits”. The same holds for the Cartier-Bresson: another Met-owned image — catalogued, but not shown online.

The Eugene Korman publicity shot of Marilyn is only in the Met by way of the 51 prints of Warhol’s From Marilyn. While the Museum of Modern Art claims, “Richard Avedon was fiercely protective of Marilyn’s memory”, perhaps Cindy Sherman was not as concerned. 

These are all the listings of a search for Marilyn at the Met online. In or out of the Met’s collections, scores of photographers did “something” to or for Marilyn and her image, one of the most reproduced faces in photography. Lee Strasberg’s second wife Anna Mizrahi inherited the bulk of the Monroe estate which she sold to Authentic Brands Group for an estimated $20-30 million in 2011. The Warhol Marilyns go up and down, but in the millions. The Sherman fetched $25,000 at Christies in 2016. The Eve Arnold estate sells her Marilyn prints at £30.

“I would prefer photography to be a folk art – cheap and available to everybody, rather than elevated to mandarin proportions created through an artificial scarcity.” — Eve Arnold (https://www.evearnold.com/posters, prints shipped worldwide).

“The new art is really a business. . . We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market. . . I’m a commercial person, I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. I’ve gotta bring home the bacon.”— Andy Warhol, 1969.

 

Nice Horizons (pause)

Top left: Boden Sea, Utwill, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1993. 
Top right: Coral Sea, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1983. 
Center: Untitled, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1960s.
Bottom: Cloud, Mexico, Edward Weston, 1926. 

“Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?  
Clov: (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name would there be on the horizon? (Pause.)” — Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 1957.

JOHN MURILLO: AN EYE ON KONTEMORARY AMERIKAN POETRY [by John Hennessy]

Today we turn to John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry as we continue looking at several books that came out early in the pandemic:

 “Well, there is the pandemic, certainly. But I believe this current moment to be equally defined by the worldwide protests against anti-Black violence. One thing that’s occurred to me—and, to be frank, saddened me to no end—is that there has never been, and may never be, a moment in which it is passé to write about black suffering. There is a poem in my first book that I would dedicate, when I read it to an audience, to Sean Bell. A couple years later, I added Oscar Grant to the dedication. Now, I can dedicate that same poem to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and it will read as if I wrote it specifically for this moment. Next year, the poem will be relevant because of another Black body dropped. And it’s not because I was at all prescient when I wrote that poem, or any of the poems in my new collection. It’s because the conditions that give rise to these poems have not changed, and—all recent public proclamations of organizational solidarity notwithstanding—show no signs of truly changing any time soon. All to say, the current moment is not just the current moment, it’s tradition.”

--John Murillo, in an interview with Dora Malech, July 2020

Born in Los Angeles, John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (2020), winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  His many honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Times, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  He teaches at Wesleyan University and in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Murillo’s poems appear in multiple issues of Best American Poetry and in the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. Here’s “On Confessionalism,” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common and reprinted in Best American Poetry 2019.

On Confessionalism

Not sleepwalking, but waking still,

with my hand on a gun, and the gun

in a mouth, and the mouth

on the face of a man on his knees. 

Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing

in a section 8 apartment parking lot,

pistol cocked, and staring down

at this man, then up into the mug

of an old woman staring, watering

the single sad flower to the left

of her stoop, the flower also staring,

my engine idling behind me, a slow

moaning bassline and the bark

of a dead rapper nudging me on. 

All to say, someone’s brokenhearted. 

And this man with the gun in his mouth—

this man who, like me, is really little

more than a boy—may or may not

have something to do with it. 

May or may not have said a thing

or two, betrayed a secret, say,

that walked my love away.  And why

not say it:  She adored me.  And I,

her.  More than anyone, anything

in life, up to then, and then still,

for two decades after.  And, therefore,

went for broke.  Blacked out and woke

having gutted my piggy and pawned

all my gold to buy what a homeboy

said was a Beretta.  Blacked out

and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun

in a mouth, a man, who was really

a boy, on his knees. And because

I loved the girl, I actually paused

before I pulled the trigger—once,

twice, three times—then panicked

not just because the gun jammed,

but because what if it hadn’t,

because who did I almost become,

there, that afternoon, in a section 8

apartment parking lot, pistol cocked,

with the sad flower staring, because

I knew the girl I loved—no matter

how this all played out—would never

have me back.  Day of damaged ammo,

or grime that clogged the chamber.

Day of faulty rods, or springs come

loose in my fist.  Day nobody died,

so why not hallelujah?  Say amen or

Thank you?  My mother sang for years

of God, babes and fools.  My father, 

lymph node masses fading from

his x-rays, said surviving one thing

means another comes and kills you.

He’s dead, and so, I trust him.  Dead,

and so I’d wonder, years, about the work

I left undone—boy on his knees

a man now, risen, and likely plotting

his long way back to me.  Fuck it.

I tucked my tool like the movie gangsters

do, and jumped back in my bucket.

Cold enough day to make a young man

weep, afternoon when everything,

or nothing, changed forever.  The dead

rapper grunted, the bassline faded,

my spirits whispered something

from the trees.  I left then lost the pistol

in a storm drain, somewhere between

that life and this.  Left the pistol

in a storm drain, but can’t remember

ever wiping away my prints.

 

In an interview, when asked about the collective purpose writers have, Murillo answered:

“I believe literature has the potential to make us more human. Poetry, drama, literary fiction, creative nonfiction—when done right—can show us exactly who we are and who we still might become. For better or worse. So, yes, I do believe we have a collective purpose. Not necessarily as individuals, or in our individual works, but as a whole, I think we’re here to help us—humanity—do and be better.”

This humanitarian center to his project, his poems, his person, is immediately apparent when you read Murillo, and it’s clearly in evidence in “On Confessionalism.”

In the same interview he was asked: What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

The answer: “A seventh grade love letter.”

So he’s funny, too, and that humor that also occasionally appears in his poems highlights their deep seriousness. This is especially in evidence in his linked sonnet sequence, “Renegades of Funk,” from Up Jump the Boogie. Murillo is a virtuoso when it comes to the sonnet, and at the heart of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is the magnificent “broken” crown, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” some of the most challenging work to appear in this reader’s lifetime.

These poems illustrate what Murillo has said in another Q and A: “I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness.” His work as a witness is concentrated, full of clarity, invention, and a humanity made stronger by its vulnerability.

On Negative Capability

      Whitewalls  Mudflaps

Late night howling down

   a dark dirt road   Headlights

killed and so the world gone

   black but for the two blunts

lit  illuminating Jojo’s fake gold

   grin    One girl each  screaming

from the backseat  we raced

   the red moon  rawdogged

the stars   His mama’s car

   my daddy’s gun   Public Enemy

Number One   Seventeen and

   simple  we wannabe hard-

rocks threw rudeboy fingers

   and gang signs at the sky

Blinded by the hot smoke

   rising like the sirens

in the subwoofers   blinded

   by the crotchfunk rising

from all our eager selves   We

   mashed in perfect murk   a city

block’s length  at least

   toward God   toward God

knows what  when  or why  

   neither Jojo nor I  not our

two dates screaming   had a clue

   or even care   what the dark

ahead held       Come road

   come night   come blackness

and the cold   Come havoc

   come mayhem   Come down

God   and see us   Come

   bloodshot moon running

alongside the ride  as if

   to warn us away from  as if

to run us straight into   some

   jagged tooth and jackal throated

roadside ditch     When Jojo

   gunned the gas  we pushed into

that night like a nest of sleeping

   jaybirds  shaken loose and

plunging    Between our screams

   a hush so heavy   we could

almost hear what was waiting

   in the dark

(from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common)

VIEVEE FRANCIS: Devotion [by John Hennessy]

As I noted earlier this week, for the next few days my focus here will be on presenting work by several of the poets we’ve published in The Common. Today we turn to the inimitable Vievee Francis.

THIS MORNING I MISS SUCH DEVOTION, by Vievee Francis

There is a sister whose voice is gentle as a lullaby. A lulling. Even when angered she won't yell. A particular upbringing that eschews the loud, though such a woman can be found embracing those whose voices swell in the streets. Perhaps less saintliness than a vicarious expression of her own rage? Frustrations? Drawing the brawler, the harsh and violent close. The softness embedded in her accent. An oiled woman. Pink lipstick on her brown lips. A woman who pulls biscuits on a Saturday from the oven. Bathwater woman. Sweet liquor in a white cabinet woman. I have found this woman in Tennessee. In Texas. In Alabama. In Mississippi. And clung to her.  Darling, and Dearest, and Hush Honey on the tongue. Not silence but delicacy, a blue slip in the drawer. A breeze through the oak leaves. Cuss and she won't shush you, she'll laugh and take you inside. Feed you cake, brush out your damp hair, pull you onto her lap, draw the cedar from the wound.

 

Born in West Texas and raised there and in Detroit, Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2010) and Forest Primeval (winner of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry magazine, many editions of Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship, and in 2021, the Aiken Taylor Award from The Sewanee Review. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

In an interview Francis has said: “I want to know how poetry serves us collectively and as individuals in ways that meet this era, this moment; however, in order to gain that understanding, contexts cannot be ignored, nor can history be set aside. It is the intent of my instruction and an inherent objective of my own poetry to upturn how we think about poetry, its lineage, and the cultural impact of received aesthetics.” And of her own poetry, Francis says, “I’m very much saying that how African-American women are defined is inhuman in its narrowness, and that I, for one, am not going to allow it.”

The idea of giving oneself permission, no, not just the idea but the act of giving oneself permission—permission to confront and dismantle such pathological definitions, to write against them and in doing so upend them—to give oneself permission to be an intellectual, as well as permission to love, to be loved—infuses all of Vievee Francis’s work. We read Francis and it’s a give and take: we take her example and give ourselves permission to do the same.

Here are three more poems by Vievee Francis (first published in The Common):

 

THE BEAUTY OF BOYS IS 

that they are not men,

that they have not settled into their beards and

remorse, their crow’s feet and givens.

There is not yet an investment in houses

settling onto their foundations, hair, or

yesterday. The boy senses his time is precarious,

growing shorter as he sprouts up, so he spends

time believing, in everything,

                                                   he climbs and

he tumbles and tunnels and spills and 

puts to good use his stones and his quarters,

penknife and book, even the stick he uses

to defeat his awkward shadow. He will dream

into existence a raft, a rocket, a fort of mud.

From a cloud

                        a gift of horses. 

From the sand

                        castle and moat,

                        kingdom and cause.

Every boy knows he is a lone king,

that above hover dragons

from which he cannot withdraw, and so he must

pull from his quiver the makeshift arrow,

so he must, draw the bow, and not yet divided

from his body all is possible.

                                                  He looks up

toward a darkening horizon, certain. So certain.

 

 

ON LEAVING THE MOUNTAINS AND COMING

TO THE CITY I THOUGHT I LEFT FOR GOOD

Without the backdrop of leaves and scat,

the possum playing possum, its mate

the same. Without the tip of the road,

its black pitch wound like a widow’s wail

through the wet trees. Consider the undergrowth

and what hides there. The brown bristle

of the hedge. The singular call of a bird

its beak red-tipped, it’s feathers black

as a pool in the moss. Without the reflection

of a dog’s tongue in the water, or the stone

lobbed over the surface in order to see

the surface ripple like a skirt being pulled up.

Only the city, present, in the face like a shout,

like a lie yelled as if to assert its veracity, but

everyone hearing it knows it’s just not true.

I reenter the city still standing, its back turned

to the forest of bears and bluing brush, and

the inedible red fruit, the berries hung just at the mouth’s

reach, that beckon easily as they would poison. Me

and the city that wraps me in its leather coat and spikes,

tragic ink, and garble: vodka after vodka, after

shot after shot, my slurred proclamations

of love where love doesn’t go far, but lays

dead as a clever rodent. In the alleyways

I kick my boots against a crumbling wall

that will always be crumbling but never fall.

The smell of sausage spilling from a factory

of sausages assuages the memory of a canopy

of green, and the verge pressing into my waist

like the hands of a man eager to take

my measure, the heat like a cologne

emitted from the skin, like a fear of

the wild before entering another, wilder.

                    --Vievee Francis

 

 

MOAN SOFT LIKE YOU WANTED SOMEBODY TERRIBLE

 (C.S.)

And if it comes to pass, the would be politician, or the lover,

and what was said was never meant, is now distant

as those moments your desire swirled about you

like new snow, cold and brisk and enlivening, remember

it was you feeling adrift,

misunderstood, calamitous, and alone, you dear,

who so needed the need grew into a rally, a rant

of promises now un-promised –

 

And the night is a hand slid over your mouth. Demanding

your silence. It surprised you,

the shift, the sudden denial, the smooth indifference –

though truth be told –

there were hints of the turn of weather in the air. Remember?

All that bluster you took

for courage. All of those copperheads you took for care.

            --Vievee Francis

Retroscope: Alan Bernheimer presents Ron Padgett's "Albanian Diary"

Alan Bernheimer writes:

<<<

Ever wonder what it was like in Albania soon after the Iron Curtain came down? Travel along with Ron Padgett for the sights, sounds, and smells in the latest episode of Retroscope:

https://nowheremag.com/2021/06/ron-padgetts-albanian-diary/

>>>

To which I add that Padgett's prose is a somewhat overlooked treasure. His book on Ted Berrigan, for example, is fantastic. -- DL

Emily Dickinson [by Mitch Sisskind]

Put aside the twaddle about her

Foisted upon us in ten thousand

Books and other tedious varieties.

Nights in green eyeshadow she

Panther-like prowled Amherst's

Back alleys her brain abuzz with

Webster's definition of volcano

As a hole or slit in the surface of

A mountain from which ejects

Smoke, flames, and the hot lava;

Of vampire as a demon of legend

Fabled to suck our blood at night;

And of hell: the place to which are

Carried all those that are caught.

UKRAINIAN POETRY AND SCREEN SAVOR: Greetings from Amherst [by John Hennessy]

(From A New Orthography, by Serhiy Zhadan)

We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part one)

+

A friend of mine volunteered.

He came back six months later.

Who knows where he was.

He won’t say what he’s afraid of.

But he’s afraid of something.

Sometimes it seems

he’s afraid of everything.

 

He left a normal person.

But he talked too much.

About everything in this world.

About everything he came across.

 

And he came back

completely changed, as if

someone took his old tongue

and didn’t leave him a new one.

 

So he sits in his bed every day

and listens to the demons in his head.

 

The first demon is ferocious,

he pours out white heat, demands

punishment for all the living.

The second demon is submissive,

talks about forgiveness,

speaks quietly,

touches his heart with hands

covered in black soil.

 

But the worst is the third demon.

He agrees with the other two.

He agrees, doesn’t object.

 

As soon as he speaks

the headaches begin.  

                                    --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

 

It’s been nine years since I last blogged for BAP, opening with my salutations from Sifnos, Greece, my former home away from home, at the height of that country’s economic crisis. I presented a trio of documents addressing Greece’s dilemma at that time: whether or not to accept EU-imposed austerity measures or to leave the union—or at least to drop the euro in favor of a return to the drachma. None of those radical changes happened, precisely as one of my savviest informants predicted, despite the national referendum three years later (July, 2015, when the people voted in favor of rejecting the austerity measures). But as we all knew would happen, Greece survived. If all goes well, this summer they will also continue to be among the first countries in the EU to welcome back international guests with few restrictions. 

In addition to a couple of personal meditations, that week I wrote extensively about serving as poetry editor for The Common. We had just completed our first year of publication then, and all was new, ranging from provisional to speculative, fingers always crossed; we celebrated our 10^th anniversary with a beautiful new issue  and a big Zoom party this past year. Yes, I’m being a bit dry and craggy, like that Greek island, about the party. But really, in all seriousness, we have had Zoom events with contributors reading their work from their homes throughout the US, Europe, and the Middle East. We got everyone together with a smaller carbon footprint. And—at least I waited a paragraph to say it—we did the best we could to gather our broad community face-beside-face in real time during the pandemic.

This week my focus with these posts will be a little narrower, sticking to a goal of offering some of the best contemporary American poetry, growing primarily from the work I do at The Common, but also from my recent experience as a judge for the National Book Award in poetry. It amuses me to think that I used to take what I called “screen-free Saturdays,” my sabbath. During the pandemic (and with family overseas, not yet vaccinated, I know it’s not over and I don’t write in the past tense) I gave that practice up. The NBA deliberations were screen-centered, both through Zoom meetings and through reading the 250 books on a Kindle. Yes, that’s right, we read virtually all 250 of the entered titles on a Kindle smaller than my hand. But I was lucky to have been with a fine group of judges through this period, people who led with kindness, curiosity, and generosity from start to finish. The National Book Foundation’s directors and staff met the unprecedented obstacles presented by the early months of the pandemic with grace, humor, and ingenuity. There was a great spirit of camaraderie, and working with them all made it much easier to get through 2020.

While I did quietly attend to my own book of poems in progress throughout the last “year and,” most of my energy has gone into reading vast screens of new American poetry—and a fair bit of Ukrainian poetry. With Ostap Kin I co-translated A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, the most significant voice in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, and one of Eastern Europe’s most critically acclaimed authors. The book we translated doesn’t exist in Ukrainian, and now that I have more translation experience I realize that’s important to note.

Let me explain: we set out to do a volume of Selected Poems spanning Zhadan’s career, but quickly changed our minds. For one thing, Ostap was in close contact with Zhadan, and the poet gave him access to brand new poems, poems that hadn’t even been published in Ukrainian yet, including all of the work in Catalogue of Ships, Zhadan’s 2020 volume. We decided early on to observe what Zhadan has said many times, that his career can be divided into a before and an after around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A New Orthography, then, is a selection of poems written since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 to present), and with the lives of civilians, soldiers, and veterans during wartime as their focus. Zhadan even wrote an introduction to this book, in addition to the translators’ introduction, about his own trips to the US and his engagement with American poets and poetry; the introductions and the poems are presented in a bilingual edition.

A New Orthography came out in the first month of the pandemic, before we all had figured out how to do launch parties and book tours online—it was sad to see this book go out into the world at such a time. What one wants is a reader, a few readers, as many good readers as possible, and towards that end we had published the individual Zhadan poems in journals throughout the US and even the New Statesman in the UK from the earliest days of our translation process. The press (Lost Horse Press, Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, distributed by University of Washington Press) and we did our best, and there were a few small reviews, but at least one big anticipated review never happened, and we were really at a loss about what to do other than follow through with the couple of articles and self-interviews we were invited to contribute to journals.

Everyone was still figuring out what the pandemic meant and how it was to be survived. Everything was uncertain, especially for the sick and those on the front lines, health care workers and hospital staff, and even the multinational big pharma companies and their vaccine efforts. What it meant for poets and writers, for books and magazines, what it meant for publishers and librarians and booksellers, who have done what they can remotely, or even in person, masked and “distanced,” well, we have a better idea now, but the smoke hasn’t cleared and the changes to the economy and our practices haven’t been calculated.

(They buried their son last winter), by Serhiy Zhadan

+ + +

They buried their son last winter.

Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.

They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.

Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say.

He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows?

Will it change anything, they say, what’s the point now?

I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need.

And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.

 

It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges.

I know so many things about you, but who’d listen?

I know, for example, the song you used to sing.

I know your sister. I always had a thing for her.

I know what you were afraid of, and why, even. 

Who you met that winter, what you told him.    

The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now.  

You always played for a neighboring school.

But who did you fight for?

 

To come here every year, to weed dry grass.

To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.

To see the calm after tragedy every year.

To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people.

The birds disappear behind waves of rain.

To ask forgiveness for your sins. 

But what do I know about your sins?

To beg the rain to finally stop.

It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.

            --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

 

Shortly after A New Orthography came out, Ostap invited me to work with him on another project, an anthology of Ukrainian poems about Babyn Yar, the Holocaust massacre that claimed the lives of between 100,000 and 150,000 people in Kyiv (1941-1943), that he was editing. To be clearer than the Soviet censors—who insisted that the people killed were “Soviet citizens” and persecuted poets who wrote about Babyn Yar as a massacre of Jewish people—the vast majority of the people killed were Jewish. In fact, in two days, early in the occupation of Kyiv, between September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi soldiers shot and killed 33,771 Jews at the site of the ravine. (Babyn Yar means “grandma’s ravine.”) The massacres continued over the next two years, and poets have been writing about Babyn Yar since the fall of 1941 to the present.

Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond also is a book that doesn’t already exist. In other words, we didn’t translate a Ukrainian collection; instead, Ostap put the book together himself. He is an archivist, and he flexes his skills with this project, having chosen poems spanning the last eight decades, many of them found in newspapers and other periodicals. He annotates and offers a publishing history for each poem and has written an extensive introduction, a bibliography, biographies of the poets, and a geographical note. We started this project last June and have just finished. It’s under contract but I don’t know if I’m at liberty to say anything further.

While we were working on this anthology, we received exciting news: A New Orthography was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. We celebrated over FaceTime and kept working. Sometimes I do bless the screen. The Zhadan book began to receive notice on social media platforms, and the poems are available, both online and in print. Ultimately the book was a finalist for the PEN Award, and it’s presently shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize. As my experience as a judge has shown me, just being in the conversation is great, and I’m grateful, as is Ostap. I’m also grateful for the opportunity to present a few of Zhadan’s poems in translation here.

We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part four), by Serhiy Zhadan

+ + + +

He’s been away for two years,

she hesitated.

Change the lock?

Or not?

Will he come back?

Or not?

 

In the end, she didn’t change the lock.

Probably, she unconsciously expected

him to come back.

He would return and she would tell him everything.

About her take on him,

about her take on all of this—

she would definitely tell him.

And about her terminated pregnancy. 

Which he knew nothing about these past two years.

And when he came back

(without keys, actually, he lost them somewhere),

she wouldn’t say anything.

And neither would he.

In general, they decided to talk less.

Especially about politics.

Talking about politics in our situation

is the same as talking about death in a TB ward—

someone there definitely won’t like it.

 

And here no matter what you say—everything is politics.

Bread on the table—politics. 

The school around the corner—politics.

The early spring that fills the sky with sweet smoke—

also politics.

Politics in gestures, politics in breathing,

politics in vocal cords

that need rest.       

                   

They got into a fight on the third day,

a fight over the shower.   

       

In the morning, he collects his stuff again.

She watches the sky like milk

that is about to simmer.

It’s too late for us to learn joy and consolation.

It’s too late to fix the floodgates when so much water has passed through.

 

Life is like a house where a person is found hanging. 

 

It’s too late to choose the right words.

It’s too late to install a new lock.

 

            --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

The New York School Diaspora (Part Five): Nin Andrews [by Angela Ball]

Sometimes I feel so inspired
after Ulalume González de LeónI think I am flying. Yes, flying far away. So far away, in fact, that between you and me, I am at a loss for words. So this is what it’s like to be an artist, I think. Which brings me to the question: if I had to choose between being bliss and writing about it, which would I choose?

Oh Yellow Bird, I sigh as I gaze outside. Oh Yellow Sun, Yellow Mood flooding my office with longing, I want to surrender to you. I want to give up all my bad habits.

I am so filled with happiness, I do not write. I cannot. What should I do? I finally ask you, my dearest poet friend. You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.

Word by word, line by line, I change my mind. I change my mood, my laundry, my socks. I change the sun into wind, the wind into clouds and grief. I talk about my soul as if it were a shroud, my heart as if it were lost. Then I change it into a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.

Yes, I lie. Today, I am a poet. I write lies.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary reviews and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Best of the Prose Poem, and four volumes of Best American Poetry. She has translated the prose poems of Henri Michaux and edited an anthology of them titled Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press). Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

In writing this poem, I was thinking how inspiration is the crack cocaine of writers—that there’s a high when the rush of ideas and images and words coalesces in the mind and begins to form a poem, an essay, a story. But there are also those days when the high is there, but one can lack the ability to translate it into words. I wanted to describe the distance that sometimes opens up between what I feel and what I can express, between what I say and what I mean, between what I describe and what I actually see. I was also thinking of the Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León, and how she often addresses that which cannot be put into words.
--Nin Andrews

The New York School Diaspora, Part Five: Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews’s poem, “Sometimes I feel so inspired,” like the poems of Frank O’Hara, engages the mutable and its quandaries, the seemingly competing needs to experience bliss and to write it. Here, as in O’Hara, there are friends to consult: “What should I do?” . . .”You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.” The vexed question, Be or Write: O’Hara evaded it. Or rather, surrendered to both, as Andrews does in this poem inspired by Ulalume González de León.

Like Mayakovsky, O’Hara and Andrews are clouds in human dress, implicated in the bliss of vapor’s changing shapes. O’Hara’s heart resides in his pocket, “it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy”; Andrews’ changes hers into beauty, nourishment, practicality: “a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.” As O’Hara says, “The eagerness of objects to / be what we are afraid to do / cannot help but move us.”

“Sometimes I feel so inspired” is an encounter of sensibility with world. To read is like strapping oneself to an experienced parachutist. We land on the fact of poetry and its seminal prevarication.

--Angela Ball

THE HOST'S GARDEN: An Invocation [by John Hennessy]

12 / 11/ 17, by David Lehman

Mahler’s Third

You can tell that the guy
who wrote “I’ll Be Seeing You”
(in all the old familiar places)
was listening to the langsam last movement
of Mahler’s third symphony
at the time but in a less
exalted though equally schmaltzy mood

Just as you can be sure that Mahler had
Nietzsche on the brain
in the fourth movement
when the alto asks the deep midnight
to speak and it does it says the world’s pain
is deeper than daytime can guess
but pain passes and joy seeks eternity
as do I when I wave my baton 

Beginning with this poem from Playlist, David Lehman’s 2019 cycle, feels a bit like offering our host flowers from his own garden. But I think it perfectly establishes the mood and tone I hope to navigate towards this week. We had the pleasure of first publishing this and half a dozen others from Playlist at The Common, where I serve as poetry editor, and I plan to draw significantly from the poets we’ve published there over the years. (This week I’ll also be bringing to this site poems by Fatimah Asghar, Ama Codjoe, Vievee Francis, Lawrence Joseph, Francisco Marquez, John Murillo, and Serhiy Zhadan.)

While David Lehman is one of those rare things, a true person of letters—a deeply companionable prose writer whose works include fiction, essay, and memoir, an editor of great discernment and wide-ranging tastes, an engaging literary critic, reviewer, music aficionado, an inspiring teacher—he is first and foremost one of our finest poets, singing and playing through a variety of forms and voices, from spontaneous improvisations (The Daily Mirror) to orchestral compositions and dark opera (Valentine Place). Not only does he edit The Best American Poetry, he also writes some of it himself.

Let me move out of the way here so we can go on to another poem of his, this one a bit longer and, as ever, characteristically full of wit and tenderness. It’s from his forthcoming collection, The Morning Line, and was first published in The Common.

The Complete History of the Boy, by David Lehman

1.

The baby giggled in his crib.
His father walked in. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because,” the baby said, “we all have our joy.”
It was his first sentence.

When the baby had his own bed,
he said children are luckier than grownups
because they get to sleep in their own bed
while grownups have to share.

At four he was asked what he wanted
to be when he grew up. “Santa Claus,” he said.

That was Thanksgiving. By January he thought better of it.
“I never want to be a grown-up because
that would be the end of me.”

It was the age of the aphorism:
“Candles are statues that burn for the ceremony.”
“Saliva is the maid of your mouth.” (It cleanses it.)

Science explained everything,
the workings of windshield wipers, for example:
“The darkness causes the rain
and comes from the rain, which goes up
to the sky and falls down again
on the windshield and the windows,
and you have to wipe the darkness off.”

2.

The boy was an early Buddhist
certain that his gerbil, Lovely Rainbow by name,
would return to earth someday as a human being
with his or her own gerbil to bring home from school.
He was five years old. “She fell asleep and then
her eyes stayed closed forever and she died.”

His father took him to the Johnson Museum
and stood him before “Mirage,” an abstract painting
by Hans Hofmann (1946). How did he like it?
“Awesome,” the boy said.

The boy said, “God is calling me.”
What?
“He wants me to go to heaven.
Then when I die I’ll come back here afterwards.”
Heaven was a house. No,
heaven was a cloud.

3.

The boy had a philosophical bent.
He spoke with icy calm.
“My wife is invisible,” he said. “My children are invisible.”

Then came the questions.

“Who named the first man Adam?
Who named the first woman Eve?
Did Adam have a mustache and a beard?
Did Eve have long hair like yours, Mama?

“Did God make Adam? How?
What was God doing in the sky
before he made Adam and Eve?

“How come Haman was wicked?
Who was more wicked, Haman or Hitler?
Who came first, Moses or Haman?
Who came first, Moses or Jonah?

“Does Haman rhyme with Satan?

“How did Jonah build his house in the whale’s belly?
Where did he find the wood?
How old was Adam when he died?

“How come wicked people are wicked?
If Ahab was wicked, how come he was king?

“Where did God get his power?
Did God create himself?
How?
Does God know what you dream?

“Are God’s eyes bigger than heaven?
Does God see everything?
Are his eyes the blue of the sky?

“Did Queen Esther have brown skin or white skin?
Do the sun and moon have a mother and father

“You say God but God is a man so who is the sun’s mother?”

He spoke into the tape recorder.
“This is the sound of a nickel,” he said.
“This is the sound of a dime.”

4.

He was going to make a movie
called What Is Better Than Home
in Cape Cod where on the fourth of July
he went to the Bourne fair so he was in
Bourne on the fourth of July.

In his opinion the ideal name for a restaurant was Toys.

His pets included Oh, Sweetheart, Marmie, Devil Cake,
Hot Dog, Most Soulful, Chimes, Quacksmith,
Yes, Mopo, and Mousson.
His favorite was Sweetheart.

5.

The boy was mad at his mother who didn’t hang up
the phone right away when he fell and hurt his head.
He was indignant. “Hurts are more important than inventions.”

He dreamed his father died. “Mama told me in the car.”
When he woke up he climbed into bed with his father, happy.

He wanted to discuss the floor plan of the house:
“Is my room over the dining room?”

He wanted to know which was more important,
the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
The former is a symbol of liberty, the latter a symbol
of industry, his mother explained. That clinched things
for the boy. He unhesitatingly chose liberty.

“Which is more important, religion or God?”
He was still five years old.

They found a special school for him.
He took classes in Magical Thinking and excelled
in the making of weird predictions and dire threats
that scared you even though you knew
they wouldn’t come true.
He also learned how to walk and talk in his sleep.

Two years later he saw Hans Hofmann’s “Mirage”
only this time on the cover of a book
with his father’s name on it.
“Awesome,” the boy said.
The world was still a dance not a duel, with invisible swords.
And at the museum the Hofmann hadn’t changed a bit.

Joy in the house, laughter in the halls, the boy in pajamas:
There were still a few good boyhood years left.

photo©)Stacey Lehman

David Lehman's recent books are One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press, 2019) and Playlist: A Poem (Pittsburgh, 2019). The Morning Line (Pittsburgh) will be published in September.

Mary Jo Salter: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

Erasers

 

As punishment, my father said, the nuns

   would send him and the others

out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.

 

Punishment?  The pounding symphony

   of padded cymbals clapped

together at arm’s length overhead

 

(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers

   powdering their noses

until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)

 

was more than remedy, it was reward

   for all the hours they’d sat

without a word (except for passing notes)

 

and straight (or near enough) in front of starched

   black-and-white Sister Martha,

like a conductor raising high her chalk

 

baton, the only one who got to talk.

   Whatever did she teach them?

And what became of all those other boys,

 

poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?

   My father likes to think,

at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black

 

chalkboard from whose crumbled negative

   those days were never printed,

but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices

 

gladly forgot themselves.  And that he still

   can say so, though all the lessons,

most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell

 

this out) it must be half the boys themselves,

   who grew up and dispersed

as soldiers, fathers, husbands, now are dust.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight books of poems, most recently The Surveyors (2017) and Nothing by Design (2013). Her new collection, Zoom Rooms, will appear in 2022. She has also been a co-editor of three editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry.  She is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.(Click here for more poems by and information on Mary Jo Salter.)

[“Erasures” copyright Mary Jo Salter; from Open Shutters, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003]  

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Seoul Food and Fists circa 2009 {by Loren Goodman}

Dr. Park calls and invites me out for lunch, suggesting bi bim bap. Dr. Park, aka "The Spin Doctor" (to be explained), is a research biologist at Seoul National University Hospital and my neighbor here in Jewelry City. He does genetic research on diabetes. We head outside (beautiful day) to find a restaurant in Jongno. "What do you want?" "I don't know." "How about fermented bean soup?" "Looks good--smells gnarly." "How about sushi?" "Nah..." "How about bulgoki?" We settle on grilled fish. "Have you been here before?" "Yes, it's good. How about dog?" Pause. "They have dog here?" "Yes! Very good for your stamina." I feel like leaving, but we already have the menus and side dishes. "Ok, let's just have fish."  

Clockwise from lower left: egg custard, kimchi, beans, burnt rice, grilled fish (mackerel?), glazed squid tidbits, spicy bean sprouts, fermented bean & tofu soup, seaweed, soy sauce + wasabi.

After lunch I walk over to Seoul National with Dr. Park, then back to Jongno. There are a lot of riot police in Jongno. There also many demonstrations here. Last year it seemed like there was one every day for three months (initially over American Beef imports, then Labor issues, then about the current president, Lee Myung-bak). A few weeks ago during a late-night Kinko's run, a compact car jetting through police bus traffic and crowds of protesters caught my eye. There was a tripod mounted video camera on the roof of the vehicle, camera man and all. Apparently some citizens found the nightly news footage of protest activity supplied by the police somewhat lacking, and decided to collect their own, which they later broadcast online.    

After taking my roommate for a quick walk, I change shirts and hustle over to the nearby KBC (Korean Boxing Commission) office for our five o'clock meeting. We discuss many things, and I am appointed Vice General Secretary of the Planning Committee for the 47th Annual World Boxing Council Convention in Cheju Island. I've never been to Cheju Island, and am looking forward to the convention in November. Please send suggestions and ideas. Meeting adjourned!

Waiting for Thomas, I snap a few shots of the Korean Boxing wall of fame. I think it's safe to say Hong Soo-Hwan is the most famous boxer in Korea. Watch this fight and you'll see why. I feel fortunate to have befriended him, and to have received "a scholarship" that allows me to train for free at Hong Star Boxing Gym. 

adapted from a post from the archive (April 30, 2009).

Neighbor Smolarek (by Mitch Sisskind)

Each morning, the squirrels, how unregulated

They jump and play. I call the police department

To keep them away and also with the birds

It is exactly the same. What kinds of birds?

I don't know their names but they poop

Without the slightest consideration on my car

So that if I had a bb gun, ah, then I would have

Some real fun but meanwhile I call the 911

Number to complain about the birds and

What is the response I get? Silence on the line.

In other words, none. So I will be cremated

Lest on my grave squirrels disport themselves,

Birds poop, and even ants have a fine old time

Oblivious of the fact that the grave is mine.

 

 

 

Our Birthday (June 11)

Dear Beth, Leo, Pauline, Allan,
Joshua, LaWanda, Deborah, Sabrina, and Jordan:
Born today, like us, were the poets
Ben Jonson and Barnabe Googe.
Also Vanzetti (of Sacco and Vanzetti)
and Loeb (of Leopold and Loeb)
and Green Bay’s coach Vince Lombardi,
who said winning is the only thing;
Joe Montana, who won;
Gene Wilder, funny man;
Erving Goffman, author of
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life;
Irving Howe, whose name asks
a question of the universe,
and William Styron, who suffered.
And so I write to praise the day
on which, in 1966, Tiffany Cohen
was born, who won gold medals
swimming the 400 and 800 meter freestyle
in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

--  David Lehman 

"June 11" by David Lehman -- in English & Portuguese (trans. Francisco Carvalho)

11 de Junho

Faço anos tenho a barriga vazia Posts
desejo preguiçar na rede
ir talvez nadar num dia quente
com o trombone de "I've Got You
Under My Skin" do Sinatra
metido na cabeça depois parar
para o almoço uma sanduíche
de carne de vaca enlatada e uma Pepsi
com muitos cubos de gelo ao contrário de França
onde põem um mísero cubo de gelo
na nossa Coca cara e quando
pedimos mais discutem connosco
desta maneira dizem pelo preço
fica com mais Coca mostrando não
perceberem nada da essência dos
refrigerantes Americanos que são uma
desculpa para os cubos de gelo contudo
não me importaria de uns dias por
lá ocorre-me a atitude do Philip Larkin
em relação à China quando lhe perguntaram
se gostaria de lá ir respondeu sim
se pudesse voltar no mesmo dia

-- trans. Francisco Carvalho; 6 / 26 / 19 

June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they 
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day

—David Lehman (from The Daily Mirror)

Do you know who composed the theme of Perry Mason?

It was Fred Steiner, who died at age 88, at his home in the town of Ajijic in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

but let's not overlook, Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the music for Patton and did some of the incidental music for many episodes of Perry Mason,

and while we're at it, let's saluter another Jerry, Jerry Fielding, who wrote the music of The Wild Bunch.