The Best American Poetry

Yom Kippur, 1948: Renee and Huy "Iggie" Harwood

Clearly my dad wasn't having an easy fast.Here he is with my mom on the Grand Concourse and 174th Street in the Bronx;

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The Curse that Cannot Speak Its Name (by Mitch Sisskind)

A New York Times article full of negative insinuations linked
Democrat candidate Tulsi Gabbard to white supremacist
groups and Russian cyberbots. Throughout the article there’s
puzzlement and a certain annoyance about Tulsi Gabbard:
“What is she up to?”

Whatever she may be up to, what’s most obvious about Tulsi
Gabbard is never mentioned in the article. Yet it’s absolutely
the first thing anyone notices about her. Tulsi Gabbard is a
beautiful woman.

If she were Black, if she were Muslim, even, perhaps, if she
were fat, the New York Times might reference those attributes.
What’s more, such references could confer on Tulsi Gabbard
some of today’s requisite victim identity. The present article
might at least have mentioned the fact that Tulsi Gabbard is
Hindu. But the general animosity of the piece was such that
no quarter would be given. I believe that the foundation of that
animosity was the candidate’s physical attractiveness. Again,
her beauty is the obvious thing about her, and for that very
reason it can't even be mentioned. It's too horrible.

I first noticed this tendency in the media following the death,
in 1982, of the actress Grace Kelly. One of the TV networks
aired a half-hour program featuring celebrities who had known
her. Not one of them mentioned the fact that she was a beautiful
woman. The irony was, if she hadn’t been a beautiful woman
nobody would ever have heard of Grace Kelly.

In the ancient world, in Northern Europe and also in South America,
beautiful young girls were subjected to sacrifice. Whatever honor
might have been ascribed to this, it was a good way of getting rid
of a potentially disruptive character, and even of punishing her for
being what she was. When the remains of a sacrificed girl were
discovered in Peru, that dog Bill Clinton uncouthly stated, “There’s
one good-looking mummy.” Impeach him!

In a 1980s shampoo commercial, a model begged, “Don’t hate me
because I’m beautiful.” It was a joke but she deserved to be hated.
If she were any good, she’d be fat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard.html?searchResultPosition=2

Noir and You: David Lehman Asks Suzanne Lummis About The Studio System

David Lehman:

Do you believe that true noir as a genre -- leaving out neo-noirs, parodies, and ingenious movies on the order of The Getaway, The Usual Suspects, and Memento -- owes its existence to the studio system, where you had the value of a generic formula, the availability of contract players to round out a cast, and excellent writers of dialogue?

Suzanne Lummis:

Film noir probably owes its origins to the studio system but not necessarily its flourishing. I’ve come upon alternative views that say the abrupt weakening of the studio system in the aftermath of some legal battles allowed more independent producers to enter the field, producers who then hired independent directors with their own visions and signature styles. I think it would’ve been hard to get a movie as weird and anarchistic as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly made under the strictures of the earlier studio system.  

Maybe the question has no definitive answer, because there always was a type of formula B-movie cranked out within the profit-making machine. Get yourself a Man, a Woman, and a Gun, maybe a second woman, maybe a couple more guns, and, somewhere, Money—that can be gotten by cheating, thievery, or murder.  Oh, and you’ll need law enforcement, which could be a squad car filled with anonymous cops or one guy who’s made it his life’s work to crack this case or dog these fugitives. They could roll those elements around each other and come up with a working script to film fast and cheap.

On the other hand, we have examples of brilliant moviemaking. Double Indemnity, for instance -- no one pitched that as a B-movie. It was top-tier all the way: Billy Wilder directing and writing, Raymond Chandler co-writing, the source material a book by a seminal writer of hard-boiled crime, James M. Cain.  Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. All of them, great talents at the top of their game. 

I just read a quote by Robert Aldrich about the paradox of the studio system, the good and the bad of it. This makes me laugh — file it under You Can’t Win for Losing. “We'd had twenty years of petty dictators running the industry, during which time everybody worked and everybody got paid, maybe not enough, but they weren't on relief. Seventeen years later you wonder if the industry is really more healthy in terms of creativity. Are we making more or better pictures without that central control? But when everybody worked under those guys, they hated them.”      

This is the fifteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers Moanin' and Wailin' on Art's Birthday

 

That's What I Thought (by Mitch Sisskind)

Everybody has a tragic story
And I have one of those too. 
Would you like to hear it 
For a couple of hours on an 
Economy class flight to LA?
Haha that’s what I thought!

Or let’s talk about money.
Just by looking at people
It’s hard to tell how much
Money they have. Do you 
Think I have a lot of money? 
Haha that’s what I thought!

Or let’s talk about sex.
Just by looking at people
It’s hard to tell how much 
Sex they’re getting. Do you 
Think I’m getting a lot of sex?
Haha that’s what I thought!

Or let’s talk about death.
Just looking at people
It’s hard to tell whether
They’re dead or alive but
If you wait long enough 
You’ll be right eventually

The way a stopped clock
Is right twice a day or blind
Pigs find truffles. Do you
Think I’m alive or am I dead?
Haha that’s what I thought!
But haha what about now?

 

 

 

 

Katinka Bock’s sculptures point the nature of material and movement [by Tracy Danison]

Katinka Bock, not titled©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis currently at Lafayette Anticipations is a more than successful marriage of exhibition space and esthetic intelligence. The lines and light of the Anticipations’ space are a perfect medium for the unmoving movement that animates Bock’s sculptures.

 

Katinka Bock, Rauschen©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

“Rauschen”, a gaping, colorful and vertically anchored monumental bulge suspended through the center of the building, could be a conch shell, a blanket enfolding a child or a vortex.

This remarkable piece visually emphasizes the up-down or side-to-side positioning of the other works on display.

 

Katinka Bock, Gisant©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

These include, among other strongly-crafted pieces sown over three floors, a field of naturalistic brass cactus, thick "rugs" (not titled) on a "clothesline", a covered reclining effigy ("Gisant") in pointy shoes and an overstuffed pincushion: the cacti strain up, the rugs flap, the effigy lays, the pincushion is pinned.

 

Katinka Bock, brass cactus©Pierre Antoine / Lafayette Anticipations, Paris

Karine, my companion, remarks that Bock’s works remind her that movement (mouvement) is not necessarily displacement (bouger). She’s right.

At Tumulte, where Bock’s hand touches, it points the “quantum” view, where fixed and solid, flux and flow are part of the same moment, if not of the same perceptual choice.

See Katinka Bock's work live if you can.

Katinka Bock’s Tumulte à Higienopolis continues at Lafayette Anticipations until 5 January 2020

From Eroticism to Extinction 8 | 83 | 22 | 00 | 44 [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

8 years | 83 days | 22:00:44

I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).

After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.

The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).

In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.

The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:

Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.

The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling. 

This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.

We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”

The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.

Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”) 

Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."

Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.

Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.

Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.

This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.

 

Every morning, my phone tells me exactly how much time has passed (2019 years, 10 months, 9 days, 8 hours, etc) since some god-like dude was born in a manger. It's standardized for our global techno-capitalist economy, and accurate enough for high-frequency trading—but is it helping us survive?

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96

 

My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?

 

 

Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."

Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here

Robert Hass on John Ashbery (1998)

This is from Robert Hass's "poet's choice" column in The Washington Post, October 11, 1998:

<<<
One of the new fall books is John Ashbery's Wakefulness. There is also a new and very readable book about Ashbery and some of the poets associated with him, like Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, poets who went from Harvard to Manhattan after World War II and began to write during the bright years of abstract expressionist painting. The book is called The Last Avant-garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, and the author, David Lehman, writes to be understood. It's a lively book about art and poetry at a formative moment in the development of postwar American culture. And it might help those who find Ashbery, often regarded as the most original poet of this half-century, difficult, hard to understand. He can be maddening. The typical sound of his poems is that of a man mumbling to himself, so he disconcerts our idea of music. His expressions -- like "we may never realize about our lives" -- sometimes have the vagueness of the way we actually speak to ourselves, and the poems seem not so much to develop an idea as to veer all over the place the way our untended thought processes do. This is his style, and it takes some getting used to. The stance is of someone who never quite gets used to anything in the way that part of all of us never does. He seems strange, and it's only after a while that you sense his aim, to be profoundly ordinary, which is opposite from the aim of most poets. That is his strangeness. Well, not all of his strangeness. Like Wallace Stevens, whom he resembles in certain ways, a poet of the mind's unhinged dailiness, a philosophical comedian, he is also a contriver of metaphors you can't quite get your head around. In this poem, for example, what does he mean by "the friend who came at midnight and wanted to replace us with a song"? Ashbery has many imitators among the young. Every time I print one of their poems, I get a number of outraged letters from my always interesting readers that say in effect, "You think that's poetry? No wonder no one reads it." My response, I guess, is always something like this: You do not have to like it. That's why at any one moment there are different kinds of art. But if you are going to read a writer or look at a painter, what you owe them is looking long enough to see what they're doing. And, especially if at first you don't like what they're doing, the moment when you actually get it -- which always comes as an intuition, a slipping into the other's skin, rather than as a clear thought -- you've learned something. Try this one. I think it's a rather amazing poem. It begins where Ashbery often begins. Mumbling to himself, thinking against the grain. A valedictory speaker seems to be droning on. The restless auditor is starting to have fantasies of the pointlessness of life, of how it ends in some surreal and stupid way. The vague form this thought takes is of "a man with a dog" who "comes to shoot us." The listener, though, discovers he has his own set of formulas: "everything has its own reward," for example, which he records with a not entirely, or not only, self-mocking irony. Then we come to the friend. But I don't want to explain the poem to death. That's what the "valedictorian" in all of us wants to do.
>>>

For Hass's comment on Ashbery's poem "The Friend at Midnight" (in which the "valedictorian" utters bromides), click here.

"The Friend at Midnight" is a great title -- whether or not you connect it to the parable in Luke (11:5-13).

Acting Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?

Suzanne Lummis:

I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.  

Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive.  Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. - Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that.  In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies…  In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.

Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.

I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death. 

They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society.  They read, these guys.  The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English.  The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it.   It’s called acting.   

David Lehman:

Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.

May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too -- for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
          and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
          Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

This is the fourteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here. 

Fred and Peggy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Dana Andrews, left, and Teresa Wright, steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 

And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 

And he's thinking: I married a stranger.

And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.

And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?

And she's thinking: Okay.

Well, it's been a long war. . .

"Visitation" [by Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)]

Now when I visit Ellen’s body in my memory,
it is like visiting a cemetery. I look
at the chiseled, muscular belly
and at the perfect thirty-year old breasts
and the fine blond purse of her pussy
and I kneel and weep a little there.
I am not the first person to locate god
in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland
but when I kiss her breast and feel
the tough button of her nipple
rise and stiffen to my tongue
like the dome of a small mosque
in an ancient, politically-incorrect city,
I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.
I circle around to see the basilica
of her high, Irish-American butt,
and I look at her demure little asshole
and am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.
And her mouth and her eyes and white white teeth.
It’s beauty beauty beauty which in a way Ellen
herself the person distracted me from. It’s
beauty which has been redistributed now
by the justice of chance and the temporal economy.
Now I’m like a sad astronaut living
deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory
out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel
drifting over the surface of the earth,
brushing its meadows and forests
with the tips of my wings,
with wonder and regret and affection.

for The Best American Erotic Poems, I asked Tony to name his favorite erotic book or author, and he replied:

<<
Some of the most exciting erotic writing I know is  Rilke’s famous “Ninth” of the Duino Elegies,
in which the poet queries,  demands, praises, promises and then swooningly yields to be entered completely by earth—“Earth, isn’t this what you want? An invisible re-arising in us? …What is your urgent command, if not transformation?” (translation Spender / Leishman)

The extended passage is unmistakably the address of an ardent lover to  beloved, and Rilke’s athletic, tremulous syntax, in its urging, falling back, swooping climaxes and surrenders, is thrillingly sexy in its brilliant performance of both masculine and feminine roles.  Rilke reminds us how dramatically, heroically, erotic spiritual life can be, and his enactment of inner life sweeps through categories in glorious encounter and catharsis. It’s hot stuff, and it always makes me want to pray harder.
>>

From "Voices of Mississippi 1957" (by Mitch Sisskind)

Reed Polifax
University Student

In Mississippi the Polifax name commands
Respect so I need to be careful about whom
I marry and that is the reason I pledged
Phi Delta Theta -- not that there was
Ever any doubt I would pledge Phi Delt
Since my daddy and his daddy before him
Were also brothers of Phi Delta Theta.

You get your pick of desirable women in
The most prestigious sororities when you
Are a brother in Phi Delta Theta particularly
If your name is Polifax, just as the women
In those sororities know they get their pick
Of the most desirable men if they are sisters
Of sororities like Tri Delt or Delta Gamma.

On a typical football weekend before the game
We will be drinking in the Grove with the girls
There naturally gravitating to the Phi Delts
And before the Vandy game there were lots of
Delta Gammas there and I was being sociable
But not revealing that my last name is Polifax
Or of course they would instantly smell blood.

However there was something about this one
Delta Gamma who without batting her eyelashes
Was unusually bewitching notwithstanding and
As we began the usual barnyard mating dance
I let it drop: “My name by the way is Reed Polifax”
To which she replied, “Well, bless your heart,
“Dear, my name is Floride Calhoun Bondurrant!”

Washington Janes
Groundskeeper

At Parchman the assistant warden
Took me under his wing and I learned
To drive the tractors and fix them if
Something went wrong with them.

It was the best thing that ever happened
To me because one day the boss man
From Greenhill’s farm came and asked
Could anybody at Parchman drive a tractor.

I was under a life sentence you know
But the assistant warden pointed at me
And said I can drive so they let me go
But money must have changed hands.

I got along fine with the boss man at
Greenhill’s farm except they paid me
Just one dollar a day with some food
And I lived in a converted chicken coop.

One day the boss man said to me,
“Is this a good tractor we got here?”
I said, “Yes, the Deere Model 60 is
“A good tractor, nothing wrong with it.”

He said, “You seem to know a lot“
About tractors. Mister Greenhill
Would like to speak with you.
“He’ll come by your coop about six.”

That evening Mister Greenhill said,
“I’m closely associated with Ole Miss.
“They’re putting in a whole new turf
“For the Ole Miss football stadium.

“They’ve got a P9600 lateral-move
“Sprinkler rig on wheels so they need
“Somebody to drive a tractor to pull
“The rig to wet down the football field.

“Recently I donated one of the new
“Deere thirty-five horsepower tractors
“That came out this year. You’ll need
“To familiarize yourself with it, Wash.”

I wasn’t sure quite what he meant
But then he said, “In other words,
“I want to get you a groundskeeping
“Job at Ole Miss. That ok with you?”

“Well, yes, it definitely is,” I said,
And we grinned at one another
“Thank you, thank you. The tractor
“Will be in very good hands.”

“I know it will be. Oh, one other thing.
“Are you married, Wash?” So I said,
“I got a wife but I’m not sure where
“She’s at since I went to Parchman.”

“Well, while you are at the university
“Best to keep your eyes on the tractor,
“You know what I mean?” Still grinning
When he said it and I kept grinning too.

Floride Calhoun Bondurrant
University Student

Even if I am now a mere college student
I am aware, grateful, and very proud that
My mother and father bestowed upon me
The name Floride Calhoun in the hope
And expectation that I will acquit myself
Worthily of my namesake Floride Calhoun,
Daughter of Senator John E. Calhoun and
Later the wife of Senator John C. Calhoun,
The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War,
And the Vice-President of the United States.

Floride and her husband had ten children
In eighteen years so obviously she and 
John C. Calhoun were busy as husband
And wife but none of the children lived
Long except their daughter Anna Maria
Who by and by married Thomas Clemson
Who inherited the Calhoun family’s plantation
Upon the death of Anna Maria and when
Thomas himself eventually passed away
He willed it to become Clemson University.

Sometimes people think I am putting on airs
When I tell about my name but I am always
Honest about not being a blood descendant of
The original Floride Calhoun and what of it?
My parents wanted to give me something to
Live up to and the more I learn about Floride
The more I want to be like her -- not by having
Ten children but by never complaining as she
Never complained while managing a plantation
When her husband was gone a lot of the time.

Floride Calhoun got herself and John C. Calhoun
Kicked out of Washington because Floride didn’t
Approve of how a woman married a rich Senator
Too soon after her husband died and for how
She messed around with the rich Senator even
While her husband was alive. Later the woman
Had her picture on a cigar box. The woman
Was known as a fizgig which is a firecracker
That makes a sizzle noise when the fuse is lit
But the word fizgig also used to mean a slut.

I don’t need to marry a hugely prominent man
Like John C. Calhoun but I do want a man
That is classy and successful like my father
Who is a businessman in Senatobia and is
Kind of like the big fish in a small pond.
My sister also goes to Ole Miss and we
Compare notes about guys we meet and
What guys are like from different fraternities.
Her name is Varina, the name of the wife of
Jefferson Davis the President of the CSA.

 

 

Elizabeth Turk, Sculptor Extraordinaire [by David Lehman]

Do you know the work

Of Elizabeth Turk?

You should!

It's awfully good.

http://www.elizabethturkstudios.com/

"We'll catch up some other time. . ." [by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green]

Just listen. 

Haven't done half the things we wanted -- 

There's so much more embracing
still to be done, but time is racing

O well --

Never have seen you do the dishes --

Seeing you there without your make up --

O well, we'll catch up / some other time

Just when the fun is starting / Comes the time for parting --
But let's be glad / for what we've had / and what's to come -- 

O well --
we'll catch up
some
other
time

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gDYVwtEp_Y

Met Percent: Week Seven [by Alec Bernstein]

Byzantine Leads to Gothic

Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300    Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304

Just never saw it that way

1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of  controversy. 

 

“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne

 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget

 - “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats

 

“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne

 

“It’s Byzantine”

 

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300

It’s too too complex is the consensus.

• “Pension savers caught out by ‘byzantine’ tax-relief rules,” reads a headline in The Times of London.
• “Experience in byzantine water policy key in elections at Coachella Valley agencies,” says an editorial in the Desert Sun.
• “It’s Complicated: Bosnia’s Byzantine System Of Government,” puns Radio Free Europe.

 

The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard

Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306

Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . . 

Stories in Light

Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306

Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation? 

A: Stained glass.

I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.

 

The Articles We “Know”

The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305

Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.

In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.

Poem for Rosh Hashanah: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

 

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

Un-naming modern primitivism and Beauty in Mondrian’s abstraction [by Tracy Danison]

Rene Rimbert, "Nature morte au jeu de cartes"©Musée Maillol, Paris

Two lovely and intriguing painting exhibitions ongoing at Musée Maillol and Musée Marmottan Monet offer more than their titles suggest. Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du douanier rousseau à Séraphine at Musée Maillol debunks the notion of “naïf (primitive)” and does a great job of showing color, shape, form in daily life in France 1920-1940 by outsider painters. Mondrian Figuratif at Marmottan Monet uses some lovely figurative painting to anchor a well-made walk-through of Piet Mondrian’s painterly quest for Beauty.

Piet Mondrian, "Crépuscule", 1906 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

 

The thing one learns from Les Grands maîtres naïfs is that modern primitive painting applies not to style but to painters who didn’t attend official art schools. Whether the subject is the outside or “natural” world, food or male desire, the Grands maîtres in question paint “what they see and what it feels like”.

 

André Bauchant, "L'Hibou" © Ewald Graber © Adagio, Paris 2019

What they see becomes visual lyric: intimate, even indiscrete, warm, colorful. Visitors will enjoy the little irony of tourist-targeted views of Montmartre by these often commercially struggling artists as well bigger and more recondite ironies such as Dominique Peyronnet’s slipping of the iconic La Femme à la Perle into the sharp symmetry of a modern urban landscape.

Camille Bombois, "Nu de face"  Courtesy Fondation Dina Vierny © Adagio, Paris

And there’s plenty more work by these marginal maîtres that just enables the eye to enjoy while the mind wanders: feathery flower bouquets by Séraphine Louis (which put me in mind of Shaker prints, even Jung drawings), Le Douanier Rousseau’s powerfully-imagined “exotic natural” scenes (which put me in mind of William Blake prints), René Rimbert’s bistro-inspired still lifes (which brought Cezanne’s to mind), the graded colors and perspectives of sea- and landscapes by André Bauchant and Ferdinand Desnos, or Camille Bombois’ good-tempered almost-porn.

"Le Douanier" Henri Rousseau, "Deux lions à l'affût dans la jungle" © Archives de l'Hôtel des Ventes de Monte-Carlo

And if Grands maîtres naïfs puts pay to the notion that modern “primitive” painting is anything more than a nasty little kick against painters of “marginal” social origins, Mondrian Figuratif  puts in doubt the “Father of abstraction”’s parental role in that particular style.

Piet Mondrian, "Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu ", 1921 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Marmottan Monet’s exhibition in fact highlights Mondrian’s personal spiritual quest for beauty. I mean “Beauty”in a Neo-Platonic, 19th-century sense, with a capital B, the one that was supposed to exist with Love and Truth at the core of the universe and Christian society. “Mondrian figuratif”’s walk-through arrangement makes the visual case that painter Mondrian knows in his heart, like poet Keats, that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. This puts a lot of water between him and a painter like a Picasso, or Jasper John’s who knows who else in the modern era whose search is mostly for new and satisfactory expressive style(s).

Piet Mondrian, "Moulin dans le crépuscule",1908 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

In the entry way of the Mondrian Figuratif  walk-through sits a ‘still life” of a “naturalist” dead hare in the Dutch Renaissance style, made by a 19-year old Mondrian. Next to it is the painter’s very first “abstract” painting. The hare’s ‘naturalism’ is on its head, subjected to the effect of light on a graded color and texture (the hare’s fur) while this first “abstract” work is clearly a study of the subtle line and color of tar and worn tiles in somebody’s floor.

Piet Mondrian, "Ferme près de Duivendrecht", 1916 © Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Turning into the exhibition from there, some wonderful examples of Mondrian’s figurative work greets visitor eyes. But raise them, look right. There at the bottom of the exhibition is Mondrian’s 1921 Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu, which definitely isn’t somebody’s tile floor! But then, those colors, those lines! Why, of course, it’s the Beauty of all tile floors! Of all windmills! Then, catching their breath and looking back and forth, there certainly seems a relation between the capture of the exact chromatic quality of early moonlight in the 1906 Crépuscule and Large plan, between the swathes of horizontal color and “natural” geometry of the 1908 Moulin dans le crépuscule and Large plan… The walk-through between these paintings is a visual discussion of Mondrian becoming toward Beauty and, maybe, Truth: all we need to know.

Mondrian Figuratif runs at the Musée Marmottan Monet until 26 January 2020.

Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du Douanier Rousseau à Séraphine runs at Musée Maillol until 19 January 2020.

Straight Down the Line: Noir Dialogue [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Name some striking lines of noir dialogue that stick with you?

Suzanne Lummis:

Some might see this coming, since it’s shown up a couple times--in my poem called “Venetian Blinds: Ghazal-like Noir” and in one my of my They Write by Night installments—maybe the one that featured you [David Lehman].  It’s in The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade opens the door and a thug comes through with a firearm. Spade just laughs, “My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” Immortal line, and truer now than ever. Every time I hear it I think, no freakin’ kidding. If I knew how to do needlework, I’d stitch that on a sampler.  The rest of his line goes, “You know, you're the second guy I've met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” I love what it says, and I envy Spade’s cool in the face of danger. He’s got a gun on him but he’s cracking jokes. That’s some French Existentialism slipping in, though the Existentialists weren’t much good for laughs.  But mix it with hardboiled American lingo…    

And I like another one, not spoken as a line of dialogue but by a woman in life, outside of any movie script – but referencing one of the most famous films noir.

Rita Hayworth, married five times, talked about the difficulty of living up to the femme fatale fantasy and her most unforgettable character, “Men go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me.” (It was either that, or “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me,“ or “Men fall in love with Gilda but wake up with me,” depending on the biography or newspaper story.) It’s a snappy line but, also, there’s wisdom in it. And disappointment. A loneliness. And the savvy to sum up her life in one crackerjack line.  Real life noir. 

David Lehman:

From DOA, the two-word interrogative sentence that informs all film noir is spoken by Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien): “Why me?”

From Out of the Past
Kathie (Jane Greer): I think we deserve a break.
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): We deserve each other.

From Laura:
Clifton Webb as celebrity critic Waldo Lydecker: “I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” And I don’t remember the exact words, but in a restaurant scene, doesn’t he tell Gene Tierney that she seems “to be completely disregarding something more important than her career.” What? “My lunch.”

Dana Andrews: “A dame in Washington Heights once got a fox fur out of me.”

From Double Indemnity:

Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck): There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Neff (Fred MacMurray): How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I’d say about ninety.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
Neff: That tears it.

“Straight down the line.”

This is the thirteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

"Opening Shot" [by David Lehman]

Marsh Hawk Press has sponsored the wonderful Chapter One project, brief memoirs "on becoming a poet,"  a new chapter each month, with contributions from Denise Duhamel, Phillip Lopate, Eileen Tabios, Jane Hirshfield, Burt Kimmelman, Sandy McIntosh, and other redoubtable writers. My own contribution is entitled "Opening Shot" and is the project's choice for October 2019. Section two of five bears the part title "A Pair of Odes," and follows:

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When I was seventeen, I wrote two poems that eventually were published. Both consisted of four lines. To both I gave the title “Ode.” I had never heard of Horace or Pindar and didn’t know what went into the making of an ode as composed by Jonson, Marvell, Gray, Shelley, or Keats. But the word was lovely and in the atmosphere of the 1960s it was okay to break rules, even to be ignorant of what they were.

The first of the odes to be written appeared in a broadsheet published by the poet John Fuller in Oxford, England, summer 1968:

                        I asked a fat man,
                        Do you enjoy being fat?
                        Yes, he said,
                        that is the only thing that I enjoy.

It pleased me that the last line of this simple poem scanned perfectly as iambic pentameter, as if to demonstrate that it is the natural flow of the English language – what we today might call the default meter.

The second ode made a hit with Columbia University radicals during the campus strike of spring 1968, perhaps because it made people laugh when I read it aloud:

                       As long as I live,
                       there shall never be
                       another Harry
                       Truman.

What made me break up the lines as I did? What made me think that these were poems? I don’t know the answer to these and other legitimate questions except to say that I let instinct guide me where it will, and in the end, instinct is what we have to fall back on.
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For more about the project, click here.  For more of my own piece, for example the sections entitled "Whitman in the Eleventh Grade" and  "Frankly. . . you're okay," click here. Photo credit: Catherine Arra.

https://marshhawkpress.org/david-lehman/

"You're My Thrill" [by David Lehman]

 "You're My Thrill"

-- as sung by Helen Merrill (1965)

1.

You’re my thrill,
my joint, my shot, my magic pill.

I dwell in that gaudy den
of smoke and mirrors where, when

you close my eyes,
I take a trip

to paradise:
a casino where I always win

as long as I’m within
the grip

of the labyrinthine dream I’m in.
I may never get wise,

may never disbelieve these lies.
Yet I know I must get high.

2.

Admit it. You’re one of us.
You didn’t miss the bus.

You need to get drunk
on wine or weed or stronger junk.

Maybe you’re addicted to kinky sex,
bouncing your checks,

blaming your ex,
imitating Oedipus Rex.

Or maybe you need a fix
of speed, acid, ecstasy, sin,

coke, angel dust, gin,
or the white magic of heroin.

“You’re my thrill. . .
Where’s my will?”

To you therefore I repeat
the sweet

immortal words of Charles Baudelaire,
and declare,

drink in hand, bidding you goodbye:
you must get high.

[from the Spring / Summer 2019 issue of Literary Matters]

"In Search of the Sublime": The Art of Ricardo Jose Mujica

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Born and raised in New York City, Ricky Mujica studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons in Paris, and at Parsons School of Design. 

The artwork of Ricky Mujica was initially influenced by the old masters and this connection has helped him achieve a high level of success as an illustrator. Before returning to his roots as a fine artist, Ricky Mujica created art for all the top publishing companies including Harper Collins, Harlequin, Bantam, and Scholastic. He has created art for major magazines including the New York Times Magazine and Ebony. His work has been seen in commercials for such products as Cherry 7-Up, on murals for Sony and Loews theaters, and on clothes for fashion designer Rachel Roy. His artwork has been represented at the Museum of American Illustration on several occasions
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Click here for a gallery of Ricky's figurative work, or go here for more about the artist http://rickymujica.com/home/index.html

Left: a self-portrait. Right: "Multitasking" (2012). About the latter, Ricky writes, "Multitasking is my homage to the working mom. My muses are my wife, Heather Joy Harlan and my daughter, Violet Mujica. But this painting is every mother who nurtures life. I painted it with love and admiration."