The Best American Poetry

The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-Eight): Lee Upton [by Angela Ball]

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi
and next by a third taxi
and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi
she is nearly run over again—
I think about this stranger often and feel something like
uncorrupted love for her
and I think about how
the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered
and I thought then: that is the way to live,
to be like the last taxi driver
knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet
but stopping anyway
and yes she’s in the back seat puddling away
and she is laughing
and I thought that is the way to live—
to keep trying to catch what speeds past
despite even the street lifting up to insult you
and aren’t you like all those taxis, the way
your heart keeps skidding around?
And let there be someone waiting
anxious to see the taxi driver and
the woman riding,
someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,
we’re all going to get somewhere.

                                                      -Lee Upton       Published in Triquarterly July 15 2024

Lee Upton's comic novel, TABITHA, GET UP, was launched in May 2024 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her most recent book of poetry is her seventh collection, The Day Every Day Is, winner of the Saturnalia Books Prize (2023). Another novel, a literary mystery, Wrongful, is due out from Sagging Meniscus in 2025, and a third novel,The Withers, set in a near-future world where organ trafficking threatens families, will appear in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. A sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, is forthcoming in 2026: Tabitha, Stay Up. Her New & Selected Poems will appear in 2027. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.

 

Lee Upton’s frenetic and enlightening “The Great Adventure” shares its breathlessness with Frank O’Hara’s famous “Poem [Lana Turner] has Collapsed” in which chaos is general over Manhattan as “it started raining and snowing” and “the traffic / was acting exactly like the sky,” and a final clarity leaps from chaos: “Lana Turner we love you get up.”  But the woman in Upton’s poem is not a headline, but someone directly observed, caught in the rapids of traffic:

 

     The woman hailing a taxi in the rain

     who is almost crushed by another taxi

     and next by a third taxi

     and then at last when she almost flags down a taxi

     she is nearly run over again—

 

This woman is behaving foolishly and dangerously, we think. She is lucky to be alive.

The poem’s next lines recall an O’Hara title, “Meditations in an Emergency”:

 

     I think about this stranger often and feel something like

     uncorrupted love for her

     and I think about how

     the next taxi drenching her and nearly running over her foot veered

     and I thought then: that is the way to live,

     to be like the last taxi driver

     knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet

     but stopping anyway

 

So much is happening: the “uncorrupted love” that makes us think of all the forms of love that don’t qualify for that description, that demonstrates it’s possible to love a stranger on the strength of ordinary actions; the run-on line that hits us with serial misfortune halted with the small verb “veered,” the astonishing conclusion, “that is the way to live,” which we think applies to the woman but instead to the beneficent driver “knowing that this woman’s going to get your taxi wet / but stopping anyway.” Upton’s phrasing is as direct and practical as the driver’s thoughts must be, but then comes what we have given up on, praise for the woman, “and yes she is in the back seat puddling away /and she is laughing”:

 

     and I thought that is the way to live—

     to keep trying to catch what speeds past

     despite even the street lifting up to insult you

 

This sentiment recalls William Blake’s “He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s sunrise”; the    multivalent “insult” like W.H. Auden’s “nights of insult,” both injurious and unkind.

Then, in a turn sudden as a careening cab’s, the speaker asks herself “aren’t you like all those taxis, the way / your heart keeps skidding around? Upton has, we find, O’Hara’s skill at bringing life to the inanimate city, joining it to herself and our selves.

A final surprise is the valedictory “Let there be someone,” asking that there be a human destination to bless the confusion and its aftermath and provide a simple, reassuring comment on the human condition:

 

     And let there be someone waiting

     anxious to see the taxi driver and

     the woman riding,

     someone who says convincingly: It’s all right, all of it,

     we’re all going to get somewhere.

Upton modestly makes way for another “someone”—a voice that can soothe her, too, with the promise that frustration will give way not to happiness, but something more bland, capacious and possible: getting “somewhere.” At the beginning of Lee Upton’s generous and generative poem, we may patronizingly think the woman lucky to be alive. At its end, we think the same—not in complaint but in mutual affirmation. – Angela Ball

Writing Comic (by Nin Andrews)

 

 

I am always fascinated by the questions poets and writers are asked in interviews and at readings about how they write--as if it's a mystery, or as if there's a recipe. At the same time, I love some of the answers poets and writers give to the question. I like to imagine a student going home and doing whatever these famous writers were said to have done.

Tonight at KGB Bar

KGB MONDAY NIGHT POETRY PRESENTS...

Matthew Rohrer + Pablo Medina + Tangie Mitchell

   
Monday, October 7, 2024

KGB BAR 85 E. 4th St. NY, NY 10003

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Readings start at 7:30 pm

Hosted by John Deming, Jada Gordon, Susan Lewis, Tyler Allen Penny and Selena Spier

Two drink minimum

 

*****

Matthew Rohrer

For a Farrier

 

Reading a kind of  laborious

poem about rural things

and a horse is shot

for breaking its leg.

I still don’t get it.

Surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

I text my friend

who is a farrier

(you know—

someone who shoes horses)

I say surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

                        And I wait

but he doesn’t text back

he’s busy with the pounding

and clanging.

 

Raising his hammer

over a bright orange horseshoe

and pausing

because in his head

a line by Issa

can be heard.

-- Matthew Rohrer 

October 7 & after [by David Lehman]

October 7

If I were a general
expert at fighting the last war,
I would regard the coming invasion
with great trepidation.

If I were a cardinal
at the Vatican the night before,
would reject the explanation
after noble hesitation.

If I were to write a novel, I would call it
“Great Expectations,”
because I belong to an alien nation.

If I were to write a play, I would call it
“Great Temptations”
in praise of the saint who abandoned his station.

10 / 7 / 23;  from The NU Review, edited by Jordan Davis

October 7 is National Inner Beauty Day /  National Propane Day / and National Frappe Day

"We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it. " -- Bari Weiss

The 13 women who remain hostages are Romi Gonen, 24; Naama Levy, 20; Liri Albag, 19; Ofra Keider, 70; Shiri Bibas, 33; Inbar Hayman, 27; Emily Damari, 27; Karina Ariev, 20; Agam Berger, 20; Doron Steinbrecher, 31; Arbel Yehoud, 29; Daniella Gilboa, 20; and Judy Weinstein Haggai, 70.

By Michelle Boorstein

WASHINGTON POST

October 7, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

BALA CYNWYD, Pa. — American Jews are buying guns more often. They’re going to Shabbat dinners and synagogues more often. They’re debating about Israel and antisemitism — topics many had set to the side in recent decades — more often.

A year ago, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel set off war in the Middle East. In the United States, the surprise assault and Israel’s countering invasion of the Gaza Strip prompted mass protests on city streets and at colleges across the nation. For many of the nation’s 7.5 million Jews, the year has led to concerns over whether they are securely woven into the fabric of American life. In the intense anger directed by protesters at the Jewish state and in some cases at Jews, many of the nearly three-dozen American Jews interviewed by The Washington Post saw antisemitism they thought had long ago subsided or at minimum wasn’t acceptable to voice.

"Give him my best..." [by Mitch Sisskind ]

"Give him my best..."

Lumpy said to me you have to assume your house

Is bugged but I said to him Lumpy it's not bugged

Especially not in the rec room. So Spilatro came by

And we went into the rec room. I said how's Sam?

I hear he's frothing at the mouth and rolling around

On his back and stuff. The next time you see him

Give him my best, okay? That's all I said because

No need to do a whole oil painting for Spilatro.

Just give him my best was all and not a word more

Because when things have passed a certain point

I just say give the guy my best but we did go

Into the rec room because what if there's bugs.

And Lumpy? Why do we call him Lumpy?

His name is Lombardo so we call him Lumpy.

Phoebe MacAdams: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

______________________________________________________

Autobiography with Fingers

            for John Wieners

 

I dream of a fist,

undelineated lumps

pushing out to form fingers.

 

On my 11 pm walk

mockingbird, skunk, possum, coyote

hold the struggle for form.

 

The fist emerges

in the bleak early morning.

I wash towels, make beds.

 

Poetry asserts itself

humbly,

 

formed me out of madness when I was young

and knew only magic

 

watching a tree turn orange

at the boarding school in upstate New York,

reading fairy tales alone in a top floor bedroom.

 

At my grandmother’s house, I sat on a bench shaped rock.

I felt rescued by her large stone rabbits

 

and by John Wieners who came to our house in Buffalo

and talked to ghosts while he drank Crème de Menthe

in our dining room.

 

I pray for an answer to a neighbor’s green plastic grass,

slim stars overhead,

raccoon slipping along the shadows,

possum moving up the driveway.

 

I woke up and my father was on his way to the hospital,

sweet deranged man

born too early for the medicines that could have saved him.

 

My sister sat alone in a rocking chair for years,

fierce guardian of the good

in the half-way house in Woodstock, New York.

 

She came to me in a dream,

thick black hair and Old Testament robes,

with a helpful message from St. Joseph, patron saint of good death.

 

Today, a man sits crying at the end of a driveway,

his much-loved cat of fifteen years

lies dead in a box at his feet.

 

I search for clarity among the cucumber leaves,

long for grammatical order,

but loss is the order that comes.

 

These are the fingers forming.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Phoebe MacAdams was born and raised New York City, but has mostly lived in California, moving to LA in 1986. With the poets James Cushing, the late Holly Prado, Harry Northup, and Jeanette Clough, she is a member of Cahuenga Press, which published five of her eight books, including in 2016 her new and  selected volume, The Large Economy of the Beautiful. In 2017, Beyond Baroque published Every Bird Helps: A Cancer Journal. She taught English at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights until her retirement in 2011. She lives in Pasadena with her husband, Ron Ozuna. [Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                              R. B. Kitaj, John Wieners, 1969. Photo by Carlie Febo.

"Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended. . ." [by Edna St. Vincent Millay]

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

 

and

 

IV

I shall forget you presently, my dear,

So make the most of this, your little day,

Your little month, your little half a year,

Ere I forget, or die, or move away,

And we are done forever; by and by

I shall forget you, as I said, but now,

If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

I will protest you with my favorite vow.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And vows were not so brittle as they are,

But so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a break thus far, —

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking.

 

Matthew Arnold’s Secret [by Lionel Trilling]

Matthew Arnold’s Secret

 

Of Matthew Arnold’s habit

of meditating on the sayings

of great thinkers, a different one

each week, after first writing them

down in his pocket diary,

Lionel Trilling wrote,

“It was as if he were obeying

as literally as he might

the commandment to fasten

the truth upon the door

of his house and upon his hand

and to set it as a frontlet

between his eyes." Aha!

Welcome to the Minyan, Matt.

-- DL

.       
Matthew Arnold.

Amapola [as sung by Juan Diego Florez, adapted by Ennio Morricone, and played by the Benny Goodman & Jimmy Dorsey bands]

 

Once Upon a Time in America

About dance performance and “faraway countries”: Lithuania [by Tracy Danison]

Edgy, personal: “When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone” by Vilma Pitrinaite. Photo © Patrick Berger

Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts –  is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue. 

Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene. 

Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups. 

As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.

For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying. 

Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods. 

Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.

 

Hands-in-pocket performance: “She dreamt of being washed away to the coast” by Lukas-Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work,  Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus. 

Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest? 

Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?

The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment. 

As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.

Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces  “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė. 

 

Laughter [by Mitch Sisskind]

In Genesis 18 when God told Sarah
She would have a baby she laughed
Since she was an old lady (90!) and 
When she denied she had laughed
God said, "No, honey, you did laugh,"
Because he wasn't angry about it;

However in Daniel 5:4 Belshazzar 
Mockingly laughed and a hand wrote

Mene mene tekel upharsin (?!?!?!)
On the wall and Belshazzar's loins
Were loosened (meaning what?)
Followed by the attack of King Darius
Who was sixty-two years of age.
(But we don't care how old he was!)

Lawrence Joseph on "The Great Modern City"

<<<
The Observer and the poet Lawrence Joseph, two Detroiters living in New York, were talking in a café in Battery Park City.

“You asked me about the connection between Detroit and New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “Detroit is the great modern city. And it becomes metaphorically the great industrial city. Céline writes about two cities when he comes to America in Journey to the End of the Night: New York and Detroit. Why? In 1932, when he writes perhaps the first great international novel of the 20th century, why does he choose New York and Detroit? What are your central metaphors internationally in 1932, when you’re going into a Depression? The center of the United States was Detroit and New York.” He slapped the table. “And I’m aware of that. Is Detroit still the center? It doesn’t matter. Detroiters will tell you that it is. And the world seems to think it’s pretty important.”
>>>
For the rest of this New York Observer interview, click here.
From the archive, first posted September 28, 2011.

26 Years On: Poetry Forums at the New School, Fall 2008

Poetry Forums and Events: Fall 2008

Monday, September 22

6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.

Poetry Forum: Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: finalist for the 2007 National Book Award), and Almost No Memory. Davis has won many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She has translated Proust and others from the French and has written six collections of original work. 

Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.

Best American Poetry 2008 edited by Charles Wright

Thursday, September 25

7:00 p.m., free

Tishman Auditorium, Johnson Building, 66 West 12th Street

David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry and poetry coordinator of the New School’s MFA program, will introduce poets chosen by Charles Wright for the 2008 volume, the 21st edition of the acclaimed annual anthology.  Readers include John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Ciaran Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard Howard, D. Nurkse and Meghan O'Rourke.

Monday, October 27

6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.

Poetry Forum: James Tate and Dara Wier

Pulitzer Prize-winner James Tate (who served as guest editor of the Best American Poetry 1997) is the author of a new book of poems, The Ghost Soldiers. Dara Wier’s most recent book is Remnants of Hannah. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.

Wednesday, November 5

6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.

Poetry Forum: Ed Ochester, author of Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and editor of the anthology: American Poetry Now. Ochester is the long-time editor of the celebrated Pitt Poetry Series. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.

Wednesday, November 19

6:30 p.m., room 510. $5

Poetry Forum: Vincent Katz, author of Black Mountain College: An Experiment, is a poet, writer, art critic, and translator. Katz will read and comment on the poets of Black Mountain School, such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan.

Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.

Wednesday, December 10

6:30 p.m., room 510. $5

Poetry Forum: Andrey Gritsman is the author most recently of the book of poems Picese and is the editor and publisher of the on_line international poetry magazine Interpoezia.  A native of Moscow, Gritsman lives in the New York City and works as a physician. Gritsman will read his translations of Pasternak, Akhmatova, Blok, and Tsvetaeva. He will also read Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” in the original and David Lehman will read his translation. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School Writing Program.

Sponsored by the New School Writing Program.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 2, 2024

Yesterday Graywolf Press published Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson. When I first read the book’s title I thought it referenced the movie of the same name from the 1920s which featured one of my favorite songs ”You’re the Cream in My Coffee.”

While I was wrong, the book does have a wonderful coffee connection. The title poem is a stunning sonnet sequence, each of which was drafted during the time it took Gibson to finish a cup of coffee. There is a breeziness, a caffeinated energy, as the poet engages with the pandemic, the frightening world news, and the death of his friend Dean Young.  The quick-witted voice never sacrifices the close attention to image, the wisdom in zooming out to see the big picture.  Here’s an example:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/02/poem-never-to-be-read-aloud-dobby-gibson-poem

 

Congratulations, Dobby!

"Leda and the Swan" [by Leonardo & Wm. Butler Yeats]

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                       Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

-- William Butler Yeats

Lew Saul on Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia"

  Happy birthday, Lew!
from "The Seven Most Meaningful Compositions That I Will Love Forever" by Lewis Saul (BAP blog,July 17, 2010):

<<< One day during my short stint at Juilliard, the composer Milton Babbitt came to guest lecture one of my composition classes.

Mr. Babbitt gave us all a nice lecture on 20th century music and how serial music (12-tone) was here to stay and it shouldn't be "our" problem if people don't enjoy it or "understand" how to react to it...

I recall that my friends and I were horrified at such elitism. Although I had learned a great deal of serial technique my senior year in high school at IAA, my own personal inclination led me to reason that music should always sound interesting and should completely engage an audience. Certainly, we all toyed around with trying to write "interesting" 12-tone music.

And then one day ...

**

I heard this piece. Actually, Berio was one of my professors, but alas, I had only one session with him and he barely spoke three words to me (he was still working on the Fifth Movement, which not completed at the premiere). I was only at Juilliard for 14 days before I was nearly killed by a drunk driver ... the premiere with the just-completed Fifth Movement was premiered eight days before my accident.

If you have been reading my previous posts, you will recall that I had the honor of performing Mahler's Second Symphony at IAA. So naturally, this piece had an extra added meaning for me:

**

Allen B. Ruch has written such a wonderful description of this piece ~ I could not do better. I hope you will read it.

Because the oversized score is so huge, it will not fit nicely into my scanner, I can only provide the first page (above).

Take a look at what the Swingle Swingers are singing! Just varied vowel-sounds -- pppp -- which quickly morphs into a frenetic text by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss from Le cru et le cuit ("The Raw and the Cooked").

By the way, Berio (may he rest in peace) could be a real asshole:

"[Y]ou know that Berio used The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia. A part of the text is recited, accompanied by the music. I admit that I did not grasp the reason for this choice. During an interview a musicologist asked me about it, and I answered that the book had just come out and the composer had probably used it because it was at hand. Now, a few months ago Berio, whom I don't know, sent me a very disgrunted letter. He had read the interview, several years after the fact, and assured me that the movement of this symphony offered the musical counterpart of the mythical transformation I was revealing. He included a book by a musicologist ... who had demonstrated the fact. I apologized for the misunderstanding, which was, I said, the result of my lack of musical training, but I'm still baffled." (Wikipedia article)

The Second Movement's text is simply a name, broken down into its tiniest components of vowel/consonant-sounds: MARTIN LUTHER KING.

The Third Movement is perhaps the reason why this piece achieved such universal acclaim. Berio did something so unique and interesting that it would be impossible not to simply sit back and admire it:

He re-orchestrates the Third Movement of the Mahler in his own style -- although it is clearly distinguishable amidst the sometimes cacophonous explosion of sound and fury which is layered in and around the Mahler quote.

In addition to the Mahler symphony, Berio has inserted "quotes" (reorchestrated and carefully and cleverly inserted into the flow):

Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement (violent opening scale played by the brass)

A brief quotation of Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (Mahler) just before.....

Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, third movement (the only quotation that is ongoing)

Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime

Berlioz's idée fixe from the Symphonie Fantastique (played by the clarinets)

Ravel's La Valse (orchestra plays octave motif with piccolo playing a chromatic scale)

Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (the "Dance of the Earth" sequence at the end of the first tableux)

Stravinsky's Agon (upper oboe part from the "Double pas de quatre")

Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (one of the waltzes composed for the opera)

a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach

Alban Berg's Wozzeck (the drowning scene late in the third act)

Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, second movement (melody stated with the clarinets)

(Schoenberg segment quoted again)

Debussy's La Mer, second movement "Jeux de vagues"

Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, very first chord of the entire piece from the first movement ("Don")

Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras (during the introductions of the vocalists near the end)

***

The eight vocalists are not soloists! They are meant to be integrated into the mix as Berio says: "a vocal group among instrumental groups" (score).

The Fourth (and later Fifth) are meant to be sort of codas to the earlier movements. They quote previous material, including bits of the First Movement and the whole-tone feel of the Second Movement.

***###

I am completely baffled as to why there is not a CD of the premiere recording, with Berio conducting the NY Phil. It is still available on vinyl (used).

I own every CD available of this piece. None compare to Berio's premiere, which I consider to be a major artistic tragedy. These two are pretty good, although I am astonished that Boulez failed to follow Berio's instructions regarding microphones and mixing. Much of the textual (and occasionally musical) details are either buried deep in this mix, barely audible, or missing entirely.

I actually attended a performance by this orchestra with Boulez conducting in Paris in 1972. It suffered from the same type of problems.

Boulez/Swingle Singers/Orchestre National de France

Eötvös/Göteborgs Symphony

Eötvös, on the other hand, gives a unique interp which is unusually intimate. Quite different from the Berio, but much more thoughtful than the Boulez...

**

Thank you, David Lehman, for giving me the opportunity to share these musical passions of mine. I enjoyed sharing my ideas and I hope some of you enjoyed some part of it.

Thank you and I wish it would rain already.

Lewis Saul  >>>

The Loneliest Whale in the World by Tom C. Hunley [by Nin Andrews]

Usually when a friend sends me a book in the mail, I pretend to be happy. I say, I can’t wait to read this!  But I’m lying. I do wait. I let the book serve as a paper weight on my desk for who knows how long. Sometimes I have a little stack of gift books—an extra-large paper weight. I don’t like to admit this, but I am suspicious of books I don’t select from the local bookshop myself. Books that I didn’t open and flip through, read a few lines, and say, I want you. I’ll pay whatever you ask to spend time with you.

But recently, this book arrived in the mail by the poet, Tom C. Hunley, and I didn’t let it sit. Instead, I flipped it open and was immediately swept away. I read it once, and then, I read it again. I found so much to admire—from funny persona poems featuring rock, paper, and scissors to personal poems about aging and raising an autistic son to heart-breaking poems about adopting a teenage daughter . . .

I will post one here. I had a hard time choosing just one.  

 

Adopting a Teenager Via Sate Foster Care
by Tom C. Hunley

We want a daughter, we say.
We have a girl, say the ladies with clipboards.
She’s about to be hit by a bus.
She’s been in many wrecks.
She’s always got a break or a bruise.

She’s about to be hit by a bus? we echo.
The ladies with clipboards point
at the teen girl, arms outstretched
towards an advancing bus.

We run to her. We wrap ourselves around her.
We can’t stop the bus. It hits all three of us.
We wake in the hospital.
We’re your parents now, we smile.

I hate you, she says.
That bus was my boyfriend.
He buys me stuffed animals.
He says he loves me and would never hurt me.
He photoshopped our faces
over a bride and groom
and he’ll be sneaking into my window at night.

We’ve got ourselves a daughter, we say.

Cameron Barnett: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

________________________________________________________________________

Murmur

 

This became my first ghost: the drum

of a stethoscope to my infant chest, an echo

deep in a doctor’s ear, the sound she heard,

named it murmur—a swoosh in the space

between the beatings of my youngest heart

                        ~

When I’d run around as a toddler, my mother

always anticipated me falling down and not

getting back up. Later, my father’s stethoscope

told us there was nothing there—this became

my second ghost

                        ~

I played every sport I could growing up. I ran

until no kid in my class could outpace me.

I beat my heart up and down playgrounds and courts,

through grass stains and bloody knees. I wanted

to learn how to make my heart sing, and I wanted

to silence it too, but always my mother’s gaze

pressed heavy on me

                        ~

Be careful she would say, and Be careful Dad would say.

I ignored them. When I did karate in high school,

squaring up against men twice my size, my mother said

Be careful and my father said Be smart and because

I didn’t care for my heart then, I was careless

                        ~

Heartbreak came when I fell in love for the first time,

and my mother said nothing and my father said nothing,

and years passed with no echo to interrupt the ending,

as they held me, and we all listened to my third ghost

singing in the space between heartbeats

                        ~

And now I run, miles a day, for my health; and now I am

a haunted house of scars; and now I always fear,

like too many men in my family, that I will die because

of my heart; I always fear, like too many Black men,

that a heart is not enough to keep me alive

                        ~

We are all ghost stories, silent chests, a heavy wager

of collapse, and isn’t this what all our mothers fear?—

the fourth ghost: every echo of love misplaced somewhere

deep in our hearts, reconvening over us in our stillness,

murmuring Be careful

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh poet, teacher. He’s the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water and Murmur, from Autumn House Press. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                  
                                                                 Adeboye Abiodun, Diary of a Black Boy, Lost Ball 1

 

 

“Remembering Peter Ferry": Lake Forest High School Pays Tribute to a Beloved Teacher and Author

<<<
“Remembering Peter Ferry: Author, teacher created lifelong relationships”
Kallista Schneiderman, Lake Forest High School Editor
September 26, 2024

                                                                                       photo: Peter Mundell Ferry, courtesy of Dignity Memorial

Mr. Peter Ferry, award-winning author of the novels "Travel Writing" and Old Heart," a beloved former English teacher of 27 years, passed away on Sept. 17. Colleagues, students, and friends remember his inspiring spirit and his abstract approach to teaching and living in the LFHS community that meant so much to him. 

Ferry died after a 16-month battle with Merkel Cell cancer. He survived by his wife, Carolyn, and his children, Lizzie and Griffin.

In his years at LFHS, Ferry impacted many lives, including best selling author and LFHS alumnus Dave Eggers, who had a close relationship with Ferry. Eggers is known for his many books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle; he also founded McSweeny’s, a popular comedic literary website. 

During his time at LFHS, Eggers says he was greatly influenced by Ferry’s teaching, in part because Ferry understood Eggers. Read more here
>>>

Click here for Peter Ferry's account of how he and David Lehman struck up an enduring friendship in 1968.

The Gala Launch [of BAP 2009]: A Report [by Liz Howort, with Star Black's photographs]]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 featured prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

“Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprised of movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

     -- Liz Howort

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post--launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood [Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black]

The cover art for BAP 2009 is a collage by John Ashbery.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

     -- Liz Howort

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post--launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood [Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black]

The cover art for BAP 2009 is a collage by John Ashbery.