The Best American Poetry

An Interview with Alan Ziegler [by Aspen Matis]

Alan Ziegler's books include Love At First Sight: An Alan Ziegler Reader; The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes, The Green Grass of Flatbush, So Much To Do, The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II, and The Writing Workshop Note Book. He is the editor of Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Tin House. As a professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and was chair of the Writing Program. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Ziegler via email about his book-in-progress, Based on a True Life: A Memoir of Sorts. We also discussed his wisdom for young poets, the themes that most fascinate and inspire him, and the “radical” practice of nourishing one’s poetic roots (through notebooks, dreams, and reading as sources of poetic protein) so those roots might continue to branch outward.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life?

Poetry lets my inner life go out and meet my outer life. Interesting things happen when they team up.

Why do you write poems?

George Mallory said he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” I write poems for the opposite reason: Because they’re not there. Yet.

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

Radical is associated with root; and roots, of course, need moisture. Some in medieval medicine extolled radical moisture as a life force, which—though eventually depleted—could be refreshed to extend life. The most radical thing a poet can do is nourish your poetic roots so they keep branching out. (Nourishment can be provided through notebooks, dreams, reading, and constant vigilance for sources of poetic protein.)

In many of your squibs and prose poems, your deft use of absurdity renders a clear and illuminating picture of human nature and the human condition—where do these squibs come from? Your life and sleep-time dreams? Pure imagination? The news and bygone news? To what degree are they “true,” and to what extent are they nonfiction?

I started writing aide-memoires based on moments of my life that I didn’t want to forget, and images that kept peeking out for no discernible reason. I gave myself an arbitrary goal of 99 stories (long since surpassed), with the premise: “Everybody has 99 stories to tell, and if you know them long enough, you’ll hear them all.” I felt a little guilty about embellishing here and there, until I adopted this William Maxwell passage from Billie Dyer and Other Stories: “For things that are not known—at least not anymore—and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.” I came up with the title Based on a True Life and stopped worrying about it. (A friend suggested I just call it a novel, which I found tempting but unearned.) 

I give equal attention to any memories—momentous or just a moment—that compel me to preserve them in language. The death of a parent and the infidelity of a lover are in the mix with buying a plastic comb in a White River Junction vending machine and having my head shaved when I was eight. They’re all connected: I bought the plastic comb on my way to visit the unfaithful lover; my father was the one who had to shave my head due to an infection.

When David Lehman and Stacey Harwood generously gave me the key to the Best American Poetry blog, I had a space to work through the memory pieces and also mix in prose poems, fables, aphorisms, fragments, etc. They didn’t stop me so I kept on.

What, in your mind, unifies your many distinct squibs—might they someday form a book?

Daniel Nester wrote, in a comment, “please tell me there will be a collection,” and how can I decline after he said please. I settled on the genre-neutral term squibs (one translation of Baudelaire’s fusées) and started numbering them. What had seemed to be all over the place now had a space to occupy, and the task became to organize a subspace that could constitute a book. I tried several approaches for unifying the pieces, and finally settled on a roughly chronological order of autobiographical pieces interspersed with texts that exist outside of time but share sensibilities with the memories.

I’ve been repeatedly buoyed by Best American Poetry Blog compatriots, especially Kent Johnson (who called them a continuation of Kafka’s journals), Mitch Sisskind, and my go-to rabbi David Lehman—all are brilliant writers and I am humbled by their readership. The manuscript is currently under the guardianship of my dear agent Annie DeWitt (The Shipman Agency).

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated by works that have great replay value. Virtually every wonderful painting has it—you’ll never hear anyone say, “We can skip the Vermeer because I’ve already seen it.” There are songs and movies one can experience over and over, feeling a combination of comfort in anticipation of what’s next and the excitement of discovering something you haven’t seen or felt before. Likewise, there are poems that continue to inspire me after dozens of readings, such as Max Jacob’s “The Beggar Woman of Naples,” Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “The Rubber Stamp” from Platero & I, and Wisława Szymborska’s “Going Home.” I think what they have in common is capturing what Cartier-Bresson (quoting Cardinal De Retz) called the “decisive moment.”

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Never tell yourself a preemptive No when you think something isn’t worth writing or you can’t do it justice; Miles Davis said, “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.” Try to get past the “I don’t like writing but I love having written” attitude: love the act of writing (with all the ups and downs of love). I’ve never heard a tennis player say after a grueling match with aching legs: “I don’t like playing tennis but I love having played.”

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

Photography energizes me, whether I’m in Paris or looking out my window. I could be half-asleep on the couch, but if my peripheral vision glimpses one of the local hawks, I’m up and at it. I’m interested in what can be done after the picture has been taken to make something new, such as cropping multiple details from an image and organizing them into a montage juxtaposed with the original image. I’m beginning work on an image/language essay on baseball. And of course more squibs.

Squibs 446-452 [by Alan Ziegler]

 

446: Cabondating: Determining when a move or TV show was recorded by the fare on the taxi door.

 

447: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Ironwood, Mulberry, Granite, Syncline, Stepping Stone.

 

448: Erin is playing Molly Bloom in Ulysses adapted for dance and music. She tells me there’s physicality between Molly and Blazes but nothing I’ll find upsetting. She comes home excited after the dress rehearsal: “The New York Times was there.” A picture runs with the review: Erin is on her knees in bed with Blazes, wearing a negligee riding up her thigh, as is Blazes’ hand. The critic calls her “luscious and devilish,” and adds, “The two lie so alone together in bed with Molly’s sensuous cry of readiness echoing in the audience’s ears.” I snap. “You didn't tell me it would be like this!” What really haunts me is what might have happened during, or after, all those rehearsals. I rip the page out of the newspaper and throw it limply in her direction. As I slam the door on my way out to nowhere, I hear her stricken plea, “What did I do wrong?” I steel myself to be professional when I go to the performance. I'm accompanied by our friend Helen, a dance teacher who has performed in, directed, and attended hundreds of productions. I sit tensely as, offstage, Molly emits her “sensuous cry of readiness.” I fight to keep my eyes open when Molly and Blazes slide under the covers. During the curtain call I turn to Helen for vindication. She laughs and says, “Oh, that’s nothing.”

 

449: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Star Web Paper, Skywriting, Sun, Penumbra.

 

450: We gave it plenty of time but didn’t put enough leaves in the pot so now we are weak and bitter.

 

451: I dream my mother is alive, reading a romance novel in her living room chair after doing the dishes. I tell her she is dead, and she reminds me I have to learn how to relax.I dream my father is dead, and I try to convince him he is alive sitting at the kitchen table watching the tiny television because he no longer watches the big TV in the living room unless other people are with him. But he is stubborn as usual, and tells me I am wrong. Awake, I imagine they pass each other along the hallway and exchange ditto marks with their fingers, but I have not been able to dream this.

 

452: Some places my poems visited in the 70s and 80s: Pequod, Kayak, Small Pond, Ark River, Three Rivers.

"Perfume" [by James Merrill]

Ticklish no longer
With tangibility
Nor rooted, crimson, over
The worm's inching stupor

Little but a spirit
Costly and volatile
Am I, want of my touch unstoppers
Now that you suffer it.

from The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace [1959]

Time for a Snack: Move with Melissa [by Stacey Lehman]

This is a the second in a series of brief gentle exercises to help boost your mood and make you feel more alert. Find the first in the series with Melissa here.

--sdl

9 X Heidegger [by Alina Gregorian]

9 x Heidegger

There used to be nine planets.
There used to be a sun on top of the galaxy
that played Chopin on a tiny violin.
The astronaut said it was sad.
The moon used to say hello
twelve minutes before the light of dawn
The being of this being
was trusted to be alone.

-- Alina Gregorian

from the archive; first posted April 9, 2009

A Curse on Blockheads [by Walter Carey]

Again thanks to Stacey Harwood for this opportunity to air my stray thoughts. . . I am a reader of poetry, get BAP annually, but write very little. . .mainly prose poems like the ones I read by french poets like char or reverdy though not in their league of course. . .I am an American, Chicago-born, in that line everyone quotes from Saul Bellow, a very smart fellow. . "everyone" in that sentence being a case not of rhetorical dishonesty but acceptable bullying. . . "I" am bullshit but so are "you" and "we" and "they" -- you have a soft spot for Chicago, especially Wrigley Field.  . we like our Calvin Klein jines. . .they say that the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach and behind him stands a successful woman. . .Bullshit. .Today my mind is on bullshit. . .also the Ukraine and Outin. . .Outin being a nice typo for Putin. . .who played a weak hand well (Syria) and a strong hand even better (Ukraine). . .at least he no take off his shirt yesterday. .  .maybe he and BO should arm-wrestle for the Crimea. . .but you really want me to write about the movement to ban cursive in schools. . . which is a foolish decision . . as Yeats once wrote . . "but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you" . .I read the newspaper and I think "bullshit". . .I watch the news and I think "bullshit". . . it's bullshit even the word "bullshit" is bullshit even people who say they have great "bullshit detectors" are bullshit. . .or they are bullshit artists. . .a bullshit artist is either a fake artist or an artist who specializes in bullshit. . .there are great bullshit artists and lesser ones. . .the last of the great bullshit artists was either Derrida, Susan Sontag, or Andy Warhol. . let me take a minute to salute the American tax system, which can beat a computer at chess. .  .please illustrate this piece with a picture that is either irrelevant, insulting, or fattening.. .that's what happens when c'est la vie meets c'est la guerre . . .bullshit. A fart in your sleep. You know who the hell you are.

-- Walter Carey
from the archive; first posted March 1, 2014

Chris Mason: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________

Pocket Dial

 

Cell phone pocket dials daughter

            sleeping with boyfriend, pre-dawn.

Crickets, truck banging around, cell phone

            doesn’t dial cranky

exuberant Mrs. Deemer, or the

            bus driver

from Special Olympics.   My Dad is gone

            but still on the phone.

My sister found U. S. Savings Bonds

            grandparents sent us,

the note says, “We are proud of the

            young man you have become.”

Hard to dial up the sound of their voices,

            even in dreams

______________________________________________________________________________

Chris Mason’s most recent books and chapbooks include Something Something Morning (Blabbermouth, 2020), Some of the Methods of Performing Poetry Employed in and Around Baltimore from the Late 60’s to the Early Teens by Poets in Their Late Teens to Early 60’s (Primary Writing, 2019), and ­Hum Who Hiccup (Narrow House, 2011).   He is a member of 3 bands:  The Tinklers, Coocoo Rockin Time, and Old Songs.  The Old Songs group translates archaic Greek poetry and puts it to music.  He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Ann.

____________________________________________________________________________

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021 [by Michael Palma]

For a number of years the editors of Italian Americana gave the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. The following citation appeared in the Summer 2008 issue to announce the awarding of that year's prize to Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

At a time when the most exciting event in the biographies of many poets is the achievement of tenure, Ferlinghetti’s life has been rich, colorful, exceptional and non-academic. He was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 24, 1919. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, who had been born in Brescia in 1872 and emigrated to the United States twenty-two years later, died before his son was born. The poet’s mother, Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was of French and Sephardic-Portuguese descent. When Ferlinghetti was two years old, his mother was hospitalized, and he was separated from his four older brothers and taken by an aunt to Strasbourg, France, where he lived for several years, learning French as his first language. Upon their return to New York when he was six, he was briefly placed in an orphanage, until his aunt became a governess to a wealthy older couple in Bronxville, New York. After they suffered financial losses in the stock market crash of 1929, the young Ferlinghetti was sent to live with yet another family. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1941 with a degree in journalism, and joined the Naval Reserve after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year. He was present at the Normandy invasion in June 1944, aboard a submarine-detecting vessel that was part of the protective screen for the landing craft. After V-E Day, he was assigned to the Pacific theater, and saw the ruins of Nagasaki two weeks after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, an experience that profoundly influenced his subsequent lifelong pacifism.

Ferlinghetti continued his education after the war, earning a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 from Columbia University—where his professors included Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren—and a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1950. In 1953 he settled in San Francisco, and in that same year he founded the City Lights Bookstore with Peter Martin. Two years later they established City Lights Publishing, which continues to flourish and has by now issued some two hundred titles. Its first publication, and the first volume in the highly influential Pockets Poets Series, was Ferlinghetti’s first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World. The fourth volume in the series, published in the fall of 1956, was the first book of another young poet—Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, which led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest and trial on charges of publishing and selling obscene materials. The case, which ended in October 1957 with his acquittal, was a landmark in the struggle for freedom of expression in the United States.

In the intervening half century, Ferlinghetti has continued an extraordinarily varied life and career that are consistently resistant to easy characterization. A family man and a respectable citizen, a practical and extremely successful businessman, he has also been a constant champion of freedom and tolerance, of experimental writers from all parts of the globe, and of progressive social causes. Despite his fame and success, he has been unswervingly open and generous to younger writers. Without ever compromising his artistic vision or pandering to expectations—his work is as culturally allusive as T. S. Eliot’s—he has been an immensely popular poet: his second collection, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), has sold nearly one million copies. In his ninetieth year, he remains as vigorous as ever; his most recent volume of poetry, Americus: Book I (2004), is his most ambitious work.

Along with his writing, bookselling, and publishing, Ferlinghetti has been a painter for sixty years, and his work has been shown in various galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. Reading in clubs and cafes, often with jazz accompaniment, he was a pioneer in the art of performance poetry. In addition to sixteen collections of verse, he has published two novels, Her (1960) and Love in the Days of Rage (1988); two volumes of short plays, Unfair Arguments with Existence (1963) and Routines (1964); and a travel journal, The Mexican Night (1970). He has also published translations of Jacques Prévert (Paroles, 1958) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Roman Poems, 1986; with Francesca Valente); Prévert—in the abundance and variety of his work, in its wit and rhythmic verve, and its ability to appeal equally to cultivated readers and a broader public—is the poet that Ferlinghetti himself most closely resembles. Ferlinghetti’s own writings have appeared in a number of languages; in Italy alone, there have been translations of his novels, his plays, and five volumes of his poetry. Among the many awards that he has received are the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Authors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1994 a street in San Francisco was renamed in his honor, and in 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

There are longer poems in the body of Ferlinghetti’s work—political manifestoes, ironic denunciations, interweavings of personal history with the sweep of twentieth-century events, elegies (including the “The Old Italians Dying,” from 1979’s Landscapes of Living & Dying), and travelogues (among them a number of Italian scenes, especially in the 1988 collection European Poems and Transitions). But it is in the lyric form that he has made his most characteristic mark. In a typical Ferlinghetti text, short lines carry the reader’s eye back and forth across the page as the poet’s eye—often a bit askance—plays easily over the surfaces of the universe, propelled by swift rhythms, frequent rhymes, echoes of the poetic storehouse of the English language, and an exuberant delight in language itself. As The Village Voice observed early in his career, “Ferlinghetti is an unabashed romanticist, drunk on the experience of wonder, mercilessly satirical of anything that stands in the way of awe.” A fine example of his various strengths is this poem from Pictures of the Gone World:

It was a face which darkness could kill
                                                               in an instant
   a face as easily hurt
                                     by laughter or light

       ‘We think differently at night’
                                            she told me once
lying back languidly

                                   And she would quote Cocteau

‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
                                                   ‘whom I am constantly
                                                                                       shocking’
       
        Then she would smile and look away
                   light a cigarette for me
                                                         sigh and rise
and stretch
                  her sweet anatomy
                                               
                                                 let fall a stocking

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]

from the archive; first posted Sept. 16, 2008

My Body, Take and Eat. Or: Sermon on Her Mound [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Genesis 2: 17

(A disclaimer: The following opinions, words, indulgences are mine and mine alone.—jae.)

Let today’s appropriately Lenten Old Testament lectionary reading—that mess about the serpent and the fruit of that goddamed (quite literally) tree—serve as my prologue. Or, if not that, then in the words of Waylon Payne as “The Killer” himself, Jerry Lee Lewis in 2005’s Walk the Line:

God gave us a great big apple, see, and He said. "Don't touch it." He didn't say touch it once in a while. He didn't say take a nibble when you're hungry. He said, "Don't touch it. Don't think about touching it. Don't sing about touching it. Don't think about singing about touching it.”

Me, I’ve touched and nibbled that apple. I’ve stolen it from orchards aplenty (oh, Augustine!), baked it into pies, stewed from it ciders of bouquets both voluptuous and vinegar, set it atop heads and shot arrows straight through (and what exactly did William Tell, hmmm?). I have dared to eat the peach, I’ve rubbed the banana, fondled the melon, pear-treed the partridge, and bitten the berry until the juices veritably gushed.

But this is not a confession. I’m repentant only in theory.

This, Brothers and Sisters, is a sermon.

I’m looking at a picture of Jesus as I compose this. Unfairly blue-eyed and ridiculously rosy-cheeked, his right hand is raised in a gesture of benediction, and his beard is, a bit hilariously, curled in ringlets. It’s certainly not my favorite picture of the Lord, but it’s not his face that concerns me here. It’s what lies in this print’s geographic middle: Jesus’ ripe, red-as-a-valentine heart. A cross blossoms from its upper cleft. A tangle of thorny vines (which, unfortunately evokes Pamela Anderson’s tattooed upper arm à la “Barb Wire”) strangles it to near infarction. And: It’s on fire.

Behold the Sacred Heart of God.

I’m occasionally asked how I reconcile both the erotic and the religious impulse in my work. My answer is—with greater confidence and ease than I do in my day-to-day life, sadly. Even so, there are lusts and longings that I’ve celebrated in various poems (some of which I’ve also and alas celebrated in various beds) that are not just sternly frowned upon by Scripture, but outright verboten. In fact—and this troubles me greatly—these are deeds for which, in some eras hence and in some contemporary regimes, the price of their doing is death. It is with gutting ambivalence that I always come back to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. Yes, Jesus stepped in on her behalf and told the stone-throwing hypocrites to take a hike. But he was also vodka-clear in his command to the woman: Go and sin no more.

Well… crap.

Martin Luther was of the opinion that as people of faith, when we sin, we ought sin boldly, trusting in Christ alone for our salvation. (Reason number 8 why I’m a Lutheran.)

But sin, unlike sex, isn’t precisely an act. It’s a condition. A terminal disease.

“The day thou eatest therof, thou shalt surely die.”

So whatever The Erotic is (argue amongst yourselves), it damn sure ain’t safe.

But then again, neither is a God whose thorn-pocked, fiery heart is splintered by a cross. A God who so loved the world that he let himself be ripped to fleshy shreds on Skull Hill some two millennia ago. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clean, it wasn’t safe.

Christ, however, is more than his crucifixion. He’s the very embodiment of God’s grace, forgiveness, joy, humility, and absolute concern for the well-being of every soul in every body that has or ever will have lived upon this twirling solar satellite we call Earth.

But: Christ is also his crucifixion.

Likewise, The Erotic is more than just cock and pussy. It’s a state of sensual fuck-it-all-ness. It’s knowing full well that the apple you’re eating bloody will kill you, but swallowing it anyway, fearing neither death nor bedevilment in the gulp-down. It’s the awareness that even though you’re eating it, it’s not this apple precisely that you’re hungry for. It’s the hunger that precedes the apple. The thirst that can only be quenched by more thirsting.

But—and make no mistake—The Erotic is also and indeed cock and pussy (configure as you will).

It’s no secret that poets are notoriously horny—or, if you will, notorious in the telling of horny tales. Moreso than the average Jack or (ahem) Jill? Oh, I think not. Sinning on paper is the safest of all. You can’t catch anything, there's no need for birth control, and if you don’t want to overtly cop to a particular kink, you can write it off as ‘poetic license’ with a mere wink and lick of the lips.

And I like to think that God has a heart for poets. King David—that sinning psalmster—was utterly, unapologetically beloved by the Lord. But David suffered greatly at the hands of his own urges. As have I. As have we all.

So already-broken hearts have the tendency to get busted up even more. And hands a body craved so desperately upon it, when gone, leave the ghost-scars of longing. And nevermind with what fervor you whetted its blade upon your skin: Desire's knife, left unused, rusts in its sheath. Night flees from daylight, and lovers’ arms turn cold.

No. There is nothing safe in this world, or, perhaps, the next.

But looking up at the Sacred Heart of Christ, and thinking of every love I’ve blundered, every lust I’ve suffered, every apple I’ve ever been the I of, I’m resigned to an altogether un-contrite gladness.

In a Day of Pentecost sermon preached last year at Martin Luther Church, Zürich, the pastor (whose name is lost to my memory) proclaimed: Gott kommt mit Feuer—God comes with fire.

Well. So do I, Brothers and Sisters. So do I.

--Jil Alexander Essbaum

(This was not written as a response to Lisa's post which in turn was not written as a response to Denise’s—I wrote it before I read Lisa’s—but Glory Be!, lookie the collective unconscious at work! I find this to be a fine, fine serendipity. -jae)

Ed. note: from the archive. Posted February 16, 2008.

Introducing Emily Dickinson, part II: A Loaded Gun [by David Lehman]

Emily Got Her Gun

Like many other readers, I have long been fascinated by Emily Dickinson's poem #764, which has instigated much commentary and many conflicting opinions:

My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a Day 
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --

And now We roam in Soverign Woods --
And now We hunt the Doe --
And every time I speak for Him --
The Mountains straight reply --

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through --

And when at Night -- Our good Day done --
I guard My Master’s Head --
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow -- to have shared --

To foe of His -- I’m deadly foe --
None stir the second time --
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --
Or an emphatic Thumb --

Though I than He -- may longer live
He longer must -- than I --
For I have but the power to kill,
Without -- the power to die --

Why does the poet present herself as an instrument of volcanic (“Vesuvian”) power? Why does she adopt a masculine, even a phallic persona? How are we to understand the paradoxes of the final stanza, the first one a beautiful example of the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus, the second an elegant antithesis? To enter this terrain is to stray into heavily contested space.

Some feminists infer a suppressed, pent-up energy ready to explode. Was the poet, about whom we know so little, full of murderous fury? Adrienne Rich believed that the poem is “about possession by the daemon.” In A Loaded Gun, his 2010 novel centering on Dickinson, Jerome Charyn describes “a woman maddened with rage—against a culture that had no place for a woman with her own fiercely independent mind and will.” Camille Paglia will have none of it. “My Life had stood” is “one of Romanticism’s great transsexual self-transformations.” It is also, Paglia writes, a “Romantic vampire poem,” with the gun representing “Dickinson as denatured vampire, a masculine maker of sadistic poetic speech.” Paglia’s views, in her irrepressible prose, are a pleasure because they quicken thought, but her musings will not necessarily facilitate a close reading of the poem.

The identification of the poet with a rifle is the mystery that confronts any reader. In “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Dickinson presents herself as “a boy.” Here Dickinson announces from the start that her life is “a Loaded Gun” and that it is as a gun that she is speaking. The unambiguous first line of the poem, even if isolated from the rest of the poem, may arouse endless speculation. It is the poem’s final mystery, never to be solved, though I rather like the theory that the gun stands for Emily’s power as a poet.

Some maintain that the poem is Dickinson’s depiction of marriage in which inevitably the husband must kill the wife. One reductive reading identifies the speaker as a woman in a patriarchal society who can escape victimhood only by joining forces with the ruthless male hunter, the gun’s owner. To Helen McNeil, a scholar influenced by Paul de Man, the solution to the final stanza is that “Dickinson knows she is immortal” – knows that her poems will live on. “The poet as pure poem-machine never dies,” McNeil writes, as if the immortality Dickinson imagined were between the covers of a book, a purely linguistic accomplishment.[1] Cynthia Griffin Wolff argues that the poem’s speaker is Death, and I suppose that, by the logic of a metonymy, with the gun a stand-in for Death, you can make the case.[2] But while it may help us to understand the riddling paradoxes of the poem’s great final stanza, the danger of this reading is that it disregards the opening words of the poem: “My Life had stood.” No, the speaker is not death but a gun with “a Life”; not an end but a means; “pure instrumentality,” as Helen McNeil would have it. In a turn of phrase that vaults me back to the 1980s and the heyday of deconstructive criticism, McNeil adds her view that the poem has “an element of sublime parody” because “to be a gun is to be only a gun.”

          Leave aside interpretation imposed on the poem from without, whether based on biographical speculation, theoretical position, or ideological conviction, all of which are on display in Dickinson criticism. The critics, ingenious though some are, do not give enough thought to the religious impulse in Dickinson’s poetry – and to the extent that her art illustrates the maxim that sacred things surround themselves with mystery.

Let’s look at the uncanny last stanza, the “closing riddle-signature” (Wolff). The chiasmus, or reversal of terms, in the first two lines is breathtaking: “Though I than He - may longer live / He longer must - than I -”  Then comes the magnificence of the final paradox. “For I have but the power to kill, / Without - the power to die – ” The rifle has the power to kill – we can see that. The rifle may endure longer than its mortal owner if it is well-made and has been used and cleaned with care. But what is the power to die that the master has?

As a Romantic in the mode of Keats, Dickinson is capable of transmuting death into “an ecstasy of woe.” She believes in an afterlife that makes sense of life and death. The metaphor of hunter and gun is at the service of this belief. When, in “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty,” the assertion depends on the same associative logic that animates Dickinson’s poems. If roses were not subject to the laws of birth, growth, decay, and death, would they be as beautiful? Were all to survive any and all fatal shocks, could our actions have any moral significance? In the moral realm, therefore, to die is a “power” informing all human acts and justifying virtuous lives.

In the final stanza of Dickinson’s poem, the distinction between “may” (indicating possibility) and “must” (implying both inevitability and a moral imperative) is all important. As an inanimate object, the rifle may outlive its owner, just as a pencil may outlive an author. But as a bare, forked animal with a soul, the owner must live longer if we understand time under the aspect of eternity – if there is such a thing as eternity, and our actions live on after us and have a moral value. And to die is a “power,” not just a necessity but also a privilege, because it is death that gives consequence to human agency. Emily may not have approved of Walt Whitman’s long lines and “barbaric yawp” – she never read him but says she heard that he was “disgraceful”  --  but she would certainly have agreed with him that “to die is different from what anyone suppos’d, and luckier.” Death is the pre-condition for the immortality of the soul, the affirmation of which may be the most radical thing about Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Ed. Note: For part one of this essay, click here. For the author's reading of "Ozymandias," click here.

[1] Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson (Virago, 1986), pp. 174-178.

[2] Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Dickinson’s Use of the Romantic Grotesque” in Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Judith Farr (Prentice-Hall, 1996), p. 128

An Interview with Elaine Equi [by Aspen Matis]

Elaine Equi's witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Among her other titles are Sentences and Rain, Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program at The New School. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Equi via email about her newest book of poetry, the poetic nature of eccentricity and mundanity, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, and the bewitching powers of 17th century poet Robert Herrick.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Funny you should ask. I was just thinking that my inner life seems to have disappeared. I’m not quite sure why that happened, but I do know that I think of poetry as a tool for getting back in touch with it. By inner life, I mean some larger sense of self — what people used to call “soul” or “psyche.” I know meditation is helpful in that regard, and I do a little of that. But for me, the fastest and most reliable road inward is poetry.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I think poetry can do all of those things. I like the way poetry can articulate moments we all experience that might otherwise go unnoticed. Haiku is a great form for making you more focused — mindful and appreciative of what’s going on around you. But I also love poetry that opens up imaginative and aesthetic space. I like fantasy and speculative realities — time travel, clones, dream worlds.

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

I am honestly not a very radical person. I’m just not the type. I consider myself more of an eccentric. I have a poem, “Ode to Weird,” that says “All poets are weird/ even when their poems/ try to appear normal.” I was being playful but also truthful. Recently, I’ve discovered there’s a whole critical movement devoted to defining and exploring the notion of weirdness. The late Mark Fisher has an excellent book, The Weird and the Eerie, on this subject.

Stylistically, do you consider yourself a minimalist? 

I think I go on a little too much to be a true minimalist, but my writing is definitely informed by my love of short poems. Some of my favorite poets are Sappho, Basho, Issa, Williams, Niedecker, Creeley, Aram Saroyan, Joe Brainard, and Rae Armantrout. I like aphorisms, epigrams, fragments, haiku, lists, jokes, and concrete poems. In short, I never came across a short poetry form I didn’t like.

The Intangibles, your newest book of poems was praised widely. Of it, Albert Mobilio wrote, “Always count on Elaine Equi’s nimble gymnastics to flip the ordinary around and create something rich and strange… These poems do not wear their brooding hearts on their sleeves but rather flirt and banter, drawing us close before revealing their ruminative complexities.” Bob Holman praised the collection, writing, “If Emily Dickinson were alive today, her name would be Elaine Equi. Each of these poem gems is a secret; to know them, simply read them.” What was the impetus and engine of this latest collection? 

I’m very much a poet of the mundane, so there are poems about pills, perfume, food, yoga, and reading murder mysteries. But I also wanted to reflect on how technology and social media were increasingly playing a much bigger role in our lives (this was in 2019). I wanted to observe that shift, and at times, complain about it. However, I must say that since the pandemic, my attitude is changing. I’m grateful to be able to order what I need, teach my workshops online, and stay in touch with family and friends. I even sort of like Zoom poetry readings.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated with how technology is changing the way we communicate. I’m also interested in writing about the body, something that’s inherently grounded in the physical. And since I’m getting older — in poems about aging.

What else? Dance, visual art — anything to do with color.

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

I admire the wit of many poets from those eras, but Robert Herrick is my absolute favorite. He wrote great short poems and some long ones too. His work is succinct, often hilarious, and pretty racy for a vicar (a position he once held). There is also a magical side to his writing. Many of the poems are spells or charms for the purpose of courting his Muses/ mistresses, banishing evil sprites, and insuring the success of his book. Obviously, they worked.

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

Photography has always been a big inspiration. I love taking pictures, looking at pictures, and thinking about pictures. I’ve already done several projects that combine words and images and I hope to do more in the future. Writing poems in the form of captions to go with my photos is very satisfying. It feels like two different sides of me are collaborating.

Most popular funeral songs [by David Lehman]

In the age of sabermetrics, they ("they, they who are known as they," as Kenward Elmslie has it), have tallied up the songs (and versions of same) most popular to play in funerals. Click here for a full run-down, or take away these teasers.

-- Sinatra leads the pack with "My Way." 

-- Both Richard Rodgers and Harold Arlen are represented in the top ten, though the most popular version of Arlen's "Over the Rainbow" is said to be by Eve Cassidy rather than the star of "The Wizard of Oz" -- and people would apparently rather hear Gerry and the Pacemakers sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" than, say, John Raitt.

-- Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" comes in at number ten.

-- -- Vera Lynn's "We'll Say Goodbye" makes the list, which reminds me that the song puts in an appearance at the end of "The Singing Detective" -- which makes exceedingly smart use of songs popular in the year of the action, 1945: "Peg o My Heart," "Accentuate the Positive," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" . . .but I see I'm digressing into a different list. 

According to Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, authors of the cleebrated biography of Willem de Kooning, say that the painter would have liked to have Sinatra's "Saturday Night is the Loneliest night in the Week" to be playing at his funeral.

As for me, I'd have an orchestra play Arnold Newman's "Street Scene" as the funeral goers arrive. In a ceremony I would play a recording of Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" as sung by the song's lyricists (Betty Comden, Adolph Green) with Nancy Walker as a third voice. I think that recording is from 1960. As the ceremony ends, I'd like "Goodbye" played by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra. An instrumental. But at a party in someone's apartment later, people will play Sinatra's vocal from the 1958 album, "Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely."

Meanwhile, I think of the wit of Larry Rivers, the painter who started out as a jazz musician and loved playing his saxophone to the end of his days. Larry arranged to have his own recording of "Everything Happens to Me" to cap his funeral. For Sinatra's memorial the choice was inevitable: his signature song on radio and TV, "Put Your Dreams Away."  

from the archive; posted March 17, 2013.

On Anne Porter, Poet, 1911-2011 [by Lucette Lagnado, 1956-2019]

A 95-Year-Old Poet Finds Her Muse and Literary Praise

'You Can't Drive Anymore,
But You Can Still Write';
Homage to Her Late Son

By Lucette Lagnado (1956-2019)

The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 11, 2006 12:01 am ET

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- At 95, Anne Porter has senior moments, like finding a ticket that says "Keep This Ticket" in her purse and having no idea what it was for or how it got there.

It is one more frustration of getting old, along with relying on a walker to compensate for an uncertain gait and wearing oversize glasses to reinforce fading eyes. Mrs. Porter also finds inspiration in these setbacks, and that has helped to launch an unlikely, late-blooming literary career.

That mysterious ticket, for instance, inspired this poem:

I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country

Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border

And ask
To see my ticket.

Mrs. Porter was 83 years old when her first volume of poetry, "An Altogether Different Language," was published in 1994. The book was named a finalist in the National Book Awards. A judge of the awards, David Lehman, a poet and professor at The New School in New York, subsequently decided to include Mrs. Porter in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, placing one of her longer poems alongside the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.

"Anne Porter is a marvelously talented poet who has not yet received the recognition that is her due," says Mr. Lehman, who praises her work for its "literary simplicity and directness."

Asked why she keeps writing poems through her 80s and 90s, Mrs. Porter responds that art may be the only pursuit that old age can't wreck:

"You can't sing anymore, you can't dance anymore, you can't drive anymore -- but you can still write," she says.

Poetry is a field filled with productive old people. Stanley Kunitz, the American poet laureate who died in May at the age of 100, was writing poems and being published till the end of his life. The late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize when he was nearly 70. John Ashbery, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is prolific at nearly 80. The new U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall, is 78 and still working.

Mr. Hall muses that some elderly poets may find the medium well-suited to the rigors of old age: "Poems are made for other persons to read but made out of silence and solitude, and perhaps there is more silence and solitude in the world of the old," he says.

Mrs. Porter has developed a knack for chronicling the rigors of old age with biting verse, as in "Old in the City":

You stay away from doctors,
They'd send you to the hospital,
Where pieces are cut out of you,
And after that you die.

She has done readings at Canio's Books, a literary hangout here in Sag Harbor, at churches, schools, libraries and at downtown New York bar called KGB, where many in the audience were in their 20s. "I was perfectly comfortable," she says.

Mrs. Porter was married to the artist Fairfield Porter, considered one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century. After he died in 1975, she found life on her own difficult, especially as her health declined. She lived with her youngest daughter for years. When her daughter married and moved out, Mrs. Porter suffered several crises. "I fell downstairs twice," she says. Alone and increasingly vulnerable, she decided to sell her home and move into an assisted-living community run by Quakers.

She was all set to go when her daughter and son-in-law offered her another option: come live with them in a nearby town, not far from the home she owned for decades with her late husband. They built Mrs. Porter a separate wing with vaulted ceilings, giving it the look and feel of a cathedral. In one sun-drenched room, they set up a desk and workspace and hung paintings and drawings by her late husband. In the space opposite the desk, they placed her favorite painting of all, of her late son, Johnny, who died in 1980.

One of Mrs. Porter's most acclaimed poems, written when she was in her early 70s, is a lengthy homage to her late son, who suffered from what she believes to be either schizophrenia or autism:

Though your shoelaces were hardly ever tied
And you seldom wore matching socks
You tried to behave with dignity in the village
"So as not to embarrass my little sisters."

...

And for years your times at home were so short and so far apart
That hearing them once called "visits" you turned white,
So deep was your speechless fear
That you might be only a guest at home, and have no home.

Mrs. Porter says she usually thinks about a poem and outlines it in her mind, and only then begins to sit down and write. She prefers scribbling verses on stray pieces of paper -- backs of envelopes, old invitations, whatever she finds at hand. Only when she has a final version does she sit down and begin to type it up.

Shunning computers, she works on an ancient manual typewriter belonging to her late husband. It is hard for her to walk, so she stuffs a pouch attached to her walker with notes and drafts and rolls it around from room to room.

After her 1994 book, she published "Living Things" this year. It contains the poems from her earlier collection and 39 new ones. This year, her publisher, Zoland Books, now an imprint of Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, asked for more poems that would go in a new anthology.

Being able to live with her family has helped her with her poetry, she suspects. "I feel sheltered. While I am in bed, I can hear them laughing and I know they are good," Mrs. Porter says.

She adds: "Institutional life is a little chilling to a person's imagination."

Born in 1911 to a family of Boston Brahmins, Mrs. Porter remembers writing poetry as a child of 7. She attended Bryn Mawr and Harvard, but dropped out of both. After her marriage, she raised five children and quietly continued writing.

The marriage was stormy, she and others recall. Mrs. Porter led her life in the shadow of her husband. "There was a lot of hospitality -- cooking, plus raising five kids and she had her hands full," says Elizabeth Porter Balzer, her daughter. Whatever poems Mrs. Porter wrote, she wrote on the side.

She only threw herself into her own work as an artist after her husband died. "I remember realizing that I was alone, and I'd have to be more organized," she says. "I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write."

In the mid-1990s, David Shapiro, a poet and art critic decided to help Mrs. Porter find a publisher for her work. "I thought that she was hiding in an Emily Dickinson way," he recalls. Mrs. Porter received a $1,000 advance from Zoland.

Anne Porter at a reading held in September at the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary Church in Southampton, N.Y.

On a recent weekend Mrs. Porter read from her newest book at Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary, a Roman Catholic church in Southampton, N.Y., that she used to attend. The audience included parishioners who used to pray with her, many of them elderly, along with a sprinkling of artists.

She and her daughter took turns reciting "For My Son Johnny," as some in the room grew misty-eyed.

Afterward, lines formed and she greeted old friends who came up to embrace her and get her autograph. Finally, exhausted, she headed home with her daughter.

"People don't use their creativity as they get older," she said. "They think this is supposed to be the end of this."

Ed. note: Portrait of  Anne Porter by Fairfield Porter.

Amy Gerstler: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

Lost in the Forest

 

I'd given up hope. Hadn't eaten in three

days. Resigned to being wolf meat...

when, unbelievably, I found myself  in

a clearing. Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me:

their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks. I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke. I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

 

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk. I'm so hungry

my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?

"Drink up, sweetheart," she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

"Atta girl." Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell. "You'll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom," she says as

she leads me upstairs--her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Index of Women, a book of her poems, will be published in April by Penguin Random House. She is currently collaborating with Steve Gunderson on a musical play. 

________________________________________________________________________________________

"Estelle" [by Molly Arden]

Mom was somewhere north
of the kitchen watching the new girl, Estelle,
sashaying in her crisp apron with a dust-mop.
The bed posts trembled when her poof
passed over them as if they were living men.

Molly read a romance that first winter night
after Estelle put away the dishes fed the dogs 
and hung the wet laundry on the lines outside.
While she read the wind dried the garments 
in the cold February wind, on the verge of flying.

Both girls watched from their windows
as shivering sky creatures wore and inflated 
the pants and shorts of the daytime household.
Molly shivered thinking of her maid, Estelle,
who lived among the camisoles and slippers.

She lived among the camisoles and slippers
of the household like a fox in a nest of feathers.
Molly saw Estelle after her Saturday bath
when everyone else slept and kissed her own
breasts thinking of Estelle’s rounder ones.

Between the Lines [by James Cummins]

                     after A Moveable Feast

We only have Papa’s account of this,
That Scott Fitzgerald asked him to weigh in
With ‘absolute honesty’ on the question
That filled Fitzgerald’s heart with fear and dread:
Was he big enough?  Was he man enough
To please a woman?  “Zelda?” his friend asked.
Scott nodded.  “Yes, Zelda.  Who else?”

It’s clear Hemingway wants to reassure
Fitzgerald with a comforting response.
He fumes at women.  “They’re all alike. 
They want to destroy a man—it’s true!
Crazy Zelda’s trying to kill you.”
Scott looks up from his cherry tart:
“You don’t know anything about Zelda!”
Hemingway backs off that one like hot
Potato soup dropped in his lap by one
Of old Michaud’s careless waiters. 
He dips a spoon in his own cherry tart;
Outside he hears the racket of a car.

“Have you tried a pillow?” he asks quietly.
“You’ve got to get some purchase on that slope.
A pillow can facilitate your mount.”
Scott stares at his wine glass.  “I never know
Whether I’m in or not,” he says.
“When I ask, she gets disgusted.  Cries.”

At this Ernest almost upsets his wine.
He can’t abide a woman’s tears—he can’t!
They’ve tried their tricks on him and found
He’s what a man should be: a stone. 
They’ve tried the “too small” line before;
And sure, he’d spent some sleepless night
Reviewing his performance in the sack;
But if a woman can’t be satisfied,
He wasn’t going to take that on himself.

“What if she’s right?  What if I’m just too small?
Scott’s question broke through his friend’s reverie,
Who then slammed his hand down on the table:
“Let’s check it out!  Let’s go to le water.”
Scott suddenly looked blank.  “Well, I don’t know,”
He said.  “I mean, they do that in Pigalle—”
“For Christ’s sake, Scottie, I don’t want your balls!
You asked for my ‘absolute honesty.’
Let’s get some sort of assessment in hand.
So to speak.”  “So to speak,” Scottie sighed.

“Michaud!”  Now Hemingway was all business.
“Michaud, come help us out?  And bring Pierre.”
Scott looked alarmed.  “Ernie, old man—old sport—”
But Hemingway brushed all dissent aside.
“Don’t ‘old sport’ me!  Save it for your prose.
Come on, we’ll have a good old show-and-tell—
You show, the rest of us will tell.”  But Scott
Held firm, and only he and Hemingway
Repaired to le water, the dank men’s room,
Where Scott undid his belt and dropped his trou.

Now Hemingway’s a bit unclear about
What happens next: we’re given to believe
He checks Scott out, and then they reappear,
Attabler, with their cherry tarts and wine.
But old Michaud fills in the blanks for us.
One of his waiters, Francois, had the runs
That day, and so was seated in a stall
Reading Le Monde when Scott pulled down his pants
Francois’ account is somewhat vague because
He had to stare through a narrow crack;
But evidently Hemingway squatted,
Then got down on all fours so he could find
The ‘angle of the dangle’ as he called it.|
And Francois swears he heard him say,
“Pull it a couple times, see if it moves.”
But Francois’ English wasn’t, say, the King’s.

Now they’re sitting above their lunch again,
And Ernest is expansive.  This might mean
What Scott showed his friend in le water
Wouldn’t keep Hemingway awake at night.
“It’s not the size that counts; it’s the motion—”
His pal was one big friendly smile.
“Let’s hit the Louvre and size the statues up.
You’ll see—their scale is pretty much the truth.” 
A frightening image flared in Scottie’s mind:
Ernie measuring statues with a tape.

The Louvre was just a short walk from Michaud’s.
Scott stammered out, “I really should get back”—
Ernie seemed more obsessed with … that ... than he.
“Zelda can't make you any more a man
Than some whore you could pick up in Pigalle.
A pal can boost your confidence, that’s all.”
But Scott was adamant outside the bar.
They let the tarts settle and had a smoke;
Ernie studied his friend as they stood there.
Was that the problem then?  Scott was a poof?
He’d never judge a friend.  Then he thought
Maybe he’d pushed him too far for one day.
“I guess you’re right,” he said, “it’s getting late.
The Louvre’s a project for another day.”

Except they did go to the Louvre that day;|
And Hemingway explained to Fitzgerald,
“The proper measurement of man is man.”
Scott still had his theories about finance,
How these abstractions can suck out your soul;
And Ernest still thought life a game
Between whose lines a man’s soul finds its measure.
They stopped at Dingo’s on the way back home
To drink apéritifs and watch the sun
Slip through the pink clouds of the Paris dusk.
Ernie held up his glass to catch the light,
And then intoned, without cracking a smile:
“A rosé is a rosé is a rosé.”

Introducing Emily Dickinson, part 1 [by David Lehman]

Emily Dickinson is one of the chief glories of American poetry because, in her poems, she weds originality of vision with an idiosyncratic style raised to a rhetorical ideal. Her characteristic utterance is the brief lyric, often in quatrains, evincing the power of compression, the resolve to “tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” a staccato rhythm, elliptical leaps, and a unique system of punctuation, with the humble dash working to juxtapose, or separate, parts of thought. The twentieth-century editors who regularized her punctuation, removing dashes, and lower-casing her capital letters, did her a great disservice. Today the power of her dash is acknowledged as an element of style in any university course in which her work is taught.

Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, nearly all of which were unread by anyone in her lifetime. She kept the poems tied up in a drawer. She averaged one a day in her most fruitful period, which coincided with the Civil War. Though she very seldom addressed the conflict, it didn’t go entirely unnoticed. “It feels a shame to be Alive -- / When Men so brave—are dead,” she wrote in 1863. But this is an exception. The external world did not much impinge on her. “Escape is such a thankful word,” she wrote, as if a concentration on ultimate things, the truths of the soul, required her to ignore temporal actualities.[1] Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. The one time she sent out her work, The Atlantic rejected it. She resisted the urge to repeat the effort not only because “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” but also because editors were bound to bungle things, and did. When, without her consent, a poem of hers was printed in The Springfield Republican, it vexed her that the editor inserted a conventional comma that she had deliberately omitted.[2]

The “belle of Amherst,” also known as the “mystic of New England,” gradually absented herself from society after a year attending the seminary that would become Mount Holyoke College. Her reclusive solitude is the fact at the base of legend and myth. Choosing to remain housebound, refusing visitors, she dressed in virginal white. In an introduction to a selection of her poems, John Malcolm Brinnin pictured a nun costumed as a perpetual bride in her father’s Amherst house: “When Emily Dickinson became the nun in the cloisters of her father’s house, enacting in her poems the bittersweet resignation of thwarted love and accepting marriage to nothing but the universe, she had unconsciously made a place for herself among the tragic heroines of drama and fiction.”[3] With a poet as secretive and private as Dickinson, the conjecture can quickly go from cloister to prison or dungeon. Summarizing Rebecca Patterson’s speculative biography The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), the poet Anthony Hecht makes shrewd use of an often misused adverb: in Dickinson’s life, Patterson “diligently discovers parental inadequacy, repressed homosexuality, and frustrated love.”[4]

Ever the provocateur, Camille Paglia contends that Dickinson’s poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated sadomasochist. Dickinson is nothing less than “Amherst's Madame de Sade.” In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia likens the poet to “the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”[5] Was Dickinson an inmate in a prison, a nunnery, or a Victorian house with an attic for an eccentric and slightly deranged maiden aunt? Maybe none of these things. What she was, by any standard, was an eccentric, a visionary, and a great American poet

Dickinson wrote poems that pose soluble riddles. The “it” in “I like to see it lap the Miles” is a train. She has poems that offer aphorisms (“Much madness is divinest Sense”) or metaphors that widen into allegories (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”). There are also capricious poems (“Bee! I’m expecting you!”) and tantalizing fragments.  “A Letter is a joy of Earth — / It is denied the Gods — ” is the whole of #1639.  Best of all are the poems that are finally inscrutable but infinitely suggestive, including otherworldly dramas of life beyond the grave: “I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died”; “I died for beauty”; “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”; “It was not Death, for I stood up”; “Death is the supple suitor.” She writes so often and so knowingly about death that the reader may wonder whether she has discovered the country “from whose bourn / No traveler returns” and has written her poems from the other side.

The poems have numbers, not titles, and the ones to which I keep returning have hearts of irreducible mystery. She can follow an opening line in a way that no one would have anticipated (see #640) or end a poem with the last word you’d expect (#510). Before an audience or a class, recite the first line of the former (“I cannot live with You”), ask people to nominate second lines, then astonish them with what Dickinson does, which I shan’t reveal here for fear of spoiling the fun.

 Anthony Hecht sees the riddling impulse as central to our understanding of her poetry, and I agree, but while there are riddling poems that are easy enough to solve, she specialized in enigmas and puzzles that tease the mind but keep their meaning hidden. This is less a strategy or a reflection of her disposition than it is an esthetic decision that follows from her respect for complexity and her distrust of easy answers. “The Riddle that we guess / We speedily despise,” Dickinson wrote.  Mystery is the link between art and religion, according to Stephane Mallarmé, and these sentences of his apply to Dickinson’s writing: “Every sacred thing that wishes to remain sacred envelops itself in mystery. Religions take refuge in arcana that are revealed only to the predestinate: art has its arcana, too."

Ed. note: For part two of this essay, please click here.

[1] “Escape -- it is the Basket / In which the Heart is caught / When down some awful Battlement / The rest of Life is dropt -- ”

[2] The poem: “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass” (#986), a riddle poem, the solution to which is a snake. The newspaper inserted the comma that Dickinson specified she did not want between lines three and four (“You may have met Him – did you not / His notice sudden is -- ”).

[3] “From the introduction to Emily Dickinson in the Laurel Poetry Series (1960).

[4] Anthony Hecht, Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (Atheneum, 1986), p. 85 Hecht’s essay is entitled “The Riddles of Emily Dickinson,” aiming his attention on her poems rather than her person.

[5] See the fascinating final chapter of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990).

The Importance of Martin Guerre, part two [by Joe Lehman]

Ed. note: Part one of this discussion of "Martin Guerre" was posted here on February 12.

I have been poring through the lyrics of the various songs from Martin Guerre the musical. The moment that has most directly affected me emotionally, is where Arnaud takes the stand in court and proclaims:

I'm a Protestant, yes
Of this I am proud
But to bring down your lives
This is not what I vowed
I vowed to love the Lord. 

I won't stand and see destroyed
the precious times we've all enjoyed…

I could easily substitute “Zionist” for “Protestant” to describe my own identity and how it has become seen as heretical to many of my friends and acquaintances on the Left. “I’m a Zionist, yes. Of this I am proud…” has a welcome ring to it. Imagine, then, a young Jewish adult obliged to proclaim his conviction in the belief of individual rights and freedoms, while simultaneously defending the existence and prosperity of the State of Israel, only to be turned away and called a racist pig, by the same progressive-minded individuals who lay claim to ownership of the belief of individual rights and freedoms.

The character of Guillaume is the consummate prejudiced demagogue of the show. He certainly has the most forceful lines:

Stand up and be counted, rise above the crowd
Say this in their memory, I will make you proud
Look around, can't you see what the world has become?
It is time we were cleansed of this Protestant scum!
By the blood of the martyrs, we will take up the sword
We will root out this cancer in the name of the Lord!
Everywhere is chaos, everywhere is doubt
Everywhere are heretics, the time has come to burn them out!

There are an infinite number of madmen throughout history, and if I follow Godwin’s Law, I could easily make an analogy to Hitler and Nazi Germany but it is just too easy a thing to do. (Ed. note: According to Godwin’s Law, if an argument goes on long enough, someone will surely compare someone else to Hitler.) Guillaume, as he is portrayed, can easily represent both a follower and a leader of a bigoted movement. He extends an appeal to lower-middle class resentments and desires:

I was born a poor man, just like each of you
Born to sweat and suffer as the poor must do
Working like a cart-horse, slaving in your field
Till my back is breaking I will never yield.

Furthermore, he exhibits a false paternalistic benevolence by reminding the fellow Catholic villagers of his roots in the community:

Baptiste, I knew your father
Albert, I knew yours too
Men who stood for decency just the same as you.

Finally, he assumes an air of traditional piety by resorting to religious exclamations:

Here I stand before you, bloody and unbowed
By the sword of Jesus
I will make you proud!

The conclusion of the show, where we have the final showdown among Guillaume, Martin, and Arnaud and Bertrande, is most illuminating. Enraged that he has no chance at winning over Bertrande’s affection, now that she is legally bound to Martin though still in love with Arnaud, Guillaume concocts the convoluted idea that it was both Martin’s and Arnaud’s plan from the start:

Right from the start, keep out Guillaume!
Keep him away, far from Bertrande, keep them apart!

All I did Bertrande, I did for you!
So true, so pure...I knew you deserved much more

(he lets Martin go and grabs Bertrande)

A Martin Guerre better than them
A Martin Guerre much more like me.

It would seem that “Martin Guerre” has become representative of both elevation and salvation -- for Arnaud, who is pure of heart, and for Guillaume, who is bitter and aggrieved. Guillaume is about to kill Martin with his knife, but Arnaud, who recognizes he has no place left in the equation except as the martyr, shields Martin and is stabbed to death in his place. He dies in Bertrande’s arms. In the melee, Guillaume too is killed, when another side character springs in and bludgeons him. Everything has come full circle.

It is Bertrande who voices the lesson to be learned from the entire experience:

When will we all learn?
We lived our lives in fear...
We say we love the same God yet there's blood on every hand!
Let him die for peace
Can't you understand?
If all we ever love is hate...
Will we ever hear?

Intolerance has indeed led the people of Artigat down the pathway to hell, from which the only recovery is reconciliation between the Catholic and Protestant factions.

Here, in 2021 America, there has been a lot of talk in the news from the Biden administration about finding unity between the various competing factions that fall under the aegis of Republican and Democratic parties. But it is still early, and the future remains terribly uncertain. I only know that I, as an individual, can strive to be, and continue to be, a better person. Perhaps I take after Bertrande:

 I will carry on
till the fear has gone
till the day I find
There's someone who will hear!

There’s someone who will hear.

Ed. note: For part one of this discussion, click here.

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.)